Paul Robertson - The Heir

And now it was time for the hard part. I pointed the car toward home and dialed a number.

Eric answered right away.

“Jason! What’s up?” I could hardly hear him, there was so much noise. The phone in his helmet was pretty poor considering how much it had cost him.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Uh… I don’t know. I’ll see a sign in a minute.”

“Come to my house-we need to talk.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“No problem. See you in a while.”

In contrast, I did have problems. I drove past a police car parked beside the road, clocking the traffic. By reflex I checked my speed, the universal guilty reaction of any driver. Could that radar pick up other crimes? Corruption, bribery, extortion? Blackmail? Breaking my own resolve to not be Melvin? I slowed down because I was cautious, not because I was law abiding.

I had lunch with Katie in the back garden. She hadn’t been down for breakfast, and it was the first I’d seen her. She had questions about Melvin and the police, but I put her off.

“Let’s wait for Eric.”

He must have been far away, because two hours later he had still not appeared. I was in my office reading papers Pamela had sent me, educating myself about my possessions. The new monitor had a bigger screen than the old one and there was no sign of the gouge in the wall. I’d have to give Katie a raise. It must have been hard getting people here that quickly.

It was three thirty, and I was on the phone with Stanley Morton discussing how to manage general publicity concerning my family concerns, when the little brother part of my family finally showed up. There was a roar in the driveway and two minutes later he was standing in the office doorway, head to toe in motorcycle leather, his helmet under his arm.

“Did you have lunch?” I asked.

Tough question. He wrinkled his forehead, thinking. “No. I came straight here when you called.”

“You want something, or just wait for supper?”

“I’ll eat.”

I found Katie and Rosita and put in an order. Then I led everyone in the world I was related to by blood out to the garden.

It was warm, the tricky heat of October. Eric shed his leather. Underneath he was dressed half decent for once, in jeans and a dark blue turtleneck.

For a while we just sat on a bench, surrounded by chrysanthemums. Most of the annuals were failing, massacred by an early frost. We were surrounded by casual death. I thought about the past spring, when the flowers had been planted, and now most of them were gone. The first color was showing in the leaves.

Eric was the image of blissful ignorance. I was tired of wearing suits and formality and maturity and what was happening to me.

“Have you been looking at your mail lately?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Those letters with little windows in front that you see your name through.”

“Huh?… Oh. Jason, it’s no problem. I’ll get everything paid off now.”

“Do you even know how much you owe?”

Talk about a sheepish look. “Not that much.” Baa, baa. It was good for him there was no spaghetti close by.

“Does a hundred eighty thousand sound familiar?”

He was alarmed. “No way. No.”

“What have you been spending it on?” He didn’t live that richly. His apartment was expensive, but it was just that and his cars. Certainly not clothes.

“I don’t know.” He looked at the heap beside him. “The leathers were three thousand, I think.”

“And that doesn’t include any sharks that don’t report to credit agencies.”

“None of those, Jason. I did a couple times back in college. Now I’ve got credit cards.”

“Rule number 83-don’t take money from anybody who doesn’t own a building in Manhattan. Rule number 84-until you’ve got the cash under control, don’t buy anything with a price more than three digits. Rule 85-don’t be stupid, Eric.”

He grinned. “The first one’s easy, the second one maybe. Eighty-five would really cramp my lifestyle.”

“So would breaking it. Things are different now.”

“I don’t get it. I mean, the difference is we’ve got a lot more money.”

“You don’t know how big a difference that is.”

“You’re getting way too tense, Jason.” He was sitting next to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed, just being a friend, a brother. “Come on. It’s okay.”

For five seconds I almost broke open. I had always taken care of him, through school and life, and now I needed someone to take care of me. I wanted to tell him what my life had become, and what I hated about it. I wanted to tell one person about how I didn’t know what I was doing and I was afraid, and I wanted someone to tell me why I was here. Just tell me why.

The man who could have told me wasn’t there. We’d buried him a week ago.

There was sound from the path behind us. I turned, and maybe I was even expecting it was him. It was Katie.

She was also in jeans, and I felt even more out of place in that comfortable, informal place; she sat at my left and Eric at my right. I have very few moments that are intimate, where I know I am in love; and I loved both of them then, my wife and my brother. If only money could have kept the rest of the world away from us. But instead, it drew the world in.

“Have you told him?” she asked me.

I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to tell Katie, except in anger. I regretted that I’d told her abruptly the way I had. And I couldn’t get angry enough at Eric to hurt him that way. I’d rather drown a puppy than tell this puppy his daddy had been murdered. It didn’t make any difference to me that it could have been either of them who did it.

“What?” Eric said.

I took a deep breath. “Last night I talked with a man from the police. He said that Melvin’s accident… wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t an accident?”

“That’s what they think.”

He stared right at me for a long time. “Someone killed him?”

“That’s what they think,” I said again.

“Do they know who?”

I tried to remember: what had I first said when Wilcox told me?

“I don’t think they do.”

“Who would want to?”

Did he really mean that? Was he that innocent?

“That’s what the police will try to find out.” I couldn’t tell if it was worse for Eric that Melvin had been killed, or just that there might have been someone who would have wanted to kill him. He really didn’t grasp what kind of man Melvin had been.

“How would they have done it?”

“The policeman said it was the brakes.”

“The hydraulics or the pads?”

This was a puppy with a degree in mechanical engineering. “He said the lines had been drained.”

He frowned. “How could they tell?”

“I guess they were empty.”

He shook his head. “But I saw the car. The front axle was so smashed that the hydraulic lines were torn off. There’s no way to tell if they’d been empty before the crash. And he would have known right away that something was wrong. Do they think it happened at Mr. Spellman’s house? It couldn’t have been low on brake fluid for very long.”

“I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out soon.”

He put his chin on his hand and stared. “I… I wonder who would kill him.” Then he was quiet. At least that was done.

It wasn’t, though. Katie had a question. “What about Angela?”

“She could have killed him.” No, I didn’t say that, but only barely. Instead I said, “One of us needs to tell her.”

“We should go over together.”

Yes, we should. It was an hour to the big house, an hour to tell her, an hour back. I could get to Fred’s office by eight. I had one more word for Eric.