Michael Nava - The Little Death

I lifted myself up.

John Smith was staring at me. He opened his mouth to speak just as the doors shut.

The wine was cold and bitter. A white-jacketed busboy moved through the darkness of the restaurant like a ghost. Outside, a freakish spell of blisteringly hot weather had emptied the streets but here it was cool and dark and the only noise was the murmur of conversation and the silvery clink of flatware against china, ice against glass. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Aaron Gold had been buried that morning in Los Angeles.

Grant asked, “Should we have sent flowers?”

“I’ve never understood that custom,” I replied. “Are the flowers intended as a symbol of resurrection or are they just there to divert attention from the corpse?”

But Grant wasn’t listening. His glance had fallen to the front page of the Chronicle laid out on the table between us. The contents of Robert Paris’s will had been made public. His entire estate, five hundred million dollars, was bequeathed to the Linden Trust of which John Smith was chairman. Would it matter to Smith now that Robert Paris was a murderer or was half a billion dollars sufficient reparation?

As if he read my thoughts, Grant looked up at me unhappily and said, “There’s no justice in this. You must do something.”

“I’ve tried everything,” I said to Grant, “everything I could think of doing.”

A waiter set down shallow bowls of steaming pasta before us. The fragrance of basil rose from the dish reminding me of summer. I picked up my fork.

“You haven’t tried what you’re trained to do,” Grant said.

I lifted an interrogatory eyebrow.

“I’ve been thinking about this,” Grant said. “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself what it is you want. You don’t want the identity of the killer, you already know who that is, but what you do want is to bring the killer to justice. And I’m not talking about Barron — he was just the instrument — I’m talking about Robert Paris. You want there to be a public record of his guilt.”

I nodded.

“Who is better able to make that record than a lawyer in a court of law?”

“Unfortunately,” I said, “Judge Paris is no longer within any court’s jurisdiction.”

“Wrong,” Grant said. “You’re thinking of the criminal side.”

I put my fork down. “What are you thinking of?”

“Well, I’m not a litigator, of course, but it occurred to me that you should sue him.”

Grant picked up his fork and speared a clam. I watched him chew and swallow. My brain was buzzing. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

“Of course,” I said. “Wrongful death. I’ll sue Robert Paris’s estate for the wrongful death of Hugh Paris.”

“And Aaron too.”

I shook my head. “The judge was already dead when that happened. We’d never be able to prove it.”

Grant buttered a bit of bread. “You think we could prove it as to Hugh’s death?”

“I don’t know but we’ll do a hell of a lot of damage to Robert Paris’s reputation in the attempt.”

I thought some more.

“In fact,” I continued, “we can do some damage to John Smith while we’re at it, or at least get his attention.”

“How?”

“Well, if a suit is pending against Paris’s estate which involves money damages, there should be enough money set aside from the estate to cover those damages in the event the suit succeeds.”

Grant dabbed his mouth with a napkin and smiled.

“You mean we can obtain some kind of injunction to prevent the judge’s executors from disbursing the estate.”

“Exactly. The Linden Trust won’t get a penny until the suit’s resolved. And as for the executor,” I continued, “which happens to be Aaron’s law firm, we’ll plaster them with discovery motions and compel them to produce every scrap of paper they have that involves Hugh or Peter Barron or Robert Paris. We’ll depose everyone from the senior partner to the receptionist.”

“Those depositions will make the front page of the Chronicle,” he said.

“For months,” I replied, “if not years.” Smiling, I reached across the table and patted his head. “Good thinking for someone who’s not a litigator. It’s perfect, Grant.”

Grant looked at me and smiled nervously. “Well, not quite perfect,” he said. “As I understand it, the only people entitled to bring the suit would be Hugh’s executors or his heirs.”

It took a moment before I understood. “Katherine Paris.”

“I’m afraid so,” he said.

Katherine Paris lit a cigarette and eyed me suspiciously from across my desk. We were in my office. This was the first time I’d used it for business since I’d leased it three months earlier. There was a film of dust on the bookshelves and the file cabinets. Both were empty. The only objects of my desk were three newly purchased volumes of the code of civil procedure, the probate code and the evidence code, a yellow legal tablet, my pen and the plastic cup into which Mrs. Paris tapped her cigarette ash.

“Tell me again how this works,” she said, “preferably in English. I cannot follow you when you start quoting the law at me.”

I smiled as charmingly as I knew how. Her hard, intelligent face showed no sign of being charmed. I had virtually pulled her off a plane to Boston to get her to talk to me. Her baggage had gone on without her. Now she planned to leave that night on another flight. The clock was ticking away.

“It’s called a wrongful death action,” I said, “and it’s a law suit brought by the heirs or estate of someone who died through the negligence or wrongful act of another. The most common instance is a suit brought by the family of someone killed in a car accident or on the job.”

“I would hardly classify homicide as an instance of neglect,” she remarked impatiently.

“But it is a wrongful act.”

“Oh, at the very least,” she snickered.

“Mrs. Paris, please — I know it sounds like hair-splitting, but there are precedents in the case law that permit the heirs of a murder victim to bring an action against his murderer.”

“So you want my consent to bring this wrongful death action against Robert’s estate.”

“Exactly.”

“And you intend to ask for two hundred and fifty million dollars in damages?”

“Yes.”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “What you want is permission to conduct a circus.”

I began to respond but she cut me off.

“Mr. Rios, you are a very clever man and I have no doubt that you were devoted to Hugh but this idea of yours is absurd.”

“It’s not absurd,” I said, “It’s entirely plausible.” She remained unimpressed. “Mrs. Paris, you stand to gain by this suit whether we get to trial or not.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know that you were left nothing in Robert Paris’s will. There’s enough truth to this suit that even if we can’t prove the allegation that the judge had Hugh murdered, the suit has considerable harassment value.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It takes five years to get a relatively simple civil lawsuit to trial. A case of this magnitude could drag on for a decade, easily. At some point the judge’s executors will simply decide to pay you off and settle the suit.”

“But what would you get out of that, Mr. Rios? Surely you have other motives for wanting to sue Robert’s estate than my further enrichment.”

“I intend to pursue this case through the pages of the Chronicle so that even the fact of a settlement will be an admission of Robert Paris’s guilt. That will satisfy me, Mrs. Paris,” I said with rising emotion, “even if it takes the next ten years of my life to accomplish it.”