Generous Death

by Nancy Pickard

  I Indicated a chair beside my desk, after I’d stalled the outer office by telling Faye and Marvin I’d talk to them about Minnie later.

  “A little more graciously if you please, my love.” He crossed his athletic legs and lit a cigarette—not one of the French ones whose smell he knows I abhor. At least he knew better than to push me that far that morning. He said, “Derek called me and asked for a ride to work. His car won’t start. So I thought I’d drop by and say hello to dear sweet Jenny.”

  He smiled ingratiatingly.

  “Must we be flip?” I was fast running out of patience and time. “I have a startling idea: Let’s address whatever it is that’s on your puerile mind and get it over with. And let’s do it now.”

  He wasn’t offended; as long as you didn’t insult or threaten his museum, it was impossible to hurt Simon’s feelings. “I want to know where the Martha Paul stands with The Foundation,” he said bluntly, getting down to the brassiest of tacks. “I want to know how these murders affect me.”

  “Minnie’s not dead,” I said angrily.

  “Yet.”

  “Oh, Simon.” I put my elbows on my desk and hung my chin in my palms and felt forlorn. “You think she’s going to die, too?”

  His shrug was a gesture of helplessness.

  “It sounds like it, Jen, although I can’t fathom who’d want to kill a terrific old gal like Minnie. Do they know who did it?”

  “Nope, except it must have been the same monster who killed Arnie and Moshe and Mrs. Hatch. They’ve got Minnie under armed guard at the hospital to make sure he doesn’t get a second chance at her.”

  “Armed guard?” Both his complexion and his sangfroid faded all at once. “This can’t be real life! This can’t really be happening to people we know!” He shrugged again, but it had an air of depression about it now. “Hey listen, I’m sorry I was such a jerk this morning. But I’m upset, too, you know. I don’t know how to handle it. I mean how do you handle murder, for Christ’s sake? So I concentrate on the one thing I do know—talk to me about my museum, Jenny love.”

  “You want to know where you stand, Simon? You stand in a big, fat, deep hole that I’m going to try to get you out of. Here, my friend, is how it is…” I straightened the papers on my desk as I quickly gathered my thoughts.

  “If Arnie’s new will stands up in court, The Foundation will not get any of the $8 million. If we go to court and challenge the will and win, we might get it all… but more likely, we’ll only get some of it. If we get any of the money, we’ll abide by the terms of the old will and invest the money and distribute the earnings to you. Are you with me so far?”

  He nodded, deadly serious now that we were talking about his life’s blood.

  I continued: “If we go to court and lose, you might as well pretend that $8 million never existed. You won’t see a penny of it unless Ginger Culverson falls in love with you or the museum.”

  “Oh well, then there’s still hope.” He managed a grin.

  “Humility, thy name is Simon Church,” I said. “Okay, that explains the Culverson bequest. Now for Moshe Cohen: The money he left to The Foundation will be funneled to the theater and some Jewish organizations. You gain only because The Foundation as a whole gains. Do you understand why that is?”

  “Don’t be condescending, love,” he smiled. And then, robot-like, he recited, “When-you-add-funds-to-the-general-assets-of-The-Foundation-you-increase-your - investment - capabilities - and - that - benefits - every - charity - on - your - list - because - the - more - money - you - mate - the - more - you - have - to - give - away - to - beggars - like - me.”

  I had to laugh.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Okay.” He leaned forward in thought. “That’s clear even to my right-brained artistic mind. As The Foundation goes, so goes the Martha Paul.”

  “Well, sort of,” I semi-agreed. “That’s true as long as we continue to be your principal source of funding, which I suppose we will unless these murders kill us, too.”

  “Is that a possibility?” He looked a little wild. “You don’t mean it.”

  “I mean it, this publicity is doing us no good at all. But let’s talk about Florence Hatch and her will. Mr. Ottilini says she finally did get around to writing one—just the week before her death, as a matter of fact. She left some money outright to the Welcome Home for Girls and some to The Foundation so we could found other treatment centers in addition to continuing to support the Home. Again, you only benefit indirectly if at all.”

