Half a Mind (The Kate Teague Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  Eddie came and leaned over him. “Think of anything else?”

  “You covered it, partner.” He stood up, brushed the sand off his faded shorts, and extended his hand toward Eddie. “I have to go, Spud. Got a date with a beautiful woman.”

  “Good to see you.” Eddie gripped his hand firmly. “Give Kate a kiss for me.”

  “Kate?” Tejeda feigned a blank look. “I don’t remember a Kate.”

  2

  “What are you up to this time, Carl?” Kate slid the insufficient-funds notice she had received from the bank across her ex-husband’s desk.

  “You look good, Kate,” Carl said, smiling, ignoring the crumpled pink paper while he looked her over, leaning his head to one side and squinting through his reading glasses as if to bring her into focus. “Your scars are hardly noticeable anymore. How’s your cop?”

  “Fine,” she said. The thin scar line that V’d from the corner of her mouth down to her chin and back up along her jawline itched furiously, but she resisted touching it. Instead, she stood, watching Carl closely, just in case he had something lethal hidden in the shiny snakeskin shoe propped against the edge of his polished granite desk. “Roger is just fine.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He had finally picked up the bank notice and was smoothing it in front of him. “Roger,” he said as he read. “Doesn’t sound right, the way you say it. Let me hear you say ‘Rigoberto.’”

  “Cut the crap, Carl.”

  “That’s his real name, isn’t it? Rigoberto Eduardo Tejeda. Somehow it doesn’t go with Katherine Margaret Byrd Teague.”

  “I haven’t used ‘Teague’ since our divorce.”

  “Katherine Margaret Byrd,” he said, as if testing its rhythm. Then he put his foot down and rolled his leather chair closer to his desk, shrugging himself into a businesslike posture. “So you bounced a check. Why come to me? Need a loan?”

  “Fred Elbridge at the bank tells me some judge has placed a hold on all of my funds,” she said. “Mr. Elbridge suggested I ask you what you know about it.”

  He leaned back, quiet for a moment, apparently thinking. She watched his face, hoping it would give him away. He was a good actor, in fact his jury summations were often high theater, drawing a regular audience of press and lawyer fans. During their twelve years together she had learned how to read him, to find clues in a lift of his pale eyebrow, a twitch at the corner of his lips. But they hadn’t been together now for over a year, and she found that the silent vocabulary between them was rusty from lack of use.

  Carl let out a long breath and ran his fingers through his perfectly cut blond hair—lighter blond than she had remembered. She wondered if he had done something to it, a little Summer Blond spray every morning before jogging maybe. He read again the insufficient-funds notice, as if it might reveal something he had missed before. And then he looked at Kate. “All of your funds?”

  “Every nickel. Savings, checking, trust funds. I can’t make withdrawals, and every check I’ve written since the first of November has been returned.”

  “It’s a mistake, a clerical fuckup,” he said. “The bank was only supposed to hold up payments from your grandfather’s trust.”

  “Oh, Carl.” Kate sat down, hard, on the cold edge of a chair—leather to match his, but scaled smaller—and forced him to look her in the eye. “What are you up to?”

  “I’ll fix things with the bank, I’m sorry for the bother,” Carl said. “But I think there should be a reevaluation of your grandfather’s trust.”

  “I think you’re nuts,” she said, and started to rise. She needed a lawyer, fast. And one who wasn’t a member of the family firm.

  Carl’s ancient secretary, Estelle Baumberg, slid noiselessly into the room. “Sorry to disturb, children. Mr. Teague, Mr. Evans is in court on break and needs some figures, could you speak with him? Line two.”

  “Kate, please,” Carl pleaded as he reached for the receiver, “don’t go.”

  She hesitated, then gave in, feeling suddenly exhausted, unprepared to slog through another of Carl’s quests. When he saw she would stay, he picked up the telephone and swiveled his chair around so that she only saw some of his profile. Estelle seemed to be hovering beside her.

  “How are you, Estelle,” she asked.

  “Fine. Busy.” Estelle smiled. “You know how it is around here.”

