Tahoe Blue Fire (An Owen McKenna Mystery Thriller Book 13) (31 page)

I got up and looked out the big windows. Although the landscape was darkening with twilight, I could see down the canal that stretched out toward the big lake. There were two floating docks that had been left in all winter. One was Vince’s and the other was some distance down. While the body of Lake Tahoe doesn’t freeze in the winter, the canals in the keys do, so homeowners put their boats in storage during the winter. The water was now thawed in the spring sunshine, but most of the boats wouldn’t return until summer.

The canal Vince lived on had a gentle curve. A hundred yards down, the canal joined the large open water area that was within the keys and near the channel out to the main lake. In that open area was a boat. As I looked into the gathering darkness, I thought I sensed a person standing up in the boat. The silhouette of the person went out to the sides as if the person had their hands up to their forehead, elbows pointing out.

My immediate thought was that the person had binoculars and was looking in our direction. Maybe even at Vince’s house.

I walked over to Vince’s telescope, bent down and looked through the eyepiece. All I saw was black. I tried turning a knob that may or may not have been a focus knob. Still black.

“You need to take the lens cap off,” Vince said as he came down the stairs. “I often use it to look up at the stars. If I leave it pointed up, the main lens catches a lot of dust. The downside to having an actual wood-burning fireplace. So I’ve trained myself to put on the lens cap.”

I looked at the large end and saw that there was a snap-on black cap. I pulled it off. Now I could see through the scope. I trained it back and forth.

The powerboat was no longer there.

“What are you looking for?” Vince asked.

“I saw a boat out there. Seemed like a person on the boat had binoculars and was looking this way.”

“Oh, that happens all the time. Lakeshore people and boat people all have binoculars with them wherever they go.” Vince pointed at his telescope. “My scope is the same thing, only more magnified. We’re all looking at everything through a lens. Even at night. You get used to it.”

The cat started walking down the stairs, looking away from Spot, nonchalant, uninterested.

Spot was still watching the cat. “Spot, stay,” I said.

“That’s Ruby,” Vince said. “Probably the biggest she-cat in the county. But she’ll run terrified from a terrier half her size.”

“Smart cat,” I said.

“She doesn’t appear to be afraid of your hound. How’s that? His head is bigger than she is.”

“Spot isn’t dangerous to cats.”

“And somehow she can tell.” Vince was shaking his head.

Vince handed me a piece of paper. It was a handwritten letter from the Italian teenager. After I was able to figure out the words, the message was as Vince had reported. There was nothing that suggested I could learn anything else.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on this,” I said, “and I had to go to Tuscany to learn about the diamond. Yet, here you were all along with this information.”

“Not all of it. From the photo, I figured the diamond probably existed. But I didn’t know how Sinatra got it.”

Ruby got to the bottom of the stairs, walked over to the baby grand piano, and sat down underneath. She appeared to not notice Spot.

“Why’d you stay so private about this photo?” I asked.

Vince made a half smile. “I own one of the largest collections of Sinatra stuff in the world, show announcements and movie posters, photos, award trophies and statuettes, Grammy Awards, Gold Record Awards, movie paraphernalia, clothes, even old shoes. I’ve been through it all many times, so I knew the diamond wasn’t there, hiding in a watch pocket or something. But I wondered if somewhere in the notes and letters and songbooks and lead sheets might be an indication of where it might be, whether Monroe had in fact given it back to Sinatra, and where Sinatra might have stashed it.”

“And if somebody knew about it, it could put you at risk.”

“I already am. Someone broke into my house a couple of weeks ago. He went through my stuff, practically everything I have, and made quite a mess. But he didn’t take anything.”

“I thought I saw an alarm panel by your door.”

Vince nodded. “I have an alarm. It is wired to the door and all of the downstairs windows.”

“The burglar came in an upstairs window?”

“And went back out the same way. My alarm is quite old, so I don’t have motion detectors.”

I thought about how Diamond described the male victim, Sean Warner, as a burglar specializing as a “second-story man.”

“Any idea what he was looking for?” I asked.

