The Little Death

by Michael Nava

  “Tell me again how this works,” she said, “preferably in English. I cannot follow you when you start quoting the law at me.”

  I smiled as charmingly as I knew how. Her hard, intelligent face showed no sign of being charmed. I had virtually pulled her off a plane to Boston to get her to talk to me. Her baggage had gone on without her. Now she planned to leave that night on another flight. The clock was ticking away.

  “It’s called a wrongful death action,” I said, “and it’s a law suit brought by the heirs or estate of someone who died through the negligence or wrongful act of another. The most common instance is a suit brought by the family of someone killed in a car accident or on the job.”

  “I would hardly classify homicide as an instance of neglect,” she remarked impatiently.

  “But it is a wrongful act.”

  “Oh, at the very least,” she snickered.

  “Mrs. Paris, please—I know it sounds like hair-splitting, but there are precedents in the case law that permit the heirs of a murder victim to bring an action against his murderer.”

  “So you want my consent to bring this wrongful death action against Robert’s estate.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And you intend to ask for two hundred and fifty million dollars in damages?”

  “Yes.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette. “What you want is permission to conduct a circus.”

  I began to respond but she cut me off.

  “Mr. Rios, you are a very clever man and I have no doubt that you were devoted to Hugh but this idea of yours is absurd.”

  “It’s not absurd,” I said, “It’s entirely plausible.” She remained unimpressed. “Mrs. Paris, you stand to gain by this suit whether we get to trial or not.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know that you were left nothing in Robert Paris’s will. There’s enough truth to this suit that even if we can’t prove the allegation that the judge had Hugh murdered, the suit has considerable harassment value.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It takes five years to get a relatively simple civil lawsuit to trial. A case of this magnitude could drag on for a decade, easily. At some point the judge’s executors will simply decide to pay you off and settle the suit.”

  “But what would you get out of that, Mr. Rios? Surely you have other motives for wanting to sue Robert’s estate than my further enrichment.”

  “I intend to pursue this case through the pages of the Chronicle so that even the fact of a settlement will be an admission of Robert Paris’s guilt. That will satisfy me, Mrs. Paris,” I said with rising emotion, “even if it takes the next ten years of my life to accomplish it.”

  Visibly startled by my vehemence, she sat back in her chair.

  “It won’t bring Hugh back to life,” she said softly.

  “Mrs. Paris, do you have any doubt that Hugh was murdered?”

  “No,” she said, without hesitation.

  “And do you have any doubt that Robert Paris was his murderer?”

  In a softer voice she said, “No.”

  “But the police say Hugh killed himself, shot himself full of heroin and drowned in three feet of water. You saw the body.”

  Her face went white. Her cigarette burned unheeded. She nodded.

  “How can you allow your son to be slandered with this ridiculous explanation of his death? It’s as if you left his body to the vultures. Doesn’t he deserve a decent burial, a peaceful rest?”

  “Spare me,” she whispered.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I loved him.”

  She lit another cigarette and proceeded to smoke it, all the while looking out the window as dusk gathered in the sky. Once she lifted a long finger to the ivory cameo at the neck of her blouse. Perhaps her husband had given it to her, perhaps, even, it had been given to her by Hugh. At length she turned her face back to me and studied me for a long time. I did not avoid her eyes but looked back into them.

  “You loved him,” she said, at last, echoing me. “I told you once I didn’t understand that kind of love.”

  “That love differs only in expression but not quality from the love you felt for him.”

  “No,” she said. “The quality is different. Yours—it’s much finer.”

  “May I proceed with the suit?”

  She said, “All right.”

  The words fell like two smooth pebbles and clattered on the desk between us.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Paris.”

  “But I intend to catch that flight for Boston tonight. You’ll be on your own.”

  “I understand that.”

  “Yes, I imagine you do,” she said. “You strike me as someone who was born to be on his own. I know I was.” These last words were spoken with sadness, resignation. Recovering herself, she said, “I suppose you want me to sign something.”

  “No,” I said. “You’ll either be good at your word or you won’t. If not, a piece of paper won’t compel you.”

  “You needn’t worry about my word. I never give it unless I intend to honor it.”

  I nodded, slightly, in acknowledgment.

  “However,” she continued, “I wish to add one condition of your employment by me. You may take your thirty percent if and when we win. In the meantime—” she dug into her bag and withdrew a leather checkbook, “you’ll need money to proceed.”

  I watched her write out a check for ten thousand dollars and lay it on the desk between us.

  “I’ll expect an accounting, of course,” she said. “If you need more money notify me at the address on the check. But do remember, Mr. Rios, while I may be well-off I’m counting on you to make me truly rich, so spend wisely.”

  “I will.”

  She rose and gathered up her things. “Now tell me, Mr. Rios, truthfully, if we do get to trial what are our chances of winning?”

  “Let me give you a legal answer,” I said. “I would say we have two chances, fat and slim.”

  She let out a low, throaty laugh that echoed in the room even after she’d left.

