Death, Diamonds, and Deception Page 2

  CHAPTER 2

  Crowds of curious onlookers gathered outside Delmonico’s Restaurant to watch the three hundred attendees at the first Assembly Ball of the season descend from their carriages. Bursts of enthusiastic applause greeted faces made familiar on the society pages of weekly magazines and the tabloid press.

  The women’s jewels flashed under bright arc lamps that had replaced the soft yellow glow of gaslights along Fifth Avenue. Furred cloaks parted to provide a glimpse of embroidered silk and satin gowns costing more than a working man could earn in a lifetime. The city’s most powerful entrepreneurs, dressed uniformly in white tie and tails, millionaires all, occasionally tipped a top hat or flashed a brief mustachioed smile.

  The Delmonico’s staff had laid a broad stretch of red carpet across the wet sidewalk and an army of small boys equipped with short-handled brooms darted along the cobbled street, sweeping away steaming piles of dung as soon as they fell.

  Each time the restaurant’s door opened to admit a new arrival, the shivering crowd outside was washed with warm, scented air and the tantalizing smells of a dinner menu whose delicacies were unpronounceable except by those who regularly traveled abroad. Consommé de volaille. Filets de boeuf aux champignons farcis. Pâté de foie gras en croûte. Salade de homard. Marrons glacés. Petits fours. And enough imported champagne to ensure that no guest ever held an empty glass.

  Tomorrow’s newspapers would wax rhapsodic about the flowers, the music, the dancing, the food, the names of the great and near great who had graced the event with their presence. The Four Hundred saw each other several times a week during the three-month winter season, from the opening galas of the New York Horse Show through obligatory Friday nights at the opera, the debutantes’ introduction to society in December, Mrs. Astor’s annual January ball, and countless dinner parties, cotillions, teas, and at homes. Their exclusivity marked them as an elite breed set well apart from anyone less wealthy, less well connected, less fortunate than they.

  Though she belonged to this select tribe by virtue of her mother’s Knickerbocker ancestry and her late father’s wealth, their arrogant snobbery and absurd rules of behavior annoyed Prudence MacKenzie no end. Yet it was the denizens of that world who ruled New York City, the financial and social capital of the country. The wheels of commerce and industry turned at their command, banks and stocks flourished or crashed at their bidding. Their investments in the dazzling array of new inventions transformed daily life for millions of their fellow citizens. The wives of the moguls, led by an Astor and a Vanderbilt, dictated habits of dress and behavior that were slavishly followed by anyone with pretentions of belonging.

  The Worth gown and suffocating stays Prudence was wearing tonight, for example.

  She sighed.

  “Almost there,” Geoffrey said quietly as the carriage inched forward toward the busy entrance to Delmonico’s.

  He might have reached for Prudence’s hand had her aunt not been sitting stiffly upright beside her, radiating disapproval. She had made it clear as soon as Geoffrey extended his arm to Prudence as they left the MacKenzie home that he was there on sufferance only. He would be permitted one dance with Prudence, perhaps two. Under no circumstances was he to monopolize her time and attention.

  Geoffrey had no intention of acceding to Lady Rotherton’s wishes.

  Ned Hayes cleared his throat as if to speak, but the dowager viscountess fixed him with a glare that dried up every drop of saliva in his mouth.

  As they climbed the curved stairway to the ballroom on Delmonico’s second floor, Prudence dug her gloved fingers into Geoffrey’s arm. Stay with me. Don’t leave my side. Her dance card and a tiny gold pencil dangled from one wrist. A girl had to be careful not to allow it to be filled in too quickly and never to bestow too many dances on a casual acquaintance.

  Though she hadn’t appeared at a major social event in more than a year, Prudence knew she would attract would-be suitors as soon as her presence and the end of her mourning period became known. The MacKenzie name, family background, and fortune made her an attractive prize despite the reputation she’d acquired for eccentricity. She needs a firm hand, everyone had thought when she’d gone into partnership with Geoffrey in Hunter and MacKenzie, Investigative Law. No doubt there were at least a dozen eligible bachelors who thought they could provide just that.

