For nearly six months Steve had put his own life on hold to care for Celeste and the girls. Perhaps he thought the doctors at Timberlawn would make them a whole, healthy family. Now that she was home and on medication for her depression, he tried to return their lives to some version of normalcy. Perhaps, despite his five years with her, he didn’t realize that with Celeste there was no such thing as “normal.”
Through all the upheaval of the spring, the shopping center had thrived and the second phase, Davenport II, was under construction. The tenants included Tramex Travel, a small agency with branches across Austin. There, one afternoon, Steve approached Stacy Sadler, a young travel agent with strawberry blond hair, to plan a trip. Not just any trip, he said, but the best they had to offer. Stacy had booked two other trips for Steve that year—one to the Florida Keys and another to Cuba—both of which had to be cancelled because of Celeste’s hospitalization. Although the relationship started out rocky, Steve pushing Stacy at every turn, she’d gradually realized he enjoyed teasing her, and she’d grown fond of him. “I found myself hoping that this time things worked out for him,” she says. “He said this would be his trip of a lifetime.”
From her files, Stacy retrieved a stack of brochures on the Rolls Royce of touring companies, Abercrombie and Kent. The possible destinations ranged from Antarctica to the Galapagos to Thailand. Steve didn’t have anything so exotic in mind. He’d already decided the trip would be romantic and luxurious.
Days later, after poring over the possible destinations, Steve and Stacy designed a customized grand tour of Europe. He and Celeste would spend October traveling the Continent, to Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Lucerne, Bern, Dijon, Paris, London, York, Scotland, Stratford on Avon, and Dublin. They’d journey in private limousines with chauffeurs, eat at the best restaurants, and stay in only the finest hotels. Such extravagance carried a $53,000 price tag. To Steve, the trip may have had a special import. “It’ll be an opportunity for us to get to know each other again,” he told a friend. Left unsaid was that if they couldn’t, he might finally admit the marriage was a mistake.
“You’ll want the insurance, Mr. Beard,” Stacy advised. “If you can’t go, you won’t want to be out so much money.”
Steve thought about it for just a moment, then said, firmly, “No. I’m going. No matter what, I’m going. This time we won’t be cancelling.”
Celeste may have known what was riding on the trip. When he came home with the itinerary and brochures, instead of excitement she expressed dread. “I can’t spend an entire month with him,” she told the twins. “This will be torture.”
From that point on, her aversion to Steve grew. She wanted him out of her life. But how could that happen and not cost her his fortune?
“If that old bastard died, he’d be out of the way,” she told Tracey. “Then we could be together, forever.”
Justin often arrived at the Toro Canyon house that summer to find Celeste giggling and watching Serial Mom, in which Kathleen Turner played a suburban housewife who kills a neighbor for not separating her recyclables. It happened so often, he bought her the DVD. At night, after Steve passed out, she told the teens to drop her at Tracey’s, where the two women drank, talked, and made love. Yet, it was far from a carefree relationship. At times Celeste flared up, screaming at Tracey with little or no provocation. Stunned, Tracey fought memories of her mother’s verbal barrages.
In bed on those nights, Celeste lay stiff and unresponsive. Unable to sleep, Tracey wondered why she wanted such an unsatisfying relationship with a married woman who had to sneak out to see her. Too often, with Celeste busy with Steve and the twins, she was alone and lonely. But there was that other side of Celeste, the charming and giving side. Celeste constantly surprised her, showing up at unexpected moments, bringing small gifts, and telling her that she loved her. Mornings after their arguments, she awoke to find Celeste curled against her, warm and loving.
When Tracey considered ending the affair, she worried that Celeste would have no one to talk her through the dangerous times. One day, for instance, Celeste drove down the road with the twins in the car, on their way home from the lake house. She screamed—why, they didn’t know—and drove across lanes and onto the shoulder. Furious, she called Tracey. “Do you have a gun?” she shouted. “I’m coming over, and we’re going to kill ourselves.”
At the Toro Canyon house she told Steve, “I don’t have to take shit from these girls. I’m going to kill myself.” She left, and Steve paced the house, waiting for her to return.
