“Hugh?”
“Yes. His father’s heir. I gave Paris custody of my son and got in exchange-”
“Your thirty pieces of silver,” I said bitterly.
“Considerably more than that,” she said. “And what right do you have to judge me? He was nothing to you but a trick.”
“No,” I said. “I loved him.”
She looked away from me. A moment later she said, “I have never understood homosexuality. I can’t picture what you men do with each other.”
“I could tell you but it would completely miss the point.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rios, and about so many things it’s hardly worthwhile to begin enumerating them now.”
“Would you like me to drive you back into the city?”
“No, thank you. The bartender cuts me off at ten and I take a room in the hotel. I’ll be fine.” She had stepped down from the bar stool. “Goodnight, Mr. Rios.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Paris.”
Then she was gone, weaving between tables toward a door marked Ladies. I went out into the darkness and the chilly autumn air, drunk and depressed.
The next morning I was at the county law library when it opened and spent the next hour ploughing through treatises on the law of trusts and estates. The coroner’s phrase, that Christina and Jeremy Paris had died simultaneously, had been ticking away in the back of my mind. I’d thought about it all the way back from Napa. There had to be a reason for the discrepancy between the times of death recorded at the scene of the accident and the coroner’s finding. The coroner’s report was a legal document and there were only two areas of the law to which it pertained, criminal and probate. Since, at the time, there was no issue of criminal liability arising from the accident, the coroner’s findings must have been sought for the purposes of the probate court. When I got to that point, I remembered simultaneous death, a phrase I recollected dimly from my trusts and estates class.
I picked up a red-covered casebook, Testate and Intestate Succession, eighth edition, by John Henry Howard, Professor Emeritus at Linden University School of Law. Professor Howard had been my teacher for trusts and estates. Back then, he was only up to his fifth edition. I opened the book to the general table of contents. The book was divided into the two main sections, intestate and testate succession. Seeing the two concepts juxtaposed in type on facing pages, I suddenly realized my research mistake. Aaron Gold had told me that Christina Paris had left a will but her estate, nonetheless, passed through intestacy. I had focused on whether there could be a drafting error that would invalidate a will and which, somehow, involved times of death. But the rule of simultaneous death was a concept of intestate succession and it functioned whether a will was properly drawn or not; the issue was not whether a will was correctly drafted, but who it named as a beneficiary. I turned to the more detailed table of contents and, under intestate succession, buried near the bottom of the page, saw the words simultaneous death.
It was not a not a hot topic in the law of estates, rating little more than a page and a half. One page was a general discussion of the concept, with case citations. The other half-page presented a hypothetical situation and a number of questions arising from it. I remembered that Professor Howard’s hypos were never as easy as they first looked.
Given the byzantine complications of most estate law, the concept of simultaneous death was relatively simple and straightforward. The underlying premise was that neither a dead person nor his estate should be permitted to inherit a bequest by one living. Consequently, if a woman left her estate to her daughter but her daughter predeceased her, the gift was void. Upon the mother’s death the gift reverted to her estate rather than passing to the daughter’s heirs.
But what happened if mother and daughter died in such a manner that it was impossible to tell who died first? Did the gift revert to the mother’s estate or pass to the daughter’s? It was for such a contingency that the rule of simultaneous death arose. Using this rule, the law presumed that where the testator and beneficiary died simultaneously, the beneficiary died first. Consequently, the gift reverted to the estate of the giver and was distributed according to the rest of her testamentary scheme.
So it made no difference whether the will was properly written or not. For instance, a father might make a will leaving everything he owned to his son, but if the son died before the father, the will became just a scrap of paper and the father’s estate was divided as if the will had never existed. I was beginning to think that something very similar to that had occurred in the case of Christina Paris.
There was one other point about the rule of simultaneous death that had special meaning for me. The presumption, that the testator survived the beneficiary, was rebuttable. This meant that it could be disputed in 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.