The Little Death hr-1

by Michael Nava

  “Did he know about it, then?”

  “Yes. She made the mistake of taunting him with it. Two weeks later she and Jeremy, who had dined together at her home, became seriously ill with food poisoning. It may have been a fluke that Robert, who ate the same things, was unaffected.” The professor shrugged. “It frightened her. By then I had discovered the hole in our scheme. I advised her to get a divorce.”

  “She never made it,” I said.

  He breathed noisily and sucked at his now unlit cigar.

  “I have only one other question. Why did she come to you?”

  “Mr. Rios,” he said, “that’s ancient history.”

  “Please?”

  “Almost sixty years ago,” he said, “I attended a reception at this university given by Jeremiah Smith who was then in the thirtieth year of his presidency. His wife was dead and so his daughter, Christina, functioned as his hostess. I was nine months out of law school, just hired as a part-time lecturer in property law. Robert Paris was also at the reception, my colleague at the law school with about three months more experience than I. Well, Robert and I dared each other to approach the grand Miss Smith and ask her to dance. I did, finally. I got the dance, but he got the marriage, four years later. She and I became friends, though. We were always friends.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He smiled, crookedly and without humor. “You know, Mr. Rios, there is one aspect of this case which you have failed to examine adequately.”

  “Sir?”

  “Jeremy’s death. Why was it necessary to kill the two of them in such a manner that simultaneous death could be found? Robert, as Jeremy’s father, was Jeremy’s principal intestate heir, since Jeremy had neither wife nor children. He could’ve picked Jeremy off at his leisure unless what?”

  “Unless Jeremy had also executed a will that named a beneficiary other than the judge.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And did he?”

  “Yes. It was still in draft form but it would’ve sufficed.”

  “Who was Jeremy’s beneficiary?”

  “His nephew, Hugh Paris.”

  “What became of Jeremy’s will?

  “I have it, somewhere. I brought it out only six months ago to show Hugh.”

  “Hugh was here?”

  “Yes. He came to me knowing less than you do but enough to have guessed the significance of the fact that his uncle and grandmother were killed at the same time.”

  “They weren’t, you know,” I said. “She died before him by fifteen minutes. That’s what the police report said, but the coroner was bribed to find otherwise.”

  He closed his eyes. “If I had known that twenty years ago, I would’ve gone to the police. How could Robert have been so clumsy?”

  “I think he was desperate,” I said. “Unnerved. If he’d been accused then, he might have fallen apart.”

  “And your friend would be alive,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry.”

  And after that, there didn’t seem to be anything left to say.

  I left the professor and walked back to the student union where I found a phone and called Terry Ormes at the police station. She was out in the field so I left a message. Sonny Patterson at the D.A.’s office was out to lunch. I set up an appointment to see him the next morning. No one was answering at Aaron Gold’s office. I hung up the phone feeling cheated, like an actor robbed of his audience. I stood indecisively in front of the phone booth until the smells from the cafeteria behind me reminded me it was time to eat.

  I bought two hamburgers and two plastic cups of beer and took them to a comer table. As I ate, I put the case together the way I would present it to Sonny the next day.

  It was a simple tale of greed. Robert Paris had been disinherited by his wife, Christina, in favor of his two sons, Nicholas and Jeremy. Nicholas posed no problems. He was mentally ill and could be easily controlled by the judge. Jeremy, however, had to be gotten rid of. Paris had to invalidate Christina’s will in such a way as to strike her bequest to Jeremy, and any of his heirs, so that he himself might inherit that portion of Christina’s estate through intestacy. Christina and Jeremy were killed in an accident to which there was but one witness who himself was later killed. A crooked coroner presided at the inquest and manipulated the times of death, making it appear that Christina and Jeremy died simultaneously. By operation of the rule of simultaneous death, Christina’s estate passed to her remaining family, half to the judge through intestacy and half to his younger son, Nicholas, by operation of Christina’s bequest which was not affected by the invalidity of the bequest to Jeremy.

