Free Playing Dirty by Susan Andersen Page B

bugged by a little thing like a laugh that wasn’t intended for him?
    Gritting his teeth, he manipulated his head to stretch the kinks out of his neck. He wasn’t, dammit. And it didn’t bug him. He was just having a nostalgic moment, that was all. Give him a minute and it would pass.
    They always did.
    Turning to the woman whose dress Beks was currently making immaculate with her lint roller, he signaled the cameraman to start shooting.
    “So, Mrs. Sandor,” he said warmly, taking his seat, scooting his chair forward and focusing on her. Putting everything else from his mind, he prepared to go mining for the thrill he got with each and every new interview, that gratification of discovering people’s stories and helping to bring them to life. “When we talked on the phone, you told me that you and Agnes Wolcott would have been debutantes together in 1946—if she hadn’t refused to participate. Could you tell me a little more about that?”
     
    T ONY P HILLIPS , the day security guard, looked around the upstairs hallway and, seeing the coast was clear,headed to the sitting room of Agnes Wolcott’s bedroom suite. His nerve endings buzzing with anticipation, he could almost feel the eager rush of the blood through his veins. So what if it wasn’t the long con he was more familiar with?
    According to Uncle Mike, this was something a helluva lot better: a one-way ticket to Easy Street.
    Tony shrugged. He didn’t know about that, but at least he had the upstairs to himself. Which didn’t mean he was gonna go get cocky. Getting into the room was the easy part. It was getting back out again with the Wolcott jewels in his pocket that was uncertain. But if he could pull it off, if he could really get his hands on the old lady’s long lost diamonds, then a huge-ass ticket was exactly what the old man’s information would turn out to be. And all he’d have left to do was stay cool for a few short hours until John the night guy showed up to relieve him.
    Knowing that, knowing that once he had those sparklers and could blow this pop stand, that he could just keep on trucking and never look back…well, that made him feel…it made him feel so—
    Day-umn.
    Like he could start planning for a life of leisure on an as-yet-to-be-determined tropical beach. So what were a couple of hours compared to that?
    As soon he entered the sitting room, however, all his pretty fantasies went up in smoke. Standing as though someone had superglued his shoes to the highly polished, long-plank fir floor, unable to step forward or back, he stared in dismay at the wall to his left. “Son of a bitch.”
    He should have known it was too good to be true. But he had cut his eyeteeth on the legend of MikeMaperton’s coup back in the eighties. He had grown up hearing about how his uncle had copped the suite of Wolcott diamonds and set in motion an urban legend so fricking juicy it was still widely known to this day.
    Hell, it was the goddamn basis for the documentary all those marks downstairs were busy getting underway.
    As much as he’d like to bring the old man back to life just for the satisfaction of killing him again, he had to give Mike his props. The bastard had taken brilliant advantage of the whims of fortune that had dropped—bing/bam/boom—in his lap back in ’85.
    First, while heading up the renovation here and in the adjoining bedroom, the man had stumbled across a secret compartment. Although he claimed he’d considered doing what unimaginative people liked to call “the right thing,” and actually report his discovery to the Wolcott broad, that very evening Agnes Wolcott had changed history forever when she’d gone and left a diamond necklace, bracelet, earrings and hair clips out on her night table instead of stashing them in her safe like she always did when she came home from an event.
    Clearly she’d been looking to get fleeced. Mike had simply obliged her by stashing the jewels in the newfound hidey-hole.
    Then—and