Frederick Ramsay_Botswana Mystery 01 Read Free Page A

Besides, Lucille would get it all anyway.”
    She nodded. She’d thought of that, and the idea that the money could really dry up, however remote or incomprehensible, scared her. She’d been poor before and knew what she would face. She did not like it. The idea of even relative poverty coalesced and condensed into something akin to a black hole in her mind. Fall into that and…no way was she going back to dancing as Brenda Starr—“yeah, like in the funny papers,” she’d told her friends, though few of them had ever heard of the comic strip, its intrepid gal reporter and her eye-patched mystery man, much less read it.
    She’d danced as near to naked as the Chicago vice squad allowed. Every night, except Mondays when she had a night off, she performed for a legion of grubby, groping, intoxicated strangers. All that ended, though, when she’d managed to snare Robert Scott Griswold, presumptive heir to the Earth Global fortune, and acquired this soft berth on the Near North Side. Brenda no longer worked for a living; she shopped.
    There’d been talk at first, of course, and she had that private detective Leo hired to handle, and the other things, but she’d done it. No, whatever this new wrinkle was, there had to be a way out. Brenda Starski was not going back to that life if she could help it.
    “You still didn’t answer me. What about your stock?”
    “I sold it to Travis Parizzi.”
    “You did what?”
    “Hey, the way you go through money, what was I supposed to do?”
    Brenda groaned. “You’re an idiot.” Bobby, she realized, had the brains of a guppy.
    “Hey, I have an option to buy it back at 10 percent over the sale price. It’s mine, sort of, like collateral on a loan, so it’s safe and all. He gets to use the stock for stuff, and we get money.”
    “You mean, if you can raise the scratch to actually buy it back. How long is that option good for? Why did he want your stock, anyway?”
    “He said he wanted to secure a voting position if the time came, or something. The option’s good for, like, a year…” Bobby didn’t sound so sure.
    Brenda sighed. Of course he could buy it back, only he wouldn’t. If he ever got the money together, he’d find some other way to spend it.
    “That is so totally lame, Bobby. How much is left?” Bobby shrugged and shook his head. Not much, she guessed. Well, at least now she knew where the Maserati and the trip to Europe had come from.
    “Maybe something could happen to both of them, Leo and Lucille, I mean…you know, like an accident or something. Isn’t Africa, like, dangerous to drive in and stuff?”
    Brenda’s knowledge of the Dark Continent derived almost entirely from movies and the cartoons she’d watched as a child. Black men with bones in their noses and brandishing spears, jumping up and down and dancing—the Watusi, something like that. And there were elephants and tigers, too. Was that right? Her friend Desiree said there were no tigers in Africa. She couldn’t remember where Desiree said they came from, but that couldn’t be right. Her father had taken her to the circus as a child and the big cat tamer had lions and tigers. Of course they must come from the same place. Bobby wheeled around the coffee table and grabbed a handful of trail mix from a bowl in its center and stuffed it into his mouth.
    “Lucille and Leo are hardly speaking to each other. She’s probably as ticked about the public offering as me. The board forced it on him, I don’t know why, but he’s hot to go with it, anyway. Her pre-nup assumed all of Leo’s net worth was in a privately held company. If he takes it public, he can bury 85 percent of it in paper with no assessable value, and then dump her. Maybe she’ll kill him. That would solve all our problems.”
    “You think?” Brenda frowned in concentration. “How?”
    “It’s complicated,” he said.
    “Tell me anyway. I’m not as stupid as some people think.” Brenda’s education had been limited to