court by competent evidence. The testimony, say, of the paramedics at the scene of the accident. But if all the probate court had before it was the coroner’s report, it was not likely to look further; a court may believe or disbelieve the evidence submitted to it, but it has no means by which to conduct its own investigations.
I turned to the hypothetical. At first glance the facts seemed simple enough, but I read the hypo more carefully the second time looking for land mines. Halfway through it occurred to me that the facts were suspiciously familiar: a wealthy woman left her entire estate to one of her two sons who, subsequently, was killed in the same car accident that killed her. Was it possible that Professor Howard had based this hypo on the facts of Christina Paris’s death? Beneath the hypo, Professor Howard provided six additional facts, each of which changed the disposition of the woman’s estate. Number six asked whether it would make any difference to the distribution of her wealth if one of her intestate heirs — her husband, perhaps — had arranged the deaths precisely to invalidate the will. Her husband, perhaps!
Two hours later I was walking alongside a dusty hedge on a dead-end street in an obscure wooded pocket of the campus where retired professors lived in university-subsidized houses. While it was generally acknowledged at the law school that John Howard, who’d retired eight years earlier, was still alive, he was seldom seen and even more rarely contacted. Finally, some antiquarian in the alumni office had found an address for me.
I came to a white picket gate. Across a weedy, dying lawn and in the shade of an immense oak tree stood a stucco house. It was remarkably still and peaceful-looking, like a ship harbored in calm waters. I pushed the gate open and went up the flagstones to a green door. There was a brass knocker in the shape of a gavel. I knocked, twice.
The door was opened by a middle-aged Asian woman wearing a green frock. She wiped her hands on her apron and eyed me suspiciously. “Yes?”
“I’ve come to see Professor Howard. Are you Mrs. Howard?”
“Housekeeper,” she replied. “You want professor?”
“Yes, does he live here?”
“Sure,” she said, “but long time no one comes.”
“Well, I’m here,” I pointed out.
“I’ll get,” she said, hurrying away. She’d left the door open so I stepped inside.
There was an odd smell in the house, musty and faintly sweet, a mixture of cigar smoke and furniture polish. I was standing at the end of a long dark hall. An arched entrance led off to a little living room. The furniture, old and very ugly, was too big for the room, as if purchased for some other house of grander proportions. A vacuum cleaner had been parked between two brick-red sofas. There were ashes of a fire in the fireplace. A pot of yellow chrysanthemums blazed on a coffee-table near a tidy stack of legal periodicals. The walls exuded an elderly loneliness. He probably never married, I thought.
The housekeeper appeared, touched my arm and told me to come with her. I followed down the hall and into a bright little kitchen. She opened the door to the back yard and I stepped outside. I saw an empty ruined swimming pool, the bottom filled with yellow leaves. Facing the pool were two white lawn chairs
— the old-fashioned wooden ones — and between them a matching table. There was a fifth of vodka, a pint of orange juice and two glasses on the table. One of the chairs was occupied by an old man wearing a sagging red cardigan frayed through at the elbow.
He turned his face to me. His thick gray hair was greasy and disheveled. He now sported a wispy goatee. He held a cigar in one hand as he reached for a glass with his other. Professor John Henry Howard, latest edition.
“You wanted to see me?” he asked in a voice thickened with the sediment of alcohol and old age.
I nodded.
“Well, boy, introduce yourself.”
“Henry Rios, sir. Class of ‘72. I took trusts and estates from you.”
He peered at me intently as I approached, hand outstretched. He put down the cigar, shook my hand and motioned me to sit beside him. “ ‘72? A good class, that. Not that many of you cared for probate. No, you belonged more to the quick than the dead. Where did you sit, Mr. — “
“Rios. In the back row.”
“Ah, one of those. What was your final grade?”
“An A-minus.”
He lifted his shaggy eyebrows and for a second I thought he was going to demand to see my transcript.
“Well, you must’ve learned something. Have a drink.” “No, I-,” but before I could finish he’d filled the glass with vodka and added, as an afterthought, a splash of orange juice. I sipped. It was like drinking rubbing alcohol.
“The smart cocktail,” the professor said touching his glass to mine. “One of my remaining pleasures. I have a system, you see. I allow myself only as much vodka as I have orange juice. Through judicious pouring I can make a pint of orange juice last all day.”
“The legal mind at work,” I said.
Professor Howard chuckled. “Indeed. So, Mr. Rios, what are we going to talk about?”
“I want to ask you about a hypo that appears in your casebook.”
“You a probate lawyer?”
“No.”
“Good, because if you were I’d charge you, and I ain’t cheap. Proceed.” He tilted his head back.
I withdrew from my pocket a xeroxed copy of the page in his book with the illustration of simultaneous death. “It’s this,” I said, handing it to him.
“What’s the question?” he asked as he skimmed the page.
“A wealthy woman and her oldest son are killed in an auto accident. She’d devised her entire estate to that son. The court uses the rule of simultaneous death to invalidate the will and her estate passes, through intestacy, to her husband. Now here, in number six, you ask what effect it would have on the distribution of the estate if her husband had actually arranged the accident.”
“Well, think, Mr. Rios,” he prodded. “If you killed your old mother to obtain the family jewels, do you think the court would reward your matricide?”
“I take it from your tone the answer is no.”
“If the law was otherwise it would be open season on every person of means. That answer your question?”
“One of them. These facts are based on the deaths of Christina and Jeremy Paris, aren’t they?”
He picked up his cigar from the edge of the table and lit it.
“I’m investigating the death of her grandson, Hugh Paris, who was a friend of mine. I believe he knew or suspected that her death and the death of her son, Jeremy, was arranged by Robert Paris. I think you know something about that.”
“What kind of law did you say you practice?”
“I didn’t. Criminal defense.”
He shook his head. “Criminal is a troublesome area. No rules. Might makes right, with only the thin paper of the Constitution between the fist and the face.”
“Why did he have them killed?”
Howard regarded me through narrowed eyes, as if deciding whether or not to lie.
“She was on her way to obtain a divorce. That would’ve extinguished his intestate rights. She’d already cut him out of her will.”
“How do you know that?”
“I drafted the will,” he said, tremulously.
“What else do you know, professor?”
“About the will or the marriage? They were intertwined. The marriage was hell for her but she put up with it for the children and because she was Catholic and, not least of all, because she was Grover Linden’s granddaughter and the Lindens don’t acknowledge defeat. But she hated Robert. He used her, robbed her. So she came to me one night and told me to write her a will that would cut him off from the Linden money in such a way that he would lose if he contested it.”
“How did you do it?”
