William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“My grandmother’s dead,” said Caroline. “I don’t think she’ll miss it.”

It took only a few minutes until we heard the ping that signaled he had cut through the metal hoop. He opened the lock and took it off the metal guards soldered into the box. That left only the internal lock, which Morris looked at carefully. “For this again I need the picks.”

“It’s getting late, Morris,” I said.

He took out the picks and began to work the little lock. “This second is not so tricky,” he said as he twisted the picks once and twice and the lock gave way with a satisfying click. Morris beamed. “Sheldon maybe would be a bissel faster, but only a bissel .”

Caroline rose from the couch and sat beside Beth at the table. Morris turned the box to her. She looked around at us. I nodded. She reached down and, slowly, she lifted the metal lid.

Beth let out a “Wow,” as the lid first cracked open and Caroline shut it again.

“What?” I asked.

“I just thought I saw something.”

“One of your flames?” asked Morris.

“I don’t know.”

“What color was it?” asked Morris.

“Yellow-red,” said Beth.

Morris nodded. “The color of the death force.”

“Enough already,” I said. “Just open it.”

Caroline swallowed and then flipped up the top of the metal strongbox. Inside were dust and dirt and a series of old manila envelopes, weathered and faded and torn. Not very encouraging.

“Let’s see what they’re holding,” I said.

One by one Caroline lifted the envelopes out of the box.

The first envelope contained a multitude of documents on long onionskin legal paper of the type no longer used in law offices, each dated in the early fifties. The documents were all signed by Mrs. Christian Shaw, Caroline’s grandmother, and witnessed by a number of illegible signatures, all probably of lawyers now surely either dead or retired. As best as I could tell, as I plowed my way through the legal jargon of the era, replete with Latin and all types of convoluted sentences, the documents created a separate trust to which a portion of the Reddman estate was to be diverted. The trust was named Wergeld and so a person or a family named Wergeld was apparently the intended beneficiary, though nothing more specific was provided in the documents. It wasn’t clear exactly how much was to be transferred, but it appeared to be considerable, and over the past forty or so years the amount in the trust must have grown tremendously.

“This must be the trust Harrington was talking about the other night,” I said to Caroline while I examined the documents. “Ever hear of a family named Wergeld?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? Anyone at all?”

“No, no one,” she said. “Never.”

“That’s strange,” I said. “Why would she set up a trust for someone you never heard of? All right, let’s go on.”

The next envelope contained a series of bank documents, evidencing the opening of accounts all in the name of the Wergeld Trust. The signatory on each account was Mrs. Christian Shaw. The banks to which the money was to flow were in foreign countries, Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands. “All tax havens,” I said. “All places where money could arrive and disappear without anyone knowing, and where the banks are all governed by secrecy laws.”

“Why would my grandmother care about secrecy?” asked Caroline. “While she was alive she had control of all the money in the trust, she could have done anything she wanted and no one could have stopped her.”

“Maybe so,” I said, “but it appeared she wanted the trust hidden and this Wergeld person to remain anonymous.”

Along with the bank documents was a three-by-five card with a list of long combinations of letters and numbers. The first was X257YRZ26-098. I handed it to Morris and he examined it carefully.

“To my untrained eye these are code numbers for certain bank accounts,” he said. “Some of the banks in these places you need mention only the code numbers and a matching signature or even just a matching phrase to release the funds. This was obviously the way your Mrs. Shaw, she could access the money from that trust you were reading us about, Victor.”

“But why would she bury it?” asked Caroline.

“She knew where it was if she needed it, I suppose,” said Morris with a shrug. “But I would guess the beneficiary person of this trust, or whatever, would have these very same numbers.”

The third envelope contained a packet of old photographs. Caroline looked at them each carefully, one by one, and then went through them again, for our sakes, telling Beth and Morris and me what she could about the people in the pictures. “These are of my family,” she said, “at least most of them. I’ve seen many of them before in albums. Here’s a picture of Grandmother when she was young, with her two sisters.”

The picture was of three young women, arms linked, marching in step toward the camera, dressed as if they were young ladies on the make out of an Edith Wharton novel. The woman in the middle wore a billowing white dress and stared at the photographer with her chin up, her head cocked slightly to the side, her face full of a fresh certainty about her future. That woman, full of life and determination, Caroline said, was her grandmother, Faith Reddman Shaw. To Faith Reddman’s right was a smaller, frailer woman, her stance less sure, her smile uneasy. Her hair was pulled tightly back into a bun and her dress was a severe and prim black. This was Hope Reddman, the sister who was to die of consumption only a few years later. And to the left, broad-shouldered and big-boned, but with her head tilted shyly down, was Charity Reddman, poor dead Charity Reddman. Her dress was almost sheer enough to see her long legs beneath, she wore a hat, and even with her face cast downward you could see her beauty. She was the pretty one, Caroline had been told, the adventurous one, though that thirst for adventure was not evident in her adolescent shyness. Beautiful Charity Reddman, the belle of the ball, who was destined to disappear beneath the black earth of Veritas.

“That’s your great-grandfather,” I said, pointing to the next photograph, a picture of a fierce, bewhiskered man, his bulging eyes still burning with a strange intensity even as he leaned precariously on a cane, his knees stiff, his back bent. He was leaner than I had remembered from other pictures, his stance more decrepit, but the fierce whiskers, the burning eyes, the wide, nearly lipless mouth were still the stuff of legend. Claudius Reddman, as familiar a figure as all the other icons of great American industrial wealth, as familiar as Rockefeller in his starched collar, as Ford with his lean angularity, as Morgan staring his stare that could maim, as Gould and Carnegie and Frick.

“That was just before he died, I think,” said Caroline. “He lived to be ninety, though in his last years he suffered from palsy and emphysema.”

She flipped to the next photograph and said, “This is my grandfather.” It was a photograph of a handsome young man, tall and blond and mustached, with his nose snootily raised. His suit was dark, his hat nattily creased and cocked over his eye. He had the same arrogant expression I saw in Harrington the first time we met at the bank. There was something about the way he stood, the way his features held their pose, that made me pause and then I realized he held himself in the same careful way I often saw in drunks.

“Who’s that?” I asked, pointing at a photograph of a thin, bald man with a long thin nose and small eyes. He wore a stiff, high collar and spectacles and through the spectacles his tiny eyes were squinted in wariness. Beside him was a handsome woman with a worried mouth. There was something fragile about this couple. There was a sense in the picture that they were under siege.