The Maltese Emerald

Los Angeles, November 1947. Private investigator Jack Malone is hired by the mysterious Vivian Cortez to quietly recover a stolen gem - the Marchetti Emerald, forty-two carats of Colombian green that has been in one family for three generations. The police think it was misplaced. Malone knows better. When the trail leads to Dutch Hennessey, a man whose size does his talking for him, and to a hidden cavity inside the emerald's setting, what began as a routine recovery becomes something far older and far more dangerous.

The Maltese Emerald is the first episode of [Series Name], an original old-time radio drama in the tradition of classic noir. Produced with full cast, original sound design, and live jazz score.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Maltese Emerald. An old time radio drama in the style of Philip Marlowe. They say Los Angeles has two seasons. The dry season, when the city bakes under a sun that doesn't care about anyone. And the wet season, when the rain comes down like God is trying to wash the whole sorry place clean, and hasn't figured out yet that some stains don't wash out. It was the wet season. A Tuesday night in November, 1947, the kind of night that kept decent people indoors and sent the other kind to find someone like me. My name is Jack Malone. I keep an office on the fourth floor of the Bradbury Building on Spring Street. The frosted glass on my door says Malone investigations in letters that need repainting. Inside there's a desk, two chairs, a filing cabinet with a stuck drawer, and a bottle of rye that was three-quarters full this morning and wasn't any more. That's the complete inventory of my professional life. I was sitting behind the desk, watching the rain make rivers on my window and thinking about nothing in particular, which was my specialty. Then I heard the heels. They came down the hallway like a metronome counting time in a key nobody else was playing in. Slow, deliberate. The walk of a woman who knew exactly where she was going and wanted you to have time to think about it before she got there.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Mr. Malone.

SPEAKER_04 1:14

She wasn't asking. She already knew. The sign on the door give me away.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

The bottle of rye and the expression of a man with nowhere better to be. The sign was supplementary evidence.

SPEAKER_04 1:25

I looked up then. I always did. Eventually, she was worth the eventually. Tall, in a black dress that had cost more than my month's rent and knew it. Hair the color of good coffee, pinned up in a way that suggested it could come down at the right moment. And eyes, jade green eyes that had seen things and hadn't looked away. She was carrying a small purse and a secret. I could tell about the purse because I could see it. I could tell about the secret because of the way she was holding herself, the specific careful posture of a person managing information. Sit down, Miss.

SPEAKER_01 2:00

Cortez. Vivian Cortez.

SPEAKER_04 2:02

Drink, Miss Cortez.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Please.

SPEAKER_04 2:05

You came a long way in the rain to sit in my office. What can I do for you?

SPEAKER_01 2:09

My employer has lost something. Something of considerable value. She would like it found quietly, without involving the police.

SPEAKER_04 2:18

Most people who come to me want things found quietly without involving the police. The ones who want the police involved generally go to the police. What's the item?

SPEAKER_01 2:27

An emerald.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

One emerald.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

The Marchetti Emerald. Perhaps you've heard of it.

SPEAKER_04 2:32

I had. Everybody in Los Angeles with a subscription to any newspaper had. The Marchetti Emerald was 42 carats of Colombian green that had been in the Marchetti family for three generations since old Carmine Marchetti brought it from Rome in 1901. It had been appraised at $60,000. It had been displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum the previous spring, and it had been stolen from the Marchetti estate in Hancock Park approximately. I looked at my watch. The Marchetti robbery was reported this morning. That means your employer waited twelve hours before coming to me.

SPEAKER_01 3:07

She had other inquiries to make first.

SPEAKER_04 3:09

What kind of inquiries?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

The kind that didn't produce results.

SPEAKER_04 3:13

Tell me about the theft.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Mrs. Marchetti held a small dinner party last evening. Six guests. The emerald was displayed in its case in the study, as it occasionally is for guests of particular distinction. Sometime between eight in the evening and eleven, when the last guest departed, the emerald disappeared from the case. The case was not broken. The window was not forced. That is the uncomfortable conclusion. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 3:46

Who were the guests?

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Pemberton. Judge Raymond Haas and his wife, Constance, and two business associates of Mrs. Marchetti's late husband, a Mr. DeLuca and a Mr. Hennessy.

