DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS (9 page)

“Maybe,” Laney muttered. “Are you sure the cat didn’t run while you were at my door?”

“I don’t think so,” Carolyn said as she walked back around the car. “Bend down again and shine the light,” she said.

Laney did as she was told, doing her best not to wish evil plagues on Carolyn and her cat.

“Oh, look!” Carolyn cried.

Laney stood. “What?”

“It’s Binkie!” She pointed behind Laney. “She’s running back toward our house.” Carolyn squealed and clapped her hands delightedly.

Laney looked at her askance, then turned, but saw nothing resembling a white cat. “You saw her?”

Carolyn nodded eagerly. “I’ll bet she’ll be waiting at the door when I get there,” she said, scurrying up the street.

“Do you want to borrow my flashlight?” Laney called after her.

“No. We’re fine.”

Laney shrugged and headed inside, closing and locking the door. She opened the refrigerator to take out the makings for spinach pasta. But just as she’d stacked the container of cheese on top of the spinach and was reaching for the butter, the doorbell rang again.

“Oh, no you don’t,” she whispered. “I am not going after that cat again.” She walked to the foyer and called out, “Who is it?”

“Uh—hi. It’s Carolyn again. I forgot something.”

“What?” Laney snapped.

“Your phone.”

“My—” Laney wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “My phone? What are you talking about?”

“I found it on the ground,” Carolyn said. “I meant to hand it to you but I forgot.”

Laney glanced down at her purse. “I wasn’t carrying my phone. It must be somebody else’s.”

“It was right beside your car—on the driver’s side.”

“That’s imposs—” She stopped herself. Maybe when she climbed out of the car? “Hang on a minute.” She felt around inside her purse, but she didn’t feel the familiar cool rectangular shape of her smartphone. She emptied her purse onto the foyer table. No. Her phone wasn’t there. Baffled, she felt the pockets of her slacks. Not there either.

Shaking her head, she stood and unlocked the door. “What color is it?”

Carolyn stood there, holding a phone in a white case. “Here you go,” she said with a smile. “This is yours, isn’t it?”

Laney took the phone. “It’s mine,” she said, puzzled. She felt as if she’d just been pranked.

“Thanks again for helping me,” Carolyn said, waggling her fingers. “Bye.” She whirled and sashayed down the steps.

After closing the door and locking it with a determined twist, Laney stood there in the foyer, looking at her phone. It had a few specks of dirt on it.
Lying beside the car on the driver’s side.
It must have dropped out of her purse, although she wasn’t sure how it could have.

Oh, well. It was lucky that Carolyn found it. Otherwise it would have lain outside all night, and there was a prediction of heavy showers.

* * *

E
THAN
WAS
ON
his way to Laney’s house when his phone rang. He’d decided to take her statement to her and get it signed tonight, telling himself that if she were gone all day tomorrow, it would be another day before her official signed statement got into the file, and that was just sloppy paperwork. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt to check on her, make sure she was doing okay.

What he wasn’t doing was making up an excuse to see her. Okay, maybe he was, but it was for her benefit. He just wanted to be sure she was safe at home, after that incident with Buddy Davis’s car on the sidewalk that afternoon.

The phone rang again.

“Delancey. Where y’at?” Dixon said when Ethan answered. It was a common casual greeting in New Orleans, but usually when Dixon said it, he meant it literally.

“In my car, headed—home.” He didn’t want his partner to know he was checking on Laney. He wasn’t sure why.

“Good. Got any brandy?”

“Sure. That bottle of Courvoisier you brought over around Christmas is still there. Why? You have a fight with my cousin?”

“No. Rose’s mom is at the house with her. They’re shopping online for baby clothes.”

Ethan smiled and rubbed a place in the middle of his chest where he felt a twinge. “How’s she doing?” His partner had married his cousin Rosemary, whom he’d tracked down after she’d been missing and presumed dead for over a decade. Dixon had been ridiculously happy ever since, but now that they were expecting their first child, he was over the moon.

Ethan had felt an odd twinge under his breastbone ever since Dixon had told him about the baby. He rubbed the place in the center of his chest again.

“She’s fine. Feeling great,” Dixon said, sounding impatient.

