03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (23 page)

Wines was cataloguing the evidence when Keith Hampton stopped in after walking Tracey through the process. They talked, and then Wines walked him to the door. “Thanks for taking care of this for us,” he said. “Hope to see you again.”

Hampton shook his hand, then looked at Wines intently and said, “I’m sure you will.”

As the defense attorney walked away, Wines thought,
He’s telling me Tracey has something to barter with.

While Keith Hampton insinuated the possibility of a deal, Celeste worried about evidence that she and the woman now charged with her husband’s shooting were lovers. One afternoon in the car, she called Cindy Light, the photographer. Light had heard about the shooting and was surprised to hear from Celeste so soon.

“How’s Steve? How are you?” she asked.

“He’s in the hospital,” Celeste said. “Do you have the photos from Tracey’s party?”

Light thought for a minute, stunned. It seemed an odd request just days after an attempted murder. “No,” she said. “I gave them to you, negatives and all.”

“Okay,” Celeste said, and hung up.

Afterward, Cindy realized that she’d been wrong. She’d given the photos to Tracey, not Celeste. What neither she nor Celeste yet knew was that they were already in evidence at the Sheriff’s Department.
Celeste,
Light thought,
what have you done?

The phone rang at Keith Hampton’s office that week as well, and in weeks to come. Celeste wanted to talk with him about Tracey’s case.

“I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “Tracey’s my client.”

As many times as he refused, Celeste continued to call.

That afternoon at the hotel, Celeste pulled Kristina to the side. “Don’t tell anybody, but I talked to Tracey,” she said. “They’ve arrested her for Steve’s shooting.” She then repeated what Keith Hampton had advised Tracey in their
meeting that day, that he would fight to keep the gun out of evidence by claiming the search was unconstitutional.

The knowledge that her mother had been talking to Tracey frightened Kristina. “You promised you wouldn’t talk to Tracey,” she said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Celeste told her. “I won’t do it again.”

Days later Jennifer looked at the caller ID on Celeste’s cell telephone and saw Tracey’s name and phone number. Frightened, she confronted Celeste. “You’re talking to Tracey, aren’t you?”

“No,” Celeste insisted. “She must be calling and hanging up.”

Not long after, Celeste changed the password on her voice mail, so the girls could no longer pick up her calls.

With Tracey now charged, Wines had to inform Steve of her arrest. Ignoring the sign on the door, he went inside and found Steve still hooked up to a ventilator and appearing as if each breath might be his last. He took the news with little emotion and showed no surprise. After the detective left, Steve motioned for a pen and pad from the nurses.
“Let my family in to see me,”
he wrote. Perhaps he reasoned that now he knew who the shooter was, and it wasn’t Celeste.

Not knowing Celeste had already learned about the arrest from Tracey, Wines’s last task that day was to tell her. He called Charles Burton and learned that she and the girls had changed hotels and were now staying at a La Quinta Inn near the hospital. When he arrived, the desk clerk called upstairs. “You have a visitor,” he said.

“She doesn’t want to see anyone,” the man said when he hung up.

Wines pulled out his badge. “Tell Mrs. Beard that Detective Wines wants to talk to her.”

Minutes later Celeste and the twins walked into the lobby. When Wines started talking, she pulled him outside, away from the ears of the clerk.

“Am I a suspect?” she asked.

“I’m here to tell you we arrested Tracey,” Wines said.

“Is the investigation closed?”

“No,” he said. She frowned when he added, “We’re still investigating.”

Although it had been nearly a week since the shooting, Steve’s outlook remained dire. Much of the time he was heavily drugged and asleep. Over the coming weeks, Dr. Coscia would first try to stabilize Steve and then wean him from the ventilator. Repeatedly he’d have to be put back on as his oxygen levels plummeted. Since the gunshot tore through his intestines, it had polluted Steve’s body with debris, raising the risk of serious infection. Signs at the door to his room asked visitors to don surgical gowns and wash their hands, to protect him from what in others might be a minor cold or flu, but to Steve could prove fatal.

Justin said nothing of his suspicions to Kristina, but he watched Celeste carefully. More than once he saw her walk into Steve’s room without washing her hands. Once, when she had a sore throat, she went into his room in the ICU anyway. Inside, she took off her mask and kissed Steve full on the lips. Later, Justin reasoned that he was afraid to tell anyone what he was thinking. If he did, it would make it real.

