Her High-Stakes Playboy

And now her worst fears had come to pass.

Joss stared at her. “Those were his big stamps, right? My god, what are we talking about—forty, fifty thousand?”

“Not even close.” Gwen’s lips felt stiff and cold. “The last Blue Mauritius auctioned went for nearly a million dollars.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER, GWEN stretched to ease the iron pincers of tension. She’d gone through every one of the books meticulously, recording what was missing.

It was worse than she’d imagined.

The four most important issues of her grandfather’s collection were gone: four nearly unique single stamps and one block of twenty, in aggregate worth some four and a half million dollars. The inventory books were missing another thirty to forty thousand dollars in more common, lower-value issues.

“Grampa has other investments, right? This is just a part of what he’s got.” Joss didn’t ask but stated it a little desperately, as though saying it would make it so.

Gwen shook her head. “He says he trusts his judgment when it comes to stamps, that he doesn’t know anything else as well.”

“This is it? This is all he has for retirement?”

“Had,” Gwen said aridly. “There’s maybe a million left at this point.”

Joss spun and reached for the phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

“No!” Gwen’s tone of command was so absolute, it stopped her dead. “That’s the one thing we absolutely can’t do right now.”

“What are you talking about? There’s millions of dollars in property missing. We’ve got to do something.”

“But not that,” Gwen emphasized.

“Why not?” Joss glared at her, inches away.

“All an investment dealer like Grampa has is his reputation. He’s still got about twenty-five live accounts right now waiting to be closed out, some of them with millions in holdings. And every one of them has a clause in their contract that if he sells their stamps below current catalog price, he’ll have to make up the difference.”

“So?”

“So, if they hear about the theft and decide they don’t trust him anymore, they may want out immediately. If he has to sell in a rush instead of at the right time, and if buyers know he’s hurting, he’ll definitely have to sell below catalog.” Gwen swallowed. “And there goes the other million.”

Gone. All gone. It made her shiver. They were his pride and joy, part of what made the philately business vibrant to him. The loss was unimaginable.

She leafed through one of the store inventory albums, staring at the empty squares. A fifteen-cent stamp showing Columbus’s landing, worth maybe three thousand dollars. An 1847 Benjamin Franklin stamp worth six. Why bother, she wondered suddenly. The store inventory stamps were chump change compared to the major issues. Gwen chewed on the inside of her lip. Then again, the important stamps would be difficult to unload immediately; there would be questions. The inventory stamps would provide a thief with money in the meantime.

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.

“You have a lot of business?” Joss asked, squinting into the cloudy square of mirror fastened to the wall.

The woman shrugged. “Hey, I’m just the desk clerk. Trust me, if I owned this dump, it would look a lot nicer.”

“No idea where he went?” Gwen asked, walking over to stare out the window across to the neighboring building.

“Nope. We don’t exactly get a lot of forwarding addresses around here.” The woman dragged a vacuum cleaner in from the cleaning cart.

“Mind if I look in this?” Gwen asked, gesturing at the trash can.

“As long as you’ve had your shots.” She jerked her head toward it. “A real pig, this guy. Nothing in the trash can if it could go on the floor.”

Gwen poked gingerly through the refuse. Cigarette cartons, an empty toothbrush wrapper, a screwed-up McDonald’s bag that still held the scent of stale grease. Then her eyes widened. In the bottom of the bin were scraps of cardboard, the thin type that came on the back of a pad of paper.

The type that could be used to make a stiff pocket for a stamp.

She pulled some out of the waste bin, staring at Joss. In her eyes Gwen saw knowledge and acceptance.

And a bright flare of anger.

The woman picked up the bin. “Okay, you guys had your chance to look around. I got to get back to work.”

Gwen nodded slowly. “So do we,” she said and turned toward the door. Her foot scuffed against something. An open matchbook. Clement Street Liquors, it said—the business next door to the stamp shop. She leaned down to pick it up.

And glimpsed writing on the inside. Excitement pumped through her. Maybe it was nothing but maybe, just maybe…

“What’s that?” the woman asked.

“Matches.” Gwen held them up. “I could use some. All right with you?”

“Sure, whatever.”

“Thanks for letting us look around,” Gwen told her, already walking out. She didn’t say a word to Joss about it until they were outside, waited in fact until they were in the car. Hope formed a lump in her throat.

“Jerry buys his cigarettes at Clement Street Liquors,” Joss told her.

“Bought. Jerry’s long gone.”

“The question is where?”

Gwen opened up the matchbook and showed Joss the writing. “Maybe Rennie will know.” It was just a name and a phone number, but maybe it would lead them to a guy who’d know where to find Jerry. She dialed the number on her cell phone, her heart thudding.

“Thank you for calling the Versailles Resort and Casino, can I help you?”

Gwen blinked. “I’m looking for a guest named Rennie,” she said and spelled it out.

“Last name?”

Gwen hesitated. “I’m not sure. Try it as the last name.”

