Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  Well, very ethical of Becky’s mom on that conflict-of-interest thing, but apparently she had not impressed firmly enough upon her offspring the legal and ethical importance of keeping a client’s secret.

  And if Becky was telling the truth, then her mother, as a real estate attorney, knew Simon had overpaid for the property.

  Of course, as she was Lonnie’s attorney, it wasn’t necessarily Becky’s mom’s place to tell Simon he was being an idiot, but she still might know something about why Simon had overpaid. And she might know if Lonnie had, in fact, ever actually finished paying my mother for the property.

  “I’m going to go find out if he really paid that much,” I said. “It sounds like up North prices, but surely Simon realized he wasn’t up North anymore.”

  “How?” Shalonda asked.

  “How did he know he wasn’t up North anymore? You’d think a trip to the IGA would show him that. You think they sell pigs’ feet in a jar at the grocery stores up North?”

  “No, how are you going to find out?”

  “I’m going to go ask Becky’s mother.”

  Becky protested, but I figured I was holding a few secrets on her behalf, for which she owed me, and I wouldn’t mind pointing this out to her in private if she made a big deal of my seeing her mom. Further, this overpayment might possibly be related to why Lonnie was dead, though I could hardly imagine how yet, and Becky would just have to take her chances once her mother knew she’d blabbed important client secrets to a relative stranger.

  I gathered up Shalonda, the kids, and Johnny, who had cake crumbs in his whiskers, leaving a protesting Patti behind with only poor old Dan to move antiques for her.

  We all piled in the car, and Becky reluctantly told me how to get to her house. When we pulled up outside, I rolled down the windows, turned off the car, and told Bobby and Armando to stay put while I ran in just long enough to chat with Becky’s mom. Becky, swathed in Johnny Winter, and Shalonda followed me.

  I thought the yard a tad overly manicured, and the house itself a bit too cluttered with decorative stuff. But it was all a nice, clean contrast to Willette’s, and I wasn’t afraid to inhale.

  Inside, Becky made the introductions, and I could tell right off where Becky got her cute; her momma was Cute with a capital C, with big blue eyes, a pert nose, a wide mouth, and what appeared to be a wholly natural and not artificially enhanced but still rather nice body, despite a little early-middle-age pear-shapedness coming to it. If she asked, I had one word for her: StairMaster.

  Her name was Rebecca, and I thought it was cool that she had named her daughter after her, but when I said so, she didn’t seem to care.

  With Becky talking a mile a minute by way of introduction, including an explanation about how, being the manipulative devil that I was, I had conned her into telling me about the sale price on Lonnie’s land, Becky’s mom was not necessarily warming right up to me.

  She and Shalonda greeted each other friendly enough, though, and that gave me some hope.

  “Why are you wearing a fur scarf?” Rebecca asked Becky.

  As if he understood Rebecca, Johnny perked up and oonked.

  “Her son ran away from home, and brought this guy with him,” Becky said. “He’s a ferret and his name is Johnny Winter, after some old rock guy. Her son is waiting in the car, but let me take Johnny for a while.”

  “He’s not my son,” I said.

  Before we got farther off track, I shooed Becky out of the living room, but not before Rebecca gave her a scolding look. Becky offered a repentant postscript: “I’m sorry but she tricked me.”

  Rather than explain that Becky had volunteered information while in a pound-cake-and-pot zone of reduced mental capacity and a hot need to be the center of attention, I started asking Rebecca about the sale price on Lonnie’s house and forty acres. Shalonda took the opportunity to stand awkwardly around. My best-phrased questions netted a single, simple reply.

  “I think it’s safe to say that is none of your business,” Rebecca said.

  Of course, I hadn’t for one moment really expected Rebecca the grown-up to verify what Becky the teenager had told me, but I was a good student of watching people’s faces, and the oh-no look on Rebecca’s face when I tossed out the $400,000 figure told me a lot.

