The Little Death

by Michael Nava

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To talk.”

  “About Hugh?”

  “Not necessarily. We could talk about you. Or your husband. Or your ex-father-in-law.”

  “I find none of those subjects appealing,” she said. The darkness of the room cast shadows that hid all but the deepest lines in her face and she looked like a much younger woman. She was small, her feet not reaching to the metal ring at the bottom of the barstool, and, for an instant, as she lifted her drink she looked as fragile as a child.

  “Then tell me about your poetry.”

  She looked sidewise at me. “Mr. Rios, I once had a talent for writing, a very small talent. I used it up a long time ago, or drank it up, perhaps. At any rate, that subject is the least appealing of all.” After a moment’s silence, she asked abruptly, “Do you like your life?”

  “You mean, am I happy?”

  “Yes, if you want to be vulgar about it.” She finished her drink. Another soldier down.

  “I have been, from time to time.”

  “A lawyer’s answer,” she said disdainfully. “Mincing—oh, pardon me. Equivocal. What I mean is,” and her voice was suddenly louder, “on the whole, wouldn’t you rather be dead?”

  “No.”

  “Well I often think I would,” she said softly.

  “Why?”

  She shook her head. “Every drop of meaning has been squeezed from my life. I hardly expect you to understand.”

  “Your husband?”

  “My husband,” she said. Another drink had appeared in front of her. I realized that I was about to be the recipient of the drunken confidences of an old, depressed woman. Common decency almost got me out of the bar, but not quite. “I married Nick Paris in my sophomore year at Radcliffe. I had an old Boston name and no money. He was rich and crazy. I knew about the rich but not the crazy.” She scraped a fingernail across the surface of her glass. “I wanted to be Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mr. Rios. Instead, I became a crazy rich man’s wife. And a minor poet.” She stared at me as if trying to remember who I was. “What is it you want from me?”

  “Who killed Hugh?”

  “Oh, that. Why do you think anyone killed Hugh. He was quite capable of killing himself.”

  “And you would rather be dead but here you are, alive and well.”

  “Alive, perhaps. I can’t help you, darling. I was bought and paid for long ago.”

  “By whom?”

  “Surely you know enough about this family to know by whom. When I married Nick his parents were horrified by my poverty, tried to buy an annulment but by then I was pregnant with Hugh. We came out to California and things were fine for awhile. Christina, my mother-in-law, treated me quite well. And Jeremy, of course, I was quite fond of.”

  “Your brother-in-law.”

  She nodded. “Then it went bad.” She lit a cigarette.

  “What happened?”

  “Christina wanted a divorce. Her husband wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “The judge.”

  “Of course. The marriage was working for him. He had what he wanted from the family—money, power, prestige. And he treated her like a chattel and his sons like less than that. He is, you know, a malevolent human being.”

  “I gathered.”

  She looked at me. “Hugh tell you some stories? I assure you, there are worse.” She expelled a stream of cigarette smoke toward her reflection in the barroom mirror. “Then they were killed, Christina and Jeremy.”

  “Do you know where they were going at the time?”

  “To Reno. Christina was to obtain a divorce. Jerry went for moral support. It was all very conspiratorial. They left early in the morning without telling the judge, but he found out. The next day they brought the bodies back.”

  “He killed them.”

  “Do your own addition,” she said. “Nicholas was already sick by then. He really loved Jeremy and after Jeremy’s death he deteriorated pretty quickly. Perhaps not so quickly as to warrant that lunatic bin, but that’s a matter for the doctors to dispute.”

  “And what happened to you?”

  “I was having an affair at the time,” she said, “and Paris—the judge—hired an investigator to document my indiscretion. He demanded that I agree to a divorce and renounce my rights to Nick’s estate. Unfortunately, I had acquired a taste for wealth, so I was desperate to salvage something. And, as it happened, I had a pawn to play.” She touched a loose strand of hair, tucking it back.

