Powers of Attorney (2 page)

“With admirable foresight the late Mr. Granger did not make his widow an executor,” Hyde retorted, smiling down the table. “I have two very realistic officers of the Granger Drug Company to deal with. You said yourself, Clitus, that they were all right. But I tell you what. If I settle this case for a penny under four hundred grand—which is a mere one percent of the gross estate—I'll be glad to tender you my resignation from the firm.”

“You'd better be careful,” Tilney muttered grimly. “I just may accept it.”

For several minutes thereafter there was no sound at the table but the chink of silver and the lapping of soup, and the dirty joke with which Waldron Webb at length broke the silence was greeted with a burst of relieved laughter.

 

The next months were terrible ones for Clitus Tilney. Hyde initiated in the Surrogate's Court a lengthy series of pre-trial examinations, or what was known in the legal world as a “fishing expedition.” He examined and re-examined, with exhaustive and exhausting care, the three witnesses to Mr. Granger's will, but he uncovered nothing but the fact that the decedent had drunk two cocktails—
after
the execution of the document. He interrogated the servants in the house, the nurses and doctors who had attended Granger's last illness, and the employees of the drug company whom the president had known personally. He showed particular interest in any evidence of the frequent manifestations of the decedent's lively temper. But above all he procrastinated. He complained to the court about his difficulties in rounding up witnesses; he pleaded illnesses and accidents; he insisted mysteriously that he was on the trail of new leads. He made motion after motion and appealed from decisions denying them. As Tilney put it disgustedly to his wife, the whole procedure, written up, would have made a perfect textbook for incipient shysters in the art of delaying tactics. The surrogate was impatient, the press caustic and the executors and their counsel livid, but time passed, and time, of course, was Hyde's trump card.

Reaching deeper and deeper into waters that he himself had muddied, Hyde at last plucked out one small, faintly wriggling eel, in the form of a modest trust fund that Granger had set up years before for a retired actress who had presumably been at one point his mistress. By showing that his client, Mrs. Crimmins, had been a friend of the actress, Hyde sought to establish a basis for Mrs. Granger's “psychopathic hatred” of her sister-in-law and her reason for “hounding the decedent until he had removed his sister from the will.” At this point Mrs. Granger, driven to exasperation by her own long interrogations, snapped in answer to one of Hyde's sneering questions that Mrs. Crimmins was “a cheat and a liar.” The words hit the headlines of the evening papers, and people began to shrug and say that the case was simply a mud-slinging competition between two angry women. When Hyde announced confidentially at a firm lunch that he had received a settlement offer of half a million, Tilney, sick at heart, assumed that all was over.

That evening he and his wife went to a private harpsichord concert in an old brownstone on lower Park Avenue. He had hoped that the music would settle his nerves, but he found that the twanging exasperated him, and he slipped out to the dining room where the butler, an old friend, gave him a whiskey and soda. He had settled down to drink it when he saw approaching him across the empty chamber the small, neat, grey, compact figure of Margaret Granger. So might Queen Victoria have crossed a room, with dignity, with intent, with relentlessness. As he rose to greet her, he noticed how everything about her, her pale round unpowdered cheeks, her thin, pale, set lips, her straight grey hair held in a knot in back, her simple satin grey dress and slippers, her single strand of tiny pearls, proclaimed, and proclaimed sincerely, that her money was but a burden and a duty.

“Sit down, Clitus,” she said severely, “I want to have a word with you.” They sat facing each other, on two high-backed Italian chairs, while she eyed him for a cool moment. “I'd like to know what you think you're up to.”

“I'm up to very little. My partner, Mr. Hyde, seems to be up to more.”

“He's a disgrace to the bar!”

Tilney glanced stealthily to his left and right and then leaned forward to whisper hoarsely: “I agree with you!”

“No, Clitus, I won't let you joke your way out of this. I really won't. He's your partner, and you should have stopped him. You owed me that much, as an old friend.”

“I tried, Margaret, believe me. My partners wouldn't go along.”

“I thought you were the senior.”

"There's a limit to what we seniors can do.”

