Once the waiter brought them their plates, Samantha leaned her elbows onto their small booth table. “Any leads on the stolen art?”
As she leaned forward, he sat back. “If I’m here so you can yank me around, then forget it. I have a lot of work to do.”
It sounded like genuine frustration. To her that signified honesty, which was good—unless he was just a better actor than she was. Man, she was an idiot to go into this without backup. She only hoped she had the chance to learn and benefit from the lesson.
She offered him a slow smile. “I’m not yanking you around. But in my position I have to be cautious, you know.” Okay, that was good.
“And what position is that?”
“You said you went after my dad once. Did you ever see him? I mean, how did you know it was Martin Jellicoe you were after?” Especially since it hadn’t been. But if he was crooked, he’d probably seen him after—and very recently.
“No, I never saw him. Not then. That son of a—Sorry, I know he’s your dad, but he was one, you know.”
“I know. He never told me much about what he did for a living, but I know.” No, she wasn’t going to completely bare her soul. She wasn’t an idiot.
“Yeah, right. Okay, I kind of liked the way you got right in my face, and your obsession with Diet Coke is kind of…endearing, I guess. But if you laugh, I’m gonna find a way to bust you. I swear to God I am. And I know you wrecked an undercover car yesterday, by the way.”
“Not if you can’t prove it. And I won’t laugh. I promise.” With the way her nerves were rattling around, she’d be lucky if she didn’t start screaming and run away.
“I didn’t have a clue who pulled that job. Not until eight months later, when the Miami PD caught him elbow-deep in a pile of Spanish doubloons at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. The MO matched my job, and they gave me a call. I flew down to Miami to question him, and he wouldn’t say a damned word. He just smiled at me. It was this ‘proveit’ look, like he knew I couldn’t. And I never could. Slick, slick, slick.” He set down his coffee so hard that it sloshed onto the saucer. “They gave him how many years in prison?”
“One hundred and eighteen,” she supplied quietly.
“One hundred and eighteen years in prison, and I couldn’t prove the Warhol. I’d give my left nut, excuse my language, to have been the one to bring him down.”
Samantha watched his expression, listened to his voice, to the words he used and to the obvious frustration and anger there. Even though Martin wasn’t the one who’d stolen the Warhol, she couldn’t believe that the man sitting opposite her would ever under any circumstances agree to work with her father, much less help him get away with an even bigger robbery.
And Martin had seen Gorstein before. He would have recognized him the night she was arrested, on the television news, and the night the detective had called on her for help. It made sense. And more importantly, it felt like it made sense.
“That Warhol was eight years ago,” she said, inwardly steeling herself, ready to run if he went after her. She couldn’t trust the honest cops any more than she could the crooked ones, although for completely different reasons. But this cop, she was about to bet, was an honest one. And one she could trust. “The statute of limitations has run out.”
“It still bugs me. And the bastard’s dead, so I can’t get a deathbed confession out of him. I hate loose ends.”
“Well, in the interest of what I hope is about to be a kind of a partnership, the Warhol went to a private collection in Amsterdam. It’s still there, as far as I know.”
Brown eyes narrowed. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I took it.”
He started to his feet. Samantha held out a hand, her other going to the butter knife on the table. “Statute, honey. You can’t arrest me for it.”
“Are you here to gloat, then? To say that I wasted all that time going after the wrong Jellicoe and there’s nothing I can do about it now?”
She grabbed his wrist and yanked him back into the booth. “Will you keep your damn voice down, Gorstein?” she hissed. “No, I’m not here to gloat. You brought me a soda, and you’ve been up front with me. Maybe I can pay you back a little for the Warhol.”
“Fuck. And how are you going to do that?”
“Okay. I’m not going to play the on-the-record or off-the-record snitch. I’m going to tell you some things because basically I have two choices in front of me, and one gets me dead, while the other one loses me…some things I don’t want to lose. You’re my third choice.”
“You did take the Hogarth and the Picasso, didn’t you? I knew it, you—”
“I did not.” She lowered her voice further. “I only have one ground rule, and that’s that you listen until I’m finished.”
Gorstein edged upright again. “And then I can arrest you.”
The tips of her fingers went cold, and she flexed them. “That would be choice number four, but I’ll leave it up to you.”
“I’m getting a little weary of having this same conversation over and over again,” Richard said, standing at the head of the conference table to emphasize his point. “If the city council would rather have a derelict thirty-five-story building in the middle of Manhattan and if they prefer to forgo my offer to supply twenty million dollars toward low-income housing, then just mention traffic congestion one more time and we’re finished.”
John Stillwell cleared his throat as Rick walked to the window. “I believe that Mr. Addison’s point is that the amount of increased traffic would be negligible when compared with the prestige of having a five-star hotel in the middle of your downtown area. Employment will increase, as will your tax revenues. Mr. Addison has been very patient, but at some point this becomes a losing proposition, and we will move on.”
