It was dusk when Katherine Paris’s bronze-colored Fiat came off the road that led from Silverwood and turned onto the highway. I switched off the radio, started my car, and followed her. There was no reason to think she would recognize my car; blue Accords are so common as to be almost invisible on the roads of California. She led me past vineyards, orchards, farm houses, and a desolate-looking housing tract with street names like Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. It was getting chilly out, a sign of autumn in the air. We drove on and on, deeper into the country between gently wooded hills now gloomy in the thick blue light of early evening. She turned her lights on and I turned on mine. A truck roared by and then a motorcycle and then it was just the two of us again, and the dense smell of wet earth rising from the darkened fields around us.
It would have been nice, I thought, had Hugh Paris been beside me. There was a restaurant in St. Helena that I’d been to once and liked. We could have driven there for dinner and stayed overnight somewhere and visited the wineries the next day. Eliot had it wrong about memory and desire; they smelled like wet earth on an autumn night and had nothing to do with spring.
My thoughts drifted back to the task at hand. The Fiat’s turn signal flashed on and we went down a narrow road. A brightly-lit three-story building rose just ahead of us. A sign above the entrance identified it as the Hotel George. The hotel was constructed of wood, painted white with green trim, a charming old place. A wide porch surrounded the first floor and chairs were lined up near the railing. They were mostly empty now. She parked and I watched her climb the steps and walk quickly across the porch into the building.
I waited in my car to see whether she would come out. There were some hot springs in the vicinity and I imagined that the George was a place from which people commuted to them. There were only three other cars in the lot; business, apparently, was slow.
When she failed to come out after five minutes, it occurred to me that Mrs. Paris might be meeting someone. Who? A member of the family? It was a small family to begin with and events had savaged it.
Of Linden’s grandchildren, John and Christina Smith, only Christina married. She and Robert had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas. Of the two sons only Nicholas married and he and Katherine had produced only one child, Hugh. Of these four generations, the only survivors were John Smith, the judge, mad Nicholas and Katherine herself. The decimation of Grover Linden’s descendants proceeded as if in retribution. I shook myself out of my musing and realized that another five minutes had passed. I decided to go in after her.
The lobby was a little rectangular space, the floor covered with a thick gray carpet, the furnishings dark Spanish-style chairs and tables. A polished staircase beside the registration desk led to the upper floors. Across from the desk was an open door with a small neon sign above the doorway identifying it as the bar. I went over and looked in. Through the dimly-lit darkness I could see her, sitting on a high stool at the end of the bar. I walked in and approached her from behind. She was alone.
I took the stool next to her, ordering bourbon and water. I wished her a good evening.
Her head swiveled toward me until we were face to face. I saw exhaustion in her eyes so deep that it quickly extinguished the flash of anger that registered when she recognized me. There was contempt in her look and disdain and beneath it all a plea to be left alone. I regretted that I could not comply.
“May I buy you a drink, Mrs. Paris?”
“Why not,” she said mockingly. “I’m sure they’ll take your money here and I never refuse a drink.” I summoned the bartender and ordered refills. “You follow me here?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To talk.”
“About Hugh?”
“Not necessarily. We could talk about you. Or your husband. Or your ex-father-in-law.”
“I find none of those subjects appealing,” she said. The darkness of the room cast shadows that hid all but the deepest lines in her face and she looked like a much younger woman. She was small, her feet not reaching to the metal ring at the bottom of the bar stool, and, for an instant, as she lifted her drink she looked as fragile as a child.
“Then tell me about your poetry.”
She looked sidewise at me. “Mr. Rios, I once had a talent for writing, a very small talent. I used it up a long time ago, or drank it up, perhaps. At any rate, that subject is the least appealing of all.” After a moment’s silence, she asked abruptly, “Do you like your life?”
“You mean, am I happy?”
“Yes, if you want to be vulgar about it.” She finished her drink. Another soldier down.
“I have been, from time to time.”
“A lawyer’s answer,” she said disdainfully. “Mincing — oh, pardon me. Equivocal. What I mean is,” and her voice was suddenly louder, “on the whole, wouldn’t you rather be dead?”
