Laughing Heirs (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “We haven’t tried the zip code, actually,” Rupert said, spraying the side of my neck with a light coating of spittle as he said his “z.”

  “It’s 23235,” Whitney said from the doorway.

  Jared, who lived right across the street and could have supplied the number, rolled his eyes. Rupert nodded, smiling at me with his shark teeth and his pale, colorless eyes.

  I bent my knees—it was too crowded in the closet to bend at the waist without pressing my bottom into somebody’s middle—and punched the zip code into the number pad, then enter.

  “Keypad seems loose,” I said, rising. “I thought I felt it shift.”

  “Leave it alone until the expert gets here,” Jared said.

  A bead of sweat broke free of my hairline and ran down my forehead. It was stuffy in the house, more so in the closet. We were packed in there like sardines, and we were going to be getting salty. I squatted again and twisted at the keypad.

  “Don’t break it, you idiot,” Jared said sharply.

  The keypad came away, trailing wires.

  “Damn it!” Jared grabbed at my shoulder, but then let go. We were looking at a keyhole, a big one that looked like the sort of keyhole people used to peer through.

  “Holy heck,” Nathan said softly, taking a step into the closet.

  “Well,” Rupert said. “The man at Gardall kept saying that some of these models had a key.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you say there was a key?” Jared said.

  “There was no keyhole.”

  “The safe people didn’t tell you it was under the keypad?”

  “I thought he meant beneath the keypad, lower down on the door.”

  “So you’ve got a key?” I asked, looking up at them. “You know where it is?”

  “No,” Jared said.

  “Then a keyhole doesn’t help us, does it? We’re still waiting on the safe man.” I stood just as Whitney appeared in the closet doorway holding up a steel key with a long shank and an open bow.

  “Where did you get that?” Jared asked belligerently.

  “Top drawer of the bureau,” came Nathan’s voice, and Whitney glanced back at him.

  “Underneath Uncle Robert’s socks,” Whitney said. “I noticed it not long after his surgery when I was helping him do his laundry. Uncle Robert couldn’t remember what it was for, and I almost threw it away.”

  She snaked her way into the closet and handed me the key. I fitted it into the keyhole, and it turned with a satisfying clunk.

  “Ready?” I said, my hand on the lever.

  They all seemed to be glaring at me, so I stopped milking the moment for drama, pushed down the lever and pulled open the door.

  The safe was empty. I emptied my lungs.

  After a few moments of silence, Jared turned on Whitney.

  “Where is it?” he asked her.

  “Where is what?”

  “You knew where the key was. You’ve been in this safe.”

  “I have not.”

  “What was in the safe?” I asked. “Do we know for sure?”

  “No, not for sure,” Jared said. “Our best guess is gold.”

  “What makes you think that? Did Robert collect gold?” I pushed up between them. Everyone was in the closet now, and I felt claustrophobic with the sense of breathing other people’s air.

  “No, but Uncle Robert’s been converting all his assets into something,” Jared said.

  I looked at Rupert. “What does that mean, converting all his assets?”

  Rupert cleared his throat, making a sound like the grinding of gears. “A couple of months before he died, six weeks or so, Mr. Walsh started emptying his financial accounts, even his retirement accounts. We haven’t been able to track all of it…”

  “We haven’t been able to track squat,” Jared said.

  “Have you checked the banks?” I suggested. “Robert may have safety deposit boxes all over town.”

  “Not in his name,” Rupert said.

  “Why are you thinking gold?”

  Jared and Rupert exchanged a look. “There are some brochures and invoices on his desk,” Rupert said.

  “How much money are we talking about?”

  Neither of them answered. “Eight million dollars,” Nathan said from the bathroom. “Maybe more.”

  “We don’t want to go throwing numbers about casually,” Rupert said, looking earnestly at the bathroom doorway. To me he added, “To tell you the truth, we’re not sure how much money is missing, not exactly.”

  “The whole thing proves the old goat was senile,” Jared said. “I've been saying that for months.”

