A Killing Gift

Nine

Birdie Bassett got in from her meeting with her husband's estate lawyers before noon and went straight to the phone in the library.

"You have ten new messages," the flat-toned female on voice mail reported.

Birdie sighed. It had been three weeks since Max's sudden death, and the phone was still ringing off the hook. Ten calls already, and she'd been gone only a few hours. She was still in shock, dizzy from hunger, but not yet up to eating. People told her she was depressed, that there was a book she could read about the stages of grieving. But she didn't think there was anything in the book about being a really prominent widow whose husband had taken care of everything.

She took a few deep breaths to calm herself after the unpleasantness in Silas Burns's office. Max's lawyer of thirty years had informed her this morning that Max's two kids were going to contest the will. They were going to hold her up, fight her for a bigger piece of the pie. And that did depress her.

"You have three options, Birdie." He put up three arthritic fingers to emphasize them. "You can fight, you can make a deal, or you can try to wait them out. You're young, and you have your allowance." He lifted his shoulders. "They could hold you up for a very long time, but so could you. Why don't you take a few days to think about what you want to do and let me know."

She opened her mouth to speak, but he stopped her.

"There's no hurry, dear. Take your time."

Birdie had left the office and headed uptown. Back in Max's favorite post in the paneled library of his fifteen-room Park Avenue apartment, she picked up the last photo taken of him, taken only a few months ago in Palm Beach. He'd looked strong, healthy, and a good fifteen years younger than eighty-one. He was still a handsome man with a full head of hair. "Max, what do you want me to do?" she whispered. "Fight or flight?"

Max's desk was a huge bureau plat of the Louis XIV period with lots of ormolu. The desk was genuine. The large leather chair behind it was of a more recent vintage. The library table and club chairs were English. The rugs were two complementary Persian garden carpets with blue borders. The curtains that framed the eight-foot French windows were made of shimmering red-and-gold silk damask and edged with two varieties of silk tassels and braid. Everything was too ornate and grandiose for her taste, but had suited Max perfectly.

Birdie still couldn't believe he was gone. She'd expected him to remain vigorous for another ten years, then fade slowly for another five. She'd fully expected them to scale down during his lifetime. Simplify. She had no interest in the three houses he'd left her or the antiques his children thought belonged to them. Max didn't give her a sign, so she began listening to her messages.

"Mrs. Bassett, this is Carla in President Warmsley's office at York U. President Warmsley asked me to call you to confirm for Monday night. Could you give me a call at nine-nine-five-six-four-eight-two. Thank you."

Birdie punched three for delete, then listened to her next message.

"Birdie, this is Steven Speel at MOMA. I'm calling to set up a lunch with you and Marilyn. She's available Thursday of next week. Would you give me a call when you have a moment? Seven-five-one-four-four-eight-nine."

Steven Speel reeled off the numbers at twice the speed of the rest of the message, and Birdie got only the first three. She had to listen to the message again and again before she got them all. She hated it when people did that.

The next two were personal requests that she take tables at forthcoming benefits to which Max had supposedly pledged his support. But how would she know if he really had? Twenty thousand for the Emerald Dinner at the Museum of Natural History sounded possible. They'd gone before. But fifteen thousand for BAM? Birdie could not recall ever seeing the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Max's foundation's donor list.

Another call was from the Psychoanalytic Institute. What the hell was that? She listened to it with Max's heavy pen suspended over his ornate message pad. The pleasant voice of a Dr. Jason Frank invited her to lunch so that he and the foundation chairman could personally thank her for Max's generous bequest last year and encourage her to consider taking his place on the board. What? Birdie hadn't even known that Max had been on such a board. She shook her head at the latest revelation.

Max had been retired, but he'd been busy every day, running his own sizable foundation with virtually no staff and no board members to keep track of his activities. The foundation had no brochure, no guidelines for grant proposals, no procedure for donors, and far fewer documents than there should have been.

While he'd sent out letters with his foundation checks, the terms for the use of his sizable grants were often vaguely stated. Worst of all, Max had left her the reins of his foundation but no mission statement, no written pledges, no clues to his intentions. He hadn't bothered to groom her for this. All Birdie had ever done for the foundation was attend the functions of organizations he supported. She'd never been asked to participate on the board of any of them. Even on the occasions when Max had been honored, or had served as honorary chairman, all she did was lend her name. And she'd always understood that she had taken the place of a first wife with whom she could never compete. Her predecessor's name had been Cornelia, pronounced Cornelllya, and Cornelllya had never gone anywhere without a hat and gloves even in the summer. Forty years her senior, after all. The original foundation had borne her name. The Max and Cornelllya Bassett Foundation. Now Max's name stood up there alone.

As sole trustee, Birdie could rename it the Birdie Bassett Foundation, and the thought of that made her smile for the first time all day. She'd been snubbed and overlooked so many times for so many years, it was bittersweet to think of the power she had now. But she didn't know where to start.

Birdie Bassett was thirty-seven years old. She'd married Max when she was only twenty-six and he was seventy, a crazy thing, but not unheard of. For the eleven years they were together people would talk over and around her at dinner parties, as if she were still the temp who'd filled in at his home office after his previous secretary went on vacation with a handful of his dead wife's jewelry and never came back. Birdie's stepchildren, both older than she, had loathed her from the start and never tried to hide it. Still, she would never have dreamed of begrudging them their wretched houses and wretched furniture.

The Bassetts lived on Park Avenue, in Palm Beach, and Dark Harbor, off the coast of Maine. Max's bequeathing her the Bassett family enclave in Dark Harbor was a truly appalling move. In Florida all types mingled with relative ease. Even among the social set whose roots in Palm Beach predated air-conditioning, May-December relationships between the socially unequal were common. Lovely blond women of any origin, the young second wives of ancient gentlemen, were part of the scenery, a social set of their own. But Dark Harbor was another story. The houses were handed down from generation to generation, and new people just weren't welcome. Next message.

"Hi, Birdie, it's Al Frayme. Just calling to reschedule our lunch. By the way, the funeral was beautiful, and I thought you were very dignified in a difficult situation. Do you have time for lunch this week? I'll take you anywhere you want to go. Sweets. Paris. Tahiti. You name it."

Birdie smiled again. Sweets was downtown in the Fulton Fish Market, close to the Wall Street lawyer's office where she'd been earlier. The phone rang, distracting her from the rest of her messages.

"Hello, this is Birdie."

"You're next," a soft voice said.

"What? Hello? Hello?" A dial tone buzzed on the other end.

Jesus. Birdie felt so ill. She couldn't eat a thing. Nothing appealed and nothing stayed down. She was almost paranoid enough to believe she was being poisoned. Max's kids hated her; that much was clear. And people with money were always at risk. She glanced around the elegant room, wondering which things could hurt her. She knew that people could be poisoned by their clothes, by their toothpaste, by the air they breathed. Again she had that nagging worry. Max had not been sick. He'd died without warning. Everybody, including his doctors, had thought he was just old. But she wondered. The voice on the phone unnerved her. She wasn't sure anymore. She just wasn't sure.