“But we have to consider—”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Richard strode to the conference room door. “My people, out.” As his employees filed past him into the reception area and the seated council representatives looked at one another, stunned, he exited the room as well, stopping in the doorway. “Consider all you want for the next fifteen minutes.” He closed the door on them.
“Rick?” Stillwell said, approaching him with some paperwork.
“No. We are not doing anything else on this project until I get an answer from the city. Go get a cup of coffee or something. I don’t want them even to see any of us for fifteen minutes. And John?”
“Yes, sir?”
“That was a nice bit of bad cop/good cop. Well done.”
Stillwell smiled briefly, glanced toward the glass walls, and stifled the expression again. “Thank you.”
His team scattered. Wishing he could lock the bloody conference room doors, Richard retreated to his office. Halfway there his cell phone rang in the tri-tones he’d assigned as Samantha’s ring. He took the phone from his belt and opened it. “Hello, my dear.”
“Are you in the middle of something?”
“We’re on strike for the next fourteen minutes,” he said, slowing at the monotone of her voice. The hairs on the back of his neck pricked. “What is it?”
“I would very much appreciate it if you could come to the Art Café on Broadway,” she returned in the same quiet tone.
“Are you safe?”
“Yes. If you could not be followed, that would also be good.”
Bloody hell. “Sam?”
“I’m okay. But we don’t have a lot of time.”
Something was seriously troubling her. “I’m on my way.”
Turning around, he strode into Stillwell’s new office. “John, I have an errand. If they aren’t ready to move past traffic when you go back in there, adjourn for the day. Tell them the mayor can call me if he wants our discussions to continue.”
“Very good.”
He descended the fifty floors in the elevator, trying not to fidget and wishing he’d had an executive elevator installed. Or a bat pole. Samantha would like that.
In the first cab he headed east for three blocks, then turned right, got out, hailed another cab, and went back in the opposite direction. He bloody well hoped that someone was trying to follow him, because otherwise he would just look like an idiot. He had the second cab drive past the café, and since he didn’t see any overt signs of battle he exited and took a third cab back to the front door.
Inside he saw her immediately, sitting in one of the back booths with her face to the door—and Detective Gorstein seated opposite her. The diners in his vicinity stirred as he walked past, but he ignored them. She waved, so at least she wasn’t handcuffed, thank Christ.
She scooted over, and he kissed her on the cheek, sitting in the booth beside her. “Detective,” he intoned, looking from one to the other.
“Ms. J. has been telling me a story,” Gorstein said.
“What kind of story?”
“Oh, you know,” Samantha took up. “People coming back from the dead, museums being robbed, things like that.”
Rick felt the blood drain from his face. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mr. Addison?” a waiter said, approaching. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thank y—”
“He’ll take a cup of tea,” Sam interrupted. The waiter nodded and left.
“Saman—”
“We’re being social,” she said in a low voice. “This is not an official meeting.”
“I should hope not.” Beneath the table he gripped her hand. Hard. “You just decided you wanted to have a chat with the man who arrested you?” he breathed. “And you declined to tell me where you were going?”
“This was my deal. My decision.”
“You told Walter, I suppose?”
“What part of ‘my decision’ did you not get, Addison?” she returned, despite her clipped tone squeezing his fingers back. “I figured if I went to Gorstein it would absolve everybody else.”
Richard turned his gaze to Gorstein. “And what was your opinion of this story, then, Detective?”
“That nobody would tell me that kind of craziness if it wasn’t true.” The detective glanced at Samantha. “It took a lot of guts to trust me with this.”
Trust. A promising word, under the circumstances. The waiter delivered the tea and a pot of hot water, and Richard nodded his thanks. “And what inspired this trust?”
“I weighed all the options, and I figured it had to be Gorstein, and it had to be me going to talk to him.” Samantha shrugged. “If you want to fight about it, we can do that later. Right now we have some stuff to take care of. My…outing is tomorrow afternoon.”
Her outing. The understatement of the year. And finally the setting for all this struck him. “You two actually sat here and discussed all of this.”
“Mostly she talked and I sat here with my mouth hanging open.”
“Rick’s right, though,” Samantha said. “Nobody much paid any attention to us here before. Now that you’re here, though, Sir Galahad, maybe we should try to find somewhere more private.”
That was a switch, he reflected, as his stunned surprise that this meeting had even taken place began to fade. His life, his fame, he supposed, was creating the difficulty this time. “How did you get here, Detective?” he asked.
“My car. It’s in the garage around the corner.”
Richard stood, drawing Samantha out of the booth with him. “Then let’s go collect it.”
He laid enough money on the table to cover what looked like the remains of breakfast, and rejoined Samantha to follow Gorstein to his car. It was insane, a clandestine Deep-Throat-style meeting in a parking garage, but as Samantha had said, they didn’t have a great deal of time.
“I assume you’ve come up with some kind of plan?” he asked, leaning against the back bumper of the late-model Taurus.
Samantha clambered onto the trunk to lean on his shoulder. “Gorstein’s going to give a tip to the FBI that the timing of the robbery has changed.”
“So we’re back to you being in the middle of an armed robbery. I don’t see much of an improvement.”
