Stocks & Blondes
18
Put ice on it—Or put it on ice
MY ROOMMATE used to put candles in the freezer. She said they’d last forever that way. Duh.
Becoming Peg
Cinnamon picked me up at six this morning, complaining all the way to the W. But I was Deb Riley and I needed to be Peg Chester before I could do today’s business. It took two hours and Cinnamon’s help to get all the makeup on, and I started feeling older as I progressed.
After what I found out last night, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go back to Georgia’s house at all. When I’d fully transformed, I checked out of the W and made sure I was seen as Peg leaving and getting into a cab. I specifically asked the concierge to get me a cab to the airport and took it all the way there. When I got out of the cab at the Delta drop-off, I went into the airport, downstairs, out the arrivals door, and straight into Cinnamon’s car. Then we went over to the Wayward Inn and I checked in as Alice Brown. I gave them a cash card and a hefty deposit for three nights, but they didn’t ask for ID.
We headed for the estate lawyer’s office. Jim Williams of Williams, Evers, Barnhardt, and Stahl (WEBS???) was charming as only a man of Lars’s generation can be. He politely offered me coffee, made sure I was comfortable, and spread a batch of papers out on the table in front of me. Just as he promised, he had everything I needed to function as the legal representative of the estate. I had a death certificate, notarized statement as the executor of the estate from the state that affirmed that I had full power of attorney to act on behalf of the estate, etc. etc. It was amazing. He gathered everything up in a neat leather portfolio, chatted with me briefly as I finished my coffee, and sent me on my way. The one little bomb that he dropped was that if I failed to produce a will, the matter would be considered intestate and after the government took their cut, everything would go to Grover as next of kin. Well, frankly that was fine with me. I didn’t want Grover’s house as part of my fee for this little job. And after last night, I was more and more convinced that the real cause of death wasn’t going to be suicide. I just didn’t have the culprit yet.
Cinnamon picked me up. She’d already been to Fred Meyer for more packing boxes and tape. We headed for the bank next. The personal banker I met with was all too glad to meet with me. She said she was glad they could release the accounts to me and that she was very sad for my loss. I’m confident this was the same woman who was an absolute cold fish the first time I met with her. What I was sure of was that I needed to make a mortgage payment on Grover’s house and having funds to work with made it much easier. I ordered paper copies of all activity on Georgia’s accounts for the previous year, explaining that I did not have access to the online information and wanted to get the final income tax papers prepared as quickly as possible. She explained there would be a charge for that and I nodded. I expected there would be a fee for everything I got from the bank over the next few weeks. I expected to have the house closed up and be moved out of it by the end of the month, but estates can take months to close, especially if it was, indeed, intestate. After waiting for an hour, I finally got the papers and was asked when I’d like to handle closing all the accounts. I begged off and signed several papers that simply made me a signer on the accounts so I could move money when I’d set up a place for it.
Georgia’s riches
In the car, Cinnamon and I went over the papers. Holy shit! Georgia was packing in the bucks. She had a money market account with fifty grand in it, a solid savings, and eight thousand in checking. There were weekly deposits in her accounts ranging from two to five thousand. Man! I didn’t think you could make that kind of money as a MILF on webcam. I set Cinnamon the task of finding where the deposits were coming from and locating any bookkeeping records that Georgia might have. It seems strange that we haven’t already stumbled across it. The house isn’t that big. But most of the time I’ve spent in the office was working the computers. I’m hoping I’ve missed something the searchers in the house have missed, too.
We drove past the house slowly and looked for any sign of people watching it. Early morning rain had washed what was left of the snow off the streets, so all that was left were piles of muddy ice where they piled it up in parking lots. The streets were still almost impossible to drive down, with cars parked on both sides of the very narrow streets. At least under these conditions, we could see directly into the windows of every car that was parked and there didn’t seem to be a stakeout. It worried me, though. I knew someone was watching. We drove through the alley behind the house, which was even narrower. The houses all had tiny back yards between a detached garage and the house. There was exactly enough room to park two cars if you didn’t mind having one of them blocked in the garage. On the second trip down the alley, we pulled in behind Georgia’s house. It would have been nice of Rick and Susan if they had mentioned there was off-street parking. Not that it would have helped when covered in snow.
The steps to the back of the house seemed slipperier in the rain than the front had been in snow. The same key worked in the back door as in the front. Next to the steps was the kind of storm cellar door you’d expect to see in The Wizard of Oz. So, there was a basement. Of some sort.
The intruders hadn’t been concerned about us finding out they had been there. Every box we’d packed had been slit open and the contents gone through. The desk drawers in the office were pulled out and the computers were on but locked. I’d changed all the passwords on them, so I was pretty confident that no one was going to just walk in and look at the disks. Nobody in that search party looked like a hacker. You know, there ought to be a rule about people who search houses putting everything back where they got it. Cinnamon got busy and started resealing the boxes. We didn’t bother to take an inventory since most of them were going to the local collection agency anyway. If they found something in one of those boxes, it was as good as gone anyway. While she packed boxes, I decided to have a closer look at the back yard. The garage was locked but there was a key on the keyring that opened the single door. In the garage was a black Mercedes AMG sports car, shiny and new. The vanity license plate read NOTMEBB. It took a minute to decipher. Not Me Baby. Hmm. Was that Georgia’s message or someone else’s? Even with the money she was apparently making, it didn’t seem that she was set up to have the kind of bucks to buy a $150,000 car. There was no bank record of loans outstanding, so unless this was financed through the car company, it looked like it was paid for with cash. Boy! What was I going to find next? Well, one thing I hadn’t found yet was car keys. Maybe it wasn’t even Georgia’s car.
I locked up the garage and went to the cellar. It was unlocked but didn’t look like it had been entered in a long time. There was no light and I didn’t have a flashlight with me. There were a lot of cobwebs that didn’t look like they’d been disturbed, so I headed back to the house to get my cellphone. That was an idea that never came to fruition.
On the way up the steps, I slipped and came crashing down hard on my left knee. I guess I screamed a little. Cinnamon was there in a flash and helped me up and into the house. I flopped down on the sofa and pulled my torn pants leg up. Nasty scrape and I could tell it was going to be a big bruise. I hurt like hell. Cinnamon became a regular little nurse and bathed my leg. We didn’t have any antibacterial spray—we’d put that on the shopping list for tomorrow—but at least it was cleaned with antibacterial soap.
“Ice,” I said. “I need to ice it.” She headed for the kitchen. When I cleaned the refrigerator out, I didn’t even open the freezer. I just assumed there would be ice in it. Maybe she could chip a big block of frost off the coils or something. I supposed I’d have to clean that out, too.
“Deb?” Cinnamon called. “I know you don’t want to move, but I think you should come and see this.”
Oh God. What now? I was already imagining body parts and maybe the baby I’d thought of earlier. MILF, indeed. None of that prepared me for what Cinnamon was holding.
The ice tray.
In the tray, frozen in neat little cubes were rings, necklaces, and one large square-cut amethyst.
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