Dead for the Money (15 page)

“She’s a piece of work, all right,” Seamus responded.

“She’s after money or I don’t know anything. She obviously read of the old man’s death and showed up to get what she could for herself. And did you see that dress? Teeny-bopper style!”

“Yup.”

“Well, Arlis certainly put her in her place! That woman is like a rhinoceros, large and slow-moving, but a formidable opponent when enraged.”

Seamus agreed that the comparison was apt.

“Brodie left,” Mildred said regretfully. “I wanted to hear the rest, but she apparently can’t abide confrontation. She practically ran to her room, which is all black and white, by the way. Very unhealthy, I think. Anyway, she buried her face in the pillows, so I didn’t hear any more.”

“There wasn’t much more,” Seamus told her. “They sent her packing.”

“Good for them!”

“Oh, she’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“First, there’s too much money at stake for her to give up now. And second, because I jumped to Callenda Dunbar when Shelley stepped up to slam the door in her face.”

Callie had stared for a moment at the door before stalking back to her rental car. “Bitch,” she said as she started the car and slammed it into gear. She had returned to Frankfort, driving much too fast for the narrow roads and seething all the way. Pulling into the parking lot of a run-down, twelve-unit motel, the only place that might have a room available in mid-July, she muttered to the steering wheel, “If Bud was home, I’d be sleeping in my old room. Instead, I get insults from Acid Arlis and a room at the Bates Motel.”

Seamus felt Callie’s conscious effort to relax her stride as she entered the motel lobby. Calling on an apparent lifetime of practice, she hid her anger, swayed her hips slightly, and relaxed her mouth into a half-smile. He picked up her thought.
You never know who might be watching.

He had to admit, Callie was an attractive woman, appearing much younger than the mother of a full-grown man had to be. Sifting through her thoughts, Seamus gleaned snippets that revealed how it was done. Not only were her hair, skin, and muscles under the care of experts, but Callie concentrated on acting young, copying the speech patterns and vocabulary of thirty-somethings. She constantly monitored herself, dumping phrases she thought sounded like something only an old person would say.

He quickly tired of Callie using every reflective surface available to check her lips, eyes, and hair. He was also repulsed by her habit of drawing attention to her breasts by touching them, apparently unconsciously, as she flirted the bespectacled desk clerk into stammering incompetence.

What Seamus sensed in Bud’s mother was total self-absorption. Callie wanted everyone looking at her, men in lust, women in jealously. She had expensive tastes, and her attractiveness allowed her to indulge them. A beautiful woman can get away with a lot, and she had, for half a century.

But a shift had occurred in Callie’s outlook, a realization that had probably begun gradually but was gaining ground. Age was catching up to her, and she could not stop it. Callie’s frequent mirror checks revealed crow’s feet and a softness under her chin. Her eyes pouched if she stayed up too late, and her upper arms had begun to jiggle underneath. It was harder and harder to present the illusion of youth. And she was tired of the constant effort it took to maintain the charade.

Over the years, Callie had lived with, slept with, and sometimes married a succession of men wealthy enough to indulge her as long as she amused them. Her relationships usually ended when the men got wise to being used as ATM machines.

Lately, it had become harder to attract the rich ones. Callie found herself pursued by younger men who clearly thought
she
was wealthy enough to support
them
. Running through her mind was the gnawing fear that these days she was regarded less as sex kitten, more as cougar. Wealthy men were still charming and flirtatious, but there were no long-term offers. Seamus guessed that was due to the desperation Callie radiated like plutonium.

As she entered the closet-sized motel room she’d rented, Callie threw her weekender on the bed, fished her phone from her purse, and made a call. “You told me he would be there,” she said as soon as it was answered.

“There was an accident on the boat this afternoon. He’s in the hospital.”

Seamus felt Callie’s gasp and for an instant thought it was maternal concern. That was contradicted by the thought he picked up next:
I need to pay something on that hotel bill in London by Friday!
Her question to the person on the other end was more subtle. “Is he all right?”

“They think so. The boom swung and hit his head. There was a lot of blood and a nasty gash. The doctors kept him overnight, but more because he’s a millionaire with good insurance than because he’s in any danger, I think.”

