Keepsake (20 page)

Geez,
Quinn thought, looking around.
If I were his kid and he told me to salute, I'd be damn well tempted to snap my heels and say, "Yessir."
He had to give Olivia credit. It couldn't be easy, resisting the threat of having all those ships' hulls yanked out from under her.

Behind him, he heard a key turn. Owen Bennett was making certain they wouldn't be disturbed. He said to Quinn, "My daughter caught me off guard tonight—she's good at that. It never occurred to me to forbid her from inviting you here. My mistake."

Quinn smiled. "She's a little dickens, all right."

"She's always been a handful," her father agreed with a sigh. He walked over to the leather-topped desk that dominated the middle of the room. "Let's get down to business, shall we?" he asked. He pulled out a side drawer and took out a small white envelope. A small, white, bulging envelope.

"As I say, Quinn, I was caught off guard. I've had to scrape this together from petty cash tonight, but I can no doubt put my hands on more," Bennett said dryly. "Lest you think that those are all twenties in there—they're not." He tossed the envelope on the desk blotter and fanned some of the money out of it. Hundreds, as far as the eye could see, with some McKinleys added for dazzle.

"Door prize?'' asked Quinn.

"You've kept your sense of humor. Excellent. I hate to see a grown man whine."

"Au contraire,''
Quinn said, rocking on the heels of his patent-leather shoes. "Lately it's been nothing but blue skies for me."

Bennett's face, itself a mask of civility, twitched into a sudden scowl. He wasn't a big guy, and that was unfortunate. Quinn was so used to facing a formation of tank-sized brutes on the football field that he found it hard to take a single, smallish, sixty-five-year-old man very seriously, patriarch or no.

Except for the money. The money, Quinn took very seriously indeed. If Owen Bennett could come up with that many thousands just to get Quinn to stop buzzing around him and his family, think what he'd be willing to pay if the stakes were
really
high.

"This money is to buy you a ticket back to
California
," Bennett said, twitching his lips into a thin smile. "I'll triple the amount if you make it one-way."

"Gee, I dunno," said Quinn with a bland look. "The airlines really penalize for that."

"How much do you want, you son of a bitch?"

The profanity was just a colorful expression, Quinn knew, but it sent a sharp surge of resentment through him. Who the hell did Bennett think he was talking to?

"Sir," Quinn said, leaning on the desk with the flat of his hands. "I don't think we're communicating real well here. That's my fault, I'm sure. You're a Yale grad, I have a GED. But let me just take another shot at this."

He picked up the envelope and tossed it nearer to Bennett's side of the desk. "I don't want your money. I don't need it, and I don't want it. All I want is to prove my dad's innocence. Now, that strikes me as a mission that any father can endorse. I understand your concern about having Alison exhumed. I understand it. But with the trail to the real murderer paved over and cold, I don't see any other way to exonerate Francis Leary. Can't you comprehend that?"

He stared hard into Owen Bennett's blue eyes, trying to find some hint of who the man was. It was like trying to see water through the ice pack at the North Pole.

Quinn was surprised by Bennett's next remark. "Whoever murdered Alison didn't necessarily get her pregnant. Have you thought of that?"

"I have."

"And?"

"You have to start somewhere."

There was a long, deadly pause. Quinn had the sense that Bennett had played a wild card and was regretting it.

"You're doing this out of respect for your father," Bennett said, taking another tack. "All right. But has it occurred to you that Alison had a father as well? Don't the living deserve some consideration?"

"Your brother Rupert, you mean. In your opposition to the idea of DNA testing, are you speaking for him?"

Quinn knew that he wasn't; the brothers weren't speaking, period.

"Don't underestimate a father's love for his child," Bennett said gruffly, looking away. "
Let
it go, Quinn," he said,
turning back to face him. "I'm telling you, let it go."

Something in his answer touched Quinn. For the first time in seventeen years, he actually felt an inkling of generosity toward the man.

"Look," he said quietly, "I'll go see Alison's parents. I'll explain what I'm doing, why I'm doing it. If they have a problem with it, I'm sure they'll let me know. But I won't see an attorney about pursuing this until I've talked to your brother and his wife. You have my word on that."

It was half a loaf. Bennett, who could buy any bakery he chose, didn't look impressed. Quinn shrugged. It was the best he could do.

"Where does my daughter fit in?"

Quinn shrugged again, but this time he was faking the nonchalance, and he had the flushed cheeks to prove it. "That depends on her," he said.

"Touch her, Quinn, I'll make your life hell."

Lucifer himself couldn't have said it with any more confidence. Quinn nodded slowly, as if he were poring over a menu and couldn't decide between the fish and the chicken. "All righty," he said at last. "That seems clear enough." He gave Owen Bennett a guileless smile and said, "I assume our work here is done?"

"You know the way out."

Presumably he meant out of the library
, but
Quinn wouldn't have been surprised to find two bouncers on the other side of the door, waiting to lift him by the elbows and chuck him all the way to upper
Main
.

He turned the key and let himself out, relieved to find the roped-off hall clear except for the security guard at the far end. Nevertheless, he made his way back to the party weighed down by feelings of dread.

I'll make your life hell.

It wouldn't be the first time. If Owen Bennett had rallied to his gardener's defense all those years ago instead of tossing him out on the street without having seen a scintilla of real evidence, then Francis Leary wouldn't have panicked
and run, and God only knows how all of their lives would have turned out.

I'll make your life hell.
So big deal. There was nothing new in that.

