Pigeon Blood

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Vinnie’s Dead

  “Damn it, Blair! What is that?” Thomas said when he saw Kevin’s crystals. “It’s two in the morning, so I must be dreaming.”

  “What do they look like to you?”

  Thomas sighed, wiping his mouth with a hand shaking from an adrenalin rush. “Well, they could be anything, I suppose. Garnet, topaz, tourmaline, spinel…. But if they are rubies as the striations suggest, samples that size could be worth a fortune.” He looked at Blair. “Where did you get them? Did you mine them yourself?”

  “No,” he said, sitting back in the kitchen chair and watching Ingrid for a moment. It was almost worth pretending they were rubies just to see that amazed, appreciative face of hers. She usually looked bored and reticent whenever Blair was around; seeing him usually meant bad news because she considered him a freeloader. When alcohol started enhancing his financial woes, Thomas’s always insisting that Blair stay with them had worn out what little welcome he ever had there. This time she actually seemed happy to have him around.

  “Then where did you get them?” Thomas asked.

  “Vinnie Moorland found them almost six years ago in North Carolina.”

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” Thomas said. “Crystals this size from North Carolina? If these are rubies, most people would just assume they came from the Mogok in Burma!”

  “I suppose,” Blair said, looking at Ingrid again and finding her smiling at him. Drawing that much of her attention in such a short time was quite exhilarating. How nice would she be if he offered to give her the rubies?

  “Wait a minute,” Thomas said. “Isn’t Vinnie Moorland the fellow who…?”

  “Yes,” Blair said, cutting him off. He and Thomas had talked about Vinnie many, many times in the past. Whenever a man thought that his actions were responsible for killing someone, talking about it had a way of easing the pain some.

  Carefully Thomas examined the gems under the room’s fluorescent lights. The slight blue cast against the deep red stones suggested dichroism, the presence of two distinct colors. “They’re so transparent,” he said, taking a triple aplanatic magnifier off the stand behind him and looking at the stones through it. “It’s hard to tell with the shadow from the limestone matrix, but from what I can see, the stones appear to be free of cracks and inclusions. Color zoning is evident.”

  “What’s that?” Ingrid asked.

  “A variance in color. In some areas of the stones, the color is more intense than in others.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that these gems are natural as opposed to synthetic,” Blair told her.

  “There’s no way that these are synthetic,” Thomas said, “especially while still embedded in a matrix. It’s rare to find rubies this big and of this quality, but it’s rarer still to find them in limestone or marble, schist or gneiss. Most are washed out of rocks and deposited in streams and river beds because they’re so hard.”

  “How strong is that lens you’re using?” Blair asked him.

  “It’s a ten-power,” Thomas said, pausing just a second to glance at Blair. He couldn’t keep his eyes from the gems for long.

  “These samples are harder than quartz,” Blair said. “I tried scratching them with a piece of rose quartz.”

  Thomas sighed, not the least bit encouraged by that. “Well, even the copycat crystals are harder than quartz. Garnet would be the softest, from six to seven-and-a-half on the Mohs scale. Tourmaline is also about a seven. Topaz and spinel are around eight, and corundum, about nine. That’s over seven hundred times harder than jade and steel. Sapphires are nine and rubies are just a hair softer at eight point eight. None of those would be scratched by quartz.”

  “What about a streak plate?” Blair said, glancing at Ingrid’s puzzled face. “When you take a mineral specimen and drag it across an unglazed, porcelain plate, it produces a powder trail,” he explained to her. “The color of that powder trail can tell us a lot about the identification of the mineral.”

  “Trouble is,” Thomas said, “some garnets are too hard to test that way, and corundum definitely is. I guess we could obtain a streak by rubbing two pieces of the same mineral together, but I wouldn’t want to mess up these specimens with a test like that. Besides, garnet, spinel, and corundum all streak white. They all have a vitreous luster and can be red like this. These gemstones, however, appear wholly hexagonal. Just look at the smaller crystals here and here.” He pointed out the places.

  “A ruby would be six-sided, am I right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Ruby crystals are usually tabular, but not always. They consist of a short prism terminated by a basal pinacoid, which may or may not have small pyramid and rhombohedron faces.”

  “Basal pinacoid?” Blair said. “You’ve lost me.”

  “What it all means is, I’d love to get an x-ray of the crystalline structure of these gems. Then there would be no doubt at all about their identity.”

  “None of the copycat crystals are hexagonal, are they?”