Keys clicked in the background. “We have no guest under that name.”

“Can you search under first names?”

The operator’s voice turned cool. “No, ma’am.”

“Okay, thank you.” Disappointment spread through Gwen, thick and heavy, as she hung up.

Joss looked at her questioningly.

“A hotel. They don’t have him listed.”

“So much for our lead. What do we do now?”

Gwen started the car. “We go home and call Stewart.”

“YOU’RE MISSING WHAT?”

Saying the words aloud made them more real. “The Blue Mauritius. The red-orange one-penny Mauritius. More.” Her stomach muscles clenched.

“Does Hugh know?”

“Not yet. They’re on their trip for another twelve weeks. I don’t know what to do, Stewart.” The words spilled out, and for the first time since she’d opened the safe, tears threatened. “He could wind up losing everything, everything, and it’s all my fault.” It was a relief to let the panic out. Stewart would know what to do. Stewart would help her.

If anyone could.

“It’s okay, Gwennie. It’s going to be okay,” he soothed. “Hugh has them insured, so even if we can’t get them back, he’ll get replacement value.”

“But he doesn’t,” she blurted.

“What?” His cool disappeared.

“The premiums went too high. He let the insurance lapse last year except the basic policy on the store. He put all the money into the business.” And his granddaughters were the weak link.

Stewart cursed pungently. “Dammit, what was he thinking? Why the hell didn’t he have them in a safe-deposit box?”

“You worked with him for ten years, Stewart. You know how stubborn he is.”

“That’s no excuse for not having them protected, though. That was the first thing he taught me—protect the clients’ holdings and protect your own.”

“It wasn’t just financial with him. He was a collector at heart.”

Stewart let out a sigh. “I know. Come on, it’s still going to be okay. We’re talking about world-famous issues. They’re not going to be easy to unload, especially if your thief is someone who doesn’t know the stamp world.”

“Oh, I have a good idea who the thief is,” she said grimly. “We hired on a new clerk, Jerry Messner, about a month ago. As near as I can tell, he’s bolted.”

“Coincidence?”

Gwen laughed without humor. “He had motive, he had opportunity. Security wasn’t compromised from the outside. You tell me.”

“You called the police?”

“Not yet.”

“Good. Keep it that way for now. The last thing you need on this is publicity.”

Gwen nodded. “That was my thinking. I’m hoping we can get them back before we have to tell anyone.”

“Any ideas?”

“Maybe. The prize issues aren’t the only stamps missing. There’s another twenty or thirty thousand in value gone from the store inventory. Common issues he can unload pretty easily, get himself some money to tide him over.”

“Well, isn’t he a greedy little bastard,” Stewart said, an edge of helpless anger in his voice.

“I put out a few feelers on the loop, asking if there’s any action out there with the low-cost issues. I’m keeping quiet on the high-value ones for now.”

“Smart thinking.”

“If it is, it’s the first smart thing I’ve done since Grampa left.”

He sighed. “Don’t beat yourself up, Gwen. There’s no point. The thing to focus on is getting them back. I’ll tell you what, e-mail me a list of everything that’s gone. I’ll make a couple of quiet phone calls to a few people I trust, just to see if they’ve heard any word of some of the issues coming on the market.”

“As soon as we hang up,” she promised, reaching over to switch on her computer. “And Stewart?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. I feel a lot better knowing we’ve got some help.”

“It’s going to be okay, Gwen. Trust me on this.”

And for a moment, as Gwen hung up the phone, she felt as if it actually would be.

Joss stared at her as Gwen logged on to the Internet. “So, what did he say?”

“He’s going to ask around, see if anything’s surfacing.” Gwen sent Stewart the file she and Joss had compiled earlier.

“Is he going to tell people why he’s asking?”

“Stewart understands the situation. He’ll keep the theft quiet.”

Joss rose to pace around the office. “You know, I’m surprised. I would have picked you for the first one to run to the cops.”

“Normally I would have been,” Gwen told her, clicking on her e-mail in-box. “These are different circumstances.” She scanned the contents of the messages that popped up in her preview pane. “I just don’t want to blow—” The thought evaporated from her brain as she stared at the words on-screen.

Joss crowded up behind her. “Did you get something?”

It took her a couple of tries to speak. “It’s a dealer. He just bought a Ben Franklin, same perf, very good condition. It sounds like one of ours.”

“Well, call him.”

“I am.” Gwen scrolled down, searching for the contact signature at the bottom of the e-mail. And then suddenly she was yanking open the desk drawer and pulling out her purse.

“What? Where is he?”

“Las Vegas.” The blood roared in Gwen’s ears as she pulled out the matchbook and compared it to the numbers on-screen. “It’s the same area code as where Rennie is.”

Joss’s gaze took on a particular stillness. “Call it,” she ordered, her voice barely audible.

Hands shaking, Gwen dialed the number and listened to the tones of a phone ringing hundreds of miles away.

“Versailles Resort and Casino,” an operator answered crisply.

