“Will Mr. Tolliver be joining us?” Des asked.
“No, Tolly’s cutting back my rosebushes,” Poochie replied with a wave of her hand. “Got his gloves and pruners and off he went. He’s been upset ever since you three spoke to him this morning.”
“We have to look at everyone,” Yolie said. “It was nothing personal.”
“I don’t wish to be rudely contradictory, Sergeant, but it was very personal. Also hurtful. You’ve completely failed to grasp our situation. Tolly would never, ever steal from me.” Poochie gazed out the window at her view of the river. Her face had a fond, faraway look on it. “Funny, him wanting to garden all of a sudden. When we were first married, he wouldn’t go near it. Ladies’ work, he called it.”
Soave looked at Des, puzzled. Des kept her own expression neutral, though she could feel her stomach muscles flutter.
Glynis smiled gently at her client. “Poochie, it’s Tolly who we were discussing.”
“And your point is?…”
“You just said that when you two were first married he disliked gardening.”
“No, dear, you’re mistaken. Tolly and I have never been married. But I do wish he’d sit in on this conversation. He ought to be here.”
“Would you like us to go get him?” Des offered.
“No, leave him be. He needs to work out his creative tensions.” Poochie reached for the brandy decanter and poured more of it into her snifter.
“Poochie, we’ve been told that Peter Mosher was the offspring of your father, John J. Meier, and the family maid, Bessie Mosher,” Des began. Soave wanted her to get it rolling. “Can you confirm this?”
“I can,” Poochie said forthrightly.
“We’ve requested access to Mr. Mosher’s will so that we might learn who he’d named as his beneficiaries.”
“I have his most recent financial statements as well.” Glynis opened one of the files in her lap, scanning it. “The income from Mr. Mosher’s trust fund was more than adequate for him to live on comfortably. In point of fact, we hadn’t even touched his interest income for more than twenty years. Consequently, his assets have…” Glynis, cleared her throat. “At the time of his death, Peter Mosher was worth somewhere in the vicinity of eighteen million dollars.”
“Shut up!” Yolie immediately clapped a hand over her mouth. “So sorry. Didn’t mean for that to… are you sure about this?”
“Quite sure, Sergeant,” Glynis replied tartly.
“But why does a man worth that kind of green live like he was living?”
Glynis looked to Poochie for an answer.
Poochie was staring down at Bailey in her lap, stroking the old golden retriever with so much focused intent that she seemed not be listening. “I wish I could give you a decent answer, Sergeant,” she replied softly. “But Peter and I hardly knew each other. That was father’s wish. For mother’s sake, he didn’t want the two of us to form an attachment.”
Soave’s cell phone rang. He answered it and listened a moment before he glanced up at Poochie and said, “Doug Garvey’s here.”
“Send him through.”
“He can pass,” Soave said into the phone, flicking it off. “Go ahead, Des.”
“Poochie, did your mother ever speak to you about Peter?”
“Absolutely never,” Poochie replied. “Mother wasn’t one to share her secrets. Mind you, she knew the truth about him. How could she not? There were so many whispers around town. I was only a girl, yet I can still remember them. I can remember the shame as well. And father did feel shame, so young Peter had to go and young Peter did go-off to boarding school.” Poochie sipped her brandy, swirling it around in the snifter. “He wrote father regularly from England. Father kept a post office box for that sole purpose. He would read each letter carefully, then burn it. He burned all of Peter’s letters. He confided this to me over martinis one evening when I was home from Smith. Father told me things he could never tell Mother.” Poochie’s face had a faraway look on it again, though this one was not especially fond. “I was his confidante, his pet, his plucky little pard.”
Des heard the flatulent rumble of a vehicle arriving out front, a car door slamming, heavy footsteps on the gravel. Then the front door opened and a husky male voice called out, “You around, Pooch?!”
“In here, Dougie!”
Doug Garvey lumbered into the parlor jangling a set of keys. “Brought you that Jeep of mine to get around in.”
“Bless you, dear. Need a lift back to the station?”
