Deception (31 page)

Popping the last of the bagel into her mouth, she went to the door to retrieve the New York Times from the landing. To her relief, there was no mention of her uncle’s arrest, which meant Wally had kept his promise. The delay would give her enough time to prepare another statement for the staff at B&A.

God, if this news didn’t make them all jump ship at once, it’d be a miracle.

An hour later, dressed in a red wool suit, Jill was inspecting the contents of her briefcase when the angry ring of the doorbell made her jump.

“You bitch!” Olivia shouted as Jill opened the door. “You lousy, self-righteous, sanctimonious bitch.”

Jill slammed the door shut and whirled around, her finger pointed at her cousin. “Don’t you start with me, Olivia.”

Olivia paid no attention to the warning. “Are you satisfied now? Are you? Is that what you had in mind when you said you’d see your father’s killer behind bars?”

“Of course not! I had no idea Cyrus went to Livingston Manor that night. He never told me. If he had…” She let the sentence hang between them like a dark, ominous cloud. What would she have done if he had told her?

“You wouldn’t have changed a damn thing. You figured since you couldn’t get the presidency after your father died, you’d nail it by putting my father in jail.”

The accusation made Jill see red. “Bull! I don’t give a damn about the presidency. My goal was to find my father’s murderer and I followed every clue regardless of where it led.” Her voice dropped. “Unfortunately, one of them led to Cyrus.”

“And now he’ll go to prison.” Like a punctured balloon, Olivia’s body, which had been taut with self-sustaining anger, seemed to deflate. With a wrenching cry, she collapsed onto a chair, buried her head in her hands and sobbed helplessly.

Rocked by this sudden and unexpected show of grief, Jill ran to her cousin. Crouching in front of her, she laid a tentative hand on her knee, half expecting Olivia to slap it away. She didn’t.

“I’m not going to let him go to prison.” The words, spoken with more passion than she had expected, considering how she had felt last night, surprised her.

“And just what do you think you can do?” Her beautiful face smeared with black mascara, Olivia glared at her. “He’s being transferred to the sheriff’s department in Monticello as we speak. Even his attorney says proving his innocence is going to be a tough fight.”

“But not an impossible one. First of all, second-degree murder is a bailable charge. With any luck, he’ll be out of jail before noon. He’ll be able to actively participate in his defense.”

“He didn’t do it, dammit! He shouldn’t have to defend himself at all.”

“Wally and Dan are working together. Between them, they’ll find the real killer.”

“Why isn’t Dad saying what happened up there?”

Olivia groaned. “Why is he being so bullheaded about this? Doesn’t he realize how guilty he looks?”

“I’m sure he does.”

She looked at Jill through puffy red eyes. “Wally says he’s protecting someone.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” Unable to look at Olivia, Jill averted her eyes. Her mother’s secret was now her secret and that’s the way it would stay.

Taking a tissue from a silver box on the end table, Jill handed it to Olivia. She was experiencing new feelings toward her temperamental cousin-a deeper attachment and a tolerance she hadn’t had before.

Olivia wiped her face, took a look at the smeared mascara on it and rolled her eyes. “Great. Now I look like a raccoon.”

Jill smiled. Even in the throes of despair, Olivia’s concern for her looks were never very far. “Why don’t you use my bathroom to clean yourself up?” she suggested. “You should find everything you need on the glass shelf above the sink.” She paused. “And maybe we could share a cab to the office?”

Olivia gave Jill a startled glance, as if she couldn’t quite understand why Jill was being so accommodating. “I can’t,” she said at last. “There’s something I need to do first.” As an afterthought, she added, “But I’ll see you there, okay?”

“Okay.”

As always at this early-morning hour, the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan was a noisy, messy, smelly bazaar whose sights and sounds were unequaled anywhere in New York.

Her face more or less presentable, Olivia paid her cab and headed toward the low concrete building at the end of the pier, where Mulligan & Son was located. Ignoring the whistles and catcalls from a group of rowdy longshoremen, Olivia kept walking while cursing Mulligan.

After more than a dozen phone calls, she had grown tired of the waiting game and had come to collect her money. And to make sure she wasn’t leaving empty-handed, she had brought a little insurance with her—a tape recorder to take down every one of Mulligan’s incriminating words.

