“I think the best thing for you to do tonight is just to have some dinner and try to get some rest. I’ll call you tomorrow and tell you what I’ve learned.”

“Joe, what am I going to do? I don’t even know if I have any money.”

“You and Walter have a joint bank account, don’t you?”

“Yes, he opened one at the San Francisco branch of his bank last week.”

“You can draw on that for anything you may need,” Wilen said.

“Joe, I know this is an awful thing to ask, but did Walter sign his new will?”

“Yes, he did, and you are very well taken care of, Eleanor. I’ll come up there in a couple of days and go through everything with you, but please be sure that you have no cause for concern.”

“Thank you, Joe. That makes me feel better.”

“Good night, Eleanor. Try and get some rest.”

“I will, Joe. Good night.” She hung up.

As Wilen hung up the phone, he heard the fax machine in his secretary’s office ring. He walked into her office and switched on the lights. The machine was cranking out two sheets of paper. He took them back to his office.

He sat down, switched on his desk light and began to read. As he did so, his eyes widened. He had been expecting unfavorable information, but what Eagle had to say was astonishing. The woman was not only a fraud, she was very likely a murderer. He read the letter twice, doing his best to commit it to memory.

If Eagle had only told him about this in Santa Fe, he could have prevented Walter from signing the will. He would have done anything to make him read the letter. Now Walter had willed this awful woman more than a billion dollars in liquid assets!

Wilen could not shake the feeling that, somehow, this was his fault. He had failed to protect his friend and client, the man who had made him rich beyond his dreams. He had to find a way to fix this.

ELEANOR WRIGHT KEELER ordered in dinner from an impossibly expensive fancy grocer down the street. She sat on her terrace, drinking from a well-chilled bottle of Veuve Cliquot Grande Dame champagne and eating beluga caviar with a spoon from a half-kilo can. When she had eaten all she could stand, she called Jimmy Long.

“Hello?”

“Jimmy, it’s Barbara.”

“Hey Babs.”

“My husband was killed in a car crash this afternoon.”

“Oh, God, Babs, I’m so sorry!”

“Don’t be, baby; I’m a fucking billionaire!”

“What?”

“I’m not kidding. He signed a new will today that leaves me everything-well, almost everything. He said there would be some bequests to his alma mater and some charities, but damned near everything!”

“You take my breath away, kid. What are you going to do with yourself?”

“Any fucking thing I want!” she crowed. “I’m going to buy a jet airplane and fly around the world, stopping everywhere! You want to go?”

“You bet I do.”

“Wait a minute, I already have a jet airplane. It’s not big enough, though. I’m going to buy one of those… what do you call them, the ones that can fly from here to Tokyo nonstop?”

“A Gulfstream Five?”

“Yes, that’s the one.”

“They cost forty or fifty million dollars.”

“What the fuck do I care? I’ve got a billion!” she exulted. “I can buy anything! Go anywhere!”

“That’s unbelievable!”

“I know, I know. I just had to tell you, baby.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“Listen, it’s going to take a few days to sort everything out. I guess there’ll have to be a funeral or a memorial service or something. Then, when all that’s over and the estate is settled, I’m coming to L.A. and buying something nice in Bel-Air.”

“Great idea!”

“Something big, for entertaining, something with an Olympic-sized pool-one of those old movie star mansions, maybe!”

“You deserve it, kiddo, after all you’ve been through.”

“You’re damned right I do! I’ll call you, Jimmy!”

She hung up and did a little dance around the apartment, making exultant noises. She could have anything!

BACK IN HIS OFFICES, Joe Wilen sat at his secretary’s desk, reading Walter Keeler’s will on her computer. Two pages needed fixing. He began fixing them.

25

DETECTIVE ALEX REESE of the Santa Fe Police Department read through the last of a stack of financial documents he had gathered from various sources, including Donald Wells’s business manager in Los Angeles, then he got up and went over to the D.A.’s office. The secretary told him to go right in.

“Morning, Alex,” Martínez said. “What’s up?”

“My background check on Donald Wells didn’t turn up much. He was born in a little town in Georgia called Delano, and he got his job at Centurion Studios through the chairman there, who is from the same town. He got arrested for domestic violence against a live-in girlfriend fifteen years ago, but the charges were dropped. He had a lot of parking tickets and a few speeding tickets when he was younger, but he seems to have calmed down the past ten years or so.”

“Have we got motive?”

“I’ve combed through all of Wells’s financials, and, in my opinion, there’s more than enough there for motive to kill his wife.”

“Tell me.”

“In short, Wells would have nothing, if he hadn’t married Donna. When they met, he was working for Centurion Studios as an associate producer, which is one notch up from gofer in that business. He meets Donna, then a couple of months after that her husband is dead, and a year or so later, they’re married. She loans him three million dollars to set up his own shop. He rents office space from the studio, pays himself half a million dollars a year, probably six times what he had been making, and starts acquiring books and magazine articles and having screenplays written from them. Out of the first half dozen things he produced, one was a big hit-a horror thing aimed at teenagers called Strangle. Within three years he had made enough back to repay his wife’s loan.

“The two houses he co-owned with his wife were bought entirely by her, but the deeds were recorded in both their names. This real estate co-ownership adds twenty million dollars to his net worth, as expressed on his financial statement. Apart from the houses, his net worth is under five million, and three million of that is expressed as accounts receivable from Centurion or his film distributors, and he has to perform to receive those funds, delivering scripts, mostly. Set those receivables aside and he’s worth less than two million bucks, not much for a supposedly successful film producer. His first benefit from his wife’s will is that her half of the real estate goes to him, nearly doubling his net worth. He does have a high income, though, from his company: an average of two and a half or three million a year.

“His wife’s will also leaves him five million dollars-more than enough for motive right there-but the fact that his wife and son died simultaneously leaves him in a much more favorable position, since her son was her principal heir. It’s only a guess right now- we’ll need to subpoena her financial records-but it looks like his inheritance could be in the region of half a billion dollars.”

“Wow,” Martínez said. “I’d certainly call that motive.”

“His alibi holds. I spoke to the manager of the Hassler Hotel in Rome, and he supports both Wells’s contention that he was in Rome when his wife died and that he received the phone call from his Santa Fe house when he said he did.”

“So, he would have had to hire somebody. Any candidates?”

“My best guess is somebody he worked with in the movies, either in L.A. or Santa Fe. He’s shot a couple of movies here. I’ve compiled a list of people who worked for him from the credits of his pictures. On the theory that anyone he knew well enough to ask to kill his wife would have worked for him more than once, I’ve come up with a list of thirty-one names of people who worked on two or more of his movies, and I’m running them through the New Mexico, California and federal databases for criminal records. I should have something by tomorrow that will give me the basis for interviews.”