She Wanted It All - Kathryn Casey [48]
If the others were amused by her mother, Jennifer never lost sight of the real Celeste. “I walked on eggshells around her,” she says. “When she’d be in a good mood, laughing and fun, it never seemed real, because any minute she could change.”
When she did, her favorite subject was Steve, complaining that he was controlling and mean. At first the twins’ friends believed her. “I thought Steve was evil,” says Justin.
Over time, however, their views changed. Slowly they grew to like the girls’ cantankerous stepfather, who often bellowed at them, as if for fun, then laughed. They noticed it wasn’t Celeste who made it a point to be there for the girls, but Steve. Although Celeste fawned over her friends, showering them with gifts, she was very different with the girls. “She treated them like nonpersons,” says Justin.
One day, driving the thirty-five miles from the lake house back to Toro Canyon with Jennifer, Justin, and Kristina in her new Ford Expedition, Celeste was in one of her flamboyant moods, smoking and laughing, when she suddenly became serious. “I don’t like the way Steve’s will is written,” she told them. “I deserve more of his money. I’m his wife. I’m going to have to do something about getting it changed.”
Whatever she did, it worked. On July 30, 1998, Steve not only finalized his trust, naming her beneficiary, but he drew up a new will. If he died and they remained married, she’d receive both houses, free and clear, mortgages paid up by the estate. On top of that, she was entitled to his personal property, including his IRAs and club memberships, plus the $500,000 gift in the original will. When Steve died, Celeste could expect to become a very wealthy woman. As before, if they divorced, she’d get much less.
That November, Steve took Celeste on a $14,000, seventeen-day tour of China, including two days in Hong Kong, two in Beijing, and a cruise down the Yangtze River. They walked on the Great Wall and saw Tiananmen Square and the burial grounds of the Ming emperors. Despite bringing home suitcases full of souvenirs, Celeste returned groaning that she hated every minute of the trip. At Tramps, she ridiculed how he’d hired rickshaws to “pull his fat ass up and down the street.”
That year, Davenport Village I, the first stage of the shopping center Steve bankrolled, opened. In stone and stucco, with tile roofs, it soon boasted a pharmacy, a travel agency, a small restaurant, professional offices, and a shipping store named PakMail. At Koslow’s, a tony furrier, Celeste bought furs, having only Celeste with no last name embroidered inside. “That way I won’t have to change it when he dies,” she told the girls.
After Studio 29, a posh second-floor salon opened, Celeste often went there to Joseph Prete, a tall man with extravagant gestures. Throughout her appointments, they gossiped, providing entertainment for the rest of the clientele, many residents of the surrounding hills. One day a manicurist overheard Celeste and Joseph chortling about Steve. “I thought that old man would be dead by now,” she said.
The month after the China trip, things moved quickly in Celeste’s life. That fall, she and Dawn went to Katz’s, a downtown eatery with a sprawling bar. About ten that night Celeste called Jimmy Martinez, her last husband, who rarely minded going out at the drop of an invitation, and asked him to join them. Celeste and Jimmy flirted, the fire between them reigniting. He took her to his house and they made love. From then on she disappeared more often from Toro Canyon. She laughed about the affair with the teens, telling them, when Kristina asked why her knees were raw with scratches, that “sex with Jimmy got wild last night.”
The affair presented a conflict