“Not me. Meadows.” He smiles without apology.
“That’s why you had her sit in that first time. She was already involved.”
“She was already involved,” he agrees. “But we had to do it the way we did it. We were carrying out the last wishes of our client. Your father. He left us one of those, ‘In-case-anything-happens-to-me-open-this’ letters.”
I remember the morning I left Aspen. “And he gave you the code to turn off the alarm at Vinerd Howse. So nobody would be the wiser.” Uncle Mal nods. But I am confused. “So why didn’t he just have you tell me what he wanted me to know? Why all this crazy rigamarole?”
Mallory Corcoran sips his lemonade, strokes another large dog between the ears as it rumbles at his side. He is not intimidated by me. He was not reluctant to see me. By his own lights, he acted honorably and has nothing to hide. “I think your father wanted you to know some things, but I am not sure he wanted to put them into ordinary language. I think he was… he was afraid that somebody else would come across it. So he made his arrangements and then hid them where only you could find them.”
“A year ago,” I murmur.
“I would say, almost two years.”
I nod. “It’ll be two years this October since he gave you the letter.”
Uncle Mal is too savvy a lawyer to ask me immediately how I figured this out. But he does not know the story I heard from Miles Madison, my father-in-law.
“That sounds right,” says Mallory Corcoran, still playing with the dog.
I nod. Earlier this summer, I consulted with my colleague Arnie Rosen, an expert in professional responsibility, who explained over lunch that an attorney’s obligation survives the death of a client. The lawyer may no longer act in the name of the client, of course, but should generally carry out any deathbed instructions, as long as they propose nothing illegal or outside the scope of the lawyer’s duties, and as long as the client is in his right mind. If what is asked seems wrong, the lawyer might try to dissuade the client or might even refuse to do it; but, if the lawyer accepts the task, the obligation exists. In other words, what Mallory Corcoran did in delivering the Judge’s letter to Oak Bluffs was within his ethical responsibility to my father-whatever its twisted morality.
Why was it necessary to trash the first floor of Vinerd Howse? I ask. Or to break the glass?
He shrugs. “To make sure that you would be the only one to venture upstairs and find the note. Your father’s idea.”
“Meadows did that, too?”
“I didn’t ask for the details.”
“What if I had just waited for the police before going upstairs?”
“I don’t know. I suppose they would have found the note and given it to you. The same if the caretaker-can’t remember his name-had been the first one to find it. I must confess, however, I’m not sure your father considered the possibility that Kimberly might see it before you did. I suppose it all could have gone wrong. Or maybe he just figured you were too much a gentleman to send your wife to check upstairs after a break-in.”
I cannot tell whether I am being complimented or mocked, so I drop the subject and, instead, ask the first of the two questions that brought me to Mallory Corcoran’s dooryard. “Did you know what my father was doing? Why he left you the note?”
“Let me anticipate. You are asking me whether I know what his arrangements were, or exactly why he wanted you to know whatever he wanted you to know. The answer, Talcott, is no. I’m afraid I didn’t know. I still don’t.”
“Do you know why he chose me and not Addison?”
This time the answer is longer in coming. “It was my impression that your brother was… oh, out of favor.”
“Out of favor?”
“Your father seemed to think your brother had betrayed him.”
This one puzzles me. But one look at Mallory Corcoran’s super-lawyer face tells me I will get no more. So I ask the second question: “Did you know what was really going on? Between my father and Jack Ziegler?”
He has his answer ready. He has probably had it ready since the day the housekeeper called the firm to say the Judge was dead: “Your father was my partner and my friend, Talcott, but he was also a client. You know it is impossible for me to divulge what he told me in confidence.”
“I take that as a yes.”
“You should not construe it either way. You should not assume anything.”
“Well, I’m your client, too. That means you have to keep my secrets.”
“True.”
“All right. Let me speculate for a moment.” Uncle Mal is a statue. “I don’t know exactly what my father and Uncle Jack were up to, but I know they were up to something. I don’t know how much of it you guessed, but I don’t think he would have told you very much, because. .. well, because he craved your respect.” And didn’t quite trust you, I think but do not say, for I am pouring on the butter here. The Judge didn’t fully trust you, which is the real reason he gave you only that one cryptic note and hid his arrangements someplace else. “But I’d like to tell you what I think happened.”
“I’d be very interested in hearing that, Talcott.”
And so I tell him. I tell him I think at first it was reasonably innocent. Probably the Judge went to Jack Ziegler to find a private investigator, and Jack Ziegler recommended Colin Scott because Scott had been a colleague at the Agency and needed work. I doubt that my father was, at first, looking for a hired killer. Perhaps Jack Ziegler meant to put temptation in his path. Perhaps it just came together at the right moment. Either way, when my father received Scott’s report, he decided not to share it with the police.
“Why not?”
“Because of who it named.” But there is nothing in Uncle Mal’s experienced face to tell him whether the Judge shared that particular truth. For my part, I have not shared it with Dear Dana-and never will.
Instead of going back to the police, I continue, the Judge asked Scott to kill the driver of the car. Scott refused. That was the argument overheard by Sally and Addison: No rules where a daughter is concerned, my father argued, or begged.
“And so my father went back to Jack Ziegler,” I continue. He went to see Uncle Jack and asked him to use his influence with Scott, or to find somebody else to do it. Maybe Jack Ziegler was surprised. Maybe he was not. From what I have read, he has always possessed a remarkable capacity to seduce others into wrong. I suspect he would have started by tossing out objections, warning my father that he had no earthly idea what he was getting into, because he knew his old friend well enough to understand that, having started down the road into the other world, he would hardly turn back just because that other world turned out to have all the deadly features he expected. On the contrary, objections of that nature would draw him further in. My father would have pressed on, insisting that he wanted the driver of the car dead. He likely said he would pay any price, he did not care what obligations he undertook, he wanted justice done. Perhaps that was the moment when he asked Jack Ziegler to make a single promise to him: that, if anything happened to him, to my father, as a result of this mess, he, Jack, would see to it that his family never came to any harm. And he trusted Uncle Jack’s word, because, as Agent Nunzio told me, his word was what Jack Ziegler lived by
“You’re guessing,” says Mallory Corcoran, his unease growing, for I am speculating aloud now on the wrongs of two of his former clients, not one.
“I know. But it hangs together.” He offers no disagreement, so I resume. Somehow, sooner or later, Jack Ziegler agreed to intercede, and went for permission to whoever makes such decisions in his world. A deal was consummated. Scott would do the killing. There would be no charge, just as there had been no charge for his investigative services. Instead, from time to time, the Judge would be asked for little favors. Nothing obvious: no votes to overturn the conviction of a Mafia don or a drug lord. Instead, he would be called upon to help out the companies in which illegal monies were invested. Throwing out a burdensome or expensive regulation. Overturning an antitrust verdict.
“That’s why my father’s voting record got more conservative after Abby died,” I explain, with real pain. “Why he struck down so many regulatory schemes. He was covering his favors with a show of ideological purity.”
“You’re still guessing, Talcott.”
“Yes, I am. But I can hardly go interview Jack Ziegler to check my facts.” I hope he will offer to intercede, for Uncle Jack has returned neither of my calls since the cemetery, but the great Mallory Corcoran continues to sit,
