The Heir

by Paul Robertson

  And all the while Nathan was working on me, trying to convince me how terrible the money was, how I needed to get rid of it. It was all about to fall into his lap when Katie got in the way.

  She was the one who could stop my plan, so she had to be stopped herself. He tried to think how he could stop the divorce or talk her out of her lawsuits and obstruction. But he knew there was only one way.

  Then, in my office that afternoon, I’d walked right in with my gun in my hand. I’d set it on the sofa. I’d looked so dazed, he realized I might not even know I had it. He slid a cushion over it. I was clueless.

  In those few seconds he’d made his plan to kill Katie—and perhaps get me accused of it by using my gun. It would jeopardize my ability to transfer the money to the foundation, but it would also give the police a suspect. Nathan was getting very worried they would find Melvin’s papers in Grainger’s office, or that Angela or Grainger had talked to someone else. There were too many loose ends.

  So he went to see her that evening.

  “What . . . did she . . . say . . . to him?”

  “He claims she wasn’t open to changing her mind.”

  “He’s . . . lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She . . . let him . . . in.”

  Wilcox considered. “You might be right. It would look a lot worse if he’d killed her even though she was willing to back down on the divorce. It would prove premeditation. And he hadn’t expected you to show up just minutes later.”

  I was tired of talking. And living, too. I closed my eyes. She really hadn’t had to die. I wanted to die.

  I didn’t feel like telling Wilcox where I’d been, which frustrated him. But he was in no position to push. And I’d thought of one other thing.

  “Airport. JFK.”

  “In New York?”

  I nodded. “Car. I rented.”

  “The white Mercury.”

  “Thousand dollars . . . in it. I don’t want it back.”

  “Right. It’s evidence. I’ll make sure it doesn’t disappear. We’ll put it in the widows’ and orphans’ fund. One more question,” he said. “Any idea why your father wanted to change his will in the first place?”

  “No.”

  If only I did.

  “Wow.” Eric had heard the whole thing. “Everybody is so . . .” He didn’t know what word to use.

  “Evil.” Or whatever. “It’s the money.”

  He was getting it. “That’s what you kept saying.”

  “I . . . hoped . . . Nathan could . . . help me.”

  “And then you found out he was the killer.”

  “I hoped . . . he knew . . . something stronger . . . than the money.”

  “And he didn’t. That’s why you tried to jump off the building.”

  “Yes.”

  He was using brain cells he never had before. “So . . . I guess that means you didn’t find anything.”

  “No.”

  “What are you going to do when you get out of the hospital?”

  “Don’t know.” This thing would be on my jaw for a month. Another reason to not live that long.

  “And . . . Jason . . . what about . . .”

  “Melvin.”

  “Yeah. So, did Nathan Kern kill him? Or else, who did?”

  “Don’t know.”

  We reactivated the phone during lunch so I could call Jacob Rosenberg. I was hungry enough to drink the stuff the hospital was providing, but it didn’t help my disposition.

  Should he resurrect the legal process he’d begun two weeks ago?

  “Wait.”

  Any other instructions?

  “No.”

  Nothing was resolved—nothing was any better. Why am I here? Had anyone ever found an answer to that question?

  I was feeling the loss of Nathan. Not the real, evil man, whom I had never liked anyway. I was grieving for the phantom I’d briefly had of a man who knew the answers, the man I could respect. Who could give me what I wanted.

  Was there anyone? I would have given everything I had for someone to help me. But the money was worth nothing to me now, the whole billion dollars and empire that went with it. It was all I had and it would also be worthless to whomever I was looking for. Everything I did have that I valued was lost and I’d gotten nothing for it.

  I needed a reason to live. I needed someone to help me.

  My eyes wanted to close, so I let them. When they opened I was still dreaming.

  “Pamela.”

  No, it wasn’t a dream.

  “Well, look at you,” she said. “I brought some chicken soup.”

  “I’m glad . . . you’re here.” For a long time to come every smile would be precious, and she had some real dazzlers. “How . . . did you . . . get in here?”

  She smiled again—I was so nai ve. “My job is to get things done, dear. Now, Jason, I know you don’t want to worry about business or reporters or politicians. I’ll take care of everything until you’re ready.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Is there anything specific you want me to do?”

  “Stan Morton,” I said. “Come here . . . no cameras . . . and then Fred.”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “I’m sorry . . . about . . . wrecking . . . the office . . . and the chair.”

  She sighed. “That’s fine. I’m sorry you had to.”

  I wasn’t ready for her to leave. “I don’t know . . . what to do . . . now.”

  “Just get finished with Stan and Fred. Then you’ll have time to think.”

  “I . . . don’t want to think . . . anymore.”

  She just looked at me for a while with her kind grandmother eyes. “You’re still here, Jason. I almost lost you.”

  “You’d be . . . better off.”

  “You wouldn’t, though.” She smiled again, just pure sweetness. “I’ve been praying for you boys every day for twenty-five years. I think you’re going to find what you’re looking for. Now, what is the doctor saying?”

  “I haven’t . . . seen one . . . today,” I said.

