One Forgotten Night Page 7

  Mike nodded approvingly. “That’s what I figured, too. After all, I’m going to be asking a lot of questions. They’ll need to know why I’m there.”

  “Do the police go to all this trouble for every amnesia victim?”

  “Nope. I’m not here because you have amnesia. I’m here because you’re the victim of a violent crime. I’ll try to find out whether anyone at your job had the motive or the opportunity to take a shot at you.”

  Mike didn’t add that the chances were pretty good that he wouldn’t even be doing that much if her job hadn’t linked her to the hush-hush federal investigation of Zakroff and Duchesne. The feds would probably take over the case any minute. And maybe there was no link. The shooting could have been purely random, a drive-by. The break-in at Nina’s apartment could have been coincidence, or maybe someone with access to information from the hospital had tossed the place, knowing that she wouldn’t be home. Nina could be completely honest, and completely safe. Stranger things had happened. He’d been trying to convince himself of that all night.

  The cardkey from Nina’s coat pocket let them into a downtown office building. On the ninth floor they found a black door bearing a shiny gold Z and D logo; Nina’s cardkey opened this door, too. It led to a suite of offices, but before Nina could take in her surroundings, a jovial voice bellowed her name.

  “Nina! At last you appear!” A tall, heavyset man in his mid-sixties bustled up and took Nina’s hands in his, kissing her cheek. Everything about him was flamboyant, from the theatrical waves of his silvery hair and his upturned mustache to the canary yellow silk of the vest that was stretched snugly across his ample paunch. He cocked a quizzical eye at Nina. “Where were you yesterday, liebchen?“ His gaze rested speculatively on Mike. “And who is your handsome friend?”

  “He’s not my friend,” Nina blurted out. “Not exactly—oh, never mind that now. Oh, hell, this is awkward!” She looked into the stranger’s eyes and saw only friendly concern. “I’ll just get it over with—I’m not sure who you are.”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise. “If this is a joke, Nina, I’m afraid I have missed the point.”

  “It’s no joke. I was...injured the night before last, and I have amnesia. I woke up in the hospital. I don’t remember anything. This is the police detective who’s investigating the case.”

  The silver-haired man looked at her for a moment, as though to determine whether she were serious, and then said, “You’d both better come into my office.”

  He ushered them into a large, well-appointed office and closed the door. “Perhaps I’d better introduce myself,” he began, but Nina interrupted him.

  “Are you...Armand?”

  “I am,” he replied delightedly. “So you remember me, eh?”

  “No,” Nina confessed, and his face fell. “But you called my apartment and left a message on my machine, and just now I recognized your voice. The accent.”

  “Austrian,” he informed them. “I am Armand Zakroff, one of the owners of this firm. And your employer, Nina.”

  Mike introduced himself, and Zakroff examined his police ID closely before handing it back.

  “Now, liebchen, tell Armand everything,” he said.

  “There isn’t much to tell.” Nina gave him an quick summary of the events of the past twenty-four hours. “So now I’m just trying to pick up the pieces,” she concluded.

  “But...but this is terrible,” said Zakroff. “Someone shoots you! That such a thing should happen, right on the street. And you,” he said, turning to Mike, “you are here to find who did it, yes?”

  “Maybe,” Mike corrected. “It’s more than likely that the attack on Miss Dennison was a random shooting, not aimed at her specifically. If that’s the case—” he shrugged “—we’ll probably never know who did it. But I’ve got to check out the people in her life, ask the questions that we always ask in cases like this. Just routine, you understand.”

  “Of course,” Zakroff said expansively. “Anything I can do to help....”

  “As a matter of fact,” Mike said smoothly, “you could help by telling me where you were between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.”

  Zakroff stared at him, frowning. “You think that I would hurt Nina? What nonsense! But if you must know, I was at home, with my wife and family.”

  “Is there someone who can confirm that?” Mike asked quietly.

