Blackberry Crumble (38 page)

“The same attorney who drafted up the letter of intent to be sent to Jim’s heirs after the funeral? The letter in which you suggested that they sell you the entire business?” Sadie’s knees were shaking. This man was powerful, and even if she wasn’t showing it, he scared her.

Keith was once again taken aback, and Sadie, once again, used his surprise as her way in. She realized that she really didn’t believe Keith had anything to do with Jim’s death. But he might be the only other person alive who knew what that lunch was about, and the reason behind the meeting might very well lead her to the real killer.

“If you weren’t desperate for the atomizer, then perhaps you can explain to me why events happened the way they did. Why did Jim Sanderson invite you to lunch for the first time in ten years, two weeks before he died?”

Keith took several deep breaths. He didn’t seem to be a man who got thrown off his game like this very often.

“Look,” Sadie said, anxious to get to the meat of the conversation. “I’m not out to get you; I’m out to discover the truth. If you can help me, then I don’t have to ask Richard questions, and you don’t have to worry about what I believe. You’re not the only person I’m looking into, but I will tell you that your history with Jim makes you a very interesting person. Help me or don’t, it doesn’t really matter, because I’ll find the answers. If you had nothing to do with Jim’s death, then save me, Richard, and you the trouble of us having to entertain the possibilities.”

“Richard thinks I could have done something to Jim?” Keith said quietly after several seconds.

“Not really,” Sadie said. “But he didn’t know anything about the lunch.” However, Sadie remembered that Keith’s secretary had noted the lunch on his calendar, which meant it wasn’t
entirely
secret. She quickly threw that detail into her approach. “And while I realize you weren’t hiding the meeting, Richard was surprised to know nothing about it. I would be thrilled to tell Richard that he has nothing to worry about and that his father is as trustworthy as ever.” Based on results, however, Keith had never been all that upstanding in the trust department, but Sadie wasn’t going to get very far with a comment like that.

After Keith digested what she’d said, he nodded. “Jim asked me to lunch. It wasn’t my idea.”

Sadie did a little victory dance in her head, but tried to look impressed with the information. “Why?”

Keith took a breath and exhaled slowly. “He wanted to sell.”

“The atomizer?”

Keith shook his head. “The whole business.”

Sadie was unable to hide her surprise. “The whole business?” she repeated. May had said Jim’s dream was to have his children run the business together. He’d worked so hard to recover after the split that it was hard to believe he would suddenly want to sell. But Karri had seen financial documents on the table when Keith and Jim had had lunch.

“Why would he do that?”

“Hugh was racking up debts faster than Jim could pay them off,” Keith said, leaning back in the chair and folding his thick arms over his thick chest. He was dressed in a powder-blue dress shirt with a buff-colored linen jacket.

“Like last time?” Sadie said.

Keith nodded. “I told Jim back then that if he simply stepped in and saved Hugh from the mess he’d made that it would happen again. And I was right. Hugh is in more trouble than ever this time. And not just with a company credit card he fished out of his dad’s wallet. He’s got bookies calling the office. And someone tried to run him off the road a few days before Jim made the lunch date. Whatever Hugh’s gotten himself into is big.”

“Big enough that Jim was willing to sell S&S to pay off Hugh’s debts?”

“Hugh’s an addict, and just like a drug, gambling requires more and more to get the same high. Here Jim had worked his whole life to become who he was—a brilliant engineer on the cutting edge of our industry—and Hugh was flushing it away on basketball and poker games.”

“That’s where the profits from the new atomizer were going,” Sadie said, gluing together the pieces of information she’d spent the last two days gleaning. The company was finally having success, and Hugh was getting sicker because of it.

“Jim was out of fight,” Keith said. “His daughter was dying, his son was drowning in debts and addiction, and he was calling uncle. He believed if he sold the business, he could pay off Hugh’s debts and get him into a treatment program as his very last attempt to save Hugh from himself. He said he wanted to retire—maybe go to Ohio to be with May after Jolene passed away—but he knew he couldn’t trust Hugh with the company. Selling it was his only option.”

