The Heir

by Paul Robertson

“Jason, be serious.” Apparently we were not quite up to sarcasm yet.

  So I thought about it seriously, for about fifteen seconds. “I guess I’ll sell it.”

  “It’s your father’s house!”

  “Do you want to live in that place?” I asked.

  I never would. I’d sell that place as fast as it was decent. It was one part of Melvin I really could disown. Maybe I actually would find a demolition company.

  No, I’d sell it and give the thirty pieces of silver to the foundation.

  “Maybe it would be best to sell it,” she said. “It would be an end.”

  Endings are good things. The morning ended and we could eat lunch. Eric’s grief had pretty much ended, too, and he was ready to get back to self-indulgence.

  “Do I need to say anything at the funeral?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I will.”

  “What about Aunt Celeste and Uncle Damon?”

  “I haven’t heard yet.” Angela could’ve just as easily been at peace with her siblings, but they were all more comfortable with distrust. Celeste would get in from Los Angeles that afternoon, and hopefully she’d be over her jet lag soon enough to make it to the funeral. But she might not. Damon would drive up from New York, if he could reschedule his clients’ appointments.

  Probably the funeral parlor could rent us some mourners.

  Eric had one more question. “Uh, Jason, could I borrow your suit again?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Katie had better start on his formal wardrobe if this was going to become routine. “Rule number 88—no motorcycles when you’re wearing my suit.”

  Stan Morton called to offer condolences, and I suggested that Angela would have wanted any news coverage to be very low-key.

  “I’ll try to respect that,” he said. “But this whole story is reaching critical mass. First Melvin, and now this. And if the police announce it wasn’t suicide it’ll be front page.”

  “Just do what you have to,” I said. “And you and I should talk soon.”

  The family had dispensed with the viewing due to lack of interest, so Monday night Katie rummaged out photo albums. I pretended to remember fondly the events that had pretended to be worth remembering: Christmases, fall days, Eric and I tossing footballs after Thanksgiving dinner, family times where we were all together. Graduation from St. Martins School, from Yale. They were beautiful pictures. When I had a chance to rid myself of the house, I would dispose of these albums, as well.

  “Poor dear,” Katie said over one picture of Angela and Melvin artificially lounging beside the pool. “What would she really have done with the rest of her life?”

  With that, we came to the end of our own real mourning. Wasn’t it much better for her this way? Might as well believe that. It had been her own decision to end it all—and we might as well believe that, too, as long as we could, and we’d believe that Melvin had died in an accident for good measure.

  When we stopped believing it, I’d have some new questions. Two weeks before Angela died, I’d forced the police to drop the investigation into Melvin’s death. If I hadn’t, would Angela still be alive?

  That night I still didn’t sleep. I didn’t deserve to.

  Tuesday morning Eric came over and we all got dressed in our buryin’ clothes. The big funeral limousine came to get us, the same one we’d ridden in for Melvin’s funeral. I could have sworn I smelled Angela’s perfume still in it.

  The church was done up as lavishly as before, but, well, the truth is that the second time is just never the same. The flowers tried as hard as they could, and the candles glowed their little hearts out. It just wasn’t Melvin. It was just Angela.

  And, good golly, the casket was pink. Another funeral and I couldn’t take my eyes off the box, but this time because it looked like a giant strawberry Popsicle. Couldn’t someone have stopped her? But who knew what she had planned? Now it was too late.

  It was too late to help Detective Wilcox find this Murderer of Boyers. Obviously Angela couldn’t have decided to pull a trigger— she couldn’t even decide what shade of pink lipstick to put on. Helpless Angela had help with this job. This garish casket held a murder victim.

  It was too late to stop the cute little gun. Even if I was rich and powerful and wonderful, I couldn’t buy her back. I couldn’t order my lawyer or my banker or my secretary to fix the problem.

  All I’d done was speed her on her way—removed Detective Wilcox, his minions and his mustache, from keeping this person out of Angela’s little parlor.

  I ran through the rationalizations. It had only been two weeks before that the police had dropped the investigation. Would they have gotten anywhere with it in fourteen days? They weren’t really trying, anyway. They were just attacking me. I’d had no choice.

  And now it was obvious that Melvin had been murdered. But back then, what had been more likely—that he’d been killed on purpose, or that he’d just had an accident?

  We’d all thought it was an accident, which just happened to be on the night he changed his will, driving home to the mansion he erected with all the money he pried from his rivals’ hands as he destroyed their businesses, on the road his own company built on extorted public contracts. Who would want to kill that man?

  What should I have done? What would have been the right thing to do? Probably not swat down the murder investigation like an annoying fly.

  The questions were the annoying flies, and I swatted them down.

  What am I doing here?

  “Jason?”

  What? . . . I was at a funeral. The priest was looking at me. Who? . . . oh, Angela. I was supposed to say something? I stood up. I slid past Katie and I walked up to the pulpit and everyone was looking at me.

  “Why am I here?” Wait, that’s what I said last time. Which funeral was this, again? Angela. “Just a few weeks ago, and now again.”