  “Shit, I lose again.”

  “I wish you’d at least use French obscenities, Simon.” I smiled. “You’d fool some of the people some of the time into thinking you’re cultured.”

  “Fou of the dog,” he said and laughed.

  “As to Minnie,” I concluded, “she is not going to die, please God. But when the day comes—years from now—that she does, half of her estate will come to The Foundation and the other half will go to her church.”

  “How will you use the money, darling Jenny?”

  “It’s unrestricted funds, dear Simon, which means she trusts us to use our discretion and spend it as we see fit.”

  “Would you see fit to spend it on me?”

  I smiled. “I can’t speak for my trustees, but I think you can be fairly sure you’d get your share, Simon. We’ve talked about Minnie’s will before this, haven’t we? I thought you already knew where you stood with the Big Five.”

  “I thought I knew where I stood with Arnold P. Culverson,” he said bitterly. “Since then, I don’t take anything for granted.” He checked his watch and abruptly stood up. “Thanks, Jenny love. As long as I’m already on the Titanic, I like to know how soon it’s going down.”

  “Are you on budget this quarter, Simon?”

  “Surely you jest. As you know perfectly well, my budget is an exercise in wishful thinking. We’re going under, my dear. I needed that money from Arnie, bad.”

  “But he might have lived for several more years, Simon. You still wouldn’t have got his money as soon as you really need it.”

  “He wouldn’t have let us drown.”

  “He as good as did, Simon.”

  Despair crossed the museum director’s strong, mobile features. He made one of his silent, sudden exits, leaving me alone with my own unhappy thoughts.

  Chapter 23

  Before I could follow him out the door to talk to my staff, the phone in my office buzzed and presented me with a complication I had stupidly failed to foresee.

  “I’ve been worried sick about you.” It was Michael. His voice had that quality that mothers get in their voices when they’re glad their child is home safe, but they could kill him for having worried them so.

  “You didn’t answer your phone,” he said accusingly. “I called and called last night. I even drove by and rang the doorbell, but the house was dark. You weren’t there this morning either.”

  I dodged the obvious if unspoken question.

  “Oh, Michael,” I said, “I’m sorry you’ve been concerned. It just didn’t occur to me that you might call after you left last night. But I’m fine, really, I’m perfectly all right.”

  “People are getting murdered left and right in this town and you disappear!” He wasn’t through being aggrieved. “What was I supposed to think? Of course I was worried!”

  “Of course you were,” I said soothingly. “I would have felt just the same way. And I’d have been furious at you for putting me through such a bad night.”

  That mollified him a bit.

  “Damn right,” he said, but more mildly. “I was so worried I almost called the police.”

  I gathered my courage and asked the most leading question of all.

  “Why,” I said, “didn’t you?”

  A long pause.

  “Because,” he said, “I would have felt pretty embarrassed to find out the police already knew where you were. I suppose you get my drift?”

  “Got it.”


  “Well?”

  “I’m trying to figure out if I think you have a right to ask that question and if I have an obligation to answer it.”

  “You have an irritatingly legalistic mind, Jennifer. Right now, I’d rather you had a merciful heart.”

  “Then the answer is yes,” I said quickly, and got it over with. “Yes, I spent the night with Geof.”

  “Thank you,” he said, without irony, and my heart ached. “One of the things I’ll always love about you is your honesty, brutal though it sometimes is. You’ve spoiled me for other women, Swede.”

  It sounded like a farewell. For him, emotionally, it probably was. And I—perverse creature—felt suddenly lonely and afraid to lose him.

  I didn’t say so. Sometimes the hardest cruelty is to show a temporary mercy that seems to offer hope for a future that cannot be.

  We said a few trivial things, promised to get together soon, said careful and gentle goodbyes and hung up. I sat with my hand on the phone and consoled myself with the thought that it had to happen sometime, if not with Geof then with another man. Unfortunately, that same thought was probably no consolation at all to Michael.

