George Mills smiled at him.
“All right,” Messenger said, “so he was dressed to kill, so he had on his best bib and tucker. All right, so it was the dinner party hour when they saw him come out of his front door and get into his car. All right, so they followed him. That still doesn’t explain what he was supposed to have done.”
“You never told me what they say he’s done.”
“Well they don’t know,” Messenger said. “The usual stuff when a dean offers his resignation.”
“Is told to resign.”
“You said ‘asked.’ ”
“You said ‘disgrace.’ ”
“All right, all right. That he’s made some mistakes, been highhanded with tenure, let good people get away, worked the buddy system, kept people on that he likes, allowed salary discrepancies between favored and unfavored departments to get out of hand, not been aggressive enough raiding other schools, made too many enemies.”
“Has he done these things?”
“I don’t know. Some. Any dean does some. It’s not an easy job. Sam’s record is as good as most. He’s only been in the job a year. He wouldn’t have had time to do all of them.”
“He lost his wife,” Mills said. “They’re gentlemen. They wouldn’t have been shouting if he had.”
“They’re princes of industry,” Messenger said. “Soft-spoken guys.”
“That’s right,” Mills said. “They’d have had to be outraged.”
“It was the last week of August for God’s sake. A mild, beautiful night.”
“That’s right.”
“He wouldn’t have had a topcoat with him. He wouldn’t have had a raincoat. So what did he put it in? Tell me that.”
George Mills looked disgusted.
“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on,” Louise said.
“Damn it, Lulu,” Messenger said, “haven’t you heard a word he’s been saying? Your husband thinks Sam is a thief.”
“He likes souvenirs.”
“What do you suppose it was?”
“I don’t know. Houses like that,” Mills said dreamily, “it could be almost anything. Something with the university’s crest, I suppose. A slim gold lighter. A pen. A letter opener. A paperweight or ashtray. Sugar tongs. Stationery even. Anything.”
“And Claunch fingered him?”
“He never took his eyes off him,” George Mills said. “He counted his drinks. He toted up the hors d’œuvres he ate.”
“That’s right,” Messenger said.
“He hates him.”
“That’s right.”
“Tell me about the will, Cornell.”
“Jesus, George,” Messenger said, “I have some loyalties here. I—”
And that’s when Mills chose to play his China card. He stormed out of the house.
Leaving Louise and Messenger staring after him on the couch next to each other.
Because it wasn’t a will she signed in Mexico but an inter vivos trust. Because she’d left no will. Because if she had there’d have been an instrument for the widower to set aside, renounce, by simply filing a paper, a paper, not even anything fine-sounding as an instrument. He could have written it on a scratch pad, on the back of his marriage license, and been awarded his widower’s aliquot third. It was that inter vivos trust. Because if she left no will and had had the grace or just simple good conjugal sportsmanship to die intestate he wouldn’t even have had to trouble himself about the scratch pad. Half the hereditament would have come to him by sheer right of descent and succession. Half, not a third. It was the numbers, it was the arithmetic.
Cornell figured Sam figured it had to be enmity. She was essentially a lazy woman. Cornell figured Sam figured she was jealous of his health. Hadn’t it been held up to him on more than one occasion not that he was free of cancer while she carried hers to term like some malignant pregnancy, but that he’d been sane the whole eleven years she’d been nuts? So it had to be enmity. She was lazy. Intestacy wouldn’t have caused her to lift a finger. But there were those numbers to deal with, the difference between that half and that third she was screwing him out of by lifting the finger, by painfully crabbing all her suffering fingers around the uncongenial Mexican motel pen and laboriously writing out the inter vivos trust that either her father or brother — Cornell figured Sam figured — had dictated to her over the phone and that left everything to the girls with Harry as trustee, and that she had to be at pains just to get the handwriting right, probably working from actual memory to recall the once free-flowing cursive, the idiosyncratic flights and loops of her own signature.
“I feel sorry for the guy,” Cornell told Mills on the telephone. (He hadn’t seen him since the night George had walked out of his home leaving Messenger alone with his wife.)
“Yes?”
“She put him through hoops. The hoops were on fire. There were prenuptial agreements, did you know that?”
“Prenuptial agreements,” George Mills said evenly.
“He didn’t have a pot to piss in. What was he? Some poor graduate student. Maybe he had a typewriter and a ream of paper to do his assignments on. Maybe he had a few dollars’ worth of dictionaries and a handful of those composition manuals and examination copies they hand out to TA’s to look over.
“The poor bastard was marrying big bucks. I told you. There were prenuptial agreements. He had to sign to go the distance. If the marriage broke up before they got through the first fifteen years he wouldn’t get a penny. He was on probation, for Christ’s sake.”
“Yes,” George Mills said.
“They were married seventeen years,” Messenger said. “She did him anyway.”
“Yes,” George Mills said. He sounded distant even to himself. “What does he have to do now?”
“What do you mean?”
“To fight it. To break the trust.”
“I don’t know, George. I’m no lawyer.”
“Victor’s a lawyer,” George Mills said. “Find out. Call me back.”
“He says he’s got three ways to go,” Messenger said when he called back the next day. “If he can prove fraud, undue influence or mental incapacity.”
“There was no undue influence,” George Mills said.
“No,” Messenger said slyly, “but there may have been fraud.”
“I don’t see it,” Mills said.
“The prenuptial agreement, the numbers. If she left everything to the girls in a will he could set aside, he’d have taken a third, half if she left no will at all. He thinks it could be fraud because she didn’t leave him anything to set aside. Not a bad will or a nonwill either. There was malice and intent. He served more than his time, those fifteen-year articles of apprenticeship. Those fifteen-year articles of apprenticeship and then some. He was entitled to his expectations.”
“Thank you for your trouble,” he said. “She was crazy,” George Mills said flatly.
“It’s good I’m enhanced,” Messenger said. “I don’t owe you shit. I never fucked your wife.”
“I know that,” George Mills said. “All you ever did was want to.”
Messenger called again instead of coming over.
“You might as well have all the facts,” he said.
“Yes?” George Mills said.
“Grant’s dead.”
“Mr. Glazer?” Mills said.
“Who’s this?”
“George Mills,” George Mills said.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“Yes?”
“It’s my back, sir. I’m afraid what might happen to it this winter.”