Poor Jim
, Sadie thought. For an instant, she pictured him laying in bed, overwhelmed with the trials of his children and coming up with this plan. Sadie wished she could have met Jim Sanderson. He seemed like a very good man. “Were you interested in buying?”

Keith looked down, and Sadie sensed that he wasn’t proud of his answer. He uncrossed his arms and lined up the silverware on the table. “I was very interested,” he said. His tone, however, was flat.

“But?”

His glance flickered to hers before returning to the silverware. He made a minute adjustment so that the handles were perfectly parallel. He looked like Shawn when Shawn knew he’d done something wrong. “But I wanted Jim to sweat it out a little bit.” He dropped his hands into his lap.

Sadie shook her head slightly. His old friend had come to him in desperate circumstances, but Keith’s pride had made him hold out. Now Jim was dead. Sadie didn’t need to say anything to rub it in.

Keith continued. “I harangued him on how he’d handled Hugh all these years and how this was exactly what he deserved. I said he should have forced Hugh to get his act together back when we were in business together. I said that I wasn’t interested in inheriting whatever reputation Hugh had given the company and that I couldn’t see any reason why his problem should be mine.”

“How very kind of you,” Sadie said, unable to help herself. She braced herself, but he just looked at her with sad eyes.

“Indeed,” he said. “How very kind of me.” He paused for a breath. “I told him I’d think about it and then I met with my attorney. We started working on how to facilitate the purchase. It was bad timing for me—I had Jepson on the hook, and they were proving to be a bunch of nervous Nellies—but I wanted S&S and, though I’m sure it’s hard to believe, I wanted to help Jim.”

“You just wanted him to know you held all the cards. No pun intended.”

“When you’ve played politics as long as I have, it’s a hard habit to break. When Jim died, I felt horrible.” He shook his head. “I really think that we could have been friends again. I was going to offer him a consulting position with the company so that he’d be able to keep his hand in the industry and make a little money. I’m slowing down too, and I really hoped that we could put everything behind us.” He shrugged. “Maybe he’d want to take up golf. We never got to that point.” There was nothing insincere about the regret in his voice. He had lost a dear friend twice: first, ten years ago because of Hugh, and now because of his own stubbornness.

“So you contacted his kids after he was gone in order to fulfill Jim’s wishes,” Sadie said. She placed her clasped hands on the table and leaned forward slightly. There were still many unredeemable qualities about this man, but she was sympathetic for his regret—a regret he had no way to remedy.

“Hugh can’t run that business,” Keith said. “He’s got a good head for the mechanics—he probably could have been an engineer himself if he’d had the discipline to go to school—but he’ll run that company into the ground within the year on his own. After Jim died, I felt I owed it to him to at least try to buy the company, but he’d told me his kids had no idea he was meeting with me. I knew they’d probably think I was a liar if I tried to convince them of Jim’s interest in selling out, but I hoped that maybe they would sell without me having to tell them Jim had given up.”

“And Hugh’s the only one who responded.”

Keith shook his head slowly, still holding Sadie’s eyes. “Jolene’s husband, Gary, called last week.”

“But Gary doesn’t get ownership.”

“I know, and the last thing Jim wanted was for Gary to have any part in anything, but with Jolene so sick, Gary said he was negotiating on her behalf.”

Sadie thought back to the living trust that had stipulated that Gary was to get nothing. But Jolene was still his wife, and she was ill. Gary saw himself as a savvy negotiator; no doubt he thought he could convince Jolene to sell. No doubt he was right; Jolene fairly worshipped him. Suddenly, something Keith had said earlier in their conversation came to mind.

“You said Jolene was dying,” Sadie said, remembering how Jolene had said she was getting better. “Did Jim tell you that?”