  I buzzed Faye and asked her to call the staff into my office. She would say I was the bigger fool; I wasn’t so sure she’d be wrong.

  Faye was crying and Marvin, the controller, looked as if he’d like to. Seeing them, and Derek, seated in a half circle around my desk brought home to me as nothing else had the larger context of the tragedies.

  I saw it clearly in Faye’s tears.

  “Poor, poor Mrs. Mimbs,” she said. And, “What is the world coming to?” And, “I’m so frightened. Everybody I know is just so frightened.”

  They weren’t aware of any threat to me, and I didn’t fuel their fears by telling them. Things were bad enough without their knowing their boss was next on the list.

  “What do the police say, Jennifer?” That was Derek, without a hint in his voice or face that he knew I had unique reasons to be privy to police knowledge. He said, “Can we believe what we read, in the papers?”

  “I think so,” I said. Then I added cautiously, “Although I’d imagine they’re not telling us everything they know.”

  “What do they know?” That was Marv, sitting as straight and precise as the long columns of figures he loved. He spoke rapidly and enunciated every consonant, so his sentences had the efficient, staccato sound of an adding machine.

  “Well…” I started to review the depressing situation, but stopped myself when I saw the outer door open. “Here comes the man who can tell you better than I.” I raised my voice so the newcomer could hear me. “Come in, Mr. Mason. We’re having a staff meeting. Pull up a chair, if you like.”

  His inexpressive face made it impossible to tell if he ever liked anything, but he did place a chair just behind and to my left, neatly usurping the position of authority in the room. It occurred to me that I might have underestimated him. I wheeled my chair around to face him. He might be young, but he must not be a total fool, or Geof wouldn’t have sent him out alone.

  “We’re worried, Mr. Mason,” I said, “and scared. We’d like to know what’s going on. Can you tell us?”

  He didn’t like that, though I hadn’t been peremptory. Evidently he only asked direct questions; he didn’t answer them. I’d be more devious next time.

  “What’s the Big Five?” he said abruptly, and it was then I decided he was a fool after all. When I heard three separate exclamations of understanding and horror behind me, I very nearly told him so.

  “No!” Faye actually stood up and leaned her tense white fingers on my desk. “Oh no, Jenny!”

  Marv clacked his tongue several times, a sure sign of his distress and consternation.

  “You should be in the theater, Mr. Mason,” I said acidly. “You have quite a little knack for the dramatic moment.”

  “I hear you have some little talents yourself, Ms. Cain,” he, unbelievably, said.

  Derek, bless his irreverent heart, laughed at that and winked at me to remind me the man was an idiot. I smiled sweetly and said, “Why thank you, that’s very flattering and nice of you to say so. Now what is it you’d like us to tell you about the Big Five? If you already know enough to call it that, I’m surprised you don’t know the rest as well.”

  “I like to hear things firsthand,” he said, somehow managing to insinuate double meanings even into that simple sentence. “Who are the Big Five?”

  “Moshe Cohen, Arnie Culverson, Minnie Mimbs and Florence Hatch,” I said.

  He waited.

  “And I.”

  “Why’d you call them the Big Five?”

  “Of all the potential donors to The Foundation, they’re—they were, are—the ones from whom we’re most likely to get generous bequests.” Verb tenses were getting to be distressingly confusing.

  “They’d promised to give money to The Foundation?”

  “Yes,” I said, “or else they’d dropped strong hints to that effect.”

  “How much money?”

  “We were supposed to get $8 million from Arnie Culverson,” I said. “That was the whole of his estate.”

  “Nothing for his family.”

  “No. You already know this, don’t you?”

  “But the wife is independently wealthy, so she didn’t need his money anyhow,” Mason asserted. I’ve always disliked people who refer to the female spouse as “the wife,” like “the table” or “the chair.”

  “Need is a relative term, Mr. Mason,” I said. “What you or I need and what Marvalene Culverson thinks she needs might be two very different things.”

