The Motive (17 page)

“Hold it, hold it, hold it.” Aaron, an attorney in jacket and tie, put his hands out in front of him. “That whole question is moot now. She’s dead. The question is what he did with his will. Catherine. When you talked to him Wednesday, did he tell you he’d already changed it?”

“No. But he’d made the decision. He was coy about whether he’d already done it.”

Theresa asked. “But he didn’t say he hadn’t done it, either, did he?”

“He said he had scheduled a meeting with his partner—what’s his name…”

“Bob Townshend,” her husband said.

“Right. Bob. They had an appointment for next week, to talk over some of the issues, he said. He just kept saying that the main thing was that he was going to marry her. He loved her. She loved him.”

A chorus of muttered negative reaction stopped her. When it died down, she went on. “Whether or not we believed any of it, of what they had together, he told me we weren’t going to talk him out of it, or into some kind of prenup, either. And when he married her, she would become his heir. She’d had a very hard life, and he was going to make it up to her. We buzzards could stop circling. That’s really all he said.”

This brought more tears to Mary’s eyes. “Did he really say that?” She looked around at her family. “But he was our
dad
, you guys. It wasn’t all about his money.”

Theresa wasn’t having that. “Your children, my grandchildren, deserve that money more than Missy did, Mary, even if you didn’t care about it.” She threw her imperious gaze around the room, daring anyone to contradict her. “All of your children, my grandchildren,” she repeated, “absolutely deserve the benefit of his wealth—for college, or medical care if any of them get really sick. Or housing. If they need a down payment on their first home, who’s going to be able to help them?”

Into the small silence, Beth said, “So we still don’t know?”

“Not until we see the will, we don’t,” Will said.

“In the meantime,” Theresa said, “I think for my grandchildren’s sake that it’s critical, absolutely critical, that we consider possible scenarios and come to unanimous agreement about our response to each of them.”

“Well,” Aaron the lawyer spoke up. “It’s pretty straightforward, Theresa, really. If Paul didn’t change his will yet in favor of Missy, then the last we heard the estate goes in equal thirds to the three kids. Anybody have an estimate of what ballpark we’re talking about?”

Catherine Hanover spoke up. “Fourteen million dollars.”

Beth snorted. “Is that before or after the renovation?”

“That’s as of Wednesday, so after.”

Carlos sat forward on the couch, looked across to Catherine. “It sounds like you two had a pretty substantive talk.”

Catherine gave him a flat look. “I was motivated,” she said, then turned quickly to her other brother-in-law. “You were outlining options, Aaron. First was thirds to the three kids, if nothing had changed. But what if he’d already rewritten it in favor of Missy?”

“Well, then we don’t know for sure until we see it, but I’d say the most likely scenario is that he’d just move her up in front of the kids. His kids, not the grandkids. In which case the secondary beneficiaries would be Will, Beth and Mary anyway, and everything would go back to being the same as it was before he met Missy. That’s assuming they died at the same time, Paul and Missy.”

“But what if he died first?” Mary asked.

Aaron shook his head. “That won’t be an issue, even if the coroner concludes that one of them killed the other, which I gather they’ve ruled out.”

But Mary wasn’t convinced. “How can you know it won’t be a problem, Aaron? What if, just hypothetically, she lived after he did, even for a minute, then wouldn’t her heirs inherit?”

“No, because Paul never would have left his will vague on that point. Any good estate lawyer—and fourteen mil buys good help, trust me—covers it. Usually it’s ninety days.”

“What is?” his wife asked.

Aaron sighed. “The amount of time a beneficiary—Missy—needs to survive after Paul before her heirs get the inheritance.”

“Who are they anyway?” Will asked. “Her heirs?”

Everybody looked at each other, and then Aaron said, “I don’t think anybody knows, but I promise it won’t be an issue.”

“If there’s a ruling that she died after him,” Theresa put in, “we’ll find out who they are soon enough, believe me. Cousins and uncles and siblings she didn’t even know she had.”

“Well, maybe,” Aaron said. “But the greater possible concern for us, I think, and what we should be prepared to
litigate if necessary, is if he changed the will in favor of Missy…”

Theresa turned on him angrily. “
Must
you keep using her nickname, Aaron?”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing personal, Theresa. It makes it clearer for everyone. But if he changed the will in her favor, then it’s likely he changed the rest of it, too, maybe in favor of some charity, or to the kids, and I mean
our
kids. Your grandkids, Theresa. That’s what we ought to be prepared for.”

