This time, Frost was ready.
“Yes, the doctor is in,” Ms. Gaylord informed him, “but he’s with a patient right now.” (“He’s with a patient,” Frost was sure, being a dodging euphemism comparable to the “He’s in conference” favored by legal secretaries.)
Then the dreaded question: “What’s the matter, Mr. Frost? What’s wrong?”
“It’s not about me, Ms. Gaylord. I’m calling on a personal matter. A homicide that occurred last night.”
“Oh, I see,” said the receptionist, adding, after a pause, “Just a minute.”
“Reuben, what the hell is this about a homicide?” the doctor asked when he came on the line.
Frost explained the circumstances of Tobias’ death.
“How can I help, old friend? It sounds to me like Vandermeer is quite dead.”
“I have a couple of questions regarding poisoning. Wayne Givens—you know, Dr. Wayne, the TV doctor—was there and said that he thought it was cyanide poisoning.”
“Sounds reasonable from what you said.”
“My question is this—how long does it take for cyanide to work?”
“Around two seconds, I’d say. Remember fat old Hermann Goering at Nuremburg? Someone sneaked a cyanide pill into his cell. He was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but he bit into that pill, swallowed it and was dead before the guards could do anything.”
“So if someone put cyanide in Tobias’ drink he would have keeled over as soon as he drank from it?”
“Right. If the dose was strong enough.”
Frost then explained the alternative theory that cyanide may have been put in his Inderal capsules. “What’s that stuff for, by the way?”
“That depends. Was it Inderal or Inderal-LA?”
“The latter.”
“And what was the dosage? Once a day?”
“Yes. Two capsules once a day.”
“Okay. Inderal is the brand name of a so-called beta blocker, the generic name of which is propranolol. It’s used to treat hypertension, angina, abnormal heart rhythms. Inderal-LA is the slow-release form. What were the capsules, eighty milligrams or one-twenty?”
“One-twenty.”
“Sounds like a maintenance dosage. Your fellow probably had some angina complaints, or a funny heartbeat, and the Inderal was supposed to keep things under control.”
“I see. If somebody put the cyanide in those capsules, would it have worked just as fast as if it had been in his drink?”
“Yes. Just as soon as the capsules began dissolving. That would happen right away. But there’s another possibility. Let’s assume some fiend replaced the Inderal in the capsules with cyanide. He or she could have coated them on the outside so that they would dissolve slower.”
“Very interesting. So Tobias could have taken capsules in his bathroom, returned to the living room and not been stricken until a few minutes later?”
“I’m no expert, Reuben. Poisoning is a little out of my line. But I think the answer to your question is yes.”
“Martin, thank you very much.”
“Not at all. How are you feeling by the way?”
“No big complaints.”
“Good. Just remember what I told you the last time you were in here. You’re a bon vivant, no doubt about it. But the time has come for you to concentrate on the vivant and ease up a little on the bon.”
“Thanks, Martin.”
“One more thing, Reuben. Cyanide’s awfully old-fashioned. Next time keep in mind that there’s only one way to commit the perfect crime.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Injecting digitalis through a hemorrhoid.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks and good-bye.”
Frost was grateful for the information obtained from his old friend; less thrilled, given his situation, with Odenson’s facetious advice about the perfect crime. Medical humor would never cease to baffle him.
Cynthia, fully dressed and ready for work, appeared at her husband’s side as he made the next call, to the Bronxville home of Bob Millard, the trust and estates partner at Chase & Ward in charge of Vandermeer matters. She waited, a glass of orange juice in her hand, while Reuben recounted to Millard the events of the previous evening, which he had already heard about on the morning news. Frost arranged an appointment with his former partner for later in the morning.
The call completed, Reuben grabbed for the proffered orange juice and drank it with ravenous pleasure.
“Thank you,” he said gratefully. “Have you solved Tobias’ murder?”
“Not quite. There are nine possible suspects, and I only eliminated two while I was tossing and turning last night.”
“You certainly were.”