  “Any other night, no. I would be asleep, my wife would be asleep. But Wednesday night my daughter became engaged to marry her young man, and we all stayed up celebrating—my wife, her sister, the sister’s husband, my two girls and Edward, who is to marry Katherine. The guests left our house around two-thirty in the morning. So you see—” he smiled, spreading his hands “—I have witnesses.”

  “So you have,” said Mike. “Sorry I had to ask. And congratulations. One more thing. I think you said ‘one of the owners of the firm’?”

  “That’s right. My partner is a young man named Julien Duchesne.” Zakroff glanced at Nina. “Surely you remember Julien?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t.” But Nina recalled the note she’d found in her diary: “Talk to Julien D.?”

  “I’d like a few words with him,” Mike was saying.

  “He’s in Switzerland right now. Julien is Swiss, by the way. He comes and goes quite a lot. I don’t have a phone number for him, but perhaps he will call.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “Let’s see. Today is Friday...Julien will be back next Tuesday.”

  That fit, Nina thought. The note in the diary was on next Tuesday’s page.

  “I’ll talk to him then,” Mike said. But the voice inside his mind said, You’re just going through the motions. You’ll be off the case by then. If there is a case.

  “Nina,” Zakroff said, “you must have a thousand questions. I have some, too. What can we do to help you get your memories back?”

  Where should she start? “First of all, what’s my job here?”

  Zakroff shook his head sadly. “Oh, Nina, how can you have forgotten so much?”

  “Well, I know I’m a gemologist. I seem to know an awful lot about gems. But what do I do?“

  Zakroff brightened. “Maybe all is not lost. Wait—I have an idea. Try a little experiment for me.” He took a key from his vest pocket and opened a desk drawer. “What’s this?” he demanded, handing Nina a small black box with the Z and D logo stamped on it in gold.

  She opened the box and held out one hand absently; Zakroff placed a jeweler’s loupe in her outstretched hand and winked at Mike, finger to his lips to ensure silence.

  The box contained a diamond. Nina picked it up, examined it and declared, “Blue-white diamond, brilliant cut, good fire. Hard to be sure of the weight without scales, but I’d say it’s about 80 points. It would be worth about two thousand dollars, except for the fact that there’s a tiny chip on the girdle. The best thing would be to have the stone recut—a perfect new stone would be worth more than this miscut one, even if it’s a bit smaller.”

  “Again,” Zakroff urged, handing her another little box.

  Nina was exhilarated. At last she’d found something that she knew, a foothold of certainty in the midst of doubt. Her confidence soared as she assessed the second gem. “Kunzite, emerald cut, about seven carats. Not very valuable, but what a beautiful stone.” She held it up, admiring its pale rose color.

  Zakroff chuckled. “One more, please.”

  “No problem. I could do this all day.”

  “You usually do, liebchen.“ He handed her a third box.

  Nina opened it and stared at the contents. Watching her from across the room, Mike saw her shoulders tense and wondered what was going through her mind. Something had happened when she opened that box, he was positive of it.

  This time Nina hesitated for a few moments before picking up the stone. “Green beryl,” she finally said, turning the gem to catch the light from the north window. Rays of green fire wavered around the room. “Better
known as emerald. Not a perfect stone—lots of inclusions. The cut’s very crude. But it could be cut down into three good baguettes, each a couple of carats.” She paused, glanced at Mike. “It’s just a guess, but I’d say this stone comes from Colombia.”

  “Of course it does,” Zakroff assured her. “You brought it back yourself. Bravo, Nina! Your skill has not deserted you.” He turned to Mike. “Nina is a brilliant gemologist, you know. One of the best I’ve worked with, and I’ve been in the jewelry business all my life. She has the instinct, something that cannot be taught—she can read the stones and tell the good ones from the bad, and the great ones from the good. That is why I send her on buying trips. Her eye never fails. Especially with rubies and emeralds, which are the hardest of all stones to assess properly.”

  Mike saw that Nina was beaming as she drank in Zakroff’s words of praise, and in that instant he understood what she had been going through. It wasn’t her vanity that was being fed—it was her need to have an identity. Zakroff had given her back part of herself. Then Mike realized something else: Without quite realizing it, he had begun to assume that Nina was telling the truth about her amnesia. Stay sharp, he cautioned himself. This could still go either way. And you’ve been wrong before.

