by Michael Nava
“Darwinist, abolitionist, union-buster, Christian. This guy was all over the map.”
“Decidedly a complicated man,” Professor Howard said. ‘Though remember, Henry, Christianity is very much like the law. It’s not about the text, but the exegesis. Linden believed that educating an enlightened ruling class at his university would be more beneficial to the poor than simply handing out money and in that sense more Christian.”
“I don’t think the poor would have agreed,” I said.
“The poor never get a vote in these matters,” he said. “The first trustees were Linden’s daughter Alice and her husband Jeremy Smith who was also, not by coincidence, the first president of the university.”
“So President Smith only had to consult with trustee Smith and Mrs. Smith on how to spend the money.”
“Exactly,” Howard said. “Smith decided the school needed graduate programs to achieve greatness so he founded the law school, the medical school and the engineering school. Mrs. Smith was a devout Christian, so she insisted on the divinity school. They spent liberally to steal away some of the most distinguished teachers from the Ivy League by offering them unheard of remuneration. Grover Linden founded the school, but the Smiths turned it into a great institution. They inculcated this responsibility into their children, John and Christina, who in the fullness of time, succeeded their parents as trustees.”
“Judge Paris was shut out even though he was a lineal descendant by marriage to Christina?”
Howard nodded. “Remember, there can only be two trustees at any given time and direct lineal descendants are given priority over descendants by marriage. So, yes, Bob was shut out.” His eyes twinkled. “He didn’t like that. In fact, he worked very hard to persuade his wife and brother-in-law to amend the trust to add a third trustee. John refused even to consider it. That was the beginning of the bad blood between them.”
“Why did the judge push so hard to become a trustee?”
Howard raised his shaggy eyebrows in disbelief. “Are you serious, Henry?”
“Yes, what was in it for him that so important?”
“Power, Henry! The power to shape one of the world’s great universities in your own image. To found graduate schools, hire famous architects to construct iconic buildings, start great archival and artistic collections, fund groundbreaking medical research at a state of the art hospital, provide seed money for a presidential library, endow chairs and prizes and a press. All of those activities at the university have been funded by the income of the Linden Trust. Building a railroad across the continent is all fine and well but creating a great university that you have named after yourself, that’s legacy, my boy. That’s immortality. Grover Linden understood this. So did Bob. The man was a megalomaniac and it killed him to stand aside while his wife and brother played king and queen.”
“What’s the value of the trust?”
“The last time I looked, it was just north of five hundred million dollars.”
And then in a stroke, it all fell into place for me. “Wait,” I said. “That’s why the judge killed Christina and Jeremy. It wasn’t for her money. It was to replace her as trustee and to eliminate Jeremy as a rival.”
“I knew you were a smart boy,” Professor Howard said. “Go on, explain it.”
“It wasn’t enough to kill Christina because Jeremy would have succeeded her as Linden’s direct lineal descendant. He was the only one who could have. Nick Paris was insane, Hugh was a minor, which made either of one of them incompetent to succeed Christina as trustee.”
“Precisely,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me this the first time I came to see you?”
“You didn’t ask about the trust, Henry. You only asked about Christina’s will.”
“But this information provides a much stronger motive for him to have killed her and Jeremy.”
“I would agree,” Professor Howard replied, “but for this document.” He indicated the papers on the floor beside his chair. “This amendment to the trust stripped Bob of any effective authority as trustee and transferred it to John Smith.”
“If Judge Paris was a megalomaniac like you said, he would never have voluntarily agreed to this amendment.”
“Yes, so, a carrot or a stick?” Professor Howard said. “Think, Henry. What could have induced him to sign this document?”
Aaron’s words in that last phone call came back to me. You’ve got it all wrong.
“Smith knew,” I said. “Smith knew the judge killed Christina and Jeremy and he used that knowledge to blackmail the judge into signing away his power as a trustee.”
“I can’t think of any other reason why Bob would have agreed to this humiliating agreement with a man who sickened him.”
“Sickened him? Why?”
Professor Howard closed his rheumy eyes and whispered, as if fearful that his voice might carry into the next room where his nurse was knitting. “John Smith is a homosexual.”
“Yeah, I know. Hugh told me as much.”
He opened his eyes. “Hugh knew this about his great-uncle?”
“Hugh was also gay, professor.”
He stared at me. I could almost hear the gears turning in his head. “Are you a homosexual as well?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And Hugh was your—” he stopped, searching for a polite description. “Your special friend?”
“Yes, professor.”
“My word,” he said. “The times really have changed. I would never have guessed looking at you, Henry.”
“No, we don’t generally have horns and a tail.”
He laughed. “Or cloven hoofs? Don’t worry, Henry, I’m an old man who has seen enough of life to have discarded most of my biases.”
“We were talking about why the judge accepted this amendment.”
“Yes,” he said, somewhat reluctantly returning his attention to the previous subject. “Yes, well, I believe you are correct to assume John Smith blackmailed him.”
