T
en days before the trial started, Charles called Destiny and said that he had to see her right away, that very day. She twiddled the telephone cord through her fingers and smiled, “Sure,” she said, “how about coming here for dinner?”
“No,” he answered, “this
really
is about the case. I need to see you soon as possible. Can you get to my office this afternoon?”
“Office?”
“Yes,” he answered. “Afterward we can grab a bite.”
When she arrived at four-thirty, Charles was at his desk with his nose pointed toward a computer screen. “Tell me something,” he said without turning around, “did you really mean what you said?”
“What did I say?” she asked.
“You said you’d rather see the money flushed down the toilet than have Elliott Emerson get hold of it.” He swiveled to face her. “You mean that?”
“I suppose I do. Of course, I’d rather keep the money. If Judge Kensington decides I’m not entitled to the inheritance, it’ll take me thirty years to pay off your fee.”
“My fee?” Charles chuckled, “
that’s
what you’re worried about?”
“Yes,” she answered indignantly. “Did you think our relationship was about me trying to freeload some legal services?”
“No,” he laughed, “I never thought that. But,” he stood, walked around to the front of the desk and took her hand in his. “I thought you knew, I took this case on a contingency basis.”
“Contingency?”
“Yes. The only fee I’m entitled to is a percentage of what the court awards you. If you don’t keep Abigail Lannigan’s money, you don’t owe me a cent.” Charles was telling a lie, because he’d taken her on as a client facing a criminal charge, but he didn’t want to wonder if her affection was just a feeling of obligation.
“That hardly seems fair,” she sighed, “after all the work you’ve done?”
“That’s the way lawyers work.” He kissed the tip of her nose, and then moved back to his side of the desk. “Well,” he said, “how about it? If the jury does find in the complainant’s favor, could you live with losing the money if it doesn’t go to Elliott?”
“I suppose so,” she answered. “Although it would mean that you don’t get anything either and that would make me feel pretty bad.”
“Forget about it,” he said, then he swung over to talking about the differential in the estimated and actual value of Abigail Lannigan’s estate. “Hoggman claims that the Lannigan Farm sold for one point three million, and of that, almost one million dollars is unaccounted for –”
“I didn’t take it!”
“I’m not saying you did. As a matter of fact, I’ve gone through Abigail Lannigan’s accounts and can’t find a trace of there ever being such an amount. You don’t know of any other holdings – right?”
Destiny shook her head.
“Any bank accounts outside of Middleboro?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you know the name of the lawyer who probated her brother’s will?”
Destiny pressed her fingers to her forehead and stretched her lips into a straight line. “I think so,” she answered pensively. “I remember Abigail mentioning him several times – a fine gentleman, she said, who’d done right by her. His name was, um, Culpepper! No,” she corrected herself, “he came from Culpepper. His name was Bartholomew, something like that.”
“Culpepper, huh?” Charles turned back to the computer and started a search of lawyers registered in the state of Virginia. He zipped ahead to Culpepper. “Babcock? Baguchinski? Bartell?”
“That’s it!” Destiny shrieked.
“Scott C. Bartell?”
She nodded. “I’m almost positive, that’s him.”
Charles reached for the telephone. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see if he knows anything about this supposedly missing million.”
As it turned out, Scott Bartell had gone for the day, but once Charles explained what he was looking for, the secretary promised to pull the file and have her boss return the call first thing in the morning.
T
he following morning, while Charles was in the middle of working up a list of Lannigan descendents, the phone rang. “Scott Bartell,” the caller said, “you wanted to talk to me about the William Lannigan estate probate?”
“Yes, indeed,” Charles replied, then he explained the situation and asked if Mister Bartell could detail the contents of the estate that was passed on to Abigail Lannigan.
“Hold on, I’ll take a look,” Bartell said.
Charles heard a click, then found himself listening to a particularly loud rendition of
Send in the Clowns.
That eventually changed over to
Pretty Mary
and finally Scott Bartell clicked back onto the line. “Sorry,” he said, “it took me a while to locate this.”
