Billionaires Prefer Blondes (6 page)

The cabdriver craned his neck around to face her through the Plexiglas barrier. “I hope you tip big for a trip that short, lady,” he rumbled in a heavy Ukrainian accent.

“That’ll depend on how polite you are,” Samantha returned smoothly, putting a touch of Manhattan in her accent. She knew the drill: not too nice, not too cranky—just enough conversation to not be remembered.

“Okay. My pleasure, Your Highness,” he said, sending her another annoyed glance in his mirror as he faced front again.

“That’s better.”

Traffic was as light as it ever got in Manhattan, and the creepy-crawlies who hid from daylight had come out to roam the sidewalks. She liked New York City at night even better than she did during the day. Decent people out at this hour were few and far between, and if they weren’t drunk or high, they were too worried about their own skins to look at anything outside their own very small circle of safety. And the rest of the midnight population had their own problems, real or imaginary, and couldn’t be bothered with anyone else’s unless they saw a benefit for themselves. She made certain it wasn’t profitable to mess with her.

Three minutes later the cab pulled over across from the Central Park side of the street. “How is this, Your Highness?”

The meter read $3.50, so she handed him a five and a one. “It’s perfect.”

He chuckled, pleased at the tip. “You want me to wait?”

“No. I’ll be a while.”

With a salute he pulled out into the light traffic. Samantha stood where she was for a minute. Even with a few light posts along the main walking paths, Central Park was one big, dark glob. One big, dark glob with her father in the middle of it.

For the first time since she’d climbed out of bed, Samantha allowed herself to think about why she was about to take a stroll through the east side of Central Park in the middle of the night. She shivered, not with fear, but with nerves. It was a damned good place for a ghost sighting; maybe under the circumstances a more populated rendezvous point would have been a better idea, after all. She waited for the traffic light, then crossed Fifth Avenue.

Get it together, Sam
, she repeated to herself—her new mantra. With a last look up and down the avenue, she squared her shoulders and walked into the park.

She’d seen the bronze statue of Balto the famous sled dog once or twice over the years, his flanks rubbed smooth by countless little kids’ hands. Even in the dark it took her less than fifteen minutes to circle around the dog and pick her spot in the undergrowth on the south side of the clearing. Without checking her watch she knew she was about ten minutes early, and she leaned sideways against the nearest tree trunk to wait.

If not for the faint sounds of traffic she might have been in the wilds of New England.
No thanks
. She preferred her jungles urban, where even on the run you could get a burger without having to hunt it down and kill it first.

A pair of men crossed the path in front of her, close enough that she could have reached out and picked the nearer one’s pocket. From the bulge in the back of his waistband she could have liberated a pistol, too, but that wasn’t her style.
Briefly she wondered whether he could be an undercover cop, patrolling the park. Either way, she wasn’t going to risk attracting his attention.

Her dad had used to call her a snob because she would only take the jobs in which the object to be stolen interested her—a rare painting, an antique, an ancient stone tablet. Even Martin, though, had his standards, and she’d never known him to carry a gun, either. Guns were for thugs who couldn’t get in and out of a place without being seen, he’d always said.

A couple of church bells chimed, not quite in unison, but clearly enough that she could make out two separate rings. Two o’clock. Go time.

A pair of rabbits meandered past, noses and ears twitching as they alternated between dumping rabbit pellets and checking the sky for owls. A speeding cyclist sent them hopping into the shrubbery. Samantha stayed in the deep shadows of the tree, unmoving.

Forty minutes later she’d waited for too long, seen another half dozen people, a scrawny-looking dog, and either a cat or a large rat pass by Balto, but no Martin Jellicoe. In the old days she would have waited ten minutes past the designated meeting time and then bolted, figuring the rendezvous had been compromised. But she hadn’t seen him in six years. And even when he didn’t show on time, she couldn’t make herself leave. Maybe he was as hesitant about this as she was.

She blew out her breath, and it fogged a little in the cool damp. “Where the hell are you, Martin?” she murmured, shifting. For Christ’s sake, he hadn’t seen her in six years, either, and she was his only kid.

Samantha frowned. If he hadn’t died three years ago, he’d certainly been in a position to track her down well before
now. So why hadn’t he? Where the hell had he been, and what had he been up to? While she’d still traveled on the dark side she’d heard about nearly every cat burglary pulled, and nothing had sounded like the work of Martin Jellicoe. Again, though, she’d never expected to hear any such thing, and she’d never tried to match anything to his familiar fingerprints.