  “Nope. Spinel is usually octahedral, whereas garnet either forms a dodecahedron or trapezohedron, or a combination of both.”

  “What actually makes a ruby so hard?” Ingrid asked.

  “Well, a ruby is actually composed of two elements, aluminum and oxygen, at approximately fifty-three and forty-seven percent, respectively,” Thomas said. “Oddly enough, aluminum is a light metal and oxygen is a very light gas. But it’s the close packing and strong bonding of the atoms in the crystalline structure that makes a ruby so hard and heavy, and its specific gravity so high.”

  “A ruby is very durable,” Blair added.

  Ingrid nodded, staring at the crystals with a smile. “What makes them so beautiful?” she asked, running her fingers over the largest one.

  “There aren’t many that are this beautiful, honey,” Thomas told her. “But to answer your question, rubies of this color have an impurity in their structure called chromium oxide. Now there’s only about point one percent of that, but it makes all the difference. This chromium absorbs the entire green portion and most of the blue portion of the light spectrum. What remains is a mixture of red, orange, and yellow, with just a trace of blue, and the combination of these factors produces the carmine red described as pigeon’s blood red by the Burmese.”

  “Wait a minute,” Blair said. “Isn’t corundum doubly refractive?”

  “Yes, light will pass through it as more than one ray,” Thomas said, taking a pencil out of his shirt pocket and drawing a line on the table mat in front of him. He put a clear, transparent portion of one of the samples against the line, and Blair stood up to see. Looking through the stone, Blair tried to see two visible lines. It was impossible to tell.

  “Corundum splits the light traveling through it into two rays perpendicular to one another,” Thomas added. “I can’t see it happening, can you?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  Thomas got up and came back with a tabletop polariscope. The top and bottom Polaroid film plates were separated by the neck of the instrument, making the whole device resemble the letter C. “This should help us to decide if these are doubly refractive or not.” He went to a cabinet and unlocked it. “I love bringing this out.”

  Blair moved to the side to get a better view. “What is that, a gemoscope?”

  Thomas smiled and put it down on the table beside Blair. “Yep. It’s a dark field, ten-power binocular microscope. Top of the line, I might add.”

  “Nice, very nice.”

  Thomas was holding something else. It was a small instrument with a lens system built into a tube.

  “A dichroscope,” Blair observed. “Rubies are a combination of two colors, and a dichroscope will show a maximum difference in the two colors.”

  “That’s right. I’m bringing everything out for these babies.”

  “None of the look-alike gems are doubly refractive, are they?” Blair asked him.

  “No, they’re not.”

  “
Use the polariscope first. The biggest crystal sticks out from the matrix by almost an inch and a half. That should be far enough to get a portion of it under, right?”

  Thomas nodded, setting up his equipment. He seemed just as excited as Blair about the discovery. Besides, he was getting a chance to perform tests he hadn’t had the opportunity to try in years. When the polariscope was ready, Thomas rotated the top Polaroid film plate until there was a minimum of light passing through to the bottom plate. Without hesitating, he took the edge of the largest gemstone and stuck it between the two plates and then rotated it in a clockwise direction. He smiled when the stone obviously became light and dark. Blair tried it and saw it, too.

  Both men looked at Ingrid, whose satisfied expression had come long before theirs had. She covered her face with her hand and started laughing. The men laughed as well.

  “Would you mind if I took a look at those field notes again?” Thomas asked.

  “Not at all,” Blair said, feeling a buzz without a drop of gin in his veins. Still, a tall drink would’ve really hit the spot. “Break out a bottle, and I’ll make photocopies you can keep.”

  “It’s a deal!” Ingrid said, unusually giddy at past two in the morning. Blair liked that.

  “You know, there’s no need to make copies,” Thomas interjected just as playfully. “I’ve got a photographic memory.”

  “My ass!” Blair said, taking his seat at the table again.

  Ingrid laughed as she came and sat down beside Blair. Using her hand to brush back her long, blonde hair, she leaned over and stared at him with an affection he’d never seen from her before. “How does it feel to be a rich man, Blair?” she asked, her magnificent features enhanced by that uninhibited deportment.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said, growing pensive. “It’s Vinnie’s find, not mine.”

  “Vinnie’s dead,” she said, raising her blonde eyebrows. She had emphasized the word ‘dead’ so that it rang like a wake-up call through his tired, tender ears. Afterward, she gave him a coy, little smile; he returned the favor.