“Well?”
“Everything in William’s estate went to his sister Abigail. There was a cash account valued at one-hundred-sixty-seven thousand and a bunch of personal effects.”
“That’s it?”
“Far as I can tell.”
“Any securities? Bonds? Real estate holdings?”
“None listed.”
“Thanks,” Charles said, a smile curling the corners of his mouth. “Please send me a certified copy of the transfer.”
Shortly after that, Charles placed a call to the Blackburn County Courthouse and asked to speak to the Property Registration Office.
The telephone rang seven times before a woman answered, “Justine Tyler.”
“Miss Tyler,” Charles said, “I’m trying to ascertain the details of a property transaction that took place in Chestnut Ridge, Virginia. The seller was William Lannigan and the buyer a land development company.”
“What was the date of sale?” she asked.
“Sometime within the last ten-fifteen years.”
“You want me to search fifteen years of records!”
“It’s quite important,” he said.
After a fair bit of grumbling, she agreed to research the transaction, but warned that he shouldn’t expect a call back before late afternoon.
When Charles hung up the receiver, he went back to the list of Lannigan descendents – which now totaled one-hundred-forty-seven. One by one, he called them and asked about their relationship with the late William Lannigan, Senior. He found forty-six grandchildren, eighty-three great grandchildren, seventeen thrice removed cousins, and one elderly gentleman who could recall that his grandma’s maiden name was Lannigan, but couldn’t say for sure that she was a
direct
descendent of William. Charles added his name to the list anyway – what was one Lannigan more or less when they were already stacked up like firewood.
It was almost five o’clock when Miss Tyler called to inform Charles that the property in question had been sold to Malloy Brothers Development in nineteen-seventy-nine for a price of one-million and three-hundred-eighty thousand dollars. Charles made note of the purchaser’s name, the date and the amount, then he sat there doodling a picture of a million-dollar bill with wings. It seemed highly unlikely that Abigail Lannigan’s brother, a man who by all other accounts lived rather conservatively, could run through a cool million in nineteen short years.
From on high, I was watching as Charles sat there scratching his head and puzzling over where the money had disappeared to. Pity, I thought, my leaving behind such a mess. Here, I’d spent biggest part of my life filing things away in their exact proper spot, and then I leave with something as important as this hanging like a loose garden gate. I knew exactly where those bonds were, but I was the only one, which didn’t do anybody a speck of good since I was dead and buried.
T
he trial started six days later, in a small courtroom at the far end of the hall on the second floor of the County Courthouse. During the process of jury selection, Hoggman, who was no longer belching, rejected nine potential jurors, eight of those women, five young enough to perhaps be sympathetic to Destiny. The lone man rejected by Hoggman had once been robbed by a visiting nephew.
Charles rejected a grandmother who didn’t think it possible for a young person to be friendly with an older woman without some ulterior motive. He also rejected an accountant who was firm on things being either black or white. His third and final rejection was that of a man who claimed his mother had been swindled out of her entire life savings by an unscrupulous nursing home attendant.
After twelve jurors and two alternates were seated, the trial began in earnest. The Judge addressed the jury first and clarified, item by item, the written instructions they had received. The plaintiff’s side then presented their opening statement. Hoggman strutted back and forth in front of the jury box for almost an hour, huffing and puffing about how he could
prove
that Destiny Fairchild had embezzled funds which should rightfully belong to Elliott Emerson, the Lannigan heir. “Almost one million dollars,” he said, waving his arms about as if to demonstrate the vastness of the amount, “is missing from the original estate of William Lannigan, and we will show ample cause for believing it to be in the possession of the defendant, Destiny Fairchild.”
Charles McCallum’s opening statement took just over fifteen minutes. He told the jurors that this was a case of a greedy relative crawling out of the woodwork and trying to take over that which was never intended to be his. “Had Miss Fairchild been callous enough to leave Abigail Lannigan’s bedside to have the dying woman’s hand-written will notarized,” Charles said, “I would not be standing here.”
