The Last Refuge (34 page)

After that, I knew it was possible to die. The lesson didn’t stick as well with Billy Weeds.

I was only a few blocks away from Burton’s house, so I could honestly say I was in the neighborhood. I pulled up to the gate and pushed the call button on the intercom. Isabella was her regular welcoming self.

“He’s working in his study.”

“Can you tell him I’m here?”

“If you want.”

“Yeah, why not? Since I’m out here at the gate.”

“Okay. Up to you.”

The giant blue hydrangea that lined the long driveway had turned brown from the frost. A crew of landscapers were cleaning things up, trimming bushes and raking out the white-pebble road surface. They admired the Grand Prix as I passed by, I could tell.

Burton met me at the door.

“Sam, excellent timing. Saved me from my work.”

“So Isabella said.”

“Let’s go sit.”

He led me down a long corridor, through a sitting room and out to a screened-in porch. A porch like mine only ten times bigger and furnished to look like the British Raj. Lots of teak lounge chairs with built-in cup holders and magazine racks, woven footstools and grass mat carpets.

There was always some place new at Burton’s house to sit. I wondered how he kept track.

It was only about ten-thirty in the morning, too early even for Burton and me. So he called Isabella on his cell phone and asked for someone to bring us alcohol-free mimosas.

“Provide the illusion.”

While waiting we quickly covered the baseball situation, which meant a general agreement over the appalling inferiority of every team that’s ever competed with the Yankees, including those guys who also played somewhere on Long Island. Apparently they were both in the World Series.

“Their stadium is in Queens, I think,” said Burton. “I really don’t know.”

“The boys lost last night. So it’s two one.”

“Piffle.”

We also reviewed prospects for the NBA season, in which Burton took a far greater interest. He had a box at the Garden, away from the celebrities to avoid TV exposure. I used to join him every once in a while.

“We should do that again,” he said. “I’ve refurbished the box.”

I looked around the screened-in porch.

“Teak?”

“Something more appropriate to the setting.”

Isabella showed up leading another woman holding a tray with the drinks, a basket of croissants and some fresh fruit. She hung around to convey her general disapproval of me until Burton managed to shoo her away.

“So, Sam. I have some information. Not a lot.”

“Me, too. A fair amount.”

“I received a message from an attorney named Hunter Johnson. Inquiring about you.”

“Checking my story.”

“I let it be known we were closely associated and left it at that. An assistant handled the communication.”

“I dropped your name so hard it busted the floor.”

“Hope it helped.”

“It did. I appreciate it.”

“Tell me what you’ve learned and I’ll see if I can fill in the holes.”

So I went through everything I’d learned since he’d sailed over to the cottage. About Carl Bollard Junior and his girlfriend Regina. Julia Anselma’s Bay Side house and tricked-out iron. Jimmy Maddox and his midnight raid. Jackie Swaitkowski’s confessional. Harbor Trust and the Battistons. Even my encounter
with the trained bear, which I’d left out of our last conversation.

“I’m not happy about that,” said Burton.

“No permanent damage. Nothing that shows, anyway.”

I told him about my meeting with Ross Semple and conversation with Joe Sullivan. And finally about the trip to New York to see Hunter Johnson in his opulent offices.

“Place is really plush, Burt. You should check it out.”

“I’m sure. Real-estate practice,” he said, by way of explanation.

“So what do you think of all this?”

“You’ve been busy,” he said. “I haven’t much to add, except something on the trust.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the beneficiary?” I asked.

“Carl Bollard, of course.”

“Of course. Who’s got to be pretty old at this point.”

“Would be, but he’s dead.”

“Dead.”

“Died some time ago. 1977 to be exact. Alcoholism. Had a room at the Institute of Living in Hartford. Was there for one last try at sobriety.”

“So that’s it for the trust. What happened to the assets? Who owns them now?”

“That’s a very interesting question, Sam. We have no idea, and as far as my associates can tell, neither does anyone else. As it is, everything we have comes from a retired loan officer who reviewed the trust as part of a WB capitalization program. This was back in the early
fifties. Luckily, he still had his notes. You’re going to find that most people involved in this are either long dead or past the point of clear recollection.”

“What about Bollard’s will? His heirs?”

“No heirs we know of. The trust was established by his father, Carl Senior, the year his mother died, leaving Carl Junior the sole heir. Within the trust were all the assets of Bay Side Holdings, which included WB Manufacturing, the real estate it sat on, plus contiguous properties around Oak Point and Jacob’s Neck, corporate equity—basically the cash in the business—and a substantial investment account with a portfolio of bonds and securities. Carl Junior, who was an only child by the way, was the beneficiary, along with his father, until his father’s death, which happened in 1950. Carl Junior also worked at WB in a succession of jobs typical of a young scion being groomed for succession. The trust at first glance looked like a typical tax vehicle used for estate management and the fluid transfer of corporate authority from one generation to the next. But it was clear to me, having some experience with these things, that it was also meant to keep young Carl in control while the father lived, and out of trouble once he died.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the trust was revocable during the old man’s life, then unmodifiable for five years after that. Carl Junior got the benefit of the income, but he couldn’t touch the business itself until 1955, when he was forty-six years old.”

“Arnold Lombard said he was a wasteabout.”

“That would follow. His father made the calculation that after five years on his own his son should be ready
to accept responsibility. If not, then to hell with it. This is a very common practice in family situations.”

“So you’re saying that since, what, 1977, all that stuff’s just been sitting there, nobody owning it but a piece of paper? That’s nuts.”