  Lady Rotherton led the way toward where Mrs. Astor stood in regal black velvet and diamond-bedecked splendor beside her devoted shadow, Mr. Ward MacAlister. Between them, they dictated who was in society, and who was not. Who received coveted invitations to the season’s most important functions, and who was forced to pretend illness or a sudden need to leave the city. Who was allowed to approach the acknowledged queen of the Four Hundred and who was condemned to remain on the fringes of the entourage that eddied around her wherever she went.

  Lady Rotherton, proud possessor of an English title, albeit through marriage, could boast antecedents as correct in every way as the former Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. Though twelve years Mrs. Astor’s junior, Gillian Vandergrift had dared to outshine her during a brief debut season before setting sail for England and her future. Now Gillian was back, a dowager peeress and favored intimate of the Prince of Wales. With an unmarried niece to launch. As she had told Prudence, any titled guest was a feather in the cap of a New York hostess. Wives of the American upper classes were besotted with the British aristocracy.

  “Now’s our chance,” Geoffrey whispered as Mrs. Astor stepped forward to greet Lady Rotherton amid a fluttering chorus of welcoming twitters from a bevy of ladies closing in on the distinguished visitor.

  “Quick, before she turns around,” Prudence agreed, eyes twinkling with the mischief of escaping her aunt’s notice.

  “Shall we dance?” he asked, lips twitching with the effort not to smile too broadly.

  Seconds later they were twirling across the ballroom floor, Geoffrey’s arm lightly but securely around Prudence’s waist, their gloved hands intertwined, his eyes never leaving her face as pure pleasure made her eyelids quiver and sent a pink flush over her cheeks.

  “You waltz divinely, Miss MacKenzie,” he murmured.

  “As do you, Mr. Hunter.”

  Prudence raised her face to his and nearly missed a step. There was a look in his dark eyes that she had never seen before, a kind of naked hunger that caused a tremor to run up her spine and a wave of heat to singe her lips.

  Then it was gone. Before she could be certain it had been there at all, the look vanished and Geoffrey was himself again. Shuttered against inquisitiveness and impeccably well-mannered. Not quite aloof, but definitely and conventionally correct.

  Prudence concentrated on the rhythm of the waltz, willing the bright spots on her cheeks to fade before anyone remarked that Miss MacKenzie certainly did look a bit odd tonight.

  * * *

  William De Vries caught sight of Lady Rotherton and her niece as soon as the ripple of interest in the American-born member of Britain’s nobility made her arrival impossible to ignore. The moment she began to shake herself free of Mrs. Astor and her court, he steered a course in her direction, majestically bejeweled Lena on his arm. He glanced at his wife, a frown forming between heavy gray eyebrows.

  “Are you quite well, my dear?” he asked. She looked pale and distracted, as though her mind were somewhere else.

  “Quite well, William,” Lena answered. “It’s just that the heat takes some getting used to. After the cold of the drive over.”

  Three hundred formally dressed men and women crowded into Delmonico’s ballroom where stands of green and red poinsettias and banks of scented candles had banished any trace of fresh air. New York’s most famous restaurant was newly electrified, but nothing flattered a lady’s skin like candlelight.

  Waves of French perfume and the redolent odor of the men’s Macassar oil hung over the dancers’ heads, beads of perspiration ran down women’s backs to their corseted waists, and more than one gentleman quaffed iced ch
ampagne like water. All along the walls, mothers and chaperones fanned themselves while keeping eagle eyes on the young ladies whose value on the marriage market must not be sullied by indecorous behavior.

  “My dear Lady Rotherton.” William De Vries bowed over the dowager viscountess’s hand. “Please allow me to present my wife, Lena.”

  Lena De Vries smiled and inclined her head ever so slightly, not quite a bow because she was, after all, the citizen of a country that had chosen not to burden itself with an aristocracy.

  “I am so delighted to finally meet you, Mrs. De Vries. Every time your husband has come to London I’ve chastised him for not bringing you with him.”

  “The only thing that takes me to London is business, as you very well know,” William chided.