“Well, I don't understand it,” she said, shaking her head. “But I should think there was some way a man in your position could have stopped it. And now I suppose you'll get a large fee?”

“Hyde gets no fee at all if he loses the case, and he can't possibly win if you fight. What's all this settlement talk? Have your lawyers lost their guts?”

Mrs. Granger was taken aback by his sudden offensive. “They tell me it costs less to settle. No matter how sure we are of winning.”

“And is costing less the only criterion?” Tilney protested. “Is there no moral issue involved?”

“You talk to me of moral issues, Clitus!” she exclaimed indignantly. “You, the partner of a man who's dragged my poor Harry's name through the mire!”

“Yes,
I
talk to you of moral issues, Margaret!” he retorted. “I have the unmitigated gall, if you will, to remind you of your moral obligation, as Harry's widow, not to give away a penny of his hard-earned money to his swindling sister.”

Mrs. Granger really gaped at this. “Your
client,”
she murmured in astonishment. “Is that the way you talk about your clients?”

“When I tell you that it could get me into the hottest kind of water with the Bar Association, will you believe I'm sincere?”

Mrs. Granger leaned over now to rest her small hand for just a moment on top of his large one. “Oh, Clitus, my good old friend, forgive me. Tell me what I should do.” Her voice trembled. “Everyone keeps telling me it's best to settle the wretched thing. They talk about the publicity and the cost, and they tell me that Harry's foundation will pay Mrs. Crimmins out of its half of the estate, so it won't make any difference to me, anyway. But I don't
care
about the publicity and the cost. And I don't care about who pays what. All I care is that Harry's horrible sister and her horrible lawyer should not be rewarded for what they've done to his memory. And I know that Harry would gladly have paid out his last dollar to lick them!”

“You believe that?”

“Passionately!” she exclaimed and clasped her hands together. “Oh, Clitus, tell me what to do.”

He hesitated a moment. “Do you still walk your poodles in the park in the early morning?”

She stared. “Yes. Every morning at seven.”

“I'll meet you tomorrow at seven. At the Ninetieth Street gate.”

They both rose in startled guilt at the sudden burst of applause from the next room. It was the intermission.

 

Tilney, of course, had made a careful study of the Granger will. It was a simple document, perfectly designed by competent counsel to effectuate the testator's twofold design: to provide sumptuously for his widow and to deprive the United States of its last penny of tax. The primary function of the Granger Foundation, at least in the mind of its benefactor, was less the study of incurable diseases than keeping the money away from the federal bureaucrats. And so the forty millions had been divided neatly in half, without a single outside bequest: twenty outright to the Granger Foundation, and twenty in trust to the widow for her life and then to the Foundation. But to qualify the widow's trust for the widow's tax exemption it had been necessary for Granger's lawyers to give her a power to dispose of her trust by will. Of course, it was understood between her and her husband that she would not exercise this power and that on her death the foundation would come into possession of the reunited halves of the estate, still virgin to the tax collector. Nonetheless, she had it. She had it, and on this Tilney had based his little plan.

The morning of his meeting with Mrs. Granger was a bright mild day of early spring, and seated on a park bench watching the pigeons and squirrels, Tilney felt as exhilarated as a young man at a romantic assignation. He jumped up when he saw her approaching, with her three absurd miniature poodles, and, taking the dogs' leashes, led her to a bench.

“Give me the little darlings, Margaret, and take this pencil and paper. I want to dictate a letter of just three lines. To the Director of the Granger Foundation. Of course, you will wish to add your own embellishments. But so long as the final version contains the gist of my message, we'll be all right, and Frank Hyde will be all wrong.”

“Dear Clitus,” she murmured affectionately as she sat down, “what a true friend you are. I wonder if having my faith restored in you isn't worth as much to me as frustrating Mrs. Crimmins.”

“You can have both,” he assured her as she took the pad and pencil and waited. “Now then. ‘Dear Bill or Jim, or whatever you call him: This is to inform you of my irrevocable decision.'” He paused and smiled while she hastily scribbled. “‘If a single penny of my husband's estate, or any money previously contributed by him to the Granger Foundation, is, under any circumstances whatever, given to Mrs. Crimmins ...'” He paused again, this time even longer than was needed.