  “He did trigger a lot of unnecessary tax liability,” Rupert added. “The estate will owe money on everything he took out of his retirement accounts. Outside those accounts, his heirs have lost a big step-up in basis in everything he sold.”

  “How does the tax liability compare to the assets you have left?” I asked.

  No one answered this time, though Rupert looked pained and Jared looked both angry and desperate.

  “Ouch,” I said.

  Rupert’s lips stretched over his big, square teeth.

  “It seems to me there are a lot of people who could have been in that safe,” Nathan said, wedging himself into the doorway.

  “Just what do you mean by that?” Jared said.

  “I’m just noting that you’ve arranged for a lot of witnesses to be here for the opening of the safe. Everyone can testify that when you opened the safe, it was empty.”

  Jared made a sudden movement, and beside him Rupert Propst lurched back against the hanging clothes, dislodging the clothing bar at one end and spilling a long row of Robert’s dress shirts and slacks onto the floor in one corner of the closet. Jared stopped short of hitting Nathan, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t even taken his hands from the pockets of the overcoat.

  “Shall I close the safe, or leave it open?” I asked as Rupert righted himself.

  Jared and Nathan were looking at each other. The fist of Jared’s that I could see was clenched, but Nathan was so nonchalant that I wondered for an instant if he had a pistol in the pocket of that open overcoat. “It hardly matters now, does it?” Nathan said to Jared. “Whatever was there is long gone.”

  “How much does gold weigh?” I asked. “Does anybody know?”

  If anyone did, no one was saying. My eyes came to rest on Rupert, but he only smiled at me, or grimaced, or had a facial spasm. It was hard to tell. I thought I’d stir the pot.

  “If the safe was full gold, whoever moved it had some heavy hauling to do,” I said.

  “He certainly did,” Nathan said.

  Jared’s hands were coming up, but Rupert grabbed an arm with both hands. “We’re going to need to work together,” he said. “We can’t start fighting among ourselves. It isn't productive.”

  “Can we move out into the living room?” I said. “I’m choking on human exhaust in here.”

  Somebody gave a nervous laugh. I pushed toward the door, and it started the crowd moving. When we got back into the living room, I wiped at the sweat on my forehead with the back of my wrist. Robert had an old cube of a TV in his entertainment center. Other than taking enough supplements to supply the nutritional needs of a herd of cattle, he seemed to have lived pretty cheaply.

  Rupert took center stage. “We all have a common interest here,” he said. “Can we put aside our differences and just agree to trust each other?” He bared his shark teeth at us, which I had to say didn’t inspire a lot of trust in me. “If we can postulate that none of us is responsible for Robert’s missing assets, no one in this room, it will suggest, I think, an obvious hypothesis. Am I right?” He was nodding, encouraging us to embrace the obvious. “From all reports, the therapist Macy Buck was in here all the time. She traded recipes with him, suggested supplements. Suppose he showed her the key before his death, and afterwards she took advantage of the situation to empty his safe.”

  “I wouldn’t have seen her,�
�� Jared said. “She could have backed her car into the driveway—it’s pretty secluded with all the privacy fences back there—and walked whatever was in there out through the garage.”

  “You really have no basis for that accusation,” Nathan said. “Either of you.”

  “Or how about this one,” Jared continued. “Robert told her what was in the safe, maybe even showed it to her. She saw where he put the key, then drowned him in the bathtub. We don’t know. Maybe baths was one of the things she helped him with.”

  “You’re just being gross,” Whitney said, at the same time that I said, “I thought he drowned in your hot tub.”

  Jared looked at me. “In all the time he’s been living right across the street, he’d never been in my hot tub. He had all kinds of knee pain leading up to that surgery, and he never asked to use it. I think Macy drowned him right here, loaded him into her car, drove him over to my place, and dumped him in the spa.”

  “She’s not that big a woman,” I said.

  “She wasn’t necessarily acting alone,” Jared said.

