“It paid out to the partnership only if my husband died, not if he got sick.”
Mrs. Tuzzolino’s voice turned bitter as she described how his partner claimed that without that insurance money he couldn’t afford to buy her husband’s percentage of the business. He’d threatened to declare bankruptcy if they tried to hold him to the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, another familiar term from my own partnership.
Even though he was our rainmaker at the start, John Claude had declared his faith in our potential by splitting the partnership into three equal shares. If he’d died, the key-man insurance would have paid us a third of the firm’s worth, which wouldn’t have made up for his loss. On the plus side however, if he’d become sick or incapacitated, Reid and I would only have had to come up with a third to buy him out under the terms of the partnership’s buy-sell agreement, not the half John Claude was probably worth at the time.
“We had to dissolve the partnership and sell out,” said Mrs. Tuzzolino, “but it was a bloody fire sale.”
My heart bled. Poor lady. Two expensive homes to keep up? Having to scrape along on whatever few pennies they’d managed to save from two high-yield careers?
“I’m willing to pay restitution and a fine, Your Honor, but I’m begging you, woman to woman, to suspend any active sentence you were thinking of imposing.” A tear trickled slowly down her smooth cheek. (Botox or plastic surgery?) “My husband needs me. If you separate us, he could sink back into depression. Maybe even harm himself.”
“I’m sorry,” I told her, “but life is full of choices and you made yours when you chose Mr. Watson to be your personal shopper.”
I ordered a mental health evaluation for Dr. Tuzzolino and sentenced them both to a total of eight months, six of it suspended to five years of supervised probation. In addition to restitution, I added up the value of the stolen goods—three thousand dollars if I counted the teak bench as worth nine hundred—and fined them nine thousand dollars.
Her tears disappeared as quickly as they had come. She coolly gave notice of appeal, and I set their bond at a hundred thousand.
After that, I needed a break and one of May’s cinnamon rolls to get the taste of Mrs. Tuzzolino out of my mouth.
CHAPTER 17
Within moments of recessing, I heard some of the rumors swirling through the halls back of the courtroom. They said Norman Osborne had been found somewhere below Joyce and Bobby Ashe’s house. He had tripped over the railing on the lower terrace and banged his head. He had been beaten to death. He had been knifed. He had collapsed from a heart attack. Take your pick. The only thing everyone agreed on was that he was dead.
Dead?
That big easygoing man who’d stood on the terrace beside me last night and teased me for being a bootlegger’s daughter?
That successful, hard-nosed businessman, who hadn’t been at all shy about singing his love for his wife in front of a crowd?
Even though I’d only met him last night, I felt a touch of the shock and dismay that must be running through the people who’d known him better.
Poor Sunny. I had enjoyed making music with her and Joyce last night. What could she be feeling now? Still so much in love with her husband, so dependent on him for emotional support. She must be shattered.
And the Ashes. So pleased with the prospects of their brand-new partnership, a partnership now abruptly ended.
Mary Kay declined my offer of a cinnamon roll— “I’m doing the no-carbs thing this week”—and went off to see what she could find out.
In the end, I wound up sharing with George Underwood. We nodded to each other as he moved through the hall amid attorneys, parole officers, and assorted law personnel, and when he stopped inside my door, I saw him looking hungrily at the rolls.
“Have one,” I said. “I’ll bet you missed lunch.”
He didn’t have to be asked a second time.
There was an extra cup sitting on Rawlings’s bookcase, and I gestured for Underwood to help himself from the coffee carafe as well.
“I didn’t realize you were head of the detective squad.”
“It’s not a very big one,” he said. “Probably half the men your Major Bryant supervises.”
“But it’s true what they’re saying about Norman Osborne? That he died from a fall off the Ashes’ terrace last night?”
“’Fraid so. I heard you were there?”
“Well, I didn’t actually see him fall, but yes, I was there when he went missing.”
“The way they described it, you would’ve been facing the room, playing the guitar?”
“Yes, but if you’re asking me who came and went before his wife missed him, I can’t help you. Most of the faces were unfamiliar. The only ones I could say for sure were in the room the whole time before he disappeared were Mrs. Osborne and Mrs. Ashe.”
“What about before the music started? Did he have any words with anybody?”
“Like a fight? No. It was all very pleasant. They were celebrating the new partnership. I guess you heard about that?”
He nodded.
“The only thing halfway argumentative was when someone called Dr. Ledwig a bigot and Osborne defended him and—oh my God!” I said. “It’s the same as Ledwig! He took a fall just like Osborne. Was Osborne hit over the head, too? They were friends. Are the two deaths related?”
“Whoa, slow down,” he said, sounding for a moment just like Dwight. “It’s early days for that. Yes, he was hit on the head, and yes, he seems to’ve been thrown over, but it could be a complete coincidence. We’re still looking for the weapon. We found blood on the railing of the bottom terrace and along the edge of the tiles. Looks like someone hit him so hard, he fell across the railing, and then they probably grabbed his legs and swung them over and let gravity do the rest.”
He had finished the bun in three bites, so I tore a small piece off mine and passed the rest of it over to him.
“You sure you don’t want it?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” I lied.
“Thanks. The others were going to pick up some hot dogs at the Trading Post, but I was afraid I’d miss court if I stopped to eat. Anyhow, the EMT who looked at his head said it was probably loss of blood that actually killed him, not the blow and not the fall. If he’d landed with his head up, he might have lived. We’ll have to wait and see what the autopsy shows. The blow was to the back of the head, not front like Ledwig, and it was only one laceration.” He held his thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “But the EMT thinks it was a full-thickness tear and being on the head and him hanging head down …”
“You don’t have to elaborate,” I said. “A medical examiner once told me that under the right circumstances you could bleed to death from a relatively small scalp wound in fifteen or twenty minutes, that the scalp is nothing but a mass of tiny blood vessels.”
“Be good if we could find the weapon,” said Underwood.
I had been visualizing the lower level of the Ashe home, the pottery, the photographs of their children and grandchildren, the long ledge crowded with candlesticks, the— Wait a minute! Candlesticks?
“Could it have been one of those candleholders?” I asked, describing the oak shelf where they stood.
He knew it and nodded. “We thought of that, but there must be forty-five or fifty on that shelf, and just eyeballing with a magnifying glass, we didn’t see blood on any of them.”
“Because it’s not there anymore.”
“Huh?”
“Last night, when everyone was looking for Norman Osborne, I noticed that some of the candlesticks had been knocked over. I straightened them, but there was one extra candle left. I stood it up at the back, so maybe you didn’t notice?”