DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS (12 page)

Laney laughed uneasily. “No. I’ve never known him to take more than a couple hundred into the casino, and if he lost that, he was done for the day.”

“Where are the savings records?” Ethan asked.

“I don’t know, but I can’t believe that—” A thought occurred to her. “Maybe he left it to some charity—anonymously. I wouldn’t know about that, right?”

Ethan shook his head. “I’m pretty sure you would. We need to find those records.”

Laney sat there.

“Hey,” Ethan said, putting a hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to find the savings records,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t want to know what happened to that money. Please, can we stop looking?” She looked up at him and saw an odd expression in his eyes. It looked almost pitying.

“No, we can’t. I can’t. I’ll take them to the precinct and finish there, but I can’t stop looking. We know Sills was blackmailing someone. This is murder, Laney. Murder.”

“Well, my dad didn’t do it!” she cried. There were too many awful emotions churning inside her. Anger, fear, grief, denial.

Ethan took her hand. “Your dad’s records might help us find the killer. I understand how much it hurts to find out something shocking about your family. Something you never knew, and that you can’t believe they would do.”

“Do you?” she said, pulling her hand away, but Ethan wouldn’t let it go.

He took her other hand, too. “Yes. I found out, and I managed to live with it. You’ll live with it, too. And if you know your dad, and I’m sure that you do, you’ll find out why he did it, and you’ll be able to live with that, too.”

“I’m afraid of knowing,” she muttered.

“I know you are.” He sat there, holding her hands and looking into her eyes.

She saw them turn smoky and dark and she felt as if she were sinking into their inky depths.

He let go of her hand and touched her cheek. For an instant, she thought he was going to kiss her and she realized she wanted him to. Desperately. She looked down at his mouth.

“Okay?” he whispered.

To kiss me?
“Okay,” she responded.

“Good.” He let go and turned back to the boxes, leaving Laney stunned and embarrassed.

She’d been expecting a sweet, gentle kiss to go with Ethan’s sweet, gentle words and touch. But all he’d wanted to do was get back to searching for proof that her father had been being blackmailed.

“Let’s keep going,” he said. “We don’t really have a lot left to go through.”

She should have known. Sure, he was charming and good looking. And those qualities obviously worked to his advantage when he wanted something—like now. What a chump she was, to think he’d wanted anything else.

She cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said wryly. “Let’s.”

They dug through the rest of the papers, looking at everything. Laney quickly emptied her box, finding nothing. No bank book. No statements. No records of any kind. “That’s impossible, isn’t it?” she asked Ethan, doing her best to be a trouper. “There has to be some kind of record of withdrawals from savings.”

He nodded, not looking up. “Definitely some kind. I suppose he could have thrown them away, or it could have been totally digital. Did your dad have a laptop computer?”

“No. Dad never advanced into the digital age. He never even had a cell phone.”

Ethan picked up a large stack of medical bills and statements.

Laney peeked at a couple. “Those are from ten years ago. When he had his first heart attack and had a triple bypass,” she said.

“Wait a second,” Ethan said, setting aside the sheets. “There’s something else here—” He pulled out a small stack of letters, bound with a rubber band. “What’s all this? Letters to your dad from you. Where were you writing from? Summer camp?”

“Let me see those,” Laney said. “The only time I went to camp was the year I was thirteen. And I for sure didn’t write all those letters.” She took the rubber band off and looked at the envelopes. “The top two are the only ones I wrote. These others are—wait. They’re in Dad’s handwriting. What was he doing, writing on envelopes as if they were from me? Why would he do that?”

She pulled the folded stacks of paper from one of the envelopes. “Oh, my God, Ethan! It’s the savings account records. He hid them in here.” She quickly read through the top one and her throat closed. She covered her mouth with her hand.

“What’s wrong?” Ethan asked.

She shook her head, unable to talk. She held out the folded sheets for him to take.

Ethan saw how upset Laney was. And he was sure he knew why. He took the statement from her and perused it. “Hand me the others,” he said, and scanned them, as well. Then he looked up at her, and saw her read the truth in his eyes.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” she said hoarsely.

