The Devil Wears Diamonds

They had been best friends for thirty years, which meant they had shared husbands, heartbreaks, cosmetic surgeons, and one secret neither woman had mentioned since 1998.

That secret had remained perfectly behaved for twenty-eight years.

Then the front door opened.

The man who entered was too handsome for the weather and too well dressed for innocence. He was forty-five, perhaps, with dark hair, a ten-thousand-dollar watch, and the polished ease of someone accustomed to entering rooms where other people lowered their voices. Rain silvered the shoulders of his coat. He paused just inside the lounge, scanning the tables.

Roxanne’s gaze moved to him, then to Vivian.

“Please tell me he’s here for someone else,” Roxanne murmured.

“He’s looking at us.”

“Perhaps he admires the wallpaper.”

“The wallpaper is floral.”

“He may have unusual tastes.”

The man crossed the room.

Vivian glanced at the crowded lounge. A country-music executive was arguing with a woman in a feathered hat near the bar. Two judges occupied the corner booth. A bride with a veil clipped to her handbag was crying into a martini. The room was full enough that any private conversation would become public before the first lie had finished dressing itself.

The handsome stranger stopped beside their table.

“Ladies,” he said.

Roxanne smiled with the brightness of a locked safe. “That depends on what you’re selling.”

He removed a photograph from the inside pocket of his coat.

“I believe you knew my father.”

Vivian’s fingers tightened around her glass.

Roxanne took a sip of bourbon. “Well, sweetheart, that depends on which father you’re talking about.”

The stranger placed the photograph on the table.

The first thing Vivian noticed was the white border, softened and yellowed with age. The second was the swimming pool. The third was herself.

She was twenty-four in the photograph, sun-browned and laughing, her dark hair piled badly on top of her head. Beside her stood Roxanne, younger and thinner but already dressed like a woman who expected the world to apologize for being inconvenient. They were standing at the edge of the pool in 1998.

Behind them, floating facedown in the blue water, was a man.

Vivian’s glass slipped.

Bourbon struck the tablecloth, splashed across the photograph, and ran in a shining stream toward the stranger’s expensive watch.

Roxanne moved faster than seemed possible in silk. She snatched the photograph away, but not before the bride with the veil turned her head.

“Oh,” said the bride. “Is that blood?”

“No,” Vivian said.

The answer came too quickly.

Roxanne pressed a linen napkin over the photograph. “It’s bourbon.”

“That’s worse,” the bride said, and turned back to her martini.

The stranger looked at the spreading stain. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Roxanne asked.

“Several things, probably.”

A server hurried over with more napkins. Roxanne waved her away, which caused the server to collide with a man carrying six champagne coupes. The man pinwheeled, saved four glasses, sacrificed two, and soaked the feathered hat near the bar.

The woman wearing it stood. “My hat!”

“It’s champagne,” Vivian said.

“It’s vintage.”

“So is the tablecloth.”

Roxanne rose with the photograph clutched beneath her hand. “We’re going somewhere private.”

The stranger nodded. “I was hoping to speak with you about the photograph.”

“Then we’re all having a remarkably successful evening.”

She turned toward the rear corridor. Vivian followed, gripping her bourbon glass because abandoning it would have suggested panic. The stranger came behind them.

At the entrance to the private booths, Roxanne stopped so abruptly Vivian walked into her shoulder.

“Why is the floor wet?” Vivian whispered.

A server had dropped a bucket of ice. Cubes skittered beneath the velvet rope like tiny, transparent escapees. Roxanne stepped over them. Vivian attempted the same in heels designed for standing still and being admired.

Her shoe landed on an ice cube.

For one elegant second, she rose above the floor like a platinum-haired swan. Then her elbow struck the brass stanchion. The velvet rope snapped free, whipped across the corridor, and knocked a tray of bourbon glasses from a passing server’s hands.

The glasses hit the carpet.

The sound was not a crash so much as a financial statement.

Roxanne caught Vivian by the waist. The stranger caught Roxanne by the arm. Three people remained upright through a miracle that would have embarrassed a church.

From the lounge came a cheer.

“No one cheer,” Roxanne called.

The room cheered louder.

Vivian looked down. The photograph had fallen from Roxanne’s hand and landed faceup in a puddle of bourbon, the dead man’s pale shirt now rippling beneath the amber sheen.

The stranger bent to retrieve it.

Vivian got there first.

She snatched it from the carpet and held it against her chest. “We’ll discuss this in the booth.”

“Of course,” he said.

“You’ll say nothing to anyone.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“You said my father.”

“I said my father.”

“That was already too much.”

Roxanne shoved open the nearest booth. “Inside.”