  “Yes, Carl’s a slave driver. I don’t know how you can stand to work for him.”

  “Actually, he’s easier than your grandfather was. At least, he doesn’t chase me around the desk.” Estelle touched her stiff silver froth of hair, glanced at Carl, and smiled. “Not that I’d mind in his case.”

  “Mind what?” Carl turned around and hung up the telephone.

  Kate smiled. “Isn’t it about time you took Estelle out for dinner?”

  Carl looked at them both carefully, never sure when he was being teased. Then he smiled. “How about Friday night, Estelle, if you don’t already have a date.”

  “Me? A date?” Estelle laughed as she walked toward the door. “I haven’t had a date since Louie the Mouth Caporello tried to weasel some information about one of Kate’s grandfather’s clients.”

  She stopped at the door. “That Louie was some dancer. Not much in bed, but boy could he tango.” Smiling at the memory, she looked at Carl. “Thanks for asking me about Friday, but I’m going up to my daughter’s for the holidays.”

  When the door closed behind Estelle, Kate turned to Carl. “As succinctly as you can, Carl, tell me exactly what it is you want.”

  “Fairness,” he said. “Your grandfather’s trust was to be equally divided among his grandchildren. Now that my paternity has been established, I want my share.”

  “Your paternity has not been established,” she said slowly, as if instructing a slow learner, which Carl certainly was not. “Someone persuaded Uncle Miles that you were his long-lost bastard, so he left you his estate. But that proves nothing, and you know it. I have as much evidence to show that Uncle Miles was tricked and that you are not his son as you have to show otherwise.”

  “But you declined to challenge his will.”

  “Why bother?” she said.

  “Heavy price to pay to avoid scandal.”

  “Scandal?” She leaned back on the squeaky leather and chuckled. “I’ve always thought our family owed this town a certain quota of scandal. Helps keep property values up and sells local papers. And beyond the local papers, well, who gives a damn?”

  He tented his fingers and studied her over the tips until she felt uncomfortable. To avoid his eyes, she looked over his head at the wall behind him, at the row of framed credentials—Stanford, Harvard Law. Then she looked back at him, at the face that was beyond handsome, at the hair that was too well-cut, the suit from London, tailored to his athletic body so exquisitely that he stood out from the department-store-clothed crowd at the courthouse. And anywhere else he went, for that matter. But none of it meant anything to him, she knew, because of an accident of birth.

  Then she shrugged, thinking that maybe Carl had earned his inheritance by sharing the myth of the long-lost bastard with her Uncle Miles. And if Miles had been fooled, then so had Carl. She thought of Miles with sadness, remembering his loneliness, wondering how different his life might have been if he had had a child to love—not her, though she knew how deeply he adored her—but a child of his own, a golden child like Carl. The illusion that he had found his son had given him happiness at the end of his life. And it had nearly gotten Kate killed.

  Kate broke the silence. “It wasn’t my place to challenge Miles’s will. And why should I? I’m sorry you got his house only because it’s so close to mine. But for the rest, well, God knows I didn’t need more money. Managing what I have already, when I have access to it, is a pain. Then there’s the law firm. With Miles’s quarter share, you’ve done magnificently, given the firm back the luster it had lost to old age.”

  She moved forward and stretched her arms across the smooth desk towa
rd him. “Can’t that be enough?”

  He remained rigid. “I got everything except his name.”

  “Is that so important?”

  “Maybe not to you.” He looked at her over the rims of his reading glasses. “Will you fight me if I pursue this?”

  “Of course,” she said. “There has to be an end.”

  “I’m sorry about the bank.” He reached out and covered her fingers with his warm hand. “I didn’t mean for you to be involved, or inconvenienced.”

  “I was. I am.” Then she forced a smile; Carl always came around, unless he felt pushed. She took her hand out of his and picked up the insufficient-funds notice. “This check I bounced? It was the deposit on my Thanksgiving caterer.”

  “Let me cover it.” He opened the desk drawer where she knew he kept his checkbook.

  “You’re too late. Henri was so offended he accepted another gig.” She shook her head. “If we can’t find someone else before Thursday, Roger and I will have to cook.”

