Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You (v1.2) (9 page)

“Oh, no!” Somerton said quickly, shaking his head. “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want her
back.”

“Pardon me?” Quinn said, but Parker interrupted before Somerton could elaborate.

“Somerton, we discussed this and I thought it was settled,” Parker said, still shuffling papers. “You and your uncle may think it a laudatory lesson if Shelby is left to her own devices for a while, that this is something Shelby seems to want, but I cannot disagree more strenuously.”

Quinn hated saying it, but heard himself agreeing with Westbrook. “I also think she should be brought home as soon as I locate her, Mr. Taite. You’ll pardon me, but I don’t think your sister was built to be out there somewhere, roughing it. I mean, if you’ll recall, she left town on a
bus.
It isn’t as if she’s flown to Aruba for the sun. She’s probably already seen enough of life outside the Main Line to have her welcoming you like a shipwrecked sailor when I tell you where to find her.”

“But that’s precisely what she needs to do,” Somerton explained as Jeremy resorted to his damp handkerchief yet again. “See more of life, that is. From everything I’ve learned from my uncle, and from Jim, even from Shelby’s maid, Susie, it’s also precisely what Shelby wants. She asked Susie what
normal
people wear, then had her pack
normal
clothing for her.”

“Versace,” Uncle Alfred said, lifting his glass in a toast. “What the well-dressed Everywoman is wearing this year, don’t you know.”

Quinn mentally ruled out his earlier thought that Shelby might have waved Jim good-bye at the bus station, then called a hired car to transport her to the airport, then out of the country. She was still in America , and still close by, if he was figuring the thing correctly. But close could still be pretty damn far away, if she was out there alone, a woman with less street-sense than a two-year-old. Immediate rescue wasn’t an option if he was right, if Somerton was right. It was a necessity.

Parker tried to speak, but Quinn glared down at him, warning him to silence as Somerton pressed on with his explanation.

“She asked Jim here if he liked living in a small town, what it was like—that sort of thing. And, no thanks to my uncle, who filled her head with fanciful notions, I really do believe my sister is off to have herself an adventure before she settles down and marries Parker here.”

“In short, Mr. Taite,” Quinn said, still glaring at Westbrook, “your sister has gone slumming, right? She’s gone slumming, and you want to let her have at it. Well, bully for her, and bully for you, and where does that leave us? What do you want from D and S?”

“We want you to find her,” Somerton said.

“We need you to protect her,” Jeremy added.

“We want to give my niece her head but make sure she’s fully protected while she’s out there exploring real life or whatever it is she thinks she’s doing,” Uncle Alfred concluded. “Consider yourself her guardian angel, if you like, Delaney. Anything that keeps these two happy and upsets Parker is just fine with me.”

Quinn held out his hands, pushing away their words as unacceptable. “Oh, no. No, no, no, gentlemen. I thought you wanted me to find her so that you could come carry her home. Now you’re saying you want me to
baby-sit
her until she’s had her fling and come home on her own, and I’m not going to do it. There isn’t enough money in the world to make me do that.”

“Well, finally a man of some sense!” Parker said with satisfaction, gathering up some of his papers and replacing them in the briefcase, then standing up, ready to rush off to his meeting.

Parker didn’t know it, but his words had finally convinced Quinn that maybe being a baby-sitter for a few weeks wasn’t all that bad an idea. After all, anything Parker Westbrook wanted definitely had to be the opposite of what Quinn wanted. Westbrook did that to a person, made him want to do anything he could to, as Ruth had said, put the man’s shorts in a twist.

“There is also the fact that Miss Taite is a grown woman, gentlemen, which means I could find her, you could go to her, and she still wouldn’t agree to come home. It would be rather difficult to make her come home if she didn’t want to. So how long?” he asked as Westbrook tapped his foot impatiently and pushed back his cuff to check his watch. “How long do you want her out there? Is there any time limit before I call you in, let you convince her to come home?”

“Ha, I should say there’s already a limit, if we’re going to persist with this foolishness, and I can see that we are,” Parker said, showing off the results of some pretty damned expensive orthodonture. “The first thing we did was to cut off her credit card. American Express, you understand, with no monthly limit. She could have gone on indefinitely with that sort of resource. That said, I imagine we’ll be getting a call within a few days, begging for Somerton here to send the car for her, wherever she is. Shelby is many things, but she has no notion of economy. She’ll have spent all her money on a new pair of shoes, then belatedly realize she has no money for food. It was a perfect solution, and so I told Somerton.”

