Death By Diamonds Part 16

Could Pierce have been responsible for Dominique's death, because she knew so much about his father's health?

I opened the door to the adjoining room and found a bedroom as seventies as the rest of the apartment, but on the wall hung the most beautiful portrait of Dom that I had ever seen. Now that should have been at the funeral home today.

On the other hand, maybe, it should stay in the room of the man who honestly loved her. I'm not even sure why I knew he loved her, but I certainly knew how much Dom loved him. It had radiated from her as I knelt before his casket.

Dom, I thought. Are you here?

I closed the door to the bedroom, leaving it be. It seemed too sacred a place to invade.

"Eve? Did you leave?" I called. "Eve?"

"Kyle took her away," Werner said as I rounded the corner, came face-to-face with him, jumped, and screamed.

He put his hand over my mouth and shoved me in a closet.

What the- He shook his head, his hand firm.

I held up one hand as if to tell him that I understood, and I removed his hand from my mouth myself.

He pointed to his ear. We heard people talking . . . about arresting me? The police?

"What time was it broken into?" a man asked.

Pierpont wasn't playing fair. He was trying to discredit me by making it look like I broke in.

Werner ran his hand over something near the door-jamb. Then he took out a pencil and put an X near it.

The voices receded a bit, but I heard enough to know that Pierpont was talking to his own private security guards. Because, seriously, how could he get the police to come because somebody wandered away during a house tour?

Right now, he and his security crew must be in the bedroom.

The closet in which Werner and I hid was stuffed with men's and women's designer jogging suits in a.s.sorted styles and colors. At the end of the closet, a folded sit- up board stood straight up. Werner pulled me toward it, the two of us tiptoeing through the barbells to get there.

He pushed me behind the exercise board, then squeezed his way in there with me.

Cozy. Not.

Someone opened the closet and I thought my heart would give out. Fortunately, Victor stuck to the seventies electrical code as well and no one had ever put a light switch in the closet. While one security guard shoved the jogging outfits back and forth, he dropped a barbell on his foot. He was so busy hopping and groaning that n.o.body looked farther than the archaic sit-up board-covered in gold plastic, behind which we hid-though it did get pushed tight against us. Werner and I were plastered together, front to front.

Eventually, Clumsy Guard closed the closet and finished his search.

"Manny," Pierpont said, "post a couple of your men in the hall, so no one can come in or out without being seen."

Wow, he had a team of security guards, but then he owned a diamond mine. No telling what treasures needed protecting.

"My father kept a fortune in antique jewels up here," Pierpont added, "and I haven't had a chance to sort them out since his death. Too painful, you understand."

"I'll post a guard," said Manny with the sore toe. After the hall door closed, we heard their voices and footsteps receding.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark by then and I could see the guilty look on Werner's face. "Is that a Taser in your pocket," I whispered, "or are you just happy to see me?"

Thirty-three.

I wanted this, I wanted to do this, but my work is me, and it has to be right.

-OSCAR DE LA RENTA Werner nearly knocked over the sit-up board trying to get out of there and away from me.

"What did you mark on the wall in there?" I asked, letting him and his physical interest off the hook. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all, but, well, I'm not dead or stupid.

"I found a bug," he whispered against my ear. "Somebody has this place bugged. Let's see if we can find any others, and shush while we do."

We searched, and I found one beneath the top shelf of an end table almost hidden by a leg. I raised my hand and pointed.

Werner pointed to another beneath a rowing machine.

I dragged Werner into the bedroom, and we checked for bugs in there, but it seemed clear. The listener might be sc.u.m but at least he/she wasn't a perv.

"How are we going to get out of here with a guard posted?" I asked in a whisper.

Werner shrugged and went to look out a window. I did the same. We looked out several but the roof was full of peaks and gables, and it wasn't covered in normal s.h.i.+ngles.

Oh no, the rich so-and-so's who built this place used what looked like blue slate or ceramic tiles, hand crafted to fit the round towers giving them the kind of texture that would catch at your clothes and break your heels.

"It does have a step-down effect," Werner said.

"I'm wearing a Coco Chanel dress, and I mean, a dress Coco herself wore."

"Your point?"

"I'd rather go out in handcuffs."

"You mean, it's valuable?"

"Museum quality." Amazingly, I caught a whiff of Dom's perfume and followed the scent. On the bedroom side of the wall, opposite the closet we'd been hiding in, the scent got strong and lingered. There I found cuts in the wallpaper, except that this cutout was in the shape of a door . . . that wouldn't budge.

I pushed a b.u.t.ton built into only one of a set of ceramic wall sconces on either side of the door cut, and the outlined panel slid into a pocket wall. "An elevator!"

Werner whipped around.

Inside, we closed the door and pushed B, since we a.s.sumed that meant bas.e.m.e.nt, and the b.u.t.ton sat below the other choices, like floors two and one. We'd been on three. "I'll be d.a.m.ned," Werner said. "Now if it doesn't deposit us into a room full of security guards, we're aced."

Werner leaned against his corner and I against mine. "Dominique's perfume is strong in here," I said. "I think she was Victor's lover. No, more than that, I think they were in love."

