„If Nedda dies, they get to keep it.“ And now he understood the elaborate money laundering. „Those two still don’t know that the will and the trust were never valid.“
Mallory nodded. „Because the Winters’ attorneys have always been Smyths.“
Charles poured a drink for Robin Duffy and ignored the telephone on his office desk. One of Mallory’s machines would pick up the call at the reception desk. Before entering into a business partnership with her, he had never been an answering-machine sort of person. If calls had gone astray, he had always assumed that people would call back. So simple. And, in case of emergency, they would send a telegram to the door. Should he be out of town when people called, well, that was their hard luck and one less hassle to deal with.
Now he could not escape his callers. The machine seemed to work for their convenience and not his own. Machines were always conspiring to strip all the charm from his life. Once, he had tried to disconnect the device, and all of the phones had gone dead. Mallory’s wiring was not to be trifled with. He had never attempted another such insurrection.
The phone stopped ringing.
Riker sat on the floor with the emptied-out contents of another carton, searching for a lost child among the papers. „You’re right, Mallory.
Sally Winter never attended a private school, either. No tuition payments.“
„I don’t think she lived long enough for kindergarten,“ said Mallory, leafing through her own stack of files. „There’s no record of payouts for nannies after the toddler years. Lots of medical bills. There was a live-in nurse. After Sally Winter turned four, the nurse’s paychecks stopped.“
„So the kid was sick,“ said Riker. „Maybe she died of natural causes. I can’t see any motive to kill Sally.“
„Then why would Lionel say she’d run away when she was ten years old? You know that was a lie. And why isn’t there a death certificate on file with the city?“
„Sally could’ve died somewhere else. Maybe it was a case of neglect. Uncle James wouldn’t want anyone to know he was an unfit guardian, not before he’d finished milking his cut from the trust fund.“ Riker turned to the open doorway to see Charles and Robin walking down the hall toward the reception room. A moment later, that distant door opened and closed. He guessed that they were making a deli run for food and wondered if they would remember to bring him a beer.
Mallory was sifting through the smallest carton, the one that had belonged to his grandfather. She began to pin the old man’s diagrams of the massacre to the wall.
„Hey,“ said Riker, „you don’t want Charles and Robin to see that stuff.“
„They won’t be back. They’ll be playing poker all night.“
Charles Butler entered his apartment behind Robin Duffy, who headed straight for the library, and now he heard Edward Slope call out, „It’s about time!“
Upon entering the book-lined room, he could hardly fail to notice an old gaming table surrounded by his new club chairs, and three of those chairs were filled by the charter members of the weekly floating poker game.
„Oh, it’s a beauty,“ said Robin, admiring the ornate carving and the touches of gilt and inlays.
Indeed, it was a good piece of furniture, in the sense of being solid and made of good hardwood, but it was too ornate, not the graceful antique of Charles’s dreams. This table had obviously been constructed in the twentieth century, and one might even call it gaudy.
„The provenance,“ said Edward, handing a sheet of paper to Robin, whose eyes went round. The doctor turned to Charles, saying, „It’s a gift from Mallory. It once belonged to Bugsy Siegel.“
A mobster and a brutal killer, but Charles let this slide, for it was so rare to receive a present from Mallory that did not require an electronics manual to operate.
„Oh, Bugsy.“ Robin Duffy ran one hand over the tabletop, caressing it with real love in his eyes. „Bugsy Siegel, the man who invented Las Vegas. It just doesn’t get any better than this.“
Indeed, there were smiles all around the room. Even the rabbi approved. And now Charles realized that the other table, the one linked to a former president, would never have made them so happy. Mallory had found the magic that he had been searching for, a history of smoke-filled-rooms and high-stakes players, a table with a provenance on the wild side.
He sat down in a chair and smiled at this company of friends. He had inherited all of them from Kathy Mallory’s foster father. Charles’s other bequest, a seat in this poker game, was also an ongoing treasure. But the game had represented so much more to the late Louis Markowitz, that crafty, manipulative good man – that stellar card shark.
Charles had heard all the players’ war stories of watching Kathy Mallory grow up in the Markowitz household, and he had heard all the theories for why Louis Markowitz had taken a young child to the weekly poker game. Edward Slope had once espoused the idea that Louis was teaching his semireformed street thief to steal in a more socially acceptable manner – rather than going straight for a victim’s wallet or ripping off cars. David Kaplan had been closest to the truth with the theory of playtime, for young Kathy had never had friends her own age. She had always frightened normal children.
But these three men had never understood how truly devious their late, great friend had been. The policeman’s profession was prone to sudden death, and Louis had been a farsighted man. He had forced these men to love his only child over the years when she was learning to cheat them and beat them all at cards.
And they loved her still.
Though she had long ago outgrown their company and deserted their game of penny-ante stakes and wild cards, these men would never desert Kathy Mallory. They were family now.
Canny Louis.
„Lionel and Cleo were in the park that day.“ Mallory had pinned up all the old diagrams of Winter House. „But Stick Man didn’t know they were missing. I think the original plan was to kill everyone in the house but the baby and Nedda. It had to look like a psycho on a killing spree instead of a hired murder.“
„But, as long as they had Nedda, why would they need the baby?“
„The draw on the fortune goes to Nedda and her siblings. That’s a lot of money to ride on the life of one child. Suppose they always planned to stash Nedda somewhere else?“
„Like an asylum?“
„Right. They can produce her if they have to. But, even if she dies in a hospital under an assumed name, the lawyers can still keep her alive on paper, and the money rolls on. But James Winter has to be established as the legal guardian of a surviving child. This was what I got from the DA’s office. They say the court would’ve assumed guardianship for a missing child, and the court could’ve declared Nedda dead after seven years. So this is the only way that James can get his share of the money. Even if he’d had the brains to contest the original will – “
„He would’ve been a murder suspect with a huge money motive,“ said Riker. „Okay, but Sally was a bad choice. The kid was sick.“
„She was a baby, no friends, no school connections. If Sally had been the only survivor, they probably would’ve replaced her with another kid when she died. I don’t think anyone minded that Cleo and Lionel weren’t in the house that day. That was an accidental bonus. Two spares.“
Nedda Winter carried a plate of sandwiches into the library and set them on the game table amid the beer bottles and ashtrays filled with smoking cigars. Charles held a chair for her. „You’ll play, of course.“
„I might watch for a while, but I’m not much good at card games.“
„Good.“ Edward Slope opened a fresh deck. „At last, Charles has someone he can beat at poker.“