Gwen resisted the urge to cross her fingers. It couldn’t just be coincidence the stamp had surfaced there, it couldn’t. “Jerry Messner, please.” She crossed her fingers. All she needed was a chance.

There was a clicking noise in the background. “How was that spelled, please?”

Gwen told her.

The keys clicked some more. “One moment, I’ll connect you.”

And the line began to ring. Gwen banged down the handset hastily and stared at Joss. “He’s there.”

3

LIGHT, COLOR, NOISE. SLOT machines chattered and jingled in the background as Gwen walked through the extravagance that was the Versailles Resort and Casino.

“You want to tell me what I’m doing here again?” she asked Joss over her cell phone as she walked across the plush carpet patterned with mauve, teal and golden medallions. Ornate marble pillars soared to the ceiling overhead, where enormous crystal chandeliers glittered. Waitresses dressed in low-cut bodices and not much else hustled by carrying drinks trays. The casino had the sense of opulence, a decadent playground for the wealthy, though it was open to all comers.

Under the luxury, though, was the reality of gambling. The air freshener pumped into the cavernous main room of the casino didn’t quite dispel the lingering staleness of cigarette smoke. The faces of the gamblers held a fixed intensity as they hoped for the big score. Or hoped just to break even. She couldn’t have found anyplace more unlike herself if she’d tried.

Then again, she couldn’t have looked more unlike herself if she’d tried.

“You know why you’re there,” Joss said. “You’ve got to find Jerry.”

A balding man in his thirties glanced up from his computer poker machine as Gwen walked by. “Hey, baby,” he said, toasting her with a plastic glass that held one of the free drinks handed out by casino waitresses. After a lifetime of wanting to be unremarkable, Gwen had gone the other way completely. Exit Gwen and enter Nina, the bombshell.

“I look like a tart,” she hissed, tugging at her tight, low slung jeans and her scrap of a red top.

“You don’t look like a tart. You just look like a woman who’s not afraid to flaunt what she’s got.”

“Yeah, well, the flaunting part’s working.” A bellhop walking by tripped over his own feet and stumbled up with a grin. “Joss, this is not my style. This should be your job.”

“It had to be you,” Joss told her. “Jerry knows me too well. He’d recognize me in a second.”

“Like he’s not going to recognize me?”

“All Jerry’s going to register is blond, tight and built. I doubt he’s going to think much beyond his gonads. Anyway, you were always in the back room. He hardly saw you. And no way would he expect you to look like this. You’re different head to toe.”

“Tell me about it,” Gwen muttered, resisting the urge to pull up her neckline. “And don’t think I didn’t notice you took my regular clothes out of my suitcase.”

“I didn’t want you to be tempted to backslide,” Joss said smoothly. “You’ve got to be Nina through and through.”

Joss had effected quite a transformation, Gwen thought, catching sight of herself in one of the enormous gold-framed mirrors that hung on the wall. Gwen—tidy, understated Gwen—was gone. In her place was Nina, whose Wonderbra-induced cleavage alone was likely to distract Jerry from recognizing the person underneath. How Joss had managed to get her into a good salon without notice, Gwen had no idea, but her brownish hair was a thing of the past. Now it had the same streaky, sun-bleached blond look it had had in Africa, only better. The makeup artist had made her eyes more vivid, her smile more bright, somehow without making her look as if she’d troweled on the makeup. She was undercover and, she had to grudgingly admit, she looked good.

Just not like herself. Still, the sooner she got the job done, the sooner she could turn back into Gwen. “All right, well, I’m in the casino, so it’s time to get to work,” she said briskly.

“What’s the plan?”

“Haven’t a clue. Wander around and get the lay of the land. Watch for our friend. I’ll figure something out and call you tomorrow.”

“Have fun,” Joss said a little enviously. “Put a five spot on red for me. I’ve always liked red.”

“Right.”

Gwen switched off the phone and tucked it into her pocket. She was here. She was incognito. Now she just had to find Jerry, cozy up to him, figure out where the stamps were and spirit them away from him, all without being recognized.

Piece of cake.

Gwen drifted steadily through the ranks of slot machines and computer poker games, scanning the players. No Jerry in sight, but then he didn’t strike her as the type for a sucker’s game. He’d want cards, where he could influence the outcome.

She resisted the urge to yawn. Between the shopping, the styling, the packing and the flight to Vegas, it was nearly eleven—about the time she usually clocked out for the night. Since it was a weeknight, the ranks of the players had thinned out some. Maybe Jerry had gone to bed, too.

Yeah, right. She snorted at herself as she passed the croupiers at the craps tables. Jerry was more likely to stay up all night, sure in the knowledge he was going to hit it big, throwing away her grandfather’s money all the while.

As she crossed the broad carpeted avenue that separated the slots floor from the green tables of the real games, the suffocating crowd and noise lessened, replaced by a steadily rising sense of purpose. The people playing at these tables still relied on chance, but they knew their games, and the knowledge gave them a sense of confidence.