  “I venture half of New York’s Four Hundred come for our spring season,” Lady Rotherton continued. “We’re quite inundated by them.” She thought Lena De Vries looked very odd, as though she were about to faint, and wondered if her maid had remembered to put the tiny vial of smelling salts into her reticule. She herself never succumbed to the vapors, but a swiftly extended vial of smelling salts was often the tool that pried open a cache of interesting and scandalous secrets.

  William nodded toward a passing Delmonico waiter, who immediately extended a silver salver of champagne glasses. Lena sipped delicately at the bubbly golden liquid. Lady Rotherton reached for a second flute before either of the two people standing before her realized she’d downed the first with a well-practiced hand.

  “And where is our precious Prudence?” William asked, his banker’s calculating gaze sweeping over the dance floor.

  “Dancing with that dangerous-looking Mr. Hunter,” Lady Rotherton said. “What is it that makes young girls want to slip away from their chaperone’s notice? They always think they’re having us on, but of course they’re not.”

  Lena De Vries’s spectacular diamond waterfall necklace and matching pendant earrings flashed translucent lightning in the reflected candle flames, attracting more than one jealously appraising glance. Lady Rotherton thought that not even Mrs. Astor’s much celebrated diamonds could match Lena’s display tonight and wondered idly what revenge the queen of New York society would exact for being eclipsed.

  The conversation eddied around the former Gillian Vandergrift while she nodded regally from time to time, dragging out one of her stock phrases that meant absolutely nothing but could safely be used to comment on any number of subjects. The only person who ever merited her full attention was the Prince of Wales. He had too well-developed an ear for sycophantic fawning ever to be fooled by anything less than sincerity. Dear Bertie. So desperately unhappy, so shut out of real power in his long wait to be king.

  The diamonds around Lena De Vries’s neck caught Lady Rotherton’s eye again. There was something about them. What was it William had confided on one of those trips to London? Loose stones once owned by Marie Antoinette and destined to grace the guillotined French queen’s lovely décolleté had recently fallen under the auction hammer and been carted off to the New World. Where William had commissioned Tiffany to create a necklace for his wife that would be the envy of every woman who saw it.

  There were the usual rumors of blood curses, of course. If anyone were foolish enough to believe in that sort of thing, no lady would wear anything but lace to frame her face. And what a bore that would be!

  * * *

  “Aunt Gillian has her eye on us, Geoffrey,” Prudence said as the music stopped and couples stepped away from each other in expectation of new partners. “I don’t think we fooled her for a moment. She’ll ask to see my dance card. I’ll have to lose it before the night’s over.”

  “Who is that she’s talking to?”

  “William De Vries and his wife, Lena. He was a friend of Father’s; they went to school together.”

  “Like Charles and I?” Geoffrey never forgot that it had been his old schoolmate’s death that had brought him into Prudence’s orbit.

  “Exactly. He used to say that there were only a few decent and socially acceptable schools to attend, so it was inevitable you’d wind up knowing the same people your whole life long. Lena is Mr. De Vries’s second wife.”

  “I thought the current Mrs. De Vries looked considerably younger than he,” Geoffrey remarked.

  “By at least twenty years,” Prudence said. “She was a widow with a young son when they married. I met him when we were both children. The son, I mean. His name is Morgan.”

  As the orchestra broke into another waltz, all thoughts of the De Vries family faded from Prudence’s mind. Geoffrey’s gloved hand holding her own, his strong right arm firmly encircling her waist, and the sandalwood aroma of the exotic cologne he favored transported her to a magical world within Delmonico’s ballroom where everything and everyone surrounding her swirled past in a mesmerizing whirl. Even the music faded into the thrum of the blood racing through her veins.

  Feelings she had been denying for who knew how long surged past Prudence’s defenses. She told herself she would examine them later, in the quiet privacy of her bed. But then a flood of red stained her cheeks as she pictured herself, not alone, in the four-poster where she had slept since childhood.

  I won’t give in to this, whatever it is, she decided, fiercely denying herself the pleasure of wallowing in a sea of blind emotion. Her aunt wouldn’t persuade her into the prison of marriage, and neither would the tide of ungovernable feelings that ruled the lives of so many foolish young women. No man, not even the fascinatingly seductive Geoffrey, would snatch away the independence Prudence was determined to secure for herself.

