The Babbling Brook Naked Poker Club - Book One (5 page)

Brookside is a nice place and not
inexpensive by any means, but I doubted it catered to very many
people who had their own tea brokers. Of course, the painting was
already a major clue that Mrs. Bartlett was not a typical
resident.

“Excuse me a moment.” She stood and looked
out the window, then came and sat down and asked me where I’d
learned about tea.

“My Indian grandmother. She used to say
there’s no problem so heavy that a good cup of tea won’t lighten
it.”

Josephine cocked her head and examined me.
“You have a non-Indian grandmother?”

“My dad married an Indiana girl instead of
the Indian girl his parents picked out.”

“And what did they think of that?”

“They weren’t very happy. At least at first.
My mother won them over by having me.” I grinned at her and was
surprised when she smiled back.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind stopping by
tomorrow afternoon?” she said with another glance out the
window.

I set my empty cup down with a happy sigh.
“Because?”

“I don’t want my son and his wife to see the
painting, but I’ll need help taking it down.”

It was the real deal then. There’d be no
need to hide a copy. “I could do it right now.”

“No. That’s all right. Tomorrow will be
better.”

“Of course. I’m happy to help.”

“Good.” Mrs. Bartlett stood and reached for
my cup in a clear sign of dismissal, not one of additional
hospitality.

Without further ado, I left.

Josephine

Our Eddie surveillance went so well that at dinner that evening, my
co-conspirators, minus one, were all bubbling like crock pots over
what they’d discovered.

“Where’s Edna,” I asked.

“She’s no longer on the meal plan,” Myrtle
said. “Told me she was tired of eating mystery meat. As to what we
discovered, well, besides Bertie, who was shorted seven dollars on
his change, we identified three additional customers.”

“All three remembered how much money they
gave Eddie, and they still had their receipts, but two of them
couldn’t verify how much change they’d received,” Lill said.
“However the one who could was eight dollars short, and she
wouldn’t have noticed anything was amiss without our help. They all
just glance at the receipts. It never occurred to them to check the
amount of change.”

“What do we do now?” Myrtle said.

“With evidence from you, Bertie, and only
one other person, I don’t know if that will be enough to convince
anyone in authority that Eddie’s stealing.” I didn’t quite trust
the manager, a Mr. Souter. He tends to speak to us as if we were
all hard-of-hearing infants who are just learning to talk. “They
could all just be careless mistakes.” It occurred to me that we
might discuss the problem with Devi. If she could threaten me, she
could do the same with Eddie.

“Do you know who Devi Subramanian is?” I
asked them.

“Of course,” Lill said. “She’s the young
woman who organizes our outings.”

“What do you think of her?”

“She’s too bright to be stuck in a place
like this,” Lill said.

I had to agree. Anyone who could recognize a
Lariston rug and an Edward Hopper painting with a glance shouldn’t
be stuck shepherding wobbly senior citizens on mall trips. “She
visited me in the middle of our operation.”

“Did you let her in?” Myrtle said.

“I’m afraid I had no choice.”

“I doubt you were happy about that.” Lill’s
comment tells me she’s beginning to know me a little too well.

“I just know I’d be more comfortable talking
to her than to the manager.”

“I agree,” Lill said. “Mr. Souter doesn’t
seem to be the responsive type.”

For me, the suggestion to enlist Devi’s help
was simply an application of that old saying,
Keep your friends
close and your enemies closer
.

The others considered it a stroke of
genius.

~ ~ ~

When Devi arrived to help me hide the Hopper painting, I first
fixed us tea. An Osmanthus Chin Hsuan tea this time. Once again,
she took a sip and closed her eyes, obviously savoring the brew. My
outlays for tea are one of the things Jeff doesn’t know about,
although I force him to pay all my obvious expenses—my Brookside
fees, food, clothing, and miscellaneous medical costs.

I also made liberal use of those assets in
furnishing this apartment, clearly a wise move, now that Jeff is
coming to visit. I want to keep him in the dark about my
independent means, just like Thomas kept me in the dark about the
movement of our assets to Jeff’s control.

