Proof of Intent (18 page)

“He's usually in the park feeding the flying rats.” The man in the turban waved his index finger at Lisa. His nails were long and French-manicured. “And if you mash that dadgum button again, girly-girl, I will scratch your eyes out, no matter what the cost to my fabulous Lee Press-ons.”

Then he slammed the door shut.

We walked down to the small park at the end of the street. There were a few bums and some elderly Korean women, but we didn't see an old man. As we were leaving, Lisa pointed at a small green bench tucked behind a weeping bronze memorial to veterans of the Spanish American War. Sitting on the bench was an ancient man wearing a tweed cap, a pipe clamped in his teeth. He was reading a newspaper printed on pink paper, the
Financial Times
.

“Ian MacDairmid?” I said.

He looked up from the newspaper, studied my face for a while, then folded the newspaper in a very precise manner and set it on the bench next to him. His eyes were bright blue and very clear.

“Ah, Mr. Sloan.” He spoke with a soft Scottish accent. “It crossed my mind that you might look for me.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh?”

“And who is the lovely young lady with you?” Ian MacDairmid's thick hair was barely tinged with gray, but his face bore the deep wrinkles of someone well into his eighties.

“My daughter Lisa,” I said.

The old man patted the bench. “By all means, rest yourself, my dear,” he said.

Lisa sat beside him. The old man exuded the scent of pipe tobacco.

“You'd be wanting to know something about Diana,” he said. “Something about her past, something that might assist your defense of her husband.”

“You're making this awfully easy,” I said.

“People change, I suppose,” he said. “But I don't see Miles Dane doing this wretched thing. He never seemed that kind of lad. Beyond that rather tepid assertion, however, I sincerely doubt I have anything to say that would be of value to you.”

“You'd be surprised. Sometimes little things have a lot of significance.”

The old man shrugged. “I've got all day. Ask anything you like.”

I asked a number of questions about how Miles and Diana had met, but learned nothing new. Eventually I ran out of questions.

“This is a little ticklish,” I said finally, “but we suspect that perhaps there's something our client isn't telling us.”

“Such as?”

“It's possible—we really don't know—but it's possible he's protecting someone, someone from fairly deep in his past. Can you think of someone he might have known, someone he might be protecting?”

The old man sucked on his empty pipe again. “No, sir, I can't,” he said finally.

“We met with Roger van Blaricum yesterday. He seemed to think you might know something.”

“Did he?” One eyebrow rose slightly. “I'm surprised he was willing to talk to you.”

“He wasn't exactly forthcoming. But he mentioned your name. Then he said something strange. During our conversation he expressed the opinion that Miles had killed Diana for her money. But then he said, ‘That's the one thing he'll never get.' Can you shed any light on what he meant?”

MacDairmid grunted softly, then slowly filled his pipe, pulling the leaf out of a soft leather bag. When he was done tamping down the tobacco, however, he didn't light the pipe, but just held it in his hand. Finally, he spoke. “First a few ground rules.”

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 nothing 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.