The Little Death (14 page)

Phillips
lowered himself in a wing chair and I sat across from him. The little table
between us held a decanter filled with syrupy brown fluid and surrounded by
small wine glasses. He poured two drinks. I lifted a glass and sniffed,
discreetly. Cream sherry. I sipped, crossing my legs at my ankles like a
gentleman.

“Now,
then, Mr. Rios, what can we,” he said, using the imperial, medical we, “do for
you?”

“I
represent the estate of Hugh Paris, the son of one of your patients — “

“Clients,”
he cautioned.

“Clients,”
I agreed. “At any rate, Hugh Paris died rather — suddenly, and there are some
problems with the will I believe I could clear up by speaking to his father,
Nicholas.”

Phillips
shook his head. “That’s quite impossible. You must know that Nicholas Paris is
incompetent.”

“Doctor,
that’s a legal conclusion, not a medical diagnosis. I was told he has moments
of lucidity.”

“Far
and few between,” Phillips said, dismissively. “Perhaps if you told me what you
need, I could help you.”

“All
right,” I said. “I drafted Hugh Paris’s will which, as it happens, made
certain bequests that violate the rule in Shelley’s case, rendering the
document ineffective. I had hoped that Mr. Paris, as his son’s intestate heir,
would agree to certain modifications that would affect the testator’s intent,
at least as to those bequests which do not directly concern his interests in
the estate.”

Phillips’s
eyes had glazed over at the first mention of the word will. He now bestirred
himself and said, “I see.”

“Then
you understand my problem,” I plunged on, “I am responsible for drafting errors
in Hugh’s will. There’s some question of malpractice — “

Phillips
perked up. “Malpractice?” He was now on comfortable ground. “I sympathize, of
course, but Mr. Paris is hardly in any condition to discuss such intricate
legal matters.”

“I
only need ten minutes with him,” I said.

“Really,”
Phillips said, lighting a cigarette, “you don’t understand. Mr. Paris is not
lucid.”

I
could tell our interview was coming to an end.

I
tried another tack. “But he’s being treated.”

Phillips
lifted an eyebrow. “We can do very little of that in Mr. Paris’s case. We try
to make him comfortable and see that he poses no danger to himself or others.”

“Is
he violent?”

“Not
very.”

“Drugs?”

“The
law permits it.”

“You
know, doctor,” I said, “even those who cannot be reached by treatment can
sometimes be reached by subpoena.”

Phillips
sat up. “What are you talking about?”

“A
probate hearing, with all the trimmings. You might be called to testify to
Paris’s present mental condition and the type of care he’s received here. It
might even be necessary to subpoena his medical records. I understand he’s been
here for nearly twenty years. That’s a long time, doctor, time enough to turn
even a genius into a vegetable with the right kind of — treatment.”

Phillips
fought to keep his composure.

“I
could have you thrown out,” he said softly.

“And
I’ll be back with the marshal and a bushel of subpoenas.”

In
an even softer voice he asked, “What is it you want?”

“I
want to make sure he’s too crazy to sue me.”

Phillips
expelled his breath, disbelievingly. “Is that all?” He rose from the chair. “Ten
minutes, Mr. Rios, and you’ll go?”

“Never
to darken your doorway again.”

“Wait
here,” he said abruptly and left the room. I poured my sherry into a potted
plant.

When
Nicholas Paris entered the room, the air went dead around him. He wore an old
gray blazer over a white shirt and tan khaki slacks. No belt. He might have
been a country squire returning from a walk with his white-blond hair, ruddy
complexion and composed features — there was more than a hint of Hugh in his
face. But then you looked into his eyes. They were blue and they stared out as
if from shadows focusing on a landscape that did not exist beneath the mild
California sun. I felt the smile leak from my face. Phillips sat him down in a
chair, scowled at me and said, “Ten minutes.”

I
approached him. “Nicholas?”

He
inclined his head toward me.

“My
name is Henry. I was Hugh’s friend.”

He
said nothing.

I
knelt beside the chair and looked at him. It was as if he were standing behind
a screen: the thousand splinters refused to add up to a human face. I saw that
his pupils were moving erratically. Drugs.

“I
was his friend,” I continued. “Your son Hugh.”

He
looked away, out the window.

He
said in a voice hoarse from disuse, “Hugh.”

“Hugh,”
I said.

I
kept talking, softly. I told him how I had met Hugh and how much I had cared
for him. I told him that I believed Hugh’s death was a murder. I was telling
him that I needed to know what, if anything, Hugh had said to him when he
visited here.

Nicholas
Paris stared out the window as I spoke, giving no indication that he heard
anything but the loud chirping of a bird outside.

And
then, suddenly, I saw a tear run from the corner of his eye. A single, streaky
tear.

He
said, “Is Hugh dead?”

He
hadn’t known.

“Oh,
God,” I muttered. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s
enough,” a woman spoke, commandingly, above me. I looked up. Katherine Paris
stood, coldly composed, beside me. Her face was red beneath her makeup, and her
small, elegant hands were clenched into fists. I glanced up at the doorway.
Phillips was standing there and, behind him, two burly orderlies.

