03.She.Wanted.It.All.2005 (26 page)

“Let’s keep him here a couple of days,” he ordered. “See if we can treat the rash.”

When she heard Steve was back in the hospital, Jennifer called Kristina on her cell phone to tell her what had happened.

“Did he look sick?” Kris asked.

“No,” Jen said.

“That’s so mean. She just doesn’t want him home.”

When Celeste called Tracey to tell her that Steve was back in the hospital, Tracey at first didn’t believe her. “Why?” she said.

“He’s really sick,” she said. “I think he has some kind of infection.”

“That HealthSouth is a disgusting pigpen,” Celeste complained to the case worker at Brackenridge. “He had a rash, and they didn’t do anything about it. They told me to put vinegar on it. He never should have been released. They said
he could take care of himself, but he can’t. They sent him home too soon.”

Checked into another room, his fourth at the hospital, Steve was treated for the rash with antifungal creams and showers. He seemed well, ate, and talked to the twins. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’ll be home again in a couple of days.”

That afternoon, Steve looked so good that another debate ensued between Coscia and a physician who saw no reason he should be in the hospital. A social worker was called in to explain to Celeste that with no clear reason why he should be there, Medicare might refuse to pay the bill.

“I don’t care,” she said. “We have money. We’ll pay.”

The following day, Steve fared well. His rash had improved and the doctors argued again about whether he needed to be hospitalized. The twins and their boyfriends stayed with Steve as Celeste came and went, saying she had errands to run. While disappointed at being back in the hospital, he was in a good mood, watching television and joking.

“This is just a setback,” he told a friend who called. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in no time.”

The first real indication that more troubled Steve than he knew was the next day, when a cardiologist ran an EKG and did an ultrasound of Steve’s heart. “I
don’t believe this is ischemic chest pain”
—coming from any problem with the heart—the doctor wrote on his chart. “I
am concerned about infection given his warm, tender lower region.”

Later that day blood work noted an elevated white blood cell count, another sign something was brewing.

In pain, Steve was given Vicodin, but his temperature had crept up overnight, another possible sign of infection. At just after three that afternoon it reached 102.5 degrees. More blood work was drawn, and this time it came back positive for infection.

Worried, Kristina called Dr. Handley, Steve’s physician, and told him that he was back in the hospital.

“Lots of people get infections in hospitals. If they caught it early, he’ll be all right,” he said. “Try not to worry.”

Meanwhile, Celeste seemed more preoccupied with her nail appointment. “I can’t make it today. I think Steve’s gonna die,” she said to Donna when she called. “Just don’t make an appointment for me.”

“Celeste, forget about the salon,” she replied. “Take care of yourself and Steve.”

“Okay,” Celeste said, and hung up.

By eight-thirty that evening drugs had brought Steve’s temperature back down to 100.2 and he was resting comfortably. Yet he slept little that night, with nurses waking him every hour to take his temperature. By three-thirty the next morning, his temperature was up again, this time to 102.3. And something else was wrong; his pulse had climbed to 120 beats per minute. He was delirious, talking but making little sense.

“You owe me money,” he told Kristina, who held his hand. “Twenty dollars.”

“Okay, I’ll pay you later,” she said, humoring him.

Soon after, Celeste’s mind, too, had turned to the issue of money.

Just after nine that morning she called Chuck Fuqua at home. “Steve’s really sick, and I need to get on his bank account,” she said.

“I can’t do that,” Chuck said. “Not without a new signature card.”

“What if Steve signs a signature card?” she asked. “He wants me on there so I can take care of the bills.”

Remembering all the times she’d forged Steve’s name, Fuqua said, “If we can independently verify that it’s his signature, yes, we can do it.”

When he hung up the phone he thought,
Well, she found some way to finish him off.

At 11:30
A.M
., Steve’s blood pressure dropped to 80 over 60. He wheezed and tossed uncomfortably in bed. He was disoriented, his breathing was shallow, and his heart raced at 140 beats per minute.

“You need to come home,” Justin said when he called Jennifer in Houston, where she was with Christopher attending his great aunt’s funeral. “Steve’s taken a turn for the worse.”

She and Christopher left the funeral and immediately drove west to Austin.

While his doctors treated Steve, Celeste fumed about HealthSouth, blaming the infection on poor care she said he’d received there. She even called the social worker at the facility. “There may be a lawsuit if he dies,” she threatened.

As bad as Steve looked, and as concerned as the doctors appeared, Kristina didn’t believe he would die. She kept remembering what Dr. Handley had said and about how many times Steve had been sick before and recovered. She’d already lost one father, and she couldn’t grasp the possibility that she could lose another.

