Deadly Interest

by Julie Hyzy

  With that in mind, I came to the realization that my parents had probably given up a set themselves. No time like the present to take them back, I thought. I didn’t much like the idea of my keys in Barton’s possession.

  I scraped a handful of them along the inside of the drawer and toppled them onto the table, using my finger to poke among the litter, looking for either “Szatjemski” or “St. James.”

  Nothing.

  I grasped around the bottom of the drawer and pulled out what I hoped were the rest of the keys. I found mine, along with my aunt and uncle’s keys. I moved them all into a single-level pile and gave a little noise of surprise when I came across a completely flat key, attached to nothing. It was obviously a key to a safe deposit vault, but the number stamped on it, thirty-two, was not the number of Mrs. Vicks’ box at Banner Bank.

  A car door slam broke into my thoughts, freezing me in place, head up—listening. After what I thought was a reasonable amount of time, I decided it wasn’t Lulinski returning with Bart, and I returned to the task at hand, moving faster now.

  I rooted around the drawer, opening envelopes and small boxes for the letters I knew had to be there. I came across a tiny red envelope that the safe deposit key had fallen out of. No bank name. No identification, just bold letters warning the owner not to lose the key because replacement costs were hefty. I pocketed that.

  But not one more letter from Theresa.

  When I heard yet another car door slam, I picked up the drawer and returned it to its niche, deciding that it was about time those bank statements from the closet got another look.

  The front door opened, bringing with it a rush of fresh air that made it all the way to the kitchen, where I sat at the table, this time poring over the file full of blue bank statements. “You’re right,” I said to Bart as they came in, Lulinski’s scent of just-finished cigarette following in his wake.

  “I am? About what?”

  I held up the bank statements. “Your mom had a few accounts down the street at Crawford Bank and Trust.”

  “I knew it. I betcha they’re all in my name, too.”

  He caught the withering glances Lulinski and I sent his way, and tried to back-pedal. “I mean,” he said. “Ma had me sign a bunch of signature cards a while ago. I’m just guessing that maybe these are the ones, since they tell me I’m not a signer on the Banner Bank accounts.”

  I started to page through the statements, realizing that the accounts had been opened even before those at Banner Bank had. “Hmm,” I said, aloud.

  “What?” Lulinski and Bart both looked up.

  “Nothing.” I felt as though all the information in my head needed to be arranged properly. That I was missing the big picture, somehow.

  Barton picked up some of the statements I hadn’t gotten through yet. I couldn’t very well stop him from reading his mother’s papers, but I hated the fact that they were now out of order. “Hang on,” I said. Mrs. Vicks had kept a coffee mug full of pens near her phone, I pulled out two and handed one to Barton. “As I go over the statements, I’ll initial them, like this.” I demonstrated, writing “AS” in tiny letters on the upper right hand corner of the page. “You do the same, in the same spot, so I know which ones we’ve each gone over, okay?”

  He nodded, and grabbed the pen from me, looking like a little-boy-lost with no clue as how to sort through the records before him. Wrinkling his nose, he shifted the pen to his left hand, and scribbled on the statement in front of him.

  “You’re left-handed?” I asked.

  The surliness was back. “Yeah. So?”

  Swirling, facts swam around in my brain, doing tantalizing dances that made my heart race with possibility. I started to see what I’d missed, and the pieces of the puzzle dropped, one at a time, until they lined up with a precision that told me I had to be right about this. What it had to do with Mrs. Vicks’ murder, I wasn’t sure, but I needed to push to find out.

  I fingered the safe deposit key in my pocket. I thought I might know where those letters were, and what information they held after all. “Barton,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  His eyes were clearer than they had been an hour before. I hoped to heaven he was sober and lucid enough to access the working parts of his brain. “How did Diana come to live with your mother?”

  “Hell if I know.” He shook his head, looking grateful for a reason to stop examining the bank statements. “One day Ma calls me and says she thinks maybe it’s a good idea if she gets somebody to live with her, you know, to help around the house and drive her places. Next thing I know, she has this Diana here.”

