The Book of Air and Shadows

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