At her house on Wilson, Tracey poured her lover a vodka from the bottle of Stoli she kept for her on a shelf and listened to her rave. When Celeste returned home the next morning, she acted as if nothing had happened.
Despite the turmoil she’d brought to her life, like Steve, Tracey thought Celeste was worth the effort, and she was willing to work to try to make the relationship better. When she told Celeste she wanted the two of them to go for counseling to work through their problems, Celeste agreed. Within days Tracey had a couple’s session scheduled for July 21 with Barbara Grant, the therapist she’d gone to when she first left Timberlawn.
“I don’t think I’m really a lesbian,” Celeste told Grant that day. “I have to drink to have sex with Tracey.”
In the therapist’s office, Tracey listened. For months she’d been sexually involved with Celeste, and now her lover questioned whether she was attracted to her. Instead of anger, Tracey just smiled. She’d been in relationships with straight women before. “Was Celeste a lesbian? I don’t know,” she says. “What I knew was that she was sleeping with me.”
Tracey explained that she worried about their relationship. “Neither of us have good track records. Both of us have been through lots of partners,” she told the therapist. “We’ve got a lot invested emotionally. And I think we both want this to work.”
Complicating matters, Celeste had plans to be gone much of the summer and fall, first on a driving trip to the Northwest with Steve, the twins and their boyfriends, then to Australia with the girls as a graduation trip, and in October, the month in Europe. “Celeste said when she got back, things would change,” says Tracey. “Celeste was always promising things would get better, and I always believed her.”
The trip to Washington State had a special purpose for Celeste: to comb through a storage shed in Stanwood that held Craig’s possessions, where the girls hoped to retrieve mementoes from their father. Steve had outlined a route from Austin, through Salt Lake into California, up to Oregon and into Washington. Then, after completing their task, they’d loop up to British Colombia and backtrack through Phoenix to Texas and home. At first they planned to drive in two cars, the teens in the Expedition and Celeste and Steve in his Cadillac. That was something Celeste didn’t want.
“I can’t be alone with him,” she told Kristina. “This isn’t going to happen.”
Somehow she convinced Steve to trade in the Expedition for a white Suburban equipped with a television and VCR. He had it parked in front of the house when his neighbor, Dr. Dennison, sauntered over to take a look. “It’s got all the bells and whistles,” Steve said proudly. “One hell of a machine.”
They left early the morning after Celeste and Tracey’s counseling session. Steve, Celeste, Jennifer, Christopher, Justin, and Kristina were in the brand new truck with their luggage in a rooftop carrier. On the road, Celeste moaned that Steve drove too slowly. “Speed it up,” she said. “We’ll never get there.”
The trip turned into an arduous one for the teens, as Celeste, keyed up in the second row of seats, glared at Steve for driving the speed limit. As the road climbed into higher altitudes, Christopher drove and Steve sat beside him in a second captain’s chair, his oxygen machine on to prevent altitude sickness. When he fell asleep, Celeste turned it off and lit a cigarette. When he asked for his medicine pack with his asthma medications, she threw them out the window and handed him sleeping pills instead.
“We didn’t like it,” says Justin. “But we didn’t say anything. None of us did.”
One morning in Ogden, Utah, Celeste ordered Kristina to smash up sleeping pills for her to slip into Steve’s food. Kristina refused, but Celeste kept after her. “Just do it!” she screamed. Finally, Kristina did as she was told, sobbing as she ground them down to a powder. At the breakfast table, while Steve went to the rest room, Celeste poured some of the white powder into his orange juice.
When he sat down and took a sip, he grimaced. “This tastes funny,” he said, looking for a waitress. “I’m going to send it back.”
“Don’t be wasteful. Drink it,” Celeste cajoled him.
Steve looked at her and drank it down. “Happy now?” he asked.
“Yes, thank you,” she said.
Minutes after they got in the car, he fell asleep. At lunch at a Red Lobster, she mixed more of the powder into his cottage cheese. This time Steve passed out at the table, and Justin and Christopher had to help him to the car. Barely coherent, he urinated on himself. When Celeste saw the yellow stain on his pants, she ridiculed him.