He could tell by the look in her eyes that she already knew the answer. She was already thinking it herself. Only she was trying to pretend she wasn’t. He knew her brain was spinning, had been ever since she’d remembered the ending balance in the savings account, trying to come up with another plausible explanation for those large withdrawals.

He clenched his jaw. He had to say it, because otherwise she would just sit there for who knew how long, doing her best to deny it. “It’s true,” he said flatly, figuring that if he tried to comfort her right now, she’d lose it. “Given the size of the withdrawals and the frequency, I don’t think there’s any doubt.”

She swallowed and her gaze wavered, but she didn’t say anything.

“Laney, of course your dad was being blackmailed. It’s the only explanation.”

For a few seconds, she didn’t move. Then she folded her hands in her lap as her head moved slowly back and forth, back and forth. “What could he have done? He was a good man. A decent man. He raised me by himself after my mother died.”

“People can be blackmailed about all sorts of things, Laney. I just found out that Darby Sills tried to blackmail my grandfather about having a child with another woman. That was hard for me to take. That my grandfather disrespected my grandmother. That there’s a Delancey out there that my family has never known about.”

“That’s
your
family. Everybody knows Con Delancey was a rounder and a crooked politician—” Her hand flew to her mouth again. “Oh, Ethan. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

He waved away her apology. “Don’t worry about it. If you knew half the things I know about my family—”

She looked at her hands. “I really believed we wouldn’t find anything.”

Ethan didn’t respond to that directly. “There are some huge withdrawals here.”

She nodded, seeming to rally a little. “And he obviously went to a lot of trouble to hide the savings account statements.”

“Maybe he was embarrassed, or didn’t want you asking questions about where the money went?”

“No. I don’t think that’s it. Look how he printed his name and address and put my name as the return address. That might fool somebody else, but not me,” Laney said, her voice unsteady. “He probably meant for me to find these right after he died. I guess I wasn’t paying attention when I packed these, or else I was distracted and didn’t stop to think that this bundle was way too big to hold the four or five letters I’d written to him.”

Ethan sat down beside Laney and took the statements from her hand, sorted through them quickly, then handed her back about two-thirds of them, starting with the most recent dates. “How many years’ worth are here?” he asked.

“Twelve years,” she answered. “I’m surprised it isn’t forty. He saved just about everything.”

“Do you feel like taking these and flagging the inordinately large withdrawals on each statement?” he asked, watching her carefully. Although she was extremely intelligent and highly intuitive, he knew that the little girl inside her that still missed her daddy had just received a huge, agonizingly painful dose of reality about the man who’d reared her.

“Sure,” she said, straightening her back. “Do you think, if the withdrawals are blackmail, that he was paying them to Senator Sills?”

“I don’t know, but once we have the information about the withdrawals, the forensic accountants can compare them with deposits Sills made. So while you flag those, I’m going to find when the withdrawals started.”

It took them over an hour to skim through the monthly statements. As Ethan finished with each year he had, he handed the bundle to Laney. Once he got through ten years of statements and started on the eleventh, he discovered exactly when the withdrawals started. So he bundled the oldest two years up and tossed them back in the box. Laney was still reviewing and flagging. She’d slipped her hand out of the sling so that the job was a little easier.

While she worked, Ethan got up and retrieved the ice pack from the freezer. It was almost frozen.

“Is it time for that again?” Laney asked when she saw him with it.

“You’re wincing whenever you move that arm. Here, let me put it under the sling.” He stepped up behind her and brushed her hair away from her neck so he could slip the ice pack under the sling without getting it tangled in the strands. When he did, she inclined her head slightly and that sweet, citrusy smell he’d noticed in the car wafted across his nostrils.

To his embarrassment, he felt a pleasant stirring deep inside him that heralded the beginnings of arousal. He tightened his jaw as he made sure the ice pack was secure.

