Rosie O'Dell (62 page)

“They are likely to do anything. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of them.
They are silly enough to think about abducting me and beating the money out of
me, or something. We need to keep our guard up. But I’m hoping they’ll come to
their senses, especially when they get a visit from the police tonight.”

“Rosie, I assume you were exaggerating about being responsible for Moose
Mercer’s death.”

“No I wasn’t. After you broke up with me, Brent tried to ask me out a couple of
times, and when Moose found out, I heard him slandering me to him again, drunk,
as he’d done to you. And I recalled that he was responsible for the separation
between you and me that led to our breaking up. And I said to myself, ‘Why am I
putting up with that vicious idiot?’ So I lured him downtown late at night in my
car, with a bottle of vodka and dirty promises, got him drunker than usual, and
left him to freeze to death behind a building. He was unconscious, didn’t feel a
thing, I’m sure. Still, I felt really bad about it, but it turned out to be
worth it, because as soon as you heard he was dead you called me up for the
first time in months, trying to worm your way back.”

“And you thought I’d suddenly regained enough guts, with him dead, to come
back. Well, why wouldn’t you? I’m lucky just to be alive, by the sounds of
things.”

“You’re still alive, sweetheart, only because I didn’t want to wail and bawl
like my mother at the funeral home that everyone I loved was dead.”

AFTER THE VISITATION AT
the funeral home that
evening, I drove Rosie home. The boys had not been seen since this afternoon.
They worried me. I asked Rosie if she would like me to spend the night there.
I’d act as security downstairs on the sofa, I said. She replied that we should
go in and have a drink and think that over. She certainly would like me to stay,
but it might look like too cozy a relationship this early to anyone looking on.
We’d see.

Inside, the phone was ringing. It was the boys. Rosie asked me aloud into her
receiver to take the other extension. They had to see us immediately. Could they
come over? Rosie looked at me and I nodded.

In minutes they were here. Rosie and I kept them outside on the veranda with
all the lights on full and cars going by, including a police car. The cops had
been waiting for them in the hotel lobby, they said, and asked them to go to the
police station to answer a few questions. They were persons of interest in the
death of old Mr. Anstey. They had been there up until half an hour ago, getting
a royal drilling.

“Jesus,” said Duke, “those guys are pretty hard-nosed for a police force out
here in the boonies. That time we were detained overnight by the LAPD when that
Vietnamese pusher turned up dead wasn’t as bad as that.”

Rosie said, “That LA caper might have been worse for you if your dad and I
hadn’t signed a bail bond for you and got you out and fixed you up with a
lawyer.”

“No, Granddad did all that.”

“Afterwards he replaced us, yes, but we were there in the first instance. Jesus
Christ, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten that. Here I’ve been racking my brains to
figure out why you two hate me so much, and now it’s all clear. You don’t even
remember when I was there getting your father to save your sorry asses.”

“God, Rosie, we were only fourteen or fifteen. What do you expect?”

“I was foolish enough to expect a little gratitude at the time. But I’ve
learned better since. Now I expect nothing. What do you want? Why are you here?
Our champagne is in there getting warm.”

“Those cops really figured we were in on Granddad’s death. They said we had the
motive and the opportunity. They knew all about the threats from the loan sharks
back home and everything. Who do you figure might have tipped them off to all
that?”

“Don’t play dumb, Duke. You know who it was. It was me. When they came around
here asking questions, I told them that if there was question
of homicide here, their best bet was to look at you two. I told them about
the money you owed to the mafia, and I guess they put two and two
together.”

“Pardon me for not being as smart as you, Rosie, but if we got nailed, wouldn’t
that implicate you the way everything turned out, and your lawyer friend who put
us up to it?”

“How would it implicate me? I hadn’t seen you or spoken to you since you were
teens. Look, I’ve got to go in before the fizz goes out of my champagne
completely.”

I jumped in. “Didn’t you tell them you knew all about the great likelihood that
your father would die before your grandfather and you’d get everything?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“The cop looked like he was hit across the head with a baseball bat. But they
kind of kept going with the grilling. I think they were putting up a
front.”

“I’ll confirm that you knew of your father’s imminent death when I talk to them
again. And your father told Rosie he’d told you, too. That should finish
it.”

“Rosie, what do you think we should we do? Can your lawyer friend here give us
some advice?”

“What you should do,” I said, “is run, not walk, to the airport, get aboard a
plane, and fly out of here. Go back home and stay there.”

“But they told us to keep ourselves available for further questioning after the
funeral.”

“They have nothing on you now. They don’t have the evidence to arrest you on,
at least not yet. God knows what the forensic guys will turn up when the tests
on the pillow get back from the lab to muddy the waters. Go.”

“Rosie, does that deal you offered earlier still stand?”

“Yes, but remember, I’ll be keeping an eye on you to see if you deserve the
money or not. If you are reasonably sensible and responsible, you will get
it.”

“Okay, we’re out of here. We’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be on the edge of my chair waiting for your call.”

Rosie watched them leave and then said, “That might turn out okay, but I’m not
betting on it. Let’s have that drink, and then you should go
home to your own bed. We have just tomorrow at the funeral home and the
funeral itself and then clewing up Brent’s estate, and we’re home free. That’s
what I’ll be on the edge of my chair waiting for.”