SPEAKER_04 4:01

The last two names sat in my office like uninvited guests at a party, Tommy DeLuca and Dutch Hennessy. I knew them by reputation, which was the only way anyone who wanted to stay healthy knew them. DeLuca was a fence, a small nervous man who moved stolen goods from the people who stole them to the people who bought them without asking questions. Dutch Hennessy was the other kind of associate, the kind that made problems go away by making the people who caused the problems go away. What they were doing at Elena Marchetti's dinner table was an interesting question. DeLuca and Hennessy were friends of the late Mr. Marchetti.

SPEAKER_01 4:37

Business associates.

SPEAKER_04 4:39

Right. What business was Mr. Marchetti in?

SPEAKER_01 4:41

Import and export.

SPEAKER_04 4:42

Sure he was. How much is Mrs. Marchetti willing to pay to get her emerald back?

SPEAKER_01 4:47

She will pay five hundred dollars for its recovery. She will pay a further five hundred if it is recovered without scandal. She is seventy-one years old, Mr. Malone. The emerald was her husband's last gift to her. The money is secondary.

SPEAKER_04 5:02

I looked at those jade eyes and I believed her. About Mrs. Marchetti's feelings anyway. About everything else, I was going to need some time. I'll take the case, Miss Cortez.

SPEAKER_01 5:13

One more thing, Mr. Malone.

SPEAKER_04 5:15

There always is.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

The police were told the emerald was misplaced, not stolen. Mrs. Marchetti does not want them investigating her guests. If you find the emerald through means that require involving Captain Brody's people.

SPEAKER_04 5:30

You'd rather I didn't.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

We'd rather you succeeded without it becoming necessary.

SPEAKER_04 5:35

I'll do my best.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

I know you will. That's why I came in the rain, Mr. Malone.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

I sat back down behind my desk and poured myself the drink I'd been pretending I wasn't going to pour. Tommy DeLuca and Dutch Hennessy at a widow's dinner party. The Marchetti Emerald missing from a locked case with no sign of forced entry, and a woman with jade eyes showing up in my office at nine on a rainy Tuesday instead of noon on a dry Wednesday, which meant the other inquiries she'd mentioned hadn't just failed. They'd failed badly. Somewhere in Los Angeles, somebody had a sixty thousand dollar emerald and a very short clock. I put on my coat and went to find Tommy DeLuca. Tommy DeLuca kept an office above a pawn shop on Cowenga, which was appropriate since the pawn shop was one of his primary business operations, the legitimate face on a collection of enterprises that Captain Brody's people had been trying to shut down for eleven years without notable success. The building smelt of mildew and old transactions. I went up the back stairs, which were the stairs you used when you didn't want the man at the front counter to make a phone call. The light was on under DeLuca's door. I knocked. We're closed. Come back tomorrow. It's Malone, Tommy. Open up before I decide to knock louder.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Malone? What the Hold on, hold on. Malone! Hey! Jack Malone in person, how about that? Come in. Come in. You want something? I got coffee.

SPEAKER_04 7:01

I got I don't want anything, Tommy. I want to ask you something.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Sure, sure, anything. What do you need? I'm an open book. Everybody knows Tommy DeLuca is an open book.

SPEAKER_04 7:11

Tommy, the last time you were an open book, somebody tore out half the pages. Ha.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

Ha. That's funny, Malone. That's what do you want?

SPEAKER_04 7:19

I want to talk about last night, the Marchetti dinner.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

I don't know anything about any emerald.

SPEAKER_04 7:24

I hadn't mentioned an emerald. I didn't ask about an emerald, Tommy.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

I just I heard look, everybody in town heard about the Marchetti thing. It was on the radio this morning.

SPEAKER_04 7:33

The radio said it was misplaced, not stolen.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Right, right, misplaced. That's what I heard.

SPEAKER_04 7:39

Then why did you go straight to the emerald? Ah, jeez, Malone. Talk to me, Tommy. I'm working for Mrs. Marchetti. She wants the emerald back. No questions asked. No police. Whoever returns it walks away clean.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

I can't. Can't what? I can't talk about it. You understand what I'm saying? I'm not being coy. I literally there are people involved in this thing that you don't that I don't Dutch Hennessy. You didn't hear that from me.

SPEAKER_04 8:07

Dutch took the emerald.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

I didn't say that.

SPEAKER_04 8:10

What did Dutch want with a sixty thousand dollar stone? He's not offense. That's your department.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

He came to me after the dinner. Real late. Like two in the morning. He had the stone. He wanted me to move it. I told him. You told him what? I told him I couldn't move something that hot. Not the marchetti stone. Everybody knows that stone. You can't sell it domestic. You'd have to take it apart. And even then the main stone is 42 carats. I told him it would take time. Contact. He didn't like that.

SPEAKER_04 8:41

Where's Dutch now?

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Malone, if Dutch finds out I talked to you, where is he, Tommy? He's got a place. Out in Boyle Height Warehouse on 6th Street. But Malone Dutch didn't just take the emerald.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

What else did he take?

SPEAKER_00 8:55

He took it because somebody paid him to. Somebody paid Dutch Hennessy to go into that dinner party and lift that specific stone. And the person who paid him, they didn't pay him because they wanted to sell it.

SPEAKER_04 9:08

Why did they want it?

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Because of what's inside it.

SPEAKER_04 9:11

What's inside a 42-garat emerald, Tommy?

SPEAKER_00 9:14

Old Carmine Marchetti wasn't just an import and export Malone. You know that. What you might not know is that before he came to this country back in Rome, he was holding things for people. Documents, account numbers, the kind of information that gets people killed. He had it all put on microfilm, real small, and he had it put inside the Marchetti Emerald in a tiny cavity in the base of the setting. His insurance policy. And now he's dead. And now somebody wants that microfilm. Who hired Dutch? I don't know. I swear on my mother's grave, Malone. Dutch didn't tell me, and I didn't ask because asking questions like that is how a person ends up in the river. That's the second time it's rung in the last ten minutes. I haven't been picking up. Pick it up. Malone. Pick it up, Tommy. Hello? Nobody there.

SPEAKER_04 10:10

We both understood what nobody there meant. It meant somebody knew I was in Tommy DeLuca's office. It meant the clock, which had already been short, had just gotten shorter. Stay here tonight, Tommy. Don't go home. Don't call anyone. Don't the shot came from across the street and took out the window six inches above where Tommy had been standing. The glass came down like expensive rain. Tommy was on the floor, not shot, just wise enough to fall down when shooting started, which was the survival skill of a man who had been in proximity to violence his whole career. You hit? No.

SPEAKER_00 10:43

No, I don't think No.

SPEAKER_04 10:46

Stay down. I hit the alley behind the building at a run and came around to Cahuenga in time to see a black sedan pulling away from the curb with its lights off. I got four letters of the plate before it turned north and the rain took it. Four letters were better than nothing. Not as good as the whole plate, but that was the story of this case so far. Enough to see the shape of the thing, not enough to name it. I went back inside to tell Tommy to find somewhere safe to sleep and to remind myself that I was being paid five hundred dollars to retrieve a stolen emerald, and had somehow gotten involved in a 40-year-old conspiracy involving microfilm, an organized crime dinner party, and a man who shot at windows in the rain. The rye bottle on my desk seemed further away than it had ever seemed. The warehouse on Sixth Street in Boyle Heights looked like every other warehouse on every other street in that part of town, which is to say, it looked like a place where things happened that people would prefer not to be specific about. Big, dark, the kind of industrial building that the city had built in the twenties to hold things and had kept for the same purpose, the contents merely changing with the decades. A light showed in a high window. I went around the back. The inside of the warehouse was half dark, crates stacked on the left, an open space in the middle, and in the middle of the open space, under a single hanging light, Dutch Hennessy was sitting in a chair, going through what appeared to be paperwork with the focused attention of a man who was not expecting company. Dutch Hennessy was six feet four and two hundred and fifty pounds, and had a face that had stopped being surprised by anything sometime around 1935. He heard me come in. Dutch always heard things it was a professional requirement, and looked up without the expression that most people would have in that situation, which was alarm. Dutch's expression was the expression he always had, which was mild and attentive and vaguely terrible.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

Malone Dutch. I know that a man who walks into my warehouse uninvited has either more courage than sense, or more information than I'm comfortable with. Which is it?

SPEAKER_04 12:51

Little of both, probably. I'm looking for something that went missing from the Marchetti house last night.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_04 12:58

Sure you do, Dutch. Forty two carats, Colombian origin, the kind of green that makes people do things they'd rather not answer for. Tommy DeLuca sends his regards.

SPEAKER_02 13:08

You talk to Tommy.

SPEAKER_04 13:09

Somebody put a bullet through his window while I was there. Someone who knew I was there, which means someone was watching Tommy, which means whoever hired you is tying off their loose ends.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

Nobody hired me.

SPEAKER_04 13:22

Then you're branching out from your regular work into gemstone theft purely as a hobby. I find that hard to believe, Dutch.

SPEAKER_02 13:28

You should go home Malone. This isn't your weight class.

SPEAKER_04 13:32

Maybe not, but I've got a seventy-one-year-old woman who wants her husband's last gift back, and apparently whatever's inside it is causing enough trouble that someone is taking shots at people in the rain, so I'm inclined to see it through.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

What do you know about inside it? Enough. The woman who hired me told me it was a simple retrieval. Said the emerald was hers by right of certain debts owed, and that the old lady had been sitting on it too long. She said nothing about microfilm. She said nothing about Who hired you, Dutch?

SPEAKER_04 14:03

The heels I'd heard once before that evening. The same metronome pace, the same quality of deliberation. I turned around.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

I'm sorry, Mr. Malone.

SPEAKER_04 14:13

She was holding a small pistol that matched the purse it had presumably come out of. Both were expensive and purposeful. You hired Dutch.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

I'm afraid so.

SPEAKER_04 14:22

You came to me to slow things down, find out how much the police knew, find out if Mrs. Marchetti had other plans.

SPEAKER_01 14:29

You're very quick. It was a recommendation.

SPEAKER_04 14:31

The microfilm. What's on it?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

My father's name. And the names of twenty men who worked with him. Carmine Marchetti had that information for forty years as insurance against the people my father worked for. My father is dying, Mr. Malone. If those names come out after he goes, if Marchetti's widow decides to use what's in that stone for leverage, or sells it to someone who will you were protecting your father. I still am.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

She's going to ask me to deal with you, Malone. I want you to know I'd rather not.

SPEAKER_04 15:03

It won't work. The shot through Tommy's window. That was your man.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_04 15:09

No, you don't. Which means there's someone else in this room we can't see yet. Someone who also wants that microfilm and isn't interested in protecting your father. Someone who wants what's on it for leverage of their own. It happened fast. A figure from the shadows behind Dutch, someone who'd been there the whole time, patient in the dark, took Dutch at the knees with something heavy, and Dutch went down like a building being demolished. Vivian's shot went into the rafters, and in the confusion, I crossed the ten feet between us and got the gun. The figure straightened up from Dutch, and I found myself looking at a face I hadn't expected, Captain Brody.

SPEAKER_03 15:47

Malone, you want to put my officer's weapon down?

SPEAKER_04 15:50

Your officer's weapon was pointed at me about 30 seconds ago.

SPEAKER_03 15:54

Miss Cortez is a complicated situation. Put the gun down. How long have you been in here? Long enough. We've had DeLuca's phone tap for six months. When your name came up on his line tonight, I decided to follow the interesting thread.

SPEAKER_04 16:08

You knew Brody was following you.

SPEAKER_01 16:10

I suspected.

SPEAKER_03 16:11

Dutch is fine. Hard head. Miss Cortez is the emerald.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

You let it happen.

SPEAKER_03 16:18

You led us to Dutch. Dutch would have led us to the stone. The stone leads us to the microfilm. And the microfilm has names on it that we've been trying to document for a decade.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

You don't care about my father.

SPEAKER_03 16:31

Miss Cortez, your father is dying. I'm sorry about that. But the names on that microfilm belong to men who are not dying. Men who have been operating in this city for 40 years under Carmine Marchetti's protection. And now that Marchetti is gone, they need new protection. That's what this is about. Not your father.

SPEAKER_04 16:50

Where's the emerald now?

SPEAKER_03 16:51

In a pocket.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Left side.