She heard footsteps down the path, and stilled again. Her heart pounded, though by now she wasn’t certain whether she was more nervous or angry. But the guy who came down the path had about half a foot on her dad. He wore a ragged coat that sagged on his thin frame, and even from the far side of the clearing she could smell the stale booze on him. He crossed past her, mumbling something about Batman.

When she finally gave in and checked her watch, it was nearly three. “Fuck,” she muttered, slipping out of the undergrowth and back onto the path. Either that hadn’t been Martin after all, or something was up. And in her experience, “somethings” were never good news.

Wednesday, 3:01 a.m.

A
horn blared down on the street. Richard blinked, rousing reluctantly from a deep-sea-fishing dream which featured Samantha as a bare-breasted mermaid. The horn sounded again, and he turned over. “Bloody Yanks,” he mumbled.

No response.

He opened one eye again, looking across the wide bed to the nightstand beyond. Across the wide, empty bed. “Samantha?” he called, sitting up and squinting in the direction of the dark master bathroom. Wide awake now, he rolled naked out of bed and shrugged into his blue dressing robe.

Samantha had been semi-nocturnal for as long as he’d known her, but her late-night wanderings seemed to increase when something troubled her. Whatever she’d said during and after the auction, and whatever he’d pretended not to notice, something troubled his former cat burglar.

Tying the robe closed, he left the bedroom to make a quick check of his office and then the sitting room opposite. Hm. His next guess was a midnight snack, and he padded barefoot down the stairs to the ground floor. The kitchen was as dark and silent as the rest of the house.

Unless she had a reason for sneaking, Samantha didn’t make much of an effort to remain hidden in her own house. Frowning, his heart beating a little faster despite his resolve not to jump to any conclusions, he headed into the downstairs sitting room. Nothing but the new Hogarths, propped against the back of the…

One
package leaned against the couch. Ice swept down his spine. A quick turn about the room verified it—only one painting. Abruptly Samantha’s disappearance wasn’t just mildly exasperating. Missing Sam, missing painting. For a split second, he doubted her. Just as swiftly, though, he pushed the thought out of his mind. The two things might be connected, but she hadn’t taken the Hogarth. Heart and mind, he
knew
that about her.

Cursing, Richard charged back upstairs to pull on some clothes. As he dug into the wardrobe, he glanced into the mirror beside it. Reflected beneath the disheveled sheets was the bottom of Samantha’s side of the bed—sans the neat little pile of emergency clothing she always kept there.

Yanking on a pair of jeans, he half hopped into the bathroom. No sign, but since she hadn’t been wearing any jammies he didn’t quite know what he expected to find, other than perhaps one of her rare sticky notes on the mirror. Nothing marred the ceiling-high reflective surface.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

For once in his life, he wasn’t sure what the devil he was supposed to do next. Someone had stolen from him. He needed to call the police. But until he knew where Samantha
was and what her involvement might be, he
couldn’t
call the police.

Then he realized that he already had. As he strode past his nightstand, he noticed the small red light blinking on his phone. The silent alarm had been tripped. Since he resided there so infrequently, the security company would call Wilder downstairs to confirm a breach.
Bloody hell
.

Halfway down the stairs, the wail of sirens and the reflection of red and blue lights through the front windows began and grew louder and brighter. “Shit.”

“Sir!” Wilder met him in the foyer, the butler disheveled and wearing a plaid bathrobe over black pajama bottoms and matching slippers. “The alarm’s gone off. It showed a perimeter breach, so I confirmed on the phone that the police needed to be dispatched.”

As he thought about it, for a bare second he felt relief. Sam had probably never set off an alarm in her life. Unless she did it on purpose. So much for relief. “Where was the breach?”

“The upstairs window at the back of the hall.”

Fuck
. “Answer the door,” he ordered, taking the stairs two at a time.
Dammit, where was she?

As his butler greeted the four policemen at the door, Richard threw aside his clothes and shrugged back into his dressing robe. All the while he undressed, he was running calculations through his mind—how much did he know, how much did they need to know, did he report the painting missing, or risk being caught in a lie later. Mainly, what would he say when they asked who else was in residence, and where the hell she might be at three o’clock in the morning?