  “Hugh?”

  “Yes. His father’s heir. I gave Paris custody of my son and got in exchange—”

  “Your thirty pieces of silver,” I said bitterly.

  “Considerably more than that,” she said. “And what right do you have to judge me? He was nothing to you but a trick.”

  “No,” I said. “I loved him.”

  She looked away from me. A moment later she said, “I have never understood homosexuality. I can’t picture what you men do with each other.”

  “I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Rios, and about so many things it’s hardly worth while to begin enumerating them now.”

  “Would you like me to drive you back into the city?”

  “No, thank you. The bartender cuts me off at ten and I take a room in the hotel. I’ll be fine.” She had stepped down from the barstool. “Goodnight, Mr. Rios.”

  “Goodnight, Mrs. Paris.”

  Then she was gone, weaving between tables toward a door marked Ladies. I went out into the darkness and the chilly autumn air, drunk and depressed.

  The next morning I was at the county law library when it opened and spent the next hour ploughing through treatises on the law of trusts and estates. The coroner’s phrase, that Christina and Jeremy Paris had died simultaneously, had been ticking away in the back of my mind. I’d thought about it all the way back from Napa. There had to be a reason for the discrepancy between the times of death recorded at the scene of the accident and the coroner’s finding. The coroner’s report was a legal document and there were only two areas of the law to which it pertained, criminal and probate. Since, at the time, there was no issue of criminal liability arising from the accident, the coroner’s findings must have been sought for the purposes of the probate court. When I got to that point, I remembered simultaneous death, a phrase I recollected dimly from my trusts and estates class.

  I picked up a red-covered casebook, Testate and Intestate Succession, eighth edition, by John Henry Howard, Professor Emeritus at Linden University School of Law. Professor Howard had been my teacher for trusts and estates. Back then, he was only up to his fifth edition. I opened the book to the general table of contents. The book was divided into the two main sections, intestate and testate succession. Seeing the two concepts juxtaposed in type on facing pages, I suddenly realized my research mistake. Aaron Gold had told me that Christina Paris had left a will but her estate, nonetheless, passed through intestacy. I had focused on whether there could be a drafting error that would invalidate a will and which, somehow, involved times of death. But the rule of simultaneous death was a concept of intestate succession and it functioned whether a will was properly drawn or not; the issue was not whether a will was correctly drafted, but who it named as a beneficiary. I turned to the more detailed table of contents and, under intestate succession, buried near the bottom of the page, saw the words simultaneous death.

  It was not a hot topic in the law of estates, rating little more than a page and a half. One page was a general discussion of the concept, with case citations. The other half-page presented a hypothetical situation and a number of questions arising from it. I remembered that Professor Howard’s hypos were never as easy as they first looked.

  Given the byzantine complications of most estate law, the concept of simultaneous death was relatively simple and straightforward. The underlying premise was that neither a dead person nor his estate should be permitted to inherit a b
equest by one living. Consequently, if a woman left her estate to her daughter but her daughter predeceased her, the gift was void. Upon the mother’s death the gift reverted to her estate rather than passing to the daughter’s heirs.

  But what happened if mother and daughter died in such a manner that it was impossible to tell who died first? Did the gift revert to the mother’s estate or pass to the daughter’s? It was for such a contingency that the rule of simultaneous death arose. Using this rule, the law presumed that where the testator and beneficiary died simultaneously, the beneficiary died first. Consequently, the gift reverted to the estate of the giver and was distributed according to the rest of her testamentary scheme.

  So it made no difference whether the will was properly written or not. For instance, a father might make a will leaving everything he owned to his son, but if the son died before the father the will became just a scrap of paper and the father’s estate was divided as if the will had never existed. I was beginning to think that something very similar to that had occurred in the case of Christina Paris.

