FORGET ME NOT (Mark Kane Mysteries Book One) (6 page)

“Is there anything else you need to know at
this stage?”

“There are other matters which may need to
be looked into, but let’s take things one step at a time. After
I’ve seen Susan I’ll be in touch.”

We went back through the glass doors to the
living room and resumed our places on either side of the table
still bearing empty coffee cups to tie up some loose ends. Philips
gave me Susan’s contact details and a check for my retainer. I told
him that I anticipated one week’s work, or five working days – so
the retainer was two and a half thousand. If the case ran longer
than that then I would charge by the day. If I solved the case to
his satisfaction before that then I would still keep the retainer.
He was happy with that arrangement.

“If I have to travel to obtain information
that I can’t get through other means it may add to the cost and
also the time frame. As for my fee there’s the possibility that I
may have to sub-contract some tasks. I’m a one-man band and I may
have to co-opt others to assist. If that happens I will need to be
reimbursed, but I’ll let you know about any substantial
disbursements beforehand,” I said.

I told Greg that I hoped I would be able to
resolve the matter quickly, but it depended how the investigation
progressed. I needed to see Susan’s amended birth certificate, and
I needed to trace the adoptive parents if I could. Greg said that
he would arrange for me to have a copy of Gloria’s will, although
he thought that had little, if any, bearing on my
investigation.

As I drove back down the gently curving
driveway my thoughts were on the will itself. Although I hadn’t
raised the subject with Philips there were niggling concerns at the
back of my mind. Firstly, was the will genuine? I had no reason at
this stage to think otherwise. Secondly was there a possibility of
duress? Susan had contacted Gloria shortly after the dementia had
started to become problematical, and had continued to see her after
that. In Greg’s absence who knows what was discussed between Gloria
and Susan? Then there was the question of when the will was
prepared and signed. Obviously it was after the onset of dementia
so there was the question of whether she was mentally fit to make
it at all. If that was the case then it might be necessary to look
for an earlier will; and if none could be found then Gloria might
be deemed to have died intestate. As an adopted daughter Susan
would have no claim under the intestacy laws. Ho hum, I thought,
this case might last a lot longer than I had originally expected.
Better call Lucy and tell her to clear the decks for at least a
week. I knew what she would say:

“What decks?”

“So she just appeared out of the blue
then?”

Lucy was lounging languorously in her beige
leather recliner, her size four feet, encased in pink ankle socks,
resting on the matching leather footstool.

“Apparently, yes.”

“Her timing was good, if that doesn’t sound
too bitchy.”

“Sounds spot on to me.”

“How much is the estate worth?”

“I didn’t ask. It hardly seemed relevant to
the enquiry; but a fair bit I should think.”

I was sitting on the sofa in the living room
of Lucy’s single bedroom bungalow in Norwood which happened to be
close to my own. This was no coincidence, since Lucy had found my
home for me. There was no point in renting an apartment in the city
and paying exorbitant rent when I could buy a bungalow and pay less
in mortgage installments, she said. It was virtually a
fait
accompli
by the time she raised the matter with me. Both
properties were handled by the same realtor and we would both get a
‘special deal’. It made sense, as most things Lucy said made sense,
and before I had time to consider all the implications of the
situation I had been relieved of a twenty percent deposit.

Lucy is not only my secretary and general
factotum; she’s also my friend. If she wasn’t my only friend I
would probably describe her as my closest friend. I had other
friends once, but marriage, aging and lack of juxtaposition had put
paid to most. The people that I knew now were more in the nature of
acquaintances, and most of my local acquaintances were those I’d
met in the course of my job.

“I wonder how she found out where her mother
was,” I said.

“Maybe through official records,” Lucy said,
“or perhaps by employing someone like you.”

“There isn’t anybody like me,” I said.

“You know what I mean, a gumshoe.”

I looked at the soles of my feet
pointedly.

“Or maybe she’s a Mormon,” she said.

I let that one go.

The microwave pinged to tell us that the meal
was ready. Actually Lucy can cook proper food. She’s a pot roast,
meatloaf, kind of cook; nothing too fancy. I’m more of a stir-fry
cook, but I seldom cook for anyone but myself so my expertise in
the field has not been independently verified. My staunchest critic
is Lucy, whose pronouncement on the last culinary delight I
prepared for her was: “Hmmm, not bad.” It wasn’t the highest
accolade possible, but it was better than “Yuk, what the hell is
that?” Gordon Ramsey eat your heart out.