As she waited for the receptionist to come back from Mulligan’s office, Olivia unzipped her big leather purse and glanced quickly inside. The tiny but powerful recorder the clerk had sworn would record through a brick wall was in place, its little red light glowing.

“Go ahead, Miss Bennett,” the receptionist said when she returned. “Mr. Mulligan is waiting for you.”

Leaving her purse unzipped as an extra precaution, Olivia walked into Pete’s office.

“Olivia!” Acting as if he was thrilled to see her, the contractor beamed as he came around his desk to meet her. “I was just about to call you.”

“At seven o’clock in the morning?”

“Well … my day starts early, you know.”

“Yeah, thanks to me.”

“Oh, come on, Olivia.” He walked back to his desk and sat down. “Don’t be mad at me. You know I’m grateful for what you’ve done.”

“You can shove the gratitude,” she said, sitting down and holding her bag on her lap. “Just give me my money.”

“Yeah, well…” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m a little strapped at the moment.”

“So am I, but a deal is a deal.” She hitched her chair a little closer so the recorder wouldn’t miss a single word.

“Give me a few more days, Olivia. Time to collect on a few accounts. You can’t imagine how hard it is to get your money these days.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I’m good for it, I swear.”

“Don’t give me that crap. I took risks for you, Pete. My cousin almost caught me red-handed, for Christ’s sake, but I didn’t back down. I gave you what you wanted and you got the job. You were supposed to do a wire transfer for ninety thousand dollars that same day, and here we are, two days later and I still don’t have my money.”

Suddenly impatient, Mulligan glanced at his watch. “Look, Olivia, you don’t understand. Ninety grand is a lot of money, and my cash flow is … well.. it’s been better, you know what I mean? But I’ll be solvent soon. I promise.”

“No more promises. I want a check, one that will clear, otherwise I’ll tell my father how you came to be the low bidder on Ted Falcon’s job.”

He laughed, a short sarcastic laugh meant to show her he had the upper hand. “And I’ll tell your daddy you’re lying through those pretty teeth of yours. I’ll tell him you have the hots for me and this is your way to get back at me for rejecting you. And since he knows your reputation with men, who do you think he’ll believe?”

“Me, if I give him proof.”

His eyes narrowed. “What kind of proof?”

“You’ll just have to wait and find out, won’t you?” she said flippantly.

“Why, you little shit…” Before Olivia could move, he had come around his desk and yanked her purse from her grip.

“Give me that,” Olivia cried, jumping to her feet.

He swatted her hand away and opened the purse. “Well, well… what have we here?”

He pulled out the recorder and turned it around, taunting her with it. Then, after dropping her purse to the floor, he flipped the cassette lid open, removed the incriminating tape and crushed it under his foot. “That was a stupid move, Olivia.”

Backing her against the wall, he pinned her there by jamming his arm under her chin. His face was within inches of hers. “Now listen to me, you no good, double-crossing little shit. Our partnership is over, you hear? And this little trick you just pulled? It nullifies our agreement. And that means no more money. Now get out of here before I really lose my temper.”

But instead of releasing her, he tightened his grip. “I don’t think you’ll be stupid enough to carry out your little threat, but in case you are, let me tell you what an impression you made on my friend Gino the other night. Why, the poor guy got hard just talking about you sleeping naked in that great big bed, with those sexy red sheets wrapped around you. Did he tell you red is his favorite color? Anyway, he’s itching to pay you another visit, so if you give me reason to, I’ll call him and tell him you’re just as anxious to see him. You get my drift, Olivia?”

Olivia could almost feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Gino? As in Gino “the slicer” Pugliese? Was that him? Oh, God’ Uncle Simon had been right to worry, after all. Mulligan did have deadly connections.

She tried to swallow but couldn’t gather enough saliva to do the job. “Let me go, Pete.”

“Just as long as we understand each other.”

“We do.” Without taking her eyes off him, she bent down to pick up her purse, and the recorder, which Mulligan had also dropped on the floor. As she started to close her hand over it, the contractor stepped on her fingers, pressing hard. The pain made her cry out.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “This stays with me. Even without a tape, fingerprints would be hard to explain.” He gave her a thin, nasty smile. “Nice try, though.”

