Rosie O'Dell (60 page)

Brent broke the silence: “Thank God I’ll be dead before the shit hits the fan.”
The three of us had to laugh. Then he asked, “But do you figure you two and the
boys are up to your asses in alligators here?”

“They haven’t got anything except some vague concerns from someone,” I said.
“But can you give me the boys’ numbers? I’ll have to alert them that they may
get a call from the local police and to say nothing without their lawyer’s
advice.”

“I get the feeling they’re used to following that advice to a tee.” Brent
reached for his notepad and scribbled. “This is from memory. The old brain is
still perkin’ so far.” I took the paper and, glancing down, nodded to hide my
shock at what I saw.

“Meanwhile,” Rosie said to me, “you’re left hanging on that insurance claim
against you. Where is that right now?”

“Oh, they’re approaching the gate. I can hear the bugles and the
hoof-beats.”

“Can’t we at least slip you enough to cover that until we can move on the
larger amount?”

“Any amount going from Brent to me right now would look suspicious, if they get
wind of it, and they will if they’re serious.”

Brent said, “I’ll lend you the money at a going rate, all done up legally—
promissory note, security, the works. How about that? That’ll look okay.”

I rose to leave. “That’s an idea, Brent. Let me think about
that.” I went over and touched his shoulder very lightly and said goodbye. The
last time I’d gently shaken hands with him, he’d grimaced in pain.

On the way out, I said to Rosie, “Ever since you and I drifted apart, honest to
God, I’ve been jinxed.” I shook my head and chuckled as if it had been a barrel
of laughs.

“Funny, it didn’t work both ways,” she said. “I’ve felt pretty lucky over the
years.” She stopped and looked at me. “Drifted apart? You mean that vicious
letter you sent me from London, and then what you said to me over the phone when
you took my pathetic call?” She smiled. “You prick.”

“You got that right. But if we’re going back into ancient history, we can start
when you broke my heart at eleven. What’s the feminine of prick?”

“Whatever I was.”

“Which of us, do you think, treated the other worse from the beginning, all
things considered, the good and the bad?”

“I’d say fifty-fifty. We’re about even. But I’m going to try to add to my
positive side of the equation in the future.”

“Me too. Starting with getting us through all this.”

“I’ve got some heartbreak ahead yet. I’m talking about poor Brent, because all
the rest seems pretty inconsequential to me right now.”

I thought I’d better show her the notepaper on which he had written his sons’
phone numbers. It contained neither numerals nor letters, but two lines of
unintelligible gibberish. “Sorry, Rosie. I thought you should know.”

“I’ll get you their numbers. Well, it’s started. I’ve noticed more lapses
myself. We’ll see what happens.”

WHAT HAPPENED WAS THAT
Brent started to go off his head. Within
days, it became so unmanageable that Rosie talked to me about having him
admitted to the Waterford, the acute care hospital for the mentally ill. We
might have done that, were it not for the fact that he was babbling on, but with
clear enunciation, about killing his father, smothering the old bastard with his
own pillow, how Tom was too useless to do the job and that Duke and Neal would
have to do it. We decided that we could not have the large hospital staff
listening to him emphatically reiterating those points, which might start to
sound all too credible, even in a sanatorium for the insane. Rosie tried to keep
her home care help from hearing too much. I spent as much time there as I
could.

After a few days, police constable Jack Hoover called upon Rosie and Brent
unannounced again. At the door, he asked Rosie if he could come in and ask her
husband a few more questions. One of their home care staff, she figured, must
have reported to the police the content of Brent’s jabbering. A couple of the
staff knew some of their counterparts at The Pines. Very likely, they had
compared notes. Yes, of course he could come in, Rosie told the constable,
although she had to inform him that her husband’s brain cancer had rendered him
mostly irrational. That was fast, he replied. In the bedroom, Brent did not
respond to the police officer’s repeated greeting, she told me, because he was
zonked out from the extra morphine she had taken to giving him for the increase
in his pain.

The police constable asked her to call him as soon as her husband regained
consciousness. Rosie replied that if, and when, such an event might
come to pass, she would get right on the phone to him. A day
later, after he had not heard from her, he dropped by again. Brent was still
peacefully unconscious. Constable Hoover asked if it were possible that she was
giving him more morphine than prescribed by the doctor and as administered by
the nurses. Rosie replied that her husband was dying an agonizing death from
cancer in half a dozen places in his body and brain, that she had promised him
that she would keep him free of pain, and that that was precisely what she was
going to do, come hell or high water, no matter what the texts on medical
protocol and formalities of medication might consider proper and desirable. “So
arrest me,” she said, holding out her arms, one wrist crossed over the
other.

Nobody was going to arrest anybody, he said, at least not just yet. He had
looked at the probate documents in the Supreme Court registry—was she aware that
a person could not profit under the law from the proceeds of one’s own crime?
Why, in God’s name, would she be aware of that, or even think about something so
bizarre? she demanded.

