The Quiet Game (67 page)

She reaches out and touches my arm. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”

“You really don’t know? Remember those records you and Leo took out of his office last week? The ones he tried to burn?”

“Yes.”

“There was a scrap of paper in there, a record of income from adoptions. He pocketed thirty-five grand off of yours. One of the highest prices paid for any baby on the list. I guess he wanted top dollar, since the baby came from his gene pool.”

The blood has drained from her face.

“Look at it, if you don’t believe me. I’ve been carrying the list around in my wallet since the day Jenny told me her story. I thought it was a record of our child being given away.”

“Let me see it.”

I pull out my wallet and fish the scrap of yellow paper from the bill compartment. Livy snatches it away and holds it up in the blue glow of the streetlight across the road, trying to read in the dark. Her face is in shadow, but after a few moments the paper starts to quiver in her hand.

“That son of a bitch,” she murmurs. “That son of a
bitch
.”

“You still think I’m lying?”

“That he would
profit
from my pain like that . . .”

“I doubt he gave it a second thought. Making money was his habit. Everything that passed through his hands had to turn a profit. You should know that better than anyone.”

She looks up at last, her eyes empty of everything but desire for the truth. These are the eyes I knew in high school. “Do you really believe my father ordered Del Payton’s death?”

“It’s not a question of belief. I know.”

“You can prove it?”

“If my witnesses reach the courtroom alive.”

She folds the paper slowly. “I’m going to do something you may not believe. I’m going to do it because I don’t believe my father killed Del Payton. I
can’t
believe that. But if it should turn out that he did, I won’t protect him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The papers you requested under discovery. Business records, all that?”

“Yes.”

“You got sanitized versions. There’s another set of files. One that nobody sees. Not the IRS, not anybody.”

My heart jumps in my chest. “You realize that withholding those papers from the court—”

“Is a felony? I’m not telling you this to hear the Boy Scout oath repeated back to me. Before I tell you where those files are, I want a promise from you.”

“What?”

“Any evidence of illegal activity that doesn’t directly pertain to the death of Del Payton, you’ll forget you ever saw.”

“Livy—”

“That’s nonnegotiable.”

“All right. Agreed. Where are these files?”

She bites her bottom lip, still resisting the deeply bred urge to protect her family’s secrets. “Ever since I was a little girl, Daddy kept his sensitive papers in a big safe under the floor of his study. He called it his potato bunk, whatever that means. If he’s hiding anything from you, it’s in there.”

“How can I get a look in there? He’s home tonight. Isn’t he?”

“He’s probably upstairs by now. Mother’s been flipping in and out for the past few days. He’s probably up there feeding her Darvocet and Prozac cocktails.”

“What about the off-duty cops he called?”

“They won’t look twice at you if I drive you in.”

She looks sincere. But it’s anger that’s driving her now. Her relationship with her father has always been one of extremes, love and hate commingling in proportions that change too fast to be assayed. To see the secret safe in Leo
Marston’s study, I’ll have to go back to Tuscany. And at Tuscany, on this night, Leo could kill me and tell the police anything he wanted. He could even have one of his cops kill me. My only real protection would be the woman standing before me.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I ask.

She folds the paper in half, then twice again, into a tiny rectangle which she slips between the buttons of her blouse and into her bra. Her eyes shine with utter resolution.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

The grounds of Tuscany are dark. I parked my mother’s shot-up Maxima at a gas station a quarter mile up the road from Tuscany’s gate, then got into Livy’s Fiat for the ride to the estate. As we approached the gate, she took a remote control from her purse, touched a button, and the barred fence slid back into itself. That was twenty seconds ago. We should have seen the lights of the mansion well before now.

“Livy—”

“I know. I’ve never seen it like this. The floodlights are always on.”

“I told you he was scared of Presley.”

“Look,” she says, pointing at a dim light high in the trees. “They’re on the third floor. Mother’s room.”

I close my hand around the butt of the gun in my waistband. Ike’s gun.

A thin beam of light slices through the darkness and comes to rest on the windshield of Livy’s car. I start to pull the gun, but then our headlights sweep across a black police uniform.

Livy slows to a stop.

The cop walks around to her window and shines his light onto her chest, sparing her the direct glare of the beam.

“Evening, Miss Marston. Everything okay?”

“Yes. My friend and I are going in for a drink. Have you seen anything suspicious?”

“No, ma’am. Not a thing.”

“Why are all the lights off?”

“Your daddy said he didn’t want nobody taking potshots through the windows.”

“I see.”

“Don’t you worry. Billy and me are on the job.”

“I feel so much better knowing that.” She gives him a synthetic smile, then rolls up her window and drives on.

Tuscany materializes suddenly, like a spectral palace in the moonlight,
ringed by towering oaks and dark magnolias. Livy pulls around to the back of the mansion and parks in a small garage.

“There’s a new entrance here,” she says. “To the pantry.”

She unlocks the door, then takes my hand and leads me quickly through the enormous house: pantry, kitchen, breakfast room, parlor, living room. The interior is shrouded in darkness, but the sense of space, of high ceilings and broad doorways, communicates itself through the sound of our footsteps and the way the air moves. Livy stops me by putting her hand against my chest, then opens a door, peeks inside, and pulls me through.

Leo’s private study looks as though it had been surgically removed from an English manor house, shipped to America, and meticulously reconstructed inside Tuscany. The paneling alone must be worth a hundred thousand dollars. Livy sets her purse on the desk and points to a Bokara rug on the floor before it.