  The monstrosity of a casket, everyone staring at me. Where was he? There, on the back wall, my little friend. His stone hand was still raised. He was just a rock, sure, and not alive, but what difference did that make? Being alive wasn’t helping me at the moment. Tell me something to say.

  “Both of them—Melvin, now Angela. Why? Is there any reason for this? I want to know. Is there a reason any of us are here?”

  If there was, I needed to figure it out quick. Time had an abrupt way of running out.

  “Angela had one goal for all the years I knew her—just to be a good wife to the man she loved. She couldn’t get over her loss. I’m sorry she didn’t find a new purpose. It’s terrible to not know your purpose.”

  Why was I up here, anyway? Trying to find some shred of meaning in her poor life? As if I’d ever been able to do that for anyone. Wasn’t this what we were paying the priest for, to say the proper things?

  “The rest of us will go on, but it gets harder.” Not near as big a crowd as last time, and neither governor nor senator; but everyone who was there was still dressed very nicely.

  Anything else to say? The little saint said no. I went back to my pew.

  I wasn’t sure what anyone would make of all that, but Katie squeezed my hand and whispered, “Very touching, Jason. That was beautiful.” I don’t think she was being sarcastic.

  The candles radiated, the flowers shimmered, the priest emanated somberness and suitable words and earned his money. Everyone did a good job, and we all took a well-deserved break in the cloud-filtered sun before setting out for the second half.

  Nathan and Fred hobnobbed; Eric was forlorn. The siblings had come of course. Katie took on Celeste while I sidled up to Damon, mainly because we were both curious. Damon had Angela’s face, but without the makeup it looked decent. We exchanged our pleasantries. That was as far as we got, though. His mind was on the hours he was losing from the office, and I expected him to bill the estate for his time and travel expenses. My curiosity evaporated and I left him alone.

  Katie had found a much deeper mine. Everything Angela was, Celeste was not—dark instead of pa
le in her color, straight instead of rounded in her features, sharp instead of vague in her nastiness. She spewed remembrances of her sister like a machine gun. Even I doubted Angela could have been so bad.

  Katie and I finally fled toward the limo. The siblings had declined to ride in it.

  “Why is she so hostile?” I said when we were safe with the door closed and the cortege forming.

  “Couldn’t you tell?” Katie said. “She wanted to marry your father, but Angela snatched him instead. Wouldn’t you hate your sister for that?”

  “I can’t imagine him marrying Celeste.”

  “I guess Celeste could, though.”

  Eric stared out the window at the thousand different grays in the sky and the grays here on the ground, which included us. Then he just stood next to me through the whole graveside performance.

  I hadn’t been here since the last funeral, and I noticed how nice Melvin’s grave looked. The sod had rooted and blended with the rest of the grass. It was very peaceful, and the new grave was an interruption. But soon it would blend like the first one had, and they could get on with their eternity together.

  “Jason?”

  It was Eric’s first word since we’d left the church. “What?”

  “Where is our mother buried?”

  It took me a few seconds to climb out from that ton of bricks.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  He’d been two years old. But no one ever told him?

  “We’ll go up there tomorrow.”

  “Is it close?”

  “No.” He had just never thought to ask? Or he’d been afraid to?

  Katie sniffed and dabbed with her little handkerchief. She was in gray. It wasn’t her best color, but she’d known it was apt for the day.

  Damon spun his wheels in the gravel turning onto the main road, and there could have been no more final sound to end the event.

  Eric was staring at Melvin’s headstone, like an abandoned child.

  Which he was.

  I wondered if he’d been here since the last funeral. The monument had been set, and it was very nice. Big but not gaudy, very solid, with three chiseled lines:

  MELVIN HOWARD BOYER

  UNITED STATES SENATOR

  PHILANTHROPIST

  And below them were the dates. I counted syllables—six, seven, four. It was haiku.

  Angela’s stone would be next to his. I hadn’t seen it, but I could guess. Matching design, just smaller.

  I checked the obstacles between me and the car. Fred and Nathan were double-teaming; that was going to be a tough one to get through.

  Celeste was at my elbow. “Which one is the lawyer?” she said. Of course—she wanted a gander at the will.

  “Fred Spellman,” I said. “He’s there, the large gentleman.”

  The cannonball flew straight, and the obstacle went down. “Let’s go,” I said, and Katie and Eric followed me. Fred was hopelessly outgunned, and Nathan was pinned down in the crossfire. I smiled at Nathan, snubbed Fred, and opened the door for my wife and brother.

  But on the drive home I relented and called Fred’s office. “Tell him I’ll see him at eight o’clock tomorrow,” I told the secretary. Mourning was over—life would just have to go on somehow.

  19

  Wednesday I fulfilled my promise and arrived in Fred’s armchair a full two minutes before eight. I had other business for the day and I wanted to get this over.

  But Fred still had anger to vent. “You’ve wasted precious time.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “So has the governor. Do you understand what this means?”

  “This refers to Angela’s suicide?”

  He snorted. “If you want to call it that.”

  I tried to make myself comfortable, but I wasn’t. “Okay, so it was no suicide. And we know for sure now that Melvin was murdered, the investigation will be re-opened, and Angela probably died because I interfered.”