“Well, from the mess, he spent most of his time going through the Sinatra stuff, so it makes me think that he was looking for the Blue Fire Diamond.”

“Any chance he found it? Someplace where you never looked?”

“There is no place where I’ve never looked. I’ve been very thorough.”

“In your searches, did you ever find any reference to the Blue Fire of Florence? Any piece of paper with the letters BFF on it?”

“Other than the letter, no. But I found something very intriguing, if ambiguous.”

“That’s what we investigators look for. What was it?”

“A note that Frank Sinatra wrote to Marilyn Monroe.”

FIFTY

Vince went over to a bookshelf and pulled out a biography of Sinatra. He opened the back cover, removed a piece of paper, and handed it to me. It was white paper, yellowed a bit with age and lined with light blue lines faded almost to the point of invisibility. There was a note written with a blue ballpoint pen. It said,

‘M, I put it all on the line for you, but you rejected the whole concept. Yes, my reaction was too dramatic. But it’s still there. That shows how I feel about you even if things will never be the same. - F’

I gestured with the note. “You kept this secret for some time, Vince. Why are you willing to tell someone about it now?”

Vince walked over to the photo wall and looked at two pictures of Frank with Marilyn.

“I think the Blue Fire is here in Tahoe,” Vince said, “and I think that others have figured out that much. Three people are dead, and there have been attempts on you and others. I can no longer think it’s right for me to sit on the info. Tell me what I can do to help.”

“Let’s start by having you show me your Sinatra collection.”

“It’s mostly just piles of boxes. This is a four-bedroom house, and I sleep in the smallest one. The others are stacked to the ceiling. Anyone who looked into those rooms would think I have a hoarding problem, which, I suppose, I do. I might sell the works. I looked up a bunch of items on eBay once. Whoa, was that an eye opener. It looks like I’ve got at least a quarter million dollars worth of stuff, if one were to carefully itemize it and sell it piece by piece. Maybe a lot more. But I’d prefer to find a good museum to take the collection. I’d be willing to donate the whole works, if it went to the right home. C’mon, I’ll give you a peek.”

Vince stood up and went upstairs. Spot jumped up and looked at me. Ruby turned to stare at Spot, but she didn’t move.

“My hound wants to come. That okay?”

“Sure.”

So Spot and I followed Vince up the stairs.

“Here’s the biggest part of it,” Vince said, walking through an open door. “Fills the master suite.”

Spot pushed ahead of me into a large room mostly filled with cardboard boxes piled in tall rows. There were two narrow aisles that one could squeeze through to get to the boxes near the wall.

The area near the corner windows was where Vince had put stuff that wouldn’t fit in boxes. The largest item was a full-sized sculpture of Sinatra. It was made of metallic plastic that glittered in shades of red, magenta, pink, and orange. Nearby, standing up in a golden support was a golf driver, gold plated from handle to the club head. I picked it up. It was engraved. ‘This club is filled with lead. Maybe now you’ll be able to hit farther than 20 yards. Your fan, Dean Martin.’  

“Got that from Caesars Palace in Vegas,” Vince said.

We moved to the other rooms. I looked in many of the boxes, not for anything in particular, but to see if anything gave me a new idea. I saw autographed napkins, a set of shot glasses with Sinatra’s picture on them, a jar of dirt with a label that said it was the first scoop that marked the beginning of the Cal Neva remodelling after Sinatra bought the hotel, bundles of letters, music award certificates too numerous to frame, copies of Nevada State files from the time when the gaming commission was investigating Sinatra’s alleged ties to organized crime.

“How’d you get these?” I said holding up what looked like official Nevada government files.

“Everything you want in life gets down to who you know,” Vince said. “I know a lot of people.”

I spent 30 minutes looking but found nothing that might connect to the Blue Fire Diamond or Sinatra’s mother Dolly or anything related. Of course, I didn’t expect to find anything considering that Vince had been looking for the same thing for decades.

When I was done, I said, “Anything else that isn’t in these rooms?”

“Just the sculptures and the photo wall downstairs.”