“You know something?” she’d said, “I think you’d better leave, and henceforth
take your obnoxious insinuations to Brent’s lawyer, Tom Sharpe, Q. C.”

Oh, thanks all to hell for turning him over to me, I thought. And then I said
aloud, “That was the right thing to say, Rosie. Was that the end of it?”

“No. He thanked me sarcastically for the suggestion and said, by the way,
lawyer Tom Sharpe doesn’t have a Q. C., a Queen’s Counsel designation—that
honorific is reserved for senior lawyers who are also highly esteemed in the
profession. Likeable young man.”

“Lawyers who are on the right side politically, he meant,” I said. I was
starting to sound defensive, even to myself.

“Whatever. I think you’re tops, Tom. And that’s all that counts. Anyway, as he
walked out—wait for this—he said, ‘Ms. O’Dell, Deputy Chief Locksley Holmes
can’t help being struck by the amazing coincidence that as soon as you and Mr.
Sharpe get together after decades apart, another dead body unexpectedly turns
up, and this time not by alleged suicide, but by alleged heart failure following
accusations from the deceased of attempted murder by Mr. Sharpe and a visit to
the deceased by your stepsons with the checkered careers stateside.’ Spooky or
what?”

Was that a twinge of worry I just felt about her? “Are you spooked out by this,
Rosie?”

“Well, the whole thing with Locksley Holmes again is weird. But no,
not spooked out, not in the least. Amused, if anything. I
think everything is going great. It’ll be just like the last time, only better.
This time, we’ll stick together to the bitter end.”

“This may have a hidden benefit to it. This might keep those two sons of his
from coming here and bothering us. The local police asking all these probing
questions might scare them off.”

“I wouldn’t get my hopes up on that one, Tom. They’re going to be so enraged by
the fast one we pulled, probably nothing will keep them from coming back here to
claim their pound of flesh. According to Brent, they’ve been down this road
before many times—police suspicions and interrogations. It’s become kind of
routine with them. Meanwhile, we’ll keep thinking about it. If I have any
brainwaves, I’ll let you know. I can usually come up with something cute to
wiggle me out of a tight spot. Meanwhile, let’s get those insurance people off
your back. I’ve asked our other lawyer to do up the documents for a
half-million-dollar loan from Brent to you. Pronto.”

“Thanks for the thought, Rosie, but Brent is not competent to sign anything.
The other lawyer will see that off the bat.”

“We anticipated that. We got her to do up a power of attorney for me earlier.
An enduring power, I think? She says it stays alive no matter what happens to
Brent’s mind. Tommy, let’s start thinking hard about our own
self-interest.”

I could have kissed the woman. Indeed, I was looking forward to doing just
that.

BUT REGRETTABLY
,
I MUST
have been born with my
father’s gene for worry and anxiety: now that my immediate financial concern was
gone, it was replaced in my 3: 00 a.m. wake-ups by dread about either the police
suspicions or Brent’s murderous spawn.

In real life, the police constable managed to tangle both dreads up together. A
day after my loan proceeds came through, Constable Hoover popped unannounced
into my office to ask questions about my relationship with the two
grandchildren, who had been the last to see their grandfather alive, and who,
earlier that same fatal day, had paid a visit to me. The police constable
couldn’t find any phone numbers in their names, listed or unlisted, anywhere in
the States. Did I have telephone numbers for them? No, I said, I didn’t.
Constable Hoover looked at me long. It was thirty years later, a whole new
detecting generation, and the intimidating glare was still big in the forensic
arsenal. He muttered, “And their own mother in Nevada
said
she had no telephone numbers for them. Does that make any sense to anybody? This
gets curiouser and curiouser.”

When I told Rosie about that conversation during my visit to them in the
evening, she was as irate by the constable’s questions as if we were two
innocents. “You mean he asked you if they had met with you in your office that
very same day. Isn’t that a violation of lawyer-client privilege or
something?”

“Brent’s sons were not my clients.”

“Well, it’s darn well harassment and legal persecution, for sure. How did he
know they’d been there at your office, anyway?”

“I have no idea. He said that on principle they didn’t divulge sources, but we
would no doubt find out when the prosecution transmitted their list of witnesses
to our defence lawyer.”

“Jesus, the cheek. He was here again and asked me for their phone numbers, too.
I told him I hadn’t spoken to them for ten years, except briefly at their
grandfather’s funeral. Then he tried to get the numbers, plus pick some
incriminating evidence out of the ravings of my poor husband as he lay there
dying with brain cancer. Do you ever have anything to do with Lucy Barrett these
days?”

“Who? Lucy Barrett? What’s she got to do with anything? She’s deputy minister
of justice now, about to retire.”

