Santa Fe Dead (10 page)

24

EAGLE WAS QUIET for a moment. "Joe, I’m afraid I can’t do that without Keeler’s permission.”

“Ed, Walter Keeler died in an automobile accident south of San Francisco a couple of hours ago.”

“I’m sorry; I didn’t know. Did Keeler sign a new will?”

“I can’t go into that right now, Ed, but I need a copy of your letter.”

“All right. It’s on my home computer. I’m leaving the office now; I’ll fax it to you in half an hour.”

Wilen gave him the fax number. “Thank you, Ed. I’ll wait here for it.”

Wilen hung up and walked to the window. Lights were coming on in Palo Alto.

His secretary came to the door. “Mr. Wilen, I think I’m done for the day. Is there anything else you need?”

“No, Sally,” he said. “I’ll be here for a while; I’m waiting for a fax.”

“Eleanor Keeler called when you were on the phone a few minutes ago.”

“I’ll call her,” Wilen said. He said good night to his secretary, went back to his desk and dialed the number.

“Hello?”

“Eleanor, it’s Joe Wilen.”

“What have you learned?”

“I’ve had a call from the state highway patrol. Walter was killed in the crash. They identified his body from a fragment of his driver’s license.”

“Are they sure?”

“I believe so, but I’ve had his dental records sent there for a positive identification. I think it will be a day or so before that can be done.”

Eleanor sounded as if she were crying. “This can’t be,” she sobbed. “We’ve only been married a week. What am I going to do?”

“Eleanor, do you have any family or friends you can call?”

She seemed to get control of herself. “No, nobody in San Francisco. Nobody at all, really.”

“I think the best thing for you to do tonight is just to have some dinner and try to get some rest. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you what I’ve learned.”

“Joe, what am I going to do? I don’t even know if I have any money.”

“You and Walter have a joint bank account, don’t you?”

“Yes, he opened one at the San Francisco branch of his bank last week.”

“You can draw on that for anything you may need,” Wilen said.

“Joe, I know this is an awful thing to ask, but did Walter sign his new will?”

“Yes, he did, and you are very well taken care of, Eleanor. I’ll come up there in a couple of days and go through everything with you, but please be sure that you have no cause for concern.”

“Thank you, Joe. That makes me feel better.”

“Good night, Eleanor. Try and get some rest.”

“I will, Joe. Good night.” She hung up.

As Wilen hung up the phone, he heard the fax machine in his secretary’s office ring. He walked into her office and switched on the lights. The machine was cranking out two sheets of paper. He took them back to his office.

He sat down, switched on his desk light and began to read. As he did so, his eyes widened. He had been expecting unfavorable information, but what Eagle had to say was astonishing. The woman was not only a fraud, she was very likely a murderer. He read the letter twice, doing his best to commit it to memory.

If Eagle had only told him about this in Santa Fe, he could have prevented Walter from signing the will. He would have done anything to make him read the letter. Now Walter had willed this awful woman more than a billion dollars in liquid assets!

Wilen could not shake the feeling that, somehow, this was his fault. He had failed to protect his friend and client, the man who had made him rich beyond his dreams. He had to find a way to fix this.

ELEANOR WRIGHT KEELER ordered in dinner from an impossibly expensive fancy grocer down the street. She sat on her terrace, drinking from a well-chilled bottle of Veuve Cliquot Grande Dame champagne and eating beluga caviar with a spoon from a half-kilo can. When she had eaten all she could stand, she called Jimmy Long.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Barbara.”

“Hey Babs.”

“My husband was killed in a car crash this afternoon.”

“Oh, God, Babs, I’m so sorry!”

“Don’t be, baby; I’m a fucking billionaire!”

“What?”

“I’m not kidding. He signed a new will today that leaves me everything—well, almost everything. He said there would be some bequests to his alma mater and some charities, but damned near everything!”

“You take my breath away, kid. What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Any fucking thing I want!” she crowed. “I’m going to buy a jet airplane and fly around the world, stopping everywhere! You want to go?”

“You bet I do.”

“Wait a minute, I already have a jet airplane. It’s not big enough, though. I’m going to buy one of those . . . what do you call them, the ones that can fly from here to Tokyo nonstop?”

