Monica Ferris_Needlecraft Mysteries_03 Read online

  13

  Betsy tried to call Patricia, but there was no answer. “When are they leaving for Phoenix, do you remember if she said?” Betsy asked Jill.

  “No.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  Jill looked around the apartment and said, “Finish decorating the tree?”

  But while doing that, Jill, still picking at the case, asked, “Are you sure it isn’t Hal Norman doing all this? There are a lot of weird men out there who decide, ‘If I can’t have her, no one can.’ ”

  “I know. But don’t they tend to shoot themselves after shooting their women? The Pig doesn’t strike me as the suicidal type. I mean, how would the world get along without him?”

  “Well, then let’s call Mike and see if he’s found any suspects among the friends and relations of the murderers you’ve unveiled lately.”

  Jill placed the call to Mike’s pager, and when he called back, she asked if he’d developed any new suspects. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “Any action on your end?”

  “No, I think the word’s out that she’s got an armed guard. The tapestry’s gone missing, and that may also be a factor.”

  But trying to think why someone might want her dead prompted Betsy to other morbid thoughts. She put the hot dish she’d just pulled out of the freezer into the microwave to thaw it and phoned John Penberthy at home. “I guess it’s time to make out that will,” she said, not very graciously.

  “Do you want to come see me tomorrow?”

  “I have to work tomorrow, so if you’re free this evening, can you come over? Come to supper. We’ve got plenty to eat, if you like hot dish. Jill Cross is staying with me for a while, so there will be two of us to talk to.”

  “Yes, I heard about that arrangement, and I think it’s a very good idea. All right, thank you, I’ll be there. We’ve got that one asset to talk about as well. I’ll bring the file.”

  Penberthy was prompt. He was about thirty, dark and good looking, with humorous, intelligent eyes. Under a short winter coat he wore khaki slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, and a sky-blue, V-necked sweater—his version of casual. He carried a shining old-fashioned briefcase that was probably older than he was.

  Betsy had chosen a hot dish of potatoes, pork, onion, and cheese. After thawing it, she had put it in the oven to heat through. She made a salad of cucumber, tomato, endive, green onions, and herbs. That was the meal, plus seven-grain bread and milk, with coffee for dessert. Penberthy declined a slice of banana cream pie.

  “Ah,” he sighed at last, putting his second cup down empty. “That was delicious. My mother used to make that hot dish from leftover pork roast.”

  “Martha Winters made this one,” said Betsy. “I only know how to mix peas and tuna with macaroni and cheese.”

  “Definitely not Lutheran, then,” said Penberthy with a nod, and Jill laughed.

  Betsy decided that was an obscure reference Minnesotans used as shortcuts to character. She also decided she didn’t want to know what it said about her. She and Jill began clearing the table. “Is it a complicated thing, making a will?” Betsy asked over her shoulder.

  Penberthy replied, “It can be. Depends on what you want to do. If you want to set up trusts, it definitely will be. Any idea who you want your executor to be?”

  “No, but what I want is not very complicated. I want to leave Crewel World to Godwin du Lac, then split the money between Godwin and Jill Cross.”

  “Me?” said Jill, clattering plates into the sink. “Sorry.”

  “Well, I have to leave it to someone—”

  Jill came to take the salad bowl from Betsy and said, “But Betsy, when he leaves, we’ll be all alone and … well, I’ve got a gun.”

  Penberthy laughed hardest at that.

  But when the two women came back from the kitchen, he had a thick file folder on the table. “Let’s look at this first,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “Have you ever heard the term silent partner?”

  “Sure. It means someone who buys shares in a company but doesn’t help run it.”

  Penberthy said, “Yes, that’s approximately correct. Your sister was a silent partner in a company called New York Motto.” He opened the file folder and began handing over documents.

  Betsy studied them for a couple of minutes, but then said, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand what this is about. In some places it looks as if Margot owned the company, but in others it seems like it was Vicki Prentice. Who’s she?”