“You goddamn jackass!” Quinn longed to rearrange Parker’s handsome face. “One phone call and I could have traced her through credit card receipts. Now not only is she out there somewhere on her own, she’s out there somewhere without money.”

“Oh, dear,” Somerton said, standing up quickly. “We hadn’t thought of that. I’ll make another call at once.”

“Poor Shelby . Alone
and
destitute!” Jeremy shuddered delicately. “Indeed, yes, Somerton. You must do something at once!”

Grady, who had been content to act as silent audience these past minutes, spoke up. “Won’t work, Mr. Taite. Canceled is canceled. If your sister has already tried to use the card, she’s already found that out and won’t try again. We’ll call the credit card company, of course, but I think there’s little hope we’ll learn anything very productive. Quinn, looks like this one is going to have to be solved with good old shoe leather.”

“In that case, I think these will be helpful.” Parker smiled rather smugly as he handed over a dozen copies of a blown-up photo of him and Shelby at a charity dinner the previous winter, as well as a three-page listing of names of friends, telephone numbers, and his thoughts on where Shelby might have gone. “Personally I think your services aren’t even necessary. We were right to cancel her credit card. Shelby will come to her senses the moment her purse is empty. And for God’s sake, man, if you are going to call anyone, be discreet. We can’t have word of Shelby’s disappearance making the papers, now, can we? And now, if you’ll excuse me?”

“What a horse’s patoot,” Uncle Alfred said to no one in particular when the door closed behind Parker. “I wonder how much Shelby is running off for an adventure and how much she’s just plain running away from
him.
Sucks the air right out of a room, doesn’t he?”

Jeremy staggered to his feet, laid both hands on Quinn’s sleeve. “You will find her, won’t you? Watch over her, protect her? She’s such a dear, dear child. Not just anyone would have accepted me so calmly, you understand.”

“Yeah, right,” Quinn said, more than a little impressed by Rifkin’s genuine concern. “Now, Mr. Taite, if we can get down to business? Fifteen hundred dollars a day, plus expenses. I report to you, and only to you, and I pull the plug at any time if I think she’s in any sort of trouble. Other than that, you want me to find her, watch her, and otherwise pretty much leave her alone until she decides to come home, if I’m understanding you correctly?”

“Yes, yes, that’s precisely what I want,” Somerton agreed. “And I’m so sorry about the credit card mistake. I promise you, there will be no more interference from any of us. Just find her, Mr. Delaney. Find her and watch over her,
guard
her. In the meantime, we’ll just have a mention in the Society pages that my sister is sailing somewhere in the Greek isles.”

“That was my idea, wasn’t it, Somerton?” Jeremy said, preening. “Everyone should go sailing in the Greek isles sometime, don’t you think, Mr. Delaney?”

“Anything you say, Mr. Rifkin. And yes, Mr. Taite, that’s the plan,” Quinn said, ushering everyone out of the office, then asking them to please wait there while he spoke with Jim in his own office.  Five minutes later Grady was in the room, holding out a slip of paper. “I called American Express, Quinn, pulled a few strings, and Shelby did try to use the card yesterday. A small diner in Allentown . I looked it up, and it’s only two blocks from the bus station. Of course, where she went from there is anyone’s guess.”

“ Allentown ,” Quinn repeated, looking at Jim. “How far is that from East Wapaneken ?”

“ East Wapa -what?” Grady interrupted, aware that Quinn had gotten as far with Jim as he had done with the phone call.

“How far? About seven miles,” Jim said, shifting in his chair. “Do you really think that’s where she’s gone?”

“Yes, Jim, I do. Using deductive reasoning, listening very carefully to your recollections of your conversation with Miss Taite, and calling on all my years of experience— and because Miss Taite appears to be more in the Secret Squirrel rather than the Mata Hari school of intrigue— I’d also say I’m probably going to be heading out to the wilds of East Wapaneken in a couple of hours.”

Jim nodded and sighed. “Well, I gotta tell you I’m feeling a whole lot better now, sirs, because Miss Taite could do a whole lot worse than to end up in East Wapaneken. Oh, and Mr. Delaney? If you’re going to be heading up there, stop in at Tony’s for a meal. You’ll love it.”

