by Mallory Kane
“Architectural—you mean literally used by architects? Maybe it’s the architect who designed the casino.”
Dawson didn’t answer.
“Or Michael Delancey? Wasn’t he an architect before he went to prison?”
Dawson shook his head without looking up. “Good question,” he said gruffly. Then he looked at his watch and stood. “I’ve got an appointment. If you’re hungry, there’s a frozen pizza in there.” He gestured toward the refrigerator.
“You’ve got an appointment now?” Juliana asked. “But it’s after eight o’clock.”
“I have to go by my client’s schedule.” He adjusted his wristwatch.
“Is it about the Sky Walk?” she asked, frowning at him. Why did he suddenly look nervous?
“In a way. So, do you want to fix the pizza or should I bring you something back?”
She shook her head. “I’m not hungry. I ate that hamburger at the police station.” She stood. “I want to go with you. I’ll get dressed.”
Dawson’s head jerked as if she’d slapped him. “No!” he snapped, then, “No. How many times do I have to tell you I guarantee my clients’ anonymity. If you want to be a private eye—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, holding up her hands. “I get it. ‘If I want to be a private eye, I need to protect my client’s identity,’” she said mockingly.
Dawson shot her a look that was tinged with amusement. “That’s right,” he said.
“Fine. I’m exhausted anyway. I’ll probably go to bed pretty soon.”
He nodded. “I should be back in a couple of hours. I’ll lock the door behind me. Take your cell phone with you. Don’t answer the landline and don’t open the door for anybody.”
Apprehension sent her pulse racing. “Are you expecting someone to come to the door?” she asked.
“No, but—”
“I’ll take my gun with me.”
Dawson looked pained. “I’m still considering taking that thing away from you. Please try not to shoot yourself or any of my neighbors.”
It wasn’t until after he was gone that Juliana realized he’d taken the letter with him.
* * *
“WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?” Dawson tossed the letter toward his dad’s lap. Michael Delancey caught it in midair, then set it on the table beside his chair.
He managed to look scared, desperate, guilty, embarrassed and indignant, all at the same time. “Son—”
“Don’t give me excuses,” Dawson snapped. “Give me answers for once. Do you have any idea what could have happened if the police had intercepted this letter?”
“The police? How would they get it? And how would they know it came from me?”
Dawson hissed. “Your prints are on file—and your DNA. Did you handle the paper with your bare hands? Did you lick the envelope to seal it?”
His dad squirmed and looked sheepish.
“What the hell did you think this would accomplish?”
Michael Delancey looked up at Dawson. “I thought I was giving Caprese’s daughter information she might be able to use. I can’t get you to listen to me.”
Dawson paced, hoping to work off the frustration and anger he felt every time he talked to his dad these days. “All I hear is how nothing is your fault, how you’ve been framed.” He stopped and glared at his dad. “Everybody in prison was framed.”
Michael stood. He was almost as tall as Dawson and still in pretty good shape, even though he hadn’t done much since he’d gotten out of prison. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said. “I don’t want to wake your mother.”
“Right. I doubt a freight train could wake her.”
Michael whirled on him, his fist raised. “You watch your mouth.”
Dawson feinted and took a defensive stance, doubling his hands into fists. “What? Did I say something that isn’t true?”
“You don’t disrespect your mother. Not now, not ever. Do you understand?” Michael warned, advancing on him.
Dawson lifted his chin. “Disrespect goes both ways, Dad. You—”
“J.D.?”
He froze. So did his dad.
His mother stood in the door to the den. She was in an elegant blue satin dressing gown and her blond hair was mussed as if she’d been asleep. She held a pack of cigarettes and a jeweled lighter. Her eyes were swollen—from sleep or booze? Dawson couldn’t tell.
“Mom,” he said, resisting an urge to shuffle his feet like a kid.
“Edie,” his dad said at the same time.
“What are you doing?” Edina Delancey asked, pushing a strand of hair back from her forehead with the hand that held the lighter.
