„It’s a table,“ said Edward Slope, as if the furniture padding might have disguised that fact.
„Ah,“ she said. „I know just the place for it.“
Following Nedda Winter, they wheeled the table into the library. With no mention of the Winter House Massacre and the lady’s celebrity status, introductions were made to Rabbi Kaplan as the two men shifted the table off the pallet and placed it in the center of a ring of club chairs. And now the rabbi began to explain what had happened to Charles Butler’s last table.
„Burned in a warehouse fire,“ said Nedda. „Yes, I know. But I’ve never heard of a surprise poker game.“
The doctor consulted his watch. „Should we unwrap it now or wait for Robin?“
„You dropped something,“ said Nedda. „It fell out of that tear in the padding.“
David Kaplan bent down and retrieved the paper. „Oh, it’s the provenance. Kathy mentioned that it was an antique.“ The rabbi scanned the text, then abruptly sank into a club chair. „Edward, you won’t believe where this table has been.“
The job in Mallory’s office did not actually require a speed reader. It had taken Charles Butler only a few minutes to break the index code – childishly simple – a few minutes more to locate the correct carton, the correct folder and to hand over the original will to Robin Duffy.
„It’s really quite easy.“ Charles looked down at the file inventory in his hand. „The last three digits of the listed items correspond to the first three digits on the cartons. For the actual documents listed in the index, disregard the first and last two digits of the index number, and everything in the middle will match up with the numbers on the file holders.“ He never saw their startled faces. His head was deep in a carton as he fished out the folder that gave up the basic structure of the Winter family trust fund. Done with this chore, he asked, „What else am I looking for?“
„Something incriminating,“ said Riker.
„Well, I’ve got that right here.“ Robin Duffy sat behind Mallory’s steel desk, poring over papers covered with handwritten lines of faded blue ink. „I’m not surprised that you couldn’t find a copy of this will in the public record. Back in the thirties, you could buy off a clerk for pocket change. And I can tell you right now that Sheldon Smyth’s father bought a judge. That’s the only way he could’ve rammed this will through probate.“
Mallory stood behind Robin’s chair and read over his shoulder. „So it’s a fake?“
„Worse than that. It’s what I call hysteric form, confused and flawed. Edwina Winter was angry when she wrote this, and she wasn’t thinking straight. Her husband was cut off. That’s like an invitation to contest a will. Everything was left to Nedda and her siblings, but the kids only get a draw from a family trust. And there’s nothing here to say that Nedda’s siblings have to be Edwina’s children. Any sibling can benefit from the trust.“
„Well,“ said Riker, „I guess the lady didn’t count on Quentin having eight more kids with another wife.“
„But here’s the catch,“ said Robin. „She writes, ‘When my last child is dead, the trust passes on to the New-York Historical Society.’“
„Sounds smart to me,“ said Mallory. „According to Bitty Smyth, Edwina’s husband was the one who killed her. Maybe she saw it coming. She wanted to take the money motive out of murdering her children to inherit.“
„Makes sense,“ said Riker. „That’s why Nedda could never be legally declared dead.“
Charles thought of a more likely scenario: Edwina was preventing her husband from spending the money before the children were properly launched into the world, but he kept this to himself.
„With this wording,“ said Robin, „any judge would know it wasn’t Edwina’s intention to support another woman’s children by a future marriage. But that’s a moot point. The trust should never have been drawn up in the first place. It was created from the instructions of a flawed will. An honest judge would’ve set the will aside and divided the money between the infant Nedda and her father, Quentin Winter.“ He looked up at Charles. „I need to see the previous will.“
Charles flipped through the document index. „Sorry. There’s only one.“
„Then the law firm destroyed a preexisting will,“ said Robin Duffy. „Once you get past the hysterics, the rest of it, codicils, gifts to friends and servants, things like that, it’s all in correct legal form. She must’ve copied it from her earlier will.“
„Then we got ‘em,“ said Riker. „The old man told me that Edwina changed her will every time she had a fight with her husband.“
„In that case,“ said Robin, pausing to look over the mass of cartons, „the earlier wills were misplaced. You won’t find them on the index. You won’t find them at all. But they’re here.“
Charles Butler stood at the center of the room, sifting through another carton. „Why didn’t Quentin Winter hire a lawyer to break the will?“
„That’s an easy one,“ said Riker. „The Winter family’s lawyers have always been Smyths. Now I got a question. Why would the law firm keep all this stuff. If it incriminates them, why not destroy it?“
„Lessons of Nixon,“ said Robin. „The cover-up is always worse than the crime. They’d rather look incompetent than go to jail for fraud.“ He waved one hand to include every carton in the room. „I don’t have to look at their Financials. I know you’ll find a penny-perfect accounting for every fee and payout. It might not be honest, but it’ll look good on paper and it’ll pass an audit.“
„All right,“ said Mallory. „So the firm had to convince Quentin Winter that it wasn’t in his best interests to contest the will.“
„Right,“ said Robin. „If they couldn’t create the trust from the will instructions, then they’d lose a huge administration fee.“
„And it’s not like Quentin was left out in the cold.“ Charles placed a folder on the desk. „That’s a summary sheet for payouts in the first year. He had more income than he could spend. There’s a generous housekeeping allowance, a maintenance allotment for each child and a guardian’s draw.“
Robin studied the file, then nodded. „The firm padded out his monthly draw. My God, this trust fund was worth twenty-five million dollars. You know what that is in today’s dollars? Maybe a quarter-billion.“
„More,“ said Mallory, whose gift was calculation.
Walking had become a great effort for Bitty Smyth. When was Aunt Nedda coming home? She undid the bolt and slumped to the floor. One ear pressed against the door, she listened to the loud conversation downstairs. Her father’s voice joined the cacophony of invectives and blame flying back and forth across the wide front room below. Sheldon Smyth was slurring his words. She knew her aunt had not yet arrived. Aunt Nedda would not be privy to this conversation of family matters. On hands and knees, Bitty crawled back toward her bed and pulled the telephone off the nightstand by its cord.
Rags awoke with a start and flapped his wings. „What?“ He came out of his cage on the run and squawking. Even the bird could see that something was wrong with his mistress.
Charles Butler and Robin Duffy had retired to the more comfortable furnishings of the private office across the hall, where the furniture was not made of cold steel, where a humidor was stocked with Havanas and the whiskey was single malt.
When Riker returned with a take-out meal, his partner was standing before her cork wall, studying the yellowed papers of financials from an era of filing cabinets.
„For the first twelve years, the trust fund outlay should never have exceeded the interest earnings.“ She glanced back at her glowing monitor screen and its display of more recent data. „Today the trust is only worth forty thousand dollars.“
Riker lit a cigarette and took a long contemplative drag. He did his best thinking when he smoked. „Figure cost-of-living increases, more money for each new kid, and you still can’t spend it all, not with a cap on the draw.“ And now he dealt with the greater problem of finding something to pass for an ashtray. He settled on a metal cup, dumping its stash of paper clips out on the desk blotter. Experimentally, he dropped in his burnt match, and his partner did not hurt him.