  “I resent that,” Nathan said.

  “I don’t see the point in moving the body,” I said. “It increases the risk, and Macy gets nothing out of it. She could walk the contents of the safe out past Robert’s body just as easily as if he weren’t here.”

  “Thank you,” Nathan said to me.

  “How about this one?” Jared said. “Macy talked him into going across the street with her, told him they were going to do some water therapy or something. She got him in the hot tub, held him under, headed back across the street to empty the safe.”

  “You keep going on about your damn hot tub,” Nathan said.

  “I just don’t know what he was doing over there.”

  “Gentlemen,” Rupert said. “I was merely suggesting a hypothesis. All of it is pure speculation at this point. Before we do anything, we should talk to Ms. Buck. If that isn’t productive, we can put a private detective on her, see where she goes and what she does. We have suspicions…”

  “You have suspicions,” Nathan said.

  “…but before we can act on them, we need to ascertain whether those suspicions are justified.”

  “I think you’re grasping at straws,” Brian said. “If Uncle Robert was hiding his money, there's no reason Macy would have known anything about it.”

  “What do you mean, Uncle Robert?” Jared said. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here.”

  The doorbell rang, and several of us started, but it was only the locksmith, there to drill into the safe.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got tied up on my last job.”

  The conspiracy theorists broke up soon after that, and I was glad to get out into the sunlight and the cold, bracing air, out of the miasma of greed and suspicion. “Well, that was unpleasant,” I said conversationally to Whitney as we stopped between our cars. Jared was getting into the Mercedes convertible two cars ahead of us, and Nathan was getting into a Ford SUV parked behind Brian’s Corvette. Rupert’s vehicle was the Nissan. They all started their cars and headed off immediately as if they had places to be. I rather thought Jared might drive his across the street and park twenty-five feet from where he started, but he was still accelerating when a bend in the road took him out of sight.

  Brian and Whitney were still holding hands on the sidewalk. “I’ve got quite a family, huh?” she said to him.

  “Don’t you worry about them.”

  She pressed her face to his chest.

  “I could talk to Macy,” I said, and they turned to look at me.

  “Or should we leave it to the others to fight among themselves?” I added.

  “What do you think, Mouse? It wouldn’t hurt for her to talk, would it?”

  She gave him a squeeze, smiling up at him.

  It seemed as if they’d be content to spend the rest of the afternoon standing on the sidewalk, hugging and smiling, but I hung around until finally they got into Brian’s Corvette and left to go somewhere they could cuddle in private. I waved from my own car as they pulled away from the curb and drove past me, but when they had disappeared around the bend in the road, I got back out and crossed the street to the alley that ran behind Jared’s house.

  I couldn’t see anything over the privacy fence, but once in his driveway I stepped up onto the lower rail of the gate and could see everything. There was a pool and a hot tub, some really nice decking, and Asian jasmine everywhere. Four sets of French doors ran along the back of the house.

  I reached over the gate and undid the latch.

  The first thing I did was go to one of the French doors and peer into the house. The living room had a high, vaulted ceiling and what I thought of as showroom furniture—big, nice pieces expensively covered and attractively arranged. I didn’t see anyone, which was what I had hoped for. From what Nathan had said at the funeral, Jared was divorced, and no one had mentioned any kids.

  I turned back around. The pool was a small one, shaped like a kidney bean, the hot tub set into the decking between it and the house.

  I went to the hot tub, unfastened the strap that held down the front of the hot tub’s maroon cover, and pushed it up. The water burbled gently, and the smell of bromine wafted out. It was a good sized hot tub, but I thought a man could push his feet against the opposite bench to keep his head out of the water. Of course, Robert didn’t have good knees, and it might not have taken a lot of force to hold him under.

  On the other hand, maybe he did just get light-headed in the heat, slide off the seat and quietly drown, the surface of the water bubbling just inches over his nose and mouth. There didn’t have to be somebody’s hand on the top of his head holding him under.

