Death Benefits (7 page)

Chapter Seven

When I returned to Abbott & Windsor, there were several boxes of Stoddard Anderson documents in my office: his time sheets, his phone messages, his correspondence files, his travel logs, and the contents of his office. Reviewing all of the documents would take several hours.

I checked my watch. It was almost five o'clock. I called my sister Ann to tell her I wouldn't be home until late. With a sigh, I lifted the first box, lugged it over to the desk, and opened the lid.

If my friends from law school and my friends in practice are any indication, a fairly high percentage of lawyers in America were encouraged as children to become lawyers because they were “great with people” or “had the gift of gab.” It is one of the many ironies of the practice. Contrary to popular belief, the legal profession is a lonely occupation. Even a trial lawyer's typical day can often resemble that of a cloistered monk. You spend hours, even days, alone in a room reviewing documents or alone in a law library researching legal issues or alone at your desk drafting court papers. And when you do have that rare opportunity to engage in an extended conversation with a living, breathing human being, more often than not he is under oath, his lawyer is at his side, and a court reporter is taking it all down.

I finished the last of the boxes of documents three hours later. I had learned several intriguing things about Stoddard Anderson, although whether any of them was important was not at all clear. Settling back in my chair and stretching first my arms and then my legs, I looked over my notes, which covered six pages of my legal pad.

Item # 1
. The first gap in Stoddard Anderson's time sheets occurred two weeks before he took out the extra insurance, which was four months before his suicide. That juxtaposition could be purely coincidental. Or it could mean that during the missing days something happened that made Anderson either believe his life was in danger or decide to kill himself.

Item # 2
. He took six trips during the last three months. Three overnight trips to Chicago, one to New York (two weeks before he died), one to Argentina (eight weeks before he died), and one to New Mexico (nine weeks before he died). He stayed at Hyatt Hotels each time, and all of the expenses he submitted appeared routine: restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, cab fares, tolls, parking, rental cars.

Item # 3
. His time sheets did not reflect Dottie Anderson's description of his work habits and long hours. He rarely recorded more than eight hours of work a day on his time sheets. There were several possible explanations, most of them innocent. Perhaps Stoddard Anderson failed to keep track of his hours during the day, or consistently underestimated those hours. Every major law firm in America has a few workhorses who lose hundreds of hours of billable time a year by simply forgetting to write them down on their time sheets. Another possibility was that Anderson didn't record his nonbillable activities; as managing partner, he would have had a heavy load of administrative tasks on top of his billable client work. This explanation seemed less likely, however: His time sheets did include many entries for firm administration, client development, and other nonbillable matters. Then there were, of course, less innocent explanations for the long hours away from home that were not reflected on his time sheets, the most obvious of which would be charged to the nonbillable category “other woman.”

Item # 4
. Neither his correspondence files nor his telephone message slips contained any apparent clues other than to confirm his secretary's recollection of the three main clients he was involved with during the last few weeks of his life: There were numerous messages from, and an occasional business letter to, Albert Weidemeir (of the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District), Remy Panzer (of the Panzer Gallery), and M. Salvatore Donalli (of Donalli Construction Company). The letters were entirely unremarkable examples of typical attorney-client correspondence.

Item # 5
. The estate of Stoddard Anderson was much smaller than one might ordinarily assume. Ishmael Richardson's comments about his stock market losses and the decline in the value of his real estate investments, along with Nancy Winslow's observations, were borne out in the financial statements. Excluding the home in Clayton and the proceeds of the life insurance policy, the remaining estate was less than three hundred thousand dollars. He had by no means died a pauper, but it was clear that his widow needed the insurance benefits.

Item # 6
. His personal appointment calendar included meetings with all three main clients during the last two weeks, along with a speaking engagement before the women's auxiliary of a local hospital, a doctor's appointment six days before he disappeared, a couple of board meetings, a golf date, and numerous luncheon engagements. Conspicuously absent from the calendar were many evening meetings.