  “You never met Diana before?”

  “Not before that. One time, Ma asked me to come down because she said she had something important to talk about. Diana was living here by then.”

  “And?”

  He made a face of annoyance, shrugging dramatically. “I take a day off of work to make the drive, and when I get here, she just says that she wanted to see me. What was so important about that?”

  Lulinski watched our conversation with interest. He leaned back in his chair, nothing moving but his eyes, flicking back and forth between us as we spoke.

  “What did you think of Diana?”

  He gave me a look that told me he thought I was nuts for asking. “She was a kid. What is she, twenty? Twenty-five? If Ma wanted a roommate and the kid was willing to cough up some rent money and drive her around to her doctors’ appointments and shit, I had nothing to complain about.”

  All of a sudden, Dr. Hooker’s voice came into my brain. He would have told me to stop here. He would have told me to butt out of something that was none of my business. But I couldn’t let this drop. Not now.

  “Who’s Theresa?” I asked

  He looked at me with those small, piggish eyes. “Why?”

  “Because she asked, asshole,” Lulinski chimed in.

  Bart looked at him, then back to me. “She’s my cousin. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  His cousin, I thought. Oh, God. It took me a moment to figure out what to say next.

  “I take it you and Theresa were . . . close?”

  He squinted and his mouth dropped slightly. Like I’d opened the door and let out the dirty little secret that he’d been keeping all these years.

  “When we were kids, yeah. So why?”

  “Maybe the better question is, Barton, how close were you?”

  I paused to let the full implication of the question sink in, then said. “Diana’s left-handed. Her mother always told her that it was a curse.”

  The big guy sat back in his chair, looking like he’d just come off of a spinning carnival ride that had left his brain jumbled and his stomach turned inside-out.

  Behind me, the kitchen clock ticked a rhythmic beat. I didn’t count, but it must have been at least thirty seconds before it all came together in the big guy’s mind.

  Leaning his head forward, he stared at me. “She was supposed to get that taken care of.”

  Taken care of, I thought. With a parent like this, no wonder Diana needed to sort things out with a shrink, though I doubted she knew that Bart was her father. I couldn’t imagine what effect it would have on her self-esteem once she found out.”

  “Nicely put, Bart,” I said, barely able to conceal the contempt in my voice. “But it looks like, for whatever reason she didn’t. Happy Father’s Day.”

  “She said she never wanted to see me again,” he said. “I thought that was okay. I’d go back to my life and she’d go back to hers and I thought . . .”

  I knew what he thought. He neither wanted to assume the financial obligations of fatherhood, nor the emotional burden that came as part of the package. How nice for him to have it all taken away with the promise by his former lover. But she hadn’t followed through, and Mrs. Vicks had stepped in to provide what she could, when her son fell short.

  The sadness weighing on my heart at the moment wasn’t for Barton’s lost years with his d
aughter, nor for his sudden comprehension of all that had gone on behind his back; what hurt was realizing that Diana had missed out on knowing that Mrs. Vicks as her grandmother.

  Pulling the safe deposit key from my pocket, I held it up.

  “I found this while you fellows were out,” I said. “I have a feeling all the proof we want is sitting in a safe deposit box in the bank down the street.”

  Barton shook his head with wide-eyed disbelief. I knew he didn’t need any proof, but I wanted to see what was in that box.

  “Come on,” I said, standing. “I’ll drive.”

  Lulinski glanced at his watch, then sidled over. “I have to get back to the station. Couple of other things I need to follow up.” His wary eyes raked over Bart, then returned to me. “You going to be okay with the big lug?”

  The piss and vinegar attitude was gone, along with the scowl of distaste Barton had worn from the first. He’d paled a bit, looking to me for guidance. I nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

  Lulinski leaned over and whispered, “Neat bit of detective work there, Nancy Drew.”

  I shot him a smile. “Doesn’t do much to solve the murder, though,” I said.

  He made a so-so movement with his head. “Let’s wait and see what other secrets Mrs. Vicks was keeping, shall we?”