  Not as much as, say, looking at the sales contract would have, but one works with what one can get. But, at the thought of the sales contract, I suddenly looked around at the windows in Rebecca’s fine little house and tried to remember the kind of lock on the front door, and then realized copies of the paperwork would be at her office, and I need not plan on breaking into her house. I did, however, need to find out where her office was, and figured asking Shalonda later would be less suspicious than asking Rebecca where her office was and then breaking into it within the same twenty-four-hour stretch.

  All of this pondering on my part created a pause in our conversation, and when I finally filled it, I did so with a side step. “What about with all the new land speculation? All the new and proposed development?” I asked. “Hasn’t that driven land prices way up?”

  “Yes. And, see there, you have answered your own question.”

  Not quite. What Shalonda had told me suggested otherwise for my grandmom’s former farm. Plus, I still didn’t buy for one minute that a piece of property that had sold for $180,000 just three years ago, and at best could have appreciated another $80,000 or $100,000, could reasonably sell for $400,000. In Florida, yes, with one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, but not in rural southwest Georgia.

  While I was doing math in my head, the front door slammed and Bobby and Armando came tromping into the living room. “It’s too hot to wait in the car,” Armando said. “And it’s boring.”

  “Hi, Miss Rebecca,” Bobby said. “May we come in?”

  Rebecca smiled at Bobby in a way that told me she wholly approved of him as dating material, and I wondered if she suspected about the tree house and the marijuana, but wasn’t about to rat out Bobby or Becky. Instead, I introduced Armando, who, to his credit and Bonita’s, knew the polite responses.

  Becky materialized out of the back of the house, Johnny perched on her shoulder, and took each young man by the arm, pulling them together in a way they didn’t seem to like.

  “We will go into the kitchen while you two finish talking,” Becky said to her mother and me. “I’ll serve them Coke and pound cake. I’m going to use the gold china.” And she flounced out of the living room, toward the kitchen.

  Whoa! Three transformations in fifteen minutes, from stoned heartthrob drama princess, to contrite daughter, to Junior League hostess. This girl had serious lawyer potential. I made a mental note to stay in touch with her in case she needed extra mentoring.

  “Use the blue china,” Rebecca said. Then, eyeing me, she explained, “It’s the everyday china.”

  “We do need to get those boys back to Dan’s,” I said, ignoring the insult that we only deserved the everyday stuff and figuring this was as much as I was going to learn from Becky’s mom. Also I did not want to spend the afternoon at a tea party with teenagers, regardless of the china pattern.

  Following Rebecca, I peered into the kitchen, where the kids had gone, Johnny in tow, and decided from the looks of things that Armando was pretty much planning on moving in with Becky and Rebecca, and that Becky was, indeed, using the gold china.

  Rebecca apparently decided not to make an issue of it, and offered Shalonda and me some iced tea. While we were declining on the basis of needing to make a quick escape, Johnny untangled himself from Becky and scampered across the floor straight to Rebecca. She picked him up and he did a ferret swoon when she cuddled him on her generous chest.

  “Why, he is just a little sweetheart,” Rebecca said.

  All this time, I’d thought Johnny didn’t like women. Turns out, he just didn’t like me. Or maybe he had a thing for blondes. He wouldn’t be the first male if he did.

  Putting aside the ferret’
s peccadilloes, I looked at Shalonda. “We’ve got to go.”

  “Bobby and your son are welcome to stay. Don’t worry, I’ll be home all afternoon and will look out for them,” Rebecca said, in a tone that suggested she figured me for child-neglect issues at the best.

  “He’s not my son,” I said.

  “Leave ’em here,” Shalonda said. “They’re having fun.”

  Oh, yeah, whatever. So, after I made Armando promise to stay with Bobby, and to keep an eye out for Johnny, Shalonda and I left them.

  How was I to know they were going to cross paths with a person without a soul?

  chapter 48

  A few years back, my junior associate had stolen Newly, my boyfriend, and before that, a much-younger nurse had vamped away a doctor I’d imagined I’d loved. Given that history, I was sensitive on the issue of women being dumped.

  So it was that when Rebecca followed Shalonda and me out to the Honda and revealed her own paranoia in this direction, I was a great deal more tolerant of the fact she was wasting my time than I might otherwise have been.

