A Nose for Justice Read Free

woman.
    “Baby!”
    “Carlotta, oh, how good to see you.”
    Carlotta, bombastic in her affections, opinions, and dress and much loved for it, proudly held up three fingers. “Three.”
    “Three what?” Mags looked puzzled.
    “I am now three times a grandmother.” The middle-aged, well-padded Carlotta beamed, her black eyes sparkling, her black hair still shiny. No gray yet.
    “I thought Tommy just had two kids.” Tommy was her only son.
    Aunt Jeep wryly commented, “It’s a fertile family.”
    “October twenty-seventh. A girl. Finally, two boys and a girl.” Carlotta’s eyes darted to her porridge and she hurried back to stir. “We are all waiting for your turn, Mags.”
    “Oh.” Mags waved her off. “I am not getting married.”
    “Famous last words,” Jeep said, pointing to the table. “I’m sure you haven’t eaten and if you’ve eaten plane food, you need help.”
    “Didn’t.”
    “What about me?”
Baxter politely inquired.
    “Touch my dish and you die!”
King curled back his upper lip.
    “Ah.” Jeep opened a cabinet door, found a small painted stool, pulled it over, and stood on it to fish out a mid-sized, heavy ceramic bowl. “I’ve shrunk.”
    “That cabinet has gotten higher.” Carlotta smiled.
    Suddenly tired, Mags sat down at the farmer’s table.
    “Never occurred to me. That must be it.” Jeep stepped off the smallstool, walked into a small pantry off the spacious kitchen, and returned with a bowl of crunchies for Baxter, which she wisely placed at the opposite end of the kitchen from King’s bowl.
    King’s ears shot up.
“Did you give him something better than you gave me?”
    Baxter, famished, made a beeline for the bowl as Jeep shot King a stern look of warning.
    Two steaming bowls of porridge were now on the table, along with a loaf of wonderful-smelling fresh bread, a wooden cutting board, and a serrated knife.
    Carlotta occasionally ate with the boss, her mother-in-law, but usually returned to her own house, a smaller replica of this house, where she made lunch for her husband. Enrique Salaberry, fifty-eight, had been orphaned in the mid-1950s and then adopted by Jeep and the late Dorothy Jocham. Even after the formal adoption, Jeep had not changed Enrique’s last name to Reed. She’d preserved the surname of his unwed mother, a Basque.
    In one of her downward spirals, Catherine, Mags’s sister, had tried to get her great-aunt to change her will so that only she and Mags (as blood relatives) would inherit Jeep’s considerable estate. Jeep’s enraged response was to strike Catherine from her will entirely. She sent copies of the revised document to Catherine, Catherine’s lawyer, as well as to Catherine’s extremely handsome and extremely loathsome husband. That had been in 2000. A long, noticeable silence followed, and had continued ever since.
    Either Catherine stewed in Brentwood, a beautiful wealthy neighborhood of Los Angeles, or she was stewed. Ever the actress, she was always ready for another comeback. Catherine, being Catherine, was sure to turn up again sooner or later. She had a talent for picking the worst possible moments to reappear. What made it worse was that she was the spitting image of her mother, Glynnis, which always hit Jeep square in the heart.
    Mags carried her mother’s high cheekbones, and had that same lithe body, but you could also see her late father in her: the coloring, the piercing green eyes. Mags was wonderful to look at, but Catherine was drop-dead gorgeous. Such striking looks are so often a curse. In Catherine’s case, it was a big one.
    Jeep rarely mentioned her other great-niece. It wasn’t that her name was forbidden, only that the conversation inevitably grew somber. Sooner or later someone would say, “You know, Cath will wind up dead. Someone will wipe her off the face of the earth.”
    Carlotta leaned over the sink and looked at the sky out the window. Then she walked to the long row of paned glass windows