Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  I glanced quickly at Lisa, who raised her eyebrows in surprise. I turned back to MacDairmid and spread my hands. “Such as?”

  “I won’t testify. I’m eighty-three years old, and I’m not in your jurisdiction. You can’t touch me if I ignore a subpoena, so I shouldn’t try if I were you. Second, I’d rather my name not be mentioned to other witnesses, should the occasion arise. I’m being hypocritical, no doubt, but discretion was always treasured in my profession.”

  I thought for a moment. He was right. Even if his testimony was of value, the likelihood of my being able to drag him into a courtroom across state lines was approaching nil. “Fair enough,” I said finally.

  He drew on the unlit pipe, making a soft whistling noise. “The crux of the state’s case, from the standpoint of motive, is that Miles was in it for the money, am I not correct?”

  “We won’t really know until the trial, but I presume that’s right.”

  “Let me tell you a story then.” The old man’s eyes went thoughtful. “It is frequently the custom of British servants to take on the worldview of their masters. That never really happened to me, but it might, nevertheless, aid your understanding of the story if I told it from the perspective of the family and reserved my own judgments on the matter until later.”

  “Okay.”

  “Diana van Blaricum met Miles Dane in 1968 as I recall. He was a busboy.” MacDairmid said this in a slightly ironic tone. “In the view of Diana’s mother—and of Roger, too, who had become the man of the family after his father’s death a few years earlier—he was a calculating little nobody from nowhere. But nevertheless Miles caught her eye. And once he had it, he was relentless. In the family’s view, he calculated that through her, he could gain the world. First publication and afterward, fortune, fame, etc., etc. Her money and connections, of course, would open all the doors for him.”

  I nodded.

  “Diana was something of a naif. Her family generally thought her a fool. Being young and romantic, all this skulking around, the flowers and candy, the cheap saloons that Miles took her to down in the Village and so on—well, no doubt it was terribly attractive to her. So she allowed him to do what he wanted with her.”

  “Which was what?” Lisa said.

  The old man laughed. “He got her pregnant, of course.”

  Lisa leaned back slightly, raised one eyebrow.

  “Miles was a clever enough boy—again, I’m giving you the family view, as I said, not my own—Miles was a clever enough boy to see that Diana was the sort of girl to whom abortion was unthinkable. According to the family, he calculated that if he got her pregnant, she would be forced to marry him. And then he’d have access to her money.”

  “I don’t mean to ask a stupid question,” I said, “but you know all of this how?”

  MacDairmid smiled thinly. “Servants are like furniture. A cliché, but it’s nonetheless true. Things may be said around people like me that would never be discussed in front of one’s peers. Masters have no secrets among their servants.”

  I nodded.

  “At any rate, Miles succeeded in what the family believed was his intermediate goal. Not terribly long after they met, Diana was with child.” MacDairmid sucked on the pipe. “But in his long-term goal he was not immediately successful.”

  “So at that point she wasn’t willing to marry him?”

  “It’s not that simple. The late Mrs. van Blaricum gave her daughter the following choice: She told Diana that if she didn’t give up the child and spurn Miles, the family would take her trust fund away and leave her to her own devices. Diana was young and unsophisticated, and she had no understanding of just how difficult it is to tamper with an existing trust. At any rate, Diana naturally didn’t find the notion of being penniless quite as attractive as she found the notion of drinking in the occasional bar down on Bleecker, so she promised to do what her mother asked. She signed the documents terminating her parental rights. The child was born, and sadly there were terrible complications that left Diana infertile thereafter. At any rate, after she awoke from the anesthetic, she was informed that in the course of these complications, the child had died.”

  “So why did they end up getting married anyway?”

