“Call Mrs. Pinchet,” he told his secretary, “and ask her if she’d be so kind as to receive me in half an hour. She’ll know what it’s about.”
Lucy Pinchet’s house, on East 80th Street, small, neat and Georgian, was as cool and exquisite as its owner’s manners. There were Victorian things in it—perhaps even ugly ones—Belter chairs and Bouguereaus—but the perfect condition of every piece produced a kind of harmony. Lucy, pale, plump and still pretty, received him with a little smile that could have meant almost anything. But it was no doubt significant that no kind of refreshment was offered.
“I’ve come about the article.”
“Of course.”
“Do you think I should sue? Or simply take an attitude of high disdain?”
“If you were to sue, what would you sue for?”
“Why, damages for libel, of course.”
“But isn’t libel the remedy for misrepresentation?”
“Certainly.”
“Then what facts does the article distort?”
Sidney paused to redeploy his forces. He even found a moment in which to wonder what he had done to unite the sex against him. Vogel, his wife and now Lucy. What was it in Sidney Claverack that turned them into termagants?
“Why, simply every fact there is! The article is a tissue of lies from start to finish. It is manifestly the product of revenge. Miss Vogel was discharged by the museum for insolence and insubordination.”
“For alleged insolence and insubordination.”
“Lucy, can you really have had the time to come to serious conclusions about that piece? It only just came out.”
“But I received it in galleys two weeks ago. The editor submitted it to Miss Vogel, and she brought it to me. I have had every opportunity to study it. And to discuss it with some of Aunt Daisy’s old friends.” She paused to smile with a deadly sweetness. Obviously she was having the time of her life. “And with my lawyers. My new lawyers. Selders and Stein. For I hardly thought it would be possible to retain your firm when you will be a defendant. One of the defendants, I should say. My brother, Tom, will be another, though he seeks to be co-plaintiff. And of course I shall ‘join,’ as I believe the legal term is, the Museum of North America and its enterprising but, I’m afraid, unscrupulous young director.”
Sidney began to feel reassurance in the prickle of combat. He summoned up a picture of a squadron of bullet-headed soldiers in brown uniform dragging a stripped Lucy down to a cold dripping cellar to machine-gun her bloated body against a wall.
There was no hint of this, however, in what he smoothly said: “If you think you can upset Cousin Daisy’s will, let me remind you that it has been duly admitted to probate pursuant to your own duly executed waiver and consent.”
“I am of course aware, Sidney, that with a firm as able as yours, every form has been scrupulously followed. The bone that I am picking with you is with your morals, not your mind. You will shortly be served with a summons and complaint instructing you that I intend to prove a conspiracy between you and Tom and your director to take advantage of Aunt Daisy’s enfeebled mind. I shall allege that you substituted a will that she never understood for the one that set forth her true intentions. As for my waiver and consent, of course they were obtained by fraud.”
Sidney was still able to smile and shake his head. “You will find the game on which you have embarked an expensive one. However, I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge a good fee to a fellow member of the bar. I’ve always had the greatest respect for Harold Stein.”
***
In the taxi crossing the park to the museum, Sidney carefully thought out his defense plan. When the driver spoke of the heat of the early spring, he shut him up. He had already been back to his office, and after a conference with Miss Norton he was beginning to make out the possibility of placing the onus of the Speddon “conspiracy” squarely on the shoulders of the director. That had not indeed been Norton’s idea. But wasn’t it with Addams that the ultimate responsibility should lie? Had Addams not recently been hinting that the chairman was impinging on the director’s territory? Well, that young man would find one territory that he could have entirely to himself!
Which was only right, too. Sidney glanced at a flock of pigeons swooping down to an old woman scattering crumbs. Were they poisoned crumbs? One read of such witches. Surely Lucy Pinchet would be capable of it. The trustees were supposed to be aloof, dignified, unchanging in temper. They should be kept clear of coprophagous bugs like Lucy, scrounging for extra legacies in the dung of the Surrogate’s Court. That was surely the director’s business.
And if Lucy were defeated, would he not have a permanent hold on Addams from the way it had been done? Would Addams not have to perjure himself? Oh, yes, he was beginning to see his way. And his duty as well! One had to be tough in all businesses, and cultural institutions were no exception.
He did not go to Mark’s office at the museum. He went to the smaller one reserved for the chairman and rarely occupied, and sent word to Mark to join him there. It was a time to observe every hierarchical distinction.
Mark came in, a copy of Art in Town in hand, and took a seat opposite the chairman without even a greeting, his expression accepting grimly the gravity of the conference about to be held. Sidney began.
“I have just come from Lucy Pinchet. She is going to sue. Undue influence, fraud, the works.”
“I supposed that was in the cards.”
“I thought I’d put Chessie Norton on the case. She’s a tough litigator, and this will be her great chance.”
A pause. “Of course, you know of our relationship.”
“I thought that was over. Anyway, she knows all about you and Miss Vogel.”