  There was one other point about the rule of simultaneous death that had special meaning for me. The presumption, that the testator survived the beneficiary, was rebuttable. This meant that it could be disputed in court by competent evidence. The testimony, say, of the paramedics at the scene of the accident. But if all the probate court had before it was the coroner’s report, it was not likely to look further; a court may believe or disbelieve the evidence submitted to it, but it has no means by which to conduct its own investigations.

  I turned to the hypothetical. At first glance the facts seemed simple enough, but I read the hypo more carefully the second time looking for land mines. Halfway through it occurred to me that the facts were suspiciously familiar: a wealthy woman left her entire estate to one of her two sons who, subsequently, was killed in the same car accident that killed her. Was it possible that Professor Howard had based this hypo on the facts of Christina Paris’s death? Beneath the hypo, Professor Howard provided six additional facts, each of which changed the disposition of the woman’s estate. Number six asked whether it would make any difference to the distribution of her wealth if one of her intestate heirs—her husband, perhaps—had arranged the deaths precisely to invalidate the will. Her husband, perhaps!

  Two hours later I was walking alongside a dusty hedge on a dead-end street in an obscure wooded pocket of the campus where retired professors lived in university-subsidized houses. While it was generally acknowledged at the law school that John Howard, who’d retired eight years earlier, was still alive, he was seldom seen and even more rarely contacted. Finally, some antiquarian in the alumni office had found an address for me.

  I came to a white picket gate. Across a weedy, dying lawn and in the shade of an immense oak tree stood a stucco house. It was remarkably still and peaceful-looking, like a ship harbored in calm waters. I pushed the gate open and went up the flagstones to a green door. There was a brass knocker in the shape of a gavel. I knocked, twice.

  The door was opened by a middle-aged Asian woman wearing a green frock. She wiped her hands on her apron and eyed me suspiciously. “Yes?”

  “I’ve come to see Professor Howard. Are you Mrs. Howard?”

  “Housekeeper,” she replied. “You want professor?”

  “Yes, does he live here?”

  “Sure,” she said, “but long time no one comes.”

  “Well, I’m here,” I pointed out.

  “I’ll get,” she said, hurrying away. She’d left the door open so I stepped inside.

  There was an odd smell in the house, musty and faintly sweet, a mixture of cigar smoke and furniture polish. I was standing at the end of a long dark hall. An arched entrance led off to a little living room. The furniture, old and very ugly, was too big for the room, as if purchased for some other house of grander proportions. A vacuum cleaner had been parked between two brick-red sofas. There were ashes of a fire in the fireplace. A pot of yellow chrysanthemums blazed on a coffee-table near a tidy stack of legal periodicals. The walls exuded an elderly loneliness. He probably never married, I thought.

  The housekeeper appeared, touched my arm and told me to come with her. I followed down the hall and into a bright little kitchen. She opened the door to the back yard and I stepped outside. I saw an empty ruined swimming pool, the bottom filled with yellow leaves. Facing the pool were two white lawn chairs—the old-fashioned wooden ones—and between them a matching table. There was a fifth of vodka, a pint of orange juice and two glasses on the table. One of the chairs was occupied by an old man wearing a sagging red cardigan frayed through at the elbow.

  He turned his face to me. His thick gray hair was greasy and disheveled. He now sported a wispy goatee. He held a cigar in one hand as he reached for a glass with his other. Professor John Henry Howard, latest edition.

  “You wanted to see me?” he asked in a voice thickened with the sediment of alcohol and old age.

  I nodded.

  “Well, boy, introduce yourself.”

  “Henry Rios, sir. Class of ’72. I took trusts and estates from you.”

  He peered at me intently as I approached, hand outstretched. He put down the cigar, shook my hand and motioned me to sit beside him. “’72? A good class, that. Not that many of you cared for probate. No, you belonged more to the quick than the dead. Where did you sit, Mr.—”

  “Rios. In the back row.”

  “Ah, one of those. What was your final grade?”

  “An A-minus.”

  He lifted his shaggy eyebrows and for a second I thought he was going to demand to see my transcript.

