Open and Shut (4 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I HAVE TO STOP AT
Roger Sandberg's office. Roger is known as “the attorney's attorney,” and for years he has personally represented many of the top lawyers in the area. He and my father had been close friends for twenty years, and my father trusted Roger with his life. Since he doesn't have his life anymore, here I am.

The purpose of this visit is to go over matters of the estate and learn the terms of my father's will. I arrive ten minutes early and start reading one of the ancient magazines from the rack in the waiting room. For some reason, every doctor's, dentist's, or lawyer's office I am ever in only has magazines more than four months old. Where do the magazines go when they first arrive? Is there a publication purgatory that they are required to inhabit until their information is no longer timely?

I pick up the current one in the office, a six-month-old
Forbes.
It predicts that the stock market will go up, a prediction which has turned out to be wrong. I'm glad I didn't read it six months ago.

The door to Roger's office opens and he comes out to greet me. Roger is a very distinguished-looking man, with a kind smile and smooth manner. He is the definition of “unruffled,” a neat trick to have pulled off since he's been married five times. I've had only one troubled marriage, and I am thoroughly ruffled.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Andy.”

Roger shakes my hand and then hugs me, just like he hugged me at the funeral. I'm not a big hug fan, but I hug him back.

“No problem.”

We exchange pleasantries about his wife and children, all of whom I vaguely know, and he inquires about my practice. I talk briefly about it, at which point his eyes start to glaze over. Criminal law is not Roger's thing.

We go into his office and he suggests that I sit on the couch. He goes to his desk and starts to gather the paperwork he is going to show me. He handles legal papers like a Las Vegas dealer handles cards … smooth, with no wasted motion.

“Roger, before we start, there's something I want to ask you. Did my father ever mention knowing Victor Markham?”

He seems surprised by the question. “Of course, don't you remember? He prosecuted that murder a few years ago … when the young woman was murdered in that bar. I believe the victim was Markham's son's girlfriend.”

“I know. I'm handling the appeal.”

“Really? Did your father know that?”

I nod. “Definitely. He encouraged it.”

“Anyway, as far as I know, that's how Nelson knew Victor Markham,” he says.

“I was talking about much earlier. Almost forty years ago. I'm pretty sure he was one of the people in a picture I found up in the attic. Dad was in the picture as well.”

“He never mentioned it to me. But there was apparently a great deal about your father that I didn't know.”

Roger has just lit a fuse; and all I can do is wait for it to reach the dynamite and explode. He doesn't make a comment like that unless he has something significant to tell me. I get a strong feeling that I'm not going to like it. I know for sure that I'm dreading it, so I take a breath so deep it sucks most of the air out of the room.

“What do you mean by that?”

He looks me right in the eye. “I was very surprised by the amount of money in your father's estate. Very surprised.”

It's exhaling time; I'm relieved to hear that it's about money. I'm comfortable enough, and I really have no need to live off an inheritance. But I'm still surprised.

“Really? Dad was always so careful with his money.”

He nods. “That he was.”

“How much is left, Roger?”

He takes a deep breath and presses the detonator. “Twenty-two million dollars.”

“Twenty-two million dollars!”
I choke.

“And change.” He reads from the papers. “Four hundred thirty-two thousand five hundred and seventy-four dollars’ worth of change.”

My mind immediately registers three possibilities, listed in order of likelihood. One, Roger made an error. Two, Roger is joking. Three, I'm rich! I'm rich! I'm rich!

I find myself standing up, though I'm not sure why. “Can't be, Roger. It's an appealing thought, but it's simply not possible.”

“You had no idea he had this kind of money?”

“He didn't,” I say firmly. “I knew he made some good investments over the years, but not like this. He would have told me. He would have raised my allowance.”

“I don't know what to say, Andy. But it's all real.”

My legs seem to give out from under me, and I sag back down on the couch. Roger brings the books over to me and takes me through them, every square inch of them, and there is no doubt about it. I am, in fact, rich.