  “They didn’t at first. Miles continued to secretly pursue Diana. And she defied her mother’s wishes to the extent that she allowed him to continue to court her. As a servant I was privy to some of these comings and goings. Diana knew I was not entirely unsympathetic to Miles, so she relied occasionally on me to cover for her. This secret courtship went on for another year or so. Eventually the ambitious young Miles consulted with a rather good lawyer who informed Diana that since her money was held in a well-constructed trust, there was really nothing the family could do to cut her off. Whereupon she immediately married Miles, and we—the family I’m speaking of—cut all ties to her, and the rest, as they say . . .” He spread his hands wordlessly.

  Ian MacDairmid sat for a while looking at Lisa with a crafty smile on his face.

  “What?” Lisa said.

  “Are you a lawyer, too, young lady?”

  “A law student.”

  “Do you know anything about trusts then?”

  “Just what I learned in corporate law. Which is to say, not much.”

  “Then I must back up a little. Roger van Blaricum and his mother were awful people. But Diana and her father were quite the opposite. Deeply, intractably decent. The old Mr. van Blaricum was trained in the law. He didn’t practice, but he taught a course at Columbia and wrote the occasional monograph. Unlike many men of his station, he concerned himself with the well-being of his servants, and because he perceived that I was interested in things generally, he would often lecture me on subjects that caught his interest. As a result I received, over the course of many years, a rather broad legal education—simply by standing in the same room as Mr. van Blaricum.

  “Which brings me back to the issue of trusts. When one is the beneficiary of a trust, as I’m sure you know, one doesn’t control the money in the trust. One can’t simply will the money when one dies, because, strictly speaking, it’s not your money at all.”

  “The point being?” I said.

  “All of Diana’s money—her family money, I mean—was held in trust. Her father discussed the matter with me at some length when his father was having the trust drawn up, so I know about the matter in rather great detail. At any rate, here’s how Diana Dane’s trust was drawn up. When she died, the trust specified that one of two things was to happen. If she had what the lawyers call ‘issue’—”

  “Meaning children by blood,” Lisa said. “Not adopted children.”

  “Precisely. If she had children by blood, those children would automatically become beneficiaries of the trust upon her death. If, on the other hand, she had no issue, no children of her own blood, then the trust was to liquidate, and the proceeds would pass, unencumbered, to her heirs in whatever manner she might specify in her will. She could will them to the Barnard College endowment, to the Fund for the Protection of Beanie Babies, whatever she chose. Or, of course, to her husband.”

  “Now hold on,” I said. “I’m prepared to believe that you got a pretty extensive lecture on this subject from Diana’s father. But you’re saying you remember all of this from a few conversations held decades ago?”

  “Not precisely. As you may have found out in the course of locating me, I was fired some while back by Roger van Blaricum. I’m old, and he had been looking for an excuse for some while—but the proximate cause of my sudden retirement was that he found me snooping into his affairs.”

  “In what way?”

  “As the chief servant, I took it upon myself to be familiar with every aspect of the van Blaricum family’s business. During the days of the old Mr. van Blaricum I had been in the habit of keeping copies of family documents. As I said, Mr. van Blaricum lectured to me often on the law. I think he found his life quite dull, and my education became a sort of hobby of his. I think nothi
ng would have pleased him more than if I had quit working for him and gone off to university.” He looked wistfully off at a knot of old Korean women on the other side of the small park. “But that was not who I was. Nevertheless, he would take copies of a great many family documents—wills, trusts, deeds, etc.—and underline important passages and make marginal notes and then give them to me. After his death, I continued to, well, make a study of the family’s legal matters. His hobby had become mine. I justified it to myself on the rather specious grounds that it helped me perform my duties more thoroughly.” He winked at Lisa. Or perhaps it was only a twitch in his eyelid.

  “At any rate, after his father’s death, I knew that Roger van Blaricum wouldn’t have approved of my little hobby. But I continued to do it because it pleased me. At one point just a few years ago, Roger—who has rather expensive tastes—attempted to gain access to the assets of his own trust by means of a lawsuit. His trust, I might add, is a virtual duplicate of Diana’s. As chief domestic in his household, I had absolute access to all of his correspondence with his lawyers in the matter. I made a certain amount of study of all the rather complex ins and outs of that case. As it happened, one day last year Roger caught me in his office photocopying several briefs, and that was the end of my sixty-year employ with the van Blaricum family.”