“Just talking,” Michael said. “I thought you were asleep.”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. I came downstairs to have a cigarette. Then I heard you two arguing.” She gave Dawson an assessing glance. “Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?”
Grimacing inwardly, Dawson crossed the room and bent to kiss his mother’s cheek, steeling himself against the smell of gin that always clung to her like perfume.
But the only scents that hit his nose were the faint smell of cigarette smoke and roses, which jarred him with a long-forgotten memory. Rosemary and he sitting with her on the couch while she read to them.
“I’ll be downstairs,” Michael said.
As his footsteps faded on the stairs, Dawson’s mother touched his cheek with a trembling hand. “You shouldn’t be so hard on your father, darling. He’s hard enough on himself.”
“How’re you doing, Mom?” he asked, not wanting to get into a conversation with her about Michael.
She smiled and he saw a glint of something in her eyes that he hadn’t seen in a long time. Determination. She’d started drinking heavily after his sister, Rosemary, was murdered twelve years ago. By the time Michael had gone to prison eight years ago, she’d been sober for almost a year. But Michael’s sentence had been too much for her. She’d relapsed.
“One day at a time,” she said, patting his cheek. “One day at a time.”
Dawson smiled back at her and kissed her on the forehead before he turned to follow Michael down the stairs to the basement media room.
“J.D.—”
He turned. She’d always called him J.D. She was the only one who did. “Yeah, Mom?”
“Thank you for helping him. He had nothing to do with that tragedy. He needs you to believe in him.”
Dawson clenched his jaw, but he gave his mother a small nod. “I’m going to do my best to find out the truth,” he said. That was the most he could offer.
Downstairs, Michael had turned on a classical music station. He watched Dawson descend the stairs.
“Mom’s sober?” Dawson asked.
Michael’s mouth thinned, but he nodded. “Three weeks. She’s on medication. I wish she’d quit smoking, but I guess she needs them right now.”
The idea that his mom was trying to get sober planted a lump in Dawson’s throat. For some reason, it upped the anger at his dad. “What she doesn’t need is her husband going back to prison,” he bit out.
His dad grimaced. “Son, I know you don’t think much of me. I don’t think much of myself sometimes, but I’m tired of trying to convince you that I didn’t have anything to do with that damned Sky Walk falling.”
“Who is Knoblock and why haven’t I heard about him before?”
Michael sighed. “Damn it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to talk to a stubborn mule who’s already made up his mind that you’re guilty?”
“Do you know how hard it is to have an ex-con for a father?”
Michael’s face drained of color. The two of them faced off for a brief moment, then Michael shook his head. “You should remember Knoblock. He was the concrete subcontractor on the condos.”
“That was Knoblock? Thick glasses? I do remember him, barely.” Dawson had worked for his dad as a framer and a roofer. By the time Michael had been indicted, Dawson had already decided that he was through with constru
ction and his dad.
Michael nodded. “I’ve told you about Tito Vega, the lowlife bum who got me put in prison,” he said.
Dawson snorted. “Right. I know who Tito Vega is. What about him?”
“Back around the time I was bidding for the contract on the Pearl River Condominiums, I got some information from one of the building inspectors I used that Vega had another inspector in his pocket.”
Dawson sat down on his dad’s favorite leather couch. He absently rubbed his fingers over the worn leather on the seats.
“Come on, Dad,” he said. “I’ve heard all this before. I’ve got a stack of files two feet high on Vega, but I didn’t find a thing.”
Michael looked at him in surprise. “You investigated Vega? For whom?”
Dawson gave him an exasperated look. “The point is, I couldn’t find anything linking him to anything illegal.”
“Of course you couldn’t. The most you’ll ever find is an op-ed piece here and there. Vega’s a very smart, very careful man. And very influential. He sinks a lot of money into local politics and charities. If you’ve got that much information on him, you know about his real-estate business. Some of what he does is buy run-down properties, raze the buildings and put up condos or office buildings or what have you. If he has a building inspector in his pocket…” Michael spread his hands.
