Free The Art of Murder (Dead-End Job Mystery) by Elaine Viets

Helen said.
    “Back in ’sixty-seven, Americans couldn’t legally own gold bullion,” Max said, “but they could have foreign coins. Krugerrands were real currency in South Africa, so we could own them. It was like a gold rush. Gold buyers snapped them up. You can’t believe how popular they were. By 1980, the Krugerrand was the number one choice for people who bought gold.
    “It looked like there was no stopping the demand for Krugerrands. But five years later, Congress made it illegal to sell Krugerrands in the US. Because of apartheid. Krugerrands were illegal in a bunch of other countries, too. It was still okay for Americans to buy and sell the ones that were already here. I made a nice profit in those years.”
    Helen wondered if he’d smuggled in Krugerrands, but she kept quiet.
    “South Africa finally stopped apartheid in, uh, 1994,” Max said. “Yeah, that was the year. It was okay to buy new Krugerrands. But by then, Americans had switched to gold eagles. Newly minted American coins. I’ve got a picture of one here. I think all gold looks fine, but this is a pretty coin.”
    He thumbed to the next photo. “See, that’s Lady Liberty, holding a torch and an olive branch. The other side has a bald eagle family. The father is carrying an olive branch to his nest, where the mother eagle has the babies.”
    Helen and Phil studied the gleaming coin’s photo. “The bald eaglefamily is a good symbol,” Phil said, “but you can’t feed the kids with an olive branch.”
    “Lady Liberty looks like a strong woman,” Helen said.
    “The Chinese got into the act in 1982 with gold pandas,” Max said, and showed them another photo. “One side has the Temple of Heaven—a sacred building—and the other has two giant pandas.”
    “The pandas are kind of cute,” Helen said.
    “The Singapore lion has a roaring lion,” he said. “Another good-looking coin. There are other gold coins from different countries, but you get the idea. Each country that made them had a tidy profit because they could buy huge quantities of gold at a discount and the coins sold at a small premium over gold value, which was ‘retail.’
    “Each of these coins is one ounce of twenty-four-karat gold. The gold coins are bought and sold as a commodity, as long as they are kept uncirculated for the most part. They can be bought and sold pretty easily without a large spread between the buy and sell prices.
    “These are not rare coins,” Max said, “but they are valuable. If the price of gold is twelve hundred dollars an ounce, then a hundred one-ounce gold coins sell for a hundred twenty thousand dollars. They weigh about seven point five pounds. If you’re stealing them, they’re not much heavier than a laptop computer.”
    “Where can you buy gold coins?” Phil asked.
    “At a coin store,” Max said, “or from gold dealers, sometimes pawn-type places. That makes them easy to fence, if you know the right pawnshop.
    “The thing is that folks who own these Krugerrands, pandas and such are not really collectors—they’re gold hoarders. A real collector will buy numismatic-quality gold coins, rare dates or uncirculated early US gold pieces. One single coin can range in value from a couple of thousand right up to a million plus. So while Krugerrands would need seven point five pounds to make up a big amount, it would be real easy to have one or two US gold coins worth as much or even more.”
    “Do the gold coin collectors—I mean, hoarders—belong to clubs?” Helen asked.
    “There are a lotta clubs,” he said. “Some collectors belong to online forums where they go to brag or ask questions and other people in the community chime in. I don’t participate in any of those because they are time eaters, but lots of people enjoy the online forums even though there is a lot of misinformation going around. I can tell you this much: A ton of Americans have their money stashed away in a closet or under the mattress in gold