“No.”
“Well I often think I would,” she said softly.
“Why?”
She shook her head. “Every drop of meaning has been squeezed from my life. I hardly expect you to understand.”
“Your husband?”
“My husband,” she said. Another drink had appeared in front of her. I realized that I was about to be the recipient of the drunken confidences of an old, depressed woman. Common decency almost got me out of the bar, but not quite. “I married
Nick Paris in my sophomore year at Radcliffe. I had an old Boston name and no money. He was rich and crazy. I knew about the rich but not the crazy.” She scraped a fingernail across the surface of her glass. “I wanted to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mr. Rios. Instead, I became a crazy rich man’s wife. And a minor poet.” She stared at me as if trying to remember who I was. “What is it you want from me?”
“Who killed Hugh?”
“Oh, that. Why do you think anyone killed Hugh. He was quite capable of killing himself.”
“And you would rather be dead but here you are, alive and well.”
“Alive, perhaps. I can’t help you, darling. I was bought and paid for long ago.”
“By whom?”
“Surely you know enough about this family to know by whom. When I married Nick his parents were horrified by my poverty, tried to buy an annulment but by then I was pregnant with Hugh. We came out to California and things were fine for awhile. Christina, my mother-in-law, treated me quite well. And Jeremy, of course, I was quite fond of.”
“Your brother-in-law.”
She nodded. “Then it went bad.” She lit a cigarette.
“What happened?”
“Christina wanted a divorce. Her husband wouldn’t hear of
“Of course. The marriage was working for him. He had what he wanted from the family — money, power, prestige. And he treated her like a chattel and his sons like less than that. He is, you know, a malevolent human being.”
“I gathered.”
She looked at me. “Hugh tell you some stories? I assure you, there are worse.” She expelled a stream of cigarette smoke toward her reflection in the barroom mirror. “Then they were killed, Christina and Jeremy.”
“Do you know where they were going at the time?”
“To Reno. Christina was to obtain a divorce. Jerry went for moral support. It was all very conspiratorial. They left early in the morning without telling the judge, but he found out. The next day they brought the bodies back.”
“He killed them.”
“Do your own addition,” she said. “Nicholas was already sick by then. He really loved Jeremy and after Jeremy’s death he deteriorated pretty quickly. Perhaps not so quickly as to warrant that lunatic bin, but that’s a matter for the doctors to dispute.”
“And what happened to you?”
“I was having an affair at the time,” she said, “and Paris — the judge — hired an investigator to document my indiscretion. He demanded that I agree to a divorce and renounce my rights to Nick’s estate. Unfortunately, I had acquired a taste for wealth, so I was desperate to salvage something. And, as it happened, I had a pawn to play.” She touched a loose strand of hair, tucking it back.
“Hugh?”
“Yes. His father’s heir. I gave Paris custody of my son and got in exchange-”
“Your thirty pieces of silver,” I said bitterly.
“Considerably more than that,” she said. “And what right do you have to judge me? He was nothing to you but a trick.”
“No,” I said. “I loved him.”
She looked away from me. A moment later she said, “I have never understood homosexuality. I can’t picture what you men do with each other.”
“I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rios, and about so many things it’s hardly worthwhile to begin enumerating them now.”
“Would you like me to drive you back into the city?”
“No, thank you. The bartender cuts me off at ten and I take a room in the hotel. I’ll be fine.” She had stepped down from the bar stool. “Goodnight, Mr. Rios.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Paris.”
Then she was gone, weaving between tables toward a door marked Ladies. I went out into the darkness and the chilly autumn air, drunk and depressed.
The next morning I was at the county law library when it opened and spent the next hour ploughing through treatises on the law of trusts and estates. The coroner’s phrase, that Christina and Jeremy Paris had died simultaneously, had been ticking away in the back of my mind. I’d thought about it all the way back from Napa. There had to be a reason for the discrepancy between the times of death recorded at the scene of the accident and the coroner’s finding. The coroner’s report was a legal document and there were only two areas of the law to which it pertained, criminal and probate. Since, at the time, there was no issue of criminal liability arising from the accident, the coroner’s findings must have been sought for the purposes of the probate court. When I got to that point, I remembered simultaneous death, a phrase I recollected dimly from my trusts and estates class.