At times Steve cried, depressed. At other moments, with the kids, he smiled, mouthing that the IV fluids and ice chips didn’t match real food. Once, Jennifer put her ear to his lips, and he whispered, “I see hamburgers in my dreams.”

Jen laughed, but when Steve chuckled, he stopped, holding his abdomen and squeezing the button on the drug dispenser
for more pain killers. By then doctors had taken him in for more surgeries, including cutting a tracheotomy, a hole in his throat for the breathing tube. He was still being fed through tubes going directly into his stomach. Daily, nurses debreeded his wounds, cleaning out infection.

Long term, no one could predict how he’d mend, but the doctors agreed he’d be in a wheelchair for the foreseeable future. Although before the shooting he’d been a robust man, Steve was now in constant pain, bedridden and feeble, dependent on others to do the simplest tasks. The social workers talked to Celeste and Kristina about the future, a series of operations in which skin grafts would be transplanted over his gaping wounds. Once he healed, he’d be transferred to a rehab facility, where Celeste would be taught to care for him. Every conversation with his doctors began with, “If Mr. Beard survives…”

Even with Steve battling for his life, Celeste’s attention seemed drawn not to him but to his accounts at the Bank of America, where his money remained out of her grasp. While Steve was incapacitated, C.W. Beard, the banker, and Steve’s attorney, Kuperman, had agreed on a system to pay household expenses. With that go-ahead, Celeste spent lavishly. Some of the expenses claimed were for preparing the house for Steve’s return home in a wheelchair, which included $26,000 for an ornamental stair railing.

Her handyman practically lived at the Toro Canyon house, building bookshelves and doing repairs. She had a gazebo built outside, telling the Dennisons it would be a place for Steve to sit in his wheelchair and look out at the trees. Dr. Dennison shook his head in wonder when she then had a pathway of loose river rocks laid to it, one on which it would have been nearly impossible to push a wheelchair.

Louis Shanks trucks pulled up weekly with new furniture
both at the Toro Canyon house and the lake house. The carpeting had been torn out and replaced, Celeste bought new wallpaper for the bathrooms, and, in what was still a brand new house, she hired painters to change the finish on the window ledges from satin to glossy.

Other expenditures, Celeste said, were for security. She paid $7,600 for chain-link fencing and razor wire, the spirals of thin steel blades often seen on the tops of fences and buildings in rough parts of large cities. For two weeks Jimmy Martinez worked daily at the Toro Canyon house, installing a cutting edge camera-equipped security system. From a central command center, Celeste could watch every door and every room.

It didn’t help the girls’ peace of mind that spectators drove by and stared at the house. Celeste posted a sign more often seen on dark country roads than in affluent neighborhoods: “No Trespassing. This property is under 24 hour video surveillance.”

In mid-October she and the girls moved back to Toro Canyon. Jimmy left his German shepherd to guard them; and the teens, all on edge, slept together in Kristina’s room, listening for Tracey’s footsteps. “We were terrified she’d come back,” says Kristina.

Jennifer was not only frightened of Tracey; she was afraid of Celeste, so much so that whenever she could, she stayed with friends. “I just knew she was involved, and I didn’t know what she’d do to us,” she says. “I wouldn’t leave Kristina, but I shook every time I got in the car with Celeste. I was afraid she’d drive us off the side of a hill.”

Meanwhile, the bills rolled into Kuperman’s office. Along with all the house repairs, Celeste had purchased two Cadillac Cateras for the twins and a brand new $55,000 bronze mist Cadillac for herself. Combined, the three cars cost $105,000. With the bills climbing from the tens of thousands
to the hundreds of thousands, Kuperman went to the hospital to see Steve. Celeste was with him, but Steve, still on a ventilator, was unable to talk. Kuperman stayed only briefly, getting no answers to any of his questions.

Ten days after Steve was shot, Becky returned to the hospital. This time she came armed with papers her father had signed years earlier that gave her his power of attorney for medical purposes. She took them to a social worker and had a notation made on his chart. When she went down to see him, Celeste tried to keep her from entering the room.

