She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [161]
Years of worrying Celeste might find the twins had all led Justin to that day on the stand. As he testified in a somber dark suit, he looked old beyond his years, filling in for the jury more of Celeste’s bizarre world, where she jumped from man to man and treated the teens like they were her servants and her entourage, confiding in them about her sex life, including the “Sunday suck.” Earlier, Dr. Handley had contradicted DeGuerin’s opening statement. No, Steve had never needed penile shots for erections, he testified. Rather, he, like millions of men, took Viagra. Justin testified that Celeste hated the encounters, complaining loudly and often.
“I need to go make some money,” she’d say, on her way into the master bedroom.
Celeste had a secret life, with secret parties and P.O. boxes she hid from her husband, Justin said. Then he told of the chaos at Toro Canyon: While Steve lay in the hospital fighting for his life, Celeste remodeled. She bought new furniture, three new televisions, the Cadillacs, shrubs; had the garage floor, crown moldings, and rain gutters all painted. She regrouted the pool, something that had been done a year earlier, sending the bills to the trust to pay. When Steve came home, she refused to hire help. “Did you ever talk to Celeste about bringing in an aide to take care of Mr. Beard?” Cobb asked.
“Yes,” Justin said. “She didn’t want that.”
Celeste told him and the twins that she cut off all communication with Tracey after the shooting, but when he found the secret cell phone, they suspected that wasn’t so. “She told us Tracey got fired from BookPeople,” Justin said. “I wondered how she knew.”
From Celeste laughing in the funeral limousine to her wild partying with Donna Goodson, Justin had seen it all. Then he told how Celeste had given Donna money, lots of money.
On cross exam, again DeGuerin attacked. “It’s true that Steve Beard didn’t like you at all,” he charged.
“No,” Justin said.
“He called you a loser.”
“No.”
After talking about the sleeping pills and the Everclear, the parties that Steve wasn’t to be told about, DeGuerin said, “In all the bad things you said Celeste was doing to Steve Beard, you participated, didn’t you?”
Grimacing, Justin admitted, “Yes.”
DeGuerin kept at him, suggesting he and the other teens had been the ones who bad-mouthed Steve, not Celeste, and that Kristina—even more than Celeste—had been close to Tracy. He slammed Justin for having been party to tape-recording Celeste’s calls and implied they’d been edited and changed. Justin, as DeGuerin described him, was a computer nerd easily capable of altering the phone calls. About Celeste’s juvenile behavior, like pilfering For Sale signs and sticking them in the lot at the lake, DeGuerin mocked, “Now that’s something that really shows Celeste to be a killer, doesn’t it?”
“I object, Your Honor,” Cobb said.
“No more sidebars or comments,” Judge Kocurek warned DeGuerin.
Over and over again DeGuerin suggested that Justin lied. He insisted that he couldn’t have seen the women in bed together at the lake house, maintaining that the line of sight from the doorway to the bed wouldn’t have allowed it. It was Tracey who acted like a couple with Celeste, not the other way around, he said. Although at times he appeared shaken, Justin held his own.
An avid photographer, Justin had photos of so much, from Celeste’s infected hands to marijuana brownie crumbs after the lake house party, that DeGuerin asserted, “If you’d actually seen Tracey and Celeste in bed you could have taken a picture, couldn’t you?”
“No,” said Justin.
At the end of the cross examination, DeGuerin