Death at King Arthur's Court (7 page)

‘That performance was nearly as good as the day I ran with the bulls in Pamplona,' Ernest said.

‘One does not run with the beasts,' Garth said. ‘It's corrida de toros.'

Rina's eyes locked with Lyon's until her companion grasped her elbow and steered her toward the far end of the patio.

‘Your sister reminds me of a gypsy,' Lyon said to the man intently bent over the computer on his desk. ‘She has a certain wild elan about her.'

‘Change that to uncontrolled lust for eagles, men and money, not necessarily in that order. Although a rich man who donated to her Eagle Foundation might head the list.'

‘Her new boyfriend has money?'

‘Whatever Skee has besides muscles, it's certainly not money, but I'm not about to ask Rina what it is.'

Clay Dickensen, working at Lyon's desk, had the hair and skin coloring of his fraternal twin. Brother and sister had the identical shade of black hair that appeared a darker hue when contrasted against their alabaster skin. That combination accentuated their sensual features. Their builds were also similar, although the primary differentiating characteristic was Clay's serious and nearly perpetual half frown, as contrasted against her uninhibited openness.

Lyon sank into the worn leather chair behind the desk and sipped on his sherry. ‘How bad is it?'

Clay thumped the thin pile of records by the computer. ‘Rotten and lousy!' he said as he swivelled the chair to face Lyon. ‘Your financial records are a travesty. I'm going to have to do a lot of interpolating, since I can't ask the IRS for another extension.'

‘Interpolation sounds like accountant talk for guessing.'

‘It's also secret CPA code that means, I hope to God you don't get audited.'

‘I don't want to cheat.'

‘With the condition of your records, even strict honesty is going to look suspicious.' He bent over the keyboard with a deepening of his usual frown. ‘If you had only kept a travel diary like I suggested last year. I could have given you a hell of a lot more legitimate travel deductions.'

‘I tried it,' Lyon said.

‘I know,' Clay replied. ‘I read it. The first two entries were terrific. You had dates, exact amounts for train fares, taxis, and the lunch with your publisher, all duly noted. Then I got to page three, which turned into a long description of two Wobbly monsters riding the roof of an Amtrack train as it struggled back to Connecticut in a snow storm.'

‘Who's Rina's new beau?' Lyon asked in an attempt to divert talk away from his tax problems.

‘Skee Chickering is an appropriate addition to my sister's gypsy caravan. He's not only a professional bodybuilder, but is now her business partner in a fitness studio. She leads the acrobatic classes while he instructs on the machines, power-lifting, and tends the juice bar while she goes eagle watching.'

Lyon laughed. ‘I don't know if it's due to her interest or not, but the bald eagles are returning to the river valley.'

Clay turned his chair at an angle that allowed him to simultaneously see Rina on the patio and Lyon in the leather chair. ‘I shouldn't bad-mouth Skee. He's the one who's gotten her into the health business, and that's a relief from past obsessions with a certain rock band.'

‘She seems to be the type of individual who's extremely enthusiastic about everything she does.' Lyon watched Rina suck on an orange with gusto and then throw back her head to laugh at Garth's quip. It was impossible not to notice the way a patio lantern backlit her figure. He realized that Clay was watching him with his usual half frown and he quickly poured another sherry.

‘She's always had a crush on you,' Clay said.

‘Hey, I'm a happily married guy,' Lyon said.

‘You forget that Rina is an aging flower child. The fact that you're married doesn't concern her in the least. She believes in what she calls the full and natural expression of feelings. You and I might call it sexual license. I've never been quite sure if this philosophy is based on some sort of Zen or the residue of too many past drugs. In addition to her girlhood crush on you, I think that she's really got her heart set on the house. She considers Nutmeg Hill as the best location on the river for an eagle sanctuary.'

‘Bea and I would never sell this place.'

‘Rina knows that. Bea has already told her.'

‘I hope you're not suggesting anything. I have no intention of sharing my house with very large feathered friends. And other alternatives won't work, since I'm too old for her,' Lyon said with what he hoped was a note of finality.

‘Nothing is too good for the eagles. There is no sacrifice too extreme, although Skee seems to be helping to relieve some of that obsessive pressure. Our older brother doesn't understand that. Morgan still holds it against Rina for dropping out of college in her junior year. It drove him up the wall when she followed the Grateful Dead for fifteen months as a Dead Head.'

‘I'm surprised he didn't try and stop her,' Lyon said.

‘Oh, but he did. Big brother turned off the money spigot.'

‘How could he do that?'

‘Although Morgan is only our half-brother, he is the one in charge of the trust our grandparents established. He has so much control that when Rina left college he was able to stop half her money.'

‘Morgan's an academic,' Lyon said. ‘That breed believes that dropping out of college is the equivalent of deserting an army under enemy fire.'

Clay clicked off the laptop and carefully placed the slim batch of financial records in a file folder. ‘The situation got worse. He finally caught up with her at a Dead concert in Foxboro, Massachusetts. There was enough marijuana smoke hovering over the stadium to fog-in an airport. As usual, Rina was exuberantly participating in the festivities. She was wearing a pair of skimpy denim shorts and no top while she sat on some guy's shoulders and screamed and waved her arms every time Garcia plucked a note. Needless to say, Morgan was not amused. That's when he stopped the other half of her trust payments.'

‘I'm surprised he has that sort of absolute power under the trust once you reached your majority,' Lyon said.

‘I know. It's illogical, but that's how it was set up. His control doesn't end until he decides that we are able to watch over our own affairs. Then he will make final distribution of the principle. When he cut Rina off after the Dead concert, he began to apply financial pressure on me. I was in the midst of studying for my CPA exam when he lowered the boom. He took the position that I was required to bring peer pressure down on Rina. Twin pressure was the exact phrase he used. I was to wrench her away from the arms of the Grateful Dead, detox her from drugs, and turn off her sexual engine. It was just about this time that she discovered eagles. Birds, not the group. Since birds don't seem to thrive at rock concerts and you don't see many zonked bird-watchers, it seemed like a healthy outlet to me. It worked in a way. She traded one obsession for another. She swapped the music for bodybuilding and eagles. The sex stayed.'

‘Do I detect a little bitterness here?' Lyon asked.

‘Hell, yes! We both resent our pompous half-brother making decisions concerning our lifestyles. He decides what is permissible and punishes us financially if we defy him. Our granddaddy who set the terms of the trust should be dug up and a stake pounded through his heart. We'd both sell our souls to be out from under Morgan.'

‘And Rina feels the same?'

‘Jesus, yes! Don't get her started on the subject. The only reason she's here tonight is to help me force Morgan to set the exact date for the financial distribution.'

‘Rina's not a Dead Head anymore, she's creating a successful business, and her work with an endangered species is certainly a positive step. What reasons does Morgan give for not making the distribution?'

Clay stared intently out the window as if answers floated in the reflections mirrored there. ‘I tried to resolve that last month. He told me that I still wore brown shoes and Rina had gone to the birds. Brown shoes and eagles were the obstacles to our getting the money.'

‘I don't understand that non sequitur,' Lyon said.

‘Morgan insists that there are certain kinds of anal retentive people who wear brown shoes after five at night. Since I fall into that category, I am pegged as retentive. It is his responsibility to me and the trust to change my personality so that I stop hoarding feces, bank accounts and IRS receipts.'

‘In other words,' Lyon said. ‘The problem in Morgan's eyes is that your sister wants to give her money to an endangered species, and you don't want to spend any of yours?'

‘You got it. When I hear contradictions like that, my accountant's mind rings an alarm,' Clay said.

‘Have you tried discussing this with him?'

‘Come on, Lyon. You know what a pompous ass he is. You don't discuss with big brother. He allows you an opinion as long as it doesn't disagree with his authoritative decree. His democracy gives Rina and me one vote to his six.'

Lyon laughed. ‘That's just about how he runs the English department at the university.'

‘He's gone too far this time,' the accountant said. ‘The situation has reached such serious dimensions that I'm afraid something violent could happen.'

