by Stuart Woods
Ellie listened in disbelief as the noise of the explosion came over the cell phone, a split second before it went dead. She stood on the terrace, the phone in her hand, wondering what to do. She went into Walter’s study, found his address book, called Joe Wilen’s office and asked to be put through to him.
“Hello, Ellie?”
"Joe, I’ve just been on the phone with Walt, and I think he’s been in an accident.”
“Where is he?”
“On I-280, somewhere south of San Francisco.”
“That makes sense, I guess. Why do you think he’s been in an accident?”
She told him about their interrupted conversation.
“Are you at home?”
“Yes.”
“Let me make a call, and I’ll get right back to you.”
“All right.”
Wilen hung up, went to his computer address book and dialed the direct number of the commander of the California State Highway Patrol in Sacramento. The man answered immediately.
“Colonel, it’s Joe Wilen.”
“Hello, Joe.”
“I believe Walter Keeler may have been in an accident on I-280 North, south of San Francisco. Do you know anything about that?”
“Hang on a minute,” he replied, then put Wilen on hold.
Joe sat, tapping his foot, hoping that this was all some mistake.
The colonel came back on the line. “Joe, switch on your TV.”
Wilen switched on the flat-screen television in his office and tuned to a local channel. He found himself watching a helicopter shot of an enormous fire on the interstate. “Jesus Christ!” he said.
“That’s on I- 280,” the colonel said. “I’ll call our nearest station personally and find out if Walter’s mixed up in that.”
“Thank you, Colonel.” He gave the man his office and cell numbers, then he called Ellie. “I’ve spoken with the highway patrol commander in Sacramento, and there’s a huge fire on I-280. Turn on your TV set.” He waited for her to come back.
“I see it, Joe. Don’t tell me Walter is involved in that.”
“I don’t know, but Walter is a big contributor to the governor’s campaigns, and the colonel knows it. We’ll find out as soon as possible. I’ll call you back.”
ELLIE SAT AND watched the fire on the TV. "I hope to God Walter signed that will,” she said.
AN HOUR PASSED before the phone rang again in Joe Wilen’s office. “Hello?”
“It’s Colonel Thompson. Do you know what kind of car Mr. Keeler was driving?”
“It was a rental,” Wilen said. “He was moving from Palo Alto to San Francisco today, and he drove down from San Francisco. I expect it was a Mercedes, because when he rented, that’s what he always asked for. I don’t know the color.”
“The color isn’t important anymore,” the colonel replied. “There was a Mercedes smack in the middle of that conflagration. The fire’s out, now, and they’re removing bodies. We’re going to need Mr. Keeler’s dental records.”
“I’ll have them faxed to you,” Wilen said, jotting down the number. “Walter and I go to the same dentist.” He hung up, made the call to the dentist and waited.
It was nearly dark when the colonel called back. “Thanks for the dental records, but it looks like we won’t need them. We found a fragment of a driver’s license on one of the bodies, which was badly burned. It belongs to Walter Keeler.”
“You’re sure there’s no mistake?”
“I’m sure. The car was consumed, but Mr. Keeler apparently got out of the car before the fire got to him.” The colonel gave Wilen the number of the morgue where the bodies had been taken. Wilen thanked him and hung up.
He picked up the phone to call Ellie Keeler; then he put it down again and called another number instead.
“Ed Eagle,” the voice said.
“Ed, it’s Joe Wilen.”
“Hello, Joe. Are you back in Palo Alto?”
“Yes. Ed, I’m going to need you to fax me a copy of the letter you wrote to Walter Keeler.”
24
EAGLE WAS QUIET for a moment. "Joe, I’m afraid I can’t do that without Keeler’s permission.”
“Ed, Walter Keeler died in an automobile accident south of San Francisco a couple of hours ago.”
“I’m sorry; I didn’t know. Did Keeler sign a new will?”
“I can’t go into that right now, Ed, but I need a copy of your letter.”
“All right. It’s on my home computer. I’m leaving the office now; I’ll fax it to you in half an hour.”
Wilen gave him the fax number. “Thank you, Ed. I’ll wait here for it.”
Wilen hung up and walked to the window. Lights were coming on in Palo Alto.
His secretary came to the door. “Mr. Wilen, I think I’m done for the day. Is there anything else you need?”
“No, Sally,” he said. “I’ll be here for a while; I’m waiting for a fax.”
“Eleanor Keeler called when you were on the phone a few minutes ago.”
“I’ll call her,” Wilen said. He said good night to his secretary, went back to his desk and dialed the number.
“Hello?”
“Eleanor, it’s Joe Wilen.”
“What have you learned?”
“I’ve had a call from the state highway patrol. Walter was killed in the crash. They identified his body from a fragment of his driver’s license.”
“Are they sure?”
“I believe so, but I’ve had his dental records sent there for a positive identification. I think it will be a day or so before that can be done.”
Eleanor sounded as if she were crying. “This can’t be,” she sobbed. “We’ve only been married a week. What am I going to do?”
“Eleanor, do you have any family or friends you can call?”
She seemed to get control of herself. “No, nobody in San Francisco. Nobody at all, really.”
“I think the best thing for you to do tonight is just to have some dinner and try to get some rest. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you what I’ve learned.”
“Joe, what am I going to do? I don’t even know if I have any money.”
“You and Walter have a joint bank account, don’t you?”
“Yes, he opened one at the San Francisco branch of his bank last week.”
“You can draw on that for anything you may need,” Wilen said.
“Joe, I know this is an awful thing to ask, but did Walter sign his new will?”
“Yes, he did, and you are very well taken care of, Eleanor. I’ll come up there in a couple of days and go through everything with you, but please be sure that you have no cause for concern.”
“Thank you, Joe. That makes me feel better.”
“Good night, Eleanor. Try and get some rest.”
“I will, Joe. Good night.” She hung up.
As Wilen hung up the phone, he heard the fax machine in his secretary’s office ring. He walked into her office and switched on the lights. The machine was cranking out two sheets of paper. He took them back to his office.
He sat down, switched on his desk light and began to read. As he did so, his eyes widened. He had been expecting unfavorable information, but what Eagle had to say was astonishing. The woman was not only a fraud, she was very likely a murderer. He read the letter twice, doing his best to commit it to memory.
If Eagle had only told him about this in Santa Fe, he could have prevented Walter from signing the will. He would have done anything to make him read the letter. Now Walter had willed this awful woman more than a billion dollars in liquid assets!
Wilen could not shake the feeling that, somehow, this was his fault. He had failed to protect his friend and client, the man who had made him rich beyond his dreams. He had to find a way to fix this.
ELEANOR WRIGHT KEELER ordered in dinner from an impossibly expensive fancy grocer down the street. She sat on her terrace, drinking from a well-chilled bottle of Veuve Cliquot Grande Dame champagne and eating beluga ca
viar with a spoon from a half-kilo can. When she had eaten all she could stand, she called Jimmy Long.
“Hello?”
“Jimmy, it’s Barbara.”
“Hey Babs.”
“My husband was killed in a car crash this afternoon.”
“Oh, God, Babs, I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t be, baby; I’m a fucking billionaire!”
“What?”
“I’m not kidding. He signed a new will today that leaves me everything-well, almost everything. He said there would be some bequests to his alma mater and some charities, but damned near everything!”
“You take my breath away, kid. What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Any fucking thing I want!” she crowed. “I’m going to buy a jet airplane and fly around the world, stopping everywhere! You want to go?”
“You bet I do.”
“Wait a minute, I already have a jet airplane. It’s not big enough, though. I’m going to buy one of those… what do you call them, the ones that can fly from here to Tokyo nonstop?”
“A Gulfstream Five?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“They cost forty or fifty million dollars.”
“What the fuck do I care? I’ve got a billion!” she exulted. “I can buy anything! Go anywhere!”
“That’s unbelievable!”
“I know, I know. I just had to tell you, baby.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Listen, it’s going to take a few days to sort everything out. I guess there’ll have to be a funeral or a memorial service or something. Then, when all that’s over and the estate is settled, I’m coming to L.A. and buying something nice in Bel-Air.”
“Great idea!”
“Something big, for entertaining, something with an Olympic-sized pool-one of those old movie star mansions, maybe!”
“You deserve it, kiddo, after all you’ve been through.”
“You’re damned right I do! I’ll call you, Jimmy!”
She hung up and did a little dance around the apartment, making exultant noises. She could have anything!
BACK IN HIS OFFICES, Joe Wilen sat at his secretary’s desk, reading Walter Keeler’s will on her computer. Two pages needed fixing. He began fixing them.
25
DETECTIVE ALEX REESE of the Santa Fe Police Department read through the last of a stack of financial documents he had gathered from various sources, including Donald Wells’s business manager in Los Angeles, then he got up and went over to the D.A.’s office. The secretary told him to go right in.
“Morning, Alex,” Martínez said. “What’s up?”
“My background check on Donald Wells didn’t turn up much. He was born in a little town in Georgia called Delano, and he got his job at Centurion Studios through the chairman there, who is from the same town. He got arrested for domestic violence against a live-in girlfriend fifteen years ago, but the charges were dropped. He had a lot of parking tickets and a few speeding tickets when he was younger, but he seems to have calmed down the past ten years or so.”
“Have we got motive?”
“I’ve combed through all of Wells’s financials, and, in my opinion, there’s more than enough there for motive to kill his wife.”
“Tell me.”
“In short, Wells would have nothing, if he hadn’t married Donna. When they met, he was working for Centurion Studios as an associate producer, which is one notch up from gofer in that business. He meets Donna, then a couple of months after that her husband is dead, and a year or so later, they’re married. She loans him three million dollars to set up his own shop. He rents office space from the studio, pays himself half a million dollars a year, probably six times what he had been making, and starts acquiring books and magazine articles and having screenplays written from them. Out of the first half dozen things he produced, one was a big hit-a horror thing aimed at teenagers called Strangle. Within three years he had made enough back to repay his wife’s loan.
“The two houses he co-owned with his wife were bought entirely by her, but the deeds were recorded in both their names. This real estate co-ownership adds twenty million dollars to his net worth, as expressed on his financial statement. Apart from the houses, his net worth is under five million, and three million of that is expressed as accounts receivable from Centurion or his film distributors, and he has to perform to receive those funds, delivering scripts, mostly. Set those receivables aside and he’s worth less than two million bucks, not much for a supposedly successful film producer. His first benefit from his wife’s will is that her half of the real estate goes to him, nearly doubling his net worth. He does have a high income, though, from his company: an average of two and a half or three million a year.
“His wife’s will also leaves him five million dollars-more than enough for motive right there-but the fact that his wife and son died simultaneously leaves him in a much more favorable position, since her son was her principal heir. It’s only a guess right now- we’ll need to subpoena her financial records-but it looks like his inheritance could be in the region of half a billion dollars.”
“Wow,” Martínez said. “I’d certainly call that motive.”
“His alibi holds. I spoke to the manager of the Hassler Hotel in Rome, and he supports both Wells’s contention that he was in Rome when his wife died and that he received the phone call from his Santa Fe house when he said he did.”
“So, he would have had to hire somebody. Any candidates?”
“My best guess is somebody he worked with in the movies, either in L.A. or Santa Fe. He’s shot a couple of movies here. I’ve compiled a list of people who worked for him from the credits of his pictures. On the theory that anyone he knew well enough to ask to kill his wife would have worked for him more than once, I’ve come up with a list of thirty-one names of people who worked on two or more of his movies, and I’m running them through the New Mexico, California and federal databases for criminal records. I should have something by tomorrow that will give me the basis for interviews.”
“That’s good work, Alex. What if none of them pans out?”
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
“Okay, let me know who in that list of thirty-one people looks good.”
“I’m likely to have to go to L.A. to question some of these people, so I’ll send you a travel authorization.”
“How long will you need there?”
“Probably no more than a week, but Wells isn’t going to be a flight risk. He’s going to sit tight and let the legal process work to get his wife’s will probated, which could take months.”
“Right. There’s something else I’d like you to look into, Alex.”
“What’s that?”
“Wells told us in his deposition that Mrs. Wells’s first husband was killed in a mugging in New York.”
“That’s right, he did.”
“I’d like to know if there’s any chance Wells had a hand in that. Call the NYPD and see if you can track down the detectives who investigated the killings and see if you can figure out where Wells was when it happened.”
“That’s a good idea, Bob; I’ll get on it.”
“Don’t talk to Wells about it just yet. If he was involved, I want him to think he skated on that one.”
“I won’t talk to Wells again until I’ve come to you first.”
“Good. I don’t want Ed Eagle to know how interested we are in his client, either.”
“Yeah, it’s interesting that when Wells got the kidnapping threat, he didn’t call the police but called a lawyer, instead.”
“Yeah, I find that very, very interesting.”
26
JOE WILEN, after a night of little sleep, arrived at his office and found a message from his contact at the state police. He returned the call.
“Good morning, Mr. Wilen,” the colonel said.
“Good morning, Colonel. Do you have any news for me?”
“Yes, the denta
l records you sent us match the teeth of the corpse carrying Walter Keeler’s driver’s license.”
“Would you send me the coroner’s report and a death certificate?”
“Of course, I’ll do it right away. My condolences on the loss of your friend. We’ll be releasing the names of the deceased today.”
“By the way, Colonel, did anything in the car survive the fire? Any papers or other contents of Walter’s pockets?”
“No, the fire consumed the car and its contents entirely. The only reason the driver’s license fragment survived was that Mr. Keeler was thrown clear of the car.”
“Thank you, Colonel, and thank you very much for your assistance in this matter. I wonder if I could ask your help on another matter?”
“Anything I can do, Mr. Wilen.”
“I’m going to fax you a letter concerning Mrs. Keeler. I’d be grateful if you could ascertain or refute the assertions made in the letter.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“This must be held in the strictest confidence, Colonel, as you will see, and I’d like you to destroy the letter afterward.”
“As you wish.”
Wilen thanked him, faxed the letter, then called his secretary. “Margie, please get Lee Hight and the two of you come into my office.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lee Hight was the associate who had drafted Walter Keeler’s will, and Margie had proofed it on her computer. The two women knocked and entered Wilen’s office.
“Please sit down,” Wilen said. “Lee, Margie, I have some bad news: Walter Keeler was killed in an automobile accident on the way to San Francisco after our meeting here yesterday.”
The two women looked shocked.
“I’m very sorry, Joe,” Lee said.
“So am I, Mr. Wilen,” Margie echoed.
“I’ve asked you in here, because I have to make an important decision, and before I do, I want to get your opinion. First, I want to read you a letter from a Santa Fe attorney named Ed Eagle. Mr. Eagle gave me the letter a few days ago, when I was in Santa Fe, and asked me to deliver it to Walter. He did not tell me the contents of the letter, only that it concerned the woman Walter married last week. I assumed that the contents were unfavorable to her, because Eagle asked me to deliver the letter to Walter before he signed his will.