  “You understand the ammunition that this has given the governor.” “A big pile of it.”

  “A very big pile. The investigation is open, since Monday, and late last night the whole story of your interference was leaked to Channel Five.” I’d been playing with fire, and Fred seemed grimly pleased that I was getting burned. He didn’t seem concerned about Angela herself.

  “I didn’t interfere in any way they could use against me.”

  “Bright will do whatever he wants. He owns the state police, and Channel Five enjoys sensational news. He will let you know that he did not like your interference. Anyway, Mr. Wilcox will call on you soon. You had best be ready for that.”

  “I will be.”

  “You need to give Stanley Morton something for Channel Six and the newspaper so he’s not left behind.”

  Maybe I had been wasting time. This mass was definitely critical. “We talked briefly. I’ll call him again.”

  “You will not be able to stop the investigation.”

  “I’m not trying to,” I said. “Is this still his way of negotiating?”

  “It would be up to you to offer a deal, and it would have to be good. Bright isn’t merely threatening. He has his opportunity, and he is going to try to destroy you. If you had only negotiated, this could have been prevented.”

  “But I didn’t. Now I have no choice,” I said. “I think it’s him or me.”

  It took him a minute to say the words. “At this point, you are both in the locked room, and you both have guns. Someone will have to fire first. I don’t see any other way out.”

  “Then I’m pulling the trigger.”

  I gave Fred a few seconds to muse. “The end of an era,” he said. “Harry Bright and your father went back a long way.” Back to the present. “I don’t know what will happen.”

  “I’ve got one advantage, Fred. I really am innocent, and he’s not.”

  “That’s a very small advantage. I don’t suggest you count on it helping you.”

  “I know. How should I do this? Take my briefcase of papers to the FBI? Publish them in the newspaper? Challenge Bright to a duel? Loaded pistols at ten paces. You can be my second.”

  “A duel would favor the coolest head, so you would both miss, and I would not want to be nearby. Talk to Stanley first. He may or may not want to be on the front lines.”

  “And what about you, Fred?” How did this man feel about being on the front line?

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you in on this?”

  “What choice do I have? You’re paying me to advise you.”

  I’d been hoping for something a little deeper. “Would you quit if I’m too big of an idiot?”

  “Oh. Not for a while.”

  I wanted to know how deep the loyalty went. “How long did you work for Melvin?”

  “Nearly from the beginning.” I did not sense any sentimentality. “I was a staff lawyer for the state assembly, and he asked me to advise him on dealing with the state government.”

  “That was before he went to Washington.”

  “Yes, by several years.”

  “Did you know my mother?”

  “Slightly.” A little bit of the old Uncle Fred was resurfacing. “She was ill. Eric was an infant, and you were a small child. In those circumstances, she did not socialize.”

  “When she died . . .” I didn’t know what to ask.

  “Yes?”

  “How did Melvin react?”

  “He didn’t react to such things, in any public way.”

  He’d always been that way. “You knew him very well, though.”

  “Through the years I did get to know him. But not back then.”

  Change the subject. A little. “Did he take chances? How would he have fought this war with Governor Bright?”

  “Ruthlessly. In the earlier days he did take big chances, but after a while he didn’t need to anymore. In this situation? He would have easily won. For one thing, he would have been much more feared. Channe
l Five would have been very reluctant to side with the governor.” “I guess I’m not very fearsome.”

  “If you come out of this alive, you’ll be feared.”

  I thought about whether I would want that, then, suddenly, about the word Fred had used.

  “Is that literal?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “If I come out alive?”

  “I didn’t mean it literally. But you should be very careful. You’re wealthy; spend some money on security for yourself and your wife.”

  Up, up, up. In my very own formidably secure office, guarded by Pamela herself, I prepared to call Stan Morton.

  One more pause: Was this it? Think it through. If I did what I was planning, Bright would not survive, at least as a politician. That wouldn’t stop the murder investigation, but the goal would be changed to finding the killer instead of killing me. That’s what I needed.

  And Bright was too dangerous. I needed to be rid of him. What was the right thing to do? It was ruthless, brutal, risky, but there was no right or wrong here. This was politics. The world without a corrupt state government under my control would also be risky, but there was right and wrong there. I could do right.

  Okay, the pause was over. Governor Bright had assailed me and I would punish him. I would punish Melvin, too. Let loose the dogs of war.

  “It’s about time you called,” Stan said. “Everyone here knows the police are about to call Angela Boyer’s suicide note a forgery, and there are funny noises about you and why the investigation got frozen two weeks ago. I’m going to put up a report on the news tonight, so if you want any input into it, give me some words quick.”

  “I’ve got lots of words.”

  “Should we meet?”

  I had my other business for the day, and it was already eight thirty. “No, I’ll say them here.”

  “Is this on the record?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay.”

  “Melvin was murdered, and so was Angela.”

  “That’s reality?”

  “I have no proof, and no specific suspect,” I said. “But I’m sure.”

  “Everyone knows that. Next?”

  “The governor wants to use the investigation to annihilate me. My guess is he’ll pick me as the murderer.”