“That would have to go through court, wouldn’t it?” “Yes.”
“Suppose the business was something you couldn’t take to court?”
“Why not?”
“Too dangerous.”
“For whom?”
“Me.”
Mason said, “Then you could absolve yourself from responsibility by paying the dead partner’s share of the funds to his heirs. But under those circumstances, you would have to take all the responsibility of seeing that you got all of the heirs and met the...”
“You mean,” Karr interrupted, “that if I paid money to someone who wasn’t the nearest relative, I might have to pay it all over again?”
“That’s right. Moreover, the nearest relative isn’t always the heir. Suppose a partner left a son, for instance, and sometime later on it appeared that he had been secretly married or he might have left a will which might not have been offered for probate.”
Karr fastened Mason with his alert, intense eyes, and said, “I understand. It’s better to take that risk than to have the court asking a lot of questions.”