“I’m supposed to get together for lunch with Mel McIntire – his partner’s wife – to firm up the details. But I’ve got this contract due at two – would you mind going for me? We’re supposed to meet at 12:30 before she goes on shift at the ER.”
“Okay.” Her nap could wait an hour or so. She’d keep her eyes open a bit longer. “Where?”
~•~
As soon as Laura disconnected, Lucy smiled to herself, a dangerous smile that would have chilled Richard’s blood, and placed a call.
“She took the bait,” she said. “You’ll know her. She looks like a younger version of Di.”
“Got it,” said Mel McIntire above her kids’ voices. Lucy heard them tearing around in the background. “It’s chili day at Mac’s, so you know the guys will be there. Now what am I looking for?”
Lucy thought a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I think you’ll know when you see it.”
~•~
To: Lucy Maitland, Esq.
From: Melanie McIntire, M.D.
Subject: Reporting in
Boy, did I know! And have they got it bad. And is it serious.
OK, can I say this first? I like her a lot more than I ever liked Diana. She’s very sweet, although a bit quiet and reserved. When she’s not so tired, she’s probably a lot of fun. For someone with all that money, she seems down to earth and not at all fancy or stuck on herself. She’ll fit in well with the Queen Bees.
She apologized for yawning and said she’d been up all night writing a song. But she’s willing to help. I confused her because Richard told her there was nothing to the party, which of course there isn’t, so I had to make it sound a lot more complicated than it is.
One thing, before I tell you what happened when the boys showed up for their chili fix. She seemed interested in my ER work and asked how I handle it with the kids. Then she hemmed and hawed around and finally asked me to recommend a GYN to her because she needs a prescription. I sent her to yours. She got out her planner to write down the number, and her stray papers fell out, so I bent to help her pick them up, and guess what she had? That picture of the man himself from his book. It looked like she cut it out. I did that kind of thing in high school.
She turned all shades of red, and she was stuffing everything in her purse every which way, and that’s when I saw a pink plastic case in there. You don’t have four kids and a husband like Scott and not recognize every birth control device known to man. That was a diaphragm case, and I’m hazarding a guess she needs a new one. So – yes, she has a new love interest.
So then the guys came in, right on schedule, since heaven forbid they miss chili day at Mac’s. I acted surprised and delighted and waved them right over. I was trying to keep one eye on her and the other on him and keep Scott from saying something like, “You know I never miss chili day at Mac’s, why are you so surprised?” So maybe I missed something, but I saw enough.
Both of them froze. She was drinking iced tea, but she stopped when she saw him, and he seemed to hesitate just a teeny bit before he came over. Scott sat beside me, so that left nowhere for him to sit except beside her. And you can’t believe how stiff they both were, not even looking at each other. I thought you might be totally off-base, because these two people acted like they couldn’t stand each other.
Except it was so deliberate. I tried to watch them without watching them, if you know what I mean, and I picked up on a lot of tension between them. Then she started looking at him, but not directly – some sideways looks where she seemed to be looking beyond him but she wasn’t. Her face was slightly inclined to him. I’m not sure if I’m describing this correctly, but, believe you me, I got the impression that, for her, it’s all about him, and forget anyone else. Him – he kept a straight face, but he knew she was watching him.
Scott asked what the lunch was all about, and Laura said you had asked her to meet with me about the hostess duties for the party. Richard gave me a look, since he knows damn well all we do is sit there mainlining margaritas. But then things got interesting. While Laura was talking, the waitress brought her some iced tea with a lemon slice, and without even looking at him, she leaned over and stuck the lemon on his glass for him to use. Now if she hasn’t seen him in 14 years and they’ve been fighting nonstop since she came to town, how did she know he drinks ice water with a truckload of lemons? And how did he know to ask the waitress for more pink packets when there were at least 20 blue packets, and then, when the girl brought him some, hand one right to Laura without asking?