“Hello, Elise,” Kristina heard Steve whisper. It gave her the chills.
He’s just confused,
she thought.

Dr. Coscia wasn’t at the hospital that day. With Steve in increasing respiratory distress, the doctor on duty ordered an infectious disease consult. The infectious disease doctor feared Steve suffered from septic shock, a rampaging and often fatal infection. “We’re going to move your husband to the ICU,” a nurse told Celeste at one-forty that afternoon. “Why don’t you all go get some lunch and then go there to see him?”

After a night at his bedside, they were tired, and Kristina, Justin, and Celeste did as the nurse suggested. They drove to
a nearby restaurant called the Brick Oven. In the car, Celeste called someone she told them was Dawn and talked to her throughout lunch. Later, Tracey would say that she was on the telephone with Celeste, her own pulse racing when she realized that if Steve died, she could soon be charged with murder.

Meanwhile at the hospital, at 2:31 that afternoon, a nurse and an aide wheeled Steve into the ICU on a gurney. By then his heart fluttered at a dangerous 162 beats per minute, his breathing was shallow, and his oxygen levels were low.

Four minutes later his pulse dropped to 60. And moments afterward his exhausted heart simply stopped.

In the minutes that followed, the ICU staff converged on Steve’s bed. They intubated him, putting a tube down into his throat and pumping oxygen into his lungs. They gave him shots of epinephrine to stimulate his heart, then gave him CPR and jolted him with paddles to electrify his heart to beat.

It didn’t work.

At 3:15
P.M
., Steven Beard Jr. was officially declared dead.

The cause noted on his chart: septic shock, overwhelming infection.

“Are you the Beard family?” a nurse asked when they returned to the hospital.

“Yes,” Celeste said.

She pulled them to the side, into a private room. “I’m sorry, we did all we could,” she said. “But we couldn’t save him.”

Celeste let out a shriek that echoed off the walls and down the hospital corridors. Inconsolable, she screamed and cried until a doctor ordered her taken to an empty room and given Haldol to calm her. In the darkness, they laid her on a gurney.

“Steve’s dead,” Justin said when he called Jennifer on her
cell phone. He caught her and Christopher rushing back from Houston. At that point Jennifer cried and Christopher pulled over to comfort her. They no longer had a reason to hurry.

With Steve’s body being escorted to the medical examiner’s wagon to be taken for autopsy, Celeste called Donna at Studio 29, a woman she barely knew.

“Steve’s dead. He’s dead,” she shouted.

“Celeste, calm down,” Donna said. “You’re going to be all right.”

“No, he’s dead, Donna. He’s really dead.”

When she hung up, Donna told the others who worked at the salon. Many had known Steve and liked him. Except from Celeste, Donna had never heard a bad word about him.

“God, he gave her everything,” Petra Mueller, the owner, said.

Celeste left the hospital that afternoon and drove home in Steve’s Cadillac with the twins and their boyfriends. As they got out of the car, she went inside. Justin opened the center console to retrieve a parking ticket they’d gotten at the hospital. Inside, he discovered something odd, an unfamiliar cell phone. As much time as he’d spent with Kristina and Celeste, he thought he knew all their phones. This was one he’d never seen.

“What’s that?” Christopher asked as he walked over beside him.

“Have you ever seen this cell phone before?” Justin said.

Christopher took it from him and held it. He flipped the buttons and pulled up the opening screen with the phone number. “No,” he said. He then flipped through the numbers recently dialed. Tracey’s home and cell phones popped up.

Justin and Christopher looked at each other with a sinking feeling.

“She’s still talking to Tracey,” Justin said. Christopher nodded. He was thinking about all the times Celeste just disappeared. Usually, she told everyone where she was going, but since the shooting, she’d left the house or the hospital and was gone for hours, never mentioning where she’d been when she returned.

Just then Celeste ran from the house toward the car. They stepped to the side, Justin holding the cell phone behind him.

“I’m missing something,” she said, throwing open the car door and searching. She opened the center console, then the glove compartment, then checked under the seats. While she was distracted, Justin dropped the cell phone and kicked it under the car.

Celeste jerked up and stood inches from him, pulling her body straight. Staring Justin in the eye, she held out her hand. “You have it. Give it to me.”

“What?” Justin said.

“You have it. I want it now,” she insisted as she frisked him down, like a cop searching a suspect. Seeing what was happening through the window, Kristina and Jennifer ran outside.

