The Case of the Yellow Diamond

By Carl Brookins

A dead man on the floor of his office in Minneapolis won’t lead P.I. Sean Sean to journey to Yap Island to protect his new client. Bombs in lawyers’ cars only jostle him. This short investigator knows the value of research and asking questions in the right places. World War II, Asian diamonds and concrete in Des Moines combine to almost destroy a Minnesota family. In the end, Sean detects flaws in the plans and brings down a criminal enterprise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud
• Release date: Sep 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682010105

Carl Brookins

Before he became a mystery writer and reviewer, Brookins was a counselor and faculty member at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has reviewed mystery fiction for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and for Mystery Scene Magazine. His reviews now appear on his own web site, on more than a dozen blogs and on several Internet review sites, Brookins is an avid recreational sailor and has sailed in many locations across the world. He is a member of Sisters in Crime, and Private Eye Writers of America. He can frequently be found touring bookstores and libraries with his companions-in-crime, The Minnesota Crime Wave. He writes the sailing adventure series featuring Michael Tanner and Mary Whitney, the Sean Sean private investigator detective series, and the Jack Marston academic series. He lives with his wife Jean of many years, in Roseville, Minnesota.

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Afterword

Chapter 1

The guy sprawled on my office floor was dead. I didn’t need my years of experience as a private snoop to know that. The big bloody hole in his bare chest clued me in. The recently deceased was about seventy, I judged, and portly, overweight, even. He was a white man wearing expensive sandals and what was probably an upscale pair of boxer-style swimming trunks. They looked dry, but I didn’t touch them to verify that. I sniffed. The blood smell was strong and the dark pool under his right shoulder was just starting to congeal. I didn’t smell any gunpowder. I recognized him, of course.

I stepped carefully around the body to avoid getting blood on my favorite tennis shoes and picked up my recently acquired cell phone to dial 911. After that I called my friend Ricardo Simon, an experienced investigator with the Minneapolis PD. I sometimes talked with him about puzzling aspects of my cases. I wasn’t your typical taciturn PI who viewed every cop as a potential enemy. I was atypical in a lot of ways. I often wore red Converse, for example. The ones with white soles.

Detective Simon, he answered.

Sean, I said. You remember my case involving diamond smuggling?

Of course.

My principal suspect’s dead. In my office. Large-caliber gunshot to the upper chest.

Preston Pederson? Wow. Did you kill him?

No, I just found him.

Call 911?

Of course.

Ricardo hummed for a few seconds, then said, Appears you’ll have to revisit your case while reordering your thinking. Hmm. Stay in touch.

Thanks, I said and clicked off. This case was getting more and more complicated.

The case to which I refered started a few weeks ago in a suburb of Saint Paul. Actually, the case started years ago, in a previous century and about six thousand miles to the west. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

* * * *

Living in a suburb of the twin cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul isn’t always easy; dying—almost anywhere—on the other hand, can be a cinch. I grew up here, so I knew the idiosyncrasies of each city, the upsides as well as the downsides. Minneapolis, the larger of the two towns (twins they have never been), is the gray, solid, businessman kind of city. Urban renewal is a big part of their scene. The streets are laid out in a rectangular grid using a logical, repetitive pattern: avenues alphabetical east to west, streets in numerical sequence starting somewhere near the center of the city and running north and south. Sure, there are variations due to topography and the idiosyncrasies of developers. But not many.

Saint Paul, on the other hand, is a series of streets and avenues with a few boulevards tossed in that seem to wander about at random. In the central part of the city there are numbered streets and named avenues, not to mention a few places. But labels quickly change to lanes, names, and boulevards. I’m a native, grew up and went to high school in the system, and even I get lost from time to time. But now I live in Roseville, a suburb on the north side of the metro area, and have an office in Minneapolis. I still consider Saint Paul home. So does the post office, for that matter.

So what, you may be asking, has this to do with anything? To be truthful, nothing at all. I was trying to find my way to an address on the east side of St. Paul, over near Lake Phalen, about ten miles east of where I live in a straight line. Except you can’t hardly go in a straight line, east to west, so I got lost. St. Paul’s like that. Every so often it’ll rise up and bite you.

Being lost, I was late for my appointment. By pure luck, I found my way to the Phalen corridor and realized I was only a few blocks from the new State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension building. I had a friend there, a national expert on DNA analysis. That’s what she worked on in their lab. That and old cases. It was helpful having friends and acquaintances in important positions who could ease my way through this life. Down the hall from my office was another office where good friends were ensconced, folks who knew everything there was to know about computers and how to use or misuse the Internet. One might think of them as hackers. They knew how to search digitally, penetrate and leave no trace. They were not, as far as I knew, affiliated with any government agency.