“A Gulfstream Five?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“They cost forty or fifty million dollars.”

“What the fuck do I care? I’ve got a billion!” she exulted. “I can buy anything! Go anywhere!”

“That’s unbelievable!”

“I know, I know. I just had to tell you, baby.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Listen, it’s going to take a few days to sort everything out. I guess there’ll have to be a funeral or a memorial service or something. Then, when all that’s over and the estate is settled, I’m coming to L.A. and buying something nice in Bel-Air.”

“Great idea!”

“Something big, for entertaining, something with an Olympic-sized pool—one of those old movie star mansions, maybe!”

“You deserve it, kiddo, after all you’ve been through.”

“You’re damned right I do! I’ll call you, Jimmy!”

She hung up and did a little dance around the apartment, making exultant noises. She could have anything!

BACK IN HIS OFFICES, Joe Wilen sat at his secretary’s desk, reading Walter Keeler’s will on her computer. Two pages needed fixing. He began fixing them.

25

DETECTIVE ALEX REESE of the Santa Fe Police Department read through the last of a stack of financial documents he had gathered from various sources, including Donald Wells’s business manager in Los Angeles, then he got up and went over to the D.A.’s office. The secretary told him to go right in.

“Morning, Alex,” Martínez said. “What’s up?”

“My background check on Donald Wells didn’t turn up much. He was born in a little town in Georgia called Delano, and he got his job at Centurion Studios through the chairman there, who is from the same town. He got arrested for domestic violence against a live-in girlfriend fifteen years ago, but the charges were dropped. He had a lot of parking tickets and a few speeding tickets when he was younger, but he seems to have calmed down the past ten years or so.”

“Have we got motive?”

“I’ve combed through all of Wells’s financials, and, in my opinion, there’s more than enough there for motive to kill his wife.”

“Tell me.”

“In short, Wells would have nothing, if he hadn’t married Donna. When they met, he was working for Centurion Studios as an associate producer, which is one notch up from gofer in that business. He meets Donna, then a couple of months after that her husband is dead, and a year or so later, they’re married. She loans him three million dollars to set up his own shop. He rents office space from the studio, pays himself half a million dollars a year, probably six times what he had been making, and starts acquiring books and magazine articles and having screenplays written from them. Out of the first half dozen things he produced, one was a big hit—a horror thing aimed at teenagers called
Strangle.
Within three years he had made enough back to repay his wife’s loan.

“The two houses he co-owned with his wife were bought entirely by her, but the deeds were recorded in both their names. This real estate co-ownership adds twenty million dollars to his net worth, as expressed on his financial statement. Apart from the houses, his net worth is under five million, and three million of that is expressed as accounts receivable from Centurion or his film distributors, and he has to perform to receive those funds, delivering scripts, mostly. Set those receivables aside and he’s worth less than two million bucks, not much for a supposedly successful film producer. His first benefit from his wife’s will is that her half of the real estate goes to him, nearly doubling his net worth. He does have a high income, though, from his company: an average of two and a half or three million a year.

“His wife’s will also leaves him five million dollars—more than enough for motive right there—but the fact that his wife and son died simultaneously leaves him in a much more favorable position, since her son was her principal heir. It’s only a guess right now— we’ll need to subpoena her financial records—but it looks like his inheritance could be in the region of half a billion dollars.”

“Wow,” Martínez said. “I’d certainly call that motive.”

“His alibi holds. I spoke to the manager of the Hassler Hotel in Rome, and he supports both Wells’s contention that he was in Rome when his wife died and that he received the phone call from his Santa Fe house when he said he did.”

“So, he would have had to hire somebody. Any candidates?”

“My best guess is somebody he worked with in the movies, either in L.A. or Santa Fe. He’s shot a couple of movies here. I’ve compiled a list of people who worked for him from the credits of his pictures. On the theory that anyone he knew well enough to ask to kill his wife would have worked for him more than once, I’ve come up with a list of thirty-one names of people who worked on two or more of his movies, and I’m running them through the New Mexico, California and federal databases for criminal records. I should have something by tomorrow that will give me the basis for interviews.”

