Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  Thus, after that further waste of time, I let Demetrious drive me home.

  After all, tomorrow was shaping up as a busy day. As soon as the locksmith got me new keys to my car, I would have to go to Mule Day to track down and convince the good judge to let my brother make all of Willette’s legal decisions for her. Plus all that other stuff I had to do.

  Yeah, okay, I was being naive, given that it was midnight in the small town of good and eerie. Sure, it was entirely probable I should have done something more, but as it was, my world had reduced itself to a single, fundamental fact: Get some sleep or die.

  So, I went to bed.

  chapter 40

  Shalonda was still sleeping when I checked on her, and I didn’t dare wake her up, though I was eager to start whatever we were going to do today—like find her missing husband, solve a murder, and all that.

  I called the police station and asked for Rodney Harrelson, assistant chief of police, the man I’d met while he was protecting Willette. I figured he was in charge now that Demetrious was missing. This didn’t fill me with confidence.

  In short order, he came on the line, assured me that the whole police department was looking for Demetrious, as was the sheriff’s department, and everything would be just fine, and how was Shalonda?

  Fine, fine, I lied, and hung up.

  As much as I wanted to wake Shalonda up, I let her sleep. She needed her rest. Edgy with my own impatience, I made another cup of coffee, which was just what I needed to calm my nerves, and I made myself ponder my so-called purse-snatching. Given all that was going on, it seemed unlikely that it was random or coincidental. Especially in a town noted for its low crime rate.

  A crime rate that was now off the charts, ever since Willette got that damn deep freeze.

  So, what did I have that somebody wanted?

  The obvious answer was my cash and credit cards.

  Another answer, and one Demetrious had favored, was that the Deer Den manager had sent someone after me to steal back the tape recorder with evidence of illegal caviar and turtle eggs.

  But, like I’d pointed out to Demetrious, how had they known I had a tape? And how had they known I was at the hospital? Hell, even more basic, how had they even known who I was?

  No, I didn’t buy the Deer Den as purse-snatcher.

  Reluctantly, I had to reconsider Jubal. If Jubal was supplying Willette illegally with prescription drugs, then he might want to steal back the pill bottles he’d seen me gather up. Maybe he’d spied on me and seen me put them in my Honda’s trunk. Maybe that’s why he was hanging around so, waiting for a chance to break in and grab the bottles.

  Or maybe it was old Mr. Spiky Hair, aka Dr. Weinstein. Maybe he had somehow learned I had those bottles, and maybe he was the source of them. If he were overprescribing downers to an old woman, he might have risked mugging me to get rid of the evidence.

  No, that didn’t make sense. There would be records of the prescriptions at the pharmacy. Getting the pill bottles back wouldn’t save him.

  Maybe it was something in my car. After all, the trunk had been emptied.

  Emptied of Willette’s important papers.

  Papers I had glanced at a couple of times, but not examined with a close, lawyer-trained eye for the basic reason they’d been living in a mold-covered box and smelled bad and I didn’t want to touch them.

  Ah, but the photocopies I’d stashed in the closet would be relatively clean.

  And they had the added benefit that nobody had stolen them.

  I hopped up, got the papers out of Dan’s closet, and sat down with them in my lap.

  So what? I thought, as I whipped through things apparently not worth stealing from my Honda’s trunk. But then I paused at the contract Willette and Lonnie had both signed, for the purchase of my grandmother’s house and forty acres.

  It was not a traditional real estate contract. I had noticed that before, but now I wondered if that meant something I’d overlooked. Rather than the common contract for sale, Willette had Lonnie sign a contract for deed.

  Below the contract for deed was an old-fashioned ledger book, in which Willette had carefully noted the date Lonnie had paid her each check, the check number, and the amount. This list stopped, though, nearly eight months ago.

  Had Willette stopped recording?

  Or had Lonnie stopped paying?

  Hm, hm, hm. I rifled through the papers some more, and remembered we had never found her bank book and statements, and didn’t know where she banked, or what her accounts might show. But now that Dan was her legal guardian, he could start calling the banks in town—thank goodness there weren’t that many—and he could find her account, or accounts, and we could probably figure out what Lonnie had paid her, or not paid her. But not before Monday.