“I reckon that social media has a lot to
answer for,” I said, as Lucy put whatever it was on plates and
placed them on the kitchen counter. As usual, the comestibles on
the plate bore scant resemblance to the picture that I had admired
on the carton. I don’t know whether it’s a co-incidence that the
contents of all microwave meals tend to taste more like the
packaging than the ingredients. Still, I only had myself to blame
since I’d invited myself round to Lucy’s place at short notice. Or
no notice at all in fact since I’d simply turned up on her doorstep
to boast about my new client.

“What do you know about social media, Kane?
Or any kind of technological advances since the transistor?”

“I think I did pretty well mastering a pager,
then a cell phone and even a satnav, plus I know how to surf the
internet, deal with emails and so on; but I admit that what I know
about social media sites and messaging could be written on a
thumbnail with plenty of room to spare around the edges. It doesn’t
stop me blaming it though.”

I knew that there were umpteen genealogical
sites freely available on the internet too, and I knew I should
have taken more time to get familiar these sites so that I could
harness their full potential for business reasons. It would have
stood me in good stead for the case in hand. I had tried, but like
learning language it was something that tiny kids were more adept
at than me. I’d registered with countless sites over the past few
years but I could never remember my username or password or both.
Only God knew how many subscriptions were being surreptitiously
sucked from my credit card for sites I never used.

“Anyway the simplest thing will be to ask
her,” I said. “She’s living in Concord and I’m driving up there to
see her tomorrow. It’s the birthplace of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

“Is it?” Lucy said. But at least she didn’t
say: “Who’s he?”

“He was a thinker,” I said, “and a pretty
good all-round guy by all accounts. Amongst many of his astute
aphorisms was this: ‘The only way to have a friend is to be
one’.”

“Sounds like a smart cookie,” Lucy said over
her shoulder while she was washing the dishes. “Have you spoken to
Susan yet?”

“Yes, I told her that I was acting on behalf
of the estate and needed to clarify a few matters with her. She
doesn’t know the real reason I want to see her, so I shall have to
box clever. Of course, if everything is above board then it’ll be
plain sailing.”

“That’s a mixed metaphor.”

“I know,” I said, “and all the better for it
in my opinion.”

“She may be a hot number,” Lucy said, “and if
she’s on the level you might be able to woo her and get your hands
on some of Gloria’s estate.”

Lucy’s look of mock seriousness failed to
mask her amusement at such a prospect. Lucy and I aren’t in a
relationship and we never have been. She’s my friend and my
employee. Well, mine and six others who share the downtown office.
She answers the phone, takes messages and receives documents and so
on. We’ve got a conference room which is available to all of us but
I have never used. It’s a sensible way of cutting overheads and the
address is intended to give our clients the impression of success.
As well as deciding where I lived and dictating the minutiae of my
life in various other ways (called ‘suggestions’ by Lucy) she had
also decided a long while back that we would be ‘friends with
benefits’. I thought she’d invented the term herself but apparently
she stole if from a movie. It allowed for occasional, or sometimes
frequent, intimacy between us she had explained to me, but not
monogamy. Either of us (by which I think she meant herself, mainly)
was permitted to see whomever we liked with no need to mention it;
but if one of us (meaning her mainly I think) got seriously
involved with someone else then we had to tell. Tell what, to whom
and how much I wasn’t sure because the situation had so far not
materialized; or if it had she hadn’t told me. There was no
intimacy tonight, however, just a microwave dinner and the
opportunity for me to use Lucy as a sounding board.

“Joking aside,” I said, “I’m concerned about
the will itself.”

“But you haven’t seen it yet, have you?”

“No, not yet; and I didn’t want to go into
details about the will with Philips until I’ve at least had a
chance to investigate Susan’s background. I know the will was made
after the onset of Gloria’s dementia, because Susan made her first
appearance a year or so after Gloria was hospitalized for a broken
leg, which is when Greg first noticed that something was wrong. Of
course, the first meeting must have been preceded by other contact
such as telephone calls, letters, emails; that sort of thing. But
it seems inconceivable that Gloria would have made Susan the major
beneficiary of her will until she had at least got to know her
better, so it’s likely that the will was written sometime later,
after Gloria started to show obvious signs of dementia.”

