Ms. Ping came in while I was on the floor amid the scattered papers. Mutely I handed her the will and told her my suspicions. She sat down and read it, and it was interesting to observe her perfect porcelain face transform itself into the kind of demon mask you see at Chinese folk-dance festivals. It’s not a good thing for a trust lawyer to present a fake will to surrogate’s court. Jasmine had some harsh words about my private affairs, somewhat unjust I thought, but I did not defend myself. She wanted to know how I had let this happen and implied strongly that (although she was too polite to use such language) I had been led around by my cock. She said that my partners would have to be told; I agreed that this was only right. She wanted my assurance that I had not allowed the imposter to lay hands on any part of the estate prior to probate, and here I had to confess that an item of value had indeed gone missing, along with the imposter. I explained what the item was and she informed me of what I already knew, which was that if the genuine legatee wished to make trouble, and should the issue be brought to the attention of the court, then I had committed a disbarrable offense. In any event, I could have no further involvement in any legal matters pertaining to the Bulstrode estate. She glanced at the strewn papers with a look on her face that was not at all pleasant, a disgusted look, as if I had been trolling through the chattels of the deceased in hopes of looting some overlooked piggy bank. With no further discussion she made a call to our office manager to shift some papers ASAP. While she was thus engaged I managed to toss Bulstrode’s appointment diary under my office sofa.
A pair of husky porters arrived, boxed all the Bulstrode papers, and took them away. As soon as my office was empty again I snatched out the diary and riffled through the pages for the weeks prior to his death. In July I found what I was looking for, the twenty-fourth at eleven-thirty: it read “Sh. Ms? Carolyn R. Crosetti.” That had to be it: the fake Miranda had mentioned a Carolyn who was somehow involved and there was the “Sh. Ms” as well. Carolyn R. Crosetti had to be either the seller or the agent for same. I rushed outside to Ms. Maldonado’s desk, made a photocopy of the relevant page, gave her the diary, told her that it was part of the Bulstrode material that had unaccountably been overlooked, and required her to take it immediately to Ms. Ping’s. I believe that this was the first actual lie I had ever offered Ms. M. and it was an even more significant indication of my depravity than the error over the will or Ms. Ping’s resultant disdain. It is bad, very bad, when a lawyer starts lying to his secretary.
Crosetti is not, fortunately, a particularly common name. After thumbing through the white pages for all five boroughs and the surrounding counties, I found only twenty-eight of them, but no Carolyn R. Crosetti. I went back to my office with a list I copied and began to punch buttons on my cell phone. Of course, only the elderly or sick were at home at this hour and I did not wish to leave a lot of messages. For reasons I cannot now recall I had started with the suburban names and closed in on the city from outside. Somewhere in Queens, Ms. M. popped her head in and informed me that Mr. Geller would like to see me right away. I nodded and went on with my number punching. After a spate of answering machines, or empty-house ringing, I got a woman’s voice, a throaty New York accent with a layer of cultivation painted over it. I asked if she knew a Carolyn Crosetti and she said she thought that she knew all the Crosettis in the New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area and that there was no such person. Then a pause and a short laugh and she added, “Unless my son married her and didn’t tell me.”
“Who?” I asked.
A pause, and in a more formal voice, “To whom am I speaking?”
At this point I was staring at the page from Bulstrode’s diary and I saw that I had made a slight error. Bulstrode wrote in a loose, nearly medical, scrawl and his appointment for the morning of July 24 had leached over into the line for the previous day. What he had written was not “Carolyn R. Crosetti” but
Carolyn R.
A. Crosetti
I decided to answer the woman semifrankly and said, “My name is Jacob Mishkin of Geller Linz Grossbart and Mishkin. I’m the lawyer for the estate of Andrew Bulstrode and I’m trying to trace a transaction Professor Bulstrode entered into this past July. I’ve located a notation in his diary of an appointment with an A. Crosetti and a Carolyn R. Would you know anything about that?”
“I would,” said the woman. “Albert Crosetti is my son. I assume this is about the manuscript.”
A rush of relief on hearing these words. “Yes! Yes it is,” I exclaimed, and then found myself at a loss for words, thinking now about the various possibilities I had laid out for Mickey Haas. Was I talking to a thief, a victim, or a villain?
“And…?” said the woman.
“And what?”
“And is the estate going to make good the despicable ruse through which your late client cheated my son into surrendering a valuable seventeenth-century manuscript for a paltry sum?”
So this was the victim. “That’s certainly one of the issues open to discussion, Mrs. Crosetti,” I said.
“I should hope so.”
“We should arrange to meet.”
“I’ll have my lawyer contact you. Good-bye, Mr. Mishkin.”
I would have immediately called her again, but my office doorway was now occupied by the stout pugnacious figure of Ed Geller. Now, on paper all the partners of Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin are equals, but as often happens in such firms, command flows toward where it is most coveted, and it was the case at our firm that Ed was that coveter and so usually got his way. Besides this, he and Marty Linz were the founding partners and somewhat more equal as a result. Ed was twitching-angry, mainly I suppose because I had not come when called, and so he had to deal with me standing, rather than from behind his desk, which is subtly raised above the normal floor level and surrounded by stuffed legless chairs into which one deeply sinks. I knew better than to stand to my full height now.
I said, “I guess you’ve talked to Jasmine.”
“Yes, I have,” he said. “And could you please now tell me what the fuck is going on?”
“A misunderstanding is all, Ed. I’m sure it’ll be cleared up shortly.”
“Uh-huh. So you didn’t convert a valuable part of our client’s estate to your own use and convey said property to your girlfriend?”
“No. I was the victim of a fraud. A woman presented herself as the legatee of the Bulstrode estate with a will that appeared genuine-”
“This was a will we prepared?”
“No. I assumed it was found with his effects at death. I…we were only retained by the deceased in a particular capacity, which was to hold a document in safekeeping and to advise him on its IP status and the IP status of such other documents that might be derived from it.”
“Derived how?”
I took a deep breath. “It was a seventeenth-century document purportedly written by a man who knew William Shakespeare. Aside from its scholarly value, which was substantial, it suggested the existence of an unknown Shakespeare play in autograph manuscript and provided what might be clues to the present location of same.”
Ed is a great litigator, as I believe I’ve mentioned, and part of the litigator’s art is to never seem surprised. But now he gaped. “Holy fucking shit! And this was legit?”
“Unknown, but Bulstrode believed it was, and he was one of the world’s great experts on the subject.”
“And this property, this seventeenth-century manuscript, is now in the possession of your fraudulent bimbo?”
“I wouldn’t call her my fraudulent bimbo. But, yes it is.”