The Beneficiary

Monday morning Pike came into the office early and did not say good morning to anyone. He hung his coat on the hook behind his door and sat down and looked at the wall for a while, and then he got up and unlocked the safe in the corner of his office and took out the long brown envelope that had been in it for years.

Pike laid the envelope on the desk and set both hands on it. Through the open door Marta Boyd looked up from her desk in the outer room when she heard the safe swing. She was the associate he had hired eight years ago and had never once regretted: fifty, quick, with a memory for faces and for handwriting, and she kept the files in an order Pike had long ago stopped trying to duplicate.

"Trouble?" she said.

"Nothing for you," he said.

She went back to her work. Pike opened the envelope.

The document inside was in Hale's own hand. Pike had refused, years ago, to draft it, and Hale had written it himself and brought it to him to keep, and Pike had taken it because a lawyer takes what a client gives him. It was four pages, in a small tight script, dated and signed and witnessed, and Pike had read it perhaps a dozen times. He read it again now, from the top, with the door open and the traffic going by on State Street below.

It was short for what it did. It left a small annuity to Oscar Diaz, who had run the house on Kirkland Street for nineteen years and had also kept the lab in order, and smaller sums to two other people who worked there. Everything else, the house and the lab and the accounts and the patents and the collection, went in one paragraph to a single person, and the person was not a relative, because Hale had none, and was not a charity, and was not the college, and was not Pike himself. The name in the paragraph was Cal Voss.

That was the first part. The second part was the part that had kept Pike awake more nights than he cared to admit. It said that if Hale died, the estate passed to Voss at once. It said that if Hale disappeared, or was absent without explanation for a period exceeding three calendar months, then on the first day after the third month the same thing happened, with no waiting, no court, no accounting, and no obligation on the beneficiary except the payment of the small sums listed above.

Pike set the pages down and turned them over and looked at the last of them again.

It was a will that did not want an heir. It was a will that wanted an exit. A man who wanted to leave his money to a friend wrote the friend's name and left it at that. A man who wrote a clause about disappearing for three months was a man who had looked at the possibility of his own absence and had found it useful.

Hale had refused every suggestion Pike had made, twice, in this office, to change a word of it. Pike remembered the second conversation. Hale had sat across the desk and listened to the objections, the tax consequences, the exposure to challenge, the plain bad sense of it, and had smiled at the end and said that Pike was a good man and a good lawyer and that he would take his chances. Then he had stood and shaken Pike's hand and gone out, and Pike had heard him on the stairs, humming.

Pike put the will back in the envelope and the envelope back in the safe.

A man with a name Pike had never heard of was walking into his friend's house with a key. That had been Sunday. On Monday the same name was sitting in the safe in his office, in his friend's handwriting, waiting for his friend to die or to vanish. There was no way to read the two facts side by side and call the result an accident. Either Hale was a fool, which Pike knew he was not, or Hale was caught in something, and the thing he was caught in had a key to his house.

Pike did not go to Hale. He thought about it and decided against it. If he went to Hale with a story told him by a cousin on a Sunday walk, he would get the same answer he had gotten about the will, polite and final, and he would have spent his one question. He wanted to know what Hale would not tell him, and to know that he had to ask someone Hale had stopped talking to.

At five he left the office and took a car to Brattle Street.

Paul Acker's house was larger than it needed to be, a white frame house with a porch and a lawn that was kept up by someone else. Pike had been there twice before, both times at Acker's invitation, both times years ago. Hector let him in. Hector was Acker's assistant, a heavy quiet man with a boxer's shoulders who had been with him since the hospital years and did not talk more than he had to.

"Is he in?" Pike said.

"He is in," Hector said, and took Pike's coat.

Acker was in the front room with a fire going and a glass of wine beside him. He was in his sixties, red-faced and white-haired, with the manner of a man who had once been loud in a lecture hall and had not entirely given it up. He stood and shook Pike's hand with both of his own, which was his way, and it was not an act, or if it was an act it had gone on so long that it had become the man.

"The lawyer," Acker said. "Sit down. You look like you came on business."

"I did," Pike said.

"Then say it before dinner."

Pike sat. He took the wine Hector brought him and set it down without drinking and looked at the fire.

"I want to ask you about Adrian Hale," he said.

