The List (2 page)

“Let me see.” McClintock paused. “Yes. I can move my three o'clock appointment up an hour.”

“Do I need to bring anything?”

“No,” replied McClintock, “we'll have the paperwork ready. See you then.”

“With your bill on top,” Renny remarked as he heard the click of the other lawyer hanging up the phone.

Renny let his mind wander as he looked around his office. Even though it wasn't much larger than a walk-in closet, Renny didn't complain. Landing a job at a big law firm in a major city was the ultimate prize for the masses of eager students passing through the law school meat grinder. Each one entered the legal education process hoping they would come out with
Law Review
on their résumés and filet mignon status in the difficult job market. Most ended up as hamburger, relieved to find any job at all.

Renny had an advantage. Although not on
Law Review
or in the top 10 percent of his class, he had something even better: connections. For once, really the first time he could remember, his father had come to his aid. Dwight Temples, one of the senior partners in the firm, had attended college with Renny's father at The Citadel in Charleston. Over the years they maintained a casual friendship centered around an annual deep-sea fishing expedition off the coast of North Carolina. When Renny mentioned an interest in working for the firm's Charlotte office, H. L. Jacobson called Dwight Temples, and the interview with the hiring partner at Jackson, Robinson, and Temples became a formality. Renny was offered a position on the spot.

Today was not the first call Renny had received from Jefferson McClintock, his family's lawyer in Charleston. Six weeks before, McClintock telephoned Renny with the news of H. L.'s sudden death on a golf course in Charleston. No warning. No cholesterol problem. No hypertension. No previous chest pains. The elder Jacobson was playing a round of golf with two longtime friends, Chaz Bentley, his stockbroker, and Alex Souther, a College of Charleston alumnus and restaurant owner.

At the funeral home, Bentley, a jovial fellow and everyday golfer who probably received more stock market advice from Renny's father than he gave to him, had pumped Renny's hand and shook his head in disbelief. “I don't understand it. He was fine. No complaints of pain or dizziness. We were having a great round at the old Isle of Palms course. You should have seen the shot he hit from the championship tee on the seventh hole. You remember, it's the hole with the double water hazards. His tee shot must have gone 225 yards, straight down the fairway. He birdied the hole. Can you believe it? Birdied the last hole he ever played!” The stockbroker made it sound like nirvana to make a birdie then die on the golf course. “We were teeing off on number eight. Alex had taken a mulligan on his first shot and hooked his second try into a fairway bunker. I hit a solid drive just a little left of center.” Renny could tell Bentley was enjoying Souther's duff and his own good shot all over again. “Then your father leaned over to tee up his ball and, he, uh…never got his ball on the tee,” he finished lamely.

Because of the circumstances of his death, the coroner had required an autopsy. The pathologist's report concluded death by coronary failure. H. L.'s family doctor, James Watson, had explained to Renny, “Your father's heart exploded. He never knew what happened. Death was instantaneous. The pathologist called me from the hospital after he examined the body and reviewed his findings with me. Given your father's good health, we were both puzzled at the severe damage to the heart muscle. We know how he died, but not why it happened as it did.”

Renny grieved, but he and his father had not had a close relationship. H. L. was a harsh, critical parent whose favor eluded his son like the proverbial carrot on a stick. Renny tried to please, but the elder Jacobson often changed the rules, and Renny discovered a new way to fail instead. After his mother's death, Renny only visited his father a couple of times a year.

Since there was no one else with whom to share the considerable assets his father had inherited and then increased through savvy investments, Renny looked forward to the trip to Charleston. Once the estate was settled, he would become what some people called “independently wealthy.” It had a nice ring to it, and Renny indulged in fantasies of future expenditures.

H. L. was not a generous parent; he paid for Renny's education but never provided the extras he could have easily afforded. After landing the job at Jackson, Robinson, and Temples, Renny sold his old car for three thousand dollars and bought a new charcoal gray Porsche Boxster convertible. The payment and insurance on the new car devoured almost half of Renny's monthly paycheck, but the sporty vehicle was a sign to himself and, subconsciously, to his father, that he had started up the ladder of success. Now he would be able to pay off the car, buy a house, perhaps even quit work and duplicate his father's exploits in the commercial real estate market. His stay at the bottom of the law firm letterhead might be very short indeed.

At 2:55 the next afternoon Renny was standing on the hot, humid Charleston sidewalk in front of the semicircular double stairway beckoning him with open arms to the law firm of McClintock and Carney, Esquires.
Some antebellum grande dame must be spinning in her grave,
he thought.
Her house, her home, the common thread of the domestic and social fabric of her life, taken over by legal scriveners and secretaries with word processors and fax machines.
It was not an uncommon fate for a growing number of the homes and mansions lining Fourth Street. An antique dealer rented Renny's ancestral home, near the Battery.