  “At the start, she was a friend of mine. She owned a small property in Wisconsin, adjoining a lake cabin your sister used to own, so Margot knew her, too.”

  “It was a nice place,” said Jill. “But Margot sold it when the developers moved in.”

  Penberthy nodded and continued, “But what I’m talking about happened a few years ago. Margot had been playing the market, but it made her nervous and it demanded a lot of her time, so she wanted someplace else to put the money. I had been fooling around with futures, and she came and asked me if I wanted to do some investing for her. It’s unethical for a person’s attorney to enter into a business connection with her, so I introduced her to Vicki.

  “Vicki was taking law courses at night while she worked as a law clerk for a lawyer during the day. The lawyer specialized in bankruptcies and receiverships, and Vicki had come up with an idea involving bankruptcy estate assets. The auction of these assets is not advertised, and often valuable assets are sold for far less than they are worth.”

  Betsy began to smile. “And that’s where Margot put her money, into buying these assets.”

  “In a way. Vicki was the one who wanted to do this, but she didn’t have the start-up money. Margot didn’t have the time it takes to find and attend the sales and then sell the assets. So what Margot did was start a shell company, called New York Motto. Did you know the state of New York’s motto is ‘Excelsior’?”

  “I used to, but I’d forgotten.”

  Penberthy continued, “Excelsior was founded by immigrants from New York.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that. I’m going to have to research the history of this place someday.”

  “You’ll love it,” said Jill. “We have a checkered history.”

  “We have a varied and interesting history,” corrected Penberthy. Then he continued, “Margot kept ninety-five percent of the company, selling five percent to Vicki. Vicki quit her job and dropped out of law school when she was named operating officer. Vicki hired a highly talented CPA as comptroller and other staff, mostly scouts to research bankruptcy and sheriff’s auctions. New York Motto has been doing quite well since its founding. But here,” he said, handing Betsy another document, “this may be of special interest to you.”

  It was some kind of land contract. New York Motto agreed to sell a piece of land on which was a restaurant to Joseph P. Mickels. “Joe!” exclaimed Betsy, and Jill came out of the kitchen to look over her shoulder. The legal description of the location didn’t mean much until Betsy got to “City of Pinewood, in the County of Hennepin, State of Minnesota.” Pinewood was another of those Hennepin county “cities” that are really small towns. In Pinewood’s case, practically a village. But it was just up the road from Excelsior, on the shore of Lake Minnetonka.

  Jill drew air softly through her teeth. “I know that place,” she said. “The manager was a crook.”

  “Was this restaurant bought at one of those auctions?” asked Betsy.

  “Yes, at a bankruptcy estate sale in bankruptcy court.”

  “And Joe is buying it from New York Motto.”

  “He’s buying it back.”

  “You mean it was his? Joe went bankrupt?”

  “Not Joe, one of his companies.” Penberthy explained, “Joe plays around with a lot of different kinds of real estate. When the deal seems particularly risky, he’ll start a new company and put the holding in the new company’s name. That way, if it doesn’t work out, the loss doesn’t put a drain on an
y of Joe’s other holdings but is confined to the corporation that owns it.”

  Betsy nodded.

  Penberthy continued, “Restaurants are chancy businesses at the best of times. Joe put his company and its restaurant into the hands of a cousin who, it turned out, really didn’t know what he was doing. And when the cousin saw it was going bad, he ran it into the ground—it’s called running a bust out—and absconded with most of the money. By the time Joe realized what was going on, it was too late. The company had to declare bankruptcy.

  “In legal terms, what happens when a company goes bankrupt is that it disappears and a new entity, a bankruptcy estate, is created, and the court assigns a trustee to manage it. These trustees are often overextended, handling six hundred or more cases a year. When they don’t investigate the background or search the estate thoroughly for assets, they may misapprehend its true value.”

  Betsy, holding onto comprehension with both hands, nodded again.