I ran through the matters that had gone
through my mind after leaving Philips’ house; the possibility of
forgery, duress, and lack of mental capacity. Lucy was in the
kitchen tidying up. She likes tidying up. It’s a kind of therapy
for her. She likes tidying up my place even more than she likes
tidying up her own place, which is fine by me.

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Lucy, as she
scraped what was left of our meal into the trash can, “the
strangest thing is the amount of the bequest. Why would she leave
such a large portion of her estate to Susan when she had two other
children and a husband too?”

“I agree, particularly in view of the fact
that by all accounts the inter-family relationship was very good;
and it’s also puzzling why Gloria would not have discussed the
matter with Greg. They were very close, you know.”

“Something’s definitely not right,” Lucy
said, as she came back into the living room and plonked herself
down on the sofa next to me, tucking her feet beneath her. “Even if
Susan really is Gloria’s daughter there must have been some kind of
manipulation by her.”

Well, all women are manipulative, I thought,
but I didn’t dare say so, particularly as I wasn’t even in my own
home.

“Duress seems unlikely though, because the
will had to be witnessed,” I said. “I don’t know yet who the
witnesses were, but obviously Susan couldn’t be one or she would be
unable to benefit from the will. I also don’t know where the
signing took place. It could have been at home, in which case Susan
could conceivably have been present, but it’s difficult to see how
she could have exerted any undue influence in the presence of the
witnesses.”

“It seems most likely to me,” Lucy said,
“that Gloria wasn’t fully
compos mentis
when she signed. And
that could be why she never mentioned it to her husband, because
maybe she forgot she’d done it. That’s one of the symptoms of
Alzheimer’s isn’t it, forgetfulness?”

“I don’t remember,” I said. Lucy gave me a
withering look. “No, seriously, you may well be right; which means
the will might not be valid even if no undue pressure was brought
to bear, in which case Susan’s blood relationship with Gloria might
not matter at all.”

It was food for thought, but the actual food
having been eaten I decided to head home, which involved a journey
of about two or three hundred feet.

The journey to Concord was dull and
uneventful. The weather had changed completely and the entire trip
was under heavy cloud and through driving rain. The wipers
valiantly slapped and sloshed against the windscreen trying to give
me something to look at. In the interest of punctuality I had set
off early. I had arranged to see Susan at her workplace which was a
restaurant just off the main street. It was either that or wait
until late evening, which I didn’t want to do, or wait until she
was off on Saturday which, given my retainer, I couldn’t afford to
do. After leaving Philips house yesterday I had waited for him to
confirm my instructions from Gloria’s attorney and then I had some
new business cards printed while I waited. My new cards proclaimed
that I was a ‘Probate Consultant’, which I imagined would sound a
lot less intimidating than private investigator. I was like a
chameleon; I had more business descriptions on my cards than most
people had cards. I didn’t want Susan to know that I had any
special concerns or suspicions about her. Instead I hoped to pass
my visit off as something strictly routine. I’d be polite and
congenial and yet cunning. I’d be crafty Kane today.

Susan had told me that she got a forty five
minute break at one thirty. I arrived well ahead of time, despite
the weather, and found a parking space nearby. I replayed in my
head the conversation I’d had with Lucy the previous evening and
wondered if Susan herself had given any thought to these matters. I
wondered too what her reaction had been to her potential windfall.
I didn’t know whether she was aware of it before Gloria’s death or
only after the will was disclosed. I knew from Philips that she was
single and living on a moderately low income. At least that’s what
he had been told. If so, it was unlikely that she had consulted an
attorney about the will, and that would make things easier for me.
I had been mentally rehearsing my approach to questioning Susan
during the drive but, as in all cases, when interviewing someone
it’s important to have a flexible game plan. Years ago I’d known an
attorney who worked his butt off preparing cross-examination of
witnesses but had little success. He would actually make a numbered
list not only of the questions he would ask but also the order in
which he would ask them. This approach was fundamentally flawed,
because you should never second guess. You must never assume that
the answer you are going to get is the one you want or expect. I
certainly had no idea what answers I was going to get from
Susan.