Later, they’d remember the trip in the snapshots Justin took, especially one of Steve taken along the side of a road, leaning against a railing. He’d just woken up from a drugged sleep. “We had dinner at a Sizzler, and Celeste gave him more pills,” says Justin. “He passed out again.”
By the time they reached Seattle, Steve was convinced there was something wrong. He called his personal physician, Dr. Handley, who blamed it on altitude sickness. “You have to get to a lower altitude,” he said. “You’re not getting enough oxygen.”
At the airport, as Steve waited for a plane to Phoenix, he handed Celeste a wad of cash and a Shell credit card for gas. She’d left Austin without her credit cards or driver’s license. She tucked it in her purse, kissed him good-bye, and, when they walked out into the parking lot, shouted with exhilaration. “He’s gone,” she screamed. “The fat old fuck is gone. Now we can make some time.”
Inside the Suburban, she tore the paper dealer’s license plate off the back window and dropped it on the floor. “If we get stopped, tell the cops it fell off,” she told the kids. Then she sat in the driver’s seat, stepped on the gas, and they were off, speeding along the mountain roads, with the teens laughing nervously and looking over the edge to see the steep drop to the valleys below.
In Stanwood, north of Seattle, they drove to the storage shed. Although retrieving Craig’s possessions was the reason for the trip, once there, Celeste was eager to leave. The girls had looked through their father’s things for only minutes when she shouted, “Let’s go.” Each grabbed small mementoes, and then they were back on the road, headed toward the ferry to Victoria, Canada. On the way they stopped at Craig’s old workshop at Twin City Foods. “Here, there’s a bunch of junk in there, old tools,” Celeste told one of his old friends, throwing him the keys. “You can have them.”
Kristina and Jennifer wanted to shout at her, telling her that wasn’t junk but all they had left of their father. Instead they said nothing.
On the way to Canada, Celeste pulled into an outlet mall. The wad of bills Steve gave her in Seattle waited to be spent, and she intended to do just that. In a Coach Leather shop, she bought shopping bags full of purses, spending nearly everything she had. Once they were hers, she threw them into the back of the Suburban, as if they meant nothing. At home she had hundreds more stacked in boxes, many with the tags still on. From that point on they ate only what they could charge on the Shell credit card, junk food, sodas, hot dogs, and doughnuts. Although Justin and Christopher had money with them, Celeste wouldn’t allow them to spend it. Only one night, when they were all so hungry for real food that they were willing to argue with her, did she let them pay for a restaurant dinner. “It was just crazy,” says Justin. “You couldn’t talk to her. If you disagreed with her, she screamed, and Kristina would get so upset, it just wasn’t worth it.”
Three to four times a day they heard her talk to Tracey on her cell phone. Once she told the girls, “You’re in trouble,” then put Tracey on the telephone. Celeste had said they were disrespectful, and Tracey ordered them to “mind your mother.” Another time she called her hairdresser friend, Denise, laughing about how she’d drugged Steve. “He was driving me crazy,” she said. “He drove like an old man.”
While Christopher drove, Celeste sat beside him, talking. “I don’t expect Steve to live much longer, not with his age, weight, and health problems,” she said. “Then the money will be mine. I can travel, buy whatever I want.”
When they picked Steve up in Phoenix, Celeste was all smiles and asking how he was. He felt better, he said, and they loaded his suitcases into the Suburban and took off. Back in Austin, Celeste went to see Tracey at BookPeople. That night they slept together, and Tracey told Celeste about what had happened while she was gone. Drinking home alone, she’d grown depressed. She called her psychiatrist, who called in a suicide attempt on 911. By the time EMS arrived, her breathing was shallow. They released her the following day, after a night at the hospital. Tracey denied she’d tried to take her life, saying it was just a bad mix of her meds with alcohol. With her trip to Australia for the girls’ graduation looming in just two days, the next day at her appointment with her therapist, Celeste was upset.
