Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
“What is it, Mother?” Peter Stanton asked as he rushed into the main office of Stanton Enterprises to see his mother seething. She held a crumpled piece of paper in her hand as she turned her fury onto him.
“You goddamn fucking idiot. You couldn’t keep it in your pants, could you? If you weren’t my son, I’d freaking fire you right now!” She screeched at him. “This is all your freaking fault! Not only did your dick cost us five million dollars, now it might have cost us our business.”
Peter was taken aback as he stared at his mother. If he hadn’t known her so well, he would think he might have to call her doctor to get her a prescription to calm her down. “What are you going on about?”
“This,” she said as she wadded up the crumbled papers and threw them at him.
He picked them up, opened them up, and read, “What the fuck is this?”
“Don’t use that language in front of me, you idiot. In case you don’t know, twenty-six years ago, when I forced that nasty woman to sign the pre-nuptial agreement, her father forced us to sign that.”
“What exactly is this?”
“It was a contract that Gibson Associates would pay Stanton Enterprises one-hundred-thousand dollars a month for as long as you and that vile woman were married. Now that you’re divorced, she’s cutting off that money.”
“She can’t do that?”
“She can and she will. If you didn’t see it, they sent a copy the original contract with the part that your father, me, and you agreed that we couldn’t go after them if they terminated the contract.”
“We can fight this in court?”
“With what?” Beatrice screeched at him. She walked over to the sideboard and poured a generous amount of amber liquid into a tumbler. Peter had never seen his mother drink before six in the evening, it was now only ten in the morning. She turned around and glared at him. “This is all your fault. If you hadn’t stuck your freaking dick in everything that walked by you, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. Not only have we lost your wife’s money, but now because of what happened during the ruling, we lost any chance to get your freaking brat to take loans out in her name. I don’t like swearing, and I never do it, but in this case it’s warranted.”
“What?”
“You literally fucked us into this situation.” She downed the entire contents of the glass in one swallow then threw the empty tumbler at him. “Get out of my sight. You disgust me right now. Don’t come back until you find a way to freaking fix this mess you got us into.” At his look, she turned fully toward him. “How do you think we’ve been able to keep our heads above water since your father killed himself? He was embezzling from the company, and when I called him on it, he took the coward’s way out and ended his own life.” She paced back and forth and wrapped her arms around her middle. Then returned her glare back onto him.
“Since he died, and stopped stealing from us, we were able to recoup our losses. Lately, the only saving grace we’ve had is the money from Gibson’s. Now that you’ve fucked us out of that, it will be a wonder if we don’t close our doors in the next six months. Get out of my face and don’t come back until you find a solution!” She screamed then turned her back on her son to look out the high-rise window. Before he left, she turned back around and glared at her son. “Oh, and Peter, you better have a solution from the head on your shoulders, not with what you’ve been functioning with for the last twenty plus years. You know, the one below the belt. That’s the one that got us in this predicament.”
Shocked by his mother’s reaction to him, and the loss of the money his ex-wife had just cut off from him, Peter left, fuming at both of them. Unable to work, he left the office and walked three blocks down to his favorite bar. He ordered a double and sat there to savor it. Instead, he ended up downing three of them in less than five minutes, then savored the fourth one. He sat there for the next four hours thinking of how he could get back at his wife, then get back into his mother’s good graces. It wasn’t until he stumbled out of the bar at closing time that he had a thought. It wouldn’t be until two days later that he remembered what he had thought while in a drunken stupor, and set it to motion.
On Wednesday morning of the following week, he entered his mother’s office with a grin on his face.
“What do you want?” Beatrice looked at him with disdain, and Peter knew she was still upset with him. He knew what he was about to say would get him back into her good graces and he would be her good boy again.
“I’ve come up with an idea to not only get Laurie to pay us the money from the contract, but also a way to get the five million I had to pay her in the divorce settlement.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?” Beatrice scowled at her son, and kept that expression as he took a seat before her desk and took the next two hours to lay out his entire plan.