  “Suppose I should be glad I’m not invited, then,” he said. He was smiling, but she could see a wistful-ness in his face. Maybe just nostalgia interruptus. Or loneliness. She had no idea what he was doing for Thanksgiving.

  Kate picked up her shoulder bag and stood. “So now what?”

  “I’ll call Elbridge at the bank, straighten things out,” he said. He ran his fingers through his hair again. “I just wish I knew what was best for both of us.”

  “For all of us,” she said.

  “Right.” He rose from behind his desk and came around to open the door for her. He seemed chastened. But she couldn’t be sure; he’d always been a good actor. He touched her shoulder as she passed him. “You never told me, actually: how is Roger?”

  “He’s fine,” she said. “Getting restless. I think he’d like to go back to work, but the doctor says he still needs rest and quiet.”

  “I’m planning to start remodeling Miles’s house. I’ll try to keep the noise down.”

  “As in jackhammers from only nine to five?”

  “No, Kate, believe me.” He seemed very sincere. “I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  “I know,” she said. She paused in the open doorway. “At least, not intentionally.”

  3

  The cooling Rolls motor pinged as Tejeda passed it on his way to the house. Kate had left the car on the wooden turnabout at the end of the drive, but hadn’t taken time to turn it. He pushed the button on the side of the garage and leaned against the wall to watch the car make its decorous 180-degree rotation into position to pull into the garage or to drive out again.

  The turnabout, one of the indulgences Kate’s grandfather had allowed himself when he built the estate in 1929, was fun, he thought. But the car—it was parade and picnic all by itself. A 1953 Rolls Royce Silver Dawn, with GM Hydramatic transmission, 4.6-liter-capacity engine, hydraulic-action front brakes, painted mauve over burgundy by some heretic. A Sunday-drive car, if you were Rose Kennedy.

  Tejeda loved the car, and so did Kate. In fact, he found her attachment to it oddly out of character. She didn’t give a damn about all her money. Though the three mansions that comprised her family’s oceanfront estate could have served as the back lot for MGM, she lived as simply as circumstances allowed.

  So maybe this was small excitement, he thought, watching the car complete its stately rotation. Small, at least, compared to the treasure hunt Spud faced. He looked down at the beach, where a few of the persistently curious still milled around the investigation scene. Then he walked over to the Rolls and flicked a bug speck off the hood ornament’s butt. The way things were at the moment, he had excitement enough.

  He heard salsa music and followed it across the back lawn and into the institution-size kitchen of Kate’s house. The loud music covered any sound he made coming in, giving him the luxury of just watching Kate and Theresa together. Kate, with a Diet Coke in one hand and a pen in the other, was leaning over a heavy cookbook propped on the counter, making notes, while his fifteen-year-old daughter, Theresa, seemed to be taking inventory of the contents of the massive stainless-steel refrigerator. They were both laughing, singing, and moving to the music from the radio. Tejeda stood there quietly, watching them, wishing again that some accident of time had brought the three of them together before there was so much history to overcome.

  Seeing them from the back, he could almost fantasize that Kate could have been Theresa’s mother if he had connected with her at the right instant in history. Their dark hair was nearly the same shade; Kate’s cut short, tailored, no fuss, like everything about her, Theresa’s a long windblown tangle pulled up on one side with a yellow plastic clip. They were both slender, athletic, though the narrowing at Kate’s waist hinted at a delicacy, however deceptive, that was missing in Theresa’s ripe-peachlike robustness. The greatest difference he saw between them was that Kate seemed so much more comfortable inside her body than teenage Theresa did in hers.

  He thought about the half-dozen times during his life when he had encountered Kate before—and here he touched the scar on his scalp, having no other label for the episode of terror that had brought them together. But among all the unassociated bits of memory scattered in his mind, his images of Kate were crystalline: Kate at ten, with new braces on her teeth, cutting the ribbon dedicating the school named for her grandfather, the school where Tejeda’s mother taught; Kate as a teenager, home from boarding school for Christmas, walking alone on the beach while he caroused with a pack of locals. They had all stopped to watch her, the princess of the richest family in Santa Angelica. He smarted now to think how their reverential silence as she passed must have isolated her.