I
rose from the floor. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Paris.”

She
raised a hand and slapped me. “Get him out of here,” she ordered Phillips.

He
gave a signal and the orderlies moved in.

It
was dusk when Katherine Paris’s bronze-colored Fiat came off the road that led
from Silverwood and turned onto the highway. I switched off the radio, started
my car, and followed her. There was no reason to think she would recognize my
car; blue Accords are so common as to be almost invisible on the roads of
California. She led me past vineyards, orchards, farm houses, and a
desolate-looking housing tract with street names like Chardonnay and Pinot
Noir. It was getting chilly out, a sign of autumn in the air. We drove on and on,
deeper into the country between gently wooded hills now gloomy in the thick
blue light of early evening. She turned her lights on and I turned on mine. A
truck roared by and then a motorcycle and then it was just the two of us again,
and the dense smell of wet earth rising from the darkened fields around us.

It
would have been nice, I thought, had Hugh Paris been beside me. There was a
restaurant in St. Helena that I’d been to once and liked. We could have driven
there for dinner and stayed overnight somewhere and visited the wineries the
next day. Eliot had it wrong about memory and desire; they smelled like wet
earth on an autumn night and had nothing to do with spring.

My
thoughts drifted back to the task at hand. The Fiat’s turn signal flashed on
and we went down a narrow road. A brightly-lit three-story building rose just
ahead of us. A sign above the entrance identified it as the Hotel George. The
hotel was constructed of wood, painted white with green trim, a charming old
place. A wide porch surrounded the first floor and chairs were lined up near
the railing. They were mostly empty now. She parked and I watched her climb the
steps and walk quickly across the porch into the building.

I
waited in my car to see whether she would come out. There were some hot springs
in the vicinity and I imagined that the George was a place from which people
commuted to them. There were only three other cars in the lot; business, apparently,
was slow.

When
she failed to come out after five minutes, it occurred to me that Mrs. Paris
might be meeting someone. Who? A member of the family? It was a small family to
begin with and events had savaged it.

Of
Linden’s grandchildren, John and Christina Smith, only Christina married. She
and Robert had two sons, Jeremy and Nicholas. Of the two sons only Nicholas
married and he and Katherine had produced only one child, Hugh. Of these four
generations, the only survivors were John Smith, the judge, mad Nicholas and
Katherine herself. The decimation of Grover Linden’s descendants proceeded as
if in retribution. I shook myself out of my musing and realized that another
five minutes had passed. I decided to go in after her.

The
lobby was a little rectangular space, the floor covered with a thick gray
carpet, the furnishings dark Spanish-style chairs and tables. A polished
staircase beside the registration desk led to the upper floors. Across from the
desk was an open door with a small neon sign above the doorway identifying it
as the bar. I went over and looked in. Through the dimly-lit darkness I could
see her, sitting on a high stool at the end of the bar. I walked in and
approached her from behind. She was alone.

I
took the stool next to her, ordering bourbon and water. I wished her a good
evening.

Her
head swiveled toward me until we were face to face. I saw exhaustion in her
eyes so deep that it quickly extinguished the flash of anger that registered
when she recognized me. There was contempt in her look and disdain and beneath
it all a plea to be left alone. I regretted that I could not comply.

“May
I buy you a drink, Mrs. Paris?”

“Why
not,” she said mockingly. “I’m sure they’ll take your money here and I never
refuse a drink.” I summoned the bartender and ordered refills. “You follow me
here?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“To
talk.”

“About
Hugh?”

“Not
necessarily. We could talk about you. Or your husband. Or your
ex-father-in-law.”

“I find
none of those subjects appealing,” she said. The darkness of the room cast
shadows that hid all but the deepest lines in her face and she looked like a
much younger woman. She was small, her feet not reaching to the metal ring at
the bottom of the bar stool, and, for an instant, as she lifted her drink she
looked as fragile as a child.

“Then
tell me about your poetry.”

She
looked sidewise at me. “Mr. Rios, I once had a talent for writing, a very small
talent. I used it up a long time ago, or drank it up, perhaps. At any rate,
that subject is the least appealing of all.” After a moment’s silence, she
asked abruptly, “Do you like your life?”

“You
mean, am I happy?”

“Yes, if
you want to be vulgar about it.” She finished her drink. Another soldier down.

“I have
been, from time to time.”

“A
lawyer’s answer,” she said disdainfully. “Mincing — oh, pardon me. Equivocal.
What I mean is,” and her voice was suddenly louder, “on the whole, wouldn’t
you rather be dead?”

“No.”

“Well I
often think I would,” she said softly.

“Why?”

She
shook her head. “Every drop of meaning has been squeezed from my life. I hardly
expect you to understand.”

“Your
husband?”

“My
husband,” she said. Another drink had appeared in front of her. I realized that
I was about to be the recipient of the drunken confidences of an old, depressed
woman. Common decency almost got me out of the bar, but not quite. “I married

Nick
Paris in my sophomore year at Radcliffe. I had an old Boston name and no money.
He was rich and crazy. I knew about the rich but not the crazy.” She scraped a
fingernail across the surface of her glass. “I wanted to be Edna St. Vincent
Millay, Mr. Rios. Instead, I became a crazy rich man’s wife. And a minor poet.”
She stared at me as if trying to remember who I was. “What is it you want from
me?”