  Nicholas was then committed to an asylum and his wife, Katherine, blackmailed into a divorce. I had no doubt that the judge had been appointed conservator of Nicholas’s estate. By the time the wheels of his machinations came to a stop, Judge Paris had secured control of his wife’s fortune.

  There was only the smallest of hitches: Hugh. In Hugh’s case the judge acted more subtly. He took the boy from his mother, sexually abused him, and then set him adrift in a series of private schools far from his home. The judge made sure that Hugh had all the money he could spend. Rootless, without direction, with too much money and not enough judgment, Hugh became a wastrel, a hype. He very nearly self-destructed. But not quite. He came home, pieced together the story of his grandfather’s crimes and suddenly became a serious threat to Robert Paris. So he too was killed.

  That was the story. The evidence would not be as seamless or easily put together. It would come in bits and pieces, fragments of distant conversations, scribbled notes, fading memories. The investigation would be laborious and involve, undoubtedly, protracted legal warfare. Sonny might look at it, see the potential quagmire and look the other way. But I doubted it. I knew, from trying cases against him, that he didn’t run from a fight. And he liked to win.

  At least my part would be over. I would finally be able to exorcise that last image of Hugh lying in the morgue.

  I got up and went back to the phone. This time Terry was in her office.

  “Listen, I’m glad you called back,” she began.

  “I’m seeing Patterson in the morning. I’m going to lay out the whole story for him and I’d like you to be there.”

  “What story is that?”

  “Robert Paris killed his wife, his son and his grandson. I know exactly how it happened and why. I’m sure Patterson will order the investigation into Hugh’s death reopened.”

  “I don’t think so,” Terry said softly. “Where are you?”

  “At the university. The student union. Why?”

  “Have you seen this morning’s paper?”

  “No, not yet. I’ve been on the move since I got up.”

  “You better take a look at it.”

  “Why?”

  “Robert Paris is dead. The judge is dead.”

  “What?”

  “Early this morning. A stroke. Henry? You still there?”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, looking across the patio of the student union to the courtyard. There were three flag poles there, one for a flag of the United States, one for a flag of California and the third for the university’s flag. Having spent most of the day on campus I’d passed those poles maybe four or five times not noticing until this moment that the three flags flew at half-mast.

  8

  There was a burst of organ music as the doors to the chapel opened and the archbishop of San Francisco, flanked by red- skirted altar boys, stepped blinking into the bright light of midday. The university security guards who had been lounging in the vicinity of the doors now closed ranks, forming a loose cordon on either side of the funeral procession.

  I was standing against a pillar next to a camera crew from a local T.V. station. A blond woman spoke softly into a microphone. The television lights exploded at the appearance of the first dignitaries emerging from the darkness of the church.

  The mayor of San Francisco, an alumna, came out on the arm of the president of the university. Fo
llowing a step or two behind came the governor, a graduate of the law school, walking alone, working the crowd with discreet waves and a slack smile. Next came a coterie of old men who, even without their robes, had the unmistakable, self-important gait of judges. For a moment afterward the threshold was empty. Then came eight elderly men dressed in similar dark suits, white shirts and black ties, shouldering the gleaming rosewood coffin.

  Inside that box were the mortal remains of Robert Wharton Paris, who had been eulogized that morning by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the most distinguished Californians of his time. No mention was made that the judge’s sole surviving descendant, his son, was locked up in an asylum in Napa. Instead, the newspapers looked back on what was, inarguably, a dazzlingly successful life.

  Robert Paris, who was born into a poor family of farmers in the San Joaquin valley eighty years earlier, worked his way through Linden University, went to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and returned to the United States to take a law degree from Harvard, all before his twenty-fifth birthday. Hired as an instructor in property law at the university law school he quickly rose to the rank of full professor. In the process, he married Christina Smith, the granddaughter of Grover Linden and daughter of Jeremiah Smith, the university’s first president.

