Colonel Durant showed his brother a good many of the unset stones and articles which he had brought back from overseas, and his brother helped him remove several diamonds from two tubes of shaving cream. Durant explained that while travelling to Italy a German had sold him more than one hundred diamonds for 3,000 German marks.
Durant gave one of the diamonds to a Washington, D. C., automobile dealer—a diamond appraised at $500—as part payment for a Hudson automobile. Another automobile dealer in Falls Church, Virginia, purchased two of the diamonds for $400, and Durant—using the assumed name of J. W. Gable—disposed of three of the diamonds to a jewelry firm in Washington for $357. Then he drove to Chicago to meet Kathleen Nash.
A few days after arriving in Chicago, Colonel Durant put in a call for his friend, Dr. Reuben Mark, at the Embassy Hotel. Dr. Mark was a dentist who had struck up a friendship with Durant a few years earlier in Washington, D. C. As Dr. Mark related the story of their meeting later:
“It was around April of this year. One evening he called and he said, ‘Ruby, this is Jack.’ I said, ‘When did you get in?’ He said, ‘Just today.’ I asked him how long he was going to be in town and he said he did not know. He was on thirty days leave and he had already spent a few days.
“Then he asked when we would get together. That was on Saturday night. He said something about a girl friend of his coming in from the coast. He said it was a girl that had been overseas with him and she was a divorcee. He said she was pretty and had been married to a wealthy man in Arizona and had just joined the WACs to get away.
“We arranged to meet in a day or so. A couple of days later we met after office hours at Isbell’s restaurant on Diversey. That was the night I first met his girl. Katy, as I began to call her, was a nice girl. Nothing unusual.
“It was there that Jack asked me, ‘Ruby, do you know any jewelers?’ I said, ‘Sure, I know some jewelers.’ Just about that time he pulled out a tissue paper. He opened it up and I saw three stones. I asked, ‘Where did you get them?’ He said he picked them up overseas in Frankfurt.
“At that time nothing occurred to me about anything being wrong. I know lots of boys who brought things from overseas and I felt, well, so what, he was overseas. I said, ‘Yes, I know some jewelers.’ And he said he would like to call them. I told him I would call the following day.
“I called a Mr. Horwitz, whom I had known for some time, and I asked if he was interested in buying some diamonds. He said yes....”
Dr. Mark accompanied Durant to the jeweler’s place of business and introduced him. Durant took a small cloth sack from his pocket and when he upended it, a shower of diamonds cascaded onto the desk. There were 102 stones in the lot.