“Yes, nuts and illegal, and entirely out of the question.”

“Okay. Keep explaining.”

“The trust was formed in 1948 in conjunction with the wills written for both Carls. Also very common. These I have. Carl Senior’s we already know. Carl Junior’s says when he dies, the assets of the trust flow to his heirs and assigns, as designated in the trust. It doesn’t say anything about what would happen if he had no heirs or assigns beyond his father, who would get everything back if he died young. In which case Carl Senior could nullify the trust and move on with his life, all of which is purely academic at this point since that didn’t happen.”

“But Carl Junior had no heirs.”

“I said heirs, not assigns.”

“I presume an assign is just that. Somebody you say is an heir.”

“Exactly. That’s what we don’t know, because we don’t have the trust document itself. Wills have to be registered on the death of the signer. Not trusts. Once Carl Junior was free of the restrictions, he could modify the trust any way he wanted. It became his trust, just like it was his father’s before him.”

“We got to have a chat with Mr. Hornsby.”

“We do indeed.”

I stood up and walked over to the screen to look at the outside. The lawn stretched away for a few hundred
yards, terminating at a tall privet hedge. The ocean was one estate away. Burton’s great-grandfather determined it was better to have twenty acres of developed real estate and landscaping between you and a big storm surge than a flimsy dune, and he was proved right in ’38 when the next-door neighbor washed out to sea with his whole family and fourteen friends who’d driven out from the city to watch the spectacle.

“You got a theory here, Burt?” I asked him as I finished off my second emasculated mimosa. Burton was still in his chair, pensive and removed. I sat back down next to him.

“I do. But it’s full of holes.”

“Me, too.”

“You know what might be happening here.”

“I do. It’s just hard to believe.”

“One of my law professors had a maxim. Just because you think it’s true, doesn’t mean it isn’t.”

“Must have shaved with Occam’s razor.”

“Sharpest blade in the drawer.”

We went back to the NBA after that, which was a big relief to me. I knew and Burton knew that the best thing to do at this point was to hand it all over to him, so he could hand it all over to the people officially responsible for this stuff. He knew and I knew I didn’t want that. I had my teeth in it now and I didn’t want to let go till I had it worked out. I just didn’t. Can’t explain it.

“I hate to owe people, you know that. But I’m glad for the help,” I told him before I got up to leave.

“Piffle,” he said, and took me on the long walk to my car.

I headed back to the cottage with both windows open to help fuel my brain. The cool, soggy October air was uncomfortable, but extra oxygen helped me focus. It was a practice I learned young. Get in a car, open all the windows and drive fast enough to fill the passenger compartment with a private hurricane. I could think better when other things overwhelmed my senses. Sometimes I’d drive home from work like this, even in the dead of winter, and when I reached my driveway I’d keep driving and use up an hour or two buffeting my brain into submission.

Abby never asked where I’d been. She was never concerned when I failed to show up, or when I worked through evenings and weekends. Her indifference to my presence was one of the things I most appreciated. It gave me the freedom to distract myself with aimless open-air driving, or raging, drunken road trips across Greater New York with my sparring partners from the gym, or obsessive attempts at mastering some arcane scientific principle, or months of near catatonia, in which I’d descend into my own customized well of despair. Through it all Abby tended the house, maintained the proper social connections, shopped and calmly raised our daughter.

I skated across the years of my marriage like an ice sled—moving at blurred speed, barely touching the surface. The weeks were filled with boiling tension and anxiety, the weekends lost on fatuous conversations and alcohol. Through it all I never once felt like my wife knew who she was married to. As she surrounded us with a gaggle of nitwit acquaintances, I was condemned to an ugly loneliness of the mind.

I stopped at the cottage to check on Eddie. He was sleeping on the landing at the top of the side-door steps. He wagged his tail without bothering to get up.

“Calm down there, boy, you’re gonna hurt something.”

I made a pot of coffee, gathered up my Regina file and spread it out on the porch table. The air was cool, but the coffee kept my fingers warm as I leafed through the papers.

I was looking at all the words and notes, the real-estate documents and other stuff I’d collected, but it wasn’t registering. I wasn’t really reading, just scanning with my eyes. What I wanted to know wasn’t there, so it felt pointless to look. But I looked anyway, out of habit, an engineer’s obsession with data gathering.

Eddie made himself comfortable on the bed. I tried to talk it out with him, but he wanted to sleep. All I got was an occasional raised head and a wagging tail. No analysis or conclusions.

At the bottom of the file were the old photographs I swiped out of the display case at the old WB. One was an eight-by-ten-inch black and white print. The setting was ambiguous, maybe a conference room at the plant, or a meeting room at a local restaurant or hotel. There were about ten men standing shoulder to shoulder. The shot was a little overexposed, and sepia tinted with age, but you could easily make out everyone’s face. I was intrigued by the conformity of their clothes and haircuts, the homogeneity of their skin, the sureness in their eyes.

On the floor was a banner, mounted on rigid backing so it could stand supported at their feet. It read
“WB Bomb Squad.” Then underneath, in much smaller type, “Management Defense Team.”

The word management caused me to flip it over and look at the back. Neatly penned along the bottom were the names and titles of all the men in the photo. Beginning with Carl Bollard Junior, President and CEO. To his left was Milton Hornsby, Exec. V.P., Chief Financial Officer. All the way at the other end was Robert Sobol, Q.C. Director. A red stamp from the photo processor showed the date to be 1970.

I looked at the back of the bowling photo, but it was unmarked except for the processor’s stamp with the date, 1972.