Callie was looking at herself in the mirror, and she brushed at her neck, wondering if plastic surgery could erase the lines that had begun to show across it.

“All right. Give me a call as soon as he gets home, hear? And see if you can’t distract Arlis tomorrow morning so I can talk to Bud without her yammering in his ear.”

“How should I do that?”

“That’s your problem.”

He sighed. “I guess I could offer to help with acknowledgments of funeral gifts and donations.”

“There, see? I knew you could do it.”

“It’ll cost you extra.”

“Everything you do costs me extra, you little jerk.” Callie glanced at her face in the mirror and made a conscious effort to stop frowning. “Once I talk to Bud, you’ll get your money.”

“You really think he’s going to let you walk back into his life?”

“Yes, I do. What’s he got for family? Arlis? That kid you keep saying is nuts? Tell me I won’t look good compared to them. Better yet, do your job.” She closed the phone with a snap.

Seamus was intrigued—and repulsed—by the nerve of Callie Dunbar. She was in a spot. She owed lots of people lots of money. The news of William Dunbar’s death could not have come at a better time for her. Although the elder Dunbar would have refused her request for more money out of hand, Callie thought her son would not. “Thirty thousand will do it,” she said aloud. “Once I talk to Buddy, everything will be all right.”

In the wee hours of the morning, long after he’d told Millie that he was Callie’s guest, Seamus heard a sound like someone clearing her throat. Callie, fast asleep, stirred only slightly.

“Um, Seamus?”

“Yes, Mildred.”

“Do you think it’s wise? I mean, guesting with that woman?”

“I don’t follow.”

“Well, you can tell by looking at her what kind of person she is. Is it a good idea to, um, be with someone like that?”

“We go where we have to, Millie. It’s the job.”

“One hopes that we aren’t, um, affected by their behavior. I mean, you wouldn’t want to start thinking like her. And what if she’s the killer?”

“I’m pretty sure she’s not. She sees Dunbar’s death as convenient, a stroke of luck.”

“There, you see? Someone dies, and she only thinks of what it might get for her.”

“Millie, there are lots of people who look at life that way.”

“Well, it isn’t right. And I don’t think we should have anything to do with them.” After a pause she added, “And pretty please, call me Mildred. Millie sounds like someone’s pet pony.”

Chapter Eleven

W
HEN
B
RODIE
CAME
DOWNSTAIRS
the next morning, Briggs and Shelley were talking in the kitchen. She stopped outside the door.

“That woman!” Shelley said to Briggs, who had missed the whole episode. “Just waltzin’ up to Mr. Dunbar’s door like she forgot she promised to stay out of that boy’s life forever.”

“Where ya think she’s been?” Briggs asked. He’d probably heard the story a dozen times by now and asked the same question every time.

“Someplace expensive,” Shelley replied in disgust. “She spent all the money old Mr. Dunbar gave her and now she’s going to gouge young Mr. Dunbar for more.”

Brodie often wondered what it would be like to have a mom, one who wasn’t sick like Jeannie had been. Other kids spoke casually of their parents, unable to imagine not having them around. TV children had at least one parent, and the moms were always hip and understanding. It was hard to know what to want, though, since memories of Jeannie still gave her nightmares.

What was Bud’s mom like? Would she tell Bud she missed him, ask him to be her son again? Maybe that was what last night had been about. Callie wanted to be a mom after all this time.

Footsteps behind her alerted Brodie to someone’s approach, and she turned and began straightening, or appearing to straighten, the pictures on the hallway wall. Arnold mumbled a morning greeting as he turned in at the dining room doorway, holding his ever-present phone to his ear. “Yes. It was a scare, but they tell us he’s all right.” There was a pause as he listened to the other person. “Okay, so you’ll drive back up after that?” A chuckle. “Yeah. It’s a bad idea to count on judges sticking to a schedule. Don’t worry. I can handle things until you get here.”

Brodie rolled her eyes. Arnold made it sound like he was so important. What was he going to handle—breakfast? She guessed he had called Collin, anxious to be the first to report Bud’s accident. Anything to get a little attention, even from the family lawyer.