  “In this case, after a halfhearted search for assets—the trustee knew this was a bust-out case—the trustee ordered the property sold to pay creditors. If he’d paid attention, he would have realized that while the restaurant was deep in debt, the lakefront property on which it stood was free of liens. New York Motto’s scout wasn’t as careless and recommended making a bid. Joe came to the auction with a cashier’s check in an amount equal to about eight cents on the dollar of the value of the property. But Vicki came with a cashier’s check for twelve cents on the dollar and, when Joe couldn’t raise his bid—you must have cash in hand or a cashier’s check—the judge dropped his gavel and New York Motto got it. Joe was very angry, of course.

  “A week later, he contacted New York Motto and expressed an interest in the property. Vicki offered him a contract for deed, and, surprisingly, he took it. What I assume is that at the time, he was cash poor, but he was sure he would be in good financial condition at the end of the purchase contract. He planned to have The Mickels Building finished or nearly finished and figured he could handle a balloon payment at the time it came due.”

  “Oh, a balloon payment,” said Betsy, nodding more easily. She’d known several people desperately worried about balloon payments.

  Penberthy smiled. “This contract offered terms that amounted to paying interest on a loan of the purchase price, with the entire principal due as the last payment.”

  Betsy looked at the deed, found the amount, and whistled softly. “When was the balloon payment due?”

  “It hasn’t come due yet. The due date is January twelve.” He pointed to a place on the document.

  Jill came to the table, wiping her hands on a dish towel, to ask, “What happens if he can’t make the payment?”

  “He forfeits all he’s put into the deal, and the property reverts to New York Motto.”

  Jill said, “No wonder Joe was so angry at Margot! She not only kept him from putting up The Mickels Building but stood in the way of his getting a valuable property back.”

  “No,” said Penberthy, “Joe didn’t know Margot was also New York Motto.”

  Betsy said, “He didn’t? Are you sure?”

  “He never said anything to me about it.”

  Jill asked Betsy, “Has Joe said anything to you, anything at all, that might indicate he knows that New York Motto is now yours?”

  Betsy stared at her. “You mean Joe owes me all this money?”

  “You’re inheriting the company, aren’t you? I’m asking how sure you are he doesn’t know about this.”

  Penberthy said, “I never told him. Margot and Vicki wouldn’t tell him. Betsy is obviously surprised to discover this, so I don’t know how Joe would have found out.”

  Betsy said, “If Joe knew Margot owned New York Motto, he might very well think she was holding on to her lease just so he’d lose that land.” Betsy smiled wryly. “In fact, it sounds like the kind of squeeze he’d love to put on someone else, doesn’t it?”

  Penberthy, smiling, nodded.

  But Jill persisted, “Surely when he set out to contact New York Motto about buying the land back, he would have found out who the owner was.”

  Penberthy said, “On the contrary. New York Motto is incorporated in the State of Wisconsin, so there is no listing of it in Minnesota at all. And in Wisconsin, the only names that appear are Vicki’s and the CPA’s.” He was still smiling, as if Betsy surely must now see the point of a complex joke.

  “What?” she asked, feeling stupid.

  “You are in a position of tremendous power over Joe Mickels. You can release this information to the press and if he’s stretched thin—which I think he is right now—ruin him financially. Or, under a threat to tell, make him agree to a new contract at very high interest rate. Even add some other terms. Make him agree to rename The Mickels Building The Margot Berglund Building. He may be facing financial ruin if he doesn’t agree to whatever terms you dictate.” Penberthy shrugged. “Or you can be kind and renew the contract under its present terms. You can even keep silent and let Vicki decide what to do—which is, after all, what a silent partner does.”

  “What do you think Vicki would do?”

  “Let him fail to make that final payment, lose everything he’s already paid into the deal plus the property, then sell the property to someone else. It’s already unusual for New York Motto to hang onto a piece of property this long. Normally, they turn around almost at once and sell at a profit. Joe must have done some fast talking to get her to agree to this.”

  “What fast talking? Look at the mess he’s in!”

  Penberthy said, “But look at it from his position back then. He was all ready to put up that building. There was only this one silly, helpless widow in his way.” He lifted a sardonic eyebrow at Joe’s ignorance.

