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?”