So Dixon was not inviting himself over to talk about babies or the joys of marriage this evening. That was fine with Ethan. He’d had enough of Dixon’s parental joy to last him a long time.

He figured that Dixon must want to talk about something related to the search warrant he’d executed at Senator Sills’s home in Baton Rouge. It had taken Dixon and three forensics specialists two days to confiscate all of the personal papers in Sills’s house, box and transport them back to New Orleans, and organize them in an empty conference room at the courthouse. “So what’s up then?” he asked. “Did you unearth something at Sills’s house?”

“How far are you from your apartment?”

“About three minutes,” Ethan replied, taking the next left and heading back toward Prytania Street.

“Okay. See you in ten. Pour me a double brandy.”

“You got it.”

Ethan had changed into jeans and had the brandy poured by the time Dixon arrived. “Come on in and take a load off,” he said when Dixon knocked on the screen door after clomping up the wooden staircase to Ethan’s second-story walk-up.

“Thanks,” Dixon said, picking up the snifter of brandy that sat on the table Ethan used as a bar. He sat in the recliner next to the couch where Ethan was stretched out.

“Have you eaten? Want to order pizza or something?” Ethan asked.

“Nah. Rose has something for me when I get home.”

“Chips?” Ethan nodded toward a crumpled bag of potato chips on the coffee table.

“I’m good.” Dixon took a sip of brandy. He sighed and settled more deeply into the recliner.

“So what’s up?” Ethan set his soft drink down and dug into the chips.

“We executed the warrant on Sills’s residence yesterday.”

“Yeah, I heard. A lot of paperwork. I guess he was planning on writing his memoirs or something.”

“Or something.” Dixon took another long swallow of brandy.

“You’re not attractive when you’re coy, Detective Lloyd.”

“I’m getting to it. All in all we brought seventy-three boxes of papers down from Sills’s house. It took most of yesterday to load the truck, transport them and then haul them into a conference room at the courthouse.”

“Seventy-three boxes. Big ones?”

“Mostly they were those 1.5-cubic-foot boxes that movers use for books.”

“Big enough. So what did you find?”

“You know I stayed there all night, right? Got about two hours’ sleep on one of the cots at the precinct early this morning.”

“Hang on. I’ll get my violin.”

“Yeah. Bite me. Ninety-nine percent of it was boring stuff. Boxes and boxes of receipts. He must have saved the receipt for every single thing he ever bought. Of the one percent that wasn’t boring, the forensics people only gave me what they thought would be relevant to our case, which might have been one percent of one percent.”

Ethan sat up and tossed the empty chip bag into the waste can and wiped his hand on his jeans before picking up his cola. “I’m getting the picture. So did the one one-thousandth percent pique your interest?”

Dixon wiped his hand down his face. “A little bit,” he muttered. “First. Darby Sills was definitely blackmailing somebody.”

Ethan practically did a spit take. “Son of a— Seriously? Who?”

“Damned if I can tell. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t know himself. His creative accounting is that good.”

“Who figured it out? You? One of the forensic guys? Y’all don’t have the bank records and safe-deposit box yet, do you?”

“Slow down, Delancey. One of the forensic techs brought me his bank statements this afternoon. She’d started early yesterday and had been studying the deposits all day and night and most of the day today. She’s worked out a pattern, but even after she walked me through it twice I still can’t find it on my own.”

“How much? How long has it been going on? And damn it! Who was he blackmailing?”

“Those are the $64,000 questions. There’s a forensic accountant working with our techs right now. I’m hoping he’ll have an answer for us soon.”

“Could the tech tell how long it had been going on?”

Dixon nodded and Ethan saw a gleam in his eyes. “For the past ten years, according to the accountant.”

“Ten years ago. And he put the deposits into his regular account? Man, he had some nerve. They talk about these politicians who think they’re untouchable. But Darby Sills took it to a new level. And nobody can figure out who he was blackmailing? Or what the hell somebody did that they’d pay to keep quiet?”

“That’s right. I’ve asked Farrantino to pull any case files from that year and the two years on either side that may have to do with Sills or Buddy Davis. I’m counting on the forensic accountant to find some trace of who Sills’s money was coming from.”

