The Coaster (28 page)
Authors: Erich Wurster
Lang shrugged. “I admit I told them about you.”
“We're supposed to be friends.”
Lang jumped up angrily. “You can be an infuriating person to be friends with. You haven't done a damn thing and yet you think you're better than everyone else.”
“I don't think that at all. I think pretty much the opposite of that.”
Lang sneered. “Oh, come on. Guys like you are all the same. You were born on third base and think you hit a triple.”
“You couldn't be more wrong. I think I was born on third base and got picked off by the pitcher.”
Lang ticked off a list on his fingers. “You married the perfect woman. She's smart and beautiful and, as a bonus, she's incredibly wealthy. You don't really work. Everybody likes you. Everything's so easy for you.”
“I'm sure it's been tough for you growing up with no alternative but to toil away in the coal mines.”
Lang's voice shook with anger. “It
has
been hard for me! I've had to work for everything I've gotten. You think I like busting my ass for sixty hours every week?”
“No, but I wouldn't have thought you'd spend all the rest of your time feeling sorry for yourself.” I thought for a minute. “You drew up the documents for them. Did they tell you to give me no pay for all that trustee work?”
Lang smiled weakly. “No. I thought of that myself. I figured you've been getting paid for doing nothing all these years, this would even it out. Look, at first they were just paying me to steer Sam in the right direction. Then when Sam dug his heels in, they wanted me to hook you up with Corny. I just figured it was another angle. I never knew it would lead to killing Sam.”
It was time to get to the point. “Rationalize all you want. You're screwed now. I have Swanson on video admitting everything.”
More or less
. “He implicates you in all of it.”
Not untrue.
“I have it here on my phone⦔
waving it in front of his faceâ¦
“and it's stored in the cloud. So it will be a simple matter to prove Sam's will was doctored. At a bare minimum you're going to get disbarred and kicked out of the firm.”
Lang had tears in his eyes. “It would crush my father if I disgraced the firm he spent his life building. I'll be humiliated. My wife will leave me. And what will I do for a living? I only know how to be a lawyer.”
“You'll be lucky if you don't spend the rest of your life in jail. Meanwhile, for your last act as my lawyer, I want you to go to Swanson's backers and tell them he's out of the picture. It turns out that Swanson was all hat and no cattle. This big criminal enterprise he talked about to intimidate everyone didn't exist. I tracked his techie down. His vast surveillance operation was one teenage computer nerd who taught himself to hack into people's e-mail so he could see what the other kids in school were saying about him. His army of enforcers consisted of Corny and two dimwitted body builders who weren't even especially mean or tough. It was nothing but bluff and bluster.”
“So you think they'll just walk away?”
“The inventor and investors didn't know anything about what Swanson was doing. He was off the reservation, acting on his own. Tell them he confessed to a criminal scheme on camera. They'll be glad to get out without being implicated themselves.”
“I'm not sure that video would even be admissible in court.”
“Maybe not, but with some push, it could become a huge YouTube hit. And they're not going to walk away empty-handed. Because they'll have all that unneeded property and equipment, I'll buy it from them at a fair price and run Sanitol as a lawful business.”
“What if they won't go for it?”
“Make it happen. I'll give you a week.”
***
Lang came through. He could be persuasive when he wanted to be. But I was still determined not to let him get away with murder. I was hesitant to involve the police and risk incriminating Sarah and me, so I wracked my brain for a solution that wouldn't compromise me or my family. Lang saved me the trouble. He crashed his Lexus into a bridge abutment and was killed instantly. It was two in the morning and he had a blood alcohol content of 0.26 percent. His wife said he had been depressed and drinking heavily. She'd been trying to make him get help. I don't know if it was suicide or a drunken accident, but I felt like justice was served. No, I didn't cut the brake lines or anything. His fear of exposure and, I like to think, shame, eventually overwhelmed him.
Corny's retirement money was enough for a down payment on a bank loan to secure the Sanitol deal. The profits won't be obscene like Swanson envisioned, but we'll do fine. We can sell that sanitizer to every legitimate business on the planet.
I made the deal personally, not on behalf of the trust. I resigned as trustee and Joan replaced me, which is as it should be. It's her money, after all. Now I run Sanitol.
A renewed sense of dedication didn't suddenly make me capable of managing a large company. I brought in Harriet to run the place. I'll be holding down my usual figurehead position. But I'm working harder at it.
I'm no longer living a lie. Maybe I never was. This is who I am. Or if I'm still living a lie, it's a better lie, one of my own choosing. I'm like a lot of successful businessmen now. I've capitalized on an opportunity and hired people better than me to handle the details. There are plenty of smart, hard-working people out there, but far fewer visionaries and leaders like I'm pretending to be. Steve Jobs didn't assemble those iPhones himself.
Approximately nine months later, little Samantha Patterson was born. Maybe we weren't careful enough, maybe subconsciously we wanted another child, maybe we just beat the contraception odds, maybe it was fate. I don't know. But I do know that if Sam hadn't died, his beautiful new granddaughter wouldn't exist, because the exact sequence of events leading to her conception would never have occurred. I could never regret that, and I have no doubt Sam would agree with me.
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