“I hope Tracey doesn’t kill herself and interrupt my trip,” she complained.
Earlier that summer Celeste had asked Tracey to order a book through BookPeople: The Poisoner’s Handbook. It arrived while she was on the trip west, and when Tracey gave it to her, Celeste handed it back. Inside was a recipe for botulism, a dangerous nerve toxin produced by a bacterium found in soil, Clostridium botulinum. “I want you to make it for me while I’m gone,” Celeste told her. “I’m going to feed it to Steve.”
Tracey protested, refusing, but Celeste argued that she didn’t expect her to feed it to him, just to grow the botulism while she was in Australia. “You’re not going to even be there,” she said. First Tracey had agreed to spike Steve’s vodka; now it seemed a small step to grow a dangerous poison.
On August 4 the twins and Celeste left on their seventeen-day trip to Australia. Steve gave Celeste another wad of cash, and, just as she had on the trip west, she quickly spent it all, this time on a bagful of opals. From that point on she had no money for food or side trips, and the girls subsisted on the meals included in the tour package, sometimes only one a day. “It didn’t matter to Celeste. She hardly left the room,” says Jennifer. “She was talking to Tracey all the time on her cell phone.”
What they were talking about, Tracey would later say, was the botulism. Tracey made it in an airtight jar, mixing corn, raw hamburger, and dirt. She then flooded the jar with water, sealed it, and left it in the Texas sun to bake. Just before Celeste returned home, Tracey put it to the test by feeding the putrid mix to three mice she bought at a pet store. That day Celeste called nearly nonstop.
“Are they dead yet?” she asked.
“No,” Tracey answered. “It’s not working.”
When Celeste returned she took the jar home anyway, telling Tracey later that she fed the contents to Steve mixed into chili dogs. “The fat fuck didn’t even notice. Didn’t even upset his stomach,” she said, laughing and looking miffed at the same time. Celeste brushed the botulism’s failure off as a joke, yet Tracey understood Celeste’s message when she said, “I can’t go to Europe with him. I’d rather die.”
Perhaps Steve wanted to meet the woman his wife spent so much time with, the one she’d called so incessantly from Australia that she’d racked up a $2,000 phone bill. The Wednesday after she returned, Celeste invited Tracey to the Toro Canyon house for hamburger night. Tracey didn’t want to go. She remembered Timberlawn when she’d been transferred off Celeste’s unit. At the time, Celeste told her it was because of Steve’s interference, that he didn’t want Tracey near her.
“Oh, that,” Celeste said. “He’s an old man. He won’t remember that.”
At the Toro Canyon house that night, Steve welcomed Tracey, shaking her hand warmly. When Celeste was out of the room, he said, “I want to thank you for being such a good friend to Celeste.”
While the teens ate burgers in the kitchen, Steve, Celeste, and Tracey drank and talked outside. By ten that night none of the three had eaten and all showed the effects of the alcohol. When Steve went inside, Tracey and Celeste sat on the porch swing together, and, in front of Kristina, Tracey leaned over and kissed Celeste on the lips. Embarrassed, Kristina walked inside.
“I can’t believe Tracey kissed mom,” she told Steve.
With that, Steve walked outside. “I think it’s time your guest went home,” he told Celeste. “It’s late.”
When Tracey didn’t move, he said it again, “You should leave now.”
Jennifer and Christopher offered to drive her, judging she was in no condition to drive. As they stood at the door, they heard Steve ask once again, “Celeste, are you a lesbian?”
“Of course not,” she shouted, then rushed out the door. While Christopher put Tracey in her car, Kristina and Jennifer got in the Cadillac to follow and drive him home.
“I want to ride in the trunk,” Celeste said, motioning for them to open it. “I don’t want Tracey to see me. She’ll want me to come inside.”
In her car, Tracey was in a talkative mood. “Celeste and I are in love,” she told Christopher, who didn’t know what to say.
At the house on Wilson, Christopher and Jennifer went inside, while Kristina opened the trunk to let Celeste out. She was choking and gasping.
“I couldn’t breathe,” she complained.