“That would be fine with me,” Theresa said. “That’s who I’m in this for.”

“We’re all in it for them, too, Mom,” Will said with some asperity.

“Well, he didn’t mention any of those other possibilities to me, Aaron.” Catherine sat rigidly in her chair. “He told me it was going to Missy. That’s what he wanted. It really wasn’t any of the family’s business.”

“That’s so ridiculous and just so like him,” Theresa said.

“Easy, Mom, okay?” Will said.

“Well,” she shot back, “you tell me. How could it be any more the family’s business? We were certainly all well enough aware that it was before…well, before this week.”

“Okay,” Will said, “but it’s still Dad.”

“I’m sure it was mostly her,” Beth said, “not him. She had him so fooled. I can’t believe he intended to cut us out completely.”

“You can believe anything you want, Beth,” Catherine said, “but the fact of the matter is that once the marriage happened, the whole financial picture was going to be different. And we all know what that was going to mean in practice, even if they hadn’t died.”

“But they didn’t just die,” Mary said. “Somebody killed them.”

“Well,” Theresa said, “of course I’m sorry about your father, but all I can say about Missy is good riddance.”

“Mom!” Mary exploded. “God!”

“What?” Theresa said. “If you’re honest, I know you’re all saying the same thing inside yourselves. Thank heaven that woman is out of the picture.” The matriarch threw her
gaze around the room, daring anyone to disagree with her. “I’ve heard all of us say one time or another that we wished she would either go away or just die.”

Catherine spoke up. “If we did, of course we were joking, Theresa. What do you think?”

“No. Obviously. I was just making the point that we knew what a danger that woman was to all of us.”

“Well, she’s not now,” Aaron said.

And at that truth, the family went silent.

Will was forty-five years old, with an athletic frame and a conventionally handsome face that had not yet gone to slack or jowl. Still wearing his Dockers and short-sleeved Tommy Bahama shirt, he was sitting on the bed as his wife came into the room carrying a load of folded laundry. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered with an uninflected, mechanical precision.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m doing fine, Will. How are you doing?”

“Good.”

She stood still for a moment, looking at him. Then she exhaled and went over to the dresser, put the pile of laundry on the chair next to it, and opened the top drawer. She wasn’t facing him. “So,” she said, “no fish?”

“None. No keepers anyway. Isn’t that weird? We’re out two hundred miles, feels like halfway to the Galápagos, and there are no fish. I’ve never been completely skunked before on one of these trips.”

“How many of you were there?”

“On the boat? Just three of us, plus the captain and crew.”

“Nice guys?”

“Okay, I guess,” he said. “The usual. Good ’ol boys. Tim and Tom.”

“Easy to remember.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. Never mind.” She closed the top drawer, opened the next one down. “I wish you’d have called, though. Not being able to reach you was terrifically frustrating.”

“I’m sorry about that. Next time I’ll remember.” He pushed himself back against the headboard. “What was that motivation you talked about tonight?”

“When?”

“When Aaron asked why you’d gone to see Dad that day.”

She stopped moving, let out a long breath, still facing away from him. Slowly she turned full around, holding one of his folded T-shirts. Finally, she shook her head slightly from side to side. “I guess I just got tired of not knowing where we were going to stand. Saul starts college in a little over a year, and he’s the first of the grandkids. I’d talked to Beth and Mary and both had asked if I’d heard anything from your dad, what with Sophie and Pablo right behind Saul. So I just thought I’d go get it from the horse’s mouth.” She was wringing the T-shirt between her hands. “Then, as you heard, we got on to other things.”

“Missy.”

“Among others.”

“Did you have words?”

“Some. Nothing worse than usual. We just talked, maybe argued a little. But it was all his decision, and there was really nothing to fight about. Besides, your father, as opposed to your mother, likes me. Or should I say liked.”

Will shrugged. “He liked attractive women. So does his son.” He patted the bed next to him. “Speaking of which, you’re looking good tonight, especially to a man who’s just spent five days at sea. Are you planning on coming to bed?”