“And so were you, might I say?”
“Of course. I was on trial for murder.”
“Well, it was a miscarriage of justice, my dear. The two suspects I eliminated were thee and me.”
“Thanks. That’s as far as I got.”
Cynthia started to leave the room.
“Where’re you going?” he asked.
“Since I’m so wide-awake I thought I’d go to the office. Get an early start on the week.”
“I’ve got a better idea. While our memories are still working—or partially working in my case, I’m afraid to say—let’s try to reconstruct every move we can remember from last night, before Tobias died.”
“That’s a bother.”
“Not with my new PC,” Frost said, patting his new toy and turning on the switch. “I’m going to put it all on here. Very easy.”
“All right,” Cynthia said dubiously. “How do we begin?”
Frost deftly pushed the keys on his machine and came up with a blank screen, ready to receive their input. He related his conversation with Dr. Odenson to his wife.
“We won’t be sure until they get the lab results, but it looks like Tobias could have taken the poison himself when he went upstairs to the bathroom—or his drink could have been poisoned.”
“There’s another possibility,” Cynthia said.
“Oh?”
“Maybe Tobias spilled the medicine bottle. Given the state he was in, that’s entirely plausible. Or maybe the person who poisoned his drink left the bottle there on the bathroom floor, where it was certain to be found. A red herring.”
“Hmn,” Reuben grumbled. “From what Martin said, either the drink scenario or the pill-bottle scenario is conceivable. Let’s do the upstairs first. Who could have planted the cyanide capsules in Tobias’ bathroom?”
“The Givenses were there when we arrived. Either one of them could have gone upstairs. And Robyn must have been upstairs getting ready,” Cynthia said. “And she almost certainly knew when Tobias was supposed to take his Inderal.”
“Hmn. Hadn’t thought of that,” Frost said, while entering the names of Wayne and Barbara Givens and Robyn under the heading “Upstairs.” “Who else?”
“Sherman and Michael both arrived from another party and had to go to the bathroom at once. Robyn directed Sherman upstairs. And I saw him go up the stairs,” Cynthia said.
“Anyone else?”
“Not that I recall. Except you, my dear.”
“But I was there only after Tobias was dead.”
“Remember my red herring theory. You could’ve poisoned Tobias’ drink and left the pill bottle later.”
“You’re damn little help,” Reuben said, reluctantly entering his own name in the interest of completeness. “Now, isn’t it true that one or the other of us had everyone in view during the whole evening?—I didn’t myself, because I went off with Robyn to conclude our little loan transaction—and no one else went upstairs? With the possible exception of the Givenses and Robyn?”
“And Tobias himself. And we don’t know what that waiter did.”
“Ah, the waiter. You’re right, he could have snuck up the stairs anytime.”
“The only question is, how would he know his way around?”
“That’s
easy. I’m sure we’ve seen him at the Vandermeers before. Let me put him down.”
“How about the maid, what’s her name, Miss Boyle? I’ll bet she was around before the party.”
“Probably so. I’ll add her. And that’s it for the upstairs, isn’t it? Six people—Wayne, Barbara, Robyn, Sherman and the waiter and the maid. Plus me, dammit. So on to the downstairs possibilities.”
“There’s the waiter again. He brought the first drinks after dinner,” Cynthia said. “And a second round later.”
“All right.” “Waiter” was entered under the heading “Downstairs.”
“We want this as complete as possible, don’t we?”
“Definitely.”
“Then there’s you.”
“Hmn.” Reuben added his own name to the list once again. “Who else?”
“I suppose Sherman and Helena, who were sitting on either side of Tobias.”
“We didn’t actually see them do anything, like stick poison in Tobias’ drink. Or one of his drinks.”
“No, but they could have.”
“Agreed. So on the list they go. Let’s see what we’ve got,” Reuben said, turning on his printer and producing a sheet that showed the following:
Upstairs
Wayne Givens
Barbara Givens
Robyn
Sherman Deybold
Waiter
Maid (Boyle?)