Inside the house, Tracey stumbled, appearing unaware anyone was with her. While the teens tried to steady her, she peeled off her clothes until she stood naked in the living room. Stifling giggles, they led her to the bedroom and helped her into bed. When they told Celeste what happened, she roared with laughter.
Later, Christopher told Jen what Tracey had said in the car, that she and Celeste were a couple. “Oh, my God. I had a feeling,” she responded.
Despite the hamburger night clash, Steve wasn’t angry at Tracey, at least not enough to keep him from extending a second invitation. The twins had worked hard to earn hours in summer school, and the following Friday night was their graduation. Steve had a celebration planned, including dinner at the Austin Country Club.
At the Tony Berger Center, the city’s south side sports complex, Kristina and Jennifer wore their blue Westlake High School graduation robes. In the stands, Steve, Celeste, Amy, Justin, Tracey, and Christopher sat together, cheering as the girls walked across the stage. Another visitor sat separated from the family; Jimmy. He saw Steve seated next to Celeste, happily unaware that he sat next to one of his wife’s lovers and across the auditorium from another.
Dinner at the club went well that night, without a replay of the incident earlier that week. They had cocktails, talked, and laughed. But Tracey watched Steve carefully, thinking about what Celeste had told her. He was in an expansive mood, happy and proud of the girls, yet under the magnification of Celeste’s words, she noticed small things she interpreted as confirming the worst about him. Steve ordered Celeste’s dinner without asking what she wanted, and her drink before she seemed ready. In Tracey’s mind she thought he could easily be overbearing.
The following afternoon, Tracey met Celeste and the girls at Tramps. They had a big night coming up. On the family planner Celeste had written “girls and Celeste to AstroWorld.” In her own date book, however, she mentioned nothing about an overnight at the Houston amusement park, but instead had scratched in “Jimmy’s for girls’ graduation.” The party had been planned for weeks. At seven-thirty that evening at Jimmy Martinez’s house, the real celebration would begin, one Steve wasn’t invited to.
At Tramps, Celeste and the twins had their hair done. Tracey, too, showed up. After Denise finished their hairdos, Celeste asked, “Do you have time to do Tracey’s?”
“Sure, sit down,” she said. Denise went to work, fluffing and brushing. Then she looked at Tracey’s lips. “You need some lipstick. I’ll get some.”
She came back with a tester tube she smoothed over Tracey’s rough lips.
“You look dykey,” Celeste said laughing, when she was finished. Denise laughed, too, but Tracey didn’t seem to mind. Denise thought she seemed proud to get the attention.
That night, Jimmy served hamburgers and hot dogs to a group of forty that included a few of the twins’ friends but mostly Celeste’s buddies, everyone from Dawn and Jim Madigan, her friends from the lake, to both her hairdressers. On the buffet table Celeste placed trays of vegetables, cheeses, and fruit, a crockpot of chili con queso for chips, and cheese cake for dessert. Music blared, and many danced, including Jimmy and Celeste, so close that few who saw them wouldn’t assume that they were lovers.
Among the crowd, Tracey watched Celeste’s every move, wondering what was going on between her lover and her ex-husband. As the night wore on, Celeste announced another party, for Halloween. “Everyone will dress up as Jimmy,” she said, visibly drunk. “You can all wear cowboy boots and jeans.”
Soon after, she disappeared upstairs. Downstairs, the party continued, but Tracey, a short time later, followed her and found Celeste sleeping in Jimmy’s bed. When Kristina walked in moments later, Tracey was draped over her mother, stroking her.
Upset, she found Jimmy. “Tell Tracey to get off mom,” she said.
Jimmy ran upstairs and saw the two women in bed. “Get the hell off her,” he ordered Tracey.
Tracey appeared not to hear, continuing to rub against Celeste.
“I said get out,” he ordered, pulling her arm. Tracey stood, unsteady on her feet.
“Tell her I’m not a lesbian,” Celeste mumbled.
Jimmy turned and followed Tracey downstairs, pushing her when she stopped and tried to go back upstairs. At the door, Kristina and Justin offered her a ride home.