Humiliated and frightened, Olivia ran out of the office.

Thirty-Two

Still shaky from her confrontation with Mulligan, Olivia walked into the crowded Sixth Avenue coffee shop, made her way to the counter where a stool had just been vacated and ordered coffee.

It was still too early to go to work and she was too damn scared to go home. Mulligan was right. She was nothing but a stupid amateur who should never have tried to con a con.

One more thing she’d managed to screw up.

The waitress, a bored-looking woman with a tripleD chest and an attitude, banged Olivia’s cup on the counter, spilling coffee onto the saucer. Annoyed, Olivia started to call her back, then shrugged. In the grand scheme of things, spilled coffee didn’t rate very high on her list of concerns. Not anymore.

As her conversation with Mulligan reran in her head, she mentally kicked herself. What had possessed her to play her hand the way she had? To practically tell him she had a recorder in her purse.

Desperation, that’s what. In her eagerness to collect her money, she had made a costly mistake.

Maybe even a deadly mistake.

So what happens now? She had compromised her integrity, not to mention the integrity of B&A, and she didn’t have a damn thing to show for it.

On the counter, her coffee had grown cold. Doubting the bitchy waitress would be back with a refill, she took two dollar bills from inside her purse, dropped them next to her cup and left.

Lifting her head from the stack of correspondence she had been trying to sort through for the past hour, Jill watched Olivia walk into her office. Although apparently recovered from her earlier emotional outburst, her cousin looked pale and weary.

“You got a minute?” Olivia said.

Jill put aside the letter she had been reading. It wasn’t every day that Olivia dropped the boxing gloves and asked to talk. In fact, it almost worried her. “Sure. What’s up?”

Olivia sat down and placed a single sheet of paper on Jill’s desk. “I’m tendering my resignation,” she said in a flat voice. “Effective immediately.”

“Your resignation?” Jill’s gaze shot from Olivia to the one-paragraph letter in front of her. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“Because after you hear what I have to tell you, you’ll fire me anyway and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give you the satisfaction.”

Jill was tempted to smile. Whatever had got her cousin so riled up hadn’t affected her old spirit “Okay,” she conceded. “Now that we’ve got that little detail out of the way, why don’t you tell me what the problem is.”

Olivia leaned back in her chair. “I rigged the bids for the Falcon project in exchange for money.”

For a couple of seconds, Jill felt as though the ceiling had just crashed on her head. “What did you say?”

Olivia’s gaze did not flinch. “Remember last Saturday when you found me in my father’s office? I lied to you. I wasn’t looking for a copy of your memo. I went there to look at the bids. Then I told Mulligan.”

Jill lowered her head in her hands. Rigging bids was a common practice among some contractors and not exactly punishable by death, but in the thirty-eight year history of B&A, the company had never been involved in the slightest scandal.

Jill shook her head. “Please, Olivia, tell me this is another of your warped ideas of a joke.”

“Not this time, ‘cuz. Sorry. I wasn’t even going to tell you. I was going to just split and never come back.” Mirthless laughter shook Olivia’s shoulders. “I don’t know what got into me, but suddenly, while I was sitting in the coffee shop down the street feeling sorry for myself, I knew I couldn’t do that to Dad.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Or to you.

Strangely, Jill believed her. And stranger still, she was suddenly driven by a desperate need to help her cousin. “How did you ever get involved with a man like Mulligan?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got time.”

The look in Jill’s eyes, a mixture of compassion and concern, took Olivia by surprise. She had come here expecting a shouting match and had met with nothing but calm and understanding.

Because she found it more difficult to accept Jill’s kindness than her scorn, she spoke without looking at her. She told her everything, from her first visit to an Atlantic City casino a year ago, to the night she had run into Pete Mulligan.

“If that’s any consolation,” she continued, “I didn’t want to do it. I was too scared.”

“But you did do it.”

“Only “because he sent a friend of his to convince me.” She told her about her nocturnal visitor and her suspicion the man was Gino Pugliese.

“My God’ Olivia. That creep got into your apartment, drugged the security guard’ threatened you at knife point and you didn’t call the police?”