It isn't immediately clear where the money came from, but it doesn't seem to be the result of particularly shrewd investments. The money is sitting in long-term tax-free municipal bonds, earning much less interest than it could be elsewhere.

None of this makes any sense, so I decide to investigate, and make the logical decision to assign my investigator. I call Laurie from Roger's office and tell her what I've learned, and the extent of my wealth.

“You've suddenly become far more attractive, you big adorable hunk, you,” she gushes.

Since I haven't told her about Nicole, this doesn't seem to be a good time to engage in sexual/romantic banter. So I don't, and she promises to get to the bottom of this quickly. I have no doubt that she will.

When I get home I tell Nicole the news, and her astonishment matches mine. My father would be the last person you'd expect to keep a momentous secret like this from his family, and I have to assume my mother had been in the dark about it as well. She was biologically incapable of keeping a secret; she would have told me without any prompting at all.

There are ordinarily no circumstances under which I have trouble sleeping. My ability to fall asleep on a moment's notice is a blessing I have never taken for granted. But tonight I toss and turn for half the night.

I don't even have Tara in bed for me to pet; since Nicole's return Tara has been reduced to sleeping on a comforter on the floor. I could pet Nicole, but she might read more into it than she should. So I just lie there, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Becoming an orphan, a husband, and a multimillionaire in the same week must be causing me some stress.

The next morning I go to the office for the first time since the funeral. When I arrive I find my secretary-receptionist, Edna, doing a crossword puzzle. Edna is sixty-six and she proudly and often proclaims that she has worked every day of her life since she was a mere child, yet she hasn't done a real day's work in the five years she's worked for me. If you think I'm about to tell her that, you don't know her or me.

Edna, to hear her tell it, has what must be one of the largest extended families in the United States. There is nothing one can mention, be it an experience, an occupation, a talent, an affliction … anything … that isn't shared by a member of Edna's family. The only thing they all seem to have in common is that all are constantly advising Edna that she doesn't need to work. If I could speak to all of them, and a venue the size of Yankee Stadium would be necessary, I would reassure them that their advice has been taken to heart. Edna does many things, but work is not one of them.

But whatever one might say about Edna, she is the greatest crossword puzzle talent this country has ever produced. It's amazing; she can go through the
New York Times
puzzle in less than twenty minutes. She often waxes eloquent about the injustice of it all. Here Michael Jordan made millions because he was better at basketball than anyone else, while she gets nothing for being at the peak of her chosen avocation. She vows she will live to see the day that crossword championships are held at Madison Square Garden before screaming multitudes, and she's signing huge pencil endorsement deals.

I get in early and set about trying to relax, which for me means a good sock basketball game. I take a pair of rolled-up socks (I keep some in the office for just this purpose) and shoot at a ledge above the door. I have to pretend to dribble, since rolled-up socks don't really bounce, and I create fantasy games to play in.

Right now I'm in the middle of an intense game, made all the more difficult by the fact that I also serve as commentator.

“Carpenter fakes left, the shot clock is off, the game clock is down to ten, his teammates have cleared out, giving him room … Carpenter loves to take the final shot … a two will tie, a three will win. The crowd is on its feet.”

Edna watches this with no apparent emotion, unimpressed by my prowess, since she has previously told me that sock basketball was invented by her Uncle Irwin. The door opens and Laurie comes in, carrying a huge watermelon. Even this isn't enough to hurt my concentration.

“Carpenter backs in, three on the clock. He turns, jumps, shoots … and hits!” The shot has actually gone in, but I'm not finished. I wait a few moments for effect.

“And a foul!”

I go up to my nonexistent opponent and get right up in his nonexistent face.

“In your face, sucker! In your face!” I snarl.

Laurie has finally managed to put the watermelon on a table, and she turns to me and my imaginary opponent. “I think you've got him intimidated.”