“No,” she shouted. “I’m fine.”
She wove out the door, obviously drunk. At the street, she stopped and shouted. “You tell Celeste I want her at my house in one hour.”
Jimmy slammed the door and locked it.
Inside, the party wound down. Amy had so much to drink she threw up and put her foot on the floor to keep the bed from spinning. Jennifer fell and scratched her face.
Half an hour later a guest who’d left called. “That gay woman got arrested,” he told Jimmy. “We saw her on the side of the road with a squad car.”
The phone rang and Travis County Jail came up on Jimmy’s caller ID. He took the phone off the hook.
At the jail, Tracey tried Celeste’s cell phone, then, in the early hours of the morning, the Toro Canyon house. When the operator told Steve he had a call from Tracey Tarlton at the Travis County Jail, he hung up, too. The next day he told Celeste what had happened and to bail Tracey out and stop seeing her. “I don’t want you to spend any more time with that woman.”
Celeste laughed that afternoon when she picked Tracey up at the jail. “Steve’s really mad at you,” she said. “He didn’t even know about the party. He was so pissed.”
In September, the month in Europe with Steve must have gaped before Celeste like approaching doom. She told Tracey to meet her at the lake house one afternoon, to brew a second batch of botulism. When Tracey got there, Celeste had all the ingredients, and they began stirring into the jar corn, a few tablespoons of chopped meat, and dirt from the yard. Then, just as Tracey had the first time, Celeste filled the jar with water and sealed it. “Taken through the bloodstream, death is quick and relatively symptomless,” the recipe read. “Botulism is fun and easy to make.”
Once she’d screwed the cap on, Celeste placed it in a cabinet in the garage, where the Texas heat would bake it. It wasn’t to be disturbed. But again the plan failed. Days later Justin noticed the jar with something that looked like liquid fertilizer brewing in it. He picked it up, unscrewed the top to look at it, and moved it, disturbing the growth of the botulism. When Celeste realized what had happened, she was despondent.
“Steve has to die,” she told Tracey. “He just has to.”
Within days she had another plan, asking Tracey to buy her ten tablets of ecstasy. “I’ll take him to a bar and slip it in his drink. They’ll think someone else did it,” she said.
As before, Tracey did as Celeste asked, reasoning she was not the one who’d be putting it into his drink. Days later Celeste claimed to have used the drugs, again without success. “That fat old fuck. He’s so big nothing can kill him,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time. “It’s like trying to kill an elephant.”
“Mom won’t get out of bed,” Kristina told Tracey on the phone the next day.
Tracey rushed over. As before, Steve was gone and Kristina was frantic, worried about Celeste. Tracey urged Celeste out of bed and convinced her to dress. “Living with Steve is killing me,” she said.
That day, Tracey told Kristina something she’d wanted to tell her for a long time. “Your mother and I are a couple,” she said. “She’s just not ready to tell you yet.”
“Okay,” Kristina said, not knowing what to think, except that in her heart she’d known it all along.
It seemed that Tracey was tired of hiding the relationship and was ready to tell the world. “I love Celeste,” she told Terry Meyer, the manicurist, the next time she was at Tramps having her nails done.
“Everyone does. She’s great,” Terry said.
“No, I really love Celeste,” Tracey emphasized. “And if that old man ever hurts her, I’ll kill him.” Terry was shocked, not knowing what to say. When Celeste came in, Terry told her what Tracey had said.
“Did she really say that?” Celeste said.
“She did.”
At home, Celeste watched Court TV and homicide investigations on the A&E channel. One program on how murderers were caught seemed to fascinate her. On Celeste’s desk Jennifer found a packet of grisly photos of dead bodies, mostly with gunshot wounds.
“Why’s she have these?” she asked Kristina.
“I don’t know,” her sister replied.
