Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  Then, without further interrupting Shalonda and Armando’s school of soul, I stuck my head outside and looked at the tree house. And sniffed the air. And followed my nose through the faint path in the high grass of Willette’s untamed backyard, right up to the tree-house ladder, and right up into that tree, into the house where my nephew and his girlfriend had recently been engaging in an indiscretion.

  In the tree house, Becky and Bobby were sitting with pleasantly blank expressions on their faces, no doubt having been warned by the sound of my climbing up the homemade ladder to compose themselves for adults on the prowl. But despite their blameless little faces, the evidence of recently smoked marijuana hung, diffused but potent, in the air. I mean, there is just no way to hide that scent.

  “You need to be way more careful about doing this,” I said.

  “Doing what?” Becky asked, her face wholly the sweetly composed face of an innocent.

  “I can smell the pot all the way down at the back door.”

  Nobody admitted anything, and I sat down on the sleeping bag, and waited.

  “Aunt Lilly, Becky and I do need to talk to you. Alone.”

  “I think we are alone,” I said.

  Bobby looked around as if he didn’t believe me. Becky continued to smile at me with that sweet, innocent grin.

  “So?” I mean, I didn’t have all day for teenage confessions.

  “We…er, Becky and me, we were…”

  “See, we were up here in the tree house, the night your momma shot that Ray Glenn man.”

  I perked right up at Becky’s statement. This was way more interesting than what I’d expected. “What did you see?”

  “I’m not…we aren’t, really, you know, sure,” Bobby said.

  “Well, I’m sure,” Becky said. “We heard a noise, I guess it was the shot, and so I got up and looked down at the house, and then this man came running out the back door, you know, the kitchen door?”

  “Who was it?”

  “It was Lonnie Ledbetter,” Becky said. “And he was carrying a picnic basket.”

  Whoa, Lonnie was there, inside the house, the night Willette shot Ray Glenn? With a picnic basket?

  Or the night Willette was accused of shooting Ray Glenn. Maybe Lonnie shot him?

  “Why didn’t you tell Demetrious? Or Dan? Or somebody?”

  Yeah, I sounded a bit like a parent there, but it was an obvious question, and somebody needed to ask it.

  “We talked about it,” Bobby said. “We were…but, you know, Mr. Ledbetter was a big, important county commissioner, and we figured he’d just say we were lying, or something, and everybody’d believe him and not us.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Becky added, “and, you know, we’re just kids, and then we were…you know?”

  Yeah, I knew. Smoking pot.

  I could see their point.

  Stoned teenagers accuse a popular county commissioner of fleeing the scene of a shooting.

  It wouldn’t have played out that well for Becky and Bobby no matter who believed or didn’t believe them.

  “You know how Momma is,” Bobby said. “We had already told everybody we were studying at the library, so we knew we’d get in trouble if we told anybody we were up here in the tree house.”

  Well, yeah, as it turned out, they’d called that one pretty good on the getting-in-trouble part, but not exactly in the way they meant.

  chapter 45

  Folks who go where they are not supposed to be often learn things they would not otherwise necessarily have the chance to know.

  This had been, and no doubt would continue to be, a rationale behind my improving skills at breaking and entering. Okay, okay, I need to practice more on the lock-picking thing, and maybe learn to climb trees better. But look at what just one illegal tour through Lonnie’s house had brought me: An unsigned deed and a picnic basket with precisely the amount it appeared Lonnie had owed my mother on the purchase price of my grandmother’s old home.

  And now, with this added information, that being Lonnie fleeing the scene of the Ray Glenn shooting, surely I could figure out this big frigging mess.

  I mean, how hard could it be? If, as it now appeared, Lonnie was definitely a bad guy smack in the middle of this circle-melee, and Lonnie was, shall we say in Bugfest-ese, pert near dumb as a post, then it stood to reason his fellow conspirators might be equally challenged in the detail-planning aspects of attempted and actual murder.

  I was close. I could taste it.

  I needed to act upon this new knowledge.