  Paris left the law school to form, with two of his colleagues, a law firm in San Francisco that now occupied its own building in the heart of the financial district. He resigned from the firm to accept appointment to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He was a distinguished jurist frequently mentioned as a potential candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court but he was too conservative for the liberal Democrats who then occupied the White House. When he was finally offered a position on the Court by a Republican president, he was forced to decline, citing age and physical infirmity. Shortly afterwards he left the court of appeals and spent the last decade of his life in virtual seclusion. Now, he was dead.

  Greater than the man was what he represented, the Linden fortune. The media estimated the extent of that fortune at between five-hundred million and one billion dollars, but so cloaked in secrecy were its sources and tributaries that no one really knew. There was so much money that it had acquired an air of fable as though it were stored not in banks, trust companies and investment management firms, but hidden away in caves as if it were pirate treasure.

  Famous money. Money gouged out of the Sierra Nevadas by the tens of thousands of picks that laid out the route of the transcontinental railroad. Ruthless money. Money acquired at the expense of thousands of small farmers forced from their farms by the insatiable appetite of Grover Linden’s land companies.

  Corrupt money. Money paid in subsidies to Grover Linden’s railroad from the Congress in an era when the prevailing definition of an honest politician was one who, when bought, stayed bought.

  Endless money. Money flowing so ceaselessly that during a financial crisis in the 1890 ’s, Grover Linden essentially guaranteed the national debt out of his own fortune and the government averted bankruptcy.

  Robert Paris was steward to that fortune and only I, and perhaps one or two others, knew at what cost he had acquired his stewardship. I watched them carry him across the courtyard, and I was thinking not of the family of a nineteenth-century American railroad baron but of the Caesars, the Borgias, the Romanovs. Only on that dynastic scale could I begin to comprehend how a man might kill his wife, his child, his grandchild to satisfy an appetite for power.

  I remembered a painting by Goya that I’d seen, years earlier, in the Prado called Saturn Devouring His Children. Saturn consumed his sons and daughters to avoid the prophecy that one son would reach manhood and depose his father. The mother of Zeus substituted for the infant Zeus a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes, which Saturn ate. Hidden away, Zeus grew and ultimately fulfilled the prophecy. Had Robert Paris feared the same end from his male descendants? Or was he simply mad? Or had that family of farmers in San Joaquin been poorer than anyone could imagine?

  Meanwhile, the funeral had become a party for the rich. The crowd spilled out from the church, sweeping across the courtyard of the Old Quad to the driveway where I had earlier observed a fleet of limousines lined up behind a silver hearse. So loud and jovial were the mourners that I expected, at any moment, to be offered a cocktail or a canape from a roving waiter. There were no signs of real grief; only, now and then, a ceremonial tear dabbed at with an elegant, monogrammed handkerchief. The rich are different, I thought: condemned to live their lives in public, they go through their paces at the edge of hysteria like show dogs from which every trait has been bred but anxiety. The body was to be interred in the Linden mausoleum, a quarter-mile distant, fudging from the snarl of cars in the driveway, I’d be able to walk there before the internment began.

  The heat was slow and intense, a pounding, relentless, unseasonable heat. I set off down the road sweating beneath my fine clothes like any animal. In a way it was pointless for me to have come to the funeral. Lord knows there was nothing more to be done about Robert Paris except, perhaps, drive a stake through his heart.

  I beat everyone to the mausoleum but the press. This was a historic event. No one had been laid to rest in Grover Linden’s tomb since the death of his son-in-law, Jeremiah Smith, first president of the university, fifty years earlier. The lesser members of the Linden-Smith-Paris clan, including the judge’s wife and eldest son, were buried in a small graveyard two hundred feet away. Hugh, however, was not there. I had never learned what became of his ashes.