“What is there to know?”
“Isn’t that for the jury, my friend?”
Sidney surveyed with some satisfaction the troubled countenance before him. What had happened between Mark and the Vogel woman? Had he really slept with the scrawny creature? Probably. Didn’t these young men screw everything that moved?
“A couple of kisses, that was all.”
“Well, it had better be a case of kissing and not telling.”
“May I ask you what you mean by that?”
“You may. In fact, I think it an excellent idea for you and me to cultivate the habit of frankness with each other. We may find it useful in the months ahead. I presume that any osculations between you and Miss Vogel did not occur before a grossly gaping public. That they happened in the privacy of your apartment or hers?”
Mark was very red now, but whether from anger or shame was not clear. “Certainly not in public.
But as I’ve never been in Miss Vogel’s apartment, nor she in mine, I suppose whatever happened took place in a taxi.”
“So unless the driver is identifiable, it will be her word against yours?”
“Surely Mrs. Pinchet’s counsel won’t go into trivia like that?”
“It’s precisely what they will do, unless they want Lucy to charge them with malpractice. They’ll try to establish a sinister plot to undermine an ancient, addled testatrix. You must take the position before the judge and jury that nothing occurred between Galahad Addams and Virgin Vogel that would not have taken place before a synod of bishops!”
“Won’t that make me seem an awful ass?”
“But an innocent ass, my boy. An innocent ass.”
Mark got up impatiently and went to the window. “At the risk of saying ‘I told you so,’ may I point out that I begged you not to fire Miss Vogel?”
“No sir, you may not. Because when I dispensed with her services, I had no idea that our virtuous director had been snatching kisses from her pretty lips.”
“Hadn’t you virtually suggested it?”
“Never!”
“Hadn’t you practically told me to get Miss Speddon to change her will any way I could? Hadn’t you even promised me the directorship if I succeeded?” Sidney, contemplating the mottled features of this angry young man,
was almost enjoying himself.
“You must know, Mark, that I have a very emphatic, at times even an exaggerated, way of putting things. No doubt, in speaking to you about using your arts of persuasion on the late Miss Speddon, I may have seemed to suggest that you cümb into the old girl’s bed, let alone her companion’s. But that is what my friends call Sidney’s hyperbole. The means were left entirely to your discretion. It certainly never crossed my mind that they would not be altogether proper and ethical.”
Mark’s stare showed that he saw he was trapped. “Would it be ‘proper and ethical’ for me to perjure myself by denying something I’d done?”
“Perjury? It’s a strong word. Look at it this way. What, in theory at least, will a court of law be trying to establish? The truth, will it not? Now you and I both know that the truth is that Miss Speddon was of sound mind when she executed that will. Don’t you agree?”
“Tes, but—’’
“Yes but nothing. She may have had some old maid’s bee in her bonnet about a romance between you and her protégée, but when you get right down to it, she knew who her heirs were, what the terms of her will were, and how it would operate. Is that not certainly so?”
Mark played with the shade cord. “Yes, I guess that is so.”
“Very well. Then it is up to us to help the court establish that truth. If you admit that in the course of your discussions with Miss Speddon you made cynical love to her confidante, you are going to cast the whole business in a very ugly light. The jury will see you as a cool and calculating villain and may well be persuaded that you bamboozled the old girl into doing something she really didn’t want to do.”
“So I must tell a lie to establish a truth?” Mark resumed his seat before the desk. “Frankly, Sidney, your attitude strikes me as unacceptably cynical. I know you care for the museum as much as I do, and I know how much I owe you. But a mein’s got to make his own moral decisions. The fact that I may have once made some wobbly ones doesn’t mean they all have to be wobbly. And I wonder whether the time hasn’t come for me to be truthful at any cost.”
“At any cost?” Sidney moistened his lips as he touched with one finger the shiny surface of the ace of trumps in his imagined hand. “Any cost to whom? To yourself or the museum?”
“Well, would it really be such a great cost to the museum to make a compromise with Miss Speddon’s relatives about the disposition of her things? I think you know, sir, that I have had doubts about your handling of that situation.”
Sidney, taking in the new air of resolution in those now unblinking eyes, reflected that perhaps this lawsuit had come in the very nick of time. The real enemy might not be Vogel or even Lucy, after all! “If we lose this case, my boy, there won’t be any Speddon things to worry about. Or Speddon money, either. Except what the old girl gave us in her lifetime, and even that may be in question.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“It’s very simple. Mrs. Pinchet is trying to knock out her aunt’s will. If she succeeds, Miss Speddon will have died intestate, which means that everything she owned will be divided between her niece and nephew. Which is why, incidentally, Tom Speddon, who has hitherto been my greatest ally, can now be counted on for the Judas kiss. Indeed, the case promises to be full of kisses.”
“But why is that? If a will goes down, isn’t the previous will substituted? Don’t you have dozens of earlier Speddon wills in your vault?”