  Instead, here I was, sitting in a tree house with two teenagers who were supposed to have gone to Sunday school and church rather than mellow out on a cool autumn day with a little marijuana.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Where?” Becky said.

  I didn’t know yet, so I didn’t answer, but just climbed down the tree and jogged back into Willette’s house.

  When we paraded into the den, we found Shalonda teaching Armando how to dance cool to some old R&B records. Becky immediately joined them in dancing, and Bobby stood by like somebody who didn’t have any rhythm.

  “Get in there,” I said, and shoved him toward Becky. “Just grab her arm and shake to the music.”

  But Bobby shook his head no, and slumped his shoulders and glared at Armando.

  I needed to run all this newfound information by Shalonda to try to figure it out via the old-fashioned method of talking. But I wasn’t going to interrupt her dance lesson for Armando.

  Becky, I noted, needed no dance lessons.

  So, I went and slumped next to my gloomy nephew. And looked around the living room. Yeah, it was a lot better than when we had all started cleaning it up, but I still didn’t want to hang out in the place—there were some nasty rooms and nasty memories both. Patti had pretty much cleared out the valuable antiques and family heirlooms, which made me think she was pretty sure ole Willette wasn’t coming back to this house and nobody would fuss about the fact Patti helped herself to Willette’s good stuff. I knew I wasn’t going to make an issue out of it, figuring Patti deserved every stick and piece of furniture in the house if she was willing to put up with all the Cleary weirdness.

  The Motown concert came to an end when the record stopped, and I jumped in to get the kids somewhere else so Shalonda and I could concentrate on figuring out what was going on. After all, she knew Lonnie way better than I did, maybe she would have some insight as to why he might have gone to Willette’s with Ray Glenn, and why, ultimately, this had led to both Ray Glenn’s and his own death. As this was not a discussion I wanted Armando, Bobby, or Becky listening to, I had to shepherd them somewhere else, where I could keep their ears all innocent and sweet so they could concentrate on lying about church and smoking dope.

  “We need to go,” I said, looking straight at Shalonda in a way I hoped suggested private talk.

  “But Dad’s bringing Mr. Chick for all of us,” Bobby said, in a way that suggested adolescent munchies.

  Oh, yeah, great, that’s a big help to me, I thought, and wondered how much longer I could live on bottled water, coffee, Save the Forest trail mix bars, and organic apples. The only decent meal I’d had since I got here was courtesy of Simon and Annier’s Courtyard, and I wondered in passing if they were open for Sunday dinner.

  “Yeah, I like Mr. Chick,” Becky said. “They have really great food.”

  At the sound of Mr. Chick repeated, like a summons from the Fried Dead Bird Netherworld, Shalonda, who had been too grief-stricken and worried to eat any breakfast, cocked her head toward the door. “Reckon I could eat too,” she said.

  Frigging great. Dead and near-dead, mayhem and possible drug smuggling and land fraud, plus the missing chief of police, and we were going to have to stop for a damn picnic in a dirty house.

  chapter 46

  Hiding in the tree house from the snare of the seductive smell of fried chicken, my own stomach gnawed by hunger, I tried to marshal my inner resources and to think this t
hrough.

  So, here’s what I had so far: As soon as Simon offered to buy Lonnie’s house, Lonnie had hotfooted it into the courthouse and filed a forged deed to show he owned the place. Simon or his title-search company didn’t know Willette’s signature from Adam’s house cat, and so had not suspected anything with the deed when they did a title search, and poor, tricked Simon had purchased the property from Lonnie without discovering Willette’s signature was forged. Then Willette phoned Lonnie and Simon on the same day—it’d probably be a good bet that call was about Grandmom’s house. That evening, after Willette’s phoning set something in motion, Lonnie and Ray Glenn had gone over to her house. Given the unsigned deed and the sixty-five thousand we found at Lonnie’s, maybe he had gone to pay off the last of what he had owed Willette, and to get her to sign the quit-claim deed.

  So, like, maybe this didn’t have a thing to do with the damn deep freeze?

  Maybe Ray Glenn was just Lonnie’s muscleman?

