Frederick Ramsay_Botswana Mystery 01 Read Free

brake lights winking, their exhausts billowing white in the chilled air, crept bumper-to-bumper working their way north in the late afternoon rush hour. At his back, to the west, a sharp-edged winter sun glittered in a cold, gray sky. In Lake Michigan, low waves lapped along its shore and splashed against concrete abutments. Ice had already formed on some of them. The autumnal equinox had come and gone, and winter hovered just over the border in Canada, waiting to pounce on Chicago with its annual icy fury.
    “Dead? What do you mean, you want your stepfather dead? What’re you planning to do, shoot him?” Brenda, his wife of a few months, slouched on the sofa sipping a diet Coke.
    “I’m just saying…”
    “You’re just saying…what, Bobby? I know Leo is no treat, but he’s your stepdad…why would you want him dead?”
    “Leo is so not my stepfather. He married my mother. She died. Now he’s married to Lucille and I’m out.”
    “You said he adopted you after your mom died.”
    “Yeah, well dream on. At her funeral he comes up to me and he goes, ‘That’s it, kid, you’re on your own.’ So, that’s the deal on the adoption thing. We’re in for nada, zilch.”
    “Look, you don’t know. He gave you a job, didn’t he, and you still have your mother’s stock in the company, right?”
    Bobby turned and walked to the wall and flipped on the recessed lighting. He paused to inspect the Mondrian original on the wall. He hated that painting, just a bunch of colored squares and lines. He’d wanted to buy a Stephen Holland painting of Brett Favre, Super Bowl XXXI. But Brenda had taken an art appreciation course at night and had overruled him,
    “Don’t you?” she repeated.
    “The job is bogus, Brenda, I sit at a desk in accounting and count paper clips. Some days I go to lunch and don’t come back and it’s, like, nobody even notices.”
    “Jeeze, Bobby, are you bragging or complaining?”
    “You don’t understand, Brenda. I mean, I should be a vice president or something, you know. Now, if Leo goes through with the IPO, if he takes the company public, I’m toast. I work there because he says so. He exercises all his stock options, collects all that cash and retires, and who’ll want me then?”
    Leo Painter manipulated their lives like a marionette master. Once, Brenda thought, he cared for them in his own peculiar way, but now he seemed to enjoy watching them fail; well, watching Bobby fail. Somewhere between Leo’s second wife, Bobby’s mother, and wife number three—that would be Lucille—he had suffered the latest in his series of cardiac accidents and had turned from being distant but tolerable to personal and nasty.
    “Maybe he’ll have another heart attack in Africa and you’ll get your wish,” she said, “But I don’t see how that works for you. You should want him alive. You should be in there making nice to him, so even if he does sell or whatever, you’ll have something.”
    Brenda studied her husband as he wandered aimlessly around their apartment. He had been an only child who’d been coddled by an overprotective mother, so that he’d achieved manhood without a clue about what it meant to be a responsible adult. She’d found his boyishness attractive in the beginning, that and his money—especially the money—and their life together had been an endless party. Then his mother died, and all that came to a dead stop. No allowance, no free rein. Leo gave him a job as much to get him out of his hair as a sign of paternal felicity. Bobby was a man-boy. She wondered if he would ever grow up.
    “He hates me, Brenda.” His voice had taken on the whining quality she’d come to detest. “He’ll just laugh me out the door. And listen, if he goes, you can kiss your Michigan Avenue boutiques goodbye, too. Never mind me and not having a job; how about you? Can you get a job? What are you good at, babe, besides maxing out our VISA card? Are you ready to go back to pole dancing?