anxiety and inconvenience resulting from it descended, over a hundred years later, on the head of Mr. George L. Carey.
1
George Carey came from a Delaware family that looked like an illustration for an advertisement of an expensive make of car. His father was a prosperous doctor with snow-white hair. His mother came from an old Philadelphia family and was an important member of the garden club. His brothers were tall, solid, and handsome. His sisters were slim, strong, and vivacious. All had fine regular teeth, which showed when they smiled. The whole family, indeed, looked so happy, so secure, and so successful that it was difficult not to suspect that the truth about them might be different. But no, they actually were happy, secure, and successful. They were also exceedingly smug.
George was the youngest son and, although his shoulders were not so broad as those of his brothers nor his smile as self-satisfied, he was the most talented and intelligent member of the family. When the glories of their football-playing days had departed, his brothers had made their ways aimlessly into business. George’s plans for the future had been clear-cut from the moment he left high school. Despite his father’s hope for a successor in his practice, George had declined to pretend to an interest in medicine which he did not feel. What he wanted to go in for was law; and not the criminal, courtroom kind, but the kind that led in early middle age to the presidencies of railroads and steel corporations or to high political office. But while the war, which came just after he had been graduated from Princeton, had removed much of his solemnity and smugness and had had beneficial effects upon his sense of humour, it had done nothing to change his mind about his chosen profession. After four and a half years as a bomber pilot, he went to Harvard Law School. He graduated, cum laude, early in 1949. Then, having spent a useful year as secretary to a learned and famous judge, he joined Lavater, Powell and Sistrom.
The firm of Lavater, Powell and Sistrom of Philadelphia is one of the really important law offices of the eastern United States, and the long list of partners reads like a selection of promising candidates for a vacancy on the Supreme Court. No doubt its massive reputation still derives to some extent from memories of the vast utilities manipulations with which it was concerned in the twenties; but there have been few corporation cases of any magnitude during the last thirty years in which the firm has not held an important brief. It remains a virile, forward- looking concern, and to be invited to join it is a mark of approbation most flattering to a young lawyer.
Thus, as he arranged his belongings in one of Lavater’s comfortably furnished offices, George had reason to feel satisfied with the progress of his career. Admittedly, he was a little old for the somewhat junior position he occupied, but he was shrewd enough to realize that his four years in the Air Corps had not been wholly wasted from a professional point of view, and that the distinction of his war record had had quite as much to do with his presence at the Lavater firm as his work at law school or the warm recommendations of the learned judge. Now, if all went well (and why shouldn’t it?), he could look forward to rapid advancement, valuable contacts, and an expanding personal reputation. He felt that he had arrived.
The news that he was to do some work on the Schneider Johnson case came, then, as a disagreeable blow. It was also a surprise of another kind. The sort of business that Lavater, Powell and Sistrom normally handled was the sort that made reputations as surely as it made money. From what George remembered of the Schneider Johnson case, it was just the sort of slapstick affair that a corporation lawyer with a thought for his reputation would pay to stay clear of.
It had been one of the notorious missing-heir-to-a-fortune absurdities of the pre-war years.
In 1938, Amelia Schneider Johnson, a senile old woman of eighty-one, had died in Lamport, Pennyslvania. She had lived alone in the decrepit frame house which had been the late Mr. Johnson’s wedding present to her, and her declining years had been passed in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. When she had died, however, it had been found that her estate included three million dollars in bonds which she had inherited in the twenties from her brother, Martin Schneider, a soft-drink tycoon. She had had an eccentric distrust of banks and safe-deposit boxes and had kept the bonds in a tin trunk under her bed. She had also distrusted lawyers and had made no will. In Pennsylvania, at the time, the law governing intestacy had been determined by an act of 1917 which said, in effect, that anyone with even a remote blood-relationship to the deceased might be entitled to a share in the estate. Amelia Schneider Johnson’s only known relative had been an elderly spinster, Miss Clothilde Johnson; but she had been a sister-in-law and therefore had not qualified under the act. With the enthusiastic and disastrous co-operation of the newspapers, a search for Amelia’s blood-relations had begun.
