Vic Daniel 6 - As she rides by

life, you were neither a con man, a fool, nor a waster of other people’s time.”
    “Kind words indeed, sir,” I said. “Eh, the reason I don’t want to go into details on the phone is that in my experience they are not, alas, always private.”
    “This one is,” he said. “It’s my home phone, and it was my daughter you spoke to a moment ago. I was just on my way back to the office after lunch when Slick caught me.”
    “Slick,” I thought. Another one of those great nicknames. I always wished someone had given me one as a lad, like Minnesota Fats or Tex or Lefty, all I’d ever had was Dopey (that dumb dwarf), Stilts, and, from the twerp as soon as she saw me wearing glasses for the first time, the derisory Prof. Who cares anyway about that stuff?
    As I really didn’t want to go into details on the phone at all, private or party line, mainly because I didn’t have many details and would have to rely on my forceful and winning personality, obviously more effective in a face-to-face encounter, I suggested we meet instead so I could fill him in, as we would probably have to meet later anyway.
    “Home or office,” he said. “Take your pick, Mr. Daniel.”
    “Office after work, maybe?”
    “Why after work?”
    “Same reason as the phone,” I said.
    There was a pause. Then Mr. Howieson said, “Mr. Daniel, I am starting to get slightly worried by all this.”
    “Well, if it helps,” I said, “there’s only the slightest chance you have anything to worry about.”
    “Which doesn’t help in the slightest,” he said. We agreed that I should pass by the IMM head office building the following evening at six-thirty, address supplied, press the button reading “Night Inquiries,” give my name to whomever answered my summons, show some LD., and I would be accompanied up to his office, where he would be waiting, if not exactly eagerly, for my arrival. I said thank you and good-bye. He said good-bye to me. Click. Click. All right. That was done, for all the use it would probably be, if there was a windmill around I’d go and have a tilt or two at it instead; much more useful and bound to be more fun.
    After I’d hung up, King looked at me hopefully.
    “OK, you win,” I told him. “Let’s get out of here.” I tidied up and out of there we got and into the car we got and up to the observatory in Griffith Park we got, where we got out and he romped and sniffed and rolled and I sat on the bench by the water fountain and observed. I didn’t see any stars, although there were enough would-be starlets passing to and fro to keep an amateur Galileo like me more than content. None of them, however, stopped to say, “Oh, what a cute pooch! I just adore an older man with a dog!” Guess I’ll never understand starlets.

    T hem little things,” I said, “that look like dried peas, only gray, are worth a quarter of a million bucks? You’ve got to be kidding.”
    It was ten o’clock the following a.m. The Lubinski brothers, Jonathan and Nathan (“Family Jewelers for Over 20 Years”) and myself were in the small workshop out back of their store, which was just around the corner from my office. Nathan was weighing the peas, with great care, one at a time, on a beautiful antique set of jeweler’s scales, while his brother and I watched. Every few minutes I left them to get on with it while I earned my fee by checking the front and back doors, the alarm systems, the street out front, and the alley out back. Earlier I’d hung a sign neatly lettered by Nathan in the front window; it said that, exceptionally, the store would be opening two hours late that morning. I’d also, earlier, unlocked the front door for the courier who’d delivered the so-called diamonds from New York so he could go have a bite of breakfast somewhere.
    I returned from my umpteenth fruitless checkup and gave the thumbsup to J. Lubinski, who gave me a grin in return. J. Lubinski was elegantly attired, as usual; this morning in a dapper gray mohair suit with his customary highly polished black loafers with tassels. His specs were gold-framed, his tie pin silver, his cuff links semiprecious-stoned, and his sliver of a watch platinum for all I knew. His lugubrious elder brother wore his customary baggy brown ensemble, topped up with a loupe in his right eye. We got on fine, me and the brothers. Jonathan was the businessman, Nathan the creative one; he was also an historian specializing in the years of the Holocaust, as I’d found