  Just as I had been about to hop into the driver’s side of my car, Rebecca said, “I’d like to speak to you, if I may.”

  Oh, nice and polite. “Talk,” I said.

  “She means alone,” Shalonda said, and got in the passenger’s side. “Don’t be long, I got to be calling around and seeing if Demetrious has showed up.”

  “Cell phone’s in the glove compartment, help yourself,” I said.

  Curious, I followed Rebecca off to the side of her front yard.

  “I know a lot about you,” she said.

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  “Look, it’s a small town, I’ve been knowing Patti and Dan ever since Bobby and Becky started dating. I know you’re one of those people who went off to law school planning to be Atticus Finch and you’re all high and mighty in Sarasota saving the downtrodden and all.”

  Not even close, on either point, I thought, but if that was the spin Patti Lea had put on my legal career, it wasn’t my place to correct her to her friend. Besides, I wanted to let Rebecca have free range to express herself so I could see where she’d end up.

  “Well, I’m not. That is, not one of those people who wanted to be Atticus Finch, see,” Rebecca said. “I grew up here, younger than you, of course, but I didn’t figure I was going to marry any of these local guys and I didn’t want to end up working in the bank, handling everybody else’s money. I wanted my own money. So I went to law school, and I went off to Atlanta to get rich, but now I’ve got Becky to think about, and you can just forget about coming in here with your perfect hair and skinny ass and taking Hank away from me.”

  On reflex, I started to say thank you. I am proud of my hair. I should be, as I pay enough to Brock, my hairdresser, to keep it a perfect, long, black pageboy. Then the romance angle hit me. Hank? That was what this was about?

  “He’ll be a good father to Becky, not like that…that last one,” Rebecca said.

  I assured Rebecca that while I doubted she was that much younger than me, she could relax on the Hank matter, as I was engaged to a perfectly nice man, who, by the way, was a world-class criminal-defense attorney and damn good-looking and rich as sin. (So okay, I was exaggerating a little, how exactly was she going to check all that out?) Further, I assured her that Hank and I were old friends, nothing more, and I appreciated her directness, and I left.

  Despite Rebecca’s concerns, as far as I could see, the only one dead-set on Hank and me getting married was Jubal, and if I couldn’t outwit a matchmaking old ex-logger, then I had no business being a lawyer.

  chapter 49

  My next goal was to drive by Rebecca’s office and scout it out for a late-night return so I might tour her files, looking for that sales contract between Lonnie and Simon.

  Shalonda wanted to go home and look for signs of her missing husband.

  Naturally, that trumped my making plans for a jump back on the B and E wagon, so, after I finagled directions to Rebecca’s office for future use, off we went to Shalonda’s house.

  Demetrious was not anywhere around, but the yellow crime tape by the barn and the deputy sheriff snooping around the house put us both in a dark, gloomy mood.

  Shalonda collapsed at the kitchen table, while I hoped she wouldn’t cry and decided to make tea for both of us. After checking the inside of the teapot for mule hair or worse, I boiled the water, and found the tea bags—Luzianne—in the cupboard, and made hot tea.

  Shalonda sipped, and looked less like she might cry. “When Demetrious comes home,” she said, “I’m going to tell him about that money.”

  With that pronouncement, Shalonda pulled out a pound cake and cut off a piece. “Want some?” she asked, and I shook my head, wondering what kind of security Rebecca might have for her law office.

  This being Bugfest, a low-crime zone, maybe Rebecca had no security, and maybe a cheap lock, I hoped.

  “Sure?” Shalonda asked, waving a piece of pound cake right under my nose. While I inhaled the buttery smell and whimpered, I tried to counsel Shalonda on her diet.

  “Would you shut up about food. You got the two college degrees, you need to be figuring out what in the hell’s going on, and who killed Lonnie, and where Demetrious is. And what this has got to do with Willette.”

  Good points.