  In the meantime, I didn’t have any evidence that Lonnie had actually paid Willette the full purchase price for the house. Yeah, Lonnie had moved into the house, but that didn’t mean he had legal title. In fact, the whole point of a contract for deed, as opposed to a traditional sale, was that the seller retained title until the buyer had actually paid all the money owed. In a traditional sale, the seller tenders title to the buyer, who usually gets a mortgage from a third party and pays the full amount, via the mortgage, to the seller. The buyer then owns the property—subject to the mortgage, of course—but the buyer can certainly resell the property. But in a contract for deed, there is no third-party mortgagor, and the original owner/seller retains title and the buyer cannot resell the property until the original owner is paid off in full.

  So, okay, good enough. But who had drafted the paperwork for Willette? Possibly even Willette herself, as she had worked in my father’s law office before they were married, back in the days when she was apparently almost a normal person, before marriage and three kids and whatever brain-chemistry trick nature had played upon her.

  But maybe my dad had drafted the contract for deed.

  Or maybe she hired it out.

  It didn’t seem likely that Lonnie would have had it drafted, or suggested it, as a contract for deed greatly favors the seller.

  In fact, it’s not generally a good idea for a buyer.

  Unless, that is, the buyer can’t get any other kind of financing.

  Which made me wonder about Lonnie’s life and finances in the Big City Up North, married to Colleen the Big Mouth, before they came back to humble Bugfest.

  Maybe Lonnie came home broke. And couldn’t get a mortgage, and Willette had agreed to the contract for deed, and then Lonnie had never finished paying on it.

  That being so, maybe Willette still owned the property?

  Or it could just be that Willette was a sloppy record-keeper, after all, and somewhere in Lonnie’s stuff were receipts, and somewhere in a bank his money was collecting interest on behalf of Willette.

  But the thing was, Willette was not a sloppy record-keeper. Every piece of paper Willette had touched for forty years was still in her house. Not only still there, but labeled and rubber-banded together in piles. She was, in spite of the dust, dirt, and filth of that house, an exacting record-keeper. She made lists that rivaled my lists. Every bill she’d ever received was in that house, with her precise, bold handwriting noting the date she’d paid it and the check number. Plus, the truly important papers had been carefully collected and saved in the metal box.

  And what was in that metal box didn’t show that Lonnie had ever finished paying my mother for Grandmom’s property.

  Which, by the terms of the contract for deed, meant Willette still owned it.

  Not Lonnie.

  And not Simon.

  But why would Simon buy the place from Lonnie unless Lonnie had a deed? I mean, the first step in a title search is, like, you know, making sure the seller has title.

  Just to be sure I wasn’t missing something, I went through all the copies of the paperwork again. Definitely, no record Lonnie had finished paying Willette what he owed her. From the records in front of me, I
calculated he still owed $65,000 on the house and property.

  Now, why on God’s green earth would Simon buy a house from a man who didn’t own it? Simon didn’t seem the least bit gullible, just vocabulary-and fashion-challenged. Oh, and that Marfan syndrome. But that hadn’t handicapped him in any way, and wouldn’t in any event have made him stupid.

  I had a sudden and desperate need to check for the deed in the courthouse. Right then. Waiting until Monday wouldn’t do.

  It was time for Shalonda to wake up.

  chapter 41

  Of course, Demetrious, being the chief of police in a small town, had a key to the courthouse. And of course, Shalonda, being a good wife—oh, except for the Lonnie thing—knew where Demetrious kept all his extra keys.

  Once I got her awake and full of coffee, and past the four hundred phone calls trying to find Demetrious she had to make before she’d even listen to me, she agreed we could borrow Demetrious’s key to the courthouse. Okay, steal was what I meant, though if she could get the key back to him before he discovered it was gone it wouldn’t be stealing, not in a strict legal technical prove-it-in-court sense. And since Demetrious was officially missing and possibly wanted for murder, we probably had a generous leeway on getting the key back to him.