SPEAKER_04 16:54

Dutch produced the Marchetti emerald from inside his jacket and set it on a crate in the warehouse on 6th Street. And the single overhead light caught it. And for a moment none of us said anything. Forty-two carats of Colombian green, the color of deep water, in a place the sun hadn't reached in years, the weight of forty years of history in a stone small enough to fit in a man's breast pocket. The microfilm is in the setting.

SPEAKER_03 17:16

My people can extract it without damaging the stone. And the stone goes back to Elena Marchetti. That was always the plan, was it? The old woman doesn't know what her husband put in that stone, doesn't know what those names mean or what they have protected over the years. She just knows it was his last gift. I'm not in the business of taking last gifts from 71-year-old women, Malone. Even in this department, tell them to wait outside.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

My father made his choices a long time ago. I made mine tonight. I suppose we both have to live with them.

SPEAKER_03 17:49

The charges. Sure, Malone? Fill the department. See how that goes.

SPEAKER_04 18:48

I returned the Marchetti emerald to Elena Marchetti at seven in the morning. She was already up, the way old people were up before the rest of the world remembered it needed to be. She was sitting in a chair in the study of the house in Hancock Park, in a dressing gown, with the particular stillness of someone who had been waiting in that chair for some time. I set the emerald on the table beside her. She picked it up with both hands, the way you picked up something you had believed you might not see again. She held it in the morning light that was coming through the window, thin and grey and washed from the night's rain. She didn't ask me how. She didn't ask me who.

SPEAKER_05 19:23

Mr. Malone?

SPEAKER_04 19:24

Mrs. Marchetti.

SPEAKER_05 19:26

My husband gave me this on our fortieth anniversary. We were standing in the garden. He said he said a stone this old had seen more of the world than either of us ever would. He said it deserved to live the rest of its years somewhere it would be appreciated. He was a complicated man, Mr. Malone. I always knew that. The things he was involved in, I did not ask, and he did not tell. And we were happy in the space between those two facts for 43 years.

SPEAKER_04 19:55

He protected you.

SPEAKER_05 19:56

We protected each other in the ways that were available to us. It is what people do. Will there be trouble for the people involved?

SPEAKER_04 20:05

Some of them, the ones who earned it.

SPEAKER_05 20:07

And the young woman? The one who came to you on behalf of her father?

SPEAKER_04 20:10

I looked at her. She knew. Of course she knew. Seventy-one years and a complicated marriage and four decades of watching from the edges of things. She'd known about the microfilm, or suspected, or known enough to understand that the stone was more than a stone. She'll be alright.

SPEAKER_05 20:26

Good. Her father and my husband. They were not good men in the simple sense, but they were loyal to the people they loved. In my experience, that is not a small thing. Even if it is not enough. You should go home, Mr. Malone. You look like a man who has been awake for something longer than a night.

SPEAKER_04 20:44

Yes, ma'am.

SPEAKER_05 20:45

Thank you for the stone.

SPEAKER_04 20:46

I drove back to Spring Street in the thin morning, the rain finally done, the city wet and quiet in that particular way it got after a long storm, when the air was clean for the first hour before the day put it back the way it was. Vivian Cortez was going to be all right. Brody had his microfilm and twenty names he'd been chasing for a decade, and he needed her more than he needed a case against her. Dutch Hennessy was in custody, which was where Dutch eventually ended up, the law of averages being what it was. Tommy De Luca was in a motel in Burbank that I didn't know the name of and didn't want to. And in a house in Hancock Park, a forty-two carat emerald sat in its case in the morning light, green as deep water, old as trouble, finally home. I parked the car. I went upstairs. I looked at my desk and the bottle of rye and the two chairs and the filing cabinet with the stuck drawer. I sat down. I thought about Vivian Cortez walking into my office in the rain with her jade eyes and her secret, and about Elena Marchetti holding her husband's last gift in both hands in the gray morning, and about what the old woman had said, loyal to the people they loved, not a small thing, even if it is not enough. No, I thought. Not a small thing. I poured myself a drink I'd earned. Outside the city was waking up and going back to being what it was, which was complicated and mostly not my business and occasionally worth getting wet for. Just another morning in Los Angeles. Just another case.