By 4:10 Tuesday afternoon, he was beginning to feel that he was on top of the situation; and for the first time since he was informed of Bruno’s death, he was getting a fix on how long it would take him to fulfill his obligations as executor. Initially, he had worried that the estate would be so complicated that he would be tangled up in it for years, or at least for several months. But now that he had reviewed the will (which he had drawn up five years ago), and now that he had discovered where Bruno’s capable financial advisers had led the man, he was confident that the entire matter could be resolved in a few weeks. His job was made easier by three factors that were seldom present in multimillion-dollar estate settlements: First, there were no living relatives to contest the will or make other problems; second, the entire after-tax net was left to a single charity clearly named in the will; third, for a man of such wealth, Bruno Frye had kept his investments simple, presenting his executor with a reasonably neat balance sheet of easily understood debits and credits. Three weeks would see the end of it. Four at most.
Since the death of his wife, Cora, three years ago, Joshua was acutely conscious of the brevity of life, and he jealously guarded this time. He didn’t want to waste one precious day, and he felt that every minute he spent bogged down in the Frye estate was definitely a minute wasted. Of course, he would receive an enormous fee for his legal services, but he already had all the money he would ever need. He owned substantial real estate in the valley, including several hundred acres of prime grape-producing land which was managed for him and which supplied grapes to two big wineries that could never get enough of them. He had thought, briefly, of asking the court to relieve him of his duties; one of Frye’s banks would have taken on the job with great pleasure. He also considered turning the work over to Ken Gavins and Roy Genelli, the two sharp young attorneys who he had taken on as partners seven years ago. But his strong sense of loyalty had kept him from taking the easy way out. Because Katherine Frye had given him his start in the Napa Valley thirty-five years ago, he felt he owed her the time it would take to personally preside over the orderly and dignified dissolution of the Frye family empire.
Three weeks.
Then he could spend more time on the things he enjoyed: reading good books, swimming, flying the new airplane that he’d bought, learning to cook new dishes, and indulging in an occasional weekend in Reno. Ken and Roy handled most of the law firm’s business these days, and they did a damned good job of it. Joshua hadn’t plunged into full retirement yet, but he sat on the edge of it a lot, dangling his legs in a big pool of leisure time that he wished he had found and used when Cora was still alive.
At 4:20, content with his progress on the Frye estate and soothed by the magnificent view of the autumn valley beyond his window, he got up from his chair and went out to the reception area. Karen Farr was pounding the hell out of an IBM Selectric II, which would have responded equally well to a feather touch. She was a slip of a girl, pale and blue-eyed and soft-voiced, but she attacked every chore with tremendous energy and strength.
“I am about to treat myself to an early whiskey,” Joshua told her. “When people call and ask for me, please tell them I am in a disgraceful drunken condition and cannot come to the phone.”
“And they’ll all say, ‘What? Again?'”
Joshua laughed. “You’re a lovely and charming young woman, Miss Farr. Such a delightfully quick mind and tongue for such a mere wisp of a lass.”
“And such a lot of malarkey you’ve got for a man who isn’t even Irish. Go and have your whiskey. I’ll keep the bothersome hordes away.”
In his office again, he opened the corner bar, put ice in a glass, added a generous measure of Jack Daniel’s Black Label. He had taken only two sips of the brew when someone knocked on his office door.