More and more today, private investigation involves telephone and computer searching. As personal privacy disappears, more and more investigators use the Internet to find the information they needed. Me, I prefered personal contact. Eyeball to eyeball, as it were. I was far from being an expert computer/Internet user. When I had the need, my friends down the hall, the Revulon sisters, did computer dances for me. They’re big, blonde Scandinavian women, a heck of a lot easier on the eyes than any computer screen. The Revulons sort of adopted me. They knew my live-in significant girlfriend, Catherine Mckerney, and approved. I suppose it’s more accurate to say I was the live-in because Catherine and I spend most of our downtime together at her place, a very nice, large apartment in an upscale part of Minneapolis, instead of at my nice split-level in Roseville.

So what does all this have to do with anything? It’s by way of an introduction to me, my piece of life on this planet and a case that recently came my way. The case started many years earlier and a long way away. It began near a small, insignificant speck of dirt and coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Now, I’m sure the speck of land isn’t insignificant to the people who lived there, or those who died there. But if I ask someone, Have you ever heard of Yap Island? chances are the answer would be no. Unless you happen to be a student of that large war in the world that happened in the last century. In particular, what they called the Pacific Theater of that war. Parenthetically, it has always amazed me that the Pacific Theater was so named, because, like the ocean, it wasn’t very. Pacific, that is.

* * * *

The large war, officially called World War Two, happened between Germany, Italy, and Japan on one side, and just about everybody else, including the U.S. of A, on the other. There was the European Theater and the aforementioned Pacific Theater, although there wasn’t a lot of acting in either theater. It was mostly fighting and dying. A general named MacArthur got tossed out of the Pacific after the Imperial Japanese Army overran the Philippine Islands. That was just after the Imperial Japanese Navy air wing wiped out a significant part of the American Navy at Pearl Harbor, which is in the Islands of Hawaii, also in the Pacific and now our fiftieth state. Then it was merely one of our territories.

That’s enough history, except to note that General MacArthur, with the help of a few Marines and the U.S. Navy, did return to the Philippines. Along the way there were several scraps at, around, and over various islands and segments of empty Pacific Ocean. One of those islands was a pinprick on the map, an atoll named Yap.

I had never heard of Yap Island until a guy walked into my office one fine morning and plunked down in my side chair, the one bolted to the floor. It gave Tod Bartelme a bit of a jolt when he couldn’t use his finely sculpted arms to move the chair. I could see it in his face. Here was a man who clearly worked out to keep his body well tuned. He frowned and gave up after two tries to move the chair. I had the chair bolted down so irate clients didn’t try to throw it at me. My friend, Minneapolis Police Detective Ricardo Simon, insisted the chair was bolted down so it was always in direct range of the pistol strapped to the underside of my desk. Totally untrue. There’s no pistol strapped to the underside of my desk. It’s actually a used sawed-off, single-barreled shotgun.

Sarcasm, my lover, Catherine Mckerney, sometimes remarked, would one day get me a fat lip. So far, I’ve been able to dodge that event. On my slender, five-foot-plus frame, a fat lip would look unfortunate. Oh, I’ve received a fat lip or two in my line of work, but not for sarcasm.

Anyway, Tod Bartelme. He’s the dude who showed up, exuding health, a super positive attitude, and a problem. He was alone, tall and worried, and he said so after we’d gotten through the obligatory introductions and he’d settled into that visitor’s chair.

What are you worried about? I queried. I tried to zero in on the main issues as quickly as I could. Otherwise, we can waste a lot of time, and time, as somebody once said, is money. I don’t quite follow that reasoning, but there you go.

It all started three Christmases ago. Traditionally, the family, well, my wife’s family, insists we all get together for the holidays. So after dinner Christmas Day, we were all sitting around the living room relaxing, having a little Christmas cheer, watching a little football. You know.

He gestured. I nodded.

Anyway my wife Josie—her name is Jocelyn but we all call her Josie—Josie mentions she’s been taking a noncredit course from some extension operation at the U, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Everybody calls it Ollie. Don’t ask me why.

I hadn’t been planning to do so.

Josie says it’s a history course on World War Two. The Pacific Theater part.

Ah, I said. The Solomon Islands, Okinawa, Bataan, places like that. The Battle of Midway. I may be short but I do have a little education.

Bartelme gave me a look and nodded. Yeah, that’s right. There’s another island out there that figured in the war. It’s named Yap. It belonged to the Japanese after the First World War and they built an airstrip and buildings and some other stuff. It’s about six hundred miles east from Japan.

Six hundred miles. Round trip, twelve hundred. A bomber could just make it, but fighters don’t carry enough gas, I betcha.

Tod Bartelme looked a little surprised. You know about these things?

Only recently learned, I said. When you called for this appointment and said you wanted to talk about Yap Island, I did a little checking since I’d never heard of the place. It sounds like a location a married man or woman might go to get away from a family problem.

Bartelme shook his head and smiled. Maybe, but that’s not the situation here. He went on to explain that his wife’s granduncle had been a flyer in the war and was lost somewhere in the vicinity of this Yap Island. Shot down. The bodies of the crew had never been recovered, nor had those of the crews of two other bombers in the flight that went down in the same action. Josie got it in her head she’d like to see the place her granduncle was lost. She said when she chatted with her sister Julie about maybe going out there, she started wondering about that part of the world and what happened there. So she asked her relatives about it, and the story came out. Part of it, anyway.