  “Are you accusing Mrs. Culverson of something?”

  “No.” I could be every bit as terse as he. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the resentful expressions on Faye’s and Marvin’s faces; they didn’t like this grilling of their director. Derek wore that deceptively amused look that conceals contempt. He liked it when I said, “It would be stupid to accuse Marvalene of killing Arnie, when she didn’t stand to gain a penny from his death.”

  “But she didn’t want you to get the money either,” the detective pointed out in his nasty, personal way.

  “I, as I have said before, was never going to get the money. But you’re right in thinking that she didn’t want The Foundation to inherit. At least that’s the impression I always got from Arnie. I never heard it directly from her, so I don’t actually know for a fact that she gave a damn.”

  “What about Cohen?” Mason said.

  “What about Mr. Cohen?” That was Faye. I smiled at her and answered the cop’s implied question.

  “Moshe left The Foundation a half million in his will,” I said.

  “Why’d he leave you the dough?”

  “He wanted to provide financial support for the new theater,” I explained. “But he didn’t want to establish a separate trust to do it. Establishing a trust is an expensive and complicated procedure, and he didn’t see any need to go through that process when he could use the mechanism of The Foundation.”

  Marv cleared his throat.

  “Yes, Marv?” I said, knowing he wanted to add something to my explanation.

  “There’s the matter of ROI,” Marv said.

  “ROI,” Mason repeated stiffly. He didn’t like being presented with terms he’d never heard of.

  “Return on investment,” Marv explained patiently. “Mr. Cohen was a successful businessman. He knew he’d get a better ROI from The Foundation than from a separate trust set up just for the theater.”

  “Why?” Grudgingly.

  “Because whenever someone leaves money to The Foundation, they are, in effect, adding their pile to a larger pot. We, in turn, invest the whole pot in stocks, bonds, securities or whatever, in the hope of earning a good return on the investment. Obviously, the larger the pot we invest, the greater our potential for a larger return. The smaller the pot, the smaller the return.”

  “Obviously,” Mason said nastily.

 
; “Common sense,” Marv agreed pleasantly. “So Mr. Cohen knew his money would make more money if he placed it with The Foundation. And that would mean there’d be more money to spend on his theater.”

  “Mrs. Mimbs and Mrs. Hatch?” Mason was eager to get out of the unfamiliar realms of high finance and back to motive and murder.

  I told him about Mrs. Hatch’s will and about Minnie’s.

  “They didn’t like their husbands?” Given his choice among several possible conclusions, I felt sure Mason would always leap to the most unpleasant one.

  “They loved their husbands,” I said politely. “But those men have plenty of money of their own, so the women could give theirs away.”

  “You do-gooders.” Mason’s face finally showed an emotion—disgust. “You sit up here in your ivory tower dispensing largesse and you think everyone’s innocent and the world’s just clean and wonderful.”

  “Dispensing largesse,” Derek murmured. “Such big words for such a …”

  “Derek.” I cut him short, though of course Mason got the insulting point.

  “It is precisely because the world is not clean and innocent that The Foundation exists,” I said calmly.

  “So what will you clean up with your money, Ms. Cain?” His tone was as full of envy as anybody’s I’d ever heard. Finally we’d got to the core of his resentment.

  “My bequest is designated as unrestricted funds,” I said. “That means The Foundation can apply the money however or wherever it wants.”

  “How much?”

  “Right now, I suppose my estate is worth about one million.”

  “Where’d you get the loot?”

  “Rich grandparents.”

  “What’s it in?”

  “You mean, what are my holdings? Blue chips, mostly. But I don’t have control over them yet They’re held in a revocable trust that pays me quarterly dividends. When I turn thirty, I’ll be able to take over the administration of the trust and manage my own investment portfolio.”

  “When will you be thirty?”

  “Sunday.”

  “This Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh, Jennifer.” Derek suddenly had an odd, hesitant look about him. “Sorry to ask this, but, uh, what if you died between now and Sunday? Would The Foundation still get the money?”