The Now-And-Then Detective

by William Wells

  He leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, was silent for a moment, and then said, “Okay, Jack, stay on the case. But be careful out there.”

  I recognized that as a reference to one of my favorite cop TV shows, Hill Street Blues. Actor Michael Conrad, playing Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, always said, “Let’s be careful out there,” at the end of every roll call. When I was a rookie patrolman, our sergeant always said, “Now get the fuck out of my face and don’t get your dicks caught in a wringer.”

  Equally effective. We had some female officers, but they knew what he meant.

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  15.

  Co-conspirators

  Nelson Lowry, Libby Leverton, and June Dumont, who were, as far as they knew at that time, the only living heirs to the vast Wilberforce family fortune of Chicago, were seated around a long mahogany table, so highly polished that their visages were reflected on its gleaming surface, in the conference room of the Washington, DC, law firm of Chesney, Hartson, Dumont & Hamilton on Constitution Avenue. Alan Dumont was the group’s host, and Libby Leverton’s husband, Stewart, was in attendance as well.

  Yellow legal pads and gold Cross pens were placed on the table before each of them. Bottles of chilled San Pellegrino water rested on sterling silver-and-cork coasters.

  “Does anyone recall when they last saw Uncle Henry?” June asked. “Was it before or after Miriam died?”

  “I saw him at Aunt Miriam’s funeral in Lake Forest, maybe ten years ago,” Libby said. “You and Scooter weren’t there.”

  “I had some sort of conflict,” June said.

  “Me too,” Scooter said.

  “You probably had a hangover, Scooter,” June said. “So, for me, it was at your daughter’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard, Libby, whenever that was.”

  “Twelve years ago,” Libby told her.

  “I had a conflict for that too,” Scooter said. “Frankly, I can’t remember the last time I saw our uncle.”

  Libby was turned out that afternoon in an ice blue Vera Wang dress and black Jimmy Choo peep-toe heels. June had chosen a charcoal wool three-button Valentino pants suit, a rose-gold Cartier Love necklace with matching earrings, and red eel-skin Dolce & Gabbana sling-back pumps. Scooter, looking like a yacht club commodore, wore a double-breasted, brass-buttoned navy-blue blazer, pleated white linen slacks, a pink oxford-cloth shirt with button-down collar, open at the neck, and Top-Siders, worn sockless, as was de rigueur for that sort of outfit.

  Alan rose from his chair at the end of the table and stood gazing through the conference room’s wall of windows at the National Mall. This vista always pleased him.

  The family was gathered in the conference room because Libby had attended Vassar with a woman named Trish Conroy, who was married to the CEO of United Airlines, which was headquartered in Chicago. Libby and Trish had remained close friends after graduation. One week earlier, Trish had e-mailed a link to a Chicago Tribune article about Henry Wilberforce to Libby, with a message: “Libby, I thought you should know what your Uncle Henry is up to these days.” The article described a number of extremely generous gifts of money and personal property Henry had been bestowing upon people and institutions in recent months, in addition to the planned giving of the Henry and Miriam Wilberforce Foundation.

  Libby showed the e-mail to Stewart and then, on his advice, forwarded it to Scooter and June, and now, here they all sat, their sole agenda being to figure out what if anything might be done to stop their uncle from squandering any more of his fortune, which, they assumed, would be their fortune when Henry passed away.

  Alan turned from the window at the sound of a secretary entering the conference room. She was pushing a cart bearing coffee, tea, soft drinks, orange juice, bottles of chilled San Pellegrino, croissants, bagels, a plate of lox with cream cheese and chopped red onions and capers, and fruit. The ceramic coffee mugs bore the name of the firm; the teacups and saucers were made of bone china with a royal Ming tree pattern.

  “Please, help yourselves,” Alan said as he shot a cuff to check his Patek Philippe. It was three fifteen, fifteen minutes past the designated starting time of this meeting. “We’ll wait a few more minutes for Ray Gillis to arrive, then we’ll begin with or without him,” Alan told them.

  “For a retainer of ten K a month, plus expenses, this Gillis person shouldn’t keep us waiting,” Scooter said testily.