“Not necessary,” Doug said, his eyes flicking around at everyone curiously. “I’m meeting one of my boys down at the foot of the drive in a minute. I’ll leave these keys by the front door.”
“Don’t people ring doorbells in this town?” Soave wondered as Doug tromped back outside.
“Doug is a friend. Why would he do that?” Poochie hesitated now, frowning. “Sorry, where was?…”
“Peter was away at boarding school,” Glynis reminded her.
“And giving every appearance of being a bright, outgoing young man,” she continued, nodding her head. “He played soccer and rugby, was a fine horseman. An excellent shot, too, all of which made father exceedingly proud. But Peter didn’t much care for university life. He left Cambridge during his second year and settled in London, where he fell in with a rather wild crowd. That ‘mod’ scene was all the rage, and Peter embraced it fully-no cares, no worries, nothing but one big party. Father did keep him comfortably provided for, after all. Winters, he’d ski in Gstaad. Summers, he’d head for St. Tropez. He took lots of girlfriends. Dropped them when he felt like it. Was seldom sober. Eventually, when Coleman was posted to Paris, I had him to the residence for lunch.” Poochie paused, her face darkening. “It was not easy for either of us. I was a good little diplomat’s wife. Peter was a full- time hedonist. Exceedingly hostile to me. High on pot, I might add. He offered to smoke some with me. He’d recently been up to the Montreux Jazz Festival, where he’d seen a group that he wanted to manage. Champion somebody and…” She shook her head. “I can’t remember their name. It came to nothing. None of Peter’s plans ever amounted to anything. They were drug-induced fantasies. He went on who knows how many LSD trips. I can’t say for certain whether it was the drugs that triggered the… change in him. I only know that Peter became uncontrollable, given to fits of wild, schizophrenic rage. In 1971, he attacked a policeman and had to be put in restraints in a London hospital. A friend of his wrote Father, who saw to it that Peter was transferred to a highly regarded psychiatric institute in Lausanne, Switzerland. Not that they actually helped him. Mostly, they just kept him sedated. If they didn’t he’d try to escape.”
“Did your father think about hospitalizing him closer to home?” Soave wondered.
“Switzerland was Peter’s home,” Poochie answered in a strained voice. “I heard very little about him after that. Coleman and I were posted back to Washington. And then, of course, Father passed away.”
“After John J.’s death in ’74 our firm took over guardianship of Peter’s financial affairs,” Glynis stated. “We paid for his long-term care by drawing on the income from his trust fund. In 1983 Peter was transferred to another institute, in Livorno, Italy. Their experimental treatments were showing promising results. Their security, however, left a great deal to be desired. Peter was able to discharge himself two months after he arrived, at which point he slipped under the radar. Wandered God only knows where for years. Had no known means of support. Apparently, he was able to get a passport, because he did make his way back to America eventually.”
“Back to Dorset,” Poochie said. “He just showed up here one day, filthy and homeless. Doug phoned me after he’d found him. I drove straight down to the filling station, hugged him and said, ‘Welcome home, Brother.’ He just looked away and said two words to me: ‘Sneaky Pete.’ Those were the only two words he ever spoke. I brought him back here, set him up in a room, ordered him some clothes from the men’s shop. But he ran away that very night. Turned up back at Doug’s like a stray animal. Doug brought him back here but the same thing happened again. Finally, Doug was kind enough to put him up. But it was all so incredibly heartbreaking. I couldn’t help thinking Peter wanted his family’s love. He could have gone anywhere in the world and he chose to come here. And yet he wouldn’t speak to me or let me…” Poochie’s eyes filled with tears. They spilled down her cheeks. She swiped at them with her hand. “I’m sorry to be so emotional. But this is very hard for me.”
“I was rebuffed as well,” Glynis put in. “He wouldn’t touch a penny of his money.”
“Poochie, what did you tell Eric and Claudia when you brought Peter home?” Des asked.
“That he was an old childhood chum fallen on hard times. Eric was fine with that, chiefly because he smelled