Another thing: how did he get gray cat hair on his pants? Not a lot, but you know me. I can see that sort of thing a mile away thanks to Scotty’s allergy. Now I know he doesn’t have a cat, but I assume someone with the name of Cat Courtney does.
And the whole time, he didn’t look at her.
OK, so none of this is smoking gun stuff. Just circumstantial, as they’d say on Law and Order.
BUT!!! Smoking guns to follow.
Scott started joking about how Richard has been scarfing down all the GS cookies in the office freezer and the staff is about to declare an official Thin Mint shortage. So Richard said he’d decided to give up smoking once and for all, so he’s snacking to keep from running outside for a smoke break. Now, he may have been talking to us, but he was really saying it to her. It makes sense; she’s a singer; he can’t smoke around her. That’s when she stopped pretending and looked at him as if he hung the moon and the stars combined. Then she said she’d make cookies for him so he wouldn’t run out of munchies, and even Scott caught on, because her voice was really saying, I will do anything for you. Lay down my life, bear your children, just name it.
Then the coup de grace. Are you ready?
We all ordered dessert. She got that strawberry thing. Scott finished before me, and, as usual, started eating my dessert before I was done with it. He had his arm on the back of my chair – hey, world, this is my woman. The guys were talking about the Charleston job, about the cracked foundation or something and how they need to jack up the estimates, when, without asking and I guess without thinking either, Mr. Manners leaned over and stuck his fork into one of her strawberries and ate it. And, instead of sticking her fork into him, which is what I would do if some man I hadn’t had four kids with ate my dessert without asking, she pushed the plate over to him so he could finish it.
And that’s when I saw his arm on the back of her chair.
Not once did I see him look at her full in the eyes.
Oh, definitely, those two have done the deed. No man who isn’t a total boor, and we all know he isn’t, helps himself to a woman’s plate unless he’s already helped himself to her plate, if you get my drift.
If you’re hoping this is all her and it will blow over, forget it. This is serious business, and she knows it. He’s hard to read. But I know how a man looks when he’s having himself a summer fling, and this ain’t it.
I have to ask, would it be so terrible? She’s nice and he needs nice, she’s loaded and he needs money. We all know that place is bleeding money.
Personally, I think she’d make a good Mrs. Senior Partner. I’d much rather have her than Diana at the Queen Bee table. Laura doesn’t look like she’ll drain the margarita pitcher dry before anyone else gets a chance. I know that was years ago, but I’m still mad.
My bill for detective services follows. You may be on the wagon, but I’m not. Bring your special mix.
Ciao!
Mel, ace detective
PS: One last thing. He walked her to her car, since of course she is too feeble to walk the 20 feet outside Mac’s on her own. As they were walking away, his hand low on her back (don’t you just love how Southern men always find a way to feel a woman up?), I distinctly heard him say, “This was a setup. Lucy set you up.”
Chapter 6: Secrets Unraveling
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON OF JULY 3, acting on instructions from Mark St. Bride, the attorneys for the estate of Cameron David St. Bride filed a detailed inventory
of the assets of his estate. St. Bride Data issued a brief press release that went ignored by most business reporters, who anticipated a slow news day on Wednesday and thus took the day off to extend the long weekend. The writer at St. Bride Data thought nothing of the press release; she had had it ready to go for months.
No one guessed that not only did Mark not inform his brother’s widow of his action, but he was using it to bring her to her senses. He planned to return from Japan on Saturday, just in time before some eager-beaver reporter untangled the maze of shell corporations set up to shield Cat Courtney from discovery. Just in time for her to see the error of her ways and run back to the St. Bride fold (and his arms) for protection before the news broke.
He reckoned without the junior financial news producer at a local TV station who lived near the Collin County courthouse in McKinney. Low man on the totem pole, Brian Schneider drew the unenviable assignment of covering the desk while the senior producer took the day off. He figured he might as well while away the time by going through the inventory of the notoriously press-shy founder of St. Bride Data, so, on his way to work, he swung by the courthouse and picked up a copy.