Reuben
Downstairs
Waiter
Reuben
Sherman Deybold
Helena Newcomb
“All of which leaves you and Michael Costas in the clear,” Frost said.
“One suspect to a family,” his wife observed. “That’s only fair.”
“Very funny. We’re left with eight possibilities. Seven, if you agree I have no business on the list.”
“I do agree, dear. Are we finished?”
Reuben sighed. “Unless you can figure out who the ‘prick’ was. Or why Tobias was yelling at Sherman.”
“Haven’t a clue. So let me leave you to your thoughts. The world’s work must go on, Tobias or no Tobias.”
“And my work must go on until I get my name off that list.”
“You should have injected Tobias through a hemorrhoid.”
“Goddammit, Cynthia. Martin Odenson’s kidding was bad enough. I don’t need yours.”
“I’m sorry, dear. I’ll see you this evening. Call me at the office if you get an inspiration.”
“You’ll be the first to know. But don’t hold your breath.”
9
The Vandermeer Fortune
Reuben contemplated the upstairs-downstairs list long after Cynthia left him. It yielded no secrets, so he looked forward to his meeting with Bob Millard. Perhaps there was something in the tangle of legal arrangements governing the Vandermeer fortune that would offer a clue.
Contrary to his usual practice, Reuben took a taxi to the Chase & Ward offices at One Metropolitan Plaza. The events of Sunday night had taken their toll, and he simply did not feel up to his normal subway ride.
Grateful that he had hailed a driver who spoke English and at least purported to know his way to the bottom of Manhattan, Frost sank into the back seat of the taxi and thought about his former partner, Bob Millard.
Millard was a serious forty-year-old with just enough sense of humor to keep him from appearing severe. A thin, lanky jogger, he was the epitome of suburban conventionality: well-groomed house in Bronxville, complete with well-groomed wife and two well-groomed young children, a boy and a girl. Life consisted of the daily train commute to Chase & Ward and escape on the weekends to a reconverted farmhouse an hour north of Bronxville, in Dutchess County, though Reuben for the life of him could not understand what there was to escape from, Bronxville being quite bucolic enough for him.
Frost reflected that he had seen far too much of trust and estates lawyers in recent years, the sad and inevitable consequence of growing old and having one’s contemporaries die off. He had concluded that the T&E advisers to wealthy New Yorkers fell into three categories. One consisted of the drudge technicians obsessed with minimizing estate taxes, to the exclusion of common-sense dispositions of individual estates. Their obsessions usually coincided with those of their clients, for whom the thought of sharing even a portion of their amassed wealth with the government was repugnant.
A second group was made up of society lawyers with the appropriate school and club pedigrees and, very often, a refined hot-potato accent. But in many instances not overly generous endowments in the brains department. Most of these social worthies kept bright but less prepossessing young men and women tucked away in their offices, insurance against making damaging mistakes in complying with the intricate and highly technical laws of inheritance.
Finally, there were the solid citizens like Bob Millard, adept enough in the social graces, yet not natural denizens of the Brook or the Links. They did have brains, however, and dispensed intelligent, sensible advice in comforting midwestern voices akin to those of airline pilots or easy-listening radio announcers.
Millard had succeeded to responsibility for several of the firm’s more important personal clients three years earlier, when Arthur Tyson, the firm’s senior T&E partner, had died suddenly of a stroke. A belligerent Type A personality (except with his well-heeled clients) and no favorite of Reuben’s—they had clashed violently at the time of the murder of their colleague, Graham Donovan—Tyson had left behind a practice that any lawyer would envy. Bob Millard, through diligent and careful work, had kept Tyson’s impressive roster of clients, including Tobias Vandermeer and the Vandermeer Trust.
Frost had felt an affinity for Millard from the time he’d first worked with him, both of them having come originally from small towns. The elder lawyer, like Chase & Ward’s clients, had found Millard both smart and reassuring; he and Cynthia had both been quite content to have Millard draw their own most recent wills.
