Page 162 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

around the country. To summarize their joint history, the experience
of being show-business brats had a predictable outcome: they became
undisciplined and antisocial adolescents. The endorsement contract
ran out just about the time their voices changed and they began
shaving. Their parents controlled the money, as trustees of a rather
tidy sum. They did what they could to keep their sons out of trouble,
doling out cash for good behavior.”
I riffled through the papers. Records and Information had printed
out rap sheets for all five of the Carbone boys. Not a good way to
start out in life, but the crimes were considered juvenile offenses, and
the quints had managed to escape serious incarceration.
“When the boys were seventeen, their parents died in an epidemic
of salmonella. They were then technically under the guardianship of
Alberto Carbone. Management of the trust funds also devolved to
him. But he was not inclined to give them a cent. Their outlaw
personalities offended him, and he wanted nothing to do with
helping his nephews attain any sort of maturity. They engaged a
lawyer to aid in wresting control of the trust from him, but their
minority status and their police records weighed heavily against them.
The money, several hundred thousand dollars, could not be theirs
until their twenty-fifth birthday; those were ironclad terms of the
estate.”
A highly-abridged transcript of a hearing on Carbone v. Carbone was
in the folder. Boring stuff. Maybe I would read it later. I was certain
Labelle had already read it; someone had made marginal notations,
and it looked like her handwriting. This is the sort of deduction a
trained mind can easily make, you know.
“The quints were thrown on their own resources. Their education,
although spotty, had left them with a mixed bag of knowledge and
skills. They drifted apart for the first time in their lives, pursuing
various illegal activities. I doubt if we have the full picture of their
criminality, but what we do have is enough; these boys are not
beyond committing murder. And they have a very good reason to see
their uncle dead: they are twenty-one now, and four years is a long
wait for the young.”
“Sure is.” I was still under thirty, and I couldn’t wait for a
promotion.

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