At that point Judge Kensington called for a recess for lunch.
T
hat afternoon Elliott was the first to get to tell his side of the story. Of course, he laid it on thick about how he’d been devastated because Destiny didn’t let him know that his favorite aunt had become bedridden. Ha, I thought. If he’d known I was on death’s door, he’d have come to call with a bottle of arsenic in his pocket. Anyway, he sat on that stand and lied so convincingly that even I almost got to believing him. Several times, he buried his face in his hands and shook as if he was sobbing, but knowing Elliott, he was yanking a hair out of his nose to produce some crocodile tears.
Hoggman’s questions were not the did-you-or-did-you-not variety; instead he prefaced everything with a preamble which pictured Elliott in the most favorable light. “As a devoted nephew,” he’d say, “interested only in your aging aunt’s welfare, did you suspect that the defendant was interfering with your family relationship?”
Of course, Elliott swore up and down that such was the case. “Why, I’d have been at my aunt’s bedside night and day, if it weren’t for her!” he said, pointing to Destiny. “She kept dear Aunt Abigail in that house and wouldn’t let me visit!”
“I see,” Hoggman would say, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “And, as a devoted nephew, a true descendent of Lannigan blood, interested only in the wellbeing of your aunt, did you repeatedly try to visit, only to be turned away?”
“Oh yes,” Elliott swore, “repeatedly!”
“And, as a devoted nephew, concerned only with –”
Pretty soon, everybody in the courtroom had grown weary of hearing the same thing over and over, so the tenth time Hoggman started, Charles jumped to his feet and exclaimed, “Your Honor, this rambling is preposterous, a waste of the court’s time!”
“I agree.” Judge Kensington fixed a firm eye on Hoggman and told him to stop pontificating and get on with whatever questions he had left.”
Hoggman then moved on to the issue of Elliott Emerson’s lineage and introduced into evidence copies of birth certificates, baptismal certificates and the Lannigan family bible. After that, Charles McCallum started his cross-examination.
“Isn’t it a fact,” Charles asked, “that neither you nor any member of your family had any contact whatsoever with William or Abigail Lannigan until you learned that the family farm had been sold for over one million dollars?”
“I suppose we might have lost touch there for a while,” Elliott answered.
“When you spoke to William Lannigan, just after the sale of the farm, didn’t he say he’d never before heard of you?”
“Well yes, but he was still happy I’d come around to make his acquaintance.”
“Did he ask what prompted you to contact him at that particular time?”
Elliott nodded sheepishly.
“Mister Emerson, please give an audible answer for the court record.”
“Uh, yeah,” Elliott mumbled.
“What reason did you give William Lannigan?”
“Um, I didn’t know his whereabouts until I saw his name in a newspaper article.” Elliott squirmed in his seat as if he’d suddenly discovered himself sitting on an anthill.
“What exactly was the context of that article?”
“I don’t recall. I’ve got a rather poor memory.”
“Mister Emerson, didn’t you in the interrogatories state that you had an exceptionally good memory?”
“I don’t know if I did or not.” Elliott swiped his hand over the line of sweat that had popped up on his forehead.
“Would you like me to read that discourse back to you?” Charles asked.
“It’s not necessary,” Elliott answered, “I think I remember saying such a thing.”
“Can you also now recall the article that prompted you to contact William Lannigan or would you like to see a copy to refresh your memory?”
“It’s coming back to me now. It was, uh, something to do with houses being built over in the Valley, where the Lannigan farm used to be.”
“Didn’t the article state that the Malloy Brothers Development Company had paid William Lannigan one point three million for that land? And, didn’t you say in the interrogatories that part of that money should have been rightfully yours?”
Elliott nodded but he was starting to look green as a man with food poisoning.
“Please give an audible answer for the court record,” Charles repeated.
When Charles finished hammering home the fact that Elliott was only interested in his Lannigan heritage after the family had come into some money, he moved on to Elliott’s claim of trying to visit me. “Approximately how many times in the past three years have you visited Abigail Lannigan?” he asked.