  The next morning I stepped up to the counter of the clerk of the superior court, wrote out a check, handed it over with a stack of papers to a young black woman, and with those actions commenced the suit of Paris versus Paris. Along with the complaint and summons, I filed a request for discovery and a restraining order against the disbursement of Robert Paris’s estate pending the outcome of this action. Simultaneously, a courier service I’d hired with some of Mrs. Paris’s money served copies of the documents upon Grayson, Graves and Miller as executors of the judge’s estate. The clerk stamped my copies of the papers and handed them back to me, wishing me a good day as she did. I thanked her and stepped out into the hall and into the glare of television cameras.

  “Sir, look this way, please,” a voice called to me. I turned to the camera. A blond man in a gray suit spoke into a microphone, explaining that I had just filed a two hundred and fifty million dollar lawsuit against the estate of Robert Paris claiming that Paris had murdered his grandson. He spoke with no particular urgency and in a normal tone of voice, but to me it was as if he was shouting his words to the world through an amplifier on the tip of the Transamerica pyramid.

  At length the blond, introducing himself as Greg Miller, turned to me and said, “Mr. Rios, why have you filed this lawsuit rather than going to the police?”

  I cleared my throat and told my story.

  When I woke the next morning the phone was already ringing. I let my answering machine take the message as I got out of bed and wandered into the kitchen to start the coffee. I caught the tail end of the message—a reporter from the L.A. Times requesting an interview.

  I’d gotten to bed at three that morning, having spent the previous twelve hours talking to reporters from newspapers and television stations from Sacramento to Bakersfield. I put on a bathrobe and stepped outside to pick up the Chronicle and the local. I’d made the front page of both. I glanced at the stories—the
y were the usual jumble of fact and fantasy but the slant was decidedly in my favor.

  I skimmed the rest of the Chronicle. On the next-to-the-last-page, in the society section, I saw a picture of John Smith. He’d attended a charitable function the night before and was shown arriving at the Fairmont. By his expression I saw that he was used to having his picture taken but not particularly tolerant of the practice. He looked away from the camera, both his eyes and his mind visibly occupied on another matter. I had a good idea of what it was.

  I folded the paper across Smith’s face and went to the window. Outside the sky was clouded over. Knots of red and yellow leaves waved back and forth in the trees like pennants. There was a lot to be done that day. Grant was expecting me for lunch where we would map out our litigation strategy. The phone messages would have to be responded to. I needed to hire a secretary and have a phone installed in my office. Abruptly, I had become a practicing lawyer. It felt good.

  I rinsed out my coffee cup and went to the bedroom where I changed into my sweats and running shoes. I stretched in the living room for a couple of minutes and then went out. It was about seven and there weren’t many other people on the road. A Chinese boy came flying by, long, skinny legs pounding the sidewalk, black hair flapping like silk at the back of his head. We nodded acknowledgment as we passed each other.

  It had been some time since I’d last run and it took longer than usual to catch my stride. I swiveled my head back and forth, trying to relax my neck. It was then that I noticed the silver Rolls.

  It was gliding a few feet behind me, too slowly and with too little sense of direction. I increased my speed and turned a corner. I looked over my shoulder, and it was still following. Suddenly, the car sped up, turned the corner ahead of me and stopped in my path. I slowed to a trot. The front passenger window was soundlessly lowered. I felt a surge of prickly heat across my chest as my blood rushed not from exertion but from fear. I stopped. The only person in the car was the driver. He was a middle-aged man with silver hair, wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie and a visored black cap. He turned his face to me and smiled.

  “Mr. Rios?” he called out. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  Cautiously, I approached the car close enough to talk without shouting.

  “How do you know who I am?”

  “Your picture’s in the papers,” he said. “Mr. Smith wonders if he could see you.”

  “John Smith?”

  The driver nodded.

  “Now?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked at him. He seemed harmless but then I couldn’t see his lower body from where I was standing.

  “And where does Mr. Smith propose we have this meeting?”

  “He’s waiting for you at the Linden Museum on the university campus.”

  “Step out of the car, please, and come around to my side.”

  “Sir?”

  “Please.”

  I heard him sigh as he opened the door and got out. When he came around I told him to turn his back to me, put his hands on the top of the car, and spread his legs.

  “Is this really necessary?” he asked as I patted him down for weapons.

  “Don’t take it personally,” I replied, “but the last time I got into a small enclosed space with one of Mr. Smith’s employees he pulled a gun on me.”

  “I’m not armed,” the driver replied.

  “So I see,” I said, turning him around by the shoulders. “On the other hand you’ve got twenty pounds over me and it feels like muscle. Do you know where you are now in relation to the museum?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked into the car and saw the key was in the ignition. “Then you won’t mind walking there.”

  “Come now, Mr. Rios—” he began.

  “Look,” I said. “I’ll drive myself to the museum alone, or I won’t go at all. Understood?”

  After a moment’s pause, he said, “Understood. But be careful with the car.”

  “I hear they drive themselves,” I said, getting into the driver’s seat.

  I calculated that it would take the driver at least a half hour to walk back to campus. Smith, or whoever had dispatched him, was probably not even certain I could be lured to the museum, much less at a fixed time, but he would begin to get nervous if too much time passed without word from the driver. I could cover the distance to the campus in about ten minutes. This gave me, I decided, about fifteen minutes of dead time before anyone got jittery. Fifteen minutes was more than enough time for the plan that now suggested itself to me.

