Private Justice

by Marie Ferrarella

  He stared at her. Well, that certainly was a mouthful. There was no way anyone would get her confused with an empty-headed bimbo, which, he’d come to learn extremely quickly, was what his father’s mistresses all had in common. Beyond their glamorous, carbon-copy looks, they all had the IQs of dormant peanuts. Maybe his father had decided to add an intelligent one to the body count for variety’s sake.

  “So what you’re telling me is,” Dylan said, just to make sure he understood what she was saying, “barring some kind of divine intervention, you’re not going to give me the address of his ‘safe house.’”

  Her smile was tight. “Finally,” her eyes seemed to say. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  Okay, if she wanted divine intervention, there was only one way to go. He might not be on a first-name basis with God, but he was, so to speak, with his father. And, he had a hunch that in this case, a word from his almighty father would have the same effect on this overly protective woman.

  “Could you at least call my father and let me talk to him?” Dylan requested, doing his best to sound patient. “We can let him decide.”

  Cindy paused, thinking. The man standing before her did seem sincere, but that was obviously something that, whether he liked it or not, this bright young lawyer had inherited from his father. The senator was the type of man who could persuade a survivor of the Titanic to book a three-week cruise to Alaska and make the person believe it was his own idea. She’d never met anyone so convincing.

  It apparently ran in the family. But she had had her shots, thanks to her ex, and it took a great deal to sway her from her position once she took it.

  Determined to get this woman to come around, Dylan tried again. “Look, wouldn’t you hold yourself accountable if you do keep us apart and the senator winds up getting nailed to the cross for his transgressions?” On his way over to the office, he had done a little calling around to various sources. The picture that had emerged of his father’s immediate future did not look good. “Right now, everyone thinks he’s guilty of everything, including starting both world wars. If I don’t at least try to help him, there’s no telling where this is going to end up.” He pinned her with a penetrating look. “You want that on your conscience?”

  This time, the silence was a great deal shorter. “You’re good,” she told him grudgingly when she spoke. “I will give you that.”

  “What I am,” he countered, “is right. Now, what’ll it be? The new address, his phone number or an eternally guilty conscience?” He laid out her three choices and waited.

  “You know, there is always the possibility that the public will come to their senses, the investigation will find him not guilty of misappropriation of campaign funds and those women will all admit to lying for the purposes of blackmail.” She looked at him. He was the personification of skepticism. “You’ve got to admit that’s a possibility.”

  He congratulated himself on not laughing in her face. Talk about a cockeyed optimist. He wouldn’t have thought it of her, not after first seeing the other side of the woman.

  “Sure it is. Right after pigs fly. They’ll not only fly,” he added, “but they’ll have their pilots’ licenses, pilots’ jackets with little gold wings pinned over the pockets and they’ll all be speaking French. Fluently,” he concluded.

  He was mocking her, she thought angrily. Why was it all the good-looking men thought they had a God-given right to put everyone else down and act as if they were the only ones who mattered? The only ones who were allowed to have an opinion—and that opinion was always right.

  Her eyes pinned him. “You’re a pessimist, I take it.”

  Actually, he saw himself as the reverse in most cases. But in this case, it was neither. “What I am is a pragmatic man who is trying to help the head of his family save face and not go down for the things he hasn’t done, however little that might turn out to be. Now, for the last time, can you at least give me his phone number and let me talk to the man before it’s too late?”

  She didn’t like the way this man kept refusing to refer to the senator by his title, but used either a pronoun or something equally as anonymous. To her, that was a sign of how little he thought of his father. She still couldn’t reconcile the notion that he was willing to go out of his way like this for someone he held in such contempt. Was there an angle he was going for that she was missing?

  In any event, though she hated to admit it, he was right. The least she could do was give him that phone number he’d asked for. The final decision about a face-to-face meeting ultimately had to lie with the senator. She was not about to presume to speak on his behalf. All she could do was lay the groundwork and make sure that no reporters got to Senator Kelley.

  Exhaling loudly as if the act would bring her very lungs out, Cindy capitulated. She pulled a notepad closer to her on the desk and wrote out a telephone number. Finished, she pushed the pad toward him.

  Dylan looked at it. It was an 818 area code, but that didn’t mean anything. This was the number to his father’s cell phone; his father could be anywhere in the state. Or out of it. Nobody said this was going to be easy, he thought with resignation.

  Tearing the sheet off the pad, he said, “By the way, you know my name because it was on my license, but I don’t know yours.”

  She didn’t take the opening he gave her. “No, you don’t.”

  This was like pulling teeth. Or, actually, more like questioning a hostile witness under oath, he thought. “What is it?” he asked her.

  There was pure suspicion in her eyes. “Why, so you can have me investigated?”

  “So I know what to call you when I need to get your attention.”

  “Through,” Cindy told him without missing a beat.

  The corners of his mouth curved slightly. “First or last?”

  Cindy cocked her head. “Excuse me?”

  “Through,” he repeated what she’d just said to him. “Is that your first name or your last name?”