“That’s good work, Alex. What if none of them pans out?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“Okay, let me know who in that list of thirty-one people looks good.”

“I’m likely to have to go to L.A. to question some of these people, so I’ll send you a travel authorization.”

“How long will you need there?”

“Probably no more than a week, but Wells isn’t going to be a flight risk. He’s going to sit tight and let the legal process work to get his wife’s will probated, which could take months.”

“Right. There’s something else I’d like you to look into, Alex.”

“What’s that?”

“Wells told us in his deposition that Mrs. Wells’s first husband was killed in a mugging in New York.”

“That’s right, he did.”

“I’d like to know if there’s any chance Wells had a hand in that. Call the NYPD and see if you can track down the detectives who investigated the killings and see if you can figure out where Wells was when it happened.”

“That’s a good idea, Bob; I’ll get on it.”

“Don’t talk to Wells about it just yet. If he was involved, I want him to think he skated on that one.”

“I won’t talk to Wells again until I’ve come to you first.”

“Good. I don’t want Ed Eagle to know how interested we are in his client, either.”

“Yeah, it’s interesting that when Wells got the kidnapping threat, he didn’t call the police but called a lawyer, instead.”

“Yeah, I find that very, very interesting.”

26

JOE WILEN, after a night of little sleep, arrived at his office and found a message from his contact at the state police. He returned the call.

“Good morning, Mr. Wilen,” the colonel said.

“Good morning, Colonel. Do you have any news for me?”

“Yes, the dental records you sent us match the teeth of the corpse carrying Walter Keeler’s driver’s license.”

“Would you send me the coroner’s report and a death certificate?”

“Of course, I’ll do it right away. My condolences on the loss of your friend. We’ll be releasing the names of the deceased today.”

“By the way, Colonel, did anything in the car survive the fire? Any papers or other contents of Walter’s pockets?”

“No, the fire consumed the car and its contents entirely. The only reason the driver’s license fragment survived was that Mr. Keeler was thrown clear of the car.”

“Thank you, Colonel, and thank you very much for your assistance in this matter. I wonder if I could ask your help on another matter?”

“Anything I can do, Mr. Wilen.”

“I’m going to fax you a letter concerning Mrs. Keeler. I’d be grateful if you could ascertain or refute the assertions made in the letter.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

“This must be held in the strictest confidence, Colonel, as you will see, and I’d like you to destroy the letter afterward.”

“As you wish.”

Wilen thanked him, faxed the letter, then called his secretary. “Margie, please get Lee Hight and the two of you come into my office.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lee Hight was the associate who had drafted Walter Keeler’s will, and Margie had proofed it on her computer. The two women knocked and entered Wilen’s office.

“Please sit down,” Wilen said. “Lee, Margie, I have some bad news: Walter Keeler was killed in an automobile accident on the way to San Francisco after our meeting here yesterday.”

The two women looked shocked.

“I’m very sorry, Joe,” Lee said.

“So am I, Mr. Wilen,” Margie echoed.

“I’ve asked you in here, because I have to make an important decision, and before I do, I want to get your opinion. First, I want to read you a letter from a Santa Fe attorney named Ed Eagle. Mr. Eagle gave me the letter a few days ago, when I was in Santa Fe, and asked me to deliver it to Walter. He did not tell me the contents of the letter, only that it concerned the woman Walter married last week. I assumed that the contents were unfavorable to her, because Eagle asked me to deliver the letter to Walter before he signed his will.

“I gave Walter the letter, but he declined to read it. He walked over to my shredder and fed the unopened letter into it. At that point I called the two of you and Helen Brock in here to witness the will. I haven’t asked Helen to join us. Lee, when you were drafting the document, did Helen see any of it?”

“No, Joe, she didn’t.”

“So only the three of us know the contents of the will.”

The two women nodded.

“Here is the letter from Ed Eagle.” Wilen read the entire letter to the two women.

The two women sat in stunned silence for a moment. “That’s appalling,” Lee said finally.

“Now, here’s my question to both of you. You were both well acquainted with Walter Keeler. Do you think that, if he had been in possession of this information about his wife, he would have signed his will in its present form?”