"And you know this because?"

"I have good instincts. I'd like to look into Victor Pierpont's death. I think Pierce lied about what killed his father. Dom led me to believe that Victor's cancer had been cured."

Well, she had, in a roundabout way.

The lift opened at the base of a curved, narrow, dark, metal gray staircase, in a tall, dank, light gray tower bas.e.m.e.nt vestibule, plain, no frills, near what looked to be an outside door. I tried the k.n.o.b. "It's locked."

"It's a deadbolt. It needs a key to unlock it from the inside." Werner nosed around the top of the door frame, the base of the stairs, ran his hands up the newel, and found that the k.n.o.b finial was set inside the newel with a wide cutoff dowel. Beneath the dowel stump, he found a key and held it up for my inspection.

I silently applauded. "I'm duly impressed."

"As a cop, you see all kinds of things," he said, "like jewels in dug-up caskets," but he couldn't seem to get the key in the lock.

I took it from his nervous hand and successfully unlocked the door.

"Not a word," he said.

I saluted. Cracking the door revealed a small corner of the small backyard covered in a dusting of snow.

Werner replaced the key, followed me out, and gave me his coat. We managed to completely cross the yard along the edges of a dry-stemmed winter garden, stepping from stem clump to stem clump, so as not to leave footprints in the snow.

When two security guards came out, one of them limping-Manny-we acted like we were heading back to the house from the mermaid fountain.

"There you are," Pierpont said following them out.

"When you weren't with us at the end of the tour, I wondered what happened to you. I honestly thought you'd invaded my father's private quarters, you were so curious."

"Wow," I said. "Wish I'd thought of it. I am curious. What's up there?"

"My father was a private man. He deeded me the house with a contractual stipulation that I stay out of his wing. I figured it was a small price to pay. I just went up there for the first time since his death, all contracts being void under the circ.u.mstances. Anyway, it's ugly. You didn't miss a thing. Aren't you cold?"

What a liar, I thought. He'd had the place bugged. He'd been up there all right, maybe only when his father was in the hospital, but he'd been there.

Werner put a protective arm around me. "Mad was missing Dominique and needed a minute."

"Funny," Pierpont said, "I smell Dom's perfume all over you, Madeira."

"They gave me her room last night. And I couldn't help myself this morning. Wearing a spritz of it made me feel a bit closer to her, which I needed under the circ.u.mstances."

"I didn't notice it on our tour."

"Of course you didn't. It was mixed with the perfume and aftershave everyone else was wearing."

He tilted his head in a silent "touche." "Well, come inside," Pierpont said. "We have films of Dominique that we hoped would console everyone and make them feel a bit closer to her."

He took my arm, as if he didn't trust me. I couldn't imagine why.

He sat in a chair up front to narrate and I stood in the back to mentally fit all the off-sized and oddly shaped puzzle pieces together.

"I can't believe you got out without being caught," Eve whispered, pulling me behind the stairs. "I nearly had a heart attack."

"Where were you all that time?" I asked.

"Creating a diversion to buy you some time. We got Pierpont and the security guards' attention, I'll tell you."

"How?"

"Kyle keyed Pierpont's gold stretch Lamborghini in front of the house."

Thirty-four.

Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.

-BILL BLa.s.s "Don't worry about the Lamborghini," Kyle said later as we climbed the stairs to Dom's house after we dropped my father and Aunt Fiona off at the train station. "Keying the limo was my idea, and I intend to pay for having it repaired."

"I expect nothing less of you," I said, "but what excuse will you give? Like, from the kindness of your heart, you're going to-"

"Because it happened during my mother's funeral collation, which Pierpont so generously hosted, I feel it only fair that the damage expense be mine."

"Ah, okay. But I'm surprised Pierpont wasn't more furious."

"Oh, he was," Eve said. "He threatened to kill the person who did it, which is probably why finding you in his backyard didn't faze him the way it might have earlier. He was pretty steamed when he thought you went to the top floor."

"I wonder why?" I said, cryptically. "Do you think it's possible that Pierce doesn't know about his father's elevator?" I asked Werner.

Kyle turned to us before he opened the door. "Victor had the elevator put in while Pierce was in Europe a few years ago. Victor gave Pierce's security goons a vacation and let the construction crew go to town. Father and son may have lived in the same house, but they were estranged."

"Weird arrangement if you ask me," Eve muttered.

"Victor would have given the house to charity if Pierce broke their agreement about him staying out of his father's wing."

"He did break it," Werner said. "The den is bugged, but the bedroom doesn't seem to be."

"Someday," Kyle said. "I hope that Pierce gets what's coming to him."

"Which reminds me," Werner said, turning my way. "During the movie about Dom, I found my way back to the tower, and I relocked the door from the inside."

"You ruthless housebreaker. You've arrested me and Eve for less."

"I'm a house locker, not a breaker. I should possibly be arrested for aiding and abetting, but you're the one who was snooping. I was simply trying to rescue you."

"My hero," I said, taking his arm to go inside as Nick opened the door to greet us.