Her High-Stakes Playboy

A thief who knew how the world of fine collectibles worked.

“Jerry,” Gwen said aloud.

“Jerry?”

“It couldn’t have been anybody else. The alarms weren’t tampered with, the security company doesn’t have any record of the slightest glitch. It had to be him.” Gwen rose to inspect the safe. “Nobody appears to have messed with this, but then I doubt he was an expert safecracker. Somehow I see Jerry as taking an easier route.” She turned to lean against the bookshelf full of reference catalogs. “Tell me he didn’t cook up some reason to get you to give him the key and combination.”

Joss’s eyes flashed. “Give me a break. I left them right here, safe and sound.”

“Here?” She resisted the urge to rant at Joss’s carelessness. “I told you to keep them safe. Where did you put them?”

“In the desk drawer.” Joss raised her chin. “I locked it.”

A lock any self-respecting toddler could break.

“I didn’t want to lose them. I figured this would be the only place I’d need them so I might as well leave them close by.” She stared at Gwen. “You don’t know it was Jerry.”

It wasn’t Jerry Joss was defending, Gwen knew. Joss didn’t want to think it was Jerry because she didn’t want to think she was at fault for the theft. But she wasn’t at fault. Gwen, in the final analysis, had made the decision to hire him. Gwen had been the one in such a hurry to get out of town that she’d left Joss in charge of the store and the safe.

If anyone was at fault, it was she.

The key and combination lay in the paper-clip compartment of the drawer, Gwen saw, but it didn’t mean a thing if Jerry were as quick as she thought. “Was he ever alone in the shop?”

“Of course not,” Joss snapped. “I was here to open every morning and here to close down and set the alarm at night. Things were always locked up. I checked.”

“Was he ever alone here at all?”

“Never.” Joss paused, then stiffened slightly. “Except…”

“Except when?”

Joss closed her eyes briefly. “Yesterday. Lunch. He offered to buy, but the deli was shorthanded and not delivering. He said he’d pay if I went to get them.” She hesitated. “I was broke.”

“How long were you gone?” It wouldn’t have taken much time, Gwen thought, not if he’d been prepared.

Not if he’d known what he was looking for.

“Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” Joss told her. “There was a line and they’d missed our order.”

“Convenient.”

“How was I supposed to know?” Joss flared. “We’d hired him. I thought that meant we were supposed to trust him. There’s an explanation,” she muttered, grabbing the phone and punching in a number. She waited and an odd look came over her face.

“What?” Gwen asked.

“Jerry’s cell phone. It’s shut off.” She set down the receiver.

Gwen swallowed. “Why change the number on a cell phone unless you don’t want to be found.” On impulse she turned to her keyboard. It took only a minute to send a quick e-mail out to a stamp dealers’ loop she belonged to, asking if they’d recently acquired the five-cent Ben Franklin or the Columbian landing stamp. If they popped up somewhere, it might give her an indication of where Jerry was fencing them. It might give her a place to start from.

Mostly it was a way to keep busy. Activity kept her from screaming. She had to get them back, pure and simple.

“That son of a bitch,” Joss muttered suddenly. Taking two steps to a cabinet on the wall, she yanked out her purse. “Give me your car keys.”

“Where are you going?” Gwen demanded, rising.

“To find Jerry.”

“I DON’T THINK THIS IS A GOOD idea.”

“It’s your chance to live on the edge,” Joss snapped, driving so quickly that Gwen’s silver Camry bottomed out at the base of the hill.

Gwen winced. “So how do you know where he lives?”

“We went out to see a band while you were gone. He invited me back for a drink.”

Gwen looked at her in horror. “You didn’t…”

“Of course not,” Joss told her impatiently, following the streets into the Mission district. “I saw his building and thought I could probably live without seeing the inside.”

Gwen nodded. “I thought you were sure he didn’t do it. So why are you flying off the handle?”

“I want to find out.” Joss scanned the street for an opening and started to whip into a space to park.

“Why don’t you get out and let me do it?” Gwen couldn’t bear Joss’s Braille-style approach to parallel parking. Still, even with her experience, it took several tries to get the car in place. “Okay, it’s probably smart to see if he’s around,” she said aloud as she got out of the car. “If there’s a reasonable explanation, maybe we’ll find it out and then we’ll know to look somewhere else.” Where else, she had no idea, but she knew in her gut that it came down to tracking the stamps stolen from the store inventory.

They stood on cracked sidewalk looking up at a sagging Victorian that had seen better days. “He might have been a snappy dresser, but he sure lived in a pit,” Gwen commented, studying the peeling gray paint on the shingled building.

“Now you know why I decided not to go in.”

It was a residence hotel, the kind of place that catered to the transient trade. Gwen’s stomach began to gnaw on itself. She’d never bothered to check to see how long he’d been living at the address he’d given. Then again, at a place like this, twenty dollars to the front desk clerk would pretty much get the person to say whatever he wanted.

And, with luck, twenty dollars would get them into his room.

It took forty. “Why do you want him?” An unsmiling dark-eyed woman, her hair skinned back from her face, stared at them from behind the desk.

“He’s got something of ours,” Gwen told her.

“Yeah, well, he’s got something of ours, too,” the woman said sourly. “He skipped on the rent.” She studied the folded twenties Gwen had slipped her and the line between her brows lessened. Abruptly she jerked a thumb at the hall. “I’m cleaning out his room right now. Wait for me at the top of the stairs.”

The dim stairwell held the musty smell of a building that had seen too many anonymous people pass through. The paper on the walls might have been flocked forty or fifty years before. Now it was dingy and scarred. At the end of the hall a parallelogram of light from an open door slanted across a cleaning cart sitting on the bare pine floorboards.

Gwen glanced at Joss. Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind them. “Over here,” the woman said briskly, walking past them toward the open door.

It was less grim than the hallway only because of the weak late-afternoon sunlight that streamed in through the single window onto the dirty beige carpet. What little of it that wasn’t covered by the bed and bureau and uncomfortable-looking chair that constituted the main furnishings, anyway.

“I ask him for his rent and he says tomorrow.” The woman stood nearby. “Always ‘tomorrow’ with him.”

Empty drawers gaped open in the scarred bureau. No clothes hung on the open steel rack in the corner that served as a closet. Gwen drifted to the window. She itched to pull out the drawers, look underneath them and on the ends for hidden envelopes, to check under the mattress, but she didn’t think the forty dollars would get her that far. Instead she poked her head into the tiny bathroom.