  She wouldn’t surrender to weakness. She just wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER 3

  “The appraiser at Tiffany says it’s definitely the work of a skilled professional.” William De Vries spoke in the furiously aggrieved tone of a successful banker and investor who suddenly discovers he’s been swindled.

  The magnificent triple-strand waterfall diamond necklace his wife Lena had worn to the Assembly Ball lay on Geoffrey Hunter’s desk, flashes of light nestled in a black velvet case.

  “How many stones were taken?” Geoffrey asked.

  “Almost half of the larger diamonds and many of the smaller ones. I asked the appraiser to mark the counterfeits with a spot of black ink, then return them to their settings.”

  Josiah Gregory’s secretarial pencil hung suspended over his Gregg shorthand pad. Mouth agape and then quickly shut, he rapidly sketched the piece of jewelry said to rival anything in Mrs. Astor’s private vault. Following William De Vries’s disdainful finger, he marked the bogus stones on his drawing, counting and recounting to make sure he got them right.

  “They’re sure about this?” Prudence asked. Try as she might, she couldn’t tell the difference between the diamonds believed to have been originally destined for Marie Antoinette’s slender neck and the fake crystals.

  “There’s no doubt,” De Vries assured her. “Tiffany bought a large lot of loose stones at the French government auction two years ago. Jewelers know their precious gems the way ordinary people recognize their children. I don’t understand how they do it, but they claim it’s true, and I have no reason to doubt them.”

  “Do they or you have any idea when the substitutions took place?” Geoffrey asked. He glanced at Josiah, who was scribbling away industriously.

  “There’s no way to be sure whether it was done all at once or piecemeal.” De Vries fingered his gold cigar case, but out of deference to Prudence, he did not open it. “What they did tell me was that whoever took the original stones from their settings did so with great care and skill. Only one or two tiny scratches were found, probably where the tool being used slipped for a moment or whoever was wielding it had to use extra force. The necklace was a gift to my wife last Christmas, so the thefts had to have occurred within the past twelve months.”

  Possibly while we were on Bradford Island, off the coast of Georgia, Prudence thought. She liked to an
chor events in time and place.

  “And you’re sure that what you gave Mrs. De Vries was the original necklace, that all of the stones were genuine, I mean?”

  “A bonded representative from Tiffany delivered the necklace to my office, Mr. Hunter. There can be no doubt about it.”

  “Mr. De Vries, may I ask what made you suspicious? What impelled you to take the necklace to be reappraised in the first place?” Prudence asked. She still couldn’t distinguish between one of the inked stones and the genuine diamond next to it.

  “It was something your aunt did at the Assembly Ball on Thursday night. Lena was looking faint. I had remarked on it earlier but she assured me it was just the heat in the room. Lady Rotherton was having none of that. You know how she is, Prudence. Before Lena could object, she was holding a vial of smelling salts under my wife’s nose. By the time Lena managed to breathe normally and lift her head again, some of the stones in the necklace were fogged over.”

  “And Lady Rotherton could tell which stones were true and which were not by how quickly they cleared.”

  “Very good, Mr. Hunter. But then I understand you were a Pinkerton at one time. I had no idea until Lady Rotherton explained it to me. She was the one who insisted I bring the necklace back to Tiffany. In fact, she accompanied me during what was a very difficult meeting with their chief appraiser. You know the rest.”

  “She never mentioned any of this to me,” Prudence said.

  “I asked her not to,” De Vries confessed. “It was important to be certain before I involved you and Mr. Hunter in the whole sorry business. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered. In all the years we’ve been friends, I’ve never known Gillian to be wrong about anything.”

  “How is Mrs. De Vries taking it?” Prudence asked.

  “She’s devastated. I’ve seldom seen her so upset. She blames herself, which is pointless. I know how careful she is with all of her jewelry. Lena has a safe in her dressing room to which only she and I have access. I insisted from the beginning that the combination not be written down anywhere her lady’s maid might come across it. Lena herself removes and replaces whatever items she has decided to wear.”