“What’s wrong?” Kristina asked.

Celeste didn’t answer, but again searched the car. Finding nothing, she ran inside.

“This is what she wanted,” Justin said, bending down to retrieve the telephone. He handed it to Kristina.

Kristina grabbed the phone and looked at it. She, too, had never seen it before. But instead of investigating any further, she walked inside and gave it to her mother. “Is this what you wanted?” she said.

Celeste snatched it and disappeared into the guest bedroom,
locking the door. Then Kristina heard her talking to someone on the telephone.

Later that night Celeste asked Kristina if she’d heard Steve’s dying wish.

“No, what was it?”

“Steve said he forgave the person who shot him, and he didn’t want to pursue the case. He didn’t want any of us to have to go through the pain of a trial,” she said. “He wouldn’t want any of you to cooperate with the police.”

Sad and confused, Kristina said nothing.

W
ithin hours of Steve’s death Celeste left a mes
sage on the home voice mail of C.W. Beard, his cousin and banker in Dallas. “Steve’s dead,” she said. “I want to be put on his bank accounts right away. I have bills to pay.”

When C.W. got the message, he called Becky. By then the bad news was filtering through the family. “We didn’t even know our dad was back in the hospital,” says Paul. “Celeste never told us.”

The loss hit all of them hard as they looked back at the final years of their father’s life. They’d had so little time with him since their mother’s death. With Celeste pushing them away, they’d felt like outsiders. When they tried to visit, she always had reasons why it wouldn’t work. “I knew she was behind the shooting,” says Paul. “She wanted him dead, and she found someone to kill him.”

That Saturday, after Steve was gone, Jennifer called Anita and told her the bad news. Anita did what she’d grown up doing when a friend had a death in the family; she bought
two pies and went directly to the Toro Canyon house to console the family. She thought the house would be filled with friends and family; instead she found the twins and their boyfriends making phone calls to tell people about Steve’s death while Celeste, in her chenille robe, smoked on the patio. After the incident with the telephone, she was in a foul mood.

“Those kids better do what I tell them,” she snapped. “The money’s all mine now. If they don’t do what I want them to, I’ll leave it all to the dogs.”

“Celeste, you don’t mean that.”

“Sure, I do. And I’m going to spend every penny I can.”

When Anita asked about the plans for the funeral services, Celeste frowned. “I’m not going to do anything but a small funeral,” she said. “I don’t want Steve’s damn kids in my house.”

“You have to do something. People will be expecting it,” Anita argued. She suggested a small luncheon at the club following the funeral service, for family and close friends. “I’ll even take care of setting it up for you.”

Reluctantly, Celeste agreed.

That afternoon, Christopher put in a call for Brett Spicer, a deputy with the Sheriff’s Department who’d sometimes worked security for the Beards. The twins were worried, afraid that with Steve gone, Tracey might show up at the house. When Spicer talked to Celeste, she was unconcerned. “I’ve talked to my therapist about it,” she said. “Tracey’s more likely to kill herself than to come after us.”

Still, she told Spicer to bring in security, “so the girls feel safe.”

At the house that night, with their adoptive father dead only hours, Celeste put the twins to work. Along with Justin and Christopher, they cleaned Steve’s closet, taking everything he owned to a Goodwill bin except what she was burying
him in and a few things she wanted to send to Steve III. The following night, when Spicer arrived, he found piles of boxes spread throughout the formal dining room with the names of family and friends on the outside. Inside were Steve’s personal possessions, the things he loved. When they had it all organized, Celeste chose who received what. Then Jennifer and Christopher hauled the boxes to the PakMail store to be shipped. Within forty-eight hours of Steve’s death, Celeste had removed nearly every trace of him from the house he’d so lovingly built.

“You need to figure out what part Celeste played in this,” Paul Beard urged Detective Wines on the phone the Monday morning following his father’s death.

“I can’t tell you about the investigation,” Wines said. “All I can say is we’re working the case.”

What he didn’t want to and couldn’t tell Paul was that the case was deeply in trouble. Early that morning he’d gone to the District Attorney’s Office to talk to Bill Mange, the prosecutor. With nearly four months between the shooting and Steve’s death, Mange explained that he’d wait for an autopsy to decide if Steve’s death was related to the homicide. If so, the charges against Tracey could be upgraded to murder. Then Mange, a thin man with sloping shoulders and a big-toothed grin, got very serious. “You did talk to Steve Beard, didn’t you? You interviewed him before he died?”

Bristling under Mange’s steady gaze, Wines admitted that he’d never gone back to the hospital to talk to him. He’d been waiting for Steve to be released. Wines had planned to attempt to talk to him when he was healthy.

“You never interviewed the victim?” Mange blustered. “You let that woman bully you into not doing what you had every right to do?”

“I guess I did,” Wines admitted, knowing immediately that he’d made a mistake he would never have the opportunity to repair. Mange simply shook his head in disgust. Later Wines would say that when it came to the Beard investigation, the cooperation between the D.A.’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department ended that day.

Hours later Mange was even angrier. After going through the materials Wines had left with him, he was appalled by the lack of care the investigation had been given. At first he thought there might be other crime scene photos, which weren’t included in the packet. He went so far as to call the crime scene officer on duty that day. “You must have a roll of film you didn’t develop,” he said. “Where are the photos of the crime scene?”

“You have everything,” the deputy said. “That’s all they told me to take.”

Mange was furious. Wines hadn’t made a diagram of the house and the crime scene. While he had access to the house, he hadn’t conducted a test to see if the sound of the gunshot carried to the guest wing, where Kristina awoke to find her mother standing at the door. Instead of photos of the bloody sheets and the blood spray against the wall—in an investigation like this he usually had dozens—he had one photo of blood on the bed and a stack of photos of Hummel figurines and the homes’ opulent furnishings. Mange blamed Wines. Although he’d worked with the detective on other cases and found him to be thorough, he judged that in this case he’d allowed himself to be distracted by the Beards’ wealth, losing his focus on the crime. Perhaps when Steve Beard seemed to be recovering he’d given the case a lower priority. And then there was Burton, the formidable criminal defense attorney. “He’d allowed his presence to intimidate the investigation. It never should
have happened,” says Mange. “Rick was usually a good cop, and he was a good guy. I liked him. He just did a bad job on this case.”

The mistake couldn’t be undone. Steve was dead. Celeste had withdrawn the consent to search and disposed of the mattress, repainted the walls, and replaced the carpeting. Everything was gone. Mange didn’t think it could get much worse, but he was wrong. That afternoon an e-mail circulated from Ronnie Earle, Travis County’s district attorney, saying he wanted to meet with the prosecutor working the Beard case. Now Mange knew he not only had a botched investigation, but a high-profile one.

“Rich Oppel, the editor of the
Statesman,
called me about this case,” Earle said. “He knew Beard. How do we stand on this?”

Mange swallowed hard and then told him the truth. “We’ve got a mess,” he said, talking about the crime scene photos and Celeste’s bullying tactics. “We don’t even know what the victim had to say. We never asked him.”

Earle looked angry. “Work the case,” he told Mange. “And keep me informed.”

A snowstorm in Virginia kept Paul and his wife from flying out on Monday, and Celeste agreed to push the funeral back until that Wednesday, January 26. She was busy anyway. Early in the morning, she sent Kristina to the bank along with a signature card with Steve’s name on it to give Chuck Fuqua. When the teenager walked in and handed it to him, Fuqua was embarrassed for her. Later, a stack of checks would also pour into the bank dated January 22, the day Steve died, bearing his signature. It would seem that despite having spent much of the day unconscious, he’d somehow been able to sign the card and checks. Fuqua wasn’t buying
it, but in truth it didn’t matter. With Steve dead, the trust kicked into effect, and he was no longer involved.

“I’ll accept the card but I can’t change anything,” he said. “Now that your father’s dead, it’s up to the trust department to administer the estate.”

When Kristina told Celeste, she was livid.

“That’s my money, not theirs,” she said. “We’ll see who controls it.”

When she called Fuqua to complain, he said only, “There’s nothing I can do.”

She was better off with Steve alive than with him dead,
Fuqua thought after he hung up the telephone.
Steve made decisions with his heart. The bank makes them by the book.

The business of death is a sad and often confusing one, with families rushing to make arrangements. Always a careful man, Steve had ensured that when he died that wouldn’t be the case. Years earlier, when he buried Elise, he planned his own funeral as well. Still, one unforeseen glitch appeared. Steve had chosen a beautiful mahogany casket, but in the years since, the policy at the funeral home had changed to only allow metal caskets in the mausoleum where he’d be interred in a crypt with his first wife. Bonita Thompson, a saleswoman from Cook Walden Funeral Home, asked Celeste to come in to pick out a new one. Monday afternoon Celeste drove to the funeral home with the twins.

At Cook Walden, Thompson led them into a showroom, where she pointed out the choices. Celeste walked through and chose a casket for Steve. Then she turned to the twins. “While we’re here, why don’t you pick out your coffins?” she said.

