Free Tulle Death Do Us Part by Annette Blair Page A

relationship up front.
    Werner pushed the box my way, and I had this ticked-off urge to pick it up and hit him over the head with it.
    Werner’s eye twinkle said he could read me better than I thought, so I closed my expression and tried to blank my mind.
    He’d love causing me a good pout. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
    “Go ahead,” he said, gruff, annoyed, probably because he could no longer read me. “Open her up.”
    “Okay.” At first, the contents didn’t surprise me, stacks of hundred dollar bills, most quite crisp and with dates that probably gave us a better bead on the year. I’d actually thought of it as a cash box a time or two.
    I lifted the back bin, where checks were usually stashed in typical cash boxes, though most such boxes weren’t made of brass. “This one must have been specially crafted for them,” I said. “Ack. No check, but I found a couple five hundred dollar bills back here. It’s U.S. currency, I think, dated in the forties.Oh, and beneath is a one thousand dollar bill; a red one. They must be forgeries. What have we stumbled on?”
    He handled the odd bills, examined them, held them under the light, and I went around the desk to examine them as closely.
    “They might be real,” he said, looking at me. “I believe that the U.S. had legal tender in those denominations once.”
    “How do you know?”
    He looked at me like I asked a lame knock-knock joke. “Degree in law enforcement?”
    “Oh, you mean, like, Forgery 101?”
    “That’s about the scope of it.”
    The smallest bills in the box were fifties, but there weren’t many, and I had to remove an antiqued brass tube about the size of the bills to get to them. But the small box inside the cash box turned out to be more interesting than the bills. It was outlined in—rubies, I believed, not garnets—on the outside, with a second row of sapphire chips to make a double dotted line around the outside top of the box. I lifted the cover on the pricey container, though where it was hinged made it more of an oblong box than a tube.
    I caught my breath when I saw what it held, not that I saw the object, because it was wrapped in a petticoat piece, a much smaller one than I already had.
    Both of us still wearing gloves—and a good thing—I removed the fabric wrapping, which did the job that tissue might have in protecting the object, and I gasped.
    Werner whistled. “Is that real?” he asked.
    I ran my gloved finger over the small, flawless shoe, covered in what appeared to be diamonds. It had a flat top that started at the vamp, extended to the top of the heel, andoverlapped the slightest bit at the back. I lifted the overlap and saw the shoe was hollowed out. “Is this a snuffbox?”
    Werner appeared flummoxed. “It sure looks like one. Those can’t be diamonds covering it,” he said. “No matter how real they look.”
    “If they’re not,” I said, “they’re better than the best fakes I’ve ever seen. And the weight. Here, hold it. Feel how heavy it is.”
    He held the snuffbox in his palm and tested its weight. “You once said you knew diamonds,” he pointed out.
    I remembered the case and the victim.
    “Our belief systems can be tested,” I admitted. “I’m not as smart as I once thought I was.”
    “I think our Maddie’s maturing into Madeira.”
    “Don’t tell my father, or anyone else for that matter, if you think you like my real name.”
    Werner shook his head. “Given the dates and sizes of those bills, I’d say the dazzle on this snuffbox is more than likely to be diamonds.”
    “What’s it made of inside that’s weighing it down?”
    “First guess? Lead,” he said.
    I set it down.
    “Or,” he added, “solid gold. Something ripe for fencing.”
    “If this is pure solid gold, never mind the diamonds—” I raised a brow. “In today’s market, it’s a new house.”
    “We may be looking at a case of first-degree larceny.”
    “What’s the difference between theft and