After three cups of coffee, a surf through the ESPN web site, and two bids on Ebay, Brian settled down to look through the inventory and found it excruciatingly dull. Not for Cameron St. Bride the yacht, the stable of racehorses, the football team, the secluded home occupied by a heretofore unknown mistress. Even St. Bride’s Plano house belonged to the corporation, displacing the wife and child who had decamped to parts unknown. The man seemed to have lived a remarkably dull life until, unfortunately, his last few minutes.
What he had done, Brian discovered, was form corporations. And corporations. And corporations. In years of financial reporting, he’d never seen anything like the number of closely-held corporations in which Cameron St. Bride, by himself or through one of his corporations, was the sole shareholder. The only comparable situation had been an energy company whose officers used it as their personal piggy bank and laundered their ill-gotten gains through multitudes of shell corporations.
So that begged the question: why on earth had Cameron St. Bride spent time and energy setting up so many corporations? Some appeared to be legitimate. One owned the computer games St. Bride had designed when he had first started St. Bride Data, before it went public; another was a nonprofit foundation set up to help runaway teens. One was the St. Bride Family Administration; another appeared to be an interior design firm in which St. Bride and his sister were the only shareholders.
And then there was Aural Gem CC, a name repeated in every state. St. Bride owned the Texas Aural Gem; it owned the South Dakota Aural Gem, which in turn owned the California Aural Gem, and on and on throughout the entire country, into the Bahamas, Virgin Islands, Canada, and the Cayman Islands.
In the Caymans, the chain seemed to come to an end.
What had St. Bride been up to? He was the majority shareholder in St. Bride Data, and it was unlikely he had been laundering money or dealing drugs. He’d had a reputation as a straight arrow. What had he been hiding?
A call to St. Bride Data yielded a polite “No comment.” An exhaustive search through public and private databases produced nothing. Other than the fact that St. Bride and his wife had married four months after the birth of their child, he found nothing even mildly scandalous. In this day and age, a slightly tardy wedding scarcely rated comment. St. Bride’s wife was twelve years his junior and must have been in her late teens, but even so, she had been of age.
Still, twelve years. Quite an age difference.
He looked for a picture of Mrs. St. Bride, now heiress to a considerable fortune, and found nothing. Not surprising. St. Bride had kept his family out of the public eye; no one remembered ever seeing Mark St. Bride’s name in print until he succeeded his brother as CEO, and Laura St. Bride barely seemed to have existed. A search turned up nothing except a membership in a PTA at an exclusive girls’ school in Plano and a listing as a patron of the Collin County Ballet (as, he noticed, Mrs. Cameron St. Bride). For the wife of a near-billionaire, she lived a private life.
Interesting. Was something wrong with the wife? Was she ill? Mentally unstable? St. Bride had appointed his brother as her trustee – lack of trust on his part, or lack of interest on hers? Brian picked up the divorce petition that someone had finally unearthed and looked through it. Nothing there, except that, whether or not something was wrong with Laura St. Bride, her husband had intended to end the marriage until a hijacked plane had ended it for them both.
Or intended to end it, then changed his mind. On September 11, before anyone could confirm his death, St. Bride’s lawyers had filed a motion to dismiss the divorce.
He went back through the file to see what previous reporting had turned up. Kate St. Bride’s will yielded the interesting tidbit that she had left her daughter-in-law sole ownership of residences in London’s Knightsbridge and New York’s Upper West Side, both of which she still owned, according to property records. Had the wife and daughter moved to either of those? Unlikely to be New York, with its unpleasant memories. Had she moved to London?
He ran a search on the daughter, Margaret, but the kid was only thirteen. She was unlikely to have made news at her age, even if she was worth a third of a billion dollars.
He was no closer to finding out why St. Bride had set up so many Aural Gem corporations. But the answer was here, he felt it with his newsman’s instinct. Somewhere in these papers lay the answer and possibly a very interesting story.