Steve had been bored that August, while Celeste and the girls were in Australia. With Davenport II nearing completion, he had no pet projects in the works. Again he turned his attention to the house. Now that he had some time on his hands, he called Gus Voelzel and asked him to design maid’s quarters and a guest house, one his grown kids could stay in when they visited. It had been years since any of Steve and Elise’s children had come. Most kept a distance from Celeste, who’d called them more than once, raging, usually about nothing of importance. “I’ll tell your father about this,” she stormed, as if talking to small children.
By mid-September, Celeste was frantic. At Tracey’s house three to four nights a week, she paced. Each time, they spent the evening drinking and talking about Steve. As Tracey saw it, Celeste was becoming increasingly unstable. “I’m giving him more sleeping pills and Everclear,” she said. “Eventually, it’s gotta kill him.”
On September 10, Stacy, the travel agent, ran into Celeste and Steve at a restaurant, having lunch. Steve introduced her to Celeste and they talked about the trip. “I really think you ought to take the insurance,” Stacy said again. “That’s a lot of money to risk.”
“I’m not going to cancel. Absolutely not,” Steve said firmly. “We don’t need insurance because we’re going on that trip.”
Many people noticed a change in Celeste that month. When she and Steve had dinner with Chuck Fuqua and his girlfriend, Celeste sat distracted at the table, not paying attention to the conversation, as if she had something else on her mind. Days later Anita and her husband ran into the Beards at a new posh, fusion restaurant in Davenport I. While Steve and the girls sat down for dinner, Celeste, her hair in a French twist and decked out in a designer dress and jewelry, paced outside. Through the windows they saw her smoking and talking on her cell phone.
“Should I go talk to her?” Anita asked.
Steve looked embarrassed and sad. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
When Celeste finally came in, she sat with Steve and the girls, but it seemed to Anita that she wanted to be anywhere but in the restaurant with Steve.
The phone rang at Tracey’s house on the night of September 12. “You need to come over right away!” Celeste screamed. “Steve’s passed out. I need your help.”
When Tracey arrived, Steve was in a kitchen chair, unconscious.
“I drugged him,” Celeste said. “Help me get him out of the chair.”
Tracey grabbed him under one arm and Celeste under the other, then they angled the chair beneath him, until he fell to the floor.
“Oh, God,” Tracey said. “What do we do now?”
“Wait,” Celeste said.
She left and moments later returned with a plastic kitchen garbage bag and a towel. She then wrapped the towel around his neck and pulled the garbage bag over his head, cinching it shut.
“I saw this on television,” she said. “Now the bag won’t leave marks.”
On the floor, Steve moved slightly, and the bag went in and out with each breath.
Suddenly, Celeste handed the bag straps to Tracey.
“Hold these,” she said.
Tracey did, and Steve’s breathing continued. She thought: I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do this. When Steve moved again, Tracey dropped the bag. “I can’t do this,” she said, horrified. “I just can’t.”
“I can’t, either,” Celeste said, pulling the bag from his head. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
After Celeste called 911, she dialed Kristina’s cell phone. “Steve’s had a seizure. I’ve called EMS,” she said.
“Do you want me to come get you?”
“No, go to the hospital. Tracey’s here. She’ll take me.”
But as soon as she hung up, Celeste changed her mind. “You should leave,” she told Tracey. She dialed Kristina again. “Come get me,” she said.
At North Austin Medical Center, Steve’s blood alcohol level was high, .168, and his oxygen level was dangerously low. A social worker was called in to talk to him about his drinking, but he insisted he hadn’t had more than two or three vodkas, not enough to cause such high blood levels. The social worker noted on his chart that Steve was not facing his drinking problem.
Two days later, at 2:00 P.M., a nurse called Celeste and said Steve was ready to be discharged. “I’m not going to be home today. I have plans,” Celeste answered. “Why don’t you keep him another day?”
“Your husband is fine. He doesn’t need to be here,” the nurse said. “He has to check out today, but you can wait until seven tonight, if you need to.”
“Okay,” Celeste said. “I’ll be there at seven.”
Steve took the news without complaint. For another five hours he stayed at the hospital, waiting for Celeste to arrive to take him home.
The morning after his release, it happened again. This time the maid screamed and Kristina came running. Steve was unconscious, facedown at the kitchen table with his eyes open. When Kristina shook him, he didn’t respond.
