“Come now, Mr. Rios-” he began.
“Look,” I said. “I’ll drive myself to the museum alone, or I won’t go at all. Understood?”
After a moment’s pause, he said, “Understood. But be careful with the car.”
“I hear they drive themselves,” I said, getting into the driver’s seat.
I calculated that it would take the driver at least a half hour to walk back to campus. Smith, or whoever had dispatched him, was probably not even certain I could be lured to the museum, much less at a fixed time, but he would begin to get nervous if too much time passed without word from the driver. I could cover the distance to the campus in about ten minutes. This gave me, I decided, about fifteen minutes of dead time before anyone got jittery. Fifteen minutes was more than enough time for the plan that now suggested itself to me.
I made a stop. When I started up again, ten minutes later, I noticed the white van a car length behind me. I began to whistle. The van’s lights flickered on and off. I relaxed.
I drove beneath the stone arch and onto Palm Drive. Just before I reached the oval lawn that fronted the Old Quad I turned off a rickety little side street called Museum Way. When I looked in my mirror, the van was gone. I followed the road for a few hundred yards until it ended, abruptly, at the voluminous steps of a sandstone building, the Grover Linden Museum of Fine Art. I parked the car and got out.
The edifice, reputedly inspired by St. Peter’s, consisted of a domed central building and two wings jutting off on each side at a slight angle. As a law student, I had sometimes come here to study since it was as deserted a spot on campus as existed. It was deserted now as I made my way up the steps to where a uniformed university security guard stood. Behind him, the museum’s hours were posted on the door and indicated, quite clearly, that the museum was closed on Tuesdays. Today was Tuesday.
“Mr. Rios?”
“That’s right.”
“Go right in, sir. Mr. Smith is up on the second floor in the family gallery. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.”
The monster was surprisingly graceful inside. Sunlight poured into the massive foyer from a glass dome in the ceiling. A beautiful staircase led up from the center of the foyer to the second floor. Walkways on that floor connected the right and left wings of the museum. The staircase and interior walls were white marble, the banisters of the staircase were polished oak and the railings were bronze. All that glare of white and polished surfaces made me feel that I was inside a wedding cake.
I started up the stairs to the second floor, got to the top and turned right. Above the entrance to the gallery at my right were chiseled the words “the Linden Family Collection.” On each side of that entrance stood an armed security guard. They weren’t wearing the university’s uniforms. I stepped past them into the room.
The family gallery was a long and narrow rectangular room, Along one of the long walls were six tall windows looking out over a garden. Along the other were paintings of the various buildings of the university as they existed on the day the university opened its doors for business. There were also a dozen standing glass cases that displayed such memorabilia as Grover Linden’s eyeglasses, Mrs. Linden’s rosary and a collection of dolls belonging to the Linden’s only daughter.
I strolled past these treasures toward the end of the room. There, alone on the wall, hung the only well- known work in the room, a six foot portrait of Grover Linden himself painted by John Singer Sargent. Beneath it, on a wooden bench; sat an old man, John Smith.
There was no one else in the room and the only noise was the soft squish of my running shoes as I walked across the marble floor. Smith rose as he saw me approach. At six foot four he had five inches over me but was thin and frail-looking. The tremulous light that fell across his face washed it of all color. Even his eyes were faded and strangely lifeless as if they’d already closed on the world. He extended his hand to me, His grip was loose and perfunctory and the hand itself skeletal and cold. And yet, even that touch conveyed authority. He sat down again and motioned me to sit beside him. I did. The two guards at the other end of the room moved to just inside the gallery. I felt their eyes on us.
“Thank you for coming,” Smith said in a surprisingly firm voice. He elongated his vowels in the manner of Franklin Roosevelt, I noticed; the accent of wealth from an earlier time,
“You’re welcome. Though I must say this is an odd meeting place.”
“My lawyers,” he said, “advised me not to speak to you at all, since it’s likely that I’ll become involved in this lawsuit of yours, but I had to talk to you.”
“So we’re hiding from your lawyers?”
“Exactly,” he replied. We watched dust motes fall through the air. “You know I haven’t been to this museum since it was dedicated sixty years ago. Of course I was just a boy then. But for years I dreamed about this portrait of my grandfather.”
“Is it a fair likeness?”
“It errs on the side of tact,” he said, smiling a little. He cleared his throat with a murmur. “Now, Mr. Rios, perhaps we can discuss our business.”
“Which is?”
“This — lawsuit.” He looked at me and said, “What will it cost me to persuade you to drop it?”
“Well, to begin with, an explanation of why you would make such a request.”
“My family’s good name,” he said.
“Robert Paris was a member of your family by marriage only,” I said, “and, from what I understand, no friend of yours. Additionally, my information is that he was responsible not only for the murder of Hugh Paris but also your sister, Christina, and your nephew, Jeremy.”
“Your information,” Smith said with a trace of contempt. “Are you so sure your information is correct?”
“I’m positive of it. Aren’t you?”
“As to my sister and nephew,” he said, rising, “yes. As to Hugh,” he shrugged, slightly, and moved toward a window. I rose and followed him over.
“How long have you known about Christina and Jeremy?” I asked.
“Twenty years,” he replied. “John Howard sought me out after they were killed and brought me the wills. I had some of my men conduct an investigation of the accident and the subsequent coroner’s inquest. They established that the accident had been arranged and the inquest rigged for the purpose of a finding of simultaneous death. It wasn’t difficult, Robert was inept as a murderer and left a trail of evidence that would have sent him to the gas chamber but the evidence was scattered through half a dozen police jurisdictions and the police were even more inept than he.”
“But you had the evidence. Why not use it against him?”
He regarded me coolly as if deciding that I was not as bright as he’d been led to believe. “I did use it, Mr. Rios.” “Not to go to the police.”
“No,” he said, laying a fingertip against the windowsill. “My investigators obtained the evidence as,” he smiled at me, conspiratorially, “expeditiously as possible. Their methods were not the police’s methods and, consequently, my lawyers informed me that Robert would’ve been able to suppress enough of the evidence to weaken the case against him, perhaps fatally.”
“Nonetheless,” I insisted, “it was worth a try.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, impatiently. “There were higher stakes to play.”
“Something greater than justice for the dead?” I asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “I was told you had a lawyer’s way with words,” he said, not admiringly.
“You were talking about higher stakes.”
“Yes, there was the money to think about, Christina’s estate, one-half of my grandfather’s fortune. It had fallen into Robert’s hands. Robert was many things, most of them contemptible, but he was good with money. I had to think ahead about what would’ve happened to that money had Robert been removed from the picture.”
“It would’ve gone to its rightful heirs.”
“Who at that time,” Smith said, “were my lunatic nephew, Nicholas, and his ten-year-old son, Hugh.”
“Why couldn’t you have had yourself appointed their guardian?”
“Because there was someone with a much stronger claim to that office.”
“Who?”
Smith snorted. “Your client, Mr. Rios. Katherine Paris.”
I said, “Ah.”