“That could work,” she said in excitement when he concluded. “Do you have one already in place?”
“I do, I took it out years ago, before she got pregnant with the brat. I don’t know if she kept the one on me, but we both had life insurance policies paying the survivor. Both were for five million dollars.”
“How do you plan to pull this off?”
Peter told her what he’d come up with and they spent the rest of the afternoon fine tuning all the details. At the conclusion, he looked at his mother with a scowl.
“What?”
“I need you to be patient. I’m not saying I’m going to do this tonight, or even in the next day or two. I need to watch her to see if she’s changed her pattern since I moved out. When she’s out of the house, I’m going to see if I can’t get in so when this goes down, I can lay in wait for her. If I recall, there were a couple of windows that while the lock was engaged, they didn’t really lock, you could still open them.” He looked at the doubtful look on his mother’s face and grinned. “Trust me, I used them a couple of time when I knew she would be waiting up for me.” He laughed at his mother’s snort, then sighed heavily. “I will call you when the deed is done.”
“Maybe I should plan on a vacation for the two of us.” Beatrice looked at her son. “You know, you’re distraught over your divorce so being the good mother that I am, I decided to take you to someplace where you could relax after the stress of the divorce.”
They both snorted a laugh and discussed where they wanted to go. Just before leaving her office, he turned to her and nodded. “Remember, no pressure from you, it might take a few days, possibly a week, but I promise it won’t take more than two. I can’t do this if you’re constantly calling and pressuring me.”
“I understand, and I’ll allow you to get away with talking to me like that if this plan of yours will recoup our loss. However, if it goes longer than a month, then all bets are off. I will step in then.”
“Deal,” Peter said with a nod and wave as he exited his mother’s office. He went to his, and didn’t really do anything as he made plans on how to get the five million dollars back from his ex-wife.
On Friday of the next week, Peter rang the bell to the home he had lived in for twenty-five years, seething inside. Not only had his ex-wife, the bitch, changed the locks, but she had also had all the old windows replaced. Though it upset him, he knew that once his plan panned out, the new windows would be a great item to get more money from when he sold the house.
After scoping out the house for a couple of days, he knew that Laurie’s routine hadn’t changed, but once he realized the windows had been changed, he had to rearrange his plans to take her out. Instead of lying in wait and attacking her when she came home, he would have to get into the house somehow. He knew how he would do it, he just needed access to the inside, then their old bedroom. From there it would be a piece of cake to kill his bitch of an ex-wife. He turned when the door opened, and he saw his ex-wife standing there. It took every ounce of control he had not to strike out and punch her in the face.
“What are you doing here?” Laurie demanded when she opened the door to her ex-husband. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Fine, I have nothing to say to you either, but I left something here, and when you put all my things out, it wasn’t there.”
“What?”
He hadn’t thought she would confront him, so he made it up as he went along. “My father’s old Rolex. I had put it in the bottom drawer in my closet. May I came in and get it?”
“Fine, but make it fast,” Laurie stepped back and he knew his plan would be successful once she shut the door behind him. He heard the whistle of the tea kettle going off in the kitchen, and when she went there, he headed toward the stairs. He looked around and found that nothing had changed except the windows, but somehow it seemed different. In his mind, it was less cluttered, but he shrugged and gave himself a mental slap to get with the program.
He knew he hadn’t left anything there, and his father had never had a Rolex, but it was a good ruse to have. It got him into the house, and more importantly up the stairs. For his plan to work, he needed her to fall down them, and not survive the fall. He was in the empty closet when Laurie walked in and asked if he had found it.
“No, I could have sworn it was here,” he said as he bent down and opened the bottom drawer, and felt all around. To make it look good, he did it to all the drawers, and even went over to hers. He looked at her and only saw her raise her brows at him.