It was, George thought, all too easy to understand the newspapers’ eagerness. They had scented another Garrett case. Old Mrs. Garrett had died in 1930, leaving seventeen million dollars and no will, and here was the case eight years later, still going strong, with three thousand lawyers still chiselling away, twenty-six thousand claimants to the money, and a fine smell of corruption over all. The Schneider Johnson thing could last as long. True, it was smaller, but size wasn’t everything. It had plenty of human angles-a fortune at stake, the romantic isolation of the old lady’s declining years (she had lost her only son in the Argonne), the lonely death without a relative at the bedside, the fruitless search for the will-there was no reason why it should not have staying-power, too. The name Schneider and its American modifications were widely distributed. The old girl must have had blood-relatives somewhere even if she hadn’t known them. Or him! Or her! Yes, there might even turn out to be a one hundred per cent non-sharing heir! All right, then, where was he? Or she? On a farm in Wisconsin? In a real-estate office in California? Behind the counter of a drugstore in Texas? Which of the thousands of Schneiders, Snyders, and Sniders in America was going to be the luck one? Who was the unsuspecting millionaire? Corn? Well, maybe, but always good for a follow-up, and of nation-wide interest.
And of nation-wide interest it had proved. By the beginning of 1939, the administrator of the estate had been notified of over eight thousand claims to be the missing heir, an army of disreputable lawyers had moved in to exploit the claimants, and the whole case had begun to soar rapidly into the cloud-cuckoo land of high fantasy, skullduggery, and courtroom farce in which it was to remain until, on the outbreak of war, it had fallen suddenly into oblivion.
What business Lavater, Powell and Sistrom could have with the resurrection of so unsavoury a corpse, George could not imagine.
It was Mr. Budd, one of the senior partners, who enlightened him.
The main burden of the Schneider Johnson estate had been borne by Messrs. Moreton, Greener and Cleek, an old-fashioned Philadelphia law firm of great respectability. They had been Miss Clothilde Johnson’s attorneys and had conducted the formal search for a will on her instructions. The intestacy duly established, the matter had come before the Orphans’ Court in Philadelphia, and the Register of Wills had appointed Robert L. Moreton as administrator of the estate. He had remained the administrator until the end of 1944.
“And very nice too,” said Mr. Budd. “If only he’d had the sense to leave it at that, I wouldn’t have blamed him. But no, the cockle-brained old coot retained his own firm as attorneys for the administrator. Jeepers, in a case like that it was suicidal!”
Mr. Budd was a pigeon-chested man with a long head, a neat, clipped moustache, and bifocal glasses. He had a ready smile, a habit of using out-of-date colloqualisms, and an air of careless good-humour of which George was deeply suspicious.
“The combined fees,” George said carefully, “must have been pretty big on an estate of that size.”
“No fees,” declared Mr Budd, “are big enough to make it worth while for a decent law office to get mixed up with a lot of ambulance-chasers and crooks. There are dozens of these inheritance cases hanging fire all over the world. Look at the Abdul Hamid estate! The British got tied up in that one and it’s been going on for thirty years or more. That’ll probably never be settled. Look at the Garrett case! Think how many reputations that’s damaged. Shucks! It’s always the same. Is A an imposter? Is B out of his mind? Who died before whom? Is the old photograph Aunt Sarah or Aunt Flossie? Has a forger been at work with faded ink?” He waved his arms disparagingly. “I tell you, George, in my opinion the Schneider Johnson case pretty well finished Moreton, Greener and Cleek as a regular law firm. And when Bob Moreton got sick in ’44 and had to retire, that was the end. They dissolved.”
“Couldn’t Greener or Cleek have taken over as administrator?”
Mr. Budd pretended to look shocked. “My dear George, you don’t take over an appointment like that. It’s a reward for good and faithful service. In this case, our learned, highly respected, and revered John J. Sistrom was
