And One to Die On(10)

“Maybe I’ll have a chance to find out when I go to Maine. Maybe I can get someone up there to talk to me.”

“Maybe you can,” Jasper said, “but don’t be worried if you don’t. They’re old people now. Tasheba Kent must be, my God—”

“One hundred,” Carlton said.

“Really?”

“Among the other things that are going on during this weekend I’m supposed to attend is a hundredth birthday party for Tasheba Kent.”

“There’s the angle for Personality magazine. That’s the kind of thing you want to play up over there. Not all this stuff about the death of Lilith Brayne.”

“To tell you the truth,” Carlton said, “I’m going to have to play up the death of Lilith Brayne. My editor’s going to insist on it.”

Jasper Fein looked ready to ask Carlton how that could, in fact, be the truth, when Carlton had said only a few moments before that his editor would take any angle he wanted to give her. Jasper took a sip of his chablis instead, and Carlton relaxed a little. At least they understood each other. At least Jasper realized that Carlton was going to hang onto his ownership of this idea. Now they could start to talk business for real, and Carlton had a chance of ending up with what he wanted.

Carlton wasn’t going to talk money now, though. He wasn’t going to talk details. He was going to wait until he got back from Maine. Then he’d have more to bargain with.





6


LYDIA ACKEN SOMETIMES WONDERED what her life would have been like if she had been born fifteen years later than she was, if she had gone into law school when the law schools were trying to include women instead of keep them out, if she had joined the firm when it was desperate to prove that it did not discriminate in hiring or promotion on the basis of sex. Lydia Acken was sixty years old and a partner at Holborn, Bard & Kirby—but a partner in trusts and estates, which was where the firm put women in the bad old days. Lydia had long ago stopped wondering if she had any interest in trusts and estates. The answer was probably no, but in her time she hadn’t felt she had any choice. The most brilliant woman in her Harvard Law School graduating class—the woman who had, as a matter of fact, graduated first in her class—had ended up having to open an office of her own in the small town she had come from in Ohio. Nobody would hire her, because she wanted to be a litigator and she refused to do trusts and estates and she had no interest at all in divorce cases. “Don’t be like her,” recruiters would tell women also looking for jobs in their firms. “She acts like a man.”

Now the firm was full of women, in every department. The younger women didn’t think there were enough of them yet, but from Lydia’s point of view, the change was astonishing. There were six women litigators in the firm now, two of them partners. There was a woman at the head of corporate liaison, when in the old days the fact that the firm hired any women lawyers at all was kept as secret from corporate clients as sex used to be kept from Victorian children. The new young women were different from the women of Lydia’s generation. They weren’t soft-spoken or particularly polite. They didn’t bow meekly to the idea that a professional woman simply couldn’t have a home and a family life. They not only got married—Lydia had been married, for twenty years, to a man who had left her in her fifties to marry his twenty-three-year-old personal assistant—but had children, too, sometimes rushing out in the middle of contract negotiations to deliver, and rushing back two days later before they’d even had a chance to catch their breath. Lydia was in awe of these young women, of their energy, of their intelligence, of their courage, of their wit. She wasn’t sure that even if she had been born fifteen years later, she would have been able to compete.

Now it was four o’clock on the afternoon of the day before she was supposed to leave for Maine, and Lydia was sitting at the desk in her office, finding it impossible to concentrate. What she was supposed to be doing was going over the legal ramifications of the auction of the personal effects of Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, what belonged to who, what was already willed to somebody else, what the tax implications were for each sale of each item at each possible price. The situation was complicated by the fact that a fair amount of what Cavender Marsh owned might be said to be more correctly the property of his dead wife. The circumstances surrounding the death of Lilith Brayne were so chaotic and disorganized, Lydia could see immediately that the auction was rife with potential lawsuits. For one thing, the daughter, Hannah Graham, had never had her interests properly represented. If Hannah got herself some decent legal representation now, she could cause real trouble.