Arlis’ groan sounded on the stairs, and Brodie slid into the dining room. Judging the old woman’s nearness by grunts that accompanied each step, Brodie piled scrambled eggs on a piece of toast, squirted ketchup over the eggs, and slapped a second piece on top. Grabbing a quart of milk from an ice-filled bowl on the sideboard, she was almost through the kitchen doorway when Arlis appeared on the opposite side. “Brodie!” Her name on Arlis’ tongue was seldom anything but a prelude to criticism. The swinging door’s
whump
was the only answer Brodie gave.

She did not stop in the kitchen but made her way out the side door and down toward the lake. A flagstone pathway led to the boathouse and the dock, and she noted the sand that sifted its way over the flat rocks during the night. Briggs made it his mission in life to keep those stones sand-free, but it was an unending battle.

Between the dock and the boathouse was a glider, and she sat down to eat her breakfast. With her egg sandwich in one hand, she drank from the milk jug by slinging it over one shoulder like Johnny Depp did as Jack Sparrow in the movies. It wasn’t rum, and the plastic jug tended to collapse and push the milk out faster than she expected, but it worked.

She didn’t like rum, having tried it—and every other liquor in her grandfather’s study—one day when no one was around. How adults could drink that stuff was beyond her. She’d asked Scarlet later, which got her into trouble because Scarlet guessed the question hadn’t come out of thin air. It had led to a talk about adult things and kid things, which, Brodie had to admit, made sense. According to Scarlet, when you were a kid, you could get away with things that adults could not.

“If Arnold put salt in your aunt’s sugar bowl, as you did last summer, what do you think would happen to him?”

“She isn’t my aunt, but if Arnold did that, he would probably get fired.”

“But because you are not an adult, you didn’t get sent away, did you? Young people can do things adults can’t, so it’s only fair that adults do some things that you cannot.”

She was reluctant to admit the difference. “I had to apologize, though.”

“As you should.”

Brodie had not liked apologizing to Arlis, so in her head she had added phrases that made it easier. “Arlis, (you ass) I’m sorry that (you are an ass) I put salt in the sugar (but your ass is so big you don’t need sugar anyway).”

Remembering that now, she apologized to Gramps. When her choice of words mimicked Jeannie’s rather than his own, he had always patiently explained that swearing is the sign of a weak vocabulary.
I didn’t mean ‘ass’, Gramps. I meant ‘jackass’
.

After the salt-for-sugar prank, Arlis had taken a dislike to Scarlet, claiming that she was too young to be in charge of Brodie. Fearing that someone might believe Arlis, Brodie had altered her behavior. There had been no more pranks, although she later confessed to a couple for reasons of her own. She hoped her improved deportment demonstrated that Scarlet really was good at her job.

Arlis remained unconvinced. Whenever she came upon the two of them doing something that was fun
and
educational, her mouth bent funny, like she tasted something bad. She would say things to Scarlet like, “Well, you’re young dear, but—” or to Gramps, “She’s no more than a child herself.” She kept at it, and it made Brodie nervous. Arlis was nothing if not determined.

“She’s only twenty, Will,” she said one evening when she thought Brodie was absorbed in a TV show. “The child needs someone mature, someone she can respect.”

“I do respect Scarlet,” Brodie had wanted to shout, but she knew it would do no good. When she turned, though, Gramps was looking right at her. With a smile he let her know that he would not be persuaded to can Scarlet, no matter what Arlis said.

But Arlis would probably go to work on Bud now with that same old song. Brodie promised herself she’d be nice—well, nicer—to the old biddy, so she’d lay off trying to get Scarlet fired.

J
UST
AFTER
EIGHT
O
’
CLOCK
, Callie got the news that Bud had been released from the hospital. “I offered to help Arlis with thank-you cards at ten,” her spy reported. “That should give you until lunchtime.”

“You’re a prince, Arnold.” Callie closed the phone and moved to the closet. She stopped at the mirrored door to check her stomach, which apparently stuck out more than she wanted it to, because she slapped it disgustedly and dug a body-briefer out of her suitcase. Tossing it on the bed, she slid the mirror aside and began choosing the outfit she would wear to visit her son.