She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [119]
As Joseph cut Celeste’s hair, Donna listened in. “People are being so mean. They all think I was involved,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t.”
“Yes they do,” she whined, saying she’d just gotten back from a meeting with her bankers in Dallas. “They’re trying to put me on a budget. They think I don’t need five telephone lines and that I ought to be able to live on ten thousand dollars a month. I told them next time I go to Dallas I want them to put all my money in a room, every bit of it, so I can sit there and look at it.”
Donna smiled, envisioning Celeste doing just that in her Chanel suit with her Gucci sunglasses and dripping in diamonds.
At Charles Burton’s office, Celeste called often, worried that she was a suspect. She called so often, she told friends Burton had threatened to drop her as a client.
“I don’t know why the police department would think I was involved,” she told Brett Spicer, the deputy she had working off-duty as security at the house. “I hate Tracey for what she did. I hate her so much I have dreams where I’m running over her with my car.”
What she didn’t mention was that she was still meeting Tracey at the park two to three days a week. Somehow, despite changing the phone numbers three times, Tracey always seemed able to get the new unlisted numbers.
“Put your mother on the telephone,” Tracey told Jennifer one day.
Jennifer hung up. When she asked her mother about it, Celeste just shrugged.
“I know she’s still talking to Tracey,” Jen told Christopher. “I see her number on the caller ID.”
In Dallas, the bankers questioned Celeste’s household expenses and refused to pay the way they had before Steve died. Once, she called one of the bank officers and claimed to have breast cancer. “I need money,” she said. When the woman refused, she screamed. “I’m going to cut off my fucking breast and mail it to you.”
Trying to mediate, David Kuperman came out to the Toro Canyon house to explain to Celeste the way the trust worked. She was entitled to disbursements from the trust’s income. With the stock market down and Davenport Village not yet fully leased, that would be between $10,000 and $15,000 a month. Under the terms of the estate, the bank, he said, would pay off the mortgages on both the house and the lake house, so her monthly stipend would only need to cover her living expenses.
Celeste was incensed. She wasn’t to be calmed, even when Kuperman explained she could easily sell the lake house and have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to cover extra expenses.
“That’s my money!” she screamed. “My money! Not the bank’s!”
A second Dallas meeting with Bank of America didn’t leave her in any better a mood. “The bank has the sole discretion on the distribution of the funds,” Janet Hudnall, the officer in charge of the trust, informed her. “With the house paid off, you can expect about fifteen thousand dollars a month.”
While she had Celeste there, Hudnall questioned her about the expenses incurred while Steve was in the hospital, including the $74,000 check to Jimmy. Confronted, Celeste admitted it had been inflated. On a sheet of paper, Hudnall then added up the expenses that were out of line, including an $80,000 eight-carat diamond Celeste bought for herself, claiming the stone had been ordered by Steve before the shooting. Hudnall didn’t know that the Christmas before, Celeste had asked for such a diamond and Steve had refused to buy it, but the banker had her suspicions. By the time she was done, the banker had a chart that showed that in four months Celeste had spent $717,610 of Steve’s estate. At that rate she’d work her way through his fortune in five years.
Days later Hudnall called with more bad news for Celeste. After reviewing the checks she’d written over the previous months, the bank was charging many of the items—including the check she’d written to Jimmy Martinez—against the $500,000 onetime payment she was entitled to under Steve’s will. Celeste had unwittingly used up her