Bitty Smyth’s eyelids weighed ten pounds each. She sat bolt upright on the bed to keep from falling asleep. When would Aunt Nedda come home?
She poured another glass of water from the pitcher by her bed. The edge of the glass blurred as she lifted it to her lips. She returned the glass to the night table and knocked the alarm clock to the floor, leaving the time of day a mystery.
Or was it night?
She fumbled in the pockets of her skirt and found the business card that Charles Butler had given her. Fortunately, she had memorized the office number, for it would have been difficult to focus on the small print of the card.
Bitty stared at the telephone, as if the large numbers on the dial might be equally difficult. No, she would not call, not yet. She would give it a few more hours. Aunt Nedda would surely come home for dinner without any prompting. She had promised.
It was such a fight to stay awake.
Robin Duffy stood among the cartons, trying to make sense of the numbers stenciled on the cardboard. Lowering his reading glasses, he said, „Give it up, Kathy. The document index has no relationship to the documents. All I can tell you at this point is that Smyth’s firm is hiding something.“ His eyes traveled over the towers of boxes, each containing thousands of documents. „This is an old lawyer’s trick – bury the sins in a ton of paperwork.“ He glanced at his wristwatch. „It’s time to get Charles.“
Riker listened for the sound of the reception room door closing on the lawyer. He stepped up behind his partner. „We’re never gonna find the will without Charles. You think he’ll come?“
Mallory sat at her computer, checking financial data she had raided from the law firm, still following the money. Riker was at the point of repeating himself when she said, „He’ll come… for Robin.“
From his turtleneck jersey to his formal evening shoes, Rabbi David Kaplan had dressed all in black. This was the proper attire in his understanding of the criminal underworld. This evening, he played the role of lookout man and loved it. He leaned into the hallway, then quickly withdrew to the elevator and spoke to Edward Slope in a stage whisper. „Charles is leaving with Robin.“ He poked his head out again. „Now they’re going into the office across the hall. The coast is clear.“
„You’ve been waiting all day to say that line, haven’t you?“
„Please, Edward, no noise.“
Together, the chief medical examiner and the rabbi moved their heavy burden along on its rolling pallet, out of the elevator and down the hallway, as Edward Slope said once again, „There’s no such thing as a surprise poker game.“
„Shhh.“ The rabbi was reveling in this crime of backward burglary. He turned the knob of the door to Charles Butler’s apartment. As promised, it opened easily. Pointing to a piece of tape that covered the bolt, he said, „Robin’s idea.“
And that made this crime of breaking and entering a conspiracy of three. The doctor and the rabbi wheeled the game table in the door, snagging its padded cover on a hinge and tearing it. Had the table not been turned on its side, it would never have fit through the door frame.
At the end of the foyer, they stopped in heart-clutching guilty surprise, as if they had been caught in the act of removing something instead of depositing a gift. Before them stood a tall, stately woman rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her hair was snow white, and her smile was bemused. She clearly recognized Edward Slope as the doctor who had written her Valium prescription earlier in the day. She studied the bulky object on the pallet.
„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.“