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I threw a long sigh and dropped my face into my hands.
Mitcham asked, “Can you tell me what you’re thinking?”
“Something like, who am I now?”
Marty’s lawyer said he was sorry a few times. Handed me a box of Kleenex. After I wiped my eyes, I looked up.
“What’s the good news?” I asked.
“The good news is that you’re not responsible for his debts and I’m going to do my best for Catherine. I’ll have to call her. And Darla.”
Darla. That was the name I’d seen in Marty’s phone, the multiple daily calls.
“Girlfriend?” I guessed.
“Wife,” Mitcham said. “They live in Ingleside Heights. He’s left her his car, and the furnishings included.”
“He remarried again? Does she know he’s dead?”
“I don’t know. I have Darla’s phone and email,” Mitcham said. “I’ll get in touch with her.”
I nodded. I knew I’d have to speak with her eventually, but I’d let Mitcham prep the news.
“Marty also had some savings bonds from the nineties,” Mitcham continued. “I’m in touch with his broker. He left the bonds to Catherine. Marty told me that he owes his bookmaker, Jack Robbie, like, two hundred thousand dollars. Could be more or less right now. Robbie can’t sue without being charged with having an illegal gambling parlor.”
“I just met Robbie. I wouldn’t mind arresting him.”
Mitcham smiled. Then he went on. “Marty left his share of the PI business to Leo Spinogatti. If you want, I can handle the transfer of ownership.”
I nodded again.
He said, “Very good, Lindsay. I do have something else for you.”
There was only so much more I could take. Mitcham slid a small square box and a card-sized envelope over to me.
“This is for you,” he said.
“This” was a box and an envelope both addressed to “Lindsay”—my mother’s handwriting, not Marty’s. I put the envelope in my inside breast pocket. I couldn’t take any more emotional battering until I’d processed what I’d just learned. But Brad Mitcham was looking at me expectantly. I knew without opening the box that there was a small blue velvet-covered box inside. Out of simple respect for my poor dead mother, I felt I should do it.
I held the small box, opened the lid, and saw my grandma Frances’s engagement ring winking up at me. The stone was a large diamond solitaire, crudely cut given its age, but my mother had loved this ring. I knew my mom must have left it in the safe deposit box before she died, to give to me. Someday.
This was the good news.
My grandmother’s ring that my mother had worn every day.
But the bad news wouldn’t be quiet. I left Brad Mitcham’s office and went downstairs to my car. I closed the door. Fought my anger and sadness and sense of loss. I needed to do something and I knew what it was.
First, I called Cat.
CHAPTER 18
I WAS DRIVING along Highway 1 toward my sister’s house in Half Moon Bay at quarter after six that evening. I was consumed with all things Marty, furious at him for more reasons than I could count and it didn’t matter that he was dead. I visualized him alive, cuffed to a chair while I grilled him, shouting all the things I’d never said.
It would have felt good to mash down the gas pedal and find out just how fast my car could go. But good sense reminded me that I didn’t need any accidents or incidents, not one more crap thing today. Right now, I had to be a rock for Cat.
My phone buzzed and Joe’s name came up on the dash. I pressed the Bluetooth connection and his voice filled the car. He asked how I was doing and I said, “Just fine,” which was an outrageous lie, and he knew it.
He said, “Hey, Linds. This is me. Where are you and what’s going on?”
