She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [115]
That Saturday, after Steve was gone, Jennifer called Anita and told her the bad news. Anita did what she’d grown up doing when a friend had a death in the family; she bought two pies and went directly to the Toro Canyon house to console the family. She thought the house would be filled with friends and family; instead she found the twins and their boyfriends making phone calls to tell people about Steve’s death while Celeste, in her chenille robe, smoked on the patio. After the incident with the telephone, she was in a foul mood.
“Those kids better do what I tell them,” she snapped. “The money’s all mine now. If they don’t do what I want them to, I’ll leave it all to the dogs.”
“Celeste, you don’t mean that.”
“Sure, I do. And I’m going to spend every penny I can.”
When Anita asked about the plans for the funeral services, Celeste frowned. “I’m not going to do anything but a small funeral,” she said. “I don’t want Steve’s damn kids in my house.”
“You have to do something. People will be expecting it,” Anita argued. She suggested a small luncheon at the club following the funeral service, for family and close friends. “I’ll even take care of setting it up for you.”
Reluctantly, Celeste agreed.
That afternoon, Christopher put in a call for Brett Spicer, a deputy with the Sheriff’s Department who’d sometimes worked security for the Beards. The twins were worried, afraid that with Steve gone, Tracey might show up at the house. When Spicer talked to Celeste, she was unconcerned. “I’ve talked to my therapist about it,” she said. “Tracey’s more likely to kill herself than to come after us.”
Still, she told Spicer to bring in security, “so the girls feel safe.”
At the house that night, with their adoptive father dead only hours, Celeste put the twins to work. Along with Justin and Christopher, they cleaned Steve’s closet, taking everything he owned to a Goodwill bin except what she was burying him in and a few things she wanted to send to Steve III. The following night, when Spicer arrived, he found piles of boxes spread throughout the formal dining room with the names of family and friends on the outside. Inside were Steve’s personal possessions, the things he loved. When they had it all organized, Celeste chose who received what. Then Jennifer and Christopher hauled the boxes to the PakMail store to be shipped. Within forty-eight hours of Steve’s death, Celeste had removed nearly every trace of him from the house he’d so lovingly built.
“You need to figure out what part Celeste played in this,” Paul Beard urged Detective Wines on the phone the Monday morning following his father’s death.
“I can’t tell you about the investigation,” Wines said. “All I can say is we’re working the case.”
What he didn’t want to and couldn’t tell Paul was that the case was deeply in trouble. Early that morning he’d gone to the District Attorney’s Office to talk to Bill Mange, the prosecutor. With nearly four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, Mange explained that he’d wait for an autopsy to decide if Steve’s death was related to the homicide. If so, the charges against Tracey could be upgraded to murder. Then Mange, a thin man with sloping shoulders and a big-toothed grin, got very serious. “You did talk to Steve Beard, didn’t you? You interviewed him before he died?”
Bristling under Mange’s steady gaze, Wines admitted that he’d never gone back to the hospital to talk to him. He’d been waiting for Steve to be released. Wines had planned to attempt to talk to him when he was healthy.
“You never interviewed the victim?” Mange blustered. “You let that woman bully you into not doing what you had every right to do?”
“I guess I did,” Wines admitted, knowing immediately that he’d made a mistake he would never have the opportunity to repair. Mange simply shook his head in disgust. Later Wines would say that when it came to the Beard investigation, the cooperation between the D.A.’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department