The Baxter Trust

and purposes, the end of his career.
    Steve sighed. Yeah. That was the choice.
    There came the clang of a metal door banging and a voice said, “All right! Hold it right there!”
    Steve looked around to see the fat cop attempting to flatten himself against the stairwell as he leveled a gun on him.
    Steve suddenly felt exhausted, too tired even to raise his hands. If the cop shot him, that was just tough.
    He smiled, slightly. “It’s all right officer. They’re both dead.”

51.
    D ISTRICT A TTORNEY H ARRY D IRKSON LEANED back in his chair and exchanged glances with Lieutenant Farron. Farron’s face was cautiously neutral, giving nothing away. Dirkson had known it would be—Farron was waiting to follow his lead. Dirkson gave it to him now—an ironic smile. Farron tried to match it, but to Dirkson it seemed a trifle forced, which suddenly made his smile seem forced too.
    Dirkson didn’t let on, veteran campaigner that he was. Having chosen his course, he plunged ahead. He cocked his head at Steve Winslow and said, “That’s a fantastic story.”
    “It happens to be true,” Steve said.
    “Yeah, sure,” Dirkson said. “Now that Max and Teddy are dead you can make up any stories you want about them.”
    Steve was sorely tempted to walk out. It was bad enough giving it to these guys, without having to force it on them.
    “You don’t believe me?”
    “Why should I?”
    “Okay. You tell me why Uncle Max and Uncle Teddy decided to go up on the roof and blow each other’s brains out.”
    “It doesn’t matter. Even if Teddy did kill Sheila’s mother, it doesn’t mean he killed Greely.”
    “Sure it does. Look at the evidence.”
    “What evidence?”
    “The blackmail letter, for one thing.”
    “What about it?”
    “The letter was cut from the newspaper so it couldn’t be traced. But the envelope was typed on Greely’s machine. Greely’s a smart blackmailer. He had to be, to keep doing it and have no police record. Do you really think he’d make a dumb slip like that? Of course not. Uncle Teddy typed the envelope on that machine because he wanted the letter traced to Greely so it would prove Sheila’s motive for the murder.”
    Dirkson frowned. “Yeah, but if this was all Teddy’s idea, how did Greely get involved in the first place?”
    Steve shrugged. “Hey, I can’t do all your work for you. But if you were to dig into Greely’s background far enough, I bet eventually you’d find a connection.
    “And besides, Greely wasn’t really involved. At least, he had no idea of what was really going on. I’m sure Teddy was the one who sent the letters. He may have had Greely make the phone call—he probably did—but what Teddy told him to get him to make it, I have no idea. But there’s no reason to think it was the truth.
    “Greely was a patsy. Teddy’s fall guy. Teddy set him up. Teddy had killed his sister. He was scared to death that Sheila was going to blab to Uncle Max about Phillip being in Vermont on that day. He knew if that happened Max would figure it out. He had to stop her. So he framed her for murder.”
    “That’s all very nice,” Dirkson said. “But if that’s true, then how does John Dutton fit into all this? He knew Greely. You want me to believe that was just an outrageous coincidence?”
    Steve shook his head. “Not at all. The way I figure it, he triggered the whole thing.”
    Dirkson frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “Well,” Steve said. “Uncle Teddy and Greely are both dead, so we’ll probably never know, but we can make a pretty good guess. The way I see it is this—Let’s assume Uncle Teddy and Greely knew each other from way back. It would have to be from way back, because Teddy wouldn’t want to take a chance on his connection with Greely ever coming out. But say they knew each other. Not that unlikely a supposition, when you think about it. Greely was a blackmailer. Teddy, in his youth, was a confidence man. So assume the connection.
    “All right. Uncle Teddy’s favorite line was that he’d been screwed out of his inheritance—that he would be a wealthy man if he hadn’t made one mistake and his father hadn’t cut him out of the will and put all the money into trusts. So Greely would have known about that, and would have known that Teddy’s son, Phillip Baxter, and his niece, Sheila Benton, had a lot of money tied up in trusts. Being a blackmailer, he would have filed that information away.
    “So what happened? Say six months ago