  Eric chipped in. “He was in here while you were asleep.” He turned to Pamela. “They think they can save his arm. And his mouth will be okay. But . . . well . . .” He trailed off.

  “What?” She was concerned. I was, too. I hadn’t heard this.

  Eric turned to me, eyes worried.

  “Your hair. It won’t recover. I’m sorry.”

  “Dope.”

  Stan Morton managed to take time out from his busy schedule to visit the poor invalid.

  “Is that you?” he said from the doorway.

  I shook my head. “Elvis.”

  “That wouldn’t be as big a story. Where have you been?”

  I nodded to Eric.

  “Mr. Boyer would like to ask for your help,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah? What? And can’t he talk?”

  “He has asked me to speak for him. He would like to have one week to rest. After that, he would like to give an interview. He would appreciate your help in arranging that, and deciding who should participate.”

  “Do you know . . .” He had to stop and start over. “Do you know who’s out there? Everyone! The networks, the magazines, every newspaper in the world!” He attempted to calm himself. “There’s a reporter from Beijing staying in my guest room. Beijing, China!” The attempt hadn’t worked. He tried again. “We’re supposed to wait a week? Come on, Jason. Just answer two questions for me, that’s all.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Where have you been, and how did you figure out it was Kern?”

  I would have smiled, but I couldn’t. I pointed to Eric.

  “Mr. Boyer is extremely fatigued,” Eric said.

  “He looks okay to me.”

  I was going to start laughing, which would really hurt.

  “You need to give him another week,” Eric said. “He’s really banged up.”

  “There are two hundred reporters in the parking lot. If I don
’t come out with something, it’ll get real ugly. Give me something. I know: today is Saturday. Where were you one week ago? Where did you spend the night?”

  Saturday night, a week ago.

  “Dumpster.”

  An hour later, Fred’s arrival in the lobby was announced.

  “Should I leave?” Eric asked.

  “No.”

  “I’d be glad to.” He meant it.

  “You’re my . . . bodyguard.” I’d have been glad to leave, too. But the confrontation would have to happen sometime. And maybe even Fred would be repelled by the devastation he was such a big part of.

  Soon we heard the heavy tread. They make hospital doors wide to accommodate wheelchairs and a certain type of lawyer. Sitting was another matter. He stood and stared at me for quite a while, and then he looked for a chair. The hospital issue was one size fits all, but not all at the same time.

  “Here,” Eric said, jumping up and pushing the two chairs we had together. Fortunately they had strong legs and no arms.

  “Thank you.” He sat and scowled. “I don’t know what we have to say to each other.”

  “I . . . can think . . . of some . . . things.”

  “I suppose. I’ll ask one question, then. What are you going to do with the Boyer assets?”

  At least he didn’t waste time faking sympathy for me, or faking any moral sense at all. I tried to think how to say what I wanted in the least painful way. That is, the least painful for my jaw.

  “Isn’t . . . it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  No, not to him. “Look at me,” I said.

  “You’re blaming your calamities on being wealthy?”

  “Look at . . . Harry Bright.”

  “You and he made decisions, and his ruin was the outcome.”

  “Look . . . at Nathan . . . Kern.”

  He hesitated. “He was weak.” That was the greatest crime Fred knew.

  “He . . . killed . . . my wife.”

  He waited a decent five seconds before answering. “I’m sorry.” It was not an apology, just a condolence.

  “He killed her . . . to get . . . my money.”

  “I understand.”

  “You . . . used her . . . you’re guilty . . . as Kern . . . that she died.” I hadn’t meant for the dialogue to go this way, but his hard heart was infuriating me.

  “I did not intend for anything to happen to her!”

  “Look . . . at yourself.”

  He was finally silenced.

  He stood and left, and I was left wondering why I’d called him, because it couldn’t have gone any other way than it had. It took a long time for the atmosphere to fill the empty space he’d left. The last lingering traces of the triumph over Nathan Kern had finally been blown away.

  My war with evil was over. I’d caused damage, but my own losses were much higher, and Fred and all the others like him would just rebuild. The money and evil had won.

  42

  I was back at the beginning. The questions were unanswered, if there were any answers. No one was pursuing me, but it was only a matter of time before I would be back at the window, looking out into the black.

  And I still had the money that I wanted to be rid of. What was I supposed to do with it?

  “Wow.” Eric was very relieved that Fred was gone and that his own name had not come up.

  Just at that moment, I did not want to deal with Eric.

  “I want you . . . to get . . . something,” I said.

  Man’s best friend snapped to attention. He was needed! “What?”

  “In my office . . . back home . . . in the desk.” I held up my fingers to show the size and thickness of the folding frame from Melvin’s bedroom. “A . . . picture frame.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  Pamela had been praying for me for twenty-five years. That seemed like something very valuable, even if I didn’t know what to do with it. I thought of the church where my mother was buried.

  Something outside myself. That was what I wanted, even if it had been Nathan who’d said it. I knew one thing that was absolute, that there was nothing on earth that answered any of my questions. Money, power . . . even love, they had all failed.