  “Nina’s a funny one, though,” Zakroff continued, looking fondly at her. “She never wears fine stones—she loves little gimcrack bits of turquoise and coral and amethyst. I think she’d rather look at spodumene than at a perfect blue diamond.”

  “Spodumene?” Mike said. “I never heard of it. Sounds like some kind of Eastern European vegetable.”

  Nina laughed, a burst of full-throated merriment. Mike realized that it was the first time she’d laughed like that in all the hours they’d spent together. “Or a pasta dish,” she said.

  “Or a tropical disease.”

  “Or a toilet bowl cleanser—New Spodumene, now with superactivating bubbles.” Nina paused. Armand Zakroff was turning from one to the other of them like a spectator at a tennis tournament. “Actually,” she continued more soberly, “it’s a very pretty pink semiprecious gem. That piece of kunzite, the second stone I looked at, was a form of spodumene.”

  “Nina, Nina, you may have amnesia, but you haven’t really changed,” said Zakroff. “You’re always talking about the semiprecious stones, how we don’t do enough with them, how dollar value isn’t everything. Your fights with Julien—” He broke off in midsentence and fiddled with his necktie.

  Mike couldn’t let this pass. “You say there were fights between Miss Dennison and your partner?”

  Zakroff looked rueful. “I shouldn’t have spoken.”

  “But you did,” Mike said in a level voice. “Now I think you’d better explain what you meant.”

  “Please, Armand. I need to know everything you can tell me,” Nina added.

  “They weren’t really fights. Just disagreements. You see, Nina, you’ve been wanting us to branch out into other areas of the business, working more with semiprecious stones and new designers, even teaching jewelry making. You had a vision of Z and D becoming a real design studio. But Julien feels very strongly that the firm should continue to do what we’ve always done—import high-value gemstones. Period. That’s where the maximum profit lies. So the two of you have had...disagreements, if you will. But such things happen in every business.”

  “What about you?” Nina asked. “Whose side were you on?”

  He met her gaze directly. “I haven’t taken a side yet. Julien is my partner, his father helped me start the business. You are my most valued employee. I have been thinking about what both of you have said—but I have made no decisions about the future of the firm.”

  “I see. And what about me? Are you willing to let me go on working here, now that you know I can’t even remember when you hired me.”

  Zakroff got up from behind his desk and crossed to Nina’s side, placing a hand on her shoulder. “January, six years ago,” he said softly. “I remember. God gave me two daughters, Nina, but you are like a third daughter to Therese and me. Let you stay? I would not permit you to leave.”

  “Thank you.” Nina felt dizzy with relief, as though a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Some part of her life, at least, was salvageable. Her professional knowledge was intact. She still had her job. And if Armand Zakroff was what he seemed to be, she also had a friend.

  “We’ll get through this, liebchen, with the help of the good detective here.”

  Mike stood. “I think Miss Dennison and I should look over her office now. After that I’ll want to talk with your other employees.”

  “Of course, anything.” Zakroff opened the door and pointed out Nina’s office, on the far side of the reception area.

  “Armand—” Nina said excitedly. “Is this Julien Duchesne?”

  She was looking at one of the many photographs on Zakroff’s office wall. This one showed Armand and a tall, slender, fair-haired man with their arms around each other’s shoulders. As soon as Nina had seen the picture, she had recognized the blond man from the vision she’d had yesterday in the restaurant.

  “Yes, it is indeed Julien. Why? Do you recognize him?”

  “Not exactly. I had a sort of memory, yesterday, just a quick image of him and another man. I thought at the time that the two men might be Zakroff and Duchesne. But the other man I saw wasn’t you. Oh, one more question. Do you—do we keep the gems, the emeralds in particular, in a metal box?”

  Zakroff’s eyebrows rose. “Well, we keep everything in the safe, of course. Is that what you mean?”

