Chapter 111: Instrument
What Kessler filed on the sixteenth of April was two pages long and it withdrew Serena Montigue’s assertion of the Fifth Amendment as to the citation.
Not as to anything else. As to the money.
Doyle explained it in one sentence.
“She has pleaded to the battery, so that exposure is spent, and taking eighty-five thousand dollars from a woman who wants to give it to you has never been a crime in any state in the union.”
The examination was held in open court in 1804 on the sixth of May, before Judge Otto, with a court reporter and eleven people in the gallery.
I was one of the eleven, in the fourth row again.
Serena wore gray and she had lost weight and she answered for two hours and forty minutes.
She met Constance Blackwood in 2023, through work.
She was a private client relationship manager at a wealth advisory firm on Wacker, and she administered a family philanthropic account.
They had lunch four times in 2024 and 2025. Constance always chose the restaurant.
On the twenty-fourth of September 2025 they had lunch at a club on East Delaware, and Constance asked her whether she had ever thought about living a different sort of life.
Doyle asked what that meant.
“She said her son was going to need someone,” Serena said. “She said it in the future tense.”
“Those were her words? Going to need?”
“Those were her words.”
Constance told her to form a company. Constance named the agent service in Springfield.
Constance told her what to put on the invoice. The phrase household transition advisory was not Serena’s.
The money was described at that table as a retainer against a period in which she might not be able to work.
She resigned her position on the third of November 2025.
On the sixth of November she was at a lunch on Astor Street and was introduced to the staff as a friend of the Kestens.
She did not meet Victor Blackwood until the eleventh of January 2026, at a dinner his mother arranged, six weeks after the funeral.
She moved into the house on the twentieth of February.
Doyle asked, flatly, “Did you love him?”
Kessler objected. Otto overruled.
“No,” Serena said. “I was fond of him. He is a kind man who isn’t there. There is nothing to love or not love. There is a place at a table.”
“What did you understand you were being paid for?”
“To be suitable,” she said, “and to be available.”
Then Doyle spent forty minutes on the corridor, the nursery, and the ninth of December 2025.
Serena gave the same answer nineteen times in nineteen shapes. No knowledge. Nothing to do with it. Never touched that machine.
She had pleaded guilty to the fourteenth of September and would not be walked into anything else.
At one point she said, “I did one thing and I have paid for one thing,” and Doyle said, “That is not responsive,” and Otto said, “It is not, but it is an answer.”
I do not know. I did not know that day and I do not know now. That is the shape of the hole.
At two twenty Doyle read into the record four lines of Constance Blackwood’s own testimony from February.
I engaged Ms. Montigue to be available to my family. In whatever respect proved necessary. I don’t itemise people.
Then she put the transcript down.
“Ms. Montigue, the woman who paid you describes you as something she engaged and did not itemise. Do you agree that you were an instrument of her intentions?”
Serena did not answer.
The court reporter waited with her hands up.
Twenty seconds, maybe thirty. Otto did not prompt her, which I thought then was cruelty and think now was the opposite.
Then she broke, and I have to describe it accurately, because it was not what anybody expected.
She did not shout. She has never shouted in her life; that is the entire point of her.
She said, “No.”
Doyle said, “No, you do not agree?”
“An instrument doesn’t get a choice.” Her voice went at the second word and she took it back.
“A woman told me her son was going to need someone. I understood her. I said yes. Then I went home and looked up how to form a company.”
“Ms. Montigue—”
“I have known what I was for since that lunch. Not since February. Not since the police. Since that lunch.”
She put both hands flat on the rail of the box.
“So you don’t get to call me a thing,” she said. “Because if I’m a thing then I’m not the one who did it, and I am the one who did it.”
Otto called a recess. She went out through the side door with her hand over her mouth, and came back composed, and finished.
The last two questions were Doyle’s and they took nine seconds.
“Did Constance Blackwood ever, in words, ask you to harm anyone?”
“No.”
“Did she ever need to?”
Kessler objected. Ashworth, sitting at the back for exactly this, stood as well. Otto sustained it.
The reporter typed the objection. The answer was never given.
That is where the case against Constance Blackwood ended, and it ended in a sentence that does not exist.