Donna Kauffman – His Private Pleasure (страница 9)

He enjoyed sitting out on the deck with a cold beer, watching the sun go down as the few winking lights in downtown Canyon Springs flickered on, the endless sky full of stars overhead, the moonrise.

He kept thinking this feeling would wear off, that he’d get that same itch that had driven him from this town the day after he’d graduated from high school. But he’d been back a little over two years now. It had been eight months since he’d hammered the last nail on this place. And he still felt that sense of homecoming every time.

They said you can’t go home again. But he was coming to believe that you couldn’t really appreciate what home was until you’d left it for awhile. For all the annoyances that went with living in a place where everyone knew you, the sense of security, the steady pace of life, soothed the part of him left jagged and raw by his years in Vegas. That more than made up for the occasional bird rescue or irritating comments from the hometown hero–turned–fire marshal.

The sudden bleat of his cell phone jarred him from his thoughts. He thought about ignoring it, his body humming as he spied Liza’s shiny little roadster parked in the drive. He reached over to punch the phone off, but stopped when he saw the number on the digital display. His gut tightened in that familiar way he’d hoped to never feel again. He pressed the Answer button. “How did you get this number?”

The deep voice on the other end chuckled. “Come on, D.J., I worked vice, same as you. If I want to find a number, it gets found.”

“What part of ‘I’m not interested’ didn’t Hannigan understand this morning?”

“You know the captain doesn’t listen to what he doesn’t want to hear.”

Dylan let the truck drift to a stop, still a hundred or so yards away from the house. “And all you’re going to hear is a bunch of silence when I hang up on you.”

He felt the amusement leave his former squad member’s voice even before he spoke. “You’re the only one she trusted, D.J. She’s ready to talk, but she’ll only talk to you.”

“I heard all this from Hannigan. She knows I’m not on the force anymore.”

“That doesn’t seem to matter. We’ve been trying to nail Dugan for—”

“I know exactly how long.” The old bite was back in his voice. Dylan didn’t appreciate being forced to use it. “It was my case, remember?” His stomach pitched and the acid burned his gut. One phone call and it was like he’d never left Vegas.

“Yeah, we all remember.”

Dylan started to tell him where to get off, then bit back the words and sighed. “Quin, I’m out of that game. I’m not coming back.”

“No one is asking you to come back. We just want you to conduct this one interview.”

“To conduct an interview,” he pointed out, “I’d have to come back.”

There was a pause. “Not if we brought her to you.”

Dylan went still, then his grip tightened on the phone. “Not a chance. I’m hanging up now.”

“D.J., wait!” There was just enough desperation in Quin’s voice for Dylan to keep his finger hovering over the End button without pushing it. Dylan could be gone for a hundred years and still never forget what it was like to be consumed by that sense of desperation, on the heels of which was always the realization that you’d devoted your whole life to bringing down scum like Armand Dugan. So if you failed…it meant your whole life was a failure.

“Dugan lost interest in you at exactly the same time you lost interest in him,” Quin was saying. “He’s been way too busy covering his tracks from the rest of us to worry about what your sorry ass has been up to. He also has no idea that we finally got Pearl to turn.”

“How did you get her to turn?” Dylan swore under his breath when Quin said nothing. “It’s a simple question. I worked on her for months. Never met a tougher broad than Dugan’s ex-flame.”

“Let’s just say a woman scorned is a woman to watch the hell out for.”

“He scorned her years ago and she accepted his sorry behavior as her due. So why turn on him now?”

“You asking because you’re interested in helping out?”

“I’m asking because you’re wasting my time with all this, so you might as well tell me the details.”

There was another pause while Quin weighed what little leverage he thought he had. Dylan wished there were none at all, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t at least interested in what had transpired on this particular case since he’d left Vegas. It wasn’t the only one still open when he’d left, far from it, but it was one he’d poured a considerable amount of personal time and energy into. It was only human to be curious about how it was going, right?

He wasn’t going back. But he might be able to help them out. “If I know why she turned, I might be able to tell you how to get a confession out of her without dragging me into this.”

Quin sighed. “I’ll take whatever help I can get.”

“And owe me for it.”

He laughed, but there wasn’t as much humor in it. “Yeah, add it to my tab. Okay, here’s the deal—”

“You sure you want to discuss this on the cell?”

“You aren’t exactly giving me many other options here.”

Dylan looked up at his house. His haven. A haven where a gorgeous and hopefully willing woman was waiting for him. He was not taking this into his house, for a lot of reasons. “If you think we’re clear, go ahead.”

“I’m as reasonably certain of it as I can be, or I wouldn’t have said as much as I already have.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry. I have an appointment here, so give already.”

“What, with the Rotary Club or something? What could possibly be going on in that one-horse town of yours at this hour?”

“We don’t have horses. We actually drive cars now. And I didn’t say it was a business meeting.”

Quin hooted. “Some things never change, do they?”

“You’d be surprised,” Dylan muttered. “So, why did Pearl decide to turn on her one and only true love?” Out of several Vegas casinos, Dugan ran an underground operation they’d been trying to break open and shut down for years. Despite his mob connections, Dugan played the role of family man. His extended family of aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews all benefited generously from not only his money—the part he kept clean—but also from his time and affection.

Five years earlier, word had leaked out that Dugan, who was forty-five at the time, had begun to despair of ever starting a family of his own. Family was sacrosanct to him, but he’d yet to meet the right woman who would help him continue his little dynasty. In the meantime, he’d run into Pearl Halliday, showgirl-turned-stripper. Definitely not the woman to bear his children, but Dugan hadn’t minded getting her to bear his attentions for a while. What he hadn’t counted on was falling in love with her.

Hopelessly in love. So much so that he’d tried to turn her into the proper woman his family would respect. He set her up with her own dance studio, as a proprietor and instructor. He lavished her with nice things, hired tutors to put some polish on her brass, basically did his best to turn his pearl into a diamond.

Only Pearl was simply Pearl. She wanted Dugan’s love, not his things, not his Pygmalion-Svengali attempts to turn her into something she was not. She just wanted her Duggie, the man she’d made breathless with the sheer magnetic force of her attentions. So she made the fatal mistake of giving Armand Dugan an ultimatum: love me for me, or find someone else.

It had taken Dugan less than a week to find that someone else. A quiet young woman of good breeding—and obvious bad taste, if you asked Dylan, for falling for a slimeball like Dugan. It wasn’t a love match, but Dugan had come to realize that passion distorted things, took away his ability to control. Elaine Bartoloni would be the perfect, malleable kind of wife he should have been looking for all along. He occasionally wished he could have had it all, but he wasn’t stupid. So he took what was best. He graciously left Pearl the title to the dance school and the apartment that sat over it—what had once been their little love nest—and walked away.

Pearl should have hated him for that. Instead she was grateful for the chance to live quietly, out of the spotlight. She was pushing fifty now, but life had aged her beyond her years. Makeup, no matter how pricey, covered only so much. She was too old—in more than calendar years—to dance in the casino shows, and too aware of what real love felt like to take her clothes off again for leering, jeering drunks.

So she’d kept her school, made a life for herself and kept her mouth shut when it came to Armand Dugan. She wouldn’t be used as the instrument for the downfall of the only man she’d ever loved. He wasn’t to be blamed for the pressure his family had put on him. He was an important man. She was lucky to have had him for the time she did. She’d supposed she’d known all along she’d never be good enough for him. Giving him an ultimatum had just brought to an end what would have ended anyway.

“So why, after years of living quietly, has she finally decided to turn on him?” Dylan asked.

“That’s just it, she won’t say. She came to us three days ago, asking after you.”

“You didn’t tell her—”