The drive to East Wapaneken took little more than ninety minutes, and that was with highway construction sending Quinn on three separate detours and missing his exit from Route 22.

Seventy miles from Philadelphia .

It was as if he’d turned his watch back fifty years.

East Wapaneken boasted one real stoplight, one blinking red light that only really operated when the Berry Street Fire Station got a call and the hook and ladder pulled out onto the main street—which, in true small-town tradition, was called just that, Main Street .

As he’d come over the bridge that led into the town backward, from the neighboring Catasauqua, the two boroughs divided by the Lehigh River, the first thought that struck him was that the place had been caught in some kind of time warp.

He passed Elm Street and saw the town’s main attraction, a really impressive baseball park with three separate diamonds, bleachers, even lights for night games. Took their baseball seriously, he decided. But then, what the hell else was there to do in a town so small it didn’t even have a movie theater, let alone a gas station?

Following Jim’s directions, Quinn continued down Main Street until he saw the large white sign for Tony’s Family Restaurant. It wasn’t as if he was hungry; he’d eaten at home before he left and taken the dogs to Grady’s house for the duration. But if Jim said Tony’s was the nerve center of East Wapaneken , then that was where he’d start his search.

If Shelby Taite had made it to East Wapaneken . If that even had been her planned destination. If she hadn’t already decided she’d seen enough of real life and wasn’t already back in her sprawling Tudor mansion, downing bonbons and making an appointment for a pedicure.

He pulled his Porsche into the lot, parking between a Ford pickup and a ‘67 Caddy that still had all its own chrome. He climbed out and spent a few moments admiring the Caddy before two little old ladies of the blue-haired, stooped-posture variety came out, leaning heavily on their canes. The taller one might have reached five feet.

They smiled at him, said, “Hello, dearie,” and then the shorter one climbed behind the wheel of the Caddy. Looking through the steering wheel rather than over it, she backed the car up as Quinn made a quick jump to his right.

He was still smiling as he entered the restaurant, passing by the pair of poker machines that had to be as illegal as they were profitable. There was a cop in a tan uniform, pistol strapped to his waist, playing the one closest to the door.

Quinn decided he was going to like this town.

But his smile faded, and faded fast, when he walked through the small inner foyer, half wall to his left, cash register to his right, and came face-to-face with Miss Shelby Taite.

“Good afternoon,” she said brightly, her arms full of menus. “Welcome to Tony’s Family Restaurant. Smoking or non, sir?”

It took a good five seconds until Quinn could find his tongue, another two before he remembered how to use it. “Um… smoking’s fine, thank you.”

“Fine. If you’ll just follow me?”

He followed her. He really didn’t have much choice. It was either follow her or turn on his heels and make a run for it—which seemed fairly unnecessary, considering the fact that she looked happy to see him but not within a million miles of recognizing him.

He threaded his way through the tables, taking in her designer suit of softest gray silk, her slim bare legs, her thin high-heeled pumps. Her blond hair was swept up in a French twist, and she had about ten thousand dollars’ worth of fine gold jewelry around her throat and wrists and stuck in her ears. She smelled like two-hundred-dollar-an-ounce perfume.

And she was working as a hostess in a greasy spoon?

Shelby had been at Tony’s for only two days, so she didn’ t know if this new customer was one of the “regulars,” although he certainly didn’t seem to be. As a matter of fact, he looked as if he’d never seen a restaurant before today. Much the same way she had felt yesterday.

She felt an immediate kinship with the man. Besides, he was of the tall, dark, and handsome variety, and if Shelby was going to learn more about the real world, well, this man certainly could make for a good start on that particular project.

Shame, shame on me, she thought, then had to suppress a giggle. Maybe she’d overdosed on home fries that morning, or had been listening too closely to Brandy’s stories, but she certainly was having a good time. A fine time. The time of her life, actually.

She quickly pulled out his chair for him, one of the four mismatched chairs arranged around a small square table with an oilclothtablecloth and dotted with four paper place mats and four sets of utensils. “There you are, sir. Our luncheon specials are chipped prime rib—on a toasted kaiser roll and a cup of either bean and barley or Italian Wedding soup, or a tuna hoagie and pierogies. I highly recommend the prime rib. John will be with you shortly to take your drink order. Enjoy your meal.”