In Plain Sight

She stepped around her desk and made her way to a set of elaborate double doors on one side of the foyer. A moment later she was back with a blocky man of medium height. He had a square jaw with close-set eyes and a Roman nose, not at all what Alex pictured when he thought of an insurance agent. He looked more like a bouncer.

Alex kept his smile pasted to his face. If this was an attempt to intimidate him, he intended to show them it failed.

“I’m Arthur Wilks,” the blocky man said as the girl took her seat behind the receptionist desk once more. He handed Alex’s card back. “I wanted to tell you in person that I have no intention of discussing my clients with you. If you insist on bothering Miss Harding, I’ll have to call the police. Now please leave.”

Alex took the card and tucked it in his shirt pocket, removing his note pad as he did so. He flipped the top few pages while Wilks glared at him, then started writing. “How do you spell Wilks?” he asked. “I’m sure the police will want to get it right when they arrest you for impeding a police investigation.”

Alex expected Wilks to protest but instead, he just glared at Alex for a long moment, then sighed. “All right,” he said. “There’s no need for that. Follow me.”

Wilks turned back toward the double doors. After a moment, Alex followed. He hadn’t strapped on his 1911 in a few days and his rune-covered brass knuckles were in his room at the brownstone. It occurred to him that if Wilks wished him ill, he might have a nasty surprise waiting for him behind those doors.

Alex breathed a sigh of relief when the doors led to a wide hallway with offices on either side. Inside each office, well-dressed men and women were busily working, filling out forms or making phone calls. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry. Wilks’ office was at the end of one row in the corner, with big windows all around giving him a wonderful view of the city core and Empire Tower. Along the inside walls were dozens of plaques, awards, and framed newspaper clippings. Most dealt with the recovery of missing or stolen property. The blocky man was clearly an important man at Callahan Brothers Property.

“All right,” Wilks said once he’d shut his door. “What do you want?”

There was a distinct trace of Brooklyn in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“You used to be on the job,” Alex said, seating himself before Wilks’ large mahogany desk. Wilks looked startled, then nodded.

“Fifteen years,” he said. “How did you know?”

Alex pointed to a framed newspaper article hanging more or less in the center of the wall of awards. Unlike the others, this one was yellow with age.

“The headline says that a police detective was responsible for finding a stolen thoroughbred horse,” he said. “Was that when the Callahan Brothers noticed you?”

Wilks raised an eyebrow, then nodded.

“I see you’re pretty good yourself,” he said. “Now what’s all this got to do with James?”

Alex crossed his legs and leaned back, still holding his notepad.

“Why did you tell Mr. Van der Waller not to report his theft to the police?”

Wilks took a deep breath, then pointed to the wall of awards behind Alex. “You see them?” he said. “I got them for recovering property. I was a robbery detective, Mr. Lockerby. And I learned that people who steal things, do it for one of two reasons. Either they want whatever it is for themselves, in which case they have to stash it somewhere. If you look long and hard enough, you usually find it. Or,” he continued, “they steal stuff to sell it for money. In that case they have to have someone to sell it to. Now in the case of art, you know, paintings, statues, that kind of thing, sometimes the thief has a buyer lined up before the theft. With loose jewels,” he shrugged, “those, they have to fence.” He pointed out the window in the general direction of the diamond district. “Sure, there’s plenty of guys in the jewelry business who don’t really care where their stones come from, as long as the paperwork is right. Provenance, we call it in the trade. Now, since the thief doesn’t have any paper trail, he’s got to sell the stones to someone who can forge one. That gives the stones provenance.”

“Very interesting,” Alex said. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

Wilks smiled. “There’s only a handful of fences in the New York area that can move high end stones, and I know them all,” he said. “I told James to hold off because I was sure I could get his property back.”

“You reached out to these fences and told them to call you if they came across Van der Waller’s property?” Alex guessed. “What makes you think they would?”

Wilks laughed an ugly laugh and jerked his thumb at a filing cabinet behind his door.

“I got enough on each of them to put them away for twenty years,” he said. “But I’m not a cop anymore. It ain’t my job to catch crooks.”

“So when you have a case, you lean on your network,” Alex said. “The rest of the time you leave them alone. No wonder your record of recovering property is so good.”