  * * * * *

  At the bank, I wasn’t surprised to find Barton’s name as signatory on the safe deposit access card. “Told you I signed one of these,” he said, when the young black girl behind the desk smiled and led him into the vault area.

  Barton and the girl came back around the corner; he carried a very large box. Ten-by-ten inches high and wide, it looked to be about thirty inches deep. The girl showed us to a minuscule examining room. Thank God it was cold in there, because otherwise it would have been unbearable with in such close quarters. The box’s lid hinged about three-quarters of the way down, and opened upward.

  Inside, just as I’d expected, we found hundreds of letters, in all sorts of stationery, separated in rubber-banded bundles by year. I let Barton read through them, content with the knowledge that if something unexpected popped up, he’d let me know.

  He flopped into the only chair in the room, and started reading, in stunned silence.

  I pulled out piles of nine-by-twelve envelopes, each carefully lettered with descriptions of their contents. “Bank,” “Questions,” piqued my interest. I picked those up along with a few others. One, called “Nursing Home Residents” seemed out of place, but I grabbed that too.

  Barton’s fist came up out of the recesses of the box with a bundle of official-looking papers, unbound, but sitting snugly in one of those narrow cardboard legal wallets. While I continued to search, Barton picked through the documents it contained.

  Since one set of hands in the jumble were better than two, I didn’t comment on his lack of participation, but I did keep an eye on him.

  A thick manila envelope, brick-like and adorned with at least a dozen multi-colored rubber bands sat in the back corner of the box. When I pulled it out, and moved aside enough of the tight bands to see what was inside, I gave a little gasp of surprise.

  “What?” Barton asked, instantly on his feet.

  I didn’t have time to respond before he yanked the package out of my hands. “Holy sweet Jesus,” he said. “Yes!” He pulled out the fat wad of cash with an expression of pure delight in his eyes. “Thank you Momma!” he said waving the bundled bills in the air.

  “Barton,” I warned through clenched teeth. “Put that away.”

  “Hell no. I’m counting it. Gotta find out how much I got here.”

  Afraid he’d react like a hungry and ferocious dog whose food was being snatched, I resisted the urge to grab the money from him. “Put it away,” I said again. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to keep cash in a safe deposit vault?” Two beats later, I added. “If they find out that was in here, you’ll have to pay tax. And maybe even a fine.”

  That got him. Staring at me like I was some sort of authority all of a sudden, he rewrapped the money and looked around for a place to hide it.

  “Just . . . here.” I found another, bigger manila envelope and, after emptying its contents, offered it to Barton and told him to stuff it.

  He nodded a thanks, still looking skittish.

  We jumped when a tap came at the door. “Excuse me,” the vault girl said in a honey voice as she peered around the doorway. “The bank will be closing in a few minutes.”

  She’d missed seeing the cash by seconds. I threw Barton a look that said “I told you so,” and then heaved a sigh. There was a lot I wanted to sort through, still. “Do you happen to have a big shopping bag?” I asked. “Maybe a couple?”

  She smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  While she was gone we sorted through the rest of the box as quickly as we could, Barton keeping one eye on the envelope like he was afraid it might jump up and dance away. When he shouted, “Hey!” I stood straight up, startled.

  “Look,” he said, with a little catch of excitement in his voice, “it’s Ma’s will. It’s right here.”

  I started to read over his shoulder, but he thrust the sheaf of papers into my hands. “What’s it say?” he asked.

  The vault girl returned and we started loading up as much as could be stuffed into the two bags she’d provided. We shifted positions, and I got Barton to bag while I continued to read. With the running commentary keeping me vaguely aware of what he was choosing to take and what he chose to leave behind, I skimmed enough to get the gist of the disposition Mrs. Vicks intended.

  “Hang on,” I said.

  He stopped.

  “I want those,” I said, pointing.