“There.”

There’s a club chair sitting on the rug. As I start to move it, she takes my arm and looks into my eyes. “Remember your promise.”

“Have you known your whole life that your father was a crook?”

She gives me a look of disdain. “My father made a science of walking the line between what’s legal and what’s not. So have a lot of other businessmen. That’s the way you get rich.”

“Like those adoptions?” I say softly. “Let’s not forget why we’re here.”

“You’re so damned self-righteous. You must have cut a few corners in a decade of practicing law.”

“I was a prosecutor, Livy. I stayed on the right side of that line you’re talking about.”

“You never conveniently misplaced a piece of exculpatory evidence to keep it from the defense?”

“Never.”

“I suppose you never cheated on your wife either.”

“Sorry. Why don’t we look at those files?”

She studies me a moment more, then drops her hand and pulls the club chair off the Bokara. I roll up the rug and prop it against Leo’s desk.

Where the rug had lain, discolored floorboards outline a trapdoor three feet square. Livy goes to the desk and brings back a small metal handle with a hook on one end. Kneeling, she slips the hook into an aperture I cannot see and folds back the trapdoor, exposing the steel door of a floor safe.

She bends over the combination lock, thinks for a moment, then spins it left, right, and left again. “He hasn’t changed the combination in years,” she says, getting to her feet.

I crouch to turn the heavy handle of the safe, but the butt of Ike’s gun digs
into my stomach. After setting it on the desk beside Livy’s purse, I get down on my knees, turn the handle, and pull open the heavy door.

Inside is a hoard of velvet-covered jewelry boxes, stock certificates, cash, gold coins, manila envelopes, and computer disks. Nine square feet of paydirt.

“How much time do we have?” I ask, reaching for the manila envelopes.

“Maybe five minutes. Maybe all night.”

“Maybe you should go upstairs and talk to your parents. Then I could be sure—”

“I’m staying here.”

The envelopes are thick and marked with handwritten labels. The handwriting is Leo’s. After wading through the mountain of discovery material, I recognize it as easily as my own. One label reads:
FEDTAX
’94/
NOT TO BE SHOWN AT AUDIT
. Another:
THIRD-PARTY HOLDINGS
(
LAND
). A third reads:
GRAND CAYMAN TRUST ACCOUNT
.

“That’s got nothing to do with Del Payton,” Livy says over my shoulder.

Maybe not. But it could probably put Leo Marston in jail for a few years, and cost him a considerable portion of his fortune. Reluctantly I set these envelopes aside and continue searching. There are more offshore accounts, records of hidden shares in oil fields, a dozen other ventures. I am about to abandon the files for the computer disks when a label jumps out at me as though written in neon. It says only: EDGAR.

Inside this folder is a thick sheaf of personal letters, all signed
Yours, Edgar
. The first begins,
Dear Leo, In the matter of the Nixon funds, please be assured that I consider your work in this area to be exemplary, and also a direct favor to me. He has his idiosyncrasies, yes, but he is a sound man, and we understand each other. The possibility of a Muskie or McGovern in the White House cannot be contemplated for one moment—

The woodwind
oomph
of a wine bottle being uncorked draws my gaze away from the safe. Livy has taken a bottle of red from Leo’s cherrywood bar and opened it with a silver corkscrew.

“Pretend it’s our lost bottle,” she says in a cynical voice.

She takes two Waterford goblets from the bar and fills them to the rim, then lifts one to her lips. She drinks a long swallow and passes it to me. Her upper lip is stained red, but she doesn’t wipe it. She simply watches me drink. I can’t read anything in her expression. The wine is tart on my tongue, acidic. She takes back the glass, drains it, then sets it beside the bottle and lifts the second glass to her lips. Half the wine disappears in three swallows.

She is more upset than I thought.

I turn back to the safe and flip quickly through the Hoover letters, searching for any mention of Del Payton, John Portman, or Dwight Stone. Most of the
letters date from the seventies, after the secret relationship was well established, and deal with political matters.

“Is there a computer in here?” I ask, glancing at the 3.5-inch floppies.

“There’s a PowerBook in the bottom drawer of the desk.”

I’m reaching for the disks when Livy’s wineglass shatters on the floor beside me.

“Someone’s coming!”

As quickly as I can, I slide the manila envelopes back into the safe—all but the Edgar file—and shut the steel door.

“The rug!” she hisses.

While I unroll the rug, Livy shuts the trapdoor and jumps clear. I slide the rug into place just as someone begins jerking at the doorknob.

“Who’s in there?” says a muffled voice.

It’s Leo.

Livy thumps the envelope in my hands. “If you want that file, you’d better do something with it. Quick.”

Leo bangs on the door. “Who’s in there?”

“It’s me, Daddy. I’m coming.”

Unbuckling my belt, I shove the envelope down the back of my pants, retuck my shirt over it, then zip up and rebuckle the belt. As I do this, Livy unbuttons the top three buttons of her blouse and musses her hair.

“Let’s make it look real,” she says, and pulls my face to hers. Her kiss is passionate, desperate even, fueled by anger and wine and God knows what else. In the few seconds that it lasts, it flushes my face and brings sweat to my skin. My senses are still buzzing when she walks to the door and unlocks it.

“What are you doing in here with the door locked?” Leo asks.

“I’m not alone.”

He pushes his six-foot-four-inch frame through the door and swings his head around to me. His hard features go slack with amazement.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

“Penn and I were talking.”