  But there could have been.

  Chapter 6

  The next day was a Friday. Not long after I got to work that morning, my phone buzzed, and I picked it up. “Hi, Carly.”

  “There’s a Mr. Rodney Burns here to see you.”

  “I’ll come get him.”

  When I came out, Rodney was standing with his back to me. A slim briefcase dangled from his hands, which were clasped behind him as he studied a large work of abstract art on the wall opposite the reception desk. Actually, I can’t tell you for certain that what he was studying was art: It might have been paint splashed on a canvas by someone with no artistic pretensions at all, but it was in a frame.

  “Hey, Rodney,” I said. “Come to check us out?”

  His head bobbed on his thin neck. “That, and I have something for you.”

  “Let me introduce you. Carly, this is Rodney Burns. He’s in the market for office space, and I told him about the empty office in my little cluster.”

  “Great! Pleased to meet you.” Her enthusiasm was not everything you’d expect if she were being presented with a check from the Publishers Clearing House, but it was of the same order of magnitude. She stood and shook Rodney’s hand over the counter, then came out through the door to one side of it. “I’m Carly Price, office manager, receptionist, and sometime data entry clerk. Let me show you around.” She was tall—well, five-eight or so—and had warm, brown eyes and a hint of olive in her complexion. She might have been beautiful, but for a big nose and a mass of curly brown hair that made her face look even narrower than it was—and she had a predilection for tube skirts tight enough to show little saddlebags on what was otherwise a thin frame.

  Okay, I’m doing Carly a gross injustice. In mentioning the minor imperfections that make Carly an individual, I’ve taken a pretty woman and made her sound like a Picasso painting. Certainly Rodney seemed mesmerized.

  Carly had Rodney’s hand again, and she continued to hold it as she talked. “Robin’s one of our newer tenants. She’s been with us, what is it, Robin? Not quite three months. We’ve got another lawyer here and a marketing consultant and a number of outside sales people. We offer them reception and the use of a boardroom and some secretarial services—we price those a la carte at twenty dollars an hour. What i
s it you do, Mr. Burns?” She fixed him with those big, brown eyes and waited for his response, her lips parted and glistening with lip gloss.

  “I, uh, have a detective agency.” He cleared his throat. “A small, one-man detective agency.”

  “A detective agency!” she breathed, leaning into him. “How exciting!”

  “Stop in when she’s showed you around,” I said. “You can tell me what you’ve got for me.”

  I went back to my office and left him to Carly’s tender mercies. It was about twenty minutes before Carly brought him to my door. “We’re going to look at the empty office here in your cluster. It’s just like this one of Robin’s, Mr. Burns. Rodney.” She smiled and ducked her chin. “It has the same wall of exposed brick behind the desk—isn’t that beautiful? I think the last tenant left his desk and client chairs, and you can use those if you like them or you can bring in your own.”

  She swept him away again. She didn’t sweep him far—the empty office was just on the other side of Brooke’s—and I could hear the current of Carly’s voice rising and falling, punctuated here and there by the silvery tinkle of her laughter.

  They came back. “I’ll leave you here with Robin, but here’s my card. If you have any questions, or want to talk more about your particular needs—” Her voice became suggestively husky. “—a private detective must have any number of special requirements—please just call me.”

  When she left us, Rodney slumped into one of my client chairs. He seemed a little dazed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Carly can be a bit overpowering.”

  “No, it’s not that.” One corner of his mouth quirked up. “It’s just been a long time since a woman’s paid quite so much attention to me.”

  “Well, it’s not an act. You rent here, and you’ll continue to be the most important person in Carly’s life.”

  “Huh. That could be a bit...”

  “Draining,” I finished for him. “But it’ll work out. It took me awhile to set some boundaries with her, too. Did you like the office?”

  “Yes, I guess. It occurs to me that she never mentioned price.”

  “It’s not bad. I pay five-fifty a month. It’s a downtown location, and you can walk to anything.”