“Who
killed Hugh?”

“Oh,
that. Why do you think anyone killed Hugh. He was quite capable of killing
himself.”

“And
you would rather be dead but here you are, alive and well.”

“Alive,
perhaps. I can’t help you, darling. I was bought and paid for long ago.”

“By
whom?”

“Surely
you know enough about this family to know by whom. When I married Nick his
parents were horrified by my poverty, tried to buy an annulment but by then I
was pregnant with Hugh. We came out to California and things were fine for
awhile. Christina, my mother-in-law, treated me quite well. And Jeremy, of
course, I was quite fond of.”

“Your
brother-in-law.”

She
nodded. “Then it went bad.” She lit a cigarette.

“What
happened?”

“Christina
wanted a divorce. Her husband wouldn’t hear of

“Of
course. The marriage was working for him. He had what he wanted from the family
— money, power, prestige. And he treated her like a chattel and his sons like
less than that. He is, you know, a malevolent human being.”

“I
gathered.”

She
looked at me. “Hugh tell you some stories? I assure you, there are worse.” She
expelled a stream of cigarette smoke toward her reflection in the barroom
mirror. “Then they were killed, Christina and Jeremy.”

“Do
you know where they were going at the time?”

“To
Reno. Christina was to obtain a divorce. Jerry went for moral support. It was
all very conspiratorial. They left early in the morning without telling the
judge, but he found out. The next day they brought the bodies back.”

“He
killed them.”

“Do
your own addition,” she said. “Nicholas was already sick by then. He really
loved Jeremy and after Jeremy’s death he deteriorated pretty quickly. Perhaps
not so quickly as to warrant that lunatic bin, but that’s a matter for the
doctors to dispute.”

“And
what happened to you?”

“I
was having an affair at the time,” she said, “and Paris — the judge — hired an
investigator to document my indiscretion. He demanded that I agree to a divorce
and renounce my rights to Nick’s estate. Unfortunately, I had acquired a taste
for wealth, so I was desperate to salvage something. And, as it happened, I had
a pawn to play.” She touched a loose strand of hair, tucking it back.

“Hugh?”

“Yes.
His father’s heir. I gave Paris custody of my son and got in exchange—”

“Your
thirty pieces of silver,” I said bitterly.

“Considerably
more than that,” she said. “And what right do you have to judge me? He was
nothing to you but a trick.”

“No,”
I said. “I loved him.”

She
looked away from me. A moment later she said, “I have never understood
homosexuality. I can’t picture what you men do with each other.”

“I
could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”

“I’m
sorry, Mr. Rios, and about so many things it’s hardly worthwhile to begin
enumerating them now.”

“Would
you like me to drive you back into the city?”

“No,
thank you. The bartender cuts me off at ten and I take a room in the hotel. I’ll
be fine.” She had stepped down from the bar stool. “Goodnight, Mr. Rios.”

“Goodnight,
Mrs. Paris.”

Then
she was gone, weaving between tables toward a door marked Ladies. I went out
into the darkness and the chilly autumn air, drunk and depressed.

* * * * *

The
next morning I was at the county law library when it opened and spent the next
hour ploughing through treatises on the law of trusts and estates. The coroner’s
phrase, that Christina and Jeremy Paris had died simultaneously, had been
ticking away in the back of my mind. I’d thought about it all the way back from
Napa. There had to be a reason for the discrepancy between the times of death
recorded at the scene of the accident and the coroner’s finding. The coroner’s
report was a legal document and there were only two areas of the law to which
it pertained, criminal and probate. Since, at the time, there was no issue of
criminal liability arising from the accident, the coroner’s findings must have
been sought for the purposes of the probate court. When I got to that point, I
remembered simultaneous death, a phrase I recollected dimly from my trusts and
estates class.

I
picked up a red-covered casebook,
Testate and Intestate Succession,
eighth edition, by John Henry Howard, Professor Emeritus at Linden University
School of Law. Professor Howard had been my teacher for trusts and estates.
Back then, he was only up to his fifth edition. I opened the book to the
general table of contents. The book was divided into the two main sections,
intestate and testate succession. Seeing the two concepts juxtaposed in type on
facing pages, I suddenly realized my research mistake. Aaron Gold had told me
that Christina Paris had left a will but her estate, nonetheless, passed
through intestacy. I had focused on whether there could be a drafting error
that would invalidate a will and which, somehow, involved times of death. But
the rule of simultaneous death was a concept of intestate succession and it
functioned whether a will was properly drawn or not; the issue was not whether
a will was correctly drafted, but who it named as a beneficiary. I turned to
the more detailed table of contents and, under intestate succession, buried
near the bottom of the page, saw the words simultaneous death.

It
was not a not a hot topic in the law of estates, rating little more than a page
and a half. One page was a general discussion of the concept, with case
citations. The other half-page presented a hypothetical situation and a number
of questions arising from it. I remembered that Professor Howard’s hypos were
never as easy as they first looked.