The Little Death (16 page)
“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?”
“Yes.
He came to me knowing less than you do but enough to have guessed the
significance of the fact that his uncle and grandmother were killed at the same
time.”
“They
weren’t, you know,” I said. “She died before him by fifteen minutes. That’s
what the police report said, but the coroner was bribed to find otherwise.”
He
closed his eyes. “If I had known that twenty years ago, I would’ve gone to the
police. How could Robert have been so clumsy?”
“I
think he was desperate,” I said. “Unnerved. If he’d been accused then, he
might have fallen apart.”
“And
your friend would be alive,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry.”
And
after that, there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.
*
* * * *
I
left the professor and walked back to the student union where I found a phone
and called Terry Ormes at the police station. She was out in the field so I
left a message. Sonny Patterson at the D.A.’s office was out to lunch. I set up
an appointment to see him the next morning. No one was answering at Aaron Gold’s
office. I hung up the phone feeling cheated, like an actor robbed of his
audience. I stood indecisively in front of the phone booth until the smells
from the cafeteria behind me reminded me it was time to eat.
I
bought two hamburgers and two plastic cups of beer and took them to a comer
table. As I ate, I put the case together the
way
I would present it to Sonny the next day.
It
was a simple tale of greed. Robert Paris had been disinherited by his wife,
Christina, in favor of his two sons, Nicholas and Jeremy. Nicholas posed no
problems. He was mentally ill and could be easily controlled by the judge.
Jeremy, however, had to be gotten rid of. Paris had to invalidate Christina’s
will in such a way as to strike her bequest to Jeremy, and any of his heirs, so
that he himself might inherit that portion of Christina’s estate through
intestacy. Christina and Jeremy were killed in an accident to which there was
but one witness who himself was later killed. A crooked coroner presided at the
inquest and manipulated the times of death, making it appear that Christina
and Jeremy died simultaneously. By operation of the rule of simultaneous death,
Christina’s estate passed to her remaining family, half to the judge through
intestacy and half to his younger son, Nicholas, by operation of Christina’s
bequest which was not affected by the invalidity of the bequest to Jeremy.
Nicholas
was then committed to an asylum and his wife, Katherine, blackmailed into a
divorce. I had no doubt that the judge had been appointed conservator of
Nicholas’s estate. By the time the wheels of his machinations came to a stop,
Judge Paris had secured control of his wife’s fortune.
There
was only the smallest of hitches: Hugh. In Hugh’s case the judge acted more
subtly. He took the boy from his mother, sexually abused him, and then set him
adrift in a series of private schools far from his home. The judge made sure
that Hugh had all the money he could spend. Rootless, without direction, with too
much money and not enough judgment, Hugh became a wastrel, a hype. He very
nearly self-destructed. But not quite. He came home, pieced together the story
of his grandfather’s crimes and suddenly became a serious threat to Robert
Paris. So he too was killed.
That
was the story. The evidence would not be as seamless or easily put together. It
would come in bits and pieces, fragments of distant conversations, scribbled
notes, fading memories. The investigation would be laborious and involve,
undoubtedly, protracted legal warfare. Sonny might look at it, see the
potential
quagmire
and look the other way. But I doubted it. I knew, from trying cases against
him, that he didn’t run from a fight. And he liked to win.
At
least my part would be over. I would finally be able to exorcise that last
image of Hugh lying in the morgue.
I
got up and went back to the phone. This time Terry was in her office.
“Listen,
I’m glad you called back,” she began.
“I’m
seeing Patterson in the morning. I’m going to lay out the whole story for him
and I’d like you to be there.”
“What
story is that?”
“Robert
Paris killed his wife, his son and his grandson. I know exactly how it happened
and why. I’m sure Patterson will order the investigation into Hugh’s death
reopened.”
“I
don’t think so,” Terry said softly. “Where are you?”
“At
the university. The student union. Why?”
“Have
you seen this morning’s paper?”
“No,
not yet. I’ve been on the move since I got up.”
“You
better take a look at it.”
“Why?”
“Robert
Paris is dead. The judge is dead.”
“What?”
“Early
this morning. A stroke. Henry? You still there?”
“Yeah,”
I mumbled, looking across the patio of the student union to the courtyard.
There were three flag poles there, one for a flag of the United States, one for
a flag of California and the third for the university’s flag. Having spent most
of the day on campus I’d passed those poles maybe four or five times not
noticing until this moment that the three flags flew at half-mast.
There
was a burst of organ music as the doors to the chapel opened and the archbishop
of San Francisco, flanked by red- skirted altar boys, stepped blinking into the
bright light of midday. The university security guards who had been lounging
in the vicinity of the doors now closed ranks, forming a loose cordon on
either side of the funeral procession.
I
was standing against a pillar next to a camera crew from a local T.V. station.
A blond woman spoke softly into a microphone. The television lights exploded
at the appearance of the first dignitaries emerging from the darkness of the
church.