“Her. I've got her intimidated,” I say. “I combine my sports and sexual fantasies. It saves time.”

Laurie looks around the office, as she always does, her face reflecting her displeasure at the mess I've made.

“This is a dump,” she says with some accuracy.

“So is that why you brought in a four-hundred-pound watermelon? To class up the place?”

We both know that Sofý, the owner of the fruit stand downstairs, has given us the watermelon as partial payment for defending her son. I would have preferred peaches, but they're not really in season.

“Someday you might want to take payment in actual money. Although as rich as you are, you don't need to.”

This interests me enough to put down the sock basketball. I walk toward her, throwing out questions along the way.

“Did you check out the money? Where did he get it? Is it really mine?”

“Yes. I don't know. Yes.”

I focus in on the negative. “You don't know where he got it?”

Laurie takes a diet soda out of the small refrigerator and pops the top before she answers. “Correct. But I do know
when
he got it. Thirty-five years ago. It started as two million.”

This has now moved smoothly from the very strange to the totally bizarre. Thirty-five years ago my father was in his mid-twenties and in law school. How the hell could he have gotten hold of two million dollars?

Laurie continues. “It gets even stranger. He never touched the bonds, not once in all these years. The principal just grew from interest.”

“But he loved to play the stock market. When he retired he used to sit by the television all day and watch that stupid ticker go across the screen.”

She shakes her head. “Not with this money. The brokerage was instructed never to suggest new investments … they were told never even to call him … to pretend the money didn't exist.”

“You spoke to them?”

She nods. “Not the same people who were there back then, but the instructions were passed down, and nobody ever questioned them. Not a single person in the place had ever spoken to your father about the money.”

“I've got to find out where he got it in the first place.”

Laurie has an annoying habit of dribbling out information, and she is dribbling away now. “The plot thickens. The brokerage records show it was a single cashier's check … so there's no way to trace it from this end.”

This is incredibly frustrating, so I spend the next ten minutes brainstorming ideas with Laurie about how to go about getting more information. We collectively come to the conclusion that she already had come to: The only way to find out more is to look back into my father's life.

Laurie thinks I should drop it, that there's nothing to be gained by going further. The unspoken concern is that there's something to be lost, that my father did something to acquire that money that was so untoward that he could not bring himself to tell anyone about it or even touch it for thirty-five years.

The prospect of going further is frightening, but I have no choice. I don't want to feel like I didn't know a big piece of my father, though the evidence clearly shows that I didn't. We discuss how to proceed, and I'm thinking that I want to take the lead in this rather than Laurie.

The phone rings and we wait for Edna to answer it. By the fourth ring it is clear that she's not going to; 48 across must be requiring all of her considerable powers of concentration. I pick up the receiver and am jolted by the voice of Judge Henderson's clerk. Hatchet wants to see me about the Miller case. It can only mean that the decision has come down from the Court of Appeals.

I grab my jacket and start heading for the door, but Laurie walks along with me and asks if we're still having dinner tonight. It's the moment of truth, and I almost choke on my tongue.

“Laurie … Nicole's back in town … we … the situation …” The actual words, when spoken, are even wimpier than they look on paper.

Her tone is instantly challenging. “Talk, Andy. Nicole's back in town and that means what?”

“I'm not sure. Part of me says it's over and part of me feels like I should see where it goes.”

“And you think I'm going to hang around while your parts fight it out? Forget it, Andy.”

“I know this is difficult … but if you'll just try and understand …” I'm dying here and she shows no sign of letting me off the hook.

“Oh, I understand. I understand that your wife, the wife who walked out on you, has decided she might give you a second chance, and you're jumping at it. Well, you can jump through this particular hoop without me.”

I start to blabber some more, but she dismissively points out that Hatchet Henderson doesn't like to be kept waiting. Her saying this is both true and at the same time an act of mercy, and I'm able to leave with what little dignity I have left.