Dawson nodded. “So you went to the board?”
“I did what I thought was the right thing and it ended up costing me my career, my dignity and a pant load of my money.” Michael wiped his face.
“The inspector who came to me knew a sucker when he saw one. He figured I’d go to the board, and he was right. He couldn’t—he’d lose his job. But his real fear was Vega. He told me a few stories he’d heard.” Michael shook his head. “They sounded like something out of one of Pop’s stories. Threats. Dead pets. Broken legs.”
Dawson stared at his dad. “How could somebody as high-profile as Vega get away with that kind of thing?” he asked.
Michael rubbed his eyes. “Pop used to say that the nation needed organized crime. He said politics and crime were like love and marriage—you know that old song. You can’t have one without the other.”
Dawson snorted. “I’m sure that worked—for him. Come on, Dad. Talk about being in somebody’s pocket, Con Delancey was probably in the pockets of every crook in Louisiana, or vice versa.”
“Your grandfather had a relationship with the top crime boss on the Gulf Coast back in the day. They were friends. They respected each other’s position. Not like today. My point is that Tito Vega’s got the same kind of relationship with some of the local elected officials around here. The difference is that he has no integrity. He doesn’t care who he hurts. And apparently neither do the politicians.”
“Integrity? Con Delancey?”
“I’m just telling you what Pop used to tell me. It was different back then. When I reported Vega for having a building inspector on his payroll, there was a big investigation, sure. But Vega managed to come out smelling like a rose.” Michael paced to the sliding glass doors and back across the room to where Dawson was sitting.
“A few weeks after I won the contract for the Pearl River job, a big bald-headed goon in a thousand-dollar suit came to my office. He sat and filed his nails while he told me that I needed to hire Randall Knoblock as a subcontractor.” Michael paused. “He had some kind of accent.”
He looked down at Dawson. “The inspector who was in Vega’s pocket was the one who reported that I’d used inferior materials on the Pearl River Condos. When the state board investigated, sure enough, the reinforced concrete on the stairs was not up to the American Concrete Institute’s building code. Knoblock had disappeared, but he’d left behind files with notes that made it look like skimping on the concrete was my idea.”
“And you went to prison for a crime you didn’t commit,” Dawson drawled. “Nice story. How come you never told me all this before?”
His dad shrugged. “You’d already tried me and found me guilty. How come you never asked me my side of it?”
Dawson didn’t have an answer for that. He’d idolized his dad from the time he was old enough to understand that there was a big difference between his cousins’ family and his. He and his cousin Lucas were about the same age. They and Brad Grayson, Lucas’s best friend, had hung out together a lot, but not often at Lucas’s house. There was always yelling and throwing things and sometimes hitting at Lucas’s house.
“Whatever happened to Knoblock?”
“When I got out of prison, I had to jump through a lot of hoops, but although I couldn’t get my architect’s license back, I finally got my contractor license restored. I couldn’t get any decent jobs, though. My reputation had been destroyed.” Michael laughed harshly.
“Then an attorney from some corporation contacted me. The corporation wanted to build a casino in Waveland. They offered me a low-ball figure to take the contract. I managed to get them to raise the offer a little, but not much. I wouldn’t make much, but the Golden Galaxy was the biggest casino on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and was going to feature the Sky Walk, a unique architectural feature that would be famous around the world. I figured if it was half as successful as they were claiming, I’d be back in business.”
“The corporation was Meadow Gold,” Dawson said. “It belongs to Vega.”
“What?” Michael stared at him.
“Juliana figured it out. She showed me a flowchart she put together that connects Meadow Gold to Tito Vega. I haven’t verified all her research, but it looks like I might be able to prove he owns Meadow Gold.”
Michael’s gaze snapped to his. “I’ll be damned.”