Celeste and the girls lowered him onto the floor and called EMS for a second time in three days. At the hospital, Steve was prodded and examined, but the doctors found no reason for his fainting spells. They did, however, chronicle his declining health in his chart: bronchitis, high blood pressure, an enlarged heart, sleep apnea, and abnormal blood chemistry from the high doses of alcohol damaging his kidneys. Celeste was right. Eventually, the Everclear would kill him.
That week, Celeste brought in the final payment for the approaching trip to Europe, a check for $40,788, to Tramex Travel. Included was the money for the cancellation insurance. Stacy was surprised, wondering what had changed Steve’s mind. He’d been so adamant about not wanting the policy, she’d given up hope that he would relent. Later, she’d wonder if he even knew, or if Celeste had been the one who bought the insurance, because she knew they’d never board the flight to Paris.
Despite all that happened to him, Steve worried more about his home life and Celeste than his health. When David Kuperman, his attorney, dropped in to see him at the hospital, he was morose, saying the marriage “wasn’t working out.”
“Do you want to call the divorce attorney?” Kuperman asked. “The one you used when you filed against Celeste in 1995?”
“I’ll think about it,” he told him.
Days after he was released from the hospital for the second time, he called Celeste’s therapist, Dr. Michele Hauser, and complained about Celeste’s behavior. She was tired all the time, seeing three to five doctors a week, everyone from an internist to a dermatologist. “She acts guilty, and she’s spending money like crazy,” he told Hauser. “When she’s angry she screams.”
There was more. Steve had found Celeste’s stash of credit cards, four with aliases, including Celeste Martinez. “She doesn’t include me in her plans,” Steve said. “She does things with other people and doesn’t tell me.”
Still, Celeste had a hold on Steve he couldn’t shake. Like the others before him, he found it impossible to leave her. When Steve finally talked to Kuperman again about a divorce, he told him he’d decided not to pursue anything, at least not yet.
Later, Tracey would say that it simply came up in conversation, and Celeste latched onto it as if fascinated. “I have my shotgun back,” she told her.
For months one of Tracey’s friends had kept the gun for her, because Tracey feared she might use it on herself during a weak moment. Finally, she felt stable enough to have it home. The shotgun was the .20 gauge Franchi her father gave her in the late sixties. A lightweight weapon, it had Tracey Tarlton etched on the stock.
Five days before Celeste and Steve were scheduled to leave for Europe, on Wednesday, September 29, Celeste brought the shotgun up again.
“I can’t go with Steve,” she said. “If I go, I won’t come back. I don’t know how to get away from him. He’ll hunt me down. And if I stay, he’ll see that I don’t survive.”
As Tracey listened, Celeste told her that Steve ridiculed her and pushed her to kill herself, telling her she was “too stupid to bail water.”
“I want you to shoot him,” she said, putting her arms around Tracey and kissing her.
“No,” Tracey said, pulling away. “I can’t do that.”
Celeste covered her face and sobbed: “Then you might as well say good-bye to me. If I leave on that trip, I’ll never come back. Go get your gun, and I’ll use it on myself. I’ll do it quickly, before I change my mind. Then, at least he won’t ever touch me again.”
Inside, Tracey fought a vicious battle. She didn’t want to kill anyone, and it was Celeste’s problem, not hers. Yet she felt she couldn’t stand by and let Steve drive her lover to suicide. If she told her no, Celeste could do as she threatened, and kill herself that very night, driving off a freeway or finding a gun and pulling the trigger. She believed Celeste was powerless with Steve and desperate.
“I have no one else to turn to,” Celeste pleaded.
“Fine,” Tracey said. “I’ll do it.”
Smiling, Celeste took Tracey’s face in her hands and kissed her hard on the lips.
Later, in a strange way, it would all make sense to Tracey. All her life she’d searched for the reason she’d been born. “I always felt unnecessary,” she says. “I thought finally I’d found something I was necessary for. I had a purpose. I had to kill Steve to save Celeste’s life.”