“Go on, Clitus!”

“‘I will immediately execute a new will, by the terms of which the entire principle of my trust will be given to charities
other
than the Granger Foundation.'”

Mrs. Granger scribbled busily until she had finished, but when she looked up, she was frowning. “I couldn't do it. I gave Harry my word.”

“And, of course, I wouldn't ask you to break it. But you never promised Harry you wouldn't do a little bluffing, did you? You never gave him your word that you wouldn't try to trick his foundation into showing a little backbone?"

“No,” she said doubtfully. “I didn't. The matter never came up. Do you think he'd have approved of that kind of stratagem?”

“I think he'd have been tickled pink. I think he'd have clapped his hands and shouted!”

“And you really think this...” She glanced down at the pad on which she had scribbled his message. “You really think it will work?”

“It will work like a charm. Can you imagine a foundation tossing away twenty sure millions to save a possible few hundred grand? They're not madmen, you know. Even if they suspected you were bluffing, how would they dare take the chance that you weren't?”

As the beauty of the scheme sank into her mind, she smiled at last at this vision of the perfect weapon. “But then it will cost your firm a great fee,” she protested. “Is there any way I can make it up to you? Can I give you a fee?”

Tilney threw back his head with a roar of laughter. “My dear Margaret, what sort of crook do you take me for? Haven't I been unethical enough for one day?” He rose and reached out a hand. “Come now. Go home and write that letter. Make me proud of you. That's all the fee I could ever ask.”

 

The next days were delectable ones for Tilney. He never missed the chance, passing Hyde in a corridor, to boom a hearty question at him as to how the great case was going, and he would chuckle loudly at the other's evasive and discomfited answers. After a fortnight had passed, he felt that it was time, at a firm lunch, to call down the table to Hyde for a report on the Granger case.

“When you last spoke of it,” he added, “you told us it was as good as settled. Has the agreement been signed?”

Hyde stared back at him with unconcealed malevolence. “I suppose the word's out by now that the settlement has fallen through.” He snorted in disgust as he directed a less baleful stare around the table at the other partners. “I was going to tell you all today, anyway. Frankly, gentlemen, it's the damndest thing that's ever happened to me. The agreement was all hashed out, typed and ready to sign. We'd even told the surrogate about it in chambers. And then, whambo, somebody gets cold feet, the widow or the foundation, and refuses to go through with it. Oh, I can tell you, their counsel's face was
really
red. Old John Gales, of Gales & Martin, admitted to me he was thunderstruck. He actually apologized!”

“What are they trying to do?” Waldron Webb demanded hotly. “Shake you down a hundred grand at the last moment? It's the most unscrupulous thing I ever heard!”

“That may be it, I don't know. But Gales says they won't settle for a penny. Somebody seems to have got religion on the Granger Foundation.”

“In that case, what do we do now?” Tilney demanded, frowning. “Fold our tents and steal away?”

“No such luck, Clitus,” Hyde retorted angrily. “If it's a fight they want, they'll get a fight. And if it's dirt they want, they'll get their fill!”

“That's a pleasant prospect,” said Tilney with an acid smile. “But first of all, there's one little matter that I feel obliged to bring to the attention of the firm. I note on the monthly statement that more than thirteen thousand dollars of cash disbursements have been charged to Mrs. Crimmins' account. Of course, I understand that the fee basis is contingent, and that we get nothing if we lose, but you must surely know, Frank, that lawyers can't pay clients' disbursements. Isn't that champerty?”

“What am I expected to do? Mrs. Crimmins hasn't got that kind of money.”

“Well, Mrs. Crimmins had better find it, I'm afraid,” Tilney continued in a sharper tone. “She'd better beg, borrow or steal it. The firm has suffered enough from the bad publicity of this case without having the Grievance Committee of the City Bar breathing down our neck. In the meanwhile I have given the cashier instructions that no further sums are to be charged to that account.”