“Why didn’t he go to the police?”
“The police?” he said incredulously. “Can you imagine the sensation that would have created? Grandson of Grover Linden accuses federal judge brother-in-law of double murder of wife and son? How do you think Bob would have responded? He would have gone directly for Smith’s jugular and exposed him as a homosexual.” He permitted himself a little smile. “Which, evidently, carries more opprobrium for men of Smith’s generation and mine than it does for yours. No, rich people don’t air out their dirty linen in public. By blackmailing Bob, Smith avoided a public battle and got to exercise power over the man who had killed his sister and nephew.”
“If the judge despised Smith so much, then Smith’s evidence must have been compelling to force the judge to sign the amendment.”
Professor Howard nodded. “He must have found the proverbial smoking gun.”
“The one that Hugh was looking for when he was murdered,” I said. “Smith had it all the time. Whatever it was.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes. Finally, I stood up, gathered the papers that the professor had scattered at his feet and said, “Thank you, Professor Howard.”
“No, my boy, thank you. I haven’t had this much mental exercise in years. It’s invigorating!” He took Linden’s book off his lap and handed it to me. “Here. Grover Linden’s memoirs. Bedtime reading.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You realize,” he said, “that if what we have hypothesized is correct, then the motive you ascribed to Bob Paris for killing your friend Hugh is no longer a valid one.”
I nodded.
“So either,” he continued, finishing the thought, “Bob had another motive for killing Hugh Paris, or someone else killed Hugh.” His trembling fingers touched my hand in valediction. “And the killer may still be out there. Take care of yourself, son.”
Grover Linden’s account of receiving his first wages, age twelve, from working in a textile factory: I cannot tell you how proud I wa
s when I received my first week’s earnings. One dollar and twenty cents made by myself and given to me because I had been of some use to the world! Many millions of dollars have since passed through my hands. But the genuine satisfaction I had from that one dollar and twenty cents outweighs any subsequent pleasure in money-getting. It was the direct reward of honest, manual labor; so hard that, but for the aim and end which sanctified it, slavery might not have been too strong a term to describe it.
In light of his later business practices, the passage was profoundly ironic. He worked a six-day week, twelve-hour day with a single thirty-minute break at noon, conditions he recognized as approximating slavery. Yet he would impose upon his Chinese railroad workers conditions that were more arduous and dangerous without a second thought and starve them when they struck for the same wage as white workers. How did he justify it? Money. His little wage of one dollar and twenty cents “sanctified” the brutal work demanded of him. The tiny wage his Chinese workers earned should have, in his mind, sanctified theirs.
This was his epiphany, his road to Damascus moment—money gave meaning and purpose to life’s struggles; money was sacred.
Therefore, a life spent in pursuit of wealth was a worthy, even a holy vocation. And if, in that pursuit, lesser mortals fell behind, that was a necessary consequence of what he called “the law of competition.” “Whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race because it ensures the survival of the fittest.”
Illuminating every page of his memoirs was the simplest of truths: Grover Linden worshiped money. Money was his God and the acquisition of wealth was his religion. A cold God, a brutal religion. The memoirs, written toward the end of his life, hinted at his internal struggle between the god of money he worshipped in life and the Christian God to whom he would have to account for himself in the afterlife; the same god who had driven the money changers from his temple. In that light, his decision to give away his money felt less like philanthropy than panic as he looked for a loophole into heaven a lot wider than the eye of a needle. And then he found it: all he had to do was to arrange to give away his money posthumously. After pages and pages celebrating his business acumen and the amassing of his fortune, in the final chapters of his memoir he recast himself as “the trustee and agent for his poorer brethren,” whose duty was to distribute his wealth “in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.” The year after his memoirs were published, he founded the university.
I thought about my scholarship to his school. Did my acceptance of it and the education it provided to me implicate me in his crimes or in his salvation? Because surely I was connected to the man by the long tendrils of his money, that fortune he amassed and celebrated and then which, as he faced his mortality, terrified him. I was connected to Linden in another, more personal way too, through his descendant Hugh Paris. Hugh’s murder, his killer, and the motive for his murder was evidence that Linden’s money still dripped with blood.
I drove to the mansion at the top of Nob Hill in the rain. A maid met me at my car with an umbrella and walked me into the great hall where John Smith was waiting. He was dressed much as he had been the last time—blazer, khakis, carpet slippers. The maid took my coat. I walked down the silent hall to where Smith stood. He extended a trembling hand.
“Henry, I didn’t expect to have the pleasure of seeing you again so soon after our last meeting.”
His tone was polite but the blue eyes were calculating and wary and I read in them the unasked questions: What do you want? What will this cost me?
“Thank you for agreeing to see me,” I said.
“Come in,” he said, gesturing toward a room off the hallway. “We’ll talk.”