More to the point, though, would he make his daughter's life hell also? If Bennett was as prone to cutting people from his will as Olivia said he was, then
.
... Shit. Quinn's Catholic upbringing would never let him handle that kind of guilt. He could sooner mug an old lady than be the direct cause of Olivia's disinheritance. On the other hand, Olivia seemed to be pretty good at getting herself disinherited, so maybe he was worrying about nothing.

There was another aspect that bothered Quinn more than all the rest: He had a strong sense that Owen Bennett was protecting someone. Who it was and why he was doing it—that, Quinn couldn't say. Considering that he was estranged from his brother, Rupert, Owen Bennett seemed pretty damned solicitous of the guy's feelings. Why was he bothering?

That's what Quinn had to find out.

He went back to the table he'd been sharing with Olivia, but she was no longer there. The party had reached critical mass, and the buffet area was filled to overflowing with swarming, hungry guests. There wasn't room to swing a masked cat. The din was horrific. Suddenly Quinn had a headache the size of
Rhode Island
. It couldn't have been from the champagne, which was anything but cheap; he just wasn't used to this kind of crush. The scene was too contrived and stagy for his laid-back, outdoor tastes. He wanted to get away, to have a moment to puzzle out the nuances of the interview in relative peace and quiet.

Where the hell was Olivia?

He turned and found himself staring into the masked face of a blond aristocrat whom he had once idolized and then overthrown. Rand Bennett—he'd know him anywhere. When they bumped into one another in town the day after Quinn's arrival,
Rand
had looked both startled and contemptuous. Not tonight. The brilliant blue eyes that gazed through the black mask at Quinn were still contemptuous, but this time they were overlaid with suspicion.

"Evenin', old man," said Quinn in a dead-on imitation of some pompous geezer he'd overheard earlier.

Rand
ripped off his mask. Underneath it his fair-skinned face was flushed, not with anger, but from the cold—another fashionably late arrival, apparently.

"What's the deal?" he said in a sneer. "Has my sister got you so whipped that you're letting her use you to get at my dad?"

In a reflex of anger, Quinn started for
Rand
's throat, then thought better of it.

"I guess I am," he answered with a lazy smile. "Does it show?"

"You—!"

Rand
's own lunge ended abruptly when someone pulled him back.

"Are you crazy,
Rand
? You'll screw up everything!"

Quinn wouldn't have known the man's face behind the big Phantom of the Opera mask, but his booming voice was a dead giveaway: Police Chief Vickers.

Rand
twisted his shoulder from the chief's grip and muttered, "Just keep him out of my way, then!"

He stormed off without a backward glance, leaving Quinn to wonder exactly what it was that he was in danger of screwing up.

"Just keep pushing it, Leary," said the chief, and then he, too, walked off—toward the roped-off wing, Quinn noticed with interest.

Quinn watched him swing one leg, then the other, over the velvet rope and then head for the far end of the hall. Reporting for duty? It wouldn't surprise him if the little white envelope ended up finding a home that night, after all.

It was a depressing, disturbing pattern: Everyone around Quinn seemed to be in on something that he was not. He felt a little the way he had back in fifth grade, when Rand and his friends built a tree house on the estate and pulled up the ladder the one time Quinn had ventured to come near.

Rebuffed and embarrassed, he had kept his distance after that. But he didn't embarrass as easily nowadays, not after what he and his father had gone through.

"Oh, Quinn! Oh good, you're alive!"

He turned to see Olivia with a half-ironic, half-sorrowful look on her unmasked face. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said, pressing her hands together in prayerful apology. "Will you ever forgive me?"

He was so happy to see her that he thought,
Forgive you? Oh, yes, and walk to the end of the earth for you besides.

"Hey," he said in laconic dismissal of the fuss she was making. "No big deal. What do you say we blow off this shindig? I think they're out of party hats, anyway."

"God, yes, let's go."

As they made their way through the guests to retrieve their coats, he found himself wondering why he assumed that Olivia wasn't in on what he now regarded as a conspiracy. Why was it that he suspected everyone of harboring secrets but her?

Because look at her face, you moron. Look at her face.

He did, and what he saw was the face of an angel. Maybe not the best-behaved angel in the universe, but certainly one of the best intentioned. Quinn didn't often trust his instincts, but in this instance, they were far too powerful to ignore. And besides, he was falling for her, and he could never fall for someone he didn't trust.

He handed the hatcheck girl his ticket and they waited as she went off in search of their coats. Olivia explained that her mother had tracked her down and had taken her upstairs not to read her the riot act, but to say how sorry she was that it was never going to work out between Quinn and Olivia.

"She said that?" Quinn said, surprised.

Olivia nodded. "You have to understand, my mother's biological clock is ticking."

"Your
mother's
clock. Uhhh, I don't get that."

"She loves—and I mean,
loves
—babies," Olivia said with a shrug. "She wants them around while she's young enough to enjoy them."

"Now that's something I never would have considered," he said, trying to seem thoughtful and wise. Holy shit. Considering that he and Olivia hadn't even been to bed yet—were all mothers so Machiavellian? Having been raised without one, Quinn really didn't have a clue.

Olivia smiled and said, "Don't panic. I'm only telling you this so that you know where my mother is coming from."

"Uh
-huh.
Sooo .
.. what did you say?"

"What could I say? I told her that clock or no clock, with you or without you, I wasn't ready to—excuse me. Miss?" she said as the hatcheck girl handed them a single wool topcoat. "I had a long black velvet cape?"

The girl, young and bored and no doubt grieving that she had to work on New Year's Eve, shook her head. "Nope. This was it."

Quinn said with a smile, "You can't really miss it. It has a red lining. Why don't you try again?"