“We get white hats there to make arrests and keep the artwork from leaving the museum, and Martin still gets credit for the setup.”
“I’ll see if I can make a deal to get some of my guys inside the museum,” the detective said, standing a few feet from them. “We’ll do what we can to back Jellicoe up.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“Well, since she volunteered to jump into the middle of this little operation without first getting a deal from anybody in authority, there isn’t much else I can do at this point.” Gorstein looked at Samantha. “I would assume that you have some…things Interpol might be interested in talking to you about. Things that happened less than seven years ago and are still pursuable. You’re as hot a commodity for them as this Veittsreig guy, I’d bet.”
What in the world had she told him? “All the more reason that this is not an acceptable plan,” Rick grunted. He couldn’t stop Samantha from stepping into dangerous situations. He accepted that her craving for adventure was part of her character. This, though, entailed far too great a risk.
“My other option with Gorstein is to have him arrest me, so I can’t hit the museum.”
“I choose that one, then.” Surprised that she’d even thought it, much less said it aloud, Rick took the hand that rested on her thigh. “I’d rather have you in jail for a day than for life.”
“I choose neither,” she said flatly. “The problem with that plan is that if I get arrested, Nicholas and Martin will probably call off the job. I’ll—we’ll—still be on the hook when I get out, and Interpol will be pissed at Martin.”
“They should be pissed at him. He’s double-crossing them.”
“Maybe he hasn’t been able to get them the updated information. This job was put together pretty fast.” She frowned. “Which probably means it’ll get sloppy.”
“You’re not making me feel any better.”
“I’m going in, Rick. This job has to start so it can be stopped by the cops, or we’ll just get sucked into it again later, someplace else. I expect to go in on my own, and I’m not going to assume that Martin’s going to look out for me. I’ve covered myself as best I can, but that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“Do you two want a minute?” Gorstein asked, fishing in his jacket pocket for a toothpick and jamming it in his mouth.
Richard wanted several minutes. Pushing away from the bumper, he glared at Samantha. It had been a very long time since anyone had attempted to lay down the law to him, and he liked it even less now. He wanted to stop her. To handcuff her himself, throw her on a plane, and take her back to England where at least he had a very large fence separating his things from the rest of the world. And where a fence might not keep Samantha in, it could certainly help to keep anything or anyone who might harm her, out.
“Very well,” he said stiffly, grinding the words out through clenched jaws.
“Good,” the detective put in before Samantha could say anything. “Because I’ve got like thirty hours to get the FBI and Interpol and the NYPD together, come up with a plan, and pull it off.”
Richard kept his gaze on Samantha. “And if he can’t, I will take whatever steps are necessary to keep you out of that museum tomorrow. Are we clear on that?”
Green eyes narrowed. “Crystal.”
“Okay,” Gorstein grunted, clapping his hands together. “Get off my car. I need to get to the station.”
“And you’re keeping my name away from everybody else.”
“Everybody but the guys I’m going to put on your ass tomorrow.” He pulled out his keys and opened the driver’s door. “And you be somewhere I can get hold of you, just in case. I’m gonna have to answer some tough questions.”
“We’ll be at home,” Rick said, “making certain Samantha has an exit plan.” Or several of them.
Chapter 20
Tuesday, 8:23 a.m.
“Okay, I got them,” Stoney said, grunting as she helped haul him over the window frame in the upstairs hall. “And I’m getting damn tired of climbing in through the window.”
“I used to do it for a living,” Samantha returned, closing the window again and pushing the hall table back in place.
“You’re a little more spry than I am. And about thirty years younger.”
“Excuses, excuses,” she murmured, leading him toward the library, which she’d commandeered to lay out her gear. “Let’s see ’em.”
“Say thank you, first.”
“Thank you, Stoney.”
“That’s better. This is a little more high-tech than you like to go, though, isn’t it?”
“A lot more. I hope I can figure out how to wire them.”
“Especially since you’ll have about five minutes total to do it. I have to say, Sam, you’ve done some shit that scared me half to death, but this is just plain crazy.”
She flashed him a smile. “At least if it doesn’t work I’ll be going out with a bang.”
“Don’t even say that.” He closed the library door behind them. “Where’s the Brit?”
“Downstairs, keeping our houseguest occupied until he can send him off to work.”
“Is this going to be a new thing? You two with a live-in chaperon?”
“We already live with other people,” she returned, holding her hand out to take his backpack. “And Solano Dorado is a big house. Besides, Stillwell’s going to be doing a lot of traveling.”
“It just makes me curious about why Addison needs a helper all of a sudden.”
Sam glanced at him. “He needs a helper because he wants to be able to spend more time with me.”
“Keep an eye on you, you mean.”
“No. Yes. Probably. I don’t know. I’m trying to be open-minded about it until I see how it plays out. Because all three of us know that I am not going to end up tethered to Rick, no matter how much I like having him around.” She freed a half dozen mini remote controls and receivers from the pack. “These are nice. Ramon?”
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