Keith nodded. “Leena had beat the cancer her first time around.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “But Jim said Jolene wasn’t going to be as lucky. I made the comment at lunch that treatments had made so much progress since Leena, but Jim had little hope. Jolene wanted to take an Alaskan cruise with her husband and son before she died. I don’t know if you know Gary Tracey, but the man is a financial nightmare. They’ve never had two nickels to rub together. If not for Jim helping them out all these years while Gary played with his stupid get-rich-quick ideas, they’d have nothing.”

“But Jim didn’t have the money, did he?” Sadie said. “To pay for that cruise.”

“Jolene asked for a loan, an advance on her inheritance, and it was when Jim started looking into his options that he realized Hugh had maxed out their line of credit with the bank and run up two more credit cards, not to mention his own personal lines of credit. Jolene was pretty upset when he told her he couldn’t do it. I don’t think he told her why, but he said it had been a few days and she still wasn’t talking to him, which was more than he could stand.”

“He was awfully open with you at that lunch,” Sadie said after a thoughtful silence stretched between them for a few seconds. A slight ticking had begun in the back of her head, and she glanced at the notes she’d written down. An equation was formulating, but she wasn’t sure what it was. “I guess that surprises me, what with how things had been between you two.”

“Even with all the issues between us, I knew his history better than most people. For good and bad, Jim loved his children, and they were destroying him.”

“Jolene didn’t get cancer on purpose.” Sadie defended, not sure what he meant by his comment. “I’m sure his inability to help was wrapped up in his own grief.” The ticking in her head continued.

Keith shook his head. “Probably, but he was losing her all the same, and it felt like he was losing her twice as much to have her angry with him.”

Losing her,
Sadie repeated.
Losing her . . .
All of a sudden, the locks clicked into place in Sadie’s mind. She sat up straight and felt a rush of heat tingle up her spine, causing her to shudder.

“What?” Keith asked, watching her closely.

Sadie opened her mouth to let it all tumble out, but stopped herself as May’s face came to mind from last night.
“Him?” she’d said. “You turned to him?”
That had been in reference to Richard, but Sadie had no doubt she would feel the same way about Keith.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, putting her notebook away and fumbling for her keys. She wished there was time to get her blackberry crumble put in a to-go box, but time was of the essence. “I need to go.” She looked up, realizing she owed him something for what he’d given her, even though the discovery she’d made had her stomach in knots. “Thank you, Mr. Kelly. I hope you know how helpful you’ve been. You did right by Jim in the end, and I’ll be sure his family knows it.”

She stood up, but stopped when he put a hand on her arm. His expression tightened. “Where are you going?”

“To talk to May.”

“May? Is that who you work for?” The words came out like a hiss. “She’s the one who thinks I would hurt Jim?”

Sadie pulled back on her arm, but Keith’s grip simply tightened. “Mr. Kelly,” she said calmly. “You need to let go of my arm.”

“If I’d known you were working for May, I wouldn’t have said any of those things.” His grip was getting tighter. Sadie could break the hold with a simple twist-and-pull move—first lesson in self-defense—but she was interested in what he had to say. “
That’s
why Richard was helping you? To help her?” He growled low in his throat, and all the compassion and regret he’d shown disappeared. Sadie wondered which persona was the real Keith. “That boy has less sense than a bucket of rocks.”

“He loves her,” Sadie said. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

Keith narrowed his eyes. “He’d have never reached his potential if I hadn’t gotten him away from her. Look at her family, look at the way her father gave up everything to clean up behind his children. There is no way to make a man of yourself when you attach yourself to people who will pull you down.”

Sadie had had enough. She twisted and pulled her arm toward her, breaking his grasp and stepping back so she was out of reach. “Mr. Kelly, you’re a brilliant businessman and have done well for yourself, but you’ve missed out on a lot of the good things in life. Jim Sanderson’s heart may have been too soft to reach his potential in the business world, but he died as a generous man and that counts for something.”