  I removed my jacket, positioned myself in the shade of an oak tree and studied Grover Linden’s resting place. The legend was that Linden wanted his tomb patterned after the temple of the Acropolis. What he got was a much smaller building constructed from massive blocks of polished gray granite adorned on three sides with Ionic columns. At the entrance there were two steps which led to a bronze screen and beneath it two stone doors. On each side, the entrance was flanked by a marble sphinx.

  In front of the tomb was an oval of grass bounded by a circular pathway, a tributary of the footpaths that crisscrossed the surrounding wood. That wood was a popular trysting place, and it was not unusual to find the grounds near the tomb littered with beer cans, wine bottles, marijuana roaches, and used condoms. Today, however, the grounds keepers had been thorough.

  I heard cars pulling up and then the cracking of wood as people surged forward from the road trampling the dry grass and fallen twigs; the more-or-less orderly procession across the Old Quad had become a curiosity-seeking mob, red-faced and sweaty, converging from all directions as the university security guards fought to keep open a corridor from the road to the steps of the tomb. I watched a photographer shimmy up one of the venerable oaks and stake out her position among its branches.

  Finally the pallbearers appeared, walking slowly and stumblingly across the uneven dirt path. They were preceded by the school’s president, who climbed the steps of the tomb and opened the doors. As he fiddled with the locks, one of the pallbearers, an old man, started to sink beneath the weight of his burden. Two security guards hurried to his side and propped him up. His mouth hung open and a vein beat furiously at his temple.

  “Welcome to necropolis,” a voice beside me murmured. I turned to find Grant Hancock standing beside me, cool and handsome in a light gray suit. “Do you see that gentleman there?”

  I followed his gaze to a shadowy corner at the far edge of the crowd from where a tall thin old man surveyed the chaos from behind a pair of dark glasses.

  “John Smith,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed him at the church.”

  “He wasn’t in attendance,” Grant said. The old man slipped away. “One titan buries another,” Grant remarked.

  “Cut from the same cloth?”

  “God, no,” Grant said. “Robert Paris was so vulgar he had buildings named in his honor while he was still alive. The only thing for which Smith has permitted use of his name is a rose.”

  “A rose?”

&nb
sp; “He’s an amateur horticulturist,” Grant said. “Incidentally, what are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to make sure he was dead.”

  He picked a fragment of bark from my shoulder and said, “It was open casket. He’s dead.”

  “Open casket? That was vulgar.”

  “Robert Paris never did anything tastefully except die in his sleep. As for me, when I die I’ll direct my family to bury me without fanfare.”

  I smiled. “When you die, Grant, the tailors and barbers will declare a day of national mourning.”

  “And when you die,” he said, not quite as lightly, “I’ll miss you.” We began walking. “In fact, I’ve missed you the past four years.”

  I said nothing, feeling the sun on my neck, thinking of the funeral, thinking of Hugh, thinking as usual of too many things.

  Grant said, “I’ve changed.”

  “Only very young people believe that change is always for the better,” I said. “I’m mostly interested in holding the line, which is, I guess, the difference between thirty and thirty-four.”

  “Am I being rejected? Again?”

  “No.”

  We had reached his car. He leaned against it and we looked at each other.

  “I feel very old today,” I said, “as though I’ve dissipated my promise and my capacity to love. I’ve felt that way since Hugh died. I don’t know what there is left of me to offer.”

  “Let me decide that.”

  I nodded. “I’ll drive up this weekend.”

  “Good, I’ll see you then.”

  I walked back to my car and got in. I loosened my tie and rolled up my sleeves, tossing my jacket into the back seat. On the front seat was a book I’d bought that morning, The Poems of C.P. Cavafy, the poet Hugh had mentioned to me that distant summer evening in San Francisco. I glanced at my watch. It was almost one, time to drive to the restaurant where I was meeting Terry Ormes for lunch. I picked up the book. Flipping through it at the bookstore I’d marked a page with the little poem that I now read aloud: