Part 13 (1/2)
He kept staring at her until she nodded agreement. He turned back to me. ”So you are acting as a friend. You will have to explain to me exactly what you mean by hanky-panky.”
”Ted Lewellen conducted original research to unearth doc.u.ments regarding the location of sunken s.h.i.+ps. As a result of the several salvage projects he undertook he was able to leave a handsome motor sailer and almost a million dollars' net estate to his daughter. His daughter knew, and I knew, and Meyer knew, and another mutual friend knew that Ted had eight or nine more projects. He was getting geared up to head out on one when he was killed in the rain in traffic.”
A lot of rigidity seemed to go out of Lawton Hisp. ”Oh, that again. I can a.s.sure you that a most careful search was made by Mr. Collier and by me. We couldn't find any trace of his research records.”
”Did you decide they didn't exist?”
”How do you mean that?”
”You must have had long conferences with Dr. Lewellen when he was setting up the trust for his daughter.”
”Of course!”
”He would have had to tell you where the money came from and where future money would come from.”
”I knew what line of work he was in, of course.”
”Could he tap Pidge's trust fund if he went broke?”
”No. There was no way he could touch it.”
”Wouldn't a banker think that sunken treasure is an iffy way of life?”
”It seemed very intriguing.”
”Here is the question that the U.S. Attorney can ask the Federal Grand Jury Mr. Hisp. The reasoning seems clear to me. He will say, 'You have heard testimony to the effect that Mr. Hisp was advised by three different people on three separate occasions that Lewellen's research records were missing and that they were of great value, and very probably unique. Does it not seem odd to you that Mr. Hisp, aside from one routine search of the vessel Trepid, made no effort to find these records, nor did he report their loss to the authorities?'”
He frowned. ”Almost anything can be made to look suspicious and ugly. It depends on how you phrase it.”
”Then you phrase it for me.”
”All I can say is that the estate has been and is being handled according to the specific instructions of the decedent.”
”So Professor Ted left instructions about the dream book?”
”If I am ever going to be questioned about this, which I doubt, it is going to be by proper authority, Mr. McGee.”
”You will be, friend. You will be.”
He stood up. Dismissal time. ”I guess we will just have to wait until it happens, won't we?”
”It's going to be triggered by Tom Collier. He tried to peddle the dream book to the wrong person. For a half interest.”
He tilted toward me like an unsteady stork. Something happened to his face, and his mustache looked as if it had been borrowed and pasted on. ”Wouldn't!” he said in a gargly voice. ”We agreed...”
”You two agreed to some hanky-panky.”
”No!”
”Then you better tell me, or I'm going to blow you out of the water.”
”You better tell both of us.” Charity said.
He sat down. ”Shut up, dear,” he said.
”We're both listening,” I said.
He took off his gla.s.ses and pinched the bridge of his big nose. ”I have to explain to you some elemental facts of life as regards tax regulations. Tom Collier, Lewellen and I had several conferences on how best to handle the research information for estate purposes. There were seven more projects. He said each one represented a very good chance of recovery. He said they would represent from ten to fourteen years of salvage work, and would probably yield between two and five million dollars on a conservative basis, or eight to fifteen if his luck was good. Now then, had all the material for those projects been included in the estate, it would have been necessary to value them for estate purposes. There are no precedents. He died at just the wrong moment. Collier and I were trying to work out some sort of contingency sale arrangement, so that we would have a specific value, and a cash flow in that same amount. Suppose the research project papers had been listed and suppose the IRS had valued them at four million dollars and we had negotiated them down to two million. Can you see what the estate taxes would have done? They would have cleaned out the cash we needed on hand in order to leave the daughter what he wanted to leave her. And there was always the chance that the last seven projects would have been seven failures. There was no guarantee that they would ever pay off.”
”Where was this stuff when Ted died?”
”Tom had the originals. He still has them. I have Xerox copies of all the pages and photocopies of all the charts and maps and overlays. As I said, we were trying to work it out when Ted was killed.”
”His will left everything to Pidge.”
”Yes.”
”So she is the rightful owner.”
”I certainly have never had any intention of depriving-”
”Then how come, if you knew of the existence of those records, you didn't, as coexecutor, put them in the inventory, dammit!”
”I told you! It could have bled all the liquid a.s.sets out of the estate to pay taxes on something that might turn out to have no value at all.”
”And your concern for the daughter of your trust customer was so great that you decided to risk concealing specific a.s.sets from the IRS, that you signed false statements when you certified as to the completeness of your accounting?”
”Well, it seemed...” He recrossed his legs. ”When you put it that way...” He stood up and looked around as if he had forgotten whose house he was in. ”The way it seemed to us...”
”What in G.o.d's name were you two clowns going to do with Ted's future projects?”
”Well... Tom said that it would perhaps be best to wait and see how well the marriage thing worked out for Pidge. He said she had a certain amount of... instability. And maybe, if the marriage broke up, it would be good therapy for her to... to sort of reconstruct her father's plans, and then maybe on that basis, Tom could get a little investment group together to back an expedition.”
”To reconstruct from memory?”
”There could be important things that might be left out of the research materials, Tom said. We'd have no way of knowing. We weren't competent to judge.”
”And you were going to be asked aboard that little investment group, right?”
”There was... that implication.”
”You two are the perfect friends for a girl who has just lost her father. She needed friends like you.”
He stepped up out of the pit. ”d.a.m.n you!” he yelled. ”You just don't know. You don't know how... how a man can get boxed.”