Jennifer looked at Kristina in alarm. “No, we don’t want to do that,” she said.

Startled as well, Kristina protested, and both the girls
turned to walk away. As teenagers, they didn’t want to ponder their own deaths. What they didn’t know was that their mother had been contemplating their deaths since their births. While at Timberlawn, she told a therapist that from the twins’ first years she kept special outfits in their closets, ones she considered their burial clothes.

“Come on,” Celeste said. “Pick them out.”

They refused.

“Then I’ll do it for you,” she said. With that, Celeste walked through until she stopped in front of a white casket with a lilac interior that shone pink.

“Pink’s my color,” she said to Thompson. “I’ll take one of these for myself and two for the girls.”

Steve’s obituary ran in the
Statesman
on Tuesday, January 25. After recounting the highlights of his life, from his military service to founding KBVO, it continued with a tribute from Celeste:
“You were a truly gifted, generous, and strong man. You were my darling husband and you brought nothing but joy to my life, and I will love you and miss you forever.”
Visitation began at two that afternoon and continued until nine that evening. Celeste didn’t attend.

“Don’t tell anyone, even Kristina, that I wasn’t there,” she told Jennifer. “They’ll just all think I left, that they missed me.”

Jennifer did as she was told, even taking Steve’s yellow rose boutonniere to the funeral home for Celeste. Jennifer rarely questioned her mother, and now she didn’t ask what was so important that she couldn’t go to her own husband’s wake.

At the funeral home, Jennifer looked down at Steve’s kind face in the casket. He looked so alive that she thought he must have been breathing. For a moment she waited, hoping he’d sit up and talk to her, or just open his eyes. Jen held the
boutonniere in her hands but couldn’t bring herself to pin it on the sweater Celeste had chosen for him to wear, a gift they’d brought back from Australia. Instead, one of the funeral home attendants pinned it on while Jennifer sat by herself and cried over the second father she’d lost in three years.

As guests arrived, Kristina acted as hostess. The twins had rarely seen Amy since the shooting, but she came, as did Justin’s family. Many of Steve’s friends were there, including his employees from KBVO. Kristina handled the day like she’d handled much of her life with her mother: She tried not to think too carefully about any of it. Stunned, she talked to people and circulated through the crowd.

Making matters even more uncomfortable was the worry about what the people walking in were thinking. Along with the obituary, an article on Steve’s death had run in the
Statesman
that morning. In it, Travis County Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo announced the autopsy results: pulmonary embolism, a blood clot to the lungs, caused by months of inactivity. Bayardo ruled the blood clot a complication of the gunshot and listed the cause of death as homicide.

On the day of the funeral, Celeste went to Tramps to have her hair styled into a chic French twist. She brought Dawn Madigan with her. In the salon, her hairdresser, Denise, watched as Celeste pawed through the accessories and knickknacks. She carried them up to the counter by the handful. When they’d all been rung up, she signed a charge slip for $1,000 and handed the overflowing bag to Dawn as a gift. “I don’t know if Dawn wanted them or if Celeste just thought she should have them,” Denise said later.

On the way to the services, the limo was filled with Celeste, Dawn, the twins and their boyfriends. Celeste was animated and full of life, throwing her head back and laughing.
“Pull over in Davenport Village,” she ordered the driver. “I want to stop at the pharmacy.”

At Northwest Hills Pharmacy, Celeste and the others left the car and ran inside. The twins assumed she had a last minute item to pick up. Instead she made her way to the pharmacist. “Now I own this place. It’s time for you people to kiss my ass like you kissed Steve’s,” she taunted. Then she turned and left.

In the limo again, she chuckled as if she’d just pulled off a great coup. “Did you see her face?” she said, laughing even harder.

They drove around Austin, then north to the funeral home. As if someone had turned a switch, when the limo pulled into the parking lot, Celeste stopped laughing. As she emerged from the limo for the 11:00
A.M.
service, she had tears in her eyes. Two hundred people, most Steve’s friends, attended. Paul, still snowed in, couldn’t be there, but Steven III held up his cell phone so he could listen to the eulogy. During the sermon the minister—the same one who’d performed their wedding five years earlier—talked about Steve and his many talents as a businessman and a father. Then he turned the subject to his marriage to Celeste. “Yes, they had the differences all couples do, but they loved each other dearly. After he lost Elise, I saw Celeste bring Steve out of his depression,” he said. As he spoke those words, Celeste dabbed at tears while one of Steve’s closest friends walked out.