  Pamela thought I’d find what I was looking for. I was looking for a reason to live.

  An hour later, Eric was back, and he brought me a reason, one that for a few minutes pushed aside my despair. He brought me a milkshake. A real one, made with real fast-food chemicals. Its purpose was simple and pure—to appeal to my most base instinct and appetites, with no nutritional value at all. I lost myself in it and for a moment again enjoyed living. If they’d left the IV in my arm, I would have sent that wise, brilliant, and golden-hearted young man out for a second one to pump directly into the artery.

  I sat up. Transferred myself to a chair.

  “I want . . . to walk.”

  I’d been up a couple times, but now I wanted to walk . . . somewhere. Nurses came scurrying, somehow sensing I had moved. Eric forced them back to a discreet distance. They offered a wheelchair but I refused. I had regained a little dignity.

  We rode the elevator to the ground floor, hobbled the length of a hallway, and then I was outside, walking, slowly but in the open air, with no one trying to kill me or injure me or put me in prison.

  It was a garden, even. A courtyard, closed off and private. Eric and I were strolling through the end of October.

  Dry, swirling leaves hurried past. Everything else was still and stiff, the last chrysanthemums, the empty branches. We had an hour or more until dusk.

  Then I felt dizzy—all the muscles suggested that I sit, and I did. I just had my pajamas and robe, and a blanket over my shoulders, and the wind was gusty and chill. I pulled the blanket more tightly around me.

  “I have that thing,” Eric said. He dug into the pocket of his jacket, a plaid and corduroy autumn coat Katie had picked as a start to his winter wardrobe. That was as far as they’d gotten.

  A little fishing and he had the frame, and put it in my hands.

  “Did you look at it?” I asked.

  “Uh, no.”

  There was a feeling of a holy relic about it as it rested between my fingers. The civilization that had owned it had fallen and was no more, but this object was clean and untainted and had passed unharmed through the Gotterda merung.

  My left hand was very limited in its motion by the cast on my shoulder. I held the frame in that hand and opened it with my right. Two pictures—a man and a woman in one, and two little boys in the other.

  “Wow,” said one of the boys.

  “It was . . . in . . . his bedroom,” said the other boy. “In the drawer . . . by . . . his bed.”

  There they were, Melvin and Ann, the two people I most fully did not know. Beneath Ann’s sad, tranquil eyes, she knew that she would never know her sons, and they would never know her. She held something that was deeper and greater than just life. It was there in her eyes, obvious to anyone who was looking.

  His eyes were unknowable. Did his young wife’s coming death harden him and build those walls that shrouded his soul? I’d only known him hard.

  Eric had her eyes. That was our biggest difference in appearance, even now. When Eric smiled, he looked so much like this picture of her. I looked at him now, beside me, and then at his own image in the frame. There he was a bright, untroubled toddler, his heart already open and supple as it would be for his whole life. Here in the garden with me he was Ann, but without that sorrow.

  I was much more like Melvin, but with greater sorrow. I knew my own face well enough to see the similarities. Heavier brow, eyes deeper set, and empty. In my own picture I was five years old and I had the weight of the world on my shoulders because I knew my mother was dying. I was formed by that sorrow and the sorrow of an unloving father, and it had left me so incomplete.

  “Let me see,” Eric said. We held it together and absorbed every meaning we could pull from those faces. A cloud had obscured the sun, and I
was shivering.

  “Is there anything on the backs?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know.”

  He took the frame and slid the glass off from the children’s side. It was tight. He had to force it, but he was still so careful. “There are papers behind the picture.”

  Two folded sheets old enough to have yellowed a little. He teased one of them open.

  “Eric,” it said at the top in a handwriting I’d only seen a few times before.

  “It’s from her?” Eric said, his eyes about popping out of his head.

  “Read it,” I said.

  “Eric

  Oh my Eric, oh my Eric, your little heart filled with joy,

  Time to sleep now, time to sleep now, oh my dear little boy.

  Come back home now, come back home now, you’ve been following your star,

  Time to rest now, time to rest now, from your wanderings far.

  Will you miss me, will you miss me, will you remember this night?

  Come now kiss me, time to sleep now, until the first morning light.

  Who will hold you, who will love you, when years pass and you’ve grown?

  I am singing, I am praying, that you’ll never be alone.”

  “She wrote it?” he said.

  I nodded—I could hear her voice. “She sang it. . . . It was her . . . lullaby for you.”

  “I don’t remember any of it. And I’m always alone.”

  “Did she say anything about me?” I’d asked Pamela.

  “She asked me to look after you and Eric.”

  “Have you been?”

  “Every day.”

  “No,” I said. “You . . . haven’t been. Open . . . that one.”

  “Jason

  Lay your tired head here on my shoulder,

  Let me hold you in my arms my precious child,

  You are growing, getting taller, getting older,

  But I’ll still hold you in my arms a little while.

  The weight of the whole world is on your shoulders,

  In your arms you carry burdens much too hard,

  Face a world of troubles, brave young soldier,

  But precious Jason, sleep awhile in my arms.