  “So what’s all of this got to do with Miles?” I said. “My understanding is that the trust fund was not terribly substantial in the first place.”

  The old man raised one eyebrow. “Where did you get that impression?”

  “That’s what Miles told us.”

  “Well Miles is wrong. The income from the trust is exceedingly modest, this is true. And perhaps he therefore assumed that the underlying principal was equally modest. In case you’ve missed the financial news lately, the stock market has done rather well over the past forty years. This has rather profound implications for any sort of trust.”

  “So you’re saying that if she dies and the trust liquidates, he, as her sole heir, gets . . .”

  “Let us say that the principal underlying the trust amounts to a not insubstantial amount of money.”

  “My, my,” I said. My stomach did a flip-flop.

  “My, my indeed.” The old man pursed his lips, then took out a Zippo and lit his pipe, studying me all the while with a look of amusement on his face.

  “From the sly look on your face,” I said, “I assume there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  “You said that if she dies he inherits the principal. And then I gave you the sly look.”

  “Is there some hidden clause you didn’t tell me about?”

  “To the contrary, I already told you.”

  I frowned. “Assuming they have no children by blood, he inherits. It’s that simple. And they don’t have children, Mr. MacDairmid.”

  MacDairmid’s blue eyes continued to stare unblinkingly into mine. The twinkle, however, had taken on a slightly rueful quality.

  “I believe what I said earlier was that Diana was informed that the child she bore in 1969 had died.” MacDairmid exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The poor child, in fact, survived and was healthy as a horse. A boy. The family placed him in foster care. Some years later Mr. van Blaricum let slip in my presence that he had intentionally initiated some sort of bureaucratic impediment that prevented the child from being qualified for adoption while he was an infant. That gives you a sense of the sort of man Roger van Blaricum is. Vindictive. As a result the child spent several years in a miserable orphanage in Utica. According to Mr. van Blaricum, when the orphanage was closed down in the early 1970s, the boy was then shuffled through ten or fifteen different foster families before finally being adopted by a rather brutal disciplinarian on a farm upstate.”

  Lisa was staring at him. “Why hasn’t Roger revealed this publicly?” she said finally. “This could change the entire complexion of the case.”

  MacDairmid smiled. “Surely you jest. First, the bastard—and I mean that in the ancient sense of the term—is an ugly little family secret. And Roger is not the sort to air his dirty linen in public.”

  “But that way, if Miles should happen to win the case, he’ll probably get Diana’s money. Surely Roger wouldn’t want that.”

  MacDairmid’s left eyebrow rose slightly. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he’s waiting to see what happens.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Think about it. If he revealed that Miles and Diana’s child is alive before the trial, then Miles could claim he’d known about the child all along. Which would remove his apparent motive for killing Diana. No, Roger would doubtless rather see him convicted first.” He drew on the pipe. “If, on the other hand, Miles wins the case, however, Mr. van Blaricum still has the opportunity to prevent him from receiving his inheritance.”

  “That son of a bitch!” Lisa said.

  “Mm,” said the old man. “No one would ever accuse him of being short on guile, however.”

  “You said you were reserving your own judgment about Miles until later,” I said. “Do you think he’s after her money?”

  “The rich are frequently color-blind when it comes to other people’s views of money. Any fool could see that Miles was never after Diana’s money. In my view, he was a simple creature who only wanted two things out of life. He wanted to write and be rewarded for it; and he wanted to spend his life with Diana. He absolutely worshiped her.” MacDairmid tapped the embers of his pipe in his palm, tossed them on the ground. A pigeon came up and pecked at them, then ruffled its feathers in annoyance and strutted away.

  “Now I won’t say that he was oblivious to her money. Miles was no fool, no child. He knew that money and connections could help his career. But that was never his goal.”

  “Was Miles ever told that his son had survived?”