“No,” Margie said. “Of course not.”

“Not unless he was out of his mind,” Lee said.

“I knew him better than either of you, and I entirely agree. If I had known the contents of the letter from Eagle, I would have insisted that Walter read it before signing, but I didn’t. Eagle faxed me the letter yesterday, after I told him of Walter’s death.”

“Joe,” Lee said, “I want to remind you that Walter’s will, after all his other bequests, leaves his wife more than a billion dollars in liquid assets.”

“Thank you, Lee, but I don’t need reminding. Now, the three of us have to make a decision together, and it has to be a unanimous decision. I warn you now that what I am talking about here is nothing less than a criminal conspiracy, a felony punishable by years in prison. I am considering altering the terms of Walter’s will by replacing two pages of it with new pages which will accomplish two things: one, I will set up a trust that will pay Mrs. Keeler fifty thousand dollars a month for life, contingent on her noncriminal behavior, and give her possession for life, but not ownership, of the San Francisco apartment, which Walter paid seven million dollars for. Two, it will reduce to one dollar the inheritance of any beneficiary, including Mrs. Keeler, who contests the terms of the will or who complains about it to the press.

“Walter’s copy of the will was destroyed in a fire that accompanied the accident, so the original on my desk is the only copy. I am proposing to forge Walter’s initials on these two pages with my pen—the same pen that Walter signed with—and substitute the two new pages for the old pages leaving Mrs. Keeler that huge inheritance. I believe that she will accept the will, especially when she learns what I know about her past. Do you both understand what I want to do?”

“Yes,” both women said simultaneously.

“If I do this, you will substitute a new computer file on both your computers, so that everything matches. Lee, do you still have my notes for drafting the will?”

“No, after you approved my draft, I shredded them.”

“Now, I have to ask each of you what your wishes are in this matter. Please remember that I am suggesting that you become part of a conspiracy to deny Mrs. Keeler the fortune she is legally entitled to and that her husband wanted her to have. If you agree to join me in this conspiracy, you can never tell another soul what I’ve done, and if you are ever deposed, or if you testify in court about this matter, you will have to perjure yourselves to protect yourselves. Do you understand what I am asking of you?”

“Yes,” both women said.

“If either of you feels, for any reason, that you should not do this, I will shred the new pages of the will and have it probated as it stands, and we can all forget that this conversation ever took place. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” both women said.

“What do you wish to do? Margie?”

“Put the new pages in the will.”

“Lee? This is a particularly important decision for you, because should the conspiracy ever become known, you would lose your law license and your livelihood.”

“I have two questions, Joe,” Lee said.

“Go ahead.”

"First, if this money does not go to Mrs. Keeler, to whom will it go?”

“Under the terms in my redraft, it will be put into a charitable trust already mandated in the will.”

“And two, will Mrs. Keeler have any part in managing the estate?”

“No, she will not. I will remain the executor of the will and Walter’s trustee, and after the estate is probated, I will have as little contact as possible with Mrs. Keeler. This law firm will manage the charitable trust, and a large part of our work here will have to do with that.”

“Then I am happy to take part in denying the bitch the money,” Lee said. “Where do I sign?”

“You don’t have to sign,” Wilen said. “You can both leave now, and I will personally alter the will. Last chance to change your minds.”

Both women shook their heads.

Wilen handed them each a computer disk. “Please copy this onto your computers, replacing the old file, and erase the backup files.”

The two women accepted the disks and left Wilen’s office.

Wilen carefully initialed the two pages and inserted them into the will. He shredded the old pages, then went to his secretary and handed her the will.

“Margie, will you make a copy of Walter Keeler’s will for Mrs. Keeler and file the original in the office vault?”

“Of course, Mr. Wilen. I’ll have the copy for you in just a moment.” She walked to the copying machine, placed the document on top and pressed a button. A moment later, she handed Wilen the copy.

“Thank you, Margie.”

Wilen took the copy into his office and sat down. He held a hand out in front of him. It was perfectly steady. He had never done anything like this in his life, but he would have done anything to protect Walter Keeler’s interests, in death as well as in life.