I picked up a red-covered casebook, Testate and Intestate Succession, eighth edition, by John Henry Howard, Professor Emeritus at Linden University School of Law. Professor Howard had been my teacher for trusts and estates. Back then, he was only up to his fifth edition. I opened the book to the general table of contents. The book was divided into the two main sections, intestate and testate succession. Seeing the two concepts juxtaposed in type on facing pages, I suddenly realized my research mistake. Aaron Gold had told me that Christina Paris had left a will but her estate, nonetheless, passed through intestacy. I had focused on whether there could be a drafting error that would invalidate a will and which, somehow, involved times of death. But the rule of simultaneous death was a concept of intestate succession and it functioned whether a will was properly drawn or not; the issue was not whether a will was correctly drafted, but who it named as a beneficiary. I turned to the more detailed table of contents and, under intestate succession, buried near the bottom of the page, saw the words simultaneous death.
It was not a not a hot topic in the law of estates, rating little more than a page and a half. One page was a general discussion of the concept, with case citations. The other half-page presented a hypothetical situation and a number of questions arising from it. I remembered that Professor Howard’s hypos were never as easy as they first looked.
Given the byzantine complications of most estate law, the concept of simultaneous death was relatively simple and straightforward. The underlying premise was that neither a dead person nor his estate should be permitted to inherit a bequest by one living. Consequently, if a woman left her estate to her daughter but her daughter predeceased her, the gift was void. Upon the mother’s death the gift reverted to her estate rather than passing to the daughter’s heirs.
But what happened if mother and daughter died in such a manner that it was impossible to tell who died first? Did the gift revert to the mother’s estate or pass to the daughter’s? It was for such a contingency that the rule of simultaneous death arose. Using this rule, the law presumed that where the testator and beneficiary died simultaneously, the beneficiary died first. Consequently, the gift reverted to the estate of the giver and was distributed according to the rest of her testamentary scheme.
So it made no difference whether the will was properly written or not. For instance, a father might make a will leaving everything he owned to his son, but if the son died before the father, the will became just a scrap of paper and the father’s estate was divided as if the will had never existed. I was beginning to think that something very similar to that had occurred in the case of Christina Paris.
There was one other point about the rule of simultaneous death that had special meaning for me. The presumption, that the testator survived the beneficiary, was rebuttable. This meant that it could be disputed in court by competent evidence. The testimony, say, of the paramedics at the scene of the accident. But if all the probate court had before it was the coroner’s report, it was not likely to look further; a court may believe or disbelieve the evidence submitted to it, but it has no means by which to conduct its own investigations.
I turned to the hypothetical. At first glance the facts seemed simple enough, but I read the hypo more carefully the second time looking for land mines. Halfway through it occurred to me that the facts were suspiciously familiar: a wealthy woman left her entire estate to one of her two sons who, subsequently, was killed in the same car accident that killed her. Was it possible that Professor Howard had based this hypo on the facts of Christina Paris’s death? Beneath the hypo, Professor Howard provided six additional facts, each of which changed the disposition of the woman’s estate. Number six asked whether it would make any difference to the distribution of her wealth if one of her intestate heirs — her husband, perhaps — had arranged the deaths precisely to invalidate the will. Her husband, perhaps!
Two hours later I was walking alongside a dusty hedge on a dead-end street in an obscure wooded pocket of the campus where retired professors lived in university-subsidized houses. While it was generally acknowledged at the law school that John Howard, who’d retired eight years earlier, was still alive, he was seldom seen and even more rarely contacted. Finally, some antiquarian in the alumni office had found an address for me.