Now eager to see what he could uncover by talking to his erstwhile partner, he went immediately to Millard’s office on arriving at the fifty-first floor of One Met Plaza.
“So you’re back in the murder business, Reuben,” Millard said as he stood up behind his desk to shake hands.
“I’m afraid so. Can’t seem to avoid it.”
“Tell me exactly what went on.”
Frost filled in the details that Millard did not already know.
“How’s Robyn taking it?”
“Very calmly, according to my wife, though I haven’t talked to her this morning. As I told you, I was pretty much in solitary confinement after the police arrived.”
“She’s a pretty cool customer.”
“That’s your impression?”
“Definitely. A very businesslike woman. Very determined. Most of my dealings were with Tobias, but we did her will as well.”
“Anything special about it?”
“Very routine. Everything she owns at her death goes to READ. Her big concern has always been that no one else could get anything from her estate.”
“Like who?”
“She’s never said. She did admit once that Tobias was her fourth husband, so I assume she may have been worried over the other three.”
“Four husbands! I knew about the Italian prince, but who were the other two?”
“Again, she’s never told me.”
“That’s a new one on me. What about children?”
“I asked her that specifically. She said there never had been any. I seem to recall something about a miscarriage, but she was very definite that she’d never had children. And didn’t want any.”
“Hmn.”
“As I say, she’s a very astute businesswoman. You remember when the Tax Reform Act was passed back in eighty-six, our tax department put out a memo on it to our clients. Even before they’d done that, Robyn was on the phone wanting to find out how the act affected her and the Vandermeer family. Not so exceptional, I suppose, but her interest in mo
ney is not limited to philanthropy, as you might be led to believe by all that favorable press coverage she receives.”
“Interesting.”
“Now, Reuben, I got the Vandermeer files out when I got in, as you can see,” Millard said, gesturing to the pile of folders beside his desk. “There’s a lot of curiosity over Tobias’ estate. I’ve had a call already this morning from Mark Small at the Rudenstine, Fried firm, requesting a copy of Tobias’ will. Also inviting me to a meeting of the Bloemendael directors on Thursday.”
“Small’s still counsel for the Bloemendael Foundation, isn’t he?”
“That’s right. I suppose he wants to check up on what his client will get. But now, what can I tell you?”
“I’m not quite certain, Bob. I guess it would help me to have fixed in my mind precisely how the Vandermeer estate is set up.”
“Okay. I’m sure you’re familiar with most of the story, so stop me if I’m going over old ground.”
“Please go ahead.”
“You have to start out with the will of Hendrik Vandermeer, Tobias’ father,” Millard said, searching through the folders. “Here’s a copy, dated October seventeenth, 1964. Basically, it left one-half the stock in Great Kill Holdings to the Bloemendael Foundation, the rest of the Great Kill stock and everything else Hendrik owned to the Vandermeer Trust, for the benefit of Tobias’ children, with a life estate in the Trust income for Tobias.”
“In other words, it cut out Tobias?”
“Except for the income for his lifetime.”
“And since Tobias didn’t have any children, what happens now?” Frost asked.
“Everything goes to the Foundation, with one twist. Hendrik executed a codicil to his will in 1968, authorizing Tobias to appoint a life estate in the Trust income to Robyn, beginning after Tobias’ death and for the rest of her life. Here’s the codicil, take a look at it.”
Frost read the operative provision:
ONE: I amend Article ELEVENTH of my said will to the extent necessary in order to grant my son, TOBIAS, the power to appoint the income from all or part of the principal of the Vandermeer Trust to his wife, ROBYN VANDERMEER, for her life. No appointment by my son shall be effective to exercise such power unless it shall specifically refer to such power and express the intent to exercise it. If such an appointment shall require that the trust principal continue in trust for the benefit of my son’s wife, upon her death my trustees shall distribute such principal to my son’s issue who shall survive her, per stirpes, or in default of any such issue, to the Bloemendael Foundation.
Murder Times Two Page 7