  He was a lawyer all right, Cindy thought. One who wasn’t going to stop badgering her until he got what he was after. Well, she supposed that it was an easy enough matter for him to find out the name of the senator’s Chief Staff Assistant. She might as well tell him now rather than keep the game going.

  “Cindy,” she told him grudgingly. “Cindy Jensen.”

  That hadn’t taken as long as he’d begun to think it would. His smile was broad. “Nice to meet you Cindy, Cindy Jensen.”

  “You know,” she told him, “you’d get along a lot better with people if you lost that mocking tone.” Now that amused him. “You’re giving me advice on how to get along with people?” Didn’t that fall into the realm of the pot-and-kettle thing?

  She took offense at his response and what it implied. “I’ll have you know I get along beautifully with people. Non-belligerent people,” she qualified.

  “I only act belligerently with people who are trying to stonewall me.” He looked at the phone number in his hand. “Now that you’ve given me a number where my father can be reached, we can become best friends.”

  Her response was immediate and without hesitation. “I’d rather eat dirt.”

  “Odd choice,” he commented, keeping a straight face even though he knew he was goading her, “but I won’t stand in your way. Whatever makes you happy.”

  “What would make me happy,” Cindy said under her breath as she resumed moving about the office, straightening things up just so that her hands could remain busy, “is if the senator had remembered to stay a little truer to his own principles and not done anything to allow the media the opportunity to jump on his bones like a pack of snarling jackals.”

  Dylan had started dialing, but stopped to listen to her. Her tone had dropped and her voice had softened. Her imagery entertained him.

  “Anyone ever tell you that you’re a very colorful woman?” She gave him a look that told him she was not about to be softened up with compliments. “I guess not,” he concluded.

  Abou
t to continue dialing, he winced as a piercing noise was emitted from the earpiece of the receiver and a female, almost metallic voice, came on the line, reciting the classic instruction: “Please hang up and dial again.”

  He was about to press down the button on the cradle when Cindy did it for him. He raised his eyes to hers, thinking she’d obviously heard the jarring message. “Thanks.”

  She gave him an ever-so-slight nod of the head to acknowledge that she had heard him.

  As he completed dialing the number, Dylan couldn’t help wondering what it was like to have someone who was as loyal to him as this woman apparently was to his father. His first thought was that his father had to be paying her awfully well. But money didn’t buy loyalty, it bought lackeys, and a couple of minutes in Cindy Jensen’s company had convinced him that this woman was no lackey. So then what was she? The senator’s Chief Staff Assistant/head mistress? Or what?

  He was going to need to get that cleared up in order to have a handle on the facts here. And on what was and wasn’t, ultimately, a press liability. Because he knew just as well as anyone that cases were first tried in the press. A victory there gave a victory elsewhere a base to grow from, becoming that much easier to achieve.

  God knew he was going to have his work cut out for him.

  He blew out an impatient breath. The phone had rung now a total of eight times and there’d been no answer, human or machine. In this day and age, that was pretty unusual in his book. Was she giving him the runaround again?

  Dylan looked at her. “You sure this is the right number?”

  She didn’t like the veiled accusation in his voice. “It’s the contact number that the senator gave me,” she told him.

  Dylan frowned, debating hanging up. If there was someone there, how long could they put up with listening to the phone ring? He had his suspicions that it was a bogus number—unless his father was out, and considering the high visibility of his face after the broadcast, he sincerely doubted that.

  Of course, there was also another explanation for why no one was picking up. One that absolved the Chief Staff Assistant of any blame.

  “How much does my father trust you?” he asked her suddenly.

  Cindy stopped moving around the office, stopped neatening, stopped straightening. She slowly turned around to look at him. Just what was this lawyer who might or might not have pure intentions saying?

  “I’m the senator’s Chief Staff Assist—”

  Dylan raised his hand to stop her in mid-word. This refrain was beginning to sound like a broken record and it was grating on his nerves. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re his Chief Staff Assistant. You told me. Trust me, you told me.”

  Two could take that sarcastic tone, she thought, annoyed. “And you remembered. How nice for you.” The words were delivered with a smile that could have frozen a pond in July.

  The woman definitely had an attitude problem, but that was something he’d deal with later. Right now, he needed to find a way to get to his damn father. The old man had picked a hell of a time for a game of hide and seek.

  “You being his Chief Staff Assistant doesn’t automatically mean that he trusts you,” he pointed out, less than tactfully. “Maybe he gave you that number to throw you off.”

  With a disgusted noise, Dylan hung up the phone. Now what? He supposed he could go back to his firm and see if the private investigator they kept on retainer could locate his father.

  Her eyes all but shooting daggers at him, Cindy crossed back to the desk and elbowed him aside.

  “Give me that,” she said, commandeering the phone and pulling the receiver out of his hand. On a hunch, she hit the redial button, then watched the caller ID screen as the numbers of the phone call he’d just made popped up one by one. Just as she’d thought. “No wonder,” she declared. Cindy raised her eyes to his face, a look of triumph on her own.