I came to a white picket gate. Across a weedy, dying lawn and in the shade of an immense oak tree stood a stucco house. It was remarkably still and peaceful-looking, like a ship harbored in calm waters. I pushed the gate open and went up the flagstones to a green door. There was a brass knocker in the shape of a gavel. I knocked, twice.
The door was opened by a middle-aged Asian woman wearing a green frock. She wiped her hands on her apron and eyed me suspiciously. “Yes?”
“I’ve come to see Professor Howard. Are you Mrs. Howard?”
“Housekeeper,” she replied. “You want professor?”
“Yes, does he live here?”
“Sure,” she said, “but long time no one comes.”
“Well, I’m here,” I pointed out.
“I’ll get,” she said, hurrying away. She’d left the door open so I stepped inside.
There was an odd smell in the house, musty and faintly sweet, a mixture of cigar smoke and furniture polish. I was standing at the end of a long dark hall. An arched entrance led off to a little living room. The furniture, old and very ugly, was too big for the room, as if purchased for some other house of grander proportions. A vacuum cleaner had been parked between two brick-red sofas. There were ashes of a fire in the fireplace. A pot of yellow chrysanthemums blazed on a coffee-table near a tidy stack of legal periodicals. The walls exuded an elderly loneliness. He probably never married, I thought.
The housekeeper appeared, touched my arm and told me to come with her. I followed down the hall and into a bright little kitchen. She opened the door to the back yard and I stepped outside. I saw an empty ruined swimming pool, the bottom filled with yellow leaves. Facing the pool were two white lawn chairs
— the old-fashioned wooden ones — and between them a matching table. There was a fifth of vodka, a pint of orange juice and two glasses on the table. One of the chairs was occupied by an old man wearing a sagging red cardigan frayed through at the elbow.
He turned his face to me. His thick gray hair was greasy and disheveled. He now sported a wispy goatee. He held a cigar in one hand as he reached for a glass with his other. Professor John Henry Howard, latest edition.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked in a voice thickened with the sediment of alcohol and old age.
I nodded.
“Well, boy, introduce yourself.”
“Henry Rios, sir. Class of ‘72. I took trusts and estates from you.”
He peered at me intently as I approached, hand outstretched. He put down the cigar, shook my hand and motioned me to sit beside him. “ ‘72? A good class, that. Not that many of you cared for probate. No, you belonged more to the quick than the dead. Where did you sit, Mr. — “
“Rios. In the back row.”
“Ah, one of those. What was your final grade?”
“An A-minus.”
He lifted his shaggy eyebrows and for a second I thought he was going to demand to see my transcript.
“Well, you must’ve learned something. Have a drink.” “No, I-,” but before I could finish he’d filled the glass with vodka and added, as an afterthought, a splash of orange juice. I sipped. It was like drinking rubbing alcohol.
“The smart cocktail,” the professor said touching his glass to mine. “One of my remaining pleasures. I have a system, you see. I allow myself only as much vodka as I have orange juice. Through judicious pouring I can make a pint of orange juice last all day.”
“The legal mind at work,” I said.
Professor Howard chuckled. “Indeed. So, Mr. Rios, what are we going to talk about?”
“I want to ask you about a hypo that appears in your casebook.”
“You a probate lawyer?”
“No.”
“Good, because if you were I’d charge you, and I ain’t cheap. Proceed.” He tilted his head back.
I withdrew from my pocket a xeroxed copy of the page in his book with the illustration of simultaneous death. “It’s this,” I said, handing it to him.
“What’s the question?” he asked as he skimmed the page.
“A wealthy woman and her oldest son are killed in an auto accident. She’d devised her entire estate to that son. The court uses the rule of simultaneous death to invalidate the will and her estate passes, through intestacy, to her husband. Now here, in number six, you ask what effect it would have on the distribution of the estate if her husband had actually arranged the accident.”
“Well, think, Mr. Rios,” he prodded. “If you killed your old mother to obtain the family jewels, do you think the court would reward your matricide?”
“I take it from your tone the answer is no.”
“If the law was otherwise it would be open season on every person of means. That answer your question?”