At the sound of feet clumping up his stairs, he shoved open the bedroom door. “What the bloody hell is going on?” he asked.

“Your alarm went off, Mr. Addison,” one of the officers said helpfully as they topped the stairs. “Stand aside and we’ll make sure your residence is clear.”

Weapons drawn, they made a show of checking behind each door and clearing each room on their way to the window at the back of the hallway. If they didn’t find anything, he supposed he could send them on their way and make the discovery of the missing painting once he’d tracked down Samantha. The damned rub was, if someone
else
had stolen from him, he didn’t want to lose any time recovering his property.

“Look at that,” one of them said. “The pane’s pushed out, and there are scratches on the glass.”

It was the same pane Samantha had removed earlier in the day. She’d also repaired it, though, because he’d seen the results. He sent a glance at Wilder. The butler knew not to volunteer any information, but from the look on his face, he was clearly concerned.

“You didn’t hear anything?” the officer with the name Spanolli pinned on his shirt asked, hauling a notepad out of his pocket.

“Not until the sirens,” Richard answered.

“I’ll need you to make a quick check of valuables, to see if anything’s missing,” Spanolli said, nodding.

“From the look of this place, that ain’t gonna be easy,” one of the others said, muttered agreement following that comment.

“Certainly I’ll take a look.” Richard started to his office. The longer he could delay discovering the missing painting, the more time he would have to decide on a strategy.

“Is anybody else staying here with you?”

He drew a slow breath. If they watched the entertainment news, they would already know the answer to that. “Yes.”

“Who might that be?”

Abruptly he had another problem, though insignificant in comparison to the first. How did he describe Samantha?
Girlfriend
seemed a very juvenile term for someone in his mid-thirties to use;
lover
sounded vacuous.
My precious
was closer, but decidedly odd and too
Lord of the Rings
. “Samantha Jellicoe,” he said reluctantly, deciding on what was simultaneously the most vague and the most precise description. “She lives with me.”

The muttering started up again. Either they knew her current business was security, or they knew her father’s had been thievery.

“Where is she now, Mr. Addison?”

The more information he gave, the more he would have to substantiate later. “Taking a drive, I would imagine,” he settled for.

“At three a.m.”

“She wanted to see Manhattan at night. I have an early meeting.” He shrugged, offering a half smile. “She gets impatient.” Taking a quick visual inventory of his office, he faced Officer Spanolli again. “No valuables missing in here that I can tell.”

“You were in the bedroom, right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s move on to the next room, then. And take your time, Mr. Addison. Your window’s definitely been jimmied. We’ve got some robbery guys on the way.”

Splendid. More questions that he didn’t want to answer, and more questions that he couldn’t answer. He needed to call Tom Donner, his attorney. At after three a.m. and several states away, though, and given Tom’s reservations about Samantha, he needed something more substantial than “I can’t find her” accompanied by “a painting’s gone missing.”
Tom would take less than a second to connect the two; if this had been three or four months ago, Richard might have come to the same conclusion himself.

Aside from the basic fact that he trusted her, if Samantha
had
finally decided to take him for all he was worth and make a run for it, she wouldn’t have taken the Hogarth. In Palm Beach he had a Picasso, two Rembrandts, and a Gainsborough, among more than two dozen others. And the bulk of the collection was in his house in Devonshire, England. The Hogarth was a new find, of course, but it wasn’t the most valuable thing in his collection. Besides, he would have given it to her.

“Mr. Addison?”

He started. “The sitting room is next.”

It wasn’t often that he didn’t know how to proceed. Purposely stalling wasn’t his style, either, and yet at the moment he was faced with both. When they got downstairs, he would
have
to notice that the painting was missing.

Another man, this one in a dark, surprisingly tasteful suit and tie, topped the stairs. With fashionably cut dark hair and nice shoes, he could have been a cop from one of those
Law and Order
shows. “You Addison?” he asked, from around a well-chewed toothpick.

“I am. And you are?”

“Detective Gorstein. Robbery. You were asleep when this happened?” The detective gave Richard’s dressing robe an appraising look.

“Until I heard the sirens,” Richard lied smoothly.

Gorstein nodded. “Anything missing so far?”