Brian ate lunch at his desk, running web searches on Aural Gem. The phrase showed up nowhere other than in reviews of various CDs; nowhere did he find it as a name or proper noun. But St. Bride had used the name repeatedly. It must have meant something. Brian wrote it down on a legal pad, then printed it absently over and over again in a line….
He’d written it ten times when the letters began to rearrange themselves in his mind.
Aural. An anagram for Laura.
Gem. An anagram for Meg? And Meg was a slightly old-fashioned nickname for Margaret.
He sat up.
The mysterious wife. Somehow connected with this corporate maze. And the daughter? CC wasn’t a normal corporate abbreviation. What could it mean?
He sat and thought some more.
~•~
At four, after taping the latest stock market news, he judged that he could leave for the day. No earth-shattering financial stories were likely to break; the markets had closed for the holiday, and he had his cell with him anyway. He lived a normal thirty minute drive away, but with the holiday traffic, it would take an hour to get home. But if he detoured past the St. Bride home, in Plano’s most exclusive neighborhood… it was worth a shot.
He drove through Plano, the upper middle class suburb of SUVs, high-dollar shopping centers, and conservative values, to the country club community off Parker Road. Not for the St. Brides of the world were the oversized McMansions on zero lot lines, the postage stamp lawns, the leased autos in the driveways. The men in these households did not spend their Saturday mornings mowing the front yard; their full-time gardeners did that for them. The women did not spend time cleaning bathrooms; their maids, illegal immigrants, took over those chores. Instead, they chauffeured their 2.3 children from dance lessons to soccer practice to cotillions in their Hummers, shopped till they dropped, and ate antidepressants like candy. Teenagers drove BMWs to the public high school. Everyone attended church and voted Republican. Unlike many of the other ritzy neighborhoods in Plano, here no one worried about paying the mortgage; they paid cash for these houses.
This was the world of Cameron St. Bride and his wife; this was the world of Aural Gem.
He found the St. Bride house easily. Like many of the other houses, set back and far apart from each other on enormous lots, a gate across the entrance guarded the long drive that led through a porte cochère to a motor court behind the house. That might have presented a problem, except that the gate was
open and a large moving truck – Johnson Piano Movers – was parked in front of the house.
Moving. Brian’s skin prickled. Who was moving? Mark St. Bride? The sister?
He drove in, parked behind the truck, and got out. Four men were struggling to move the largest concert grand piano he had ever seen through the enormous double doors of the house. To the side, a hostile look on her face, arms crossed across an impressive bosom, stood a pretty blonde who looked as if she was in her mid-thirties – which, in Plano, meant that she was at least five years older than that. Probably St. Bride’s sister, Emma.
She was saying testily to one of the movers, “I don’t care if the damn thing falls into the Chesapeake. Watch the door, please.”
He crossed the drive to mount the steps to her side. She noticed him and took the opportunity to look him up and down. He wasn’t a bad-looking man; he knew that, and if it meant she might talk to him, he didn’t mind her looking at him. Not that she was hard on the eyes herself. She was nicely dressed, and like most upper crust women, well-manicured and so expertly made up that you could hardly tell she was wearing makeup. She must have had Botox injections; the scowl on her face didn’t touch her forehead.
Brian nodded at the piano. “Problems?”
Emma seemed to relax. “Oh, just my damn sister-in-law, throwing a temper tantrum about her precious piano.”
The damn sister-in-law had to be St. Bride’s mysterious wife, since Mark St. Bride wasn’t married. Emma didn’t ask who he was, and he took advantage of that to stand there and survey the situation. He was no expert on pianos, but he’d helped his former wife look for one, and he knew that they certainly hadn’t seen anything like this at the piano outlet store. Most of it was wrapped in some protective material, but he saw enough. It was an unusual wood, rosewood, if he guessed right, and an exotic shade at that, polished to an incredible sheen, and it was huge – nine or ten feet long. So Laura St. Bride played the piano, or perhaps this was just a very expensive decoration for her home.
All That Lies Broken (Ashmore's Folly Book 2) Page 11