  Without questioning me, Barton nodded, grabbing two more file folders, held together by thick crisscrossed rubber bands and paper-clipped sides. Mrs. Vicks had written “Maya, home phone” in pencil on the top folder. That struck me as odd enough that I wanted to know what was inside.

  “What does the will say?” Barton asked, standing too close.

  All of a sudden, a wave of claustrophobia hit me. Too tight. Whoever designed these dinky little rooms certainly didn’t have the patrons’ comfort in mind. “Let’s get outside first, okay?” I said, brushing past him.

  Back in the car, Barton started counting his money. I locked my doors with the master lock, worried that some carjacker might decide to target us and not only get away with my little car, but also Mrs. Vicks’ windfall.

  “How much?” I asked when he finally came up for air.

  “Forty-two hundred,” he said in a hushed, disbelieving voice. A big smile broke over his pudgy face and for a half-second I could see a shadow of the boy that Theresa might have found handsome all those years ago. Eyes wide with delight, he said the words again. “Forty-two hundred.”

  “Okay Bart, I got it. Now pay attention.” Reading over the will, I summarized. “It looks to me that your mother had her will drawn up about twelve years ago. That’d be right after your father died, wouldn’t it?”

  Barton looked like he’d just buzzed in on Jeopardy! and had forgotten the answer. “Yeah, I think so,” he said.

  “I’m guessing,” I continued. “But the timing seems about right.”

  “Come on,” Barton said, his voice high with impatience and fists tight around the cash, “What’s it say about her other money?”

  I wondered again how such a perfectly lovely woman could have birthed such a deplorable son. “It’s split between you and Diana. Evenly.”

  “What?”

  “Per stirpes,” I added.

  “Speak English.”

  “What that means,” I explained, “is that if you would have died before your mother did, and if you didn’t have a will, then your share would have gone to Diana, too. And it means,” I let my gaze float over till it landed on the cash sitting in his lap, “half of that belongs to Diana now, too.”

  “The hell it does.”

  I waved the will. “It
says it right here. Half to you, half to Diana.”

  His face went red in the amount of time it took him to gather the bills into two fat fists. “This is my inheritance,” he said, stuffing the cash into his pockets and spitting as he spoke. “She was my mother and this is mine. I ain’t sharing it with nobody. Got that?”

  “Barton, you’re breaking the law.”

  I could tell it was too much information at once, and he was having difficulty processing it all. “Give me that,” he said, ripping the will from my hands. He began to read it, and I could tell from the blank expression on his face that he didn’t comprehend a word. “I don’t understand,” he said, in classic understatement.

  I shook my head, not understanding a lot of this, myself. “David Dewars told me that your mother wrote up a new will, and that you were the sole beneficiary.”

  Barton’s eyes lit up. “Yeah?”

  His face suffused with puppy-dog eagerness now, like I’d just held up a leash and offered him a walk. I gritted my teeth, but I would have much rather slapped that hopeful look off his face. “Barton,” I said with a sharpness that got his attention, “that doesn’t make sense. Why would your mother have suddenly excluded Diana after all these years?”

  “Maybe because she was having problems. Didn’t you say that low-life boyfriend of hers came back?”

  He had a point.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. Letting loose a deep breath through pursed lips, I turned to regard the big bags in my back seat. “Let me take all this stuff home and go over it, okay?” Even as I said the words, I cringed, wondering when I’d have a chance to examine all this as fully as I needed to. Lucy was counting on a day out tomorrow, and I couldn’t let her down.

  “Why do you get it all?”

  “I have the time to go over it,” I lied.

  “Uh-uh,” he said, his mouth pushed downward in anger. “I don’t trust you.”

  I pressed my fingers into my eye sockets, trying to force the building aggravation out of my head. There was no way I was going to give up this stash of information. Not to Big Bart, anyway, “Okay, how’s this for a compromise?” I began, thinking it through as I spoke, “We’ll go together to the copy place down the street. I’ll make a duplicate of everything we picked up,” shaking my head, I amended, “except for the letters.” There were too many of them, and I doubted they held much more than an ongoing narrative of Diana’s life, anyway.