BRENT
’
S WILL LEFT ALL
the money he got from his
father and the big house to Rosie, except for a million dollars, which, at
Rosie’s suggestion, he left to Suzy. The boys got nothing. There was bluster
from Nevada. Their lawyer in Las Vegas telephoned me to negotiate “off the
record and without prejudice” a possible settlement. Nothing said between us
today could be used in court. He suggested that Rosie had unduly influenced
their sick father and that I had been in a serious conflict between my personal
interests and my professional advice. He had advised the lads to contest the
will, he said, unless a reasonable settlement could be arrived at. I replied
that their concerned and solicitous stepmother had already made a more than
reasonable offer to them, far greater than they deserved, based on their future
good conduct as desired by both their father and grandfather, and there the
matter ended. Their lawyer said that the amounts offered and the conditions were
not appropriate. The boys had serious cocaine addictions that made them
irresponsible and sometimes uncontrollably violent, and they needed more funds
from their father’s ample estate for medical help and therapy to cure
themselves. So sue, I said, and we’d see if the judge considered that last
statement I’d just recorded to be a description of the boys’ condition or an
extortion attempt by them and their lawyer backed by threats of violence. “That
was without prejudice and off the record,” he howled.

“A without-prejudice murder threat,” I replied. “Good luck with that in our
Supreme Court.”

TWO MONTHS PASSED FROM
Brent’s death before Rosie and I went to
bed together. She had told me one night over a drink at my place that she now,
at last, had the feeling again, for the first time since the funeral, that she
was ready to take up where we had left off thirty years before, if I was. She’d
woken up that morning with the sensation that it was only yesterday when we’d
been together, she said, and she was interested in seeing whether her memories
accorded with reality or were just a blissful delusion. “Talk about imposing
performance anxiety on a guy,” I replied.

“You’d better be good,” she said.

Our first night together felt to me as if there had never been a time gap.
But I did undergo a leap in appreciation that made the
experience even better than I remembered. I fully appreciated without urgency
every point and plane where our bodies touched, the exquisite smoothness, the
actual knowledge, the realization, of warm beloved life beneath. I appreciated
the smallness, the narrowness, the compactness of her naked waist when my arms
went around it. I appreciated just lying there beside her, admiring her beauty
as she lay stretched out on her back—the separate angles, curves, rounds, juts,
indents, and clefts—without any overpowering need to do anything right away. The
only thing I missed, I told Rosie, that might have improved on the great feeling
I’d had when I made love to her, was the fear that my mother was going to catch
us at it.

Rosie got up on her elbow: “When did your mother ever catch us…? Oh yeah, that
time your squirt nearly dripped on her head from the ceiling. That was close.”
She fell over on me laughing.

Now I told her for the first time about my mother seeing our used condom in her
toilet after our inaugural adventure in anal intercourse on my bed, and the fuss
she’d made about it. Rosie stretched to the length of her arms and looked down
at me. “You mean every time I said hello to your mother after that, all she
could see in her mind was me being sodomized by her teenaged son?” She flopped
over on her back and put her pillow over her head. “Jesus, I’m glad you never
told me that at the time.” Her breasts gave two or three gentle heaves of more
laughter and she rolled over on top of me and said, “We must try that again one
of these days.”

“It’s a deal. How about our little cuddle tonight? Did you like that?”

“Sort of. It was okay. You were… fine.” She looked down at me. “I’ll give you
another chance to improve before I have to take drastic steps.”

“Oh, this certainly turned out well,” I said. “Here I am with the police
breathing down my neck trying to dig up the evidence to nail me for yet another
murder. Any day now, two dope-crazed assassins with extortion and revenge on
their minds may decide to kneecap or kill me unless I pay up millions.
Meanwhile, I don’t have a cent, and the woman I’m a love-slave to has thirteen
million dollars in the bank and holds a promissory note from me for half a
million, which she can call in at any time. And now she’s telling me that if I
don’t measure up better in bed, I’m history.”

“That’s what I like about a good lawyer. They can cut through the bullshit and
get right to the crunch. But you never said anything about me having a penchant
for killing people who haven’t treated me nice.” She pinched my thigh.

“You mean me from thirty years ago. I thought you said we’re
even.”

“Every murder planner says that. But that’s down the road. First, I need you to
help me work out how we can liquidate Brent’s two louts before they get a chance
to do something to us.” Rosie turned her face away. “Oh.” Tears were flowing
from under her eyelids. “I was so happy, and then I thought about poor
Brent.”

“Be happy, Rosie. I know I am for the first time in my adult life.”

“I’m getting there. Do you think we’ll ever be as happy as we were for those
few months when we were fourteen or fifteen?”

“That would be asking a lot. But I don’t need to be that happy. Or
crazy.”

“Forgetting about the money, Tom, what makes you happier, what you have now,
even with all that crap you just described, or when you were peacefully and
quietly living and practising law?”

“What we have now. By far. Not even in the same ballpark. How about you? This,
or your dreamlike escape from real life into your beautiful old dead languages
and literature?”

“This. But I do have the old feeling that I am going to be caught somehow by
the cosmic jokester and sent straight back to hell from whence I came in the
first place. ‘Rosie O’Dell, go back to hell.’ Remember that? Somebody in school
nailed it dead-on.”