  Maybe this didn’t completely add up.

  Still, the idea that Lonnie and Ray Glenn had gone to Willette’s to pay her what Lonnie owed and then get her to sign that unsigned deed kept playing in my head, as steadily as Stevie Wonder had been playing on the old turntable.

  If everything had gone right, Lonnie would have had ample opportunity to substitute the new quit-claim deed with Willette’s real signature for the one he had forged. After all, he had been a county commissioner, who naturally would have spent time in the courthouse, and no one would have thought it odd if he’d stepped into the property records office.

  Yet something had gone wrong. Here I was purely guessing, but it looked like a good wager that Willette had refused to take the money and sign the deed. Given her refusal, maybe Ray Glenn, being Lonnie’s henchman, had tried to force her. And, of course, if they had tried to force her to sign the new deed, perhaps, maybe, they had tried to kill her, possibly by forcing a bunch of pills down her throat. Pills Lonnie might have brought with him. That suggested strongly to me that Lonnie was the source of Willette’s downer collection.

  But wait a minute, that didn’t make good sense. Why bring the cash to pay off his debt to Willette if he was planning on killing her?

  Maybe Ray Glenn had a different agenda?

  Maybe the bruises around her jaw happened in the ER? Like, maybe, someone had tried to OD her there, and not in her own home? Which made me remember the strange saga of Dr. Weinstein and his steadfast refusal to give Willette over to Dr. Hodo’s care.

  And then there was the missing Demetrious, who had access and means to pull off the death-by-red-ants attempt, though no motive, as far as I could see.

  Whatever guesswork was in all this, and whatever Lonnie and Ray Glenn had planned for Willette, one thing was for sure. Somebody had shot Ray Glenn, and things had gone quickly downhill from there.

  No doubt, Lonnie had run out the back door instead of hanging around to explain to Demetrious why he was there with cash in a picnic basket, an unsigned backdated deed, and a dead man on the filthy carpet.

  But wouldn’t Willette eventually straighten up enough to tell Demetrious what was going on the night she shot Ray Glenn, including the fact that Lonnie was there?

  Oh, yeah, okay, that would make Lonnie the lead suspect in the question of who tried to kill Willette, first with dope and then with ants. Being practically a neighbor, he probably knew about Demetrious’s roadkill and buzzard haven and could have siphoned off some red ants. And his motive would be obvious enough from my theory.

  Okay, so that pulled Demetrious off the hook for the attempt on Willette.

  But here was the thing that wasn’t obvious at all: Who had killed Lonnie?

  And why?

  Okay, so I was fuzzy on the details here, but the ground work was being laid out nicely. First thing, though, I needed to check in on my mother and her round-the-clock psychiatric nurses and child police officers.

  I climbed down from the tree house and eased back into Willette’s living room, where the Mr. Chick picnic was winding down, and I looked about me, taking stock of my helpmates: the stoned, the indignant, the worried, and the merely puzzled, plus one albino ferret. While I stared at them, the thought that hung itself out like a bright red flag against a blue sky was this: There was still a dangerous person out there somewhere, and I didn’t have a clue who it was.

  chapter 47

  Becky was a show-off.

  I guess it wasn’t good enough to just be sixteen, and blond, and cute, and a good dancer, but she also had to be the smart one, the one that knew secrets, the drama queen.

  So it was that with their bellies full, and Patti trying to organize an antique-moving party with the available strong backs, Becky noticed Armando and Bobby were no longer vying for her attention. While Becky was noticing this, and Patti was organizing, Shalonda had cut everybody slices of pound cake from one Patti brought from the hospital. Nobody even pretended to listen to me when I tried to point out we didn’t know who cooked it, what was in it, and how clean the kitchen from which it had come had been. The fact they were eating on paper plates on the floor in the living room of Willette’s house suggested that cleanliness issues didn’t concern anybody but me. Still, I had to try.

  “Armando,” I said, trying to sound like a stern mother, or maybe a hired nanny with good-behavior issues, “don’t let that ferret eat off your plate.”

