Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

call and ask me up to have a few drinks. After I finished the carpentry, I mean.”
    “And when was that?”
    “About three months ago.”
    “And would you spend the night?”
    “Yeah. I usually would. Or sometimes I wouldn’t. We’d drink and we’d have sex and then she’d have someplace else to go. Tonight she asked me to come up early, so maybe she was going out later. I don’t know. She said she wanted to talk about something.”
    “Frankly, Ricky, it sounds as if she treated you like a servant.”
    He stared at the ground.
    “Why did you put up with it?”
    “I liked her. I was in love with her.” He looked undecided, as if there was more but he didn’t want to get into it. I had a pretty good idea what it was.
    “I’m sorry to ask this, but I’m your lawyer and I need to know what went on. So here’s my question: Was there compensation?”
    He flushed rosy pink, a nice color to paint a boudoir. “She’d always say it was for Amber. So I couldn’t say no.”
    “She gave you money?”
    “Yes. Sometimes a fifty, sometimes more. Sometimes nothing.” He straightened up and looked me in the eye. “I didn’t do it for the money. I would have married her—” Sure. For the money.
    “Other gifts?”
    “One.” He sat on the grass, as if finally defeated. “She drank a lot. She’d get drunk pretty often and try to give me things. And then about a week ago—I don’t know, I think someone dumped her. Someone she cared about, I mean. She got really drunk and started telling me about all the guys she’s had—besides her ex-husband, I mean. Oh, man. She named movie stars, politicians, millionaires—practically every dude that ever played in the Crosby. Jeez, it was embarrassing. But, you know, she’s got this thing for the sea. We should walk to the other side of the house—” He stopped, remembering we weren’t there on a sight-seeing trip. “Anyway, this place isn’t built right on the ocean for nothing. That’s her first love. And she’s a big sponsor at the aquarium. She’s got a real thing for it, no kidding.”
    I nodded.
    “So after she dumped her husband—her first husband, I mean, before she married Francis Montebello—some dude came along and wanted to marry her, but he didn’t give her a diamond. Uh-uh. He gave her a half-pound pearl.”
    My ears pricked up. “How big?”
    “Real big. So big you couldn’t even make jewelry out of it. Anyway, she didn’t want to marry the dude, but he said keep the pearl anyway, no one else was good enough for it, or something like that, and so she did. It got kind of famous, at least locally, because she’d show it around and stuff. It’s called the Sheffield Pearl, for some reason.”
    “I think Marty told me Katy Montebello was once named Katy Sheffield.”
    “Anyway, she showed it to me one other night. She kept it in a little velvet bag locked in a wall safe. She made this ritual of getting it out and letting me see it and putting it on the glass table and looking at it and I don’t know what all—it lasted, seemed like hours.”
    “She was pretty drunk, huh?”
    “Drunk as fifty skunks. And morose. Crying. Awful. Anyway, she gave me the pearl.”
    “She
gave
you the pearl?”
    “‘For Amber.’ She said it meant nothing to her and she wanted someone who’d really appreciate it to have it. Well, listen. I was pretty drunk, too.”
    “Something like that must be worth a lot.”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know. I was going to find out.” He tugged at a tuft of grass, pulled up a handful, and pulled up another handful. “Oh, shit!”
    I waited.
    “I didn’t think I should keep it. Thought I’d talk about it with her when we were both sober—and I guess she had second thoughts, too, because that’s what she wanted to talk about tonight. That’s why she invited me here.” He flushed. “To tell you the truth, she left a pretty weird message on my machine. I don’t think she remembered giving it to me.”
    “What did the message say?”
    “She asked if I could come over and said the time I should come and all, and then there was this pause and her voice got kind of strange and embarrassed and she said, ‘I wonder if you have my pearl?’”
    “Oh, Ricky!” It wasn’t very professional, but I couldn’t keep the dismay out of my voice.
    He flushed again. This was a man who shouldn’t play poker. “Yeah. Looks bad, huh?”
    I shrugged.
    “It’s true, though. She gave it to me, Rebecca. Think I’d