Schwartz blinked against the light from the window. “I must apologize,” he said, “for being urgent about this appointment, but I felt there should be no delay.” He sounded formal. “I gathered from Mr. Perrit last evening that you had not explicitly given your assent, and therefore—”
“May I ask, assent to what?”
“To your appointment, in his will, as executor of his estate and in effect the guardian of his daughter. Did you?”
“Utterly” — Wolfe wiggled a finger at him — “preposterous.”
“I was afraid of that,” Schwartz said regretfully. “It will complicate matters. I’m afraid it’s partly my fault, drafting the documents in such haste. There is a question whether the fifty thousand dollars provided for that purpose will go to the executor if the executor is not you but someone appointed by a court.”
Wolfe grunted. His eyes opened and then half closed again. “Tell me about it,” he said.
X
Schwartz opened the flap of his brief case, then let it drop back again, and kept it on his lap.
“In the past,” he said, “I have attended to a few little matters for Mr. Perrit of a purely legal nature. I know law, but on account of my temperament I am not a successful lawyer. Last evening he came to my home — a modest little apartment on Perry Street — he has never been to my office — and asked me to draw up some papers at once, in his presence. Luckily I have a typewriter at home but it isn’t very good and you’ll have to overlook typographical deficiencies. It took a long while because I am not fast on a typewriter, and also because of the special conditions to be covered. It’s a difficult business, extremely difficult, to convey property by testament to a daughter without naming her and indeed without identifying her in any way.”
The lawyer blinked. “I should tell you right off that there will be no problems of administration. The property consists exclusively of government bonds and cash in banks, a little over a million dollars. In that respect there are no intricacies. All other property owned by Mr. Perrit, including his interest in various enterprises, goes to others — his associates — in another document. Your functions are limited strictly to the legacy to his daughter. There are only two other provisions in the document under consideration: fifty thousand dollars to you as executor, and the same amount to me. The witnesses to it were a man who owns a delicatessen and a young woman who runs a rental library, both of whom are known to me. I have the original in my possession. Mr. Perrit took a copy.”