Settle down, Yukon,” Maxi told her dog, a big, furry, friendly Alaskan malamute who was standing at attention next to the brown leather Eames chair in her study, where she squirmed into different positions, trying to get comfortable. “Just because I can’t relax doesn’t mean you can’t.”
Maxi had been jittery since the funeral that morning. She couldn’t keep the horrific stream of events and their potential consequences from tumbling about in her head. Her well-ordered life had been unraveling on several edges since Jack Nathanson had come into it, and now it had turned downright precarious. She knew it would look dicey for her when Sheriff’s Homicide began to sift through the flotsam of the late Jack Nathanson’s affairs. Her lawyer had been working with her business manager to extricate her as close to whole as possible from Nathanson’s financial twining. The lawyer had put her on alert, phoned her as soon as he’d heard the news of the murder that Saturday and told her to expect a call.
And Wendy was suspicious. Of course, newswoman Wendy Harris was more analytical than the average person. Still, Maxi thought, when the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and the various agencies working with them on this high-profile murder case unearthed the complex fiscal maneuvering ongoing between Jack Nathanson and Maxine Poole Nathanson, they would be dialing M for Motive, and Maxi’s phone would ring.
Besides the IRS, several banks and lending institutions had filed for attachment of Maxi’s salary, as well as all, all of her assets, to help cover unpaid taxes and millions of dollars in loans that Jack had taken out when they were husband and wife—loans that Jack had never told Maxi about. Not that she’d have objected. At that time, Maxi, and the world, thought that mega-star Jack Nathanson had to be sitting on a fortune, from the way he lavished it on himself and others, from his track record as an extremely successful actor with his own production company, even from the way he talked—he talked rich.
Now that Maxi was privy to his books, she saw that Jack had needed those loans, needed those quick money fixes, because the top roles weren’t coming his way anymore, and the money kept flying out the doors and windows.
Yes, he would pull down an occasional small-potatoes gig, which Sam would no longer allow him to turn down—a television X-Files or some such—but they didn’t put a dent in the bills. And Janet had sold him to star in Serial Killer when Clint Eastwood turned it down, but that movie hadn’t come out yet, and his points, if it was a hit, would pay off way down the road—too late to take care of his bills. The IRS had caught up with his tax debt, and the banks were calling their loans. Jack Nathanson showed zero assets on paper, but he’d had a wife when he’d piled up all that debt, a wife who was a well-paid television news reporter, and there was no legal contract separating their estates in those years. Which meant that Maxi had faced the possibility of being wiped out, and worse, the insane but very real prospect of working indefinitely to finish paying off his debts, while Janet Orson supported his continuing high lifestyle.
Maxi knew she was kidding herself, or at least kidding Wendy, when she’d said that Jack was worth more to her alive than dead. Not true, as the criminal investigators would plainly see. Money with the late Jack Nathanson’s name on it, albeit in invisible ink, had already begun surfacing from hidden accounts, money that was pounced upon by his legion of creditors, which creditors in turn signed off on their claims to the assets of Maxine Poole. Since the murder, Maxi’s business manager had been receiving notices letting her off her dead ex-husband’s financial hook. Jack Nathanson was definitely worth more to Maxi Poole dead.
What to do? First of all, she determined to stop waffling on covering the story, and jump on it. True, under these circumstances it was inappropriate for her to cover this murder, but only she knew that. Unless her bosses found out and flashed her a red light, she’d get into it. She’d let everyone see that she was actively looking for the truth in the Jack Nathanson murder case.
The red light came sooner than she’d expected.