  “Well, you must’ve learned something. Have a drink.”

  “No, I—,” but before I could finish he’d filled the glass with vodka and added, as an afterthought, a splash of orange juice. I sipped. It was like drinking rubbing alcohol.

  “The smart cocktail,” the professor said touching his glass to mine. “One of my remaining pleasures. I have a system, you see. I allow myself only as much vodka as I have orange juice. Through judicious pouring I can make a pint of orange juice last all day.”

  “The legal mind at work,” I said.

  Professor Howard chuckled. “Indeed. So, Mr. Rios, what are we going to talk about?”

  “I want to ask you about a hypo that appears in your casebook.”

  “You a probate lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because if you were I’d charge you, and I ain’t cheap. Proceed.” He tilted his head back.

  I withdrew from my pocket a xeroxed copy of the page in his book with the illustration of simultaneous death. “It’s this,” I said, handing it to him.

  “What’s the question?” he asked as he skimmed the page.

  “A wealthy woman and her oldest son are killed in an auto accident. She’d devised her entire estate to that son. The court uses the rule of simultaneous death to invalidate the will and her estate passes, through intestacy, to her husband. Now here, in number six, you ask what effect it would have on the distribution of the estate if her husband had actually arranged the accident.”

  “Well, think, Mr. Rios,” he prodded. “If you killed your old mother to obtain the family jewels, do you think the court would reward your matricide?”

  “I take it from your tone the answer is no.”

  “If the law was otherwise it would be open season on every person of means. That answer your question?”

  “One of them. These facts are based on the deaths of Christina and Jeremy Paris, aren’t they?”

  He picked up his cigar from the edge of the table and lit it.

  “I’m investigating the death of her grandson, Hugh Paris, who was a friend of mine. I believe he knew or suspected that her death and the death of her son, Jeremy, was arranged by Robert Paris. I think you know something about that.”

  “What kind of law did you say you practice?”

  “I didn’t. Criminal defense.”

  He sho
ok his head. “Criminal is a troublesome area. No rules. Might makes right, with only the thin paper of the Constitution between the fist and the face.”

  “Why did he have them killed?”

  Howard regarded me through narrowed eyes, as if deciding whether or not to lie.

  “She was on her way to obtain a divorce. That would’ve extinguished his intestate rights. She’d already cut him out of her will.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I drafted the will,” he said, tremulously.

  “What else do you know, professor?”

  “About the will or the marriage? They were intertwined. The marriage was hell for her but she put up with it for the children and because she was Catholic and, not least of all, because she was Grover Linden’s granddaughter and the Lindens don’t acknowledge defeat. But she hated Robert. He used her, robbed her. So she came to me one night and told me to write her a will that would cut him off from the Linden money in such a way that he would lose if he contested it.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “We gave him all the community property, his and hers. It was not an insignificant amount. That was the carrot. Everything else went to their sons. Jeremy was given his share outright and Nicholas’s was put in a trust to be administered by Jeremy and his uncle, John Smith. That was the stick.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Robert could hardly complain he wasn’t provided for since he got everything they’d accumulated in thirty years of marriage. And should he contest the will that would put him in the position of challenging the rights of his own sons as well as his brother-in-law, a man richer even than he. For good measure, we threw in an in terrorem clause providing that he would lose everything if he unsuccessfully challenged any clause of the will.”

  “You thought of everything,” I said, admiringly.

  “Except one thing. His intestate rights. As long as they remained married, he was her principal intestate heir. So, from his perspective it was just a question of invalidating the will.”

  “Did he know about it, then?”

  “Yes. She made the mistake of taunting him with it. Two weeks later she and Jeremy, who had dined together at her home, became seriously ill with food poisoning. It may have been a fluke that Robert, who ate the same things, was unaffected.” The professor shrugged. “It frightened her. By then I had discovered the hole in our scheme. I advised her to get a divorce.”