  She shook her head. “Never mind. I want to look at my office now. I’ll be back to talk with you soon.” Impulsively she leaned forward and kissed Armand on the cheek. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  “Do you want to tell me what that was all about? The business about the metal box, I mean?” Mike asked when they were alone in Nina’s office. He sat casually on the edge of her desk, and in spite of her interest in exploring her workplace Nina could not help but notice how the material of his slacks tightened across one muscular thigh.

  Mike was dressed much more formally than yesterday, but he looked just as masculine in khakis and a sport jacket as he had in leather and denim. In fact, Nina couldn’t imagine any outfit in which Mike wouldn’t look all male—and just a little rough around the edges. This guy would look sexy in a clown’s suit. But she had to admit that the orange wig probably wouldn’t do as much for the sapphire brilliance of his eyes as the light blue shirt and deeper blue tie he was wearing today. He was clean shaven, too, and for the first time she noticed a slight cleft in his chin. His face looked a little gentler without the beard stubble, she decided, but no less attractive.

  “The metal box?” he reminded her.

  “Oh, right. Well, when I opened the third box Armand gave me, the one with the emerald, I had another of those flashes—like the two men I saw when we were in the restaurant, and the woman wearing the mink coat.” She didn’t mention the third vision she’d had: the image of Mike himself, wearing a smile and no shirt. She still hadn’t figured out how he had managed to work his way into what had to be her memory. Maybe she was simply getting a bit too obsessed with him.

  “So what did you see?” Mike asked.

  “This time it was a bunch of emeralds, dozens of them, some of them just raw stones, not even cut. They were in a box about the size and shape of a cigar box, but it looked as if it was made of steel.”

  “Anything else? Anyone holding the box?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, it’s probably something that you saw on one of those buying trips.” Mike was relieved; the memory flash was what had spooked Nina when she had looked into the third box. No big secret, after all.

  Nina paced restlessly to the window. Like Armand’s, it faced north. Sure, north light is the best for looking at gems. But it didn’t offer much of a view: just another office building across the street. “What now?” she asked Mike.

  �
��I’d like to talk to the other people here, see if anybody knows anything about your movements Wednesday night or Thursday morning, possible enemies, that kind of thing. And if it’s okay with you, maybe I’ll talk to a few people from your address book, too.”

  Nina hesitated. On one hand, she still hoped that somehow she could recover her memory without letting everyone in on the fact that she’d lost it. On the other, it had been a relief to tell Armand the whole story, and she had no doubt that everybody in the office would soon know the details. Why try to keep the shooting a secret? Or the amnesia?

  “Sure, go ahead,” she said resignedly. “I’m going to go through the book and talk to people, too. We have to ask questions if we’re going to find any answers.”

  “That’s the attitude,” Mike said. “I’ll meet you here this afternoon and take you home.”

  Nina was still looking out the window, and in its surface she saw Mike’s reflection behind her. It came closer.

  “I know this isn’t easy,” he said in a low voice. “You’ve got a lot of courage, Nina.” She turned to thank him, but he was already on his way out the door.

  * * *

  That afternoon Mike and Nina compared notes. No one at Z and D had offered any information about what Nina was doing in northeast Philly in the small hours of Thursday morning. No one admitted to possessing a key to Nina’s apartment. No one had any ideas about who might have wanted to harm Nina. Nina’s secretary had told Mike that Nina seemed to have something on her mind for a few days before the shooting—”kind of quiet, like she was worried about something,” was how she put it. But, Mike cautioned himself, that might mean nothing at all.

  The pattern of Nina’s life had begun to emerge: workouts at the neighborhood gym with her friend Danielle, vacations to California once a year to see a college roommate who lived in San Francisco, visits to her mother’s home in Florida two or three times a year. In the past year Nina had dated three men, but none of the relationships had amounted to anything serious. Nina’s secretary described all three of them as “nice guys—but the kind who turn out to be friends, not boyfriends, if you know what I mean.” Mike was having their backgrounds checked out, but on the surface none of them looked like a likely candidate for a would-be murderer. As far as Mike could tell, Nina hadn’t seen any of them for several months.