It still makes me angry when I think how
Jeff and Lynn hustled me out of my house a few days after the
funeral, claiming that they would worry about me, that there was no
way I could handle such a large place on my own, that I needed to
be some where safe. I thought about calling the police, but once
Jeff informed me Thomas had transferred the title of the house and
its contents to him, I knew there was no point.

Jeff and Lynn had then helped themselves to
whatever they wanted and sold the house out from under me, as if
I’d died too. Not that it hadn’t been my intention to get rid of
the house and most of its contents. I just wanted to do it in my
own time, in my own way.

Devi set her cup down with a click. “Another
delightful brew. Your tea broker does excellent work.” She cocked
her head and examined me. “Will you tell me the story of the
painting?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps. Someday.” In reality,
I couldn’t imagine a circumstance that would tempt me to share that
information. With anyone.

“Good,” Devi said, obviously unable to read
my mind. “Where are we putting it? And you do realize your wall is
going to look bare.”

“Under my bed. We’ll move the painting from
my bedroom out here.”

Devi nodded, and we went to work. She
finished hanging the replacement painting, a watercolor by Domenic
Demeri, an artist who never achieved the fame I thought him worthy
of.

“I like this,” Devi said, stepping back. “It
might not have the emotional heft of the Hopper, but it’s very
fine.”

I gestured for her to take a seat. “There’s
something else I need to talk to you about.”

She grinned at me. “For another cup of that
tea, I’ll listen to whatever you want to say.”

While she sat waiting for me, I brewed
another pot. After our first sips, I set my cup down. “I’ve been
delegated to speak to you about Eddie Colter.”

She set her cup down with a rattle and
cleared her throat. “Wh-who delegated you?”

“Myrtle, Edna, and Lillian.”

“Oh? What’s it about then?”

“Myrtle thinks he’s stealing from the people
he shops for. In at least three instances we’re aware of, he’s
short-changed people.”

“And you think he’s done it
deliberately?”

“It’s not easy to prove intent. He may just
be very bad with math. The amounts, you see, are small, but over
time they could add up to a substantial amount.”

“You’ll likely need more evidence to prove
that. But why talk to me about it? Why not Mr. Souter?”

“I don’t like Mr. Souter.”

“You do realize I have no power here.”

“Except when it comes to threatening me that
you’ll report my painting.”

“I apologize for that.” She lowered her head
and stared at her cup. Then she looked up. “Although it would be
easier to go back on my word about that than it would be to report
Eddie.”

“You don’t have a thing for him, do
you?”

She shook her head and shuddered.
“Absolutely not. I can’t stand the man.”

“Why is that?” I thought her reaction
extreme. I don’t care for Eddie, but he doesn’t make me shudder in
obvious revulsion. “Did he do something to you?” It was a shot in
the dark, but it obviously hit its mark.

“He keeps touching me, and the other day, he
grabbed me and tried to kiss me.”

“What happened next?” I wasn’t trying to
pry. But this seemed like useful information to add to our ongoing
investigation.

“He let me go when a nearby door opened. But
I had a feeling. . .”

I waited.

She closed her eyes and shuddered again. “I
don’t think he’s used to taking no for an answer.”

“So along with him being a thief, we’re
talking a potential rapist?”

“I don’t know about that. I just think it’s
not a good idea to be alone with him.”

It didn’t surprise me that Eddie would be
attracted to her. While he has a fake tan, she’s naturally a lovely
golden color. Perhaps he’s smitten and just expressing it
inappropriately.

“Avoiding him sounds like a good plan,” I
told her.

“Yes.” She looked at her watch. “Sorry, I
need to get going. Thanks for the tea.” And with that, she jumped
to her feet and headed for the door.

~ ~ ~

When Jeff and Lynn arrived promptly at ten Saturday morning, the
receptionist called to let me know. Hoping to head them off, I
grabbed my tote and a jacket and went to meet them.

“Mother.” Jeff hugged me. He hadn’t bothered
to shave, so I leaned away when he tried to kiss my cheek.