  Which was why, after a side trip to her house to fetch said key, we were in the courthouse, in the property records, and I was ever so glad I knew how to track little columns of numbers in one book to another book and find the recorded deed.

  While I was tracking numbers, Shalonda sat dull and morose, and punctuated the air around her every few minutes with some version of the same question: Where was Demetrious?

  And yes, it was an interesting and important question. But I didn’t see how I was in a position at the moment to answer it, and I was getting just a wee bit tired of hearing it. What I was, however, in a position to answer was the question of the deed. That is, was there a deed that showed Lonnie had actually owned my grandmother’s property?

  I found the number of the deed-recording book in the index, and pulled the massive book from the case, and flipped through the pages of small print and people’s dreams of property ownership.

  And there it was, a deed, one purporting to be from Willette to Lonnie, a quit-claim deed.

  The rub was this: I saw right off that the signature on the deed was not Willette’s. Not unless her craziness had changed her handwriting, which had always been distinctly bold and neat, oddly in contrast to the mess in which she lived.

  So, here I paused, then punted. What this suggested was that Lonnie had forged my mother’s signature and filed a fake deed. I mean, why not? He had probably judged her—or misjudged her—as too drugged and crazy to object, or to even know he’d filed a fake deed, and the folks at the courthouse do not verify signatures as a matter of course when they record deeds. After all, Lonnie had moved into the house, bitchy wife and all, had lived there for three years, and probably had paid the taxes. To the outside world, it would certainly look like Lonnie had owned that house and the surrounding property. It also crossed my mind that Simon sure had a dandy lawsuit against the folks who did the title search.

  Shalonda continued sitting on a stool, in a corner, with that painful, dull look on her face.

  “Want to know what I’m doing?” I asked, hoping at the least to perk her up some.

  “It gonna tell us where Demetrious is at?”

  Well, maybe in the long run. But it wasn’t going to be a quick, direct line of causation, so I said no. And she said well, then, no, she didn’t care what I was doing.

  But talking helps me think, so I explained it to her anyway. That Lonnie had forged a deed to property he probably didn’t really own, and then he’d sold it to Simon, who had no doubt looked at the deed, and believed that Lonnie did own Grandmom’s place, free and clear.

  “Why’d Simon buy something from Lonnie that Lonnie didn’t own?”

  Okay, Shalonda wasn’t paying attention. Grief and worry, no doubt, distracted her from legal details. “I just told you—Lonnie forged a deed. Simon wouldn’t have known Lonnie didn’t actually own the property.”

  She gave me that dull look, and I let it go. I wanted to look up Simon’s deed, and see what light it might shed on this.

  As it turned out, it didn’t shed any light at all. Simon’s deed looked entirely proper and ordinary. It said the purchase price was $1 and “other consideration,” that phrase being a standard devise of Realtors, lawyers, and savvy real estate investors to hide the actual purchase price from the public record. It did not mean for one minute that Simon had paid only $1 for the place—the “other consideration” was most likely several thousand dollars more.

  Damn, why was this still Sunday? If only it were Monday morning, I would have filed a lawsuit to determine title by 9:01 in the morning, and, poor defrauded Simon or not, I would get that title to Grandmom’s place back where it belonged.

  In my hands.

  All this, of course, depended upon the unanswered question: Had Lonnie paid Willette for the property?

  Okay, if Willette didn’t have records showing that he had, or hadn’t, paid that last $65,000 on her house, and I couldn’t get inside a bank until Monday, where else could I look?

  The answer danced in front of me, as bright and pretty as any migraine aura but, in my Zomig no-pain zone, without agony.

  That is—we had to look inside Lonnie’s house for any records.

  And, oh, wasn’t it just mighty convenient that Lonnie, being dead, wouldn’t be around to disturb us while we looked.

  Which left his widow, Colleen the Vile.

  I pulled out my cell phone and bugged Shalonda to tell me Lonnie’s number, and I called.

  No answer. Great!