  He had touched her once, when he was a rookie cop already with a wife and baby son, while helping her onto a sheriff’s bus during a mass arrest of war protesters. How easy it would have been for him to have taken her to the side to save her from all the grief the press had given her when they recognized her famous name.

  His passivity then, and at every other encounter with her, he now saw as a regrettable lapse, a lost chance to have somehow merged their separate fates.

  “Put down celery.” Theresa held up a limp bunch of celery. “Did you put turkey on the list?”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “But how big?”

  “I don’t know.” Theresa shrugged. “Just big. Get enough so Trinh can make us turkey balls for a while instead of fish balls to go with the rice.”

  “How many people are coming for Thanksgiving?” Tejeda asked as he moved farther into the room. He reached around Theresa and took a beer from the refrigerator. “Should be some sort of chart in the cookbook.”

  “The things you know,” Kate said, raising her face for his kiss. “You want to be the designated cook Thursday?”

  “Please, no,” Theresa protested. “And don’t let him carve, either. Get Grandpa to do it.”

  Tejeda had a sudden flash of the neat, pale slice line around the throat of the severed head, and he shuddered. Kate came into his arms and put a cool hand against his cheek.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  He looked at Theresa over Kate’s head, saw the concern on her face. “I’m fine. Relax, you two.”

  Theresa turned to Kate for reassurance; then a smile spread across her face, lighting her huge brown eyes. “Do you think he’s strong enough for the news?”

  “Never.” Kate snuggled against him. He couldn’t see her face but he could feel her ribs moving as she stifled her laughter. “But go ahead. Tell him where we went today.”

  He put the beer bottle on the counter. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  Theresa blushed furiously. “Kate, you tell him.”

  “DMV,” she said.

  “Motor Vehicles?” Tejeda looked Theresa over again, searching for evidence of vehicular mayhem. “Any problem?”

  “You forgot, didn’t you?” Theresa reproved. “I’m fifteen and a half today.”

  “Theresa got one hundred percent on her Motor Veh
icles test,” Kate said proudly. “She has her learner’s permit to drive now.”

  Tejeda took a moment to let this bombshell sink in. “Happy half-birthday.”

  Theresa suddenly smiled so broadly her full set of braces showed. “Kate let me drive home.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Tejeda tried to imagine the trip home from across town. Kate seemed unscathed. “How’d she do?”

  “Okay.” Kate hesitated. “For a first run, she did just fine.”

  “In a Rolls-Royce, Daddy,” Theresa bubbled. “Can you believe it? Kate’s going to show me how to drive in her Rolls-Royce.”

  “No way,” Tejeda protested.

  “Why not?” Kate asked. “It’s an easy car to drive, and nothing can hurt her—it’s built like a tank.”

  “I can’t afford to replace Rolls bumpers. I’d rather she used my Cutlass.”

  “Can’t,” Theresa said. “Richie has the Cutlass up at Santa Barbara.”

  “He does?” Tejeda looked to Kate for confirmation. Was this something else he should have remembered? “How long has Richie had it?”

  “I told you. Richie was coming down from school every weekend to be with you while you were in the hospital,” Kate said. “It was too expensive for him to fly back and forth, so he took the Cutlass back to school with him.”

  “So”—Theresa smiled—“I can’t learn to drive in the Cutlass if it isn’t here.” She opened her hand and held the Rolls key out to Kate. “Where do you want this?”

  “In the big Chinese vase on the table by the front door.”

  Theresa looked at the key possessively.

  “I’d let you hang on to it,” Kate said, “but the car washer comes tomorrow morning. He needs the key, and that’s the only one I have.”

  Theresa shrugged and folded the key into her palm as she opened the door into the passageway.

  Tejeda waited until the door had closed behind Theresa before he got serious about embracing Kate. She returned his long kiss, teasing him a little with her tongue. Then she pulled back and smiled up at him.