Acker's face did not change. He picked up his glass and drank and set it down again and looked at the fire himself, as though Pike had handed him something and he was deciding whether to accept it.

"I have not spoken to Hale in eleven years," he said.

"I know," Pike said. "That is why I came to you."

Acker turned his head.

"You know why," Pike said.

"I know why," Acker said. "The question is whether you know why, or whether you have heard a version that a man tells for company."

"Tell me your version."

Acker was quiet for a moment. The fire moved.

"We trained together," Acker said. "We were residents at the same hospital and shared a lab bench for four years after that, and for eleven years I thought he was the best mind I had ever stood next to. This was not a quarrel over a dinner or a fee. I did not stop speaking to Adrian Hale because he slighted me. I stopped because of what he did with the work."

"What did he do," Pike said.

"He published," Acker said, "and then it turned out that what he published had been built on results that were not there. Not a mistake. Not a rounding. A good result that he wanted, entered as though he had seen it, and he had not seen it, and it sat under everything he wrote that year. I found it because I was repeating his work and it would not repeat, and I went to him, and he did not deny it. He told me that he had known the result was true and had merely written it down early." Acker's mouth went flat. "He wanted me to understand that the number was honest because the conclusion was. I told him what I thought of that, and he told me what he thought of me, and that was the end of eleven years of a friendship I would have called the closest of my life."

Pike said nothing.

"The university never knew," Acker said. "The paper still stands. It was not worth ruining him over, and I did not ruin him over it. I said what I thought and I walked away, and after that he was respectable and I was respectable and we were strangers, which is what he preferred. And that, Mr. Pike, is the man you are asking me about, so you will understand when I say that I am not surprised to hear that something is wrong."

"Who said something was wrong," Pike said.

"You did," Acker said. "You came up my steps with a face. I have known that face for years. Let me save us both a little time. I do not know what you know. But I will tell you what I know, and it is this. A man who will write down a result he did not get is a man who has already decided that the rules are for the others. He does not stop at one number. He stops when he is stopped."

Pike looked into the fire. He thought about the check. He thought about the eighty dollars.

"Have you ever heard the name Cal Voss," he said.

Acker was quiet.

"No," he said. "Who is he?"

"A young man who has a key to Hale's lab."

Acker drank the rest of his wine. He set the glass down and folded his hands and looked at Pike for a long time, and something in his face had gone careful, as though he had started to say a thing and had chosen the shorter word.

"I do not know the name," he said. "And I have nothing to sell you. I am old and I do not owe Hale my silence, and I still have nothing to say."

Pike let it sit. Then he told Acker the one thing he had told nobody: that the man in the lane had paid off a knocked-down child with a check in Adrian Hale's hand, and that Pike had known Adrian Hale for twenty-six years and had never once seen him sign money away to a stranger without a reason.

Acker heard him out.

"Then you may as well have the rest," he said. "I have heard from two people in a year, a man at the hospital and a man in the trade, that Adrian Hale has been buying things. Reagents and equipment and the odd glass, and not through the usual channels, and not the sort of thing a man buys for a paper on the kidney. That is all. I do not know what it means and I do not want to know."

"Reagents," Pike said.

"Chemicals," Acker said. "The small kind. The kind that go in a locked cabinet." He spread his hands. "That is all I have. It may be nothing. He may be chasing a hobby. Men his age chase hobbies." He looked at Pike. "But you did not come here to hear that, did you. You came here because you already think the work is not clean."

"I think something is not clean," Pike said. "I don't know yet that it is the work."

They ate in the room by the fire. At the door, reaching for his coat, Acker said one more thing without looking at him.

"If I were you," he said, "I would ask the man himself. And if he will not answer, I would stop asking and start watching the house. That is what an old doctor does with a thing he does not understand. He watches it."

Pike thanked him and walked down to the corner and waited for a car.

He watched the lane for the next four nights.

It was not a plan he would have described to anyone as a plan. He stood at the mouth of the lane from ten until nearly midnight on four nights running, and nothing happened on any of them; once a man walked through with a dog, and once it rained. On the fifth night he almost did not go. He had a brief in the morning, and on the way home he told himself the thing was a story told on a Sunday walk.

He went.