It was a different room than on my last visit but no less ornately decorated and furnished. The predominant color was yellow in all its shades, from lemon to gold, from carpet to drapes to upholstery, and it was filled with the same ponderous and uncomfortable Victorian furniture. A silver coffee service was set out on a marble-topped table.
“Please,” he said, indicating it. “Help yourself.”
“May I pour you a cup?”
“No, thank you. Caffeine no longer agrees with me.”
I poured coffee into a bone-china tea cup decorated with blue hibiscus flowers and a gold rim. Smith had seated himself on a cane-backed settee and patted the seat beside him.
“This is a beautiful room,” I said, stalling.
“You think so?” he replied. “My grandfather’s will specified that nothing in the house was to be changed. Other than necessary replacements and maintenance, it looks exactly the same as when he was alive. Sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a museum.”
“Surely you could live anywhere.”
“Why would I?” he said. “It’s my family’s home. Caldwell said you had something you wanted to talk to me about.”
I had worked out my speech in my head on the drive up from Linden but now, confronted with Smith in the flesh and surrounded by Grover Linden’s artifacts, I wavered. Accusing a man of murder was considerably more anxiety-producing in life than in the crime novels that Smith collected. I steeled myself with thoughts of Hugh and Aaron.
“After my last visit here,” I said, “I went to clean up the house where my friend Aaron Gold was murdered. I discovered a document he had left for me that I think his killer might have been after. It was an amendment to the trust instrument creating the Linden Trust.”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Gold was your friend, you said.”
“We were classmates at the law school. He worked for the firm that represented Judge Paris.”
“And this is where he found this document? Isn’t it impermissible for a lawyer to share his client’s confidential records?”
“It is,” I said. “But he wanted me to see this document because he thought it explained who killed Hugh.”
“We know who killed Hugh,” Smith said. “Peter Barron and Mr. Gold himself. That being the case, I would think you would be skeptical of any attempts by Mr. Gold to exonerate himself.”
He spoke with such conviction that I faltered for a moment, before saying, “Aaron was like a brother to me, sir. Whatever you and Caldwell may have cooked up to implicate him, I can’t believe he had anything to do with Hugh’s death.”
Smith leaned back slightly and I thought I saw a glint of amused interest flash across his eyes. “Cooked up, you say? Please, go on.”
“I believe Aaron was killed because he discovered who actually commissioned Barron to murder Hugh. It wasn’t Judge Paris.”
“I’m sorry but you’re not making any sense,” he said lightly. “If it wasn’t Bob, then who?”
“The man Barron worked for,” I said. “You.”
I expected his next words to be a threat or a directive to get out of his house. Instead, he laughed.
“How extraordinary! I was the only one in our family who cared for Hugh. I supported him all those years he seemed intent on destroying himself. And you think, after all that, I had him killed?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What motive could I have possibly had to injure the boy?”
“Control of the Linden Trust,” I said. “Hugh wasn’t going to expose his grandfather as a pedophile, he was going to expose him as a murderer. He was gathering evidence that Judge Paris killed his wife and son, your sister and nephew. He tried to convince you to help him, but you’d known the truth about their deaths for years. You used your knowledge to force Judge Paris to sign the amendment to the trust that gave you complete control over it. If Hugh had brought these allegations against the judge, he would have been forced to resign as trustee and Hugh would have replaced him. But Hugh wouldn’t have been bound by the amendment you forced the judge to sign. Hugh would have had authority over the trust equal to yours. You needed to stop
him. The only thing I don’t understand is why that possibility was so threatening to you.”
I had spoken in a great, clumsy gust, getting the words out before my nerve deserted me entirely. When I finished, I was perched at the edge of the settee, my hands in a fist, breathing hard, as if I’d just finished a sprint.
“What an astonishing story,” Smith said, smiling charmingly.
I was incredulous; he appeared to be enjoying this. My anger overcame my nerves. “Is this a game to you, sir?” I demanded.
The amusement went out of his eyes. “Young man,” he said, “if you haven’t already, you will soon discover that life is a game, but we are not the players. We are the pieces, moved around a board of which we see only the smallest part, a square or two, and which is beyond our comprehension.” The smile reappeared. “Do you read mysteries, Henry?”
The abrupt change of topic disconcerted me. “Uh, sometimes.”
“They’re my favorite reading,” he continued, “because mystery writers know about the game and about our pathetic attempts to control it. They understand the law of unintended consequences and the good intentions that pave the road to hell. This scenario of yours has all the elements of a really top drawer mystery.”
“Mr. Smith, do you deny that you had Hugh killed?”
“Of course, I do,” he said. “I loved Hugh. I understood Hugh. I knew what he was. What you are.”
“What you are,” I said.
“What I was perhaps, once, back when my heart still pumped warm blood. A long time ago, I assure you. I am not that thing, now. Not a protagonist like you, Henry, filled with youthful ardor and an unshakeable conviction in his own rightness. No, I’m an antagonist. An old spider in the middle of a dusty web.”