“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.
Given the byzantine complications of most estate law, the concept of simultaneous death was relatively simple and straightforward. The underlying premise was that neither a dead person nor his estate should be permitted to inherit a bequest by one living. Consequently, if a woman left her estate to her daughter but her daughter predeceased her, the gift was void. Upon the mother’s death the gift reverted to her estate rather than passing to the daughter’s heirs.
But what happened if mother and daughter died in such a manner that it was impossible to tell who died first? Did the gift revert to the mother’s estate or pass to the daughter’s? It was for such a contingency that the rule of simultaneous death arose. Using this rule, the law presumed that where the testator and beneficiary died simultaneously, the beneficiary died first. Consequently, the gift reverted to the estate of the giver and was distributed according to the rest of her testamentary scheme.
So it made no difference whether the will was properly written or not. For instance, a father might make a will leaving everything he owned to his son, but if the son died before the father, the will became just a scrap of paper and the father’s estate was divided as if the will had never existed. I was beginning to think that something very similar to that had occurred in the case of Christina Paris.
There was one other point about the rule of simultaneous death that had special meaning for me. The presumption, that the testator survived the beneficiary, was rebuttable. This meant that it could be disputed in