Lynn also stepped up and hugged me, although
I know she dislikes me. But at least she wasn’t prickly like
Jeff.

“You didn’t have to come meet us,” Jeff
said. “We want to see your place. Then we thought we’d take you to
lunch.”

Rather than argue, I turned and led the way
back to my apartment. I stepped inside, then watched the two of
them enter and look around.

“Well,” Jeff said. “You’ve, ah, fixed this
up . . . nicely.”

I didn’t understand why he was surprised.
After all, he’d paid the bills.

Lynn frowned. “But what happened to all your
things?”

My “things,” as she called them, were
leftovers from their house after they’d appropriated what they
wanted from mine. “Goodwill was thrilled to take them off my
hands.”

“This is—”

“That’s okay. I know it’s not your taste,
Lynn.”

“I thought you were into antiques.”

“No, Thomas was. Not me.”

“That’s one of the things I need to talk to
you about, Mother,” Jeff said, standing awkwardly in the
doorway.

“What? My new furniture?”

“Sort of.”

Ah, he wanted to talk about my spending. How
pleasant.

“Maybe we should sit down?” Lynn said,
glancing from Jeff to me.

“Yes, perhaps we better,” Jeff said.

I moved quickly to take a seat in the chair
by myself, forcing them to sit together on the sofa opposite
me.

Jeff, wringing his hands, was still
examining my things. He frowned at my rug, which well he might. It
had been my single largest expenditure. Then he spotted the Demeri
painting, and his frown deepened.

“Is that new?”

“No, I’ve had it for years. It was upstairs
in the guest bedroom.” Clearly, it was superior planning on my part
to hide the Hopper.

He continued to frown. “I don’t remember
it.”

“You must have overlooked it. You were so
busy deciding what else you’d help yourselves to.”

“Now, Mother, I don’t want to fight with
you. You’d just lost Dad, and since you were moving in with us,
Lynn and I took on the burden of deciding. We wanted to make your
transition as easy as possible for you.”

I doubted they’d given a single thought to
making my transition easy. And saying they expected me to be living
with them for more than five minutes was, at the least, a gross
exaggeration.

“You could have asked me what I wanted to
take.”

Jeff’s lips went through a number of
contortions that made him look distinctly odd. “Yes, I suppose
you’re right. We should have.”

“What is it you want to talk to me
about?”

“Since you moved here, your expenses have
been far greater than expected. I need to make sure your resources
last the rest of your life. But in order for that to happen, two
strategies are essential. One is that you not make any more large
purchases.”

“And the second?”

“That you agree to a lower monthly
allowance.”

“Lower by how much?” I said, ignoring the
rest of his request.

“I believe you should be able to manage your
incidentals on Dad’s Social Security check, and that will leave
sufficient resources for your Brookside fees.”

“How parsimonious of you.”

“Now, Mother, I’m doing it for your own
good.”

“Of course you are. I hope you don’t expect
me to pay for lunch.”

He looked away, as well he might. No doubt
he was dipping into the “resources” whenever he could.

“How much is in the accounts?” I’d asked him
before, and he’d always evaded the question.

“There’s enough to last as long as you live,
but only if we start conserving now.”

“There’s no way I can possibly spend five
million dollars, even if I live to be a hundred.” But I could
certainly figure out some good uses for it.

His mouth firmed, making him look exactly
like his father. “Five million? Really, Mother. Where did you get
an idea like that?”

“Didn’t your father ever share with you
where most of that money came from?”

“Of course. He said he made some excellent
investment choices. But the market’s been, well, not good these
last few years.”

“Are you saying there’s less than five
million?”

He squirmed and didn’t answer. The fact was
if Thomas hadn’t changed anything, several of the stocks I bought
back in the sixties had appreciated so much, there should be
considerably more than five million. But the way Jeff was acting
. . .

I didn’t need another dime from those
accounts, but fair is fair. It’s my money. And my intention has
been to recoup as much as I could through periodic requests for
large amounts. I planned to then transfer those assets to
Aardvark’s coffers, and those resources would eventually pass to
groups I judged much more deserving than my son.