“Eventually,” she said. “I usually do.”

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

Biting her lip, nodding to herself, she turned back to the dresser, dropped the crumpled T-shirt into the open drawer. Clearing her throat, she said, “Let me go check on the kids,” then left the room.

The assistant district attorney who handled arson cases was Chris Rosen. He’d been a prosecutor for nine years now, after first serving a year fresh out of law school as a
clerk for Superior Court Judge Leo Chomorro. So he’d lived his entire legal life in the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant. Rosen thrived in the environment.

An old-fashioned, hard-on-crime professional prosecutor, he didn’t believe that he’d ever seen an innocent person in custody. “You don’t get all the way to arrested—and believe me, that is a long, long way—unless you did it,” he liked to say. “That’s the truth, it always has been and always will be nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

Unmarried and slightly unkempt, with an easygoing personal style, he often grew a day or two’s stubble when he wasn’t due in court. His dark hair licked at the top of his collar. The conscious image he projected was border-line blue collar, a guy with no special passion for prosecuting his fellow citizens. He was just a regular working dog going about his business, doing his job. Nobody to worry about. Attorneys who hadn’t already faced him in court found out the truth soon enough, and often found themselves on the defensive from the get-go, blindsided by his cold passion.

“No law says you can’t come across out of court as sympathetic, you know, a little…sensitive,” he was saying over midnight drinks to Dan Cuneo as they sat at the bar at Lou the Greek’s. “Then you get ’em in court, suddenly I’m the iceman and whop ’em upside the head. They don’t know what hit ’em.”

Rosen’s experience had taught him that he needed every advantage he could get in San Francisco, where juries tended to see their main role as finding some reason, almost
any
reason—stress, hardship, bad luck, unfortunate upbringing—to let defendants off. There always lurked some mitigating factor, some reason for juries to forgive.

“Hey, but enough about me.” Rosen sipped at his single malt. It wasn’t anywhere near his working hours on a Friday night. He was out here now with his Oban on the rocks as a favor to his main-man arson inspector Arnie Becker, and also because the recent double-homicide fire was going to be the biggest case he’d tried to date. “Becker says you got a lead on Hanover.”

Cuneo, on duty, drank Cherry Coke, no ice. “You know the basics?”

“Not much beyond Hanover and his girlfriend.”

“All right.” Cuneo tapped his fingers on the bar. “There was this couple, Maxine and Joseph Willis…” Drinking more Cherry Coke, fidgeting in his chair, continuing his percussion on the bar top, Cuneo laid out for Rosen the originally conflicting stories of the Willises—how Maxine had seen Missy D’Amiens leave the Hanover house within minutes of when the fire must have started, how Joseph had been uncertain—it might have been somebody else. Then there was Jeffie at the Valero station who
volunteered
that someone who looked something like her, but had different hair, had bought gasoline in a container and put it into her trunk.

“I’m still listening,” Rosen said. “So you’ve got a woman who resembled this Missy.”

“Well, wait. More than that. I’ve got a true fox, middle-aged…”

“Which one?” Rosen asked. “A fox or middle-aged?”

“Both.” At Rosen’s skeptical look, Cuneo said, “It happens. You’d seen her, you’d believe it. Anyway, she’s in jeans and a shiny blue shirt, black leather jacket, driving a Mercedes, buying a container of gasoline and then coming out of Hanover’s house a few minutes before it goes up.”

“If it’s all the same woman.”

“Right. Of course. It was.”

“Which means?”

“Which means, what if she had a motive?” Cuneo waited, but Rosen didn’t bite. “Which she did.”

“So you’re telling me you’ve got a suspect.”

“Not quite yet. I’m close. Light on physical evidence, but loaded with probable cause.”

“You want a warrant,” Rosen said.

“Yep, yep, yep.” Cuneo bobbed his head, tattooed the bar with a final paradiddle. “Becker says you’re tight with some judges.”

Rosen shrugged. “The question is, can we make the case. I don’t want to bring anybody in front of a grand jury and have nothing to talk about.” He cast his eyes around. “I need a narrative. If I buy it, I can sell it to whoever’s signing warrants.”

Cuneo willed himself still, met Rosen’s eye. “Grand jury’s Tuesday, right?”