They crowded in. The booth was upholstered in red leather and smelled faintly of cedar, citrus, and the previous occupant’s poor judgment. Vivian slid in first. Roxanne sat beside her. The stranger took the opposite seat, his watch now gleaming with bourbon.

A server appeared at the curtain.

Roxanne pointed at him. “If anyone asks, we’re discussing a plumbing issue.”

The server glanced at the broken glasses in the corridor. “There is a plumbing issue.”

“Excellent. Tell them that.”

He vanished.

Vivian placed the photograph on the table. Bourbon had blurred one corner, but the faces remained clear. Her younger face. Roxanne’s younger face. The pool. The man floating in it.

She remembered the heat of that night. The wet stone beneath her bare feet. Roxanne’s hand around her wrist. A voice from somewhere beyond the house, furious and low.

Then nothing she had permitted herself to remember.

The stranger leaned forward. “My name is - ”

“Not yet,” Vivian said.

His mouth curved. “You know who I am?”

“No. I know men who introduce themselves before explaining why they’ve brought dead bodies to dinner.”

“He wasn’t dead when this was taken.”

Roxanne’s bourbon glass stopped halfway to her mouth.

Vivian looked at him. “That is not an improvement.”

The stranger tapped the photograph. “My father died twenty-eight years ago. Everyone said it was a boating accident.”

“Everyone is frequently stupid,” Roxanne said.

“He did not die in a boating accident.”

The lounge outside erupted in another burst of noise. Something metallic clattered. A woman shouted about lipstick. Music resumed, smooth and expensive, as though the room had not just witnessed a small catastrophe involving bourbon, ice, and three people who had no business remaining graceful.

The stranger lowered his voice. “Forty-two million dollars disappeared the night he died.”

Vivian stared at him.

Roxanne set down her glass. “That is an unpleasantly specific amount.”

“It belonged to my father.”

“Men often say that about money they’ve never seen.”

“He kept records.”

“Men also keep records when they should be keeping lawyers.”

His eyes shifted to Vivian. “I believe one of you knows where it went.”

The booth seemed to contract.

Vivian looked at Roxanne. Roxanne was studying the stranger’s watch, which was what she did when deciding whether to charm someone, ruin someone, or have them removed through a side door.

“And the other?” Roxanne asked.

The stranger’s gaze returned to the photograph.

“The other knows who killed him.”

For a moment the only sound was the muted saxophone from the lounge and the soft drip of bourbon from the photograph onto the leather table.

Vivian reached for it.

The stranger covered the edge with his hand.

She looked at his fingers, then at his face. “Remove your hand.”

“Tell me what you remember.”

“I remember that you’ve damaged a perfectly good watch.”

“I’m more concerned about the photograph.”

“So am I.”

“Then tell me.”

Roxanne’s smile returned, but it had lost its warmth. “Darling, you came into my establishment carrying a photograph of a dead man, accused two women of hiding forty-two million dollars, and allowed my friend to assault your watch with bourbon. You don’t get to make demands.”

The stranger released the photograph.

Vivian pulled it toward her.

The face in the pool was partly obscured by water and shadow, but she knew him. Not from the photograph. From the night itself. From the sharp angle of his jaw and the silver signet ring on his hand, barely visible beneath the surface.

She had seen that ring on a man who had stood beside the pool, dripping wet, while Roxanne whispered, Don’t look.

Vivian’s stomach tightened.

The dead man had not been a stranger.

He had been the man everyone said died in a boating accident.

The stranger watched her recognize him.

His expression changed first. The polished charm fell away, leaving something colder and much more patient.

“You know my father,” he said.

Vivian folded the photograph in half before he could see her hands shake.

Roxanne rose. “Private office.”

“Roxanne - ”

“Now.”

Vivian slid from the booth. The stranger followed, and for once nobody in the lounge cheered. The crowded room had gone oddly attentive. The bride with the veil was watching. The woman in the feathered hat was whispering to the judge. Somewhere near the bar, a phone camera lifted.

Roxanne swept toward the back hall, dragging Vivian with her.

“Smile,” she murmured.

“I’m not smiling.”

“You’re wearing diamonds. That’s close enough.”

Behind them, the stranger stepped over the broken glass and followed into the darkness beyond the velvet rope, carrying a bourbon-stained watch, a vanished fortune, and the face of a man Vivian had spent twenty-eight years pretending she had never seen dead.

In Roxanne’s office, the door clicked shut.

Roxanne locked it.

Vivian placed the photograph on the desk.

The dead man stared up through the bourbon stain.

Roxanne looked at him, then at Vivian. “Tell me you don’t recognize him.”

Vivian met her eyes.

“I recognize him.”

Outside, someone tried the office door.

Then the stranger said, very softly, “Ladies, we need to discuss my forty-two million dollars.”

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters in the full book.