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"And I take it," Mason said, "you're not going to be able to make restitution."
"Restitution?" Dutton said in surprise. "Why, I have the entire fund intact. I have simply kept the properties in my name."
Mason regarded him thoughtfully. "Sit down," he suddenly invited.
"Thank you," Dutton said, and took a seat.
"Suppose you tell me," Mason said, "exactly what was the idea."
Dutton said, "I tried to do my best to protect Desere's interests. One hundred thousand dollars is not a great deal of money if you look at it in one way; in another way, it is a very gTeat deal of money.
"At the time of her father's death, the people with whom Desere was ru
"Her father thought four years would give her a more mature perspective."
"And it was to protect her from that type of associate that her father made this spendthrift trust?"
"Yes. He wanted to protect her from herself. Undoubtedly her father's idea was that I would clamp down on the money she was to receive; that I would bring financial pressure to bear to force her to drop her friends and form her friendships from another environment. In fact, he intimated as much to me before his death."
"Why didn't you do it?" Mason asked.
"Because that would have been the wrong way to play my cards," Dutton said. "I realized that if she represented a large sum of money to these individuals, an attempt would be made to exploit her simply to secure a financial advantage. I wanted her friends to believe the trust fund would be exhausted.
"If, on the other hand, I could build up enough speculative profits which she knew nothing about so that I could afford to dish out her money to her with a liberal hand, she would spend it and any prospective fortune hunter would then regard her as a woman who had gone through her inheritance and, as -such, she would be ostracized from the beatnik crowd."
"And you risked going to jail for this?" Mason asked.
"I want you to keep me from going to jail," Dutton said. "While I had taken chances on mingling the trust funds with my own assets, I had always held them in my name as trustee without disclosing the beneficiary of the trust."
"Suppose you had died?" Mason asked.
"I am in good health. I have no intention of dying in the near future."
Mason said, "Every week several hundred persons are slaughtered on the highways in a red harvest. None of these people had any intention of dying when they started out."
Dutton gri
Mason looked at Dutton and said, "You're a young man."
"It depends on what you consider young. I consider myself quite mature. I'm thirty-two."
"And Desere?"
"She'll be twenty-seven in a few months."
"When you started handling this trust you were still in your late twenties?"
Dutton flushed and said, "That's right."
"Do you," Mason asked suddenly, "love her that much?"
"What!" Dutton exclaimed, snapping back in the chair and sitting very straight.
Mason said, "You have your career ahead of you. Apparently, you have a remarkable aptitude in your chosen profession. In order to protect Desere Ellis and keep her from being the victim of fortune hunters, you have jeopardized your entire professional career and apparently haven't gained a thing by it.
"Now you are talking to a lawyer. Lawyers are not noted for being particularly naive, so perhaps you had better tell me the real story."
Dutton sighed, looked for an embarrassed moment at Della Street, then blurted out, "All right, I love her. I have always loved her, and I don't want her to know it the way things are now."
"Why?"
"Because she would never think of me in that way. Her attitude toward me is one she would show to a much older man… Well, I'm sort of a big brother; a species of uncle. I don't talk her language. I don't mingle with the set that appeals to her. At the present time, she regards me only as the custodian of her money. Her set regards me as 'square.'"
"Were you so successful four years ago," Mason asked, "that Desere's father thought his daughter's financial affairs would be better in your hands than in those of some more experienced and older banker?"
Dutton hesitated.
"Go on," Mason said.
"All right," Dutton told him, "her father wanted to- Well, he liked me. He thought I might have a steadying influence on Desere- She was ru
"And her father hoped that if she had to see a lot of you in co
"I guess that was partly his idea. He wanted to protect her from herself, and he may have had some idea of having her fall in love with me. He knew how I felt toward her.
"Actually, like so many schemes which fail to take human nature into consideration, the thing worked out just the opposite. She thinks of me as a moneygrubber. Our difference in ages has been accentuated."
"And you've been in love with her for four years?"
"Five."
"And never told her how you felt?"
"Of course I did. That was more than four years ago."
"What did she say?"
"She felt sorry for me. She said it was simply that I'd built up a synthetic feeling for her. She said she'd be a younger sister to me if I'd take her on that basis; that if I was going to persist in this crazy idea of being in love with her it would mean she couldn't see me any more. It would spoil the friendship."
"So you took it on that basis?" Mason asked.
"I've been waiting," Dutton said.
"Did her father have any idea he was dying?"
"Yes. He knew. The doctors gave him eight months. They were too optimistic. He lasted six."
"And now you feel that the will and the spendthrift trust didn't work out the way he had anticipated?"
Dutton said, "It had exactly the opposite effect. For a few months, Desere was so terribly hurt and angry that she would hardly speak to me.
"She felt that her father had repudiated her; that he had insulted her intelligence; that he was trying to dominate her life even after he had passed away and- Well, she's like a wild colt. She doesn't want any restrictions. Show her a fence and she tries to jump it. Come toward her with a halter and she wants to run; and if she gets cornered, she wants to bite and kick.
"After the will was read, she felt her father had crowded her into a corner, so she started biting and kicking."
"And, I take it," Mason said, "you were the target?"
"That's right."
"And you felt that embezzling the trust assets would make everything all right?"
"I wasn't trying to make things all right. I was trying to keep them from going all wrong."
"How?"
"She'd be a target for dead-beat fortune hunters if they knew the truth. Even as it is, she has a beatnik nogood moving in on her. He wants to marry her and 'manage' the few thousand she's going to get on the termination of the trust."
Mason smiled. "You don't approve of him as a husband for Desere?"
Dutton said grimly, "If he marries her, I'll-I don't know what I would do, but someone should shoot the guy."
Mason regarded Dutton thoughtfully. "Perhaps," he suggested, "you should be a little more aggressive in your romantic affairs."
"I have to play the waiting game a little longer," Dutton said.
"You've been playing it without any results for four years now," Mason said.