The
mayor of San Francisco, an alumna, came out on the arm of the president of the
university. Following a step or two behind came the governor, a graduate of the
law school, walking alone, working the crowd with discreet waves and a slack
smile. Next came a coterie of old men who, even without their robes, had the
unmistakable, self-important gait of judges. For a moment afterward the
threshold was empty. Then came eight elderly men dressed in similar dark suits,
white shirts and black ties, shouldering the gleaming rosewood coffin.
Inside
that box were the mortal remains of Robert Wharton Paris, who had been
eulogized that morning by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most
distinguished Californians of his time. No mention was made that the judge’s
sole surviving descendant, his son, was locked up in an asylum in Napa. Instead,
the newspapers looked back on what was, inarguably, a dazzlingly successful
life.
Robert
Paris, who was born into a poor family of farmers in the San Joaquin valley
eighty years earlier, worked his way through Linden University, went to Oxford
as a Rhodes scholar, and returned to the United States to take a law degree
from Harvard, all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Hired as an instructor in
property law at the university law school he quickly rose to the rank of full
professor. In the process, he married Christina Smith, the granddaughter of
Grover Linden and daughter of Jeremiah Smith, the university’s first president.
Paris
left the law school to form, with two of his colleagues, a law firm in San
Francisco that now occupied its own building in the heart of the financial
district. He resigned from the firm to accept appointment to the United States
Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a distinguished jurist
frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court but
he was too conservative for the liberal Democrats who then occupied the White
House. When he was finally offered a position on the Court by a Republican
president, he was forced to decline, citing age and physical infirmity. Shortly
afterwards he left the court of appeals and spent the last decade of his life
in virtual seclusion. Now, he was dead.
Greater
than the man was what he represented, the Linden fortune. The media estimated
the extent of that fortune at between five-hundred million and one billion
dollars, but so cloaked in secrecy were its sources and tributaries that no one
really knew. There was so much money that it had acquired an air of fable as
though it were stored not in banks, trust companies and investment management
firms, but hidden away in caves as if it were pirate treasure.
Famous
money. Money gouged out of the Sierra Nevadas by the tens of thousands of picks
that laid out the route of the transcontinental railroad. Ruthless money.
Money acquired at the expense of thousands of small farmers forced from their
farms by the insatiable appetite of Grover Linden’s land companies.
Corrupt
money. Money paid in subsidies to Grover Linden’s railroad from the Congress in
an era when the prevailing definition of an honest politician was one who,
when bought, stayed bought.
Endless
money. Money flowing so ceaselessly that during a financial crisis in the
1890
’s,
Grover Linden essentially guaranteed the national debt out of his own fortune
and the government averted bankruptcy.
Robert
Paris was steward to that fortune and only I, and perhaps one or two others,
knew at what cost he had acquired his stewardship. I watched them carry him
across the courtyard, and I was thinking not of the family of a
nineteenth-century American railroad baron but of the Caesars, the Borgias, the
Romanovs. Only on that dynastic scale could I begin to comprehend how a man
might kill his wife, his child, his grandchild to satisfy an appetite for
power.
I
remembered a painting by Goya that I’d seen, years earlier, in the Prado called
Saturn Devouring
His Children
. Saturn consumed
his sons and daughters to avoid the prophecy that one son would reach manhood
and depose his father. The mother of Zeus substituted for the infant Zeus a
stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Saturn ate. Hidden away, Zeus grew
and ultimately fulfilled the prophecy. Had Robert Paris feared the same end
from his male descendants? Or was he simply mad? Or had that family of farmers
in San Joaquin been poorer than anyone could imagine?
Meanwhile,
the funeral had become a party for the rich. The crowd spilled out from the
church, sweeping across the courtyard of the Old Quad to the driveway where I
had earlier observed a fleet of limousines lined up behind a silver hearse. So
loud and jovial were the mourners that I expected, at any moment, to be offered
a cocktail or a canapé from a roving waiter. There were no signs of real grief;
only, now and then, a ceremonial tear dabbed at with an elegant, monogrammed
handkerchief. The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives
in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs
from which every trait has been bred but anxiety. The body was to be interred
in the Linden mausoleum, a quarter-mile distant, fudging from the snarl of cars
in the driveway, I’d be able to walk there before the internment began.
The
heat was slow and intense, a pounding, relentless, unseasonable heat. I set
off down the road sweating beneath my fine clothes like any animal. In a way it
was pointless for me to have come to the funeral. Lord knows there was nothing
more to be done about Robert Paris except, perhaps, drive a stake through his
heart.
I
beat everyone to the mausoleum but the press. This was a historic event. No one
had been laid to rest in Grover Linden’s tomb since the death of his
son-in-law, Jeremiah Smith, first president of the university, fifty years earlier.
The lesser members of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan, including the judge’s wife
and eldest son, were buried in a small graveyard two hundred feet away. Hugh,
however, was not there. I had never learned what became of his ashes.