  “I second that,” Libby added, clicking her long red nails on the tabletop to display her annoyance.

  “What’ve you got for us, Alan?” Scooter asked. He’d been doodling smiley faces and rows of second-grade-penmanship circles on his note pad. “Any ideas, or are we just here for a familial circle jerk?”

  “As you’ll see, Alan has a very good idea,” June said.

  June had been raised on Philadelphia’s Main Line, where the term “circle jerk” had never come up during social gatherings. She wasn’t entirely certain what it meant, but coming from Scooter Lowry, she was reasonably certain she didn’t want to know.

  Alan checked his watch again, tapped a manila file folder lying before him on the table, and said, “Mr. Gillis has given me a comprehensive report. I’ll summarize it for you while we’re waiting, and then …”

  The same secretary who’d brought in the snack cart opened the conference room door and announced, “Mr. Gillis is here, Mr. Dumont. I have him in the reception area.”

  “Show him in, Cindy,” Alan told her. Then to the group: “I think you’ll agree our man has earned his fee.”

  Cindy reappeared a moment later with Ray Gillis in tow. Libby leaned toward Scooter and said, “Our man seems to be mainly interested in investigating young Cindy’s ass.”

  “Can’t blame him for that,” Scooter said as he watched Cindy turn and exit the conference room.

  Ray Gillis was indeed observing the ebb and flow of Cindy’s buttocks moving beneath the tight fabric of her pink linen skirt, which made him momentarily forget where he was, and why.

  Alan rose to greet Gillis with a handshake, then gestured him toward the opposite end of the conference table where a laptop computer was connected to a projection device aimed toward the far wall. Alan picked up a remote control from the credenza, pushed a button, and a white screen descended from the ceiling.

  “This is Mr. Raymond Gillis,” Alan said as Gillis settled in before the computer, withdrawing a flash drive designed to look like a Swiss Army knife from his jacket pocket. “He has undertaken a number of assignments for our firm in the past. We’ve always been pleased with the results.”

  “Good to meetcha, you all,” Gillis said as he inserted the flash drive into a USB port on the side of the computer. The cousins did not return the greeting; they would wait to see how pleased they were to meet him.

  “I’ll use visual aids in my presentation,” Gillis said as he moved the mouse on the tabletop and double-clicked it. As he did, a large color photograph appeared on the screen. It showed Henry Wilberforce, wearing yellow pajamas, a white terrycloth robe, and a Panama hat, watching workmen operating heavy equipment at a beach. A bulldozer was moving a pile of sand, and a crane was lowering a boulder onto a retaining wall jutting out into the water. The foreground of the photo was out of focus, as if the photographer was using a long lens.

  “I took this April 9th at the Lake Forest town beach,” Gillis told them.

  “So Henry’s watching some guys working at the beach,” Libby interjected. “That’s important because?”

  “You’re seeing a beach improvement project,” Gillis explained. “Price tag, ten million six for reinforcing the seawall, resanding the beach, building a new pavilion, expanding the parking lot, and purchasing a fleet of eight-foot sailing dinghies for a children’s instructional program. Funding for the project had been cut from the city budget for the past three years. Then Mr. Wilberforce became involved.”

  Scooter, a sailor, was impressed with Gillis’s attention to detail: eight-foot dinghies, not
just little sailboats. “He’s fucking killing us,” he sighed, slumping back in his chair.

  “This is more serious than I thought,” Libby whined.

  “Copy that,” Stewart added. “Something must be done. And soon.”

  Gillis moved the mouse, and another photo appeared: Henry standing in an art gallery with a well-tailored woman in her seventies. They were looking at a large, framed oil painting showing a bed of purple flowers. Henry this time wore the uniform of a Pullman train conductor. His hand was on the woman’s shoulder.

  “Maybe Uncle Henry’s getting some nooky,” Scooter joked, adding, “I’d say that babe’s sell-by date expired some time during the Eisenhower Administration.”

  “Mr. Wilberforce is with Elizabeth Broomfield in a gallery at the Lake Forest Art Museum,” Gillis told them. “She is the widow of Elias Broomfield, who founded the Broomfield Iron and Steel Company of Gary, Indiana. She’s chairwoman of the museum’s acquisition committee.”