Item # 7
. The box of his personal correspondence consisted almost entirely of bills, solicitations, legal publications, and newsletters and similar correspondence from literally dozens of professional organizations, charitable institutions, trade associations, and the like. Nancy Winslow was right: The task of keeping track of Stoddard Anderson's correspondence was enough to keep a secretary busy almost full time.

There were, however, two items of possible interest in his correspondence. One was a bill from the postal service for rental of a post office box downtown. I jotted down the PO box number and added a note to check that out. The other item was the monthly statement from the St. Louis Club that had been among the papers the police found in his briefcase. The only significant entry for that final month was a $145.78 charge for dinner on June 8, which was ten days before he disappeared. The size of the bill suggested that Anderson had not dined alone that night.

I checked his appointment calendar. There was no entry for June 8. Maybe a spur-of-the-moment dinner with someone, I said to myself.

Then I remembered his pocket calendar—the one the police had found among his papers at the motel. I pulled it out of the manila envelope Dottie Anderson had given me and flipped to the date of the dinner. He had printed the word “ParaLex” in the evening portion of that day. That was all. Maybe a new client?

I mulled that over for a moment and reached for the telephone book. I found the number for the St. Louis Club. A man named Philip answered and identified himself as the maitre d' of the main dining room. I told him briefly who I was and asked him to check his reservation book to see if he could tell who Stoddard Anderson had had dinner with on the night of June 8. A few moments later Philip apologetically told me that all that the reservation book showed was that Mr. Anderson had dined with another person that night in the Marquette Room, which was one of the club's small private dining rooms. Claude was the maitre d' on duty the night of June 8, Philip told me, but tonight was his night off. He would be back at the club tomorrow at noon, and Philip promised that Claude would call me then. I thanked him and gave him the office number.

I pulled my legal pad over and jotted down “ParaLex??” I stared at the word. Then I circled it. There. A clue, I said to myself. Just like I really knew what I was doing.

I pushed the legal pad away and looked at the two appointment calendars—the big desk one and the small pocket one. They seemed like a good source of people to contact. As I was getting up to make a photocopy of several pages from the calendars, my phone rang. It was Benny Goldberg, calling from Chicago.

“So, what do you have so far?” he asked.

I went through everything I had found in the documents. Maybe Benny would see a pattern where I could not.

“Sounds like ole Stoddard was shtupping some babe,” Benny said.

“You think?”

“Sure. Just 'cause his labanzas go into vapor lock around his old lady don't mean they don't function around someone else.”

“Labanzas?” I said after a pause, a smile on my lips. “Where did you get that one, Mr. Esperanto?”

“Portuguese, I think.”

“I thought you said fishteras was the Portuguese term.”

“Fishteras, labanzas, whatever. I'm telling you, the guy was shtupping some babe. What's his secretary look like?”

“She's pretty. But I don't think so.”

“She's a likely suspect, Rachel. They usually are. Ask around the office. It might be her. Or one of the paralegals. Yeah, probably a paralegal.”

“Maybe. I'll keep my eyes peeled. Hey, have you ever heard of a company called ParaLex?”

“ParaLex? ParaLex…nah. Listen, kiddo, you need some help down there? I could always come down. It's slow around the office, and there's a terrific barbecue joint down there. It's called Roscoe—Roscoe something or other.”

“Oh?”

Benny was a barbecue fanatic. For years he had kept track of his favorites on a set of index cards that he continually updated, filling the backs and sides with arcane annotations. This summer he had transferred the entire file to a data bank in the personal computer in his office.

There was a pause as Benny was no doubt typing a Roscoe search request for his computer. “Ah, here we go,” he said. “Roscoe McCrary's Hickory Bar-B-Que House. On 2719 Parnell. They serve hickory-smoked pig snouts.”

“Snouts? As in piggies' noses?”

“Snouts, as in one of the best things you can put in your mouth without the consent of another adult.”

“No wonder we're supposed to keep kosher.”