  I made a stop. When I started up again, ten minutes later, I noticed the white van a car-length behind me. I began to whistle. The van’s lights flickered on and off. I relaxed.

  I drove beneath the stone arch and onto Palm Drive. Just before I reached the oval lawn that fronted the Old Quad I turned off a rickety little side street called Museum Way. When I looked in my mirror, the van was gone. I followed the road for a few hundred yards until it ended, abruptly, at the voluminous steps of a sandstone building, the Grover Linden Museum of Fine Art. I parked the car and got out.

  The edifice, reputedly inspired by St. Peter’s, consisted of a domed central building and two wings jutting off on each side at a slight angle. As a law student, I had sometimes come here to study since it was as deserted a spot on campus as existed. It was deserted now as I made my way up the steps to where a uniformed university security guard stood. Behind him, the museum’s hours were posted on the door and indicated, quite clearly, that the museum was closed on Tuesdays. Today was Tuesday.

  “Mr. Rios?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Go right in, sir. Mr. Smith is up on the second floor in the family gallery. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes.”

  The monster was surprisingly graceful inside. Sunlight poured into the massive foyer from a glass dome in the ceiling. A beautiful staircase led up from the center of the foyer to the second floor. Walkways on that floor connected the right and left wings of the museum. The staircase and interior walls were white marble, the banisters of the staircase were polished oak and the railings were bronze. All that glare of white and polished surfaces made me feel that I was inside a wedding cake.

  I started up the stairs to the second floor, got to the top and turned right. Above the entrance to the gallery at my right were chiseled the words “the Linden Family Collection.” On each side of that entrance stood an armed security guard. They weren’t wearing the university’s uniforms. I stepped past them into the room.

  The family gallery was a long and narrow rectangular room. Along one of the long walls were six tall windows looking out over a garden. Along the other were paintings of the various buildings of the university as they existed on the day the university opened its doors for business. There were also a dozen standing glass cases that displayed such memorabilia as Grover Linden’s eyeglasses, Mrs. Linden’s rosary and a collection of dolls belonging to the Linden’s only daughter.

  I strolled past these treasures toward the end of the room. There, alone on the wall, hung the only well-known work in the room, a six foot portrait of Grover Linden himself painted by John Singer Sargent. Beneath it, on a wooden bench, sat an old man, John Smith.

  There was no one else in the room and the only noise was the soft squish of my running shoes as I walked across the marble floor. Smith rose as he saw me approach. At six foot four he had five inches over me but was thin and frail-looking. The tremulous light that fell across his face washed it of all color. Even his eyes were faded and strangely lifeless as if they’d already closed on the world. He extended his hand to me. His grip was loose and perfunctory and the hand itself skeletal and cold. And yet, even that touch conveyed authority. He sat down again and motioned me to sit beside him. I did. The two guards at the other end of the room moved to just inside the gallery. I felt their eyes on us.

  “Thank you for coming,” Smith said in a surprisingly firm voice. He elongated hi
s vowels in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt, I noticed; the accent of wealth from an earlier time.

  “You’re welcome. Though I must say this is an odd meeting place.”

  “My lawyers,” he said, “advised me not to speak to you at all, since it’s likely that I’ll become involved in this lawsuit of yours, but I had to talk to you.”

  “So we’re hiding from your lawyers?”

  “Exactly,” he replied. We watched dust motes fall through the air. “You know I haven’t been to this museum since it was dedicated sixty years ago. Of course I was just a boy then. But for years I dreamed about this portrait of my grandfather.”

  “Is it a fair likeness?”

  “It errs on the side of tact,” he said, smiling a little. He cleared his throat with a murmur. “Now, Mr. Rios, perhaps we can discuss our business.”

  “Which is?”

  “This—lawsuit.” He looked at me and said, “What will it cost me to persuade you to drop it?”

  “Well, to begin with, an explanation of why you would make such a request.”

  “My family’s good name,” he said.

  “Robert Paris was a member of your family by marriage only,” I said, “and, from what I understand, no friend of yours. Additionally, my information is that he was responsible not only for the murder of Hugh Paris but also your sister, Christina, and your nephew, Jeremy.”

  “Your information,” Smith said with a trace of contempt. “Are you so sure your information is correct?”

  “I’m positive of it. Aren’t you?”

  “As to my sister and nephew,” he said, rising, “yes. As to Hugh,” he shrugged, slightly, and moved toward a window. I rose and followed him over.

  “How long have you known about Christina and Jeremy?” I asked.

  “Twenty years,” he replied. “John Howard sought me out after they were killed and brought me the wills. I had some of my men conduct an investigation of the accident and the subsequent coroner’s inquest. They established that the accident had been arranged and the inquest rigged for the purpose of a finding of simultaneous death. It wasn’t difficult, Robert was inept as a murderer and left a trail of evidence that would have sent him to the gas chamber but the evidence was scattered through half a dozen police jurisdictions and the police were even more inept than he.”