“One of them. These facts are based on the deaths of Christina and Jeremy Paris, aren’t they?”
He picked up his cigar from the edge of the table and lit it.
“I’m investigating the death of her grandson, Hugh Paris, who was a friend of mine. I believe he knew or suspected that her death and the death of her son, Jeremy, was arranged by Robert Paris. I think you know something about that.”
“What kind of law did you say you practice?”
“I didn’t. Criminal defense.”
He shook his head. “Criminal is a troublesome area. No rules. Might makes right, with only the thin paper of the Constitution between the fist and the face.”
“Why did he have them killed?”
Howard regarded me through narrowed eyes, as if deciding whether or not to lie.
“She was on her way to obtain a divorce. That would’ve extinguished his intestate rights. She’d already cut him out of her will.”
“How do you know that?”
“I drafted the will,” he said, tremulously.
“What else do you know, professor?”
“About the will or the marriage? They were intertwined. The marriage was hell for her but she put up with it for the children and because she was Catholic and, not least of all, because she was Grover Linden’s granddaughter and the Lindens don’t acknowledge defeat. But she hated Robert. He used her, robbed her. So she came to me one night and told me to write her a will that would cut him off from the Linden money in such a way that he would lose if he contested it.”
“How did you do it?”
“We gave him all the community property, his and hers. It was not an insignificant amount. That was the carrot. Everything else went to their sons. Jeremy was given his share outright and Nicholas’s was put in a trust to be administered by Jeremy and his uncle, John Smith. That was the stick.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Robert could hardly complain he wasn’t provided for since he got everything they’d accumulated in thirty years of marriage. And should he contest the will that would put him in the position of challenging the rights of his own sons as well as his brother-in-law, a man richer even than he. For good measure, we threw in an in terrorem clause providing that he would lose everything if he unsuccessfully challenged any clause of the will.”
“You thought of everything,” I said, admiringly.
“Except one thing. His intestate rights. As long as they remained married, he was her principal intestate heir. So, from his perspective it was just a question of invalidating the will.”
“Did he know about it, then?”
“Yes. She made the mistake of taunting him with it. Two weeks later she and Jeremy, who had dined together at her home, became seriously ill with food poisoning. It may have been a fluke that Robert, who ate the same things, was unaffected.” The professor shrugged. “It frightened her. By then I had discovered the hole in our scheme. I advised her to get a divorce.”
“She never made it,” I said.
He breathed noisily and sucked at his now unlit cigar.
“I have only one other question. Why did she come to you?”
“Mr. Rios,” he said, “that’s ancient history.”
“Please?”
“Almost sixty years ago,” he said, “I attended a reception at this university given by Jeremiah Smith who was then in the thirtieth year of his presidency. His wife was dead and so his daughter, Christina, functioned as his hostess. I was nine months out of law school, just hired as a part-time lecturer in property law. Robert Paris was also at the reception, my colleague at the law school with about three months more experience than I. Well, Robert and I dared each other to approach the grand Miss Smith and ask her to dance. I did, finally. I got the dance, but he got the marriage, four years later. She and I became friends, though. We were always friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
He smiled, crookedly and without humor. “You know, Mr. Rios, there is one aspect of this case which you have failed to examine adequately.”
“Sir?”
“Jeremy’s death. Why was it necessary to kill the two of them in such a manner that simultaneous death could be found? Robert, as Jeremy’s father, was Jeremy’s principal intestate heir, since Jeremy had neither wife nor children. He could’ve picked Jeremy off at his leisure unless what?”
“Unless Jeremy had also executed a will that named a beneficiary other than the judge.”
“Precisely.”
“And did he?”
“Yes. It was still in draft form but it would’ve sufficed.”
“Who was Jeremy’s beneficiary?”
“His nephew, Hugh Paris.”
“What became of Jeremy’s will?
“I have it, somewhere. I brought it out only six months ago to show Hugh.”
“Hugh was here?”
“Yes. He came to me knowing less than you do but enough to have guessed the significance of the fact that his uncle and grandmother were killed at the same time.”