  “I believe not. At the time the child was born, his paternity was neither documented nor acknowledged, so he would have had no say-so in the child’s disposition.”

  “So this child of Miles and Diana’s,” I said. “Do you know his name?”

  “No. Mr. van Blaricum never told me that.” MacDairmid shook his head sadly. “Poor little bastard. Poor, poor little bastard.”

  Twenty-eight

  Lisa and I took a cab straight to the airport. Four or five raindrops hit our windshield on the way through Queens, with the result that when we got to the airport, we got the usual pack of lies from the airlines about weather delays. The rain delays turned into missing engine parts, then into canceled flights, and suddenly it was nightfall. Our reserved seats on the one-fifteen direct flight to Detroit had now turned into standby tickets on a ten-thirty-five flight with a layover in Minneapolis—so we adjourned to one of the overpriced restaurants for dinner.

  Since our options did not include a couple of fingers of scotch as a tonic for the irritation of spending most of our day wrangling with the airlines, Lisa and I used shop talk as our next best distraction.

  “Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Miles didn’t kill his wife,” Lisa said. “Why would he say one time that he can only work in absolute silence, and the next minute he says he’s blasting Beethoven while Diana was killed? Why would he make up this improbable story about some strange home invader killing Diana for no good reason? Why the lies? The only logical answer—if he is in fact innocent—is that he’s protecting someone.”

  “We’re agreed on that.”

  “So it’s got to be the son, don’t you think? He’s protecting his son.”

  “Possibly. But according to MacDairmid, he was never told that the boy had survived.”

  “What if he found out somehow? Maybe the kid contacted them recently. Maybe he’s blackmailing Miles. It could be a lot of things. If so, all we have to do is find him and put him on the stand, right? Plus, it’s like MacDairmid said, if Miles knows about him and knows that the son will inherit Diana’s trust fund, his very existence blows away the state’s whole theory of motive.”

  I sawed off
a piece of tough, overcooked steak, but didn’t answer.

  “What?” Lisa said.

  “One of the most frustrating things about being a lawyer, Lisa,” I said after I’d finally masticated my steak into submission, “is that it’s hard to practice law without clients. There is no bigger pain in the ass than a client. Clients lie, they obfuscate, they withhold information, and then when you do your job and save the day for them, they refuse to pay the bill.

  “That said, consider this delicate issue: What do you do when a client’s stated wishes are clearly counter to his legal interests?” I took a sip of my Diet Coke and wished, for about the fifth time during the meal, that I was drinking something stronger.

  “Take Miles Dane for instance. Say you’re right, Lisa. Say he knows about his son’s existence. Say his son killed Diana. And let’s say Miles knows it. Say that out of guilt or shame or God only knows what motive, Miles is protecting his kid. Given all that, what’s my next move?”

  Lisa looked confused.

  “Here’s the obvious law school ethics class choice. I march cheerfully into the jail wrapped in the Grand Ole Flag of legal ethics, and I tell Miles: ‘Okay, we believe you have a living son and we believe you know of his existence. We believe you know that under the terms of Diana’s trust, your supposed pecuniary motive is out the window. Now, Miles, did your son kill your wife?’ Miles may then admit he’s covering for his long-lost son and thereby give me the tools to crack him out of the slammer.

  “But. Here’s what I think he’ll say. He’ll say, ‘As far as I know, Charley, my son’s dead; a mysterious stranger killed my wife while I was blasting Beethoven; and I don’t want you pursuing some ridiculous line of inquiry about some alleged son who, to the best of my knowledge, died thirty years ago.’ At which point I’m ethically obliged to hew to his instructions. With the likely result that I’ll lose the case and Miles will spend the rest of his life writing his memoirs with a nice soft crayon over in the state pen at Jackson. Miles may believe that my reputation as a legal brilliantissimo will save his bacon. I, however, am not suffering under that delusion.” I did battle with my steak again, finally surrendering after a long fight. “Like I say, a dilemma.”