  Libby said, “I’m not liking the word ‘acquisition’ in her title.”

  “The painting is by Vincent van Gogh,” Gillis said. “It recently sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for $42.5 million to an anonymous buyer, presumably your Uncle Henry, who then donated it to the Lake Forest museum. It was their biggest gift ever.”

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Scooter shouted. “He buys a painting like that for a small-town museum? What’d they have before, a few Audubon prints and some watercolors by locals who always wanted to paint? Now he’ll have to buy them an alarm system too! Maybe hire a guard!” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, burying his face in his hands. “It’s just not right, giving all that money to … to people who aren’t even family.”

  Libby stood, went to the cart, picked up a croissant, and took a bite. Then, remembering her no-calorie diet, which basically required her to live on air like an orchid, she turned her back to the conference table and spit the bite into a cloth napkin. She took a Diet Coke and huffed, “Well, if Uncle Henry runs out of money, I’m not taking him in.”

  Next came a series of photos showing Henry entering a restaurant, getting into the back seat of a chauffeured limousine, reclining on a lounge chair on his back patio while reading a book, and flying a kite in a park with a man dressed in butler’s mufti standing beside him. In the photos, Henry was dressed as an equestrian with jodhpurs and riding boots, a World War I-era aviator with leather helmet and goggles, a cowboy with chaps and ten-gallon hat, and Santa Claus.

  “As distressing as all this … generosity … is, and as loony as he looks, is there anything actually actionable here?” Libby asked. “I mean, the man can give his money to anyone he wants, can’t he? And dress up however he likes?”

  “Maybe we should just have him whacked,” Scooter said, looking at Gillis.

  “Try to be somewhat relevant,” Libby said. “This isn’t an episode of The Sopranos.”

  “Continue, please,” Alan told Gillis.

  “People say that Henry often doesn’t know what decade it is,” Gillis said. “And that he talks to an imaginary dog named Buddy.”

  “I remember that he told me once that he had a golden retriever named Buddy when he was younger,” Libby said. “He showed me pictures. That dog must have died by now.”

  “If I may continue,” Gillis said.

  “Go on,” Alan told him.

  Next in the slide show was a photo of Henry riding in the back seat of a Lake Forest police cruiser. He was smiling broadly.

  “He got arrested?” June asked hopefully.

  “No,” Gillis answered. “He takes walks and sometimes gets lost. The local police department watches out for him and takes him home. I know this because a sergeant on the force used to be a Chicago cop when I was.”

  Alan held up the file folder. “We have copies of Henry’s tax returns for the past seven years, his credit card and bank statements, and telephone bills.”

  Scooter indicated Gillis, still seated at the end of the conference table, with a nod of his head, and said, “Man, I hope you never sic this guy on me.”

  “How do you know we haven’t?” June asked.

  Scooter looked at her.

  “Kidding,” June added, after a pause just long enough to make her cousin wonder.

  “What we don’t have yet are Henry’s medical records,” Gillis told them. “I’m working on that. So I can’t tell you at this point what has caused this behavior. Maybe the onset of Alzheimer’s, or a brain tumor, or a stroke … Or maybe he just read his Bible, you know, the part about Jesus saying it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven.”

  Scooter held out his palms in a pastoral gesture. “Let us pray that disease and not the New Testament is responsible for Uncle Henry’s attempt to lead us all into the Land of Abject Poverty. Not that any of us needs the money, of course. But I hate to see it being pissed away, and you know what they say about never being too rich.”

  “Amen to that,” Libby said. Stewart nodded his agreement.

  Scooter looked at the others and wondered: Or does one of you actually need our uncle’s dough?

  His report complete, Gillis ejected the flash drive, and stood. As he did, his suit coat flapped open, revealing a shoulder holster holding a big black pistol.

  “Excellent job, as always,” Alan told Gillis. “Now, if you will excuse us …”

  When Gillis was gone, Scooter asked Alan, “What’re the next steps, counselor?”