Sidney made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Not one. Miss Speddon had a fetish about destroying the old will each time she executed a new one. She had a horror of legatees about whom she’d changed her mind—giving Cousin Harriet the lavalière she’d once given Cousin Tillie—finding out about it.”
“So even if you settle the case, you’ve got to save the will?”
“The very existence of the museum may depend on it. If that will goes down, Mark Addams, it will be you and you alone who will have struck the fatal blow at our beloved institution!”
“Aren’t you going rather far there, Mr. Claverack?”
“Not an inch too far, Mr. Addams.”
“You would share none of the responsibility?”
“None. Because if undue influence is proved, it will be your undue influence, not mine. You were the man who talked her into signing that new will. You were the person who chose the means to do it. Had you not intervened, her will of a year earlier would have been probated, and the museum would have received the collection plus millions of dollars. Under onerous conditions, it is true, but that would be a hell of a lot better than zilch.”
The flicker now in those gray-green eyes was something like agony. “But do you deny altogether that it was your idea?”
“Why should I deny anything? I simply indicated to you that it would be a very agreeable thing if the museum were to receive its bequest unconditionally. What chairman of a board of trustees would have felt otherwise? It was you who undertook the project of implementing what had been a mere wish on my part. And in choosing your means you had to take the responsibility for their success or failure. I charge you, Mark Addams, with the moral duty of doing everything in your power to sustain that will!”
Mark sat still, brooding, and made no answer. Sidney rose and took his hat from the pole. “I shall tell Miss Norton to call you as soon as the lis pendens has been filed.”
11
MARK, sitting in Chessie’s bare, clean cell of an office, with its gleaming fresh gray paint and its sole ornament, a print of bland-faced, thinly smiling Lord Mansfield, proud in wig and robe, reflected ruefully that his one-time lover had the advantage of him. Her desk was clear of all papers but the court documents of Pinchet v. Claverack et al, neatly piled on the blotter before her and surely too well previously studied to be really needed. Over them her long Modigliani face and straight red hair presented an aspect as coolly judicial as the engraving above.
“Have you had any difficulty in being represented by me?”
“Not really. I know you’re capable of separating yourself from any emotioned involvement in the past. If there was any.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“Well, forgive me, Chessie, but you seem so—so legal, if that’s the word, that I can hardly believe that some things ever happened.”
He suddenly realized that he meant it. Had he actually been in bed with this woman? It was as if he were a randy kid brought up on charges of playing dirty games in the barn before a stern teacher who in some mad fashion had also been the detective disguised as the lusty girl who had entrapped him.
“Oh, they happened all right.” The teacher was even smiling now. “And I don’t regret them. I hope you don’t?”
“Oh, no.”
“Then we can work together? With no reservations?”
“None. Except some people at the museum think it odd that Claverack should use his own firm for the defense.”
“It’s unusual. But perfectly proper. And if the right detachment exists between Claverack and myself, there’s nothing against it.”
“You don’t even much like the guy, as I recall.”
“That is true. But I think I understand him, which is more important. And I have no doubt that you and he should win this case.”
He noted the flicker of a spark in her eye. “Which will be to your professional advantage?”
“It should make me a partner in this shop. Isn’t that all to the good? Shouldn’t your lawyer be strongly motivated?”
He considered it. “But do you really want to be a partner of Claverack’s?”
“Does that matter? Once I’m a member of this firm I can go anywhere I want.”
“Then let me tell you this, counsellor. I intend to deny absolutely that I ever made any sort of a pass at Anita Vogel.”
“Of course.”
The stare with which she met his was the signal that he was not to go on. A reputable lawyer could have nothing to do with perjury.
“Then that is understo
od. And knowing what Claverack knows about me—or thinks he knows about me—can’t you imagine what my future at the museum is going to be? With him always able to mutter: ‘Remember the Speddon case, my boy. We got you out of that one with a fairly clean nose, but if you give me any trouble…’”
“But you know as much about him as he does about you.”
“Ah, but he doesn’t care!”
Chessie frowned. She was not liking the turn of the conversation. “I wish you wouldn’t fret about the future. These things will probably take care of themselves. A worried witness is going to be a bad one.”
“I won’t be a worried witness, Chessie.”
“Can I count on that?”
“Oh, surely.”
“Why so surely?”
“Because I want you to win and be a partner.”
“But that’s charming of you, Mark!” The quick smile made her look almost girlish. “I appreciate it very much.” She looked down for some moments at the papers on her desk, but he could see she was not thinking of them. She seemed to be concentrating on something quite different. When she looked up, her lips were pursed in doubt. Then she nodded in sudden decision. “All right, I’ll tell you something. Something that may give you a bit of a hold on the great Sidney.”
“Is there a corpse he’s hidden?”
“Not hidden; that’s the point. Check the appraisals of all of the gifts that clients of his have made to the museum.”
The Golden Calves Page 12