  I called Acting Police Chief Rodney back, and after a bit of a delay, followed by some polite chatter focused on the still-missing chief of police, I asked him if he knew where Colleen was.

  “Why, that woman was so struck down with grief, we had to take her to the hospital. They got her up there on the same wing as your momma, sedated. Ain’t it a shame?”

  Well, no, it wasn’t a shame, at least not from my immediate point of view, but I didn’t admit that to Rodney.

  What I did do was give a quick prayer of thanks to the little demon gods of the B and E crowd, and to a hospital that apparently specialized in deep sedation, and then I went and shook Shalonda.

  “Come on. We’re going over to Lonnie’s house.”

  She didn’t even ask me why.

  But she did tell me that before we went anywhere else, we were going to the hospital to check on Willette. Shalonda was clear on that; as a priority, our obligation to my mother trumped breaking and entering. When I protested, even though I had sort of grunted a promise to Dan to do just that, Shalonda took me to task about my mother.

  “How do you know that new psych nurse’s treating her right? And how you know if that new lawman is awake and guarding her against any more bugs? And what if she woke up with strangers, and had another psychotic fit?”

  Shalonda had a point. Thus, eager as I was to get out to Lonnie’s for a little sneak and plunder, I agreed to the side trip. Also, it occurred to me to make sure Colleen was still in the hospital and still sedated. Since she was a woman with at least two trained hit dogs, I wanted to make sure she was in no position to sic those dogs on Shalonda and me.

  So, we stopped by the hospital. Where we found a nice youth who looked about fifteen, in a police uniform, sipping coffee outside of Willette’s door, and he greeted us as Miss Shalonda and Miss Lilly and assured us no one had bothered Willette all night, that Dr. Hodo had been in a couple of times to check on her, and even that strange little doctor from New York had come by to check on her.

  Why the hell would Dr. Spiky Hair have checked on Willette, I thought, but pushed the question aside for the time being.

  We stepped inside the room, where we found Bobby, Becky, and Armando. Visiting Willette. And not in church
. Johnny was stretched out on Willette’s chest, licking up pound-cake crumbs.

  “Where’s that psych nurse?” I asked.

  “On her break,” Bobby said. “She said she’s legally entitled to a fifteen-minute break every four hours.”

  I introduced Armando and Shalonda, and made a mental note to have a law clerk look up that fifteen-minute-break rule and see if that applied to psych nurses, and if it did, whether they could just abandon their charges, and if I had to pay for the break too.

  Then I asked Bobby what he was doing in Willette’s room.

  “I hadn’t, you know, ever gotten to see her. Just shouting at her through the door at Christmas. I wanted to meet my grandmomma.”

  “It was my idea,” Becky said. “A man ought to know his close kin, don’t you think?”

  Well, that certainly depended on the kin, but I decided, in the interest of not belittling Becky’s honorable sentiment, not to say so.

  “You’re a good-looking young man,” Shalonda said to Armando, who puffed out and beamed at Becky. Then, to Bobby, she said, “You get that ferret off Miss Willette’s bed, you hear me, right now. And knock off those crumbs.” Then, to me, she said, “White girl, we are going to find that psych nurse.” And just like that, Shalonda’s dullness was gone. But before we left, I told Bobby what to do if his grandmother woke up screaming—that being call for a nurse and get out of her reach.

  Despite a quick hallway patrol, we didn’t find hide nor hair of the psych nurse. Shalonda cursed her good and proper for disappearing and leaving Willette with teenagers, saying exactly what I’d been thinking. “They’re good kids, but they’re still kids, and it ain’t right, her getting up and going off like that, leaving poor ole Willette with teenagers that’d let a ferret crawl around on top of her.”

  Bitch, bitch, bitch, and a renewed and thorough search of the hospital floor and a peek outside for the nurse, and then I stopped at the front desk to ask if Colleen was still in the hospital. She was. However, the nice volunteer pink lady said Colleen was not accepting visitors, which worked out exceedingly well, since I had no wish to visit her but, rather, to explore her Victorian without any impediments.