It was colder Friday than it had been, with the frost back and the pavement going slick in patches, and the lane was empty and very quiet, and the lamps at either end laid down stripes of light that did not quite reach the middle. Pike stood in the shadow of the loading dock with his hands in his pockets and listened to the city the way Boone had described listening to it, the low hum of it, the way small sounds came forward and then went back.

At eleven the footsteps came.

He heard them a long way off, the way Boone had said you could hear one man in a quiet lane, and they were quick and light and even, and they came up the lane from the far end and got louder and did not slow. Pike stayed where he was. He had thought about this moment for four nights and had decided that he would not hide and would not ambush and would simply stand in the man's path, because that was the honest thing and because he was too old for anything else.

The man came into the stripe of light under the far lamp and Pike saw him.

He was small. That was the first thing and the only clean thing about him. He was short and compact and young, perhaps thirty, in a dark coat too good for the lane and shoes too good for the weather, and he walked with his hands in his pockets and his chin up, watching Pike. He did not slow and he did not turn and he did not cross the lane. He came on.

He was ten feet away when Pike stepped out of the shadow.

"Cal Voss," Pike said.

The man stopped. He did not start. His head tilted a little, the way Boone had described, and he looked up at Pike with a face that Pike would spend a long time afterward trying to draw and failing. There was nothing wrong with the face. It was young and not ugly and, by any measure, ordinary. And looking at it was like finding a hair in food. Every feature was in the right place and the whole of it was wrong, and Pike could not have named one thing out of order, and he wanted to step back and did not.

"You have the advantage," the man said. His voice was low and a little rough, as though he had been breathing cold air for a while. "Who are you."

"Warren Pike. I am a lawyer and an old friend of Adrian Hale."

"Ah," Voss said. And he smiled. "The lawyer. Yes. He has mentioned you."

"He has not mentioned you," Pike said.

"No," Voss said. "He would not." He took a hand out of his pocket and looked at his watch and put it back. "Well. You have been standing here in the cold for some nights now, and I should tell you that four of them came to nothing, and I should also tell you that you are not as invisible as you think you are. There is a light behind you from the window and it makes a shape."

Pike said nothing.

"You want to know what I am doing at this door," Voss said. "I am going in it. I have a key. If you would like to come in and look around, I will not stop you, and you will find there is nothing in there for a lawyer. It is a laboratory. It smells of the things laboratories smell of. There is no letter of yours in it and no money of yours and no client of yours. You have no standing here at all, and that is why you are standing in the lane instead of going up the front steps and asking your friend."

The cold had gotten into Pike's hands. He put them in his coat.

"You paid for a child with his check," he said. "That makes you his business, whether you like it or not."

Voss went still for a second. It was the first time all evening that Pike had seen him pause, and it lasted about a beat and a half, and then he laughed, one short flat sound with nothing in it.

"You have been talking to the man in the lane," he said. "The one with the cane who chases people down streets. I remember him. Do you know, I remember the whole of that night, and the part I remember best is the face of the doctor, the one who looked at me as though he wanted to open me up." He shook his head slowly. "Those people were owed something and they got it and it was more than they were owed, and if the man with the cane spent some of his own money in the meantime, then he can send me a bill. I am easy to find."

He reached past Pike and put his key in the lock. He turned it and pushed the door and the door gave, and behind it there was dark and a smell of cold stone and something else, something sharp and faint and chemical, and Pike caught it and did not have a name for it.

"Here," Voss said. He had taken a card from his coat, a plain white card, and he held it out. "This is where I live. Since you have decided to take an interest. Do not come on a Tuesday, I am never there on a Tuesday. Do come, though. I would rather have you in the open than standing in a lane behind a window with a light on you."

Pike did not take the card. Voss put it in the breast pocket of Pike's coat himself, quickly, as though he were pocketing something of his own, and then he stepped through the door and shut it, and Pike heard the lock turn on the far side, and then nothing.

Pike stood in the lane for another minute. Then he took the card out and held it under the lamp.

It was an address in Cambridge, in a block of cheap apartments off Central Square, and under the address, in a fine hand, in ink, were three words: ask for me.

He put the card away and walked home. It was past midnight when he got in. Before he slept he thought about the one thing in the lane that he had not been able to put down. The man had opened that door with a key of his own, at midnight, without hurrying and without looking back, and had gone in the way a man goes in to the place where he works.