When Josie gets an idea in her head, it most often happens, said Tod.

Chapter 2

Tod Bartelme told me a lot of other things, too. About how he and Josie were experienced SCUBA divers and that it looked like the bomber with her granduncle shot down over Yap went into the ocean with everybody aboard. The wreck had never been found. A sad story, but it had happened to a lot of others and it happened a long time ago, and I wasn’t so sure I needed to know all that. I still wasn’t clear on why the Bartelmes needed the services of a private investigator located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. So I interrupted my potential client to ask, This is all interesting history, Mr. Bartelme. But I confess I don’t see the connection to today. Why do you want to hire me?

Bartelme stopped and took a swig from a water bottle he carried. He smiled. Sorry. I’ll get to the point. It appears someone’s trying to sabotage our next trip to Yap.

Sabotage. Your trip to Yap. Of all the things I might have supposed Bartelme would say, that was about at the end of the list. Hell, it didn’t even make it on the list. Somebody doesn’t want you to go back to the South Pacific? Why?

Haven’t a clue. That’s where you come in, if you’ll take the case, Mr. Sean.

I liked that he didn’t hesitate over my name. Over either of my names. My first name was the same as my last. Sean Sean, Private Investigator, Ltd. That was what it says on my office door. I had it painted there when I leased this office. I might be limited in the height department, being only five-two, but otherwise, I was fully functional.

I didn’t do divorce cases or other domestic wrangles, and I tried to stay away from the bent-nose boys, the organized, mobbed up, fellows. I had an acquaintance, a guy in town who was a player. Maybe. I don’t believe everything he told me. He claimed to have some ties to organized crime in places like Chicago. I used him as a sort of resource. If I got vibes I didn’t like, he could often warn me if I was getting too close to an organized felony. I used to insist I’d never get involved with the CIA and international spies and such, but then last year I had to deal with a stolen painting. From Poland.

Tod Bartelme was not mobbed up and he wasn’t a wise guy. From everything I could determine with a quick Internet search, he was just a guy who had worked for the state in mid-level administrative positions for a ton of years and had never been in any trouble with the law. I hadn’t met his family, but that could come later. Right now I had to suss out whether there was even a case here. We talked some more and I made some notes. Then we made an appointment for the coming weekend. I would drive to their place on White Bear Lake, a northeastern outer suburb of Saint Paul. I wasn’t fond of woods and brush and things rural, even though I lived in an inner suburb with a lot of trees. A former client gave me the place. I could hardly refuse, right? I grew up in the city and I liked it there. I even enjoyed the tall buildings, the smell of hot pavement in the summer, the street musicians, the parties and even the scufflers and the players. Some of them. The Bartelmes liked the cooler leafier suburban life. And the water. Okay with me.

What I’d learned from Tod that made me think there was something hinky going on was this: for a couple of years Josie and Tod have been looking for her granduncle, Richard Terry Amundson. The Bartelmes had done their research and even made two trips to Yap. They had zeroed in on his bomber group, the planes and the date and approximate flight route. They had developed a contact with a guy in St. Louis who said he was a crew member of a different aircraft in the same group and could tell them things. What things? Important things, apparently. He was due to arrive in the Twin Cities a few days after my meeting with the Bartelmes.

Bartelme was excited. He explained he thought that, with the information the St. Louis vet would supply, they’d pinpoint more precisely the location of the bomberwhen it was shot down. That was to be their next big trip, coming up in August.

But then, he said, things started going wrong. Oddly wrong. Suddenly, the wheels are coming off the cart, as he put it. Somebody seemed determined he and his wife should not go back to the remote island of Yap or ever find her granduncle’s remains. Would I meet with him and his wife to discuss the rash of odd happenings?

Yes, I would meet with them. I was willing to meet because what little I had learned about Yap and the war in the Pacific intrigued me. I also had a personal connection, tenuous though it was. What I knew of my dad was what my mother had told me not long before she died. My dad had been in the service, probably the Navy, although my mom wasn’t too clear when the topic came up. He’d definitely been in the Pacific, she told me, fighting the North Koreans. I’d never met my dad. He and my mom had split right after I showed up. Her information about his sojourn in the service was sketchy. She also told me that my grandfather, her dad, had been in the service as well. He was apparently a sailor and had been in action in the Pacific. I’d never met my grandfather, either. I was intrigued, mildly so, by Bartelme’s tale. So I’d journey out to the far eastern reaches of our metropolitan area, to that foreign land called White Bear Lake, to meet his wife and look over the information they had. Then I’d assess the problems that had recently poked up and see what there was to be seen.

Meanwhile, but not back at some ranch, I would connect with my pard, and we’d ride off to some nice downtown restaurant