  “Oh, let me get him a plate,” Becky said, sweet as if it were Eleanor sitting on the floor with her face in Armando’s plate, and not a strange white cousin to a polecat. And before I could object, Johnny was standing in his own plate and eating pound cake.

  Then everyone went back to ignoring Becky in favor of making excuses to Patti.

  So, naturally, Becky had to drop the big one, rather than let Patti have center stage.

  “You know Simon paid Lonnie four hundred thousand for your grandmomma’s old place,” she said to me in a fake stage whisper.

  Lonnie sold that place for $400,000?

  “Not possible,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” Shalonda said.

  “No way,” Patti and Dan said, in concert.

  “Is too. I saw the paperwork. My mom is a real estate attorney and she handled the sale for Mr. Ledbetter. I work over at her office sometimes after school and she had me making photocopies of all the paperwork on the sale.”

  I gave Becky my best trust-me smile, and started my cross-examination.

  “Was it the final contract for sale you saw? Or an offer? And, when was it dated? And, tell me again, what was the price?”

  Becky, the teen vixen, gave me one of those blank-slate-but-pleasant stares perfected by seasoned witnesses. And didn’t say a word.

  Uh-oh. Too eager on my part. Breathe, smile, relax.

  “I bet you’re just remembering someone else’s contract,” I said, trying too late to fake a certain nonchalance.

  “That’s an awful lot of money for that place,” Dan said.

  “Mom did say no little piece a land, with part of it wet, and no house that old, what with it just being a two/one, was worth that. Even with all the fruit and nut trees,” Becky said, turning her head slightly toward Dan.

  Part of me took umbrage at Becky’s mother’s dismissal of my grandmother’s place, and I didn’t care if she was a trained professional—it was forty acres, and it was only wet when we had a major storm or hurricane, which of course nowadays, with global warming, was four or five times a year, but hey, those serial monster hurricanes hadn’t impacted Florida coastal property prices. Plus, Grandmom’s house was solid brick with hardwood floors, a giant front porch, a blueberry patch, a dozen pecan trees, and a small peach orchard. And it backed up to Little Sleepy Lake, and had a good clay private drive leading down to the house from off a county road.

  But even I, seeing the property in its most positive terms, had to remember it was located just outside Bugfest, in a rural county. In Bugfest terms, old farmland without saleable timber st
ill went for $3,000–4,000 an acre, and an older brick house with only two bedrooms and one bath, no matter how nice, rarely sold for more than $100,000.

  Older country houses in Bugfest just didn’t go for that much. One reason so many people from up North were eyeing the county for retirement was our cheap real estate. So, no matter how you cut it, Simon had seriously overpaid—that is, if he had paid $400,000 for the place. I figured quickly in my head that the top price for Grandmom’s place would have been $260,000. And that would have made that sale a real sweetheart deal.

  So, if there was any truth to Becky’s tale, that certainly explained why Lonnie had used the “one dollar and other consideration” phrase on the deed to hide the real sale price from the nosy eyes of anyone who knew how to look up public records.

  So, what gives, I wondered.

  “Are you sure—” I started to ask.

  “I’m sure,” Becky said. “I have an excellent memory.”

  And no reason to lie about it that I could imagine. Still, Becky might be mistaken.

  I aimed another round of questions at Becky, quickly abandoning my previous pretense at nonchalance. But she stuck to her original story. Yet even in her center-stage stoned zone, my shooting twenty questions at her must have signaled her that she’d crossed a line in blurting out that original story. While Becky didn’t back off the $400,000, she wouldn’t tell me a thing more.

  But maybe she’d told me enough, I thought, and rocked back on my heels on the floor, and stared at her cute little face. So, Becky’s mom had handled the sale between Lonnie and Simon? That might be the conflict of interest she had mentioned to Hank. I mean, if Lonnie was her client and a county commissioner, she could hardly represent him in a sale and then turn right around and represent Hank and Jubal in an eminent domain lawsuit, where Lonnie and the other commissioners would be front and center on the opposing side.