“Sorry, I must have missed it when I unpacked my things.” He thought he sounded contrite, then he stood, brushed off his pants, and slowly made his way out of the closet, glanced at the bed and saw that even his pillows were gone. Only one person slept in that bed, he didn’t know how he felt about that, for some reason he suddenly felt sad that he wasn’t a part of this house any longer. Outside the bedroom, they walked side by side to the top of the stairs, and he paused to turn to her.
“I don’t have a right to ask, but how are you?”
“I’m fine, you don’t need to concern yourself about me. You didn’t give a damn about me for over twenty years, don’t start now.” She tossed her head in the air and looked down her nose at him.
Peter saw red, as soon as she had that haughty attitude with him, he reached out and saw one of his daughter’s baseball bats leaning against the doorway of her old room. He picked it up and swung. At the last minute, instead of swinging at the back of her head like he wanted to, he lowered the bat enough to take out her knee as soon as her other foot was in the air to take a step. He couldn’t have had better luck. With the bat still in his hand, he shoved her down the stairs. At the impact of the bat to her flesh, he heard a bone breaking, her scream, and then nothing. He stood at the top of the stairs with a satisfied look on his face.
Without an ounce of feeling, or remorse, he returned the bat to its original place. Walked down the stairs and stood over his wife’s prone body. Without squatting down, he pulled his phone, took a picture and sent it in a text.
“Payback’s a bitch,” he said clear as day, then called his mother. He only said two words as he walked out the front door. “It’s done.” He hung up, walked the three blocks to where he’d left his car, climbed in, and drove away. A little way down the road he had to pull over because he was laughing so hard in his glee at killing his ex-wife. Because it had been pre-arranged, he drove to the airport, parked, grabbed his bag, and made his way inside to catch his flight to the Bahamas where his mother was already waiting for him.
Laurie woke with a start, then screamed out in pain. She looked around wildly when she was held down. It took several seconds to realize she was in the hospital and several people dressed in scrubs were running around, while others were barking out orders.
“Where am I?” she asked, then shook her head and winced. “Sorry, I know I’m in the hospital, but I don’t know what happened to land here.”
“I don’t know the entire story either,” a nurse said. “All I know is that a neighbor called the police, they came to investigate, and you were brought here. From the scene, it looked like you fell down the stairs at your home.”
Laurie looked around wildly and then at the nurse. “I didn’t, I was pushed, after my ex-husband used a baseball bat on my knee.”
The nurse looked at her in shock, then disappeared, she came back with a man in uniform and told him what Laurie had said.
“Are you sure?”
“I am. Peter Stanton is my ex-husband. A couple of weeks ago, we received the final ruling in our divorce. I won, he had to pay me a substantial amount of money because of the pre-nuptial agreement I signed. The only time I saw him in the last thirteen months was when we were in court. He showed up at my house tonight saying he left something there. He went up to his old closet to look for it, while I turned the tea kettle off. I met him up there. The item he was looking for wasn’t there, we were leaving, we exchanged words at the top of the stairs. I remember feeling ungodly pain in my leg, then I woke up here.”
She looked around wildly, then sat up suddenly. “Is anyone at my house? You know? Do you have cops looking around?”
“We did, I don’t know if they’re still there.”
“I have Nanny cams all over the house. They have my permission to take them. Also, I have a home monitoring system. Call Mike Powers with Powers and Associates. Ask him to review the footage. Peter arrived at my house around six forty-five this evening. If today is still Friday.”
The officer stepped outside, and Laurie saw him talk on the phone, he came back in and asked, “Where are the Nanny cameras?”
“At the top of the stairs, on the set of shelves there is an old Raggedy Ann doll. It’s on the button of her dress. At the base of the stairs, there’s a Raggedy Andy doll. The camera is in his hat. All the Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls throughout the house have the cameras.”
She lay back as the details were relayed and then a doctor arrived to say that her knee was shattered and she needed to go into surgery.
“Can you call my daughter?” Laurie asked the nurse, and gave the contact information before being wheeled away.