“Who else knew?”
“The family was made aware not too long ago, except the grandson. What’s his name again?”
“Junior. Well, Herbert, Jr., but everyone calls him Junior.”
“She wanted him to have his degree before he became a trust fund baby. Until he’s thirty, he only gets $40K per year.”
“What happens at thirty?”
“Junior’s allowance goes to $100K, then he has full access at forty. According to the notes, that’s when she thought he would have the maturity to responsibly handle the money. Also, it’ll force him to work and be self-sufficient in the meantime.”
That’s a long time to have a carrot dangled, but Francine was probably right, forty would be late enough to give him an appreciation, but sometimes knowing that money’s waiting out there keeps a person from doing anything else with their life.
Chapter 22
The Bacon family dynamic nagged at me like a hungry mosquito. Up until now, my amateurish deductions had kept me dialed in on them as part of this murder. But my mentor’s voice nagged that something wasn’t right. Henry would have agreed that the family had secrets and that they had had a less-than-loving response to Francine’s demise. But one thing I’d observed in myself and others who suffered the loss of someone close, it was damned hard to judge behavior in a room full of grief. People sometimes laughed at funerals or remained stoic to everyone on the outside while cheering on the inside. They clung to habits and behaviors that might seem heartless, but got them through each second until they were ready to process.
I’d spent hours riddled with guilt over my anger since I’d found out about Evelyn’s infidelity the same night she was killed. Try dealing with hate and love and death in one melting pot of guilt and grief. Try getting the call that your wife’s died of a collapsed lung from a hit-and-run driver, when you’ve spent the whole night stewing about her staying over at another man’s house. Instead of worrying about her safety, I imagined the worst, most graphic sexual events as I drowned my sorrow in a bottle of not-so-cheap scotch.
I couldn’t know what Hillary, Herbie, Harold, or Junior felt internally from the brief moments when I infiltrated their home. What I did have was the endless and confident loop of every base behavior immemorial—primal motive.
Henry liked to say, “When you lose track of the tiger’s teeth, go back to why. Teeth are for eating, find the food.” It always seemed like a weird metaphor, but the gist was pure and simple: motive solves cause. Cause narrows your suspect pool.
None of the family had a rational motive from a long-term perspective. That doesn’t mean they didn’t or couldn’t have done it. It did mean if they did, their reasoning was flawed or they killed from an emotional place, which was entirely possible if they discovered her intentions to abdicate, tried to convince her to change her mind, and upon failing ended Francine’s life in a mad rage. The obvious place for a family member to kill her would have been in the house with lots of privacy, but everything looked copacetic there. It seemed the person who knew every inch of the home, Wilma, had no inkling of anything untoward happening on the premises.
A non-disclosure document to Kendal that Pickering had shared with me, indicated Francine purposefully kept her children and Junior out of her business. This explained the bickering I’d witnessed when Junior asked about getting involved and Herbie put him off. Herbie had no access, but he didn’t want the rest to know that was because his mother had kept her first-born out of the family business and nothing he could do would change her mind. The man had three business degrees, but they didn’t matter. He would never measure up, because it wasn’t about measuring up.
This feeling of inadequacy on Herbie’s part would certainly satisfy motive. Being ignored by the one person whose approval he craved could drive anyone to engage in reckless, even lethal behavior. After all, once you cleared all of the hoops and still get nowhere, you might just want to see the whole thing burn, if only to see what would happen next.
From what I’d gleaned from the notes on Kendal’s computer, Francine’s motives were more altruistic. Consciously, Francine seemed to be trying to protect them all from the whole messy sugar business and to give them a life independent of the Bacon family’s sordid history. Subconsciously, perhaps she really was not satisfied with any of her children and knew they could not cut it in the sugar world.
My phone buzzed.
Pickering barked at me, “Get over here to Kendal’s now. Savannah came home to find the place ransacked.”
Even in the shade of a coconut palm outside the house, the relentless heat pressed on my shoulders like a weight. A flock of sparrows exploded from beneath a festive bougainvillea bush. Bees circled and crawled between the magenta petals.
Kendal had a standard two-story job of cinderblock construction doused in white with gray trim. Thick tempered glass blocks wiggled between the cinderblocks to allow a diffuse light into the house. It wasn’t the house I pictured Adirondack Kendal living in, but when I tried to imagine anything else, my mind drew a blank. Maybe a condo out by Aunt Glor in Bolongo Bay? Probably the wife picked this, which was more in line with a sophisticate like Pickering. The wife had the cash or one of them had family dollars. No newspaper guy in a small backwater could afford this pad on his salary.
“Boise, this is Savannah.”
“Hi, yes, we met at the paper’s memorial,” I said, extending my hand. “How’re you holding up?”
She shrugged.
Pickering eyed the yard and street with suspicion. “Does anyone know you came here?”
“The cabbie,” I said.
After one more furtive glance around, Pickering beckoned me inside slamming the door and throwing the deadbolt in one fluid motion.
“What happened?” I asked.
Pickering looked at Savannah. “Is it
