Proof of Intent (19 page)

“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.”

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.”

“But you're ethically obliged to tell him,” Lisa said. “I mean . . . aren't you?”

“I'm convinced, Lisa,” I continued, “that the law school ethics class answer is the wrong one. So being the good lawyer that I am, I have concluded it's time to do what we lawyers do best: to wit, split hairs. As long as Miles is unaware that we know his son is alive, then he can't instruct us to ignore that avenue of investigation. I can then—in clear conscience and marching forward beneath the banner of the ethical guidelines of the State Bar of Michigan—send you out to pursue the investigation into this alleged long-lost son, and see where it leads you.

“This approach is ethically defensible because at this time the only evidence we have for this man's existence is the word of an old man who may or may not be in a position to know what he's talking about. So right now, we're just conducting a simple factual investigation of moderate pertinence to the case. At such time as you get some results—
if
you get them at all—I will inform my client of his options. Because heaven forfend that I leave my client in the dark!” I smiled and lifted my Diet Coke in toast. “Ah, The Law. Consider its majesty.”

Lisa peered at me with an odd look on her face. “You look awfully pleased with yourself, Dad.”

I grinned. “You want to know something funny? I am, kind of.” My grin went away. “But that means you'd better get real busy as soon as we get back home.”

For two days after we got back to Pickeral Point, Lisa acted mysterious. She had installed herself in the spare office—the one I store old files in—and set up a phone and a desk in the corner, hiding herself behind piles of old bankers' boxes. She didn't talk, just stayed in there with the door closed. I just hoped this reclusiveness had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol.

Late in the afternoon of the second day she walked into my office, and said, “Got him!”

“Got who?”

“Miles and Diana's son.”

I smiled broadly. “How'd you pull it off?”

“Lots and lots of phone calls. Eventually, I called the New York Department of Vital Records and told them I was an ER doc and that I needed to find the birth parents of a John Doe who'd been adopted. I said that if he didn't get a transfusion of some obscure amino acid from a blood relative within eighteen hours, he'd die. Of course they didn't want to tell me without a court order, so I was all ‘
Right now, dammit, he's gonna die and it's all on your head!
' Blah blah blah. That didn't work, so I said his wife was threatening to sue for wrongful death if we didn't get this amino acid, and she would name this bureaucrat personally in the lawsuit if he died. Boom, the waters parted. It wasn't until after she gave me the name that she goes, ‘Wait a minute, if this guy's a John Doe, how do you know who his wife is?' ”

I laughed.

“Turned out his birth name was Unnamed Child van Blaricum.”

“Unnamed Child? Boy, the van Blaricums really went all gah-gah over him, didn't they?”

“Apparently so. So then I walked downtown and called the New York Department of Social Services on my cell phone and told them I was a cop in the Pickeral Point Police department and if they didn't believe me they could call information for the number and then call me back at the station. Then I went over to the police station and chatted up the girl at the front desk—you know the one I'm talking about? Regina, the one that's sweet on you?”

“No she's not,” I said.

“She
is
.” Lisa sounded indignant. “Anyway, while I was talking to her, I said, ‘Oh, by the way, a client's probably going to call me while I'm here at the station.' Next thing I know, the phone rings. ‘Oh, great, honey, she's right here.'
Voilà
, I'm an officer of the law. So based on my urgent need as a police investigator, this DSS caseworker gives me the history of Unnamed Child van Blaricum. According to her records, first he gets renamed David van Blaricum, then it's changed to David Reid by a family who was thinking about adopting him but backed out somewhere between the name change and the adoption finalization, then when he was twelve years old he was finally adopted, and his adoptive parents inflicted the name Otto Gerd Heusenfelter on him.”

“That could come in handy,” I said, “if he ever decides to become a Nazi.”

Lisa laughed. “
Then I
called his adoptive parents, the Heusenfelters of Clinton County, New York. Farm country, up near Vermont. And the Heusenfelters said they haven't talked to him in five years. Not since, get this,
he got out of prison last time
.”

I raised my eyebrows. “No kidding. How interesting. Where did he do time?”

“It's more like, where
didn't
he go to prison. He was lodged at the Clinton County Jail for battery, then at Rikers Island, where he did a time-served bit for a burglary in the city, then he was a guest for six months at the Nassau County Diversion Center on Long Island. Assault, that time. Then the Volusia County Jail in Florida, for simple possession. Then CCI in Columbia, South Carolina, for aggravated assault. That was in 1992. But then I hit a wall. No records since then that I was able to find. Not just criminal, I mean no records, period. No credit bureau, no nothing.

“So I call his adoptive parents in New York again. I go: ‘What's the deal, you said he got out of prison five years ago, but I can't find a record of it.' Direct quote from this Heusenfelter guy: ‘That son of a bitch hated us so much, he went and changed his name.' I ask him, ‘To what?' ‘Why the hell should I care? Biggest mistake we ever made, getting involved with that ingrate.' So I checked around to see if there'd been an order entered to change his name. New York, no. Florida, no. South Carolina, bingo. I go back and check again under his new name. Lo and behold . . . tah-dah! . . . he's back in New York in the midnineties, this time at Sing Sing for aggravated assault again. So I call the police department in the little town where the offense occurred, guess what he did?”