  What was she up to? “No wonder what?” he wanted to know.

  The phone on the other end began ringing. For a moment, she ignored it as she pointed to the screen for his benefit. “You transposed two of the numbers.”

  Terminating the call, Cindy tapped in the right numbers on the keypad and then listened as the phone on the other end began to ring.

  Dylan silently upbraided himself for the mistake. That was careless. And he’d been so careful lately, too. It hadn’t happened to him in a number of years now. Most days, when he remembered not to rush himself, he could keep the dyslexia completely under control.

  No one at the firm suspected he had it. And except for this one girl—and he’d never confirmed it, saying she had to be mistaken—no one in either his college or the law school he’d subsequently attended, had ever even suspected that he had it.

  It was, overall, rather a mild form of the annoying condition. But it was always there, in the shadows, waiting to bedevil him when he least expected it, if he just let his guard down. And it always appeared when he had the least amount of time to deal with it.

  Until just now, it hadn’t cropped up for a very long time. He’d begun to think that maybe he was finally free of it. Finally free to feel unencumbered.

  Just went to show him he was going to have to remain ever-diligent and on his guard.

  He supposed that there were a lot worse things in life.

  Like a father courting public scandal.

  “Anyone?” he asked his father’s Chief Staff Assistant as she held the phone against her ear.

  Rather than answer him, Cindy held the receiver out for him to take. The ringing noise had ceased. A deep, masculine voice on the other end was saying, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Dylan grabbed the receiver from her and placed it against his ear. It sounded like his father, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Dad? Dad, is that you?”

  For a moment, there was silence on the other end. It stretched out so long that Dylan thought perhaps the connection had been lost. Or maybe the man on the other end had just laid the phone down and walked away. That, in his opinion, would have been par for the course, representing the sort of behavior he had come to expect from his father.

  And then, just as he was about to hang up the receiver, the same voice cautiously asked, “Who is this?”

  It made sense that his father didn’t immediately recognize his voice, Dylan decided. After all, it wasn’t as if they spent hours on the phone, talking. Or any time at all, really. When it came right down to it, other than a few calls home from his father over the years, he couldn’t remember ever talking to him on the phone.

  Phoning to catch up was just not his father’s way. These days, he seemed to like his family subdued and out of sight.

  Too bad you can’t follow your own required behavior, Dad.

  “This is Dylan Kelley,” he answered, then added, “your son,” for good measure.

  The information was met with more silence on the other end.

  Chapter 3

  Just as he was about to surrender his last shred of patience and say something really terse to his father, Dylan heard the voice on the other end of the line challenge, “How do I know that you are who you say you are? How do I know that it’s really you?”

  He didn’t remember his father being this paranoid. But then, his personal memories of his father were admittedly not only few and far in between, but vague as well.

  “Why?” Dylan asked. “You have another son named Dylan?”

  “No, but my son Dylan hasn’t spoken to me in months now. So many that I can’t really recall just how long,” his father replied.

  It annoyed Dylan that his father made his answer sound more like an accusation than a statement of a situation that he had brought upon himself. “And I wouldn’t be calling now if you hadn’t gotten yourself into one hell of a mess.”

  Hank was still wary. Still nervous. “My son wouldn’t care.”

  “I don’t,” Dylan answered coldly. “But all of this is ripping the hell out of Mother.”

  The last he’d hea
rd, his mother had gone into hiding to avoid having to make any sort of a statement or subject herself to the public’s insatiable appetite for scandal.

  For a split second, Dylan debated continuing on this path. Inadvertently, his father was handing him his way out. He could just back away, saying something inane about just wanting to check on his father’s whereabouts and now that he had, he was done with it.

  But that wasn’t why he was here, Dylan reminded himself stoically. He was here not just to do damage control but, like it or not, to try to pull his father out of this quagmire.

  “I’m offering you my services so we can find a way out of this and spare Mother any further humiliation. After everything you’ve put her through, essentially leaving her to raise the four of us by herself, she doesn’t deserve this.” And if it hadn’t been for his uncle Donald, they would have found themselves to be all alone. The nannies and servants were exceedingly poor substitutes for a parent’s love, a parent’s attention. “The press is hell-bent on hounding her.”

  He heard his father laugh shortly. “I know the feeling.”

  Dylan knew he should keep his comment to himself, but he just couldn’t. There was a deep-seated anger he needed to vent before he could be of any use to the old man. “I doubt that you’re able to feel anything at all that doesn’t directly affect you.”

  There was a pause again. He was sincerely skeptical that guilt had backed his father into silence. When it came to what the family thought of him, Dylan was convinced that his father had the emotional hide of a rhino.

  When the senator spoke again, it was to ask another question. “How did you get this number?”

  Dylan glanced toward the woman who had given up all pretense of not paying attention to every word he was saying. She stood on the other side of the desk, unabashedly listening to his end of the conversation, most likely trying to fill in the blanks that she wasn’t able to hear.