  Jill added, “And even if he thought it was risky, this deal with New York Motto involves land that was once his. Joe operates under Will Rogers’s advice: ‘Buy land, they ain’t makin’ any more of it.’ It probably caused him a lot of pain to lose that lakefront site, and he was feeling very motivated to get it back.”

  “I think that’s an accurate assessment,” said Penberthy.

  Betsy said, “What do you think, Jill? If he knew, this might give him a motive to murder me?”

  Jill said, “Oh, yes.”

  Penberthy said, “But if he knew, he would have accused Margot of deliberately trying to damage him. Margot never said anything like that. And she would have told me, because I needed to stay one step ahead of whatever he was up to.”

  “Still …” Jill said.

  “Yes,” Betsy said. “And it’s important we find out. I want to be the one who tells him.”

  Penberthy said, “There is no legal responsibility to tell him anything. If it was me, and I felt he should know, I’d want to tell him long distance. From, say, Hong Kong.”

  Betsy snorted. Then she asked, “What’s the total value of the company today?”

  “You’ll have to contact Vicki and ask for an accounting. I know it’s been making money, but I don’t think Margot was letting equity build up, she was using the money for some project or other, something charitable, I think. Here’s Vicki’s address.” Penberthy gave her a business card.

  “Thanks.” Betsy asked, “When is this probate matter going to be wrapped up?”

  “If you can get the information on New York Motto to me before the new year, I’d say we can finalize this by mid-January. Which is why I think we should now turn our attention to the matter for which you summoned me: your will.”

  He glanced up at her. She was gaping at him. “Really?”

  “Really what?”

  “Mid—January? That’s about three weeks from now.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased.”

  “I am pleased. I’m also surprised. The way there’s always one more thing to do, I thought it would be months before we got it all resolved.”

  “No, things have progressed very smoothly. No other heirs have stepped forward to make a cla
im, all the assets are found and will soon be accounted for, and there’s no reason we can’t make a final court appearance within that time.”

  Betsy sat back. “Wonderful,” she murmured. And then she smiled.

  Penberthy got out a yellow legal pad and prepared to take notes. “You said you want to divide your estate between Mr. Godwin and Ms. Cross,” he said, writing. “Any charities?”

  “Oh …” Betsy hesitated. Her head was spinning, and she was suddenly tired. “I—I can’t think. Let’s just get something on paper for now. We can revise it later, can’t we? If I live.” She meant that as a joke, but it came out through gritted teeth.

  Through a slip in Penberthy’s composure he gave her a look of such compassion she nearly threw herself on his shoulder to relieve her feelings in tears. But he was an even cooler head than Jill, and the look vanished as swiftly as it had appeared. Betsy, already leaning forward, feigned an interest in what he was writing on the notepad.

  “For something as simple as what you describe,” he said, “especially since it’s very likely an interim will, you can just write it out in your own words.”

  “And then you’ll turn it into legal language?”

  “There’s no need to do that. Holographic wills are perfectly legal. That means handwritten, not just signed. Written entirely by hand. You don’t even need witnesses to a holographic will.”

  Betsy made a doubtful face.

  “There is a case where a tractor rolled over on a farmer out in his field, and he wrote ‘All to Mother’ in his own blood on the tractor’s fender, and it was admitted to probate. But be clear; don’t attempt fancy language. A will is not subject to interpretation; it means exactly what it says.” He tore off the top sheet of his legal pad, turned the pad around, and pushed it toward her. He handed her his heavy gold pen and said, “Use your full legal name.”

  I, Elizabeth Frances Devonshire, wrote Betsy—“I took my maiden name back after each divorce,” she said—hereby make this my last will.

  “Have you ever made a will before?” he asked.

  She started to say no, then remembered. “You know, I did make a will, back when Hal and I got married. We each made one. You know the kind, where you leave everything you die possessed of—that sounds like you’re leaving a flock of demons, doesn’t it?—to your spouse.” She put a hand over her mouth and stared at Penberthy.