Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series)
Page 21
As she sipped, she walked to the houseboat with Michael, hand-in-hand. The little boy chewed slowly on his banana. As they approached the door, he finished it on cue, and handed her the slimy banana skin. This event set up the next part of her plan: to ask Didi politely where the trash can was, giving Faye the opportunity to check its contents while getting rid of the peel.
This plan would fail if Didi took the nasty banana peel and threw it away herself, but Faye couldn’t imagine that she was that good a hostess. It would also fail if Didi and Steve recycled their beer cans. This would be an unlikely display of good citizenship, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Proving her resourcefulness, she had developed Plan B, the Coca-Cola. If Faye didn’t get access to the kitchen trash because Didi threw Michael’s banana peel away for him, she would at least have located the trash can. At that point, she would suck down the last of her Coke, walk over to the can where Didi had just dumped the banana peel, and toss it in for herself.
If she did get access to the trash but saw no beer cans, all was not lost, because the Coke can served a dual purpose. The absence of cans in the trash would be a clear sign that there was a recycling bin full of cans somewhere, because Faye had seen beers in their hands as they sat on the boat’s deck just the night before. And she knew in her heart of hearts that both Didi and Steve had both been too hungover that morning to have taken out the trash already. To get access to the recycling bin, all she’d need to do was brandish the empty Coke can and ask where she should throw it. Didi and Steve had to put their empty beer cans somewhere, and either the banana peel or the Coke would take Faye straight to them.
Faye was proud of the banana-Coke plan. Too bad it was unnecessary. When Amande opened the door and let them in, she saw that Steve and Didi couldn’t even be bothered to throw away their empties. The kitchen counter was covered with Coors Light cans and Busch cans, in equal quantities. If forced to guess whether it was Didi or Steve drinking the light beer, Faye was going to go with Didi.
She wished Joe were there so she could give him a high five or a fist bump or something. Then Tebo rose from the couch. Damn. How could she have forgotten that a third person of drinking age was hanging around the houseboat? Maybe because he didn’t seem to be there too awful much.
Maybe Tebo was the Busch drinker. Maybe Steve and Tebo both drank Busch. Or maybe the person hanging around Amande’s island was some other Busch drinker entirely. It wasn’t like they were looking for someone who only drank a private-label microbrew. Still, Faye noticed that, despite the open door into the room where Didi was sleeping, Steve was nowhere to be seen. Was he already out of bed and in his boat, heading toward an island that didn’t completely belong to him? Maybe. Steve wasn’t around much in the daytime, either.
Didi and Tebo waved good-bye as Faye took Amande off their hands once again. It was only a five-minute drive to Bernard Reuss’ office, located in an unrestored Victorian house that was, like most homes and businesses in the area, just a stone’s throw from Plaquemines Highway. Faye could see the levee from Reuss’ front yard. His house must be sturdily built to have stood through more than a century of hurricanes.
Reuss’ office, in his old home’s parlor, was nicer than Faye would have expected. Maybe the man did have other clients who had actual money. The upholstered guest chair was worn but comfortable, and the aged wood floor had been recently waxed. Reuss waved Amande into it while he moved a second chair from the dining room for Faye. Then he found a box of brightly colored toys to keep Michael happy.
“I’ve been thinking about you, Amande. It’s way past time for us to have this conversation. It’s good that you called.”
Faye was glad he’d admitted that a sixteen-year-old had been forced to light a fire under her lawyer to get him to do his job.
“Your case has stayed front-and-center on my schedule, though. I’ve had four visitors come here separately to talk to me about you—Steve, Didi, Stan, and Tebo.”
Steve and Didi were Miranda’s other two heirs, and Stan had a plausible interest in the property of the woman to whom he was still technically married, so Faye had no doubt why they’d been to visit Reuss. But Tebo?
Maybe he just couldn’t make himself believe that he had no claim on anything Miranda had left behind. Faye had been wondering why he’d lingered in the area after he and Didi had decided not to waste money on funerals for their dead loved ones. By all rights, he should have gone back wherever he came from by now. Maybe he stayed because of a vain hope that Louisiana’s weird inheritance laws might still cough up something for him.
“What did they want?” Faye asked.
“Money,” Reuss answered in a “you idiot” tone of voice. Something about his tone made Michael look up from his toys and giggle. Faye realized that she could imagine this unprepossessing man dealing successfully with a jury and a judge, after all.
Then Reuss said, “I take that back. I’m not a hundred percent sure they were all sniffing around for money. Didi and Steve certainly were. Stan wasn’t quite so straightforward, but his intent was obvious. They all wanted information that would help them get their hands on Miranda’s estate. I reminded each of them that I was Amande’s attorney, not theirs.”
The words, “And I’m not yours, either,” hung unspoken in the air.
“I talked to Tebo a little longer than the others, because he has a bit of stealth about him. He just wanted to talk about whether Didi was really going to get custody of Amande. I don’t think he believed the legal system could be that stupid. Maybe he was hoping to get her and her inheritance for himself, but he didn’t say so and he was faking concern for my client pretty well, so I talked to him for quite a while. I wouldn’t trust him with a gerbil I liked, but I did talk to him.”
