A stolen diamond, a murdered woman and a man with too many secrets. Robert Tricozzi’s Italian thriller that leaves you breathless
In a famous club in New York distinguished professionals and retired men meet every day. Among these, three friends usually tell each other the most significant anecdotes of their working lives. The most compelling story is that of Judge Gardner, which traces a complex story experienced in the last phase of his career.
Jim McCarthy went one day to his lover Linda with the intention of ending their stormy relationship. However, things came to a head when the woman revealed to him that she had filmed their love scenes with a camera hidden between the spotlights on the false ceiling, above the bed. Jim, seized with a fit of rage, threw a large glass vase at her. Linda fell to the floor, hitting her head on the marble base of the fireplace, and remained motionless in a pool of blood. Terrified, Jim made sure she was still breathing, then fled.
When he returned home to his wife, he hoped that everything would end there. Two days later, however, the news announced that a woman had been found shot dead on the eighteenth floor of 58 West Broadway, the building where Linda lived. Jim was speechless: he hadn’t killed her, much less with a gun.
The following day the police knocked on his door. Jim tried to explain to the investigators how he had met Linda: she was an ambitious girl, who sought fame and success through her connections at TV20, a television station where her friend George also worked. Together they tried to give her visibility with commercials or small parts in fiction. Despite his explanations, Jim remained the prime suspect. However, his lawyer managed to keep him out of trouble, at least temporarily, thanks to the absence of the murder weapon.
Determined to shed light on the matter, Jim recovered a key that opened Linda’s safe. Inside he found only some letters signed by a certain Mark Sullivan, probably the woman’s husband, and some photographs portraying him at work in South Africa.
What no one knew was that Mark, twenty years earlier, together with his accomplice Clint, had stolen a priceless diamond from a Dutch fixer in Pretoria. The stone had been hidden inside a wooden statuette depicting an oriental deity. The statuette had passed from hand to hand between the two accomplices several times, until Mark handed it over to Linda, his newly married wife, completely unaware of what it contained.
Linda’s story had painful roots. As a child she had witnessed something dark and never fully clarified: her parents had left on a boat for a trip on the lake, but only her father had returned. The mother, it was said, had gone down to the other bank after yet another argument with her husband. Linda may have seen something, but the memory remained confused and nebulous. Raised by her aunt, she had become a rebellious girl with only one desire: to go to New York and enjoy life. So he had done. After marrying Mark Sullivan, one evening she ran away taking the statuette with her, to start over in a luxurious apartment made available by her new lover, Jim McCarthy.
Commissioner Talbot found himself having to unravel a very intricate skein. Linda’s murder was intertwined with the blackmail linked to the hidden camera footage, the parallel investigations conducted by Charles, the victim’s father, who was looking alone for the person responsible for his daughter’s death, and Jim’s colleagues at TV20, who had also had relationships with Linda – perhaps not only for her beauty, but also because she may have come into possession of the precious diamond.