“He’s been my father a lot longer than he’s been your husband,” Becky told her. “Get out of my way.”

“He has a new family now. He doesn’t love any of you!” Celeste screamed.

Becky stared at her. “I know my father loves me. I’m not going to take this up with him now, but when he’s better, we’ll have a talk.” Then she went into his room.

After Becky left for Dallas, Celeste had Steve sign a new form, removing Becky and giving her his medical power of attorney. Once she had it noted on his chart, she began a code system; only people who knew the word of the day were given information about Steve’s condition. From that point on, the older Beard children were rebuffed when they called the hospital and asked about their father. “Steven finally got someone at the hospital to help us,” says Paul. “Celeste wouldn’t even let us talk to our father.”

Although she catered to him at the hospital, it gnawed at Celeste that Steve hadn’t died. She hated going to the hospital, and complained to the twins that she had other things to do. The day the nurse put her hand over Steve’s trach opening, so he could not just mouth words or write but talk, the kids were delighted. But his raspy voice struck a different chord with Celeste. Suddenly, all the weeks of pledging her
love ended. “I can’t believe she did that,” she said. “Now I’ll have to listen to that fat old fuck telling me what to do.”

Many afternoons, Celeste and Tracey met at a picnic table in a small creekside park just north of downtown. Since her arrest, Tracey’s friends at work stared at her. People treated her differently; many, including Pat and Jane, kept a distance. She felt alone. In mid-October she overdosed on prescription drugs and booze and spent another night in St. David’s, barely pulling through. But when they were together, Celeste appeared unconcerned about Tracey. She was worried about her own future.

“I think the kids are suspicious of me,” she said. “Not Kristina, but the others.”

“Do they know anything?”

“I don’t think so. They’re just guessing,” she said. Rambling on, she talked about Steve, saying that she’d never expected him to hold on for so long. She had to be at the hospital every minute, she told Tracey, watching to see who he was talking to. She didn’t even want him talking alone to her attorney, Burton, afraid of what he might tell him. “And the will’s not what I thought it was,” she lamented. Celeste complained that she’d thought she’d have access to Steve’s money, not be at the mercy of the bank. “I’m going to get him to change it,” she said.

Perhaps Steve truly believed Celeste was innocent; still, there must have been a nagging doubt, a little voice that asked, “Why would Tracey do this?”

“Do you believe that crazy nut? She had the hots for Celeste and was jealous of a fat old guy like me,” he said to one friend when he came to visit. The friend, who doubted Tracey had acted alone, only nodded. Around Steve, they all watched every word.

“His condition was up and down,” says Jennifer. “We didn’t want to upset him. We were afraid for him. And if we said anything, we were afraid he’d tell our mom.”

Only Kristina, who had no doubts about her mother’s innocence, asked Steve one day what he remembered from the night of the shooting. “Just waking up hurting like hell,” he said. “Now don’t you worry your pretty head about it.”

Still, that doubt must have been there, perhaps fueled by a visit from Kuperman in early November, when he laid out Celeste’s expenditures. In the month since the shooting, she’d spent nearly $300,000. Upset, Steve just shook his head. “I can’t think about this now,” he said. “When I get out of here, then I’ll take care of it.”

A month after the shooting, however, Steve was suddenly forced to confront his doubts. That afternoon, Celeste answered her cell phone in his hospital room. The girls listened as she talked, and they realized it was Tracey.

“Girls, wait outside. I want to talk to your mother,” Steve ordered.

They did as they were told. Minutes later Celeste left Steve’s room fuming. “Change all the phone numbers on the cell phones,” Celeste told Kristina.

Later the twins would find out what went on in that room. Steve had looked at Celeste and asked her, “Did you put Tracey up to this?”

The following day, Celeste told Kristina to go to the hospital. She’d written a letter for Steve and wanted her to read it to him. Kristina didn’t want to, but Celeste insisted.

In his room, Steve listened as Kristina read the rambling letter, in which Celeste maintained her innocence and pledged her love and devotion. “I
love you and I didn’t do this,”
Celeste had written.
“Please believe me.”

When Kristina finished, she looked up and realized
Steve was crying. Angry, he took a glass full of ice and threw it at her.

“Get out,” he shouted.