  “Stop daydreaming and get to work,” Shalonda said, and shoved the last of her pound cake into her mouth, and then smacked me lightly across the top of my shoulders with her napkin.

  Okay, yeah, right, I was suddenly all for doing something rash right now, especially since I’d have to at least wait till midnight to try and get into Rebecca’s filing cabinets.

  But even rash needed a direction. Where did we go from here?

  Rather than run around in circles, I decided the thing to do was gather more information. Starting with the source in front of me.

  “So, tell me about Lonnie.”

  Shalonda sniffed a bit, a real sad look coming into her eyes. “He was not a bad man. Not really.”

  Well, okay, so far you could have fooled me on that “not a bad man” thing, but then lovers see the object of their lust differently than the rest of the world does. The lawyer in me took over. “Let’s talk facts, not emotional supposition,” I said. “What was he doing up North before he came back here?”

  “Well, you know he was in Nashville for a while. Long time, and he had him that hit song—” and she paused to hum the chorus. “You know he wrote that song ’bout me, don’t you? Used to call me up and tell me I was his own, true sweetheart.”

  “Yeah, I know that song. About you, wow, that’s so cool,” I said, but I was thinking Lonnie probably told that to every woman, like his infamous “you’re the one who got away” line.

  “Yeah, it was a great song. But after that, I don’t know, nothing seemed to happen for him.”

  “I heard he’d never got anywhere after that, and he left Nashville,” I said. “Dan and Patti used to tell me stuff about him, time to time, like when he went up North to run his own business.”

  “Yeah, he did. Ran a little sporting goods store. He was part-owner.”

  “Where?”

  “In Minnesota.”

  Minnesota? Where they had snow? Serious snow? No wonder he failed, he was too cold to think. Why did a man from the semi-rain-forest heat and humidity of Bugfest, Georgia, go to the land of deep snow to make his way in the world?

  I asked Shalonda just that.

  “’Cause that stuck-up woman with the foul mouth he married was from up there. He followed her home, then married her.” Shalonda shook her head, her beaded hair lifting and circling. “She’s his whiskey, I reckon. They’re not happy far as I could tell, but, Lord, that man was drunk on her.”

  Shalonda paused for a moment, and the look on her face was sad. “I reckon he needed me ’cause a man needs a little softness, some tenderness.”

  Being an attorney, not a relationship counselo
r, I merely nodded, then went straight back to the cross-examination.

  “What happened to the store?”

  “It went broke.”

  “So, when he came back to Bugfest, he didn’t have much money, right?”

  “I don’t know ’bout that. I didn’t ask him ’bout his money.”

  “But soon after he came back, he got him the appliance store, right?” Perhaps he got local financing on the basis of having been almost the next Vince Gill, but I didn’t figure Shalonda would know where he got his money to start another store. So, I went with what she would know. “Where was he living? I mean before he bought my grandmom’s house.”

  “He and that bitch wife were renting a little old house downtown. I don’t think she was real happy about it.”

  “So then three years ago, Willette sells him my grandmom’s place for $180,000. Right? And then Simon buys it from him two weeks ago for $400,000? That is, according to Becky.”

  “Yeah, well Lonnie never said nothing to me about getting no $400,000 for your grandmomma’s place. You can bet I’d’ve mentioned that to you.”

  That amount being so fishy, I could understand why Lonnie might not have told Shalonda or anyone else. Of course, understanding why Lonnie wasn’t bragging about the sale price didn’t explain why on earth Simon so overpaid for that property.

  Maybe Lonnie was blackmailing Simon somehow. But with Lonnie being the one who was probably dealing in stolen goods, defrauding poor people, maybe supplying Willette with drugs off the Internet, and maybe having a hand in some smuggling, it seemed more likely that Simon could be blackmailing him.

  “When did Simon come to town?” I asked.

  “Can’t give you an exact date, but ’bout a year ago.”

  “When did the county start planning on damming up the creek and making a big lake?”

  “Oh, they been talking ’bout that near two decades. You come home now and then, you’d know these things. Corps of Engineers approved the plans ’bout a year ago. Maybe a little more than a year.”