“Rotten,” Drake said. “He made very few friends, either in college or outside. George Wray was the business producer in the firm. Prescott was a walking encyclopedia of miscellaneous information. He had a great mind for detail. He was valuable when it came to taking care of the business Wray brought in.”
“What about Driscoll?” the lawyer asked.
“Just a nice rich play-boy. His mother died when he was fifteen. She left an estate of around a couple of million, mostly in the form of cash. It’s all tied up in a complicated trust, administered by the bank. Driscoll can’t touch the principal until he’s thirty-five. The income goes to him in accordance with the terms of the trust, one of which is that he can’t have more than three hundred dollars a month unless he earns more than three hundred dollars a month in some gainful and legitimate occupation. Then he can get more — but that’s at the discretion of the trustees again.”
“Sounds as though the boy had some defect of character,” Mason said. “From the time he’s fifteen until the time he’s thirty-five is a long time.”
“I know,” Drake said, “but apparently it was his mother’s idea that he was going to have to work and learn something of the value of money before he started playing around with the estate. You see, she put it right up to him. He couldn’t be much of a man-about-town on three hundred a month. But if he earned three hundred dollars a month, then the trustees could turn over as much or as little of the income as they thought advisable. I think it was drink she was afraid of, I don’t know. Anyway, she sure put a fence around the kid.”
“How did she happen to pick on Dimmick, Gray & Peabody?”
“They’d been her lawyers for years. They drew up the trust. And, incidentally, picked off a sweet thing for the bank. That’s the way they do. The bank turns them an estate every once in a while, and they turn the hank a nice piece of trust business.”
“Mrs. Driscoll evidently had a lot of confidence in Abner Dimmick.”
“She did. He was the one who had the contact with her. It was partnership business, but Dimmick was the one she always asked for. Incidentally,” Drake said, “that young chap, Cuff, did a pretty good job of representing Driscoll, didn’t he?”
Mason frowned thoughtfully and said, “I wish I knew. He was either practicing law by ear and happened to make a good guess, or else he’s one of those natural courtroom lawyers we hear about but seldom see. He rather forcibly impressed on me that the authorities couldn’t extradite Rosalind Prescott and that it might be a good move on my part to keep her outside of the state.”