Lyon tried to manufacture a reassuring smile, but was afraid that it probably appeared more of a grimace. ‘Garth and Ernest may exhibit a lot of bluster and spout words, but they've fought each other and Morgan for years. They are upset right now over a new man coming into the department, but I don't think that they would do anything violent to your brother.'

Clay laughed. ‘If they don't get him, there's another candidate in my sister and that muscle-bound hunk she shares her cave with. Skee will do anything Rina tells him, and I'm worried about what she might be whispering in his ear recently.'

‘New England families have argued over trust funds for generations,' Lyon said. ‘If even a small percentage of those fights ended in mayhem, our cemeteries would be overflowing.'

‘The money in the trust was nurtured for two centuries. Sea captains chased whale or sailed two-year trips on the China Run. When the manufacturing age began, they invested in the mills. Now, our half-brother is involved in the worst possible New England sin.' His voice lowered to a hoarse tone that signified his desperation. ‘Morgan is dipping into capital.'

Lyon recognized his alarm. Capital depletion was a gross violation of the New England puritan ethic. Profligate spending transcended ordinary sins and other high crimes and misdemeanors. ‘Morgan has an excellent salary from the university,' he said in defense of his former teaching mate.

‘As a full professor and chair he's drawing eighty-five thousand dollars and you can add another fifty from the trust fund. Deduct a proper per cent for federal and state income taxes for that bracket and he's taking home …' He punched some numbers into a small pocket calculator. ‘Exactly eighty-nine K a year.'

‘Some people manage to somehow squeak a living from that sort of money, Clay.'

‘I know the man's lifestyle. He makes at least two trips a year to the continent on Concorde. He stays at the Savoy in London, and buys suits and accessories from the best tailors on Bond Street. That tank he has parked in your driveway set him back a hundred thou after he finished redoing it. Add these little items to the cost of his wine cellar, the bimbo he keeps in Boston, and you find that the man is living at a standard that calls for two, two point five a year. He's making up that shortfall with our money!'

‘That's supposition,' Lyon said. ‘He sells articles to those journals.'

Clay snorted. ‘They pay peanuts.'

‘Clay's right. He's taken our money,' Rina said from the doorway.

As both men turned to look at her, she automatically assumed a pose against the doorframe. She leaned her shoulders back and thrust her hips forward. She slowly waved a large glass of papaya juice in their direction. Lyon wasn't sure what signal this posture was supposed to transmit, but it seemed to fall somewhere between wanton sexuality and ‘screw you guys for all I care'. He was struck again with the strong resemblance between the brother and sister.

‘Are you still ready to beard the bastard tonight, Clay?' she continued.

‘I told him yesterday that I'd be at Nutmeg Hill tonight to work on Lyon's taxes. I also said I would ask you to come so we could talk about a final accounting of the trust.'

‘What was his answer after he finished laughing?' Rina asked.

‘There wasn't any answer, just one of his
will you nows.
'

Rina turned toward Lyon with a vehemence. ‘I need that money. Skee and I have entered into a franchise agreement with a national health club and we're obligated to open two more outlets in a sixty-day period. That takes start-up money. I have also promised the Eagle Foundation a sizable donation to continue the good results we're seeing with the arrival of new birds in the area. I want my damn capital now!'

‘Bravo, my eaglet!' Morgan's resonant bass voice reverberated through the study. He pushed into the room and seemed to occupy its full dimensions by the power of his personality. ‘Aren't they a sterling pair, Lyon?' he said with an expansive gesture toward his half-siblings. ‘The feminine part of one end of our gene pool thinks she is a bird. The male portion of the pair, such as it is, has a bookkeeper mind of dimensions so broad that it staggers the imagination of Lilliputians.'

‘Knock it off, Morgan,' Clay said. ‘We're here to talk money.'

‘Aren't you always, you minion of the tax authorities? Did it ever occur to you that the principle you're so worried about might have been added to by my small efforts in real estate and the stock market?'

‘That possibility never crossed my mind,' Clay answered.