“First, though, I’ve got to prove a connection between Vega and Bayside Industries. I’ve got one of my guys checking it out. Ever heard of them?”
Michael shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I hope Mack can find something. So you were talking about Knoblock?” Dawson pressed.
“Yeah. After I signed the contract to build the casino and had started work, I got a call from Vega. He suggested I subcontract the Sky Walk to Knoblock. I wanted to build that thing myself. It was going to be spectacular. Besides, Knoblock had screwed me before on the condos.”
“Vega called you?”
Michael nodded. “I’m sure he used a throwaway cell. He’s too smart to slip up. I told him no. I wouldn’t hire Knoblock.”
Dawson waited, but Michael stopped pacing and sat down in a club chair near the couch and rubbed his eyes. When he looked up, his cheeks had no color and his eyes looked haunted. He took a deep breath.
“Vega was polite. Said he understood how I felt. But the next day, the goon in the suit came to see me. He did exactly the same thing he’d done before—sat down and filed his nails. He had on an opal ring. He never even looked at me.” Michael swallowed. “After he’d sat there—I swear, at least five minutes—he said, ‘It’s a shame about your wife. I know you’d hate it if she were driving drunk and ran off the road.’”
Chapter Nine
Shock paralyzed Dawson. He tried to speak but his throat had seized. Finally he croaked, “He actually said that?”
He’d guessed his dad was going to tell him Vega had somehow threatened him, but he hadn’t expected this.
Michael nodded and rubbed his eyes again.
“What—” Dawson had to work to swallow “—what did you do?”
His dad laughed again, not a pleasant sound. “What the hell do you think I did? Knoblock called me and I hired him.”
Dawson stood and walked over to the sliding glass doors. Tito Vega had threatened his mother’s life. He slammed his palm against the glass, not caring if it broke. He almost wished it would. The anger and fear were growing so fast inside him that they needed an outlet or he would burst. Anything short of bloodletting would not be enough.
“Son, calm down.”
Dawson whirled, his fists clenching. “Calm down? Calm down? You hired
him? You’ve got two sons who are cops and you just rolled over and let the bastard—” He couldn’t even finish the sentence.
Michael leveled a gaze at him. “That’s right, I did. Do you think I’d take the smallest chance that your mother might be hurt?”
The question slammed Dawson in the gut. He felt about two inches high. “No, but you could have come to one of us. You could have come to me.”
His father smiled sadly. “I tend to forget how young you are.”
“Young? What the hell? Are you saying I couldn’t handle Vega?”
“Don’t raise your voice at me!” Michael shot back. “This is what I’m talking about. You’d go off half-cocked and probably make things worse.”
“At least I’d do something,” Dawson shouted. “You’re just a—”
“J.D.? Michael?”
It was his mother. Dawson gulped down the words he was about to fling.
Michael shot him a glare and stepped over to the stairs. “It’s okay, hon. Sorry if we woke you.”
Dawson heard his mother’s soft footsteps on the stairs. He looked up to see her blue slippers and the blue satin robe.
“Go on back to bed,” his dad said gently. “We were just having a discussion.”
Edie Delancey walked down the stairs as if she were making an entrance on a Las Vegas stage. She looked at Dawson, her eyes narrowed, then turned to her husband.
“Michael, you’re tired. You go on up to bed. I’ll see J.D. out.”
“Edie—”
“Go on, Michael.”
There was a note in his mother’s voice that Dawson hadn’t heard in a long, long time. It reminded him that she had been a beautiful, vibrant and strong woman who had reared her children with a gentle, yet firm, hand. She’d rarely raised her voice, but all the kids knew that when they heard that tone, they’d better obey.
He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the conflicting emotions churning inside him.
Once Michael’s footsteps got to the top of the stairs and faded away on the hardwood floors, Edie turned to her son.
“Mom,” Dawson said in a futile attempt to stave off whatever she was going to say, which he knew would add shame and more guilt to the mix of feelings inside him.