by Bill Rowe
“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.”
Chapter 19
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.
That first afternoon, in swaggered Marmaduke and Cornelius. They went right to Rosie and embraced her. Her five foot six, hundred-and-twenty-pound form was swallowed up by the six foot three, two-hundred-and-ten-pound, broad bodies and apelike arms. I was standing on the other side of the room and saw Duke or Neal mutter something into her ear. They stood by the closed coffin for a second, and then with baleful glowers at me they left.
I went over. “What did they say to you, Rosie?”
“Duke said, ‘We want a sit-down, bitch.’” Rosie looked at me and stifled a titter. “Let’s talk about
it later, Tom. I shouldn’t burst out laughing at my own husband’s wake.”
“Yeah, okay, but what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Sure, Duke. You can sit down on this any time you want.’” She flashed me a fairly sharp fingernail on her extended middle finger.
“And?”
“And he said, ‘We’ll be back.’ I think they think they’re the Terminator. Then I ran out of sophisticated repartee and they just left.”
“They did not look happy.”
“And they’ll be less happy when we’re finished with them. I expect they’ll be waiting for me when this is over this afternoon. And then we can get together with them as we planned.”
“Right.” I smiled at her. Even as I shivered inwardly, she made me smile. But I wondered how happy she and I would be when this was all finished.
THEY WERE WAITING FOR us outside, leaning against the wall of the building, smoking. Rosie went right over to them. “Okay, let’s talk. Follow us to the house.” She turned away and then turned back to them. “The two of you are lovable, but you’re also dense. So I need to explain a couple of things to you. One, the exterior and interior of the house have security video cameras left over from Granddad’s day, surveying everything, and two, we have left written messages with several different people to go directly to the local police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police describing everything you did to Gramps and your threats to us if anything happens to us, and to nail you two for it. Everyone clear on all that? Yes? No gaps or grey areas? No? Okay, let’s go, then.” The boys looked at each other for a long few seconds and then, as if under duress, made their way to their car.
At the house, we four sat in the living room. The place was empty and we were alone with the boys. “Tea, anyone?” asked Rosie.
“I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea,” said one of the boys. “Is this place bugged—I mean with audio, too?”