“Better than that,” she said. “I’ve got a lawyer on the way.”
“Oh, well that’s just great. Lawyers read at two hundred dollars an hour—real slow.” He turned to the cork wall. It had been cleared in preparation for their autopsy on a trust fund.
“We don’t need Charles.” Mallory opened a folder and held up a sheet with columns of words and numbers. “The documents are indexed, and all the boxes are clearly marked.” She pinned up the first page of her document list in perfect alignment with the walls. Two pushpins.
Riker could see their first problem in the making. Was his little neatness freak even capable of doing this without her usual time-consuming perfection? He decided to experiment. Taking a handful of sheets from her index folder, he plopped them on the cork wall in haphazard fashion, one pin a piece and every sheet dangling at a different angle. One glance over his shoulder told him that it actually hurt her to look at his mess.
“Mallory, we don’t have years for this.” He walked off to the reception room to answer a knock. When he reached the end of the hall, the door was flung open, and he was assaulted by a little man with the jowls of a bulldog. Riker was forced to endure a bear hug from the only lawyer he could abide.
Robin Duffy had lived across the street from Lou and Helen Markowitz since forever. And now, in his retirement years with both his old friends in the ground, Robin looked upon every connection to them as his extended family. He released his hold on the detective and stepped back. His eyes were lit up and manic. He was just so happy to be here. “Where’s my Kathy?”
The old lawyer was in that small circle of friends allowed to address his partner by her given name and get away with it unscarred.
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 the
re’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.
He exhaled.
Mallory walked half the length of the wall, then stopped to tap one sheet of pinned-up paper. “Here, right after the massacre. This is when it starts.” She moved on down the wall, then paused again. “Twenty percent of the money was drained in a period of two years. The firm wrote it off as poor investment of capital.”
“You mean they stole it. I’m betting the guardian helped with that,” said Riker. “Good old Uncle James. I say he hired Stick Man for the massacre.”
“Him or Sheldon Smyth’s father. My guess is collusion. Nedda went to brunch with the Smyth family on the day of the massacre—conveniently out of harm’s way.” Mallory walked back to her computer and tapped the keys to change the document on the monitor’s screen. “I found the money, only now it’s well over a hundred million, all in personal brokerage accounts for Cleo and Lionel.” She printed out a sheet. “This is their investment history. They took a bath in the nineties and again with the tech-stock fiasco. Now their holdings are zero risk, hardly any growth. But they show a deposit income of one million a year that doesn’t derive from stocks and bonds. And I know where it came from.” She split her screens to pick up an item she had flagged on the law firm’s financial data. “The law firm has a payout of one million every year. It’s listed under client settlements.”
“Lawyers paying clients?”
“Not that simple.” Mallory spent a few quiet minutes following the money through cyberspace, switching screens, diddling keys, and robbing banks via their databases. “I’ve got a memo to purchase bearer bonds. The dates and the amounts add up on both sides. Lionel and Cleo cashed in those bonds to make their yearly deposits.”
The screen changed again, and Riker turned away the moment he saw the logo for Mallory’s latest invasion, bypassing lockouts to enter Internal Revenue files. It always made him uncomfortable to witness a crime in progress.
“They don’t pay any taxes on the yearly million,” said Mallory. “The tax is paid to the IRS by a check drawn on an offshore account for a bogus corporation.”
“I feel a headache coming on,” said Riker. “Who’s doing who?”
“Best guess? It looks like Lionel and Cleo busted the Smyth firm for embezzlement. But simple restitution wouldn’t require money laundering on this scale. What if they nailed Sheldon Smyth’s father for hiring a mass murder?”
Bitty had left the bolt undone, and it had taken some time for this little horror to settle in. Her mind was slipping.
So sleepy.
And her limbs felt like cement. She struggled to make the short trip from her
bed to the door, shuffling, unable to lift her heavy feet from the carpet. She slid the bolt home so no one would intrude upon her, not until her aunt returned. Bitty sat on the floor, her back propped up against the door, listening, waiting for rescue. Aunt Nedda should have been here by now. She must come very soon. She must. Bitty called Charles Butler’s office number again.
Mallory continued to scroll down the lists of investments. Riker watched her run calculations of large figures on a split screen. She was so good with the math of money motives. The assistance of a forensic accountant would only have slowed her down.
“I can access trades back to the early eighties,” she said. “Allowing for dividends paid out and reinvested, market booms and dives, I’d say this stock portfolio was built up from the law firm’s yearly payouts over at least forty years. The Smyth firm is paying back the stolen money, but not to the trust fund. It all goes into Lionel and Cleo’s personal accounts.”
“Proof of embezzlement,” said Riker, “motive for a massacre. And people ask me why I hate lawyers. I guess murder runs in the family, first the father and now the son. Sheldon’s gotta be the one who hired Willy Roy Boyd. He had to kill Nedda before she started asking questions about the trust fund.” The detective crushed out his cigarette. “I love this case more and more every minute.”
“This financial arrangement works better for Lionel and Cleo. Instead of a lifetime draw on the trust fund, they have access to all of the money. And now, they’re part of the embezzlement. The restitution money should’ve gone back into the trust.”
“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.
Winter House Page 23