Spanolli stepped forward. “Not so far. We’ve cleared the office and one of the dens.”

Dens
. Americans.

“They came in that way,” the officer continued, pointing
his pen toward the back window. “One of the panes is missing, and it’s jimmied.”

With a nod, Gorstein moved past them and stuck his head into the bedroom. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

Richard stifled his annoyed frown. He was still in charge, but he would have to lead from the rear. And cautiously. This Gorstein apparently read the rag sheets. “Out. Sightseeing.”

“Okay.” The detective leaned sideways to mutter something to one of the officers, who then trotted back downstairs. “My forensics guys are downstairs. Spanolli, get Gina and tell her to dust the sill for prints. Send Taylor to the fire escape to dust out there. Whoever broke in wasn’t Spider-Man.”

“Yes, sir.” With everything but a click of his heels, Spanolli vanished downstairs.

“You have an entire forensics team?” Richard asked. “This isn’t a murder.”

“No, it’s a robbery. Maybe. But you’re Rick Addison, and you pay a lot of taxes.” Gorstein shifted the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “You were at the Sotheby’s auction tonight, weren’t you?”

“How did you know that?” Not asking would probably have been more prudent, but he needed to know who this fellow was, and how much trouble he could cause for Samantha—and for himself.

“You were a news bit, right after sports. You bought a couple of paintings and a big statue.”

Fuck
. “Yes, I did.”

“They here?”

“The paintings are downstairs, in the front room.”

“Did you check them after we got here?”

“No. We started our search up here.”

“That was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?” Gorstein pursued, heading back for the stairs. “I mean, if I’d just spent a couple of million, I’d want to know it was safe.”

Richard narrowed his eyes. “I wouldn’t call someone who pays a lot of taxes ‘stupid,’ detective,” he returned deliberately. Gorstein needed to remember where he was, and with whom he was dealing. And equally importantly, who was actually in charge.

“Right. Sorry.” The detective paused on the landing to glance up at him. “Let’s go check your paintings, then, shall we, Mr. Addison?”

“Certainly.”

Obviously Gorstein was of a different caliber than the officers who’d been respectfully following Richard about. And the detective was already suspicious. To what degree, Rick didn’t know yet. He needed to find out. Fast.

Richard took a slow breath as he descended the stairs behind Gorstein. Back in Florida, Samantha had managed to earn the respect and even the trust of at least one member of the Palm Beach Police Department. Here in Manhattan, all the police had was her father’s name and reputation.

And perhaps some unsolved high-class cat burglaries. Martin Jellicoe, however, was the one who’d been caught and found guilty of stealing a myriad of expensive pieces of art and history, and he was the one who’d died in prison. They could speculate about Samantha, but she’d never left a clue that he’d ever heard of. And he’d spent untold hours checking, just to be certain no one could ambush her with an arrest warrant. She’d exposed herself in a high-profile public life because of him, and he wasn’t about to forget that.

“Try not to touch anything, Mr. Addison,” the detective cautioned, as they entered the downstairs sitting room.

“I live here,” Richard returned flatly. “I would expect to
find my fingerprints, and Samantha’s and Wilder’s and the two maids’, everywhere in here.”

“I just don’t want you smudging over somebody’s else’s prints. Okay, where are the paintings?”

“Over there.”

The two of them made their way to the back of the couch, where one crated, cushioned, and brown-paper-wrapped painting leaned. The sight surprised him for a second time, though he wasn’t certain why. Perhaps he’d thought Sam would have reappeared and replaced the painting.

“How many paintings did you bring home?” Gorstein asked, as he motioned at one of the officers in the doorway.

“Two.”

“I see one.”

Richard glanced at him. “I can see why you made detective.”

“Yeah. I’m real observant. How much was it worth?”

“That depends on which one was taken. Between five and twelve million dollars.”

“American dollars.”

“Yes, American dollars.”

Gorstein cleared his throat. “Okay. I want some photos of the room, and I want everything dusted for prints. Then we’ll take a look and see which painting they got.” He motioned Richard to leave the room ahead of him. “And I need another couple of words with you.”

“I’d like to keep this low-profile,” Richard said, leading the way down the hall and into the quiet kitchen. “The last thing I want is the press reporting that I’ve been robbed.”

The detective leaned on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “Excuse me, but you didn’t seem all that surprised, Mr. Addison.”