Then he turned away from Faye toward his client. “Amande, it is very likely that the state of Louisiana will leave you in Didi’s care until you’re eighteen.”
“She’s really going to be my guardian?”
“Actually we use the word ‘tutor’ instead of ‘guardian’ here in Louisiana, but I don’t like the term. It confuses people. And since she’s the easy and obvious candidate, yes, I do think the state will put you in her care. You’re old enough that they’ll listen to your opinion, but the only other realistic option I see is foster care. You’ll have to decide how you feel about that option.”
Faye couldn’t help herself. “Didi? A tutor?”
“I know,” Reuss said. “She’s not likely to teach my client much, other than how to drink beer, but—”
“Vodka shots, actually,” Faye observed.
Reuss cringed. Faye couldn’t help noticing that there were seven photos scattered around the office, featuring girls whose ages ranged from preschool to early adolescence. This tracked with the oversized play structure dominating the front yard. Maybe Amande’s case hit a little close to home for this man.
“Didi’s planning to teach me how to watch my bank account drop to zero. My aunt just cannot be put in charge of my money.” Amande reached out a hand and tapped on his desk to emphasize her words. “She cannot. I’ll be on the street by the time I’m eighteen. And the houseboat—how can that possibly work? It looks like Steve thinks it would be real cozy for us three owners to live there together, and I think Tebo’s planning to sleep on the couch forever. I don’t want to live this way, and I don’t see how things can possibly be different. None of us is ever going to have enough money to buy the other two out.”
Reuss pulled Amande’s folder out of his desk drawer and slid a pair of reading glasses onto his face. “Hold on. Let’s take one thing at a time. I can put your share of the oil stock in trust for you. I could be the trustee. Didi wouldn’t control it.”
“No, but she’ll be in here once a week with a new story about how she’s got to have some money because I need medicine or flute lessons or something. She’ll keep coming up with stories until you give her the money. The result will be the same. I’ll be b
roke when I’m eighteen.”
“Maybe you underestimate my ability to play hardball with your trampy aunt.”
Amande crossed her arms and leaned back in the chair. “Now you’re starting to sound like an attorney-at-law.”
“Why, thank you, ma’am. So glad that you approve. Now let’s talk about the houseboat. No, Didi is never going to have enough cash at one time to buy you out, and neither is Steve. If you try to set up a payment plan, you’ll just be back in court every time one of them defaults. Even if I cut my fees to the bone, you can’t afford to keep coming back to me and, much as I’d like to, I can’t afford to work for you for free. But there are other options. Maybe you three can rent the boat to somebody else and split the income. Or maybe you could sell it and split the money. Both of those options make the roof over your head go away, so I’d wait to do either of those things until you’re of age.”
“Both of those options also leave me homeless at eighteen.”
“Or you could sell the oil stock and use the money to buy out Didi and Steve. Again, I’d wait until you were of age.”
“That option leaves me broke at eighteen and living in a place with no college within driving distance. And no car to drive, anyway. Nothing you’ve suggested gets me free of Didi before then. I came here to get legal advice I could live with.”
Judging from the uncomfortable look Reuss was wearing, he was completely aware of how little help his legal advice was going to be to Amande, and so was everyone in the room, except for Michael. None of her options were attractive.
Amande let out a short breath that a poker player would have recognized. The girl was ready to put all her chips in the pot. “I want you to get me emancipated. Then we can decide what to do about the boat before Didi has a chance to drain my stock brokerage account dry.”
Faye knew she should have seen this coming. She probably had seen this coming, but she hadn’t wanted to entertain the idea of a young girl taking on the world alone.
Amande was still talking. “Won’t I get Social Security payments, now that my mother’s dead? And can you find out how much I’ll get every month from the stock dividends? It may not be much, but it’ll be something, and I can flip hamburgers, too, if I have to.”
Reuss put up his hands as if to tell her to settle down. “First of all, I’m not entirely sure you’d keep getting survivor’s benefits from Social Security if you got yourself emancipated. I’ve never had need to find out, so I’ll have to check. Second, in case you haven’t noticed, there was already a recession on, even before that oil spill out there knocked a bunch more people out of work. There are grown men flipping burgers out there, these days. Look up and down Plaquemines Highway. How many burger joints do you see? How many businesses of any kind have Help Wanted signs hanging out front? Just because you want to be able to take care of yourself doesn’t mean that you can, Sweetheart.”
It was as if she hadn’t heard him. “How long does it take to get emancipated?”
“You know what the court system is like. Slow. I think you’d be better off to hunker down and survive the next year or two with Didi. Truly, I do.”
“If I tracked down my father, he could sign paperwork to get me emancipated.”
“Nobody knows who he was. Your mother took his name to the grave. My guess is that he’s sorry enough to go after a piece of your inheritance, as the price for his signature.”
Realizing what he’d just said, he hurriedly added, “I’m sorry, Sweetie, I didn’t mean to say bad things about your father.”
“It’s okay. If my mother thought he was a nice person, she would have left me with him, instead of her stepmother. Anyway, there’s another way to get emancipated.”