Back in the living room, Vince held his arms wide in a gesture to show the scope of the photo wall. There were several dozens of photos, most, but not all, of Sinatra. Many of the other people in the photos were famous, from presidents and foreign heads of state to royalty from around the world. There were photos of Sinatra receiving Grammy Awards and his Academy Award and Golden Globe Awards. There were photos of Sinatra performing all over the world from Caesars Palace in Vegas to Carnegie Hall in New York to London and Paris.

In its own area on the wall was a group of photos that were all taken at Tahoe, from the Cal Neva Hotel to boats out on the lake. There were pictures of Sinatra with his Rat Pack pals Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Dean Martin. There were photos of his friends and associates, including John and Robert Kennedy. There was a picture of Sinatra with mobster Sam Giancana. And there was Marilyn Monroe, sitting at a table at the Cal Neva, watching Sinatra perform.

“And these are Sinatra’s records,” Vince said, pointing at a substantial shelf on an adjacent wall. “I have them all, including the rare ones.”

Ruby walked out from under the piano, strolled past Vince’s feet, and sauntered over near Spot. Casual as could be, she lay down on the carpet near him, then stretched out her head until her nose nearly touched his. Spot shifted his head closer, but he didn’t lift it off the carpet. His nostrils were flexing. It seemed as if Ruby was watching them move.

Vince stared. “I’ll be damned. Look at that cat. It’s like she’s flirting with your dog.”

Vince moved over near the fireplace. On a stand was a large aquarium with bright tropical fish, orange and yellow and blue, swimming elaborate patterns.

“This was at the Cal Neva. See the line on the bottom?” He pointed to a black line that went across the white gravel on the bottom of the tank.

I nodded.

“For years, this aquarium was inset at the end of the lobby where the state line between Nevada and California ran across the lobby floor. So Sinatra had a line painted on the bottom of the aquarium, and then he put in a bunch of fish and asked visitors to guess which were the Nevada fish and which were the California fish.”

“Are these the same kind that he had?”

Vince laughed. “I doubt it. I just picked what the pet store had. To my knowledge, there’s no record of what Sinatra had. I saw one old photo with the aquarium in the background. The photo was in black and white, and the fish were nondescript, so it’s anybody’s guess what kind of fish he had.”

“Anything else I should’ve asked about?”

Vince paused, then slowly shook his head. “But if I think of something, I’ll give you a call. You’re welcome to come back anytime and dig through boxes.”

“Thanks.” I turned to leave, then stopped. “Vince, I don’t want to alarm you, but I’d like you to be very security conscious. Someone is killing people who knew about the diamond.”

I told Vince about Old Man Joseph and how he’d been interrogated about the Blue Fire Diamond and then left to die.

“So I can’t stress that enough. Be very careful. Lock your doors.” I gestured at the windows. “Keep the drapes pulled.”

“Will do. This place seals up tight. Ruby has her cat door, but it’s tiny, and its frame is solid. No person could get through.”

“You should also use your garage so that you’re not visible when you get in and out of your car,” I said. “Come and go at unpredictable hours. Don’t let him know where you are at any time.”

Vince shook his head. “That would be like living in prison. At my age, I won’t spend the rest of my life, however little of it there is, hiding from the boogeyman.”

I walked over to the front door. Spot followed. I turned and reached for the doorknob. “Thanks for letting me look at your Sinatra memorabilia. It is an amazing collection.”

Vince came over and gave Spot a pet, then looked up at me. He seemed sad to see us go. And in his sadness, he looked his age. With his ever youthful false teeth and false hair and facelift, and, probably, nitro-freezing for age spots, and laser treatments for fading vision, he seemed like one of the awkward agers.

I appreciate older people who embrace their age, wrinkles, yellowed teeth, thick eyeglasses, and bald pates with the fringe of white fuzz. Yet, even as I thought that Vince’s cosmetic applications looked obvious and goofy, I also realized that they did in fact make him look younger. Maybe the facades he put up to fend off aging were just a sign of youthful spirit. He still felt young, so he was going to try to look young. Screw the degradations of age. And if anyone had a problem with it, Vince didn’t care.

Spot and I walked out the door into the night. I shut it and waited a few seconds to hear the reassuring sound of the deadbolt.