“I know. I’ve been meaning to visit her socially, for old times’ sake. Are you
still close to her?”

“Still close? God, I haven’t had anything to do with Lucy since our
professional relationship in the Department of Justice.”

“What about when you first started with the department?”

“Rosie, is there some reason you brought up Lucy in the middle of this police
scare?”

“I’m going to see her to say hello.”

“Okay, listen to me. You need to be very careful about all this. This could
blow up in our faces.”

“Don’t you worry your little lawyer’s head about that, my sweetness and light.
I’ve only been wrong about something serious twice in my life. Once when, out of
pure ego, I blinded my eyes to what might be happening to poor little Pagan, and
next when, out of pure pride, I refused to forgive you after your silly little
escapade in England. This is going to work out okay.”

To me, the woman’s pure ego and pure pride seemed to be still pretty
well intact. And she had conveniently neglected to mention
her disastrous mistake with Rothesay. Now Lucy Barrett was about to be dragged
into this potential calamity. Something else to add to the pitching wakefulness
of my nights.

WHEN ROSIE GOT BACK
from her social visit to Lucy Barrett the
next day, the first thing she said to me was, “Gosh, that woman loves you. She
said she always thought you were a winner, and then she gave me hell for not
making you a keeper way back then. I told her not to expect any argument from me
on that.”

“Rosie, what did you say to her about the police?”

“I told her that, regretfully, I had to sue the police and her department for
harassment of me and my dying husband, and I told her why. It had all the
earmarks of a police vendetta, I said. I told her I should have sued after the
police persecution following Rothesay’s suicide, but I didn’t have the wits or
the money back then to make that decision. Now I had both. I was only telling
her this out of a sense of gratitude. She said she’d quietly look into it. She
could not interfere in a legitimate police investigation, but she was glad of
the heads-up.”

I TELEPHONED BRENT
’
S SONS
Duke and Neal in Las
Vegas, using the numbers Rosie got out of Brent’s book. The phone was answered
by receptionists at two different hotels. I left messages, and they both called
back within the hour, on the same line from two extensions. I told them that
their father was dying. They were startled and became agitated. One of them said
that a couple of girls they’d met in St. John’s had looked them up on a visit to
Las Vegas last week and told them they’d heard that a Brent Anstey was
terminally ill with cancer back home. Was that their dad? It couldn’t be, they’d
replied. Their dad was just fine a few weeks ago, and anyway, Dad’s lawyer, Tom
Sharpe, would have informed them of such illness immediately, if it was true.
Now they were going to look like a couple of cocksucking jerks for not even
knowing their dad was nearly dead. What the fuck was going on? This was starting
to look awful fucking funny. They were going to call Dad right away. I told them
not to, and to give me the number for their lawyer’s office, and I’d call them
there and explain—did they have a lawyer there in Las Vegas? “Duh, yeah,” one of
them said.

I called them at their lawyer’s office from a safe phone and told them about
the probing questions from the police. One of them interrupted to
ask how long Brent had been sick. I didn’t answer the question, but went on
that, for all I knew, the police here had contacted the police there to put a
tap on their phones. The police had been asking me for their telephone numbers.
I’d be giving them their lawyer’s number.

“Don’t hand us that ‘Oh mercy me, the police are asking questions’ shit,” said
one. “How long has Dad been sick?”

“Only a few weeks. He has very fast-acting cancer.” I gave the details,
including the incoherence.

“When is he going to die?”

“A matter of weeks, if not days.”

“Which you knew all about when you made a couple of patsies out of us in your
office. You owe us fourteen million dollars, pal, and we’re coming up there to
get it.”

“No, I did not know. And I would advise strongly against your coming up here. I
know that’s a hard thing to say, missing your father’s funeral, but with the
police suspicions, it could be very dangerous for you up here.”

“Don’t you ever stop with the bullshit? Don’t worry about us missing the
funeral. The grieving widow can see to all that. We’re not coming up to hear
what a wonderful man he was. We’re coming up for our motherfucking money. Let me
try to put this gently. It’s our money or your fucking ass. Hers too. If Dad
doesn’t leave everything to us in his will—except for maybe one lousy million
for the cunt—we could stomach that—you might as well pre-arrange your own
funeral now. Both of you. And don’t try to make yourself scarce. We’ll track you
down wherever you go.” They hung up.

“They’re coming,” I said to Rosie.

“Let them come,” said Rosie. “We’ll be ready for them.”

BRENT DIED WITHIN THE
week. A surprising number of people showed
up at the first session of four at the funeral home to pay their last respects
to, as described in one newspaper, “the late great local hockey star of
unfulfilled promise.” The old hockey crowd, I expected. But there were many
others unfamiliar to Rosie and me. Then we realized that they were mostly
investment brokers and real estate agents who claimed a close relationship to
Brent from the old days at school, university, or business. They pushed their
business cards on Rosie.