Ethan thought for a couple of moments. “Maybe you should include Whitley and Stamps. Oh, and get one of those accountants to compare their financials with Sills’s. See if anything in their records matches up.”

“Good idea. What about Davis’s financials?” Dixon asked.

Ethan laughed. “Sure. Why not. It could be good for a laugh. I can see it now, Buddy and Benita standing there with their lawyer, thumbing their noses at us. I’m not sure there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that we’ll ever see a single piece of paper from them.”

“We could get a court order.”

“I don’t know. First hint that we’re coming for their records, Benita is liable to start a bonfire that could be seen from space.” Ethan paused. “Man, I wish I could deal with Buddy and leave her out of it.”

“Why’s that?” Dixon asked as he got up to pour himself another few millimeters of brandy.

“He’s the polar opposite of Benita. He’s easygoing, quiet. Sometimes it seems like he’s not even all there. Like he’s—”

“Like he’s what?”

Ethan frowned. “I don’t know. He’ll be talking and just sort of drift off.”

“Like he’s crazy?”

“I don’t know. Either there’s something wrong with him or he’s putting on a hell of an act.”

“Why don’t you separate the two of them? It’s your prerogative as the investigating officer.”

“I’m probably going to have to do that. I doubt we’ll get the answers we need by investigating them together. But separating them could stir up a whole ’nother hornet’s nest. They’re big friends with the Superintendent and they’ll be in there pulling every string they’ve got as soon as I even try to put them in separate rooms.”

“True,” Dixon said on a sigh. He set his snifter down and picked up a manila folder he must have put there when he first came in.

When he sat back down, Ethan said, “What’s that?”

“It’s the other thing I found,” Dixon said. His expression was grim. “I’ll let you read it.” He slid the folder across the smooth surface of the coffee table.

Ethan caught it before it came to a stop. There was only one sheet of paper in the folder. He read the entire sheet. At one point, he glanced up briefly to find his partner watching him over tented fingers, then he read the entire sheet again.

The contents were shocking to him, although they probably shouldn’t be. Con Delancey had never claimed to be a saint. Although from everything Ethan had heard throughout his life about his grandfather, he would have figured the man to be more discreet and respectful of his wife.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“Sills’s house. I take it you didn’t know. Do you think any of your family does?”

“Know that my grandfather had an affair with Kit Powers, the famous Bourbon Street stripper? Yes. Know that he fathered a son with her? No.” Ethan laughed harshly. “I think I can say with a fair measure of certainty that none of the Delanceys know that. If they had, I think I’d have heard.”

He looked back at the certified copy of the birth certificate of Joseph Edward Powers, then thumped it with his knuckles. “Did you notice the date? Joseph Powers was born the same year I was. Hell, he’s only a month younger than me.” Ethan didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in his voice.

“From what I’ve heard—” Dixon started, then stopped.

Ethan sent him a sidelong look. “Go ahead. What were you going to say?”

Dixon shook his head. “Nothing. Forget it.” Dixon took a sip of his brandy and swirled the glass, watching the golden liquid.

“Come on, Dix. It’s not like you’re going to say anything I haven’t heard before. You think I don’t know what kind of man my grandfather was? I mean, in a lot of ways he was admirable. His record of public service is long and filled with innovative programs to help the people of Louisiana. He was generous—he’d give a man the money in his pocket and did, many, many days. But he was a scoundrel.” Ethan gestured toward the birth certificate. “No denying it.”

“People say your grandmother locked her bedroom door after their youngest child was born.”

“I know. I’ve heard that.” He shrugged. “And maybe it’s an excuse for what he did. But—”

Dixon didn’t speak.

“He was my granddad. It’s hard to think about another Delancey out there. A—what? Half cousin? Plus, if there’s one, who’s to say there aren’t more?” He chuckled wryly. “Dozens even.”

After a pause, Dixon spoke. “So what do you want to do about it?”

Ethan sighed and closed the folder and set it on the coffee table. “Hell if I know,” he muttered, still unable to take his eyes off the plain folder. “Who all saw this?”

Dixon thought. “Maybe nobody other than the tech who brought me the folder. The only label on it said Delancey. The tech said, ‘I thought you might want to go through this yourself.’ I suppose I could ask him if he looked at anything.”