He thought it wonderful, then, that Leslie turned to Marsh and asked abruptly, “How much am I inheriting, Al?”
“The answer to that goes back to Johnny’s father. Under Benedict Senior’s will, on Johnny’s death his heir or heirs would receive the entire income from the Benedict holdings. Mind you, Leslie, I said income, not principal. Mr. Benedict didn’t believe in distributing principal, even after he was dead. The principal remains in trust and intact.”
“Oh,” Leslie said. “That sounds like a letdown. How much will the income come to?”
“Well, you’ll be able to do a few good works with it, Les, and maybe have a few dollars left over for yourself. Let me see... oh, you should be collecting an income of some three million dollars a year.”
“My God!” Leslie Carpenter whispered; and she fell, weeping, into Marsh’s arms.
The press and the networks had descended in clouds late on Sunday, when the news of Johnny-B’s murder got out of Wrightsville. The invasion brought with it the usual orgy of sensationalism and slush. Newby and his small department, groggy from coping with the riotous student mass-trip at Fyfield Gunnery, had their hands overfull; in the end, the chief had to call on the state police for assistance, and a number of importunate newsmen and slop sisters were escorted from the grounds. Order was restored when a news pool was agreed upon, consisting of one representative each of the wire services, the TV networks, and the radio people. A single round-robin conference with the ex-wives and Leslie Carpenter was authorized to take place in the living room of the main house, a brouhaha that the Queens and Newby observed out of range of the cameras, watching and listening for some slip or lapse, no matter how tiny or remote. But if their quarry was one of the disinherited women, she was too guarded to give herself away. The women merely contended for camera exposure and had nothing but kind and grieving words for the passing of their Lord Bountiful. (The trio had evidently made a pact not to malign Benedict in public for tactical reasons, at least until they could consult counsel about the will trick and the prestidigitation of their millions.) Leslie Carpenter limited herself to an expression of surprise at her windfall and the statement that she had “plans for the money” which she would disclose “at the proper time.”
At this juncture Marcia Kemp was heard to say, “Which is going to be never, baby!” — not by the press, fortunately for her, only by the Queens and Chief Newby. They questioned the redhead about the remark later, when the news people were gone. She explained quickly that she had been referring to the coming contest over the holograph will, which she was “sure” she, Alice, and Audrey would win; she had certainly not intended the remark as a threat to Miss Carpenter. (Newby thereupon assigned an officer to keep an eye on Miss Carpenter.)
But that was the only note of discord.
There followed the surprising episode of the little hill and what stood upon it.
During the idyllic (pre-homicide) part of their stay, while exploring Benedict’s property, the Queens had come across what looked like a Greek antiquity in miniature, a sort of ancient temple for dolls, with a little pediment and some more than creditable frieze-figures of a bucolic nature, little Doric columns, and for fillip two heavily stained-glass little windows. The tiny structure stood on the crest of a hillock surrounded by meadow, a pleasant if incongruous sight in the New England countryside.
The Queens, père et fils, walked around the diminutive construction wondering what it was. It did not look old, yet it did not look new, either. Ellery tried the adult-sized bronze door and found it as immovable as the entrance to SAC headquarters.
“A playhouse for some rich man’s little girl?” the Inspector ventured at last.
“If so, it was an expensive one. This is genuine marble.”
It did not occur to either man that it might have been built by John Levering Benedict III to shelter his moldering mortality.
But that was what it proved to be, a mausoleum. “Johnny left a covering letter about it,” Al Marsh told them Monday night. “He wanted to be laid away in it. He had a horror of being planted in the elaborate family vaults — there’s one in Seattle and one in Rhinebeck, New York. I don’t really know why — in fact, I doubt Johnny did himself. At heart he was a rebel like his Aunt Olivia — Leslie’s mother — only he had too much of his father in him, who in turn was dominated all his life by the grandfather. Or, as Johnny put it, ‘I inherited my father’s disease — no guts.’ It’s my opinion Johnny hated everything that had gone into creating the Benedict fortune.
“Anyway, shortly after he purchased this property he designed the mausoleum — rather, had an architect blueprint it to his specifications — and hired a couple of oldtimers, country masons, practically an extinct breed, I understand, from around here to build it on that rise above the meadow. He brought in a sculptor from Boston to do the figures in the pediment; and the only reason he went to Boston for one is that he couldn’t find a local sculptor. Johnny loved this town and the surrounding country. The marble comes from the Mahoganies up there, native stuff. He left a special maintenance fund in perpetuity, by the way. He said, ‘I expect to lie here for a long time.’”
“But how did he finagle a cemetery permit?” Inspector Queen asked curiously. “Doesn’t this state have a law against burial in private ground?”
“I had something to do with that, Inspector. I rooted around and found that the section of land where that hill and meadow lie has been in dispute between Wrightsville and Wright County for over a hundred and seventy-five years, the result of a surveying error in the eighteenth century. Wrightsville’s always claimed that the meadow is within the town limits, with Wright County just as stubbornly maintaining that it’s outside the disputed line. The claims have never been satisfactorily adjudicated; it’s one of those Biblical problems these old communities run into sometimes, with no Solomon around to settle them. I worked through a local law firm, Danzig and Danzig, and we just stepped into the legal No Man’s Land and presented the contending parties with the accomplished fact. The thing is in such a tangle that I could assure Johnny he might count on resting in peace in that miniature temple till the day after Armageddon. So he went ahead with his plans.”
On Wednesday, Benedict’s body was officially released by the coroner’s office (the jury, having little of evidential substance to go on but the meager autopsy report, found that the deceased had come to his death “by a homicide caused by a blunt instrument hereunder described at the hand of person or persons unknown”); and on Friday, which was the third of April, Benedict was laid to rest in his meadow.
There had been a fierce if hushed competition for the business. Wrightsville’s mortuary needs were served by three establishments: Duncan Funeral Parlors (the oldest in town), the Eternal Rest Mortuary, and Twin Hill Eternity Estates, Inc. They cuddled together on the east side of Upper Whistling Avenue (across from The Nutte Shop and Miss Sally’s Tea Room) like three cotyledons in a seed. The notoriety of the case, which in an earlier day would have caused the conservative gentry of the embalming fluid to shudder and shy, only spurred their descendants to the chase; it was not every day that a local undertaking parlor was called on to bury a Benedict, and a murdered Benedict at that.
The determinant in the selection of the Duncan establishment was free enterprise. The incumbent, Philbert Duncan, had absorbed his art at the knees of the old master, his father, whom envious detractors had called “the slickest people-planter east of L.A.” Johnny Benedict’s letter of instructions on the subject of his interment had directed that his remains be encased in a stainless-steel inner container of a solid bronze casket of specified quality and design. No such magnificent box being available at any of the Wrightsville parlors, there was talk of postponing the funeral until the appropriate one could be shipped up from Boston. But Philbert Duncan drove over to Connhaven in the middle of the night of Wednesday — Thursday (presumably after moonset by the light of a dark lantern) and returned in triumph at dawn carting the specified coffin; it turned out that he had a cousin, one Duncan Duncan, who was in the business in Connhaven, a good-sized city in which demands for $5000 caskets, while uncommon, were not unknown.