She fixed a level gaze on him, as if she were daring him to say it first. Faye had the feeling that she wasn’t going to like the sound of this.
She was right. When Reuss lost the game of chicken he was playing with a teenager, he revealed Amande’s final playing card and, no, Faye didn’t like the sound of it at all.
Faye actually snorted out loud when Reuss said, “Amande Marie Landreneau, I want you to forget any notion of emancipating yourself by getting married.”
“Married?” Faye squawked.
“I do give you credit for doing your homework,” Reuss went on, “but if you were mine, I’d ground you from the Internet for the foreseeable future to keep you from coming up with more lame-brained schemes like this one. Besides, your guardian—meaning Didi, probably—would have to sign for you to get married.”
Amande rolled her eyes and said, “It is so frickin’ inconvenient to be a minor. I’ll get Didi to sign, one way or another. Maybe I’ll convince her that I’m marrying somebody rich. Or maybe I’ll just get her drunk. She’s easily influenced and she’s predictable. I can do it.”
Reuss twisted the arm of his reading glasses until it fell off, then he studied it for a few seconds. “Yes. You probably can. And I’m reasonably sure that you’ll lose your Social Security benefits just as soon as you do, so factor that into your little scheme. Who were you planning on marrying, anyway?”
“Never mind that. I see the way men look at me. If you can’t find a better way to get me out of Didi’s clutches, I’ll find somebody to marry. If you don’t want me to do that, then you find me another answer to my problems.”
Reuss spoke slowly, maybe hoping that his brain would catch up with his mouth. “Give me some time before you run out and ruin your young life, okay? If we can’t get you emancipated, we’ll need to work with the legal situation as it is. You’re going to need another tutor besides Didi, someone who has your best interests at heart or, at the least, someone who is easier to handle.”
“What’s to keep you from being my guardian? Tutor. Whatever.”
“Nothing, really. It’s not out of the question.”
Amande continued, inexorably laying out her plan. “You could help me cash in the oil stock and buy out Steve and Didi—”
“If the stock’s worth enough to do that. I don’t imagine that the current situation is doing anything good for oil companies and their stockholders.”
“Presume it is, for the moment. You could help me buy them out and get my Social Security checks flowing. I think Manny would let me work in the marina grill. That should give me enough to live on, if I own the boat outright. Eventually, I’ll finish high school and I’ll need to rent the boat out and move away, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t want to live here with you, even if you’re my guardian. I’d feel stupid trying to jam myself into somebody else’s family. I’m too old for that. I would live on the boat, and you’d help me handle my money, and you’d come check on me now and then. That’s all you’d need to do.”
“I’ll have to think about it, Amande. I’m not convinced it’s your best option.”
Amande rose. Faye was still too flummoxed to join her, so she stood alone, while Michael played on the floor as if nothing had happened. “Well, you’d better think fast. This nice lady and her husband have helped me a lot, but they’re gonna finish their work and go home to Florida. If you can’t show me a better plan by then, I’m going to start looking for a husband. Don’t think I won’t do it.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Faye didn’t say much on the drive home. Part of her wanted to shake Amande and holler, “Get married??? Are you insane???” Part of her was seriously considering handcuffs and shackles for the girl. And yet another part of her remembered what it had been like to be alone at twenty. Amande was in a far worse position than Faye ever had been.
She hated to be suspicious of the entire world, but sometimes the world seemed to deserve it, and she was more than a little disturbed by the last turn Amande’s interview with Reuss had taken. It had seemed that the idea for the lawyer to take over as her guardian had come from Amande. But had it? Or had she been cleverly guided in that direction by a man who was remarkably good at looking dumber than he was?
Michael had gone to sleep as soon as the car started to roll, so Faye wouldn’t have had much to say to Amande, regardless. New parents rarely risked doing things that might wake a sleeping child, like talking. Still, it felt like she was giving the girl the silent treatment, and she felt bad about it. She wasn’t Amande’s mother. It wasn’t her place to dole out disapproval. Still, she kept her silence, because she couldn’t think of anything constructive to say.
Her cell beeped and she dug it out of her pocket, forgetting that she was setting a bad example by doing that while she drove. It was Benoit.
“I had to come out to the marina to talk to Manny, and I thought I should touch base with my favorite cut-rate consultant. But you’re not here.”
“I’m just turning off Plaquemines Highway now. Look up and you’ll see my car. Why did you want to talk to Manny?”
“He called me because he’d remembered some stuff. I noticed from the very start that Manny sees everything that goes on around here, so I came right out as soon as he called.”
“What did you learn?”
“I learned how long Dane Sechrist has been hanging out in Manny’s bar. It’s been months, although it’s only been the past couple weeks that he turned into a regular. And I learned that Manny’s seen Dane having private conversations with Steve.”
Faye parked the car. “I see you standing over there. Let me hang up the phone and come talk to you in person.”
Amande followed Faye to where Benoit stood. Without waiting for the adults to speak, she blurted out, “Why were you talking to Manny? He’s not in trouble, is he?”