The Quiet Game

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."

CHAPTER 38

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?"