  “Securities law is my area of expertise,” Alan answered. “I’ve consulted with one of my partners who does estate planning, wills, and trusts and such, as well as other kinds of family matters relevant to our situation. Giving him a hypothetical fact situation, of course.”

  “Involving a hypothetical old fart who is hypothetically buttfucking his hypothetical heirs,” Scooter said, looking as distressed as he was.

  Ignoring this, Alan continued: “He explained that there is well-established precedent for a family member to petition a probate court for a mental competency hearing. Your petition must meet a threshold of behavior calling into question the person’s ability to function on his own. If the petition is approved, a judge or jury reviews the evidence, hears testimony, and decides whether or not the court should appoint a legal guardian. Often the guardian is a family member.”

  He paused, then added, “It wouldn’t be easy. There is a fine line between incompetent and eccentric. We need more than colorful costumes and largesse. There must be evidence of a substantial loss of mental faculties, whatever the cause, to the extent that Henry is clearly unable to take care of himself. And possibly that others are taking advantage of him.”

  “People like us, you mean,” Libby said.

  Alan shot her a disapproving look and said, “An additional complication is that Henry has a household staff that looks after him. We’d have to show that, even with this assistance, he’s not able to function on his own.”

  “And how exactly do we obtain that sort of evidence?” Stewart asked.

  Alan walked to the credenza and poured a cup of coffee. “Ray Gillis is very skilled at that sort of thing,” he told them. “He assures me that he can go deeper with his investigation, using covert means we don’t need to know about, if we tell him to.”

  “So moved,” June said.

  “Seconded,” Stewart said.

  The vote was unanimous.

  “So what’s the timing for all this?” June asked.

  “Raymond estimates that his investigation will take two or three months to do it right, possibly longer,” Alan answered. “After that, one or all of you would file the probate court petition. My partner said that, depending upon the court’s backlog, it could take anywhere from six months to a year to get a decision.”

  “By which time Uncle Henry will have used our money to solve world hunger, as well as the problem of clean drinking water on the African continent, and to put out the wildfires in the Amazon rain fore
st,” Scooter said. “Bill and Melinda Gates will be happy for the help.”

  “Perhaps we need a timelier solution,” Stewart said, and everyone looked at him. He paused and added, “I’ll have to think about what that might be.”

  “I suggest that we direct Raymond to begin his research, and go from there,” Alan told the group.

  Everyone agreed, and the meeting was adjourned.

  They all stood to leave. Scooter picked up the unused Cross pen in front of him and put it into his jacket pocket. Then he picked up Libby’s, who’d been sitting beside him, and put that one in his pocket too.

  “Did you notice that Mr. Gillis was packing heat?” Scooter asked Libby and Stewart as they rode the elevator down to the lobby.

  Stewart had noticed.

  “Maybe Alan has a backup plan in mind, in case the probate court thing doesn’t work out,” Scooter commented as the elevator doors opened on the ground floor. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if Uncle Henry had an accident.”

  “Whatever works,” Stewart said as he and Libby stepped out of the elevator ahead of Scooter, her heels clicking on the marble floor of the lobby.

  Walking behind her, Scooter reflected that his cousin Libby still had a very nice body, thanks, he imagined, to her personal trainer, plastic surgeon, and a diet consisting largely of kale, tofu, and coconut water. Even though she was more than a decade older than he was, and family, he’d still very much enjoy playing hide-the-salami with her, given the opportunity. Scooter was nothing if not an equal-opportunity lover.

  THE PRESENT TIME

  16.

  An Unexpected Visitor

  Marisa and I were seated in my usual booth at The Drunken Parrot, having coffee and chit-chatting, when she looked up and asked, “Who’s that classy chick in the Chanel knit cardigan set, Jimmy Choo Mirren 85 soft patent leather ankle boots, wearing a string of pearls with matching earrings, Mikimoto is my guess, and carrying a Hermes Himalayan crocodile Birkin bag?”

  When it came to ladies’ fashion, Marisa knew her stuff. I looked toward the bar and saw, to my great surprise, Sam talking to a woman it took me a moment to recognize. If a woman dressed like she was had ever come into The Drunken Parrot before, I wasn’t there to see it.