“Believe me, Rachel, if Moses had tasted one of Roscoe McCrary's hickory-smoked pig snouts up on Mount Sinai, there'd be a special exemption in the laws of kashrut for certain parts of certain cloven-hoof mammals. God, my mouth is watering. What do you say, Rachel? I could be there tomorrow.”

“I'm okay so far, Benny. I'll check in with you tomorrow. I promise.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure.”

“Okay. But if I hear word of some tall, foxy white chick doing a pig snout carry-out at McCrary's, I'm going to be crushed.”

“Trust me, Benny. I'll call you tomorrow.”

***

“Rachel Gold?”

I was up at the Xerox machine copying pages from Stoddard Anderson's appointment calendars. I turned and stared at the guy who had said my name. He looked about my age, and vaguely familiar.

“Rachel Gold, right?”

I nodded.

“Sandy Feldman. We were in high school together.”

I shook his hand. “Sure. Of course. I didn't recognize you with the beard. How are you?”

“Great. I heard you were coming down to do something on Anderson's estate. I haven't seen you since high school, Rachel. You look terrific.”

“I didn't know you worked here.”

“I came over from Thompson and Mitchell last fall.”

Sandy Feldman and I had been in the same homeroom together at University City High School. Back then he had been a shy, slide-rule type who wore black pants pulled high above the waist, as if his hips were fused to his rib cage. Other than an occasional hello in the morning, I doubt if we spoke ten words to each other throughout high school. The last time I saw him, which was probably graduation day, he had fierce-looking pimples on his cheeks and a clump of dark frizzy hair hanging over his eyes. The pimples were gone, and so was most of the hair on top, replaced by a dark beard. As I followed him back to his office, I marveled at how much better he looked. He had grown a few inches since high school, filled out some, and obviously retained the services of a tailor with a better sense of the whereabouts of his waist. He looked like a neatly coiffed Allen Ginsberg.

“You have to remember,” Sandy said after we were seated in his small office, “we're one of the colonies down here.”

“I don't follow.”

“Abbott and Windsor started in Chicago back in the eighteen hundreds. Chicago is still the motherland. This is the hinterlands. We didn't come of age singing the Abbott & Windsor fight song. Down here we didn't start off as summer clerks playing tennis at the big firm outing on the North Shore.” He shrugged. “This is an office filled with opportunists. Speaking of which, have you met our new fearless leader?”

“You mean Reed St. Germain?”

He nodded. “There's a piece of work. You should see the way he sucks around the BSDs from Chicago. Practically straps on the knee pads. Especially when Ishmael Richardson comes down to inspect the troops.”

“Where did St. Germain come from?”

“He started at his dad's firm, Harris and St. Germain. He joined Anderson's old firm two years before the merger with A and W. Hard to figure him out. Guy meditates almost every day after lunch, flies off to Nepal every other year, a strict vegetarian. And do you know what the end product of all that inner harmony bullshit is? He cheats on his wife, keeps a secret bachelor's pad in the Central West End, and usually takes some girlfriend with him on his business trips. He can be a real prick with everyone, except for Mrs. St. Germain.”

“Oh?”

“Apparently, she's a real ballbuster. I hear he's a real wimp around her. She tries to keep him on a short leash.”

“Not too successfully, I gather.”

“I guess not. I don't know how he hides all those extracurricular expenses from her. She'd kill him if she found out. Maybe that tension makes him mean. I'm telling you, I've seen that guy in a negotiation. When he senses a weakness, he's like a shark scenting blood.”

“Be glad he doesn't eat red meat.”

“You're right. He'd probably grab an Uzi and head for the nearest highway overpass.”

“So you don't like him, eh?” I said with a smile.

Sandy shrugged. “He's a fellow member of the bar. If I wanted to work with saints, I'd have become a social worker. His clients love him.”

“Your wife looks familiar,” I said, gesturing at the photograph of his wife and two children on his credenza.