He would not give in to his body’s cravings. Not with her. She was a victim, a witness, and tonight, she was a grieving daughter and, last but not least, his responsibility. He turned and went into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from her refrigerator dispenser. It was cold and refreshing as he swallowed it. It would be good if he had another ice pack, one he could apply directly to the area that was fast becoming hot and hard, but the thought was nearly as good as the deed. By the time he’d finished drinking the water, the problem was almost gone.

“Ethan?” Laney called.

With a grimace and a stern, if short, lecture about keeping business and personal stuff separate, he went back into the living room.

“I’m done,” she said, gesturing toward the stack of statements on her lap. There were tiny, colored sticky flags adorning every single sheet.

“Are you okay?” he asked. She looked better than she had earlier. The color that had drained from her cheeks was back.

“I am. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’ll collapse in grief tomorrow, but right now, I’m kind of creepily fascinated with the amounts of money he withdrew.” She shook her head. “Is that awful?”

He smiled. “No. I think your brain is coping by becoming involved with the mundane stuff, the numbers and amounts of withdrawals. Just go with it.”

“Okay. So you won’t believe how many withdrawals I found. I looked for those over five hundred dollars, because I don’t think Dad ever withdrew that much for his personal use. Maybe once or twice, if ever.”

“How many?”

“You handed me ten years of statements, so that’s essentially 520 weeks, right? Well, he sometimes made withdrawals more than once a week. I counted 848 withdrawals of $500 or more during that ten years.”

“Five hundred dollars or more. How much more?”

“Some were as much as a thousand. A few were even larger. Plus, he transferred money from savings to checking a few times a year, usually around $5,000.” She rubbed her temple. “I’m still just stunned. I’m sitting here looking at these withdrawals and I still can hardly believe that
my dad
did this.”

“I’m going to use the calculator on my phone. Go through the statements and call out the amounts. You can go as fast as you want.”

Laney sighed. “That’s a lot of numbers. I’m cross-eyed already.”

“It won’t take too long.”

She went through the statements, reading off numbers as rapidly as she could find the flagged entries. “Eight hundred. Sixteen fifty. And seven forty,” she said finally. “That’s it.”

Ethan held up the total. “I can’t guarantee I got every single one, but take a look at this. Over $550,000 in ten years.”

She pressed her lips together and sent her gaze skyward. He knew the information was devastating to her. After a second, she nodded. “That’s probably right,” she said. “Your forensic accountants can get the real numbers, can’t they?”

Ethan nodded, feeling an unexpected pride in her for rallying, despite the shocking truth that her father was paying blackmail. “Yep. I just wish we had some way of knowing who he was paying. All my instincts say Darby Sills.” He paused before asking the question that was on his lips.

“Are you sure you can’t imagine what your dad’s secret might have been? Nothing sticks out in your mind about your dad and money? Or the relationship between him and Sills?” As he spoke, he stacked the statements and tapped them against the surface of the coffee table to straighten them. Then he picked up the envelopes and a large rubber band.

“No. Dad never talked about money with me. Not after my mother died. The two of them had huge fights about money before she got sick enough that she didn’t care to fight about anything.” She sighed. “It’s no wonder he avoided the subject at all costs.”

“You’ve mentioned your mother a couple of times. Did she die when you were young?”

Laney nodded. She bit her lip for a second, then sighed. “You should probably know everything, if my father’s information can help with finding out who murdered Senator Sills. My mother was an alcoholic. A very good one,” she said with a sad smile. “Apparently she could drink a lot without actually appearing drunk, until she passed out.”

“I’m sorry, Laney.”

“And that’s what killed her. She died when I was eleven. I know most of this because he told me. She was hiding vodka and drinking about a quart a day. I know—” she said, holding up a hand. “That’s hard to believe. Most days by the time Dad got home, she was passed out.”

“But what about you?” Ethan interjected.

“I was pretty good at taking care of myself. But one day when she left the stove on and I burned myself trying to turn it off, Dad decided she had to get help. He made her go to rehab. She stayed for about two weeks and was not drinking. But she checked herself out, went to a hotel, drank a quart of vodka and died of alcohol poisoning. It was probably a wonder that she hadn’t overdosed before then.”