“They weren’t, you know,” I said. “She died before him by fifteen minutes. That’s what the police report said, but the coroner was bribed to find otherwise.”
He closed his eyes. “If I had known that twenty years ago, I would’ve gone to the police. How could Robert have been so clumsy?”
“I think he was desperate,” I said. “Unnerved. If he’d been accused then, he might have fallen apart.”
“And your friend would be alive,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry.”
And after that, there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.
I left the professor and walked back to the student union where I found a phone and called Terry Ormes at the police station. She was out in the field so I left a message. Sonny Patterson at the D.A.’s office was out to lunch. I set up an appointment to see him the next morning. No one was answering at Aaron Gold’s office. I hung up the phone feeling cheated, like an actor robbed of his audience. I stood indecisively in front of the phone booth until the smells from the cafeteria behind me reminded me it was time to eat.
I bought two hamburgers and two plastic cups of beer and took them to a comer table. As I ate, I put the case together the way I would present it to Sonny the next day.
It was a simple tale of greed. Robert Paris had been disinherited by his wife, Christina, in favor of his two sons, Nicholas and Jeremy. Nicholas posed no problems. He was mentally ill and could be easily controlled by the judge. Jeremy, however, had to be gotten rid of. Paris had to invalidate Christina’s will in such a way as to strike her bequest to Jeremy, and any of his heirs, so that he himself might inherit that portion of Christina’s estate through intestacy. Christina and Jeremy were killed in an accident to which there was but one witness who himself was later killed. A crooked coroner presided at the inquest and manipulated the times of death, making it appear that Christina and Jeremy died simultaneously. By operation of the rule of simultaneous death, Christina’s estate passed to her remaining family, half to the judge through intestacy and half to his younger son, Nicholas, by operation of Christina’s bequest which was not affected by the invalidity of the bequest to Jeremy.
Nicholas was then committed to an asylum and his wife, Katherine, blackmailed into a divorce. I had no doubt that the judge had been appointed conservator of Nicholas’s estate. By the time the wheels of his machinations came to a stop, Judge Paris had secured control of his wife’s fortune.
There was only the smallest of hitches: Hugh. In Hugh’s case the judge acted more subtly. He took the boy from his mother, sexually abused him, and then set him adrift in a series of private schools far from his home. The judge made sure that Hugh had all the money he could spend. Rootless, without direction, with too much money and not enough judgment, Hugh became a wastrel, a hype. He very nearly self-destructed. But not quite. He came home, pieced together the story of his grandfather’s crimes and suddenly became a serious threat to Robert Paris. So he too was killed.
That was the story. The evidence would not be as seamless or easily put together. It would come in bits and pieces, fragments of distant conversations, scribbled notes, fading memories. The investigation would be laborious and involve, undoubtedly, protracted legal warfare. Sonny might look at it, see the potential quagmire and look the other way. But I doubted it. I knew, from trying cases against him, that he didn’t run from a fight. And he liked to win.
At least my part would be over. I would finally be able to exorcise that last image of Hugh lying in the morgue.
I got up and went back to the phone. This time Terry was in her office.
“Listen, I’m glad you called back,” she began.
“I’m seeing Patterson in the morning. I’m going to lay out the whole story for him and I’d like you to be there.”
“What story is that?”
“Robert Paris killed his wife, his son and his grandson. I know exactly how it happened and why. I’m sure Patterson will order the investigation into Hugh’s death reopened.”
“I don’t think so,” Terry said softly. “Where are you?”
“At the university. The student union. Why?”
“Have you seen this morning’s paper?”
“No, not yet. I’ve been on the move since I got up.”
“You better take a look at it.”
“Why?”
“Robert Paris is dead. The judge is dead.”
“What?”
“Early this morning. A stroke. Henry? You still there?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, looking across the patio of the student union to the courtyard. There were three flag poles there, one for a flag of the United States, one for a flag of California and the third for the university’s flag. Having spent most of the day on campus I’d passed those poles maybe four or five times not noticing until this moment that the three flags flew at half-mast.