At least Jefferson McClintock had Charleston roots. He wasn't a New York lawyer who came south for the Spoleto festival, unpacked his carpetbag, and hung out a legal shingle. In fact, few current Charlestonians went further back to the city's origins. McClintock's great-great-grandfather, a Scottish blacksmith's servant, could have been the farrier who made sure the grande dame's horses had proper footwear. Now the servant's descendant had his desk in the parlor and law books in the living room.

When McClintock and his law partner, John Carney, purchased the house, they spent the money necessary to maintain the historic and architectural integrity of the 150-year-old structure. They had cleaned the white marble double stairway leading up from the street to the main entrance and made sure the hand railings were kept in good condition by a yearly staining to erase the corrosive effect of Charleston's proximity to the ocean. The exterior stucco had been painted a fresh light peach—only in Charleston could pastel houses reflect good taste. From a low-flying plane, the old residential district looked like a summer fruit compote.

Opening the large front door, he stepped into the law firm's waiting area. As with many large nineteenth-century homes, the foyer was as wide and spacious as the dining room in a modern house plan. McClintock and Carney had turned the greeting area into a gracious reception room, furnishing it with antiques and quality reproductions.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jacobson,” a cheerful receptionist spoke before Renny could give his name. “Mr. McClintock will be with you in a minute.”

Noticing a graduation photo of The Citadel's class of 1958 on the opposite wall, Renny walked over for a better look at the black-and-white picture.

“That's our class, a good one,” McClintock remarked as he walked out of his office and shook Renny's hand. “There's your father, third from the left in the back, and me, second from the right in the first row.”

It was easy to see why McClintock was in the first row. At five feet six, he was barely tall enough to gain admittance to a military academy. But to his credit, McClintock didn't weigh ten pounds more now than he had almost fifty years before. He still sported a Citadel haircut and held himself erect, ready to snap to full attention. Renny knew his father's classmate ran five miles every morning and jumped into the Atlantic Ocean every New Year's Day in a Southern version of the famous Polar Bear Club's annual dip in Lake Michigan.

Renny leaned closer to see his father. Henry Lawrence Jacobson, H. L. to everyone who knew him, was tall and slim. The influence of early military discipline kept his back straight and shoulders square to the end of his days. Even in the grainy picture, H. L. exuded a sense of confidence and control. Not particularly handsome, but without any distracting negative features, it was not his physical appearance but an intangible presence that set him apart from his peers. Whether on the schoolyard or in the boardroom, it did not take long for the elder Jacobson's internally generated power to pervade the atmosphere around him. If austere Southern aristocracy existed in the twentieth century, H. L. Jacobson qualified as Exhibit A. From the graduation photo, H. L.'s dark eyes seemed to probe the depths of Renny's soul just as they did when he interrogated Renny after he was caught wandering away from school during recess in the second grade.

Renny, with his dark hair, brown eyes, and wry, almost shy, smile, looked more like his soft-spoken mother than his father. Short and solid, Renny had played outside linebacker for three years at Hammond Academy, a private high school in Charleston. In his senior season, he received the Best Hit of the Year award for a play in which he tackled the opposing team's punter. It was fourth down late in a game and the other team was behind ten points. Renny suspected a fake punt was in the works and ran as hard as he could toward the punter. Slipping between two players who were supposed to block him, he hit the punter so hard the punter was knocked several feet through the air. It looked great on the highlight film of the game, and Renny won the award. Neither of his parents attended the game. His mother was in the early stages of the Lou Gehrig's disease that killed her three years later, and his father was out of town at a business meeting.

McClintock ushered Renny into his office. “Come into the parlor. Some of the antiques here, including my desk, were purchased from the Stillwell Gallery,” he said, referring to the antique dealer located in the former Jacobson family home.

McClintock sat down behind an eighteenth-century partners desk, a beautiful mahogany piece designed for two clerks to work opposite each other. Of course, McClintock had the desk to himself.

The older lawyer picked up a heavy folder, set it down, and tapped a fountain pen against his desk blotter. “Well, let's get down to business.” He hesitated, opening the folder on his desk then closing it again without taking anything out. “I'm not sure where to begin.”

“I've reviewed my copy of the will,” Renny said. “Everything appears straightforward. Could we look over the documents you intend to file with the probate court?”

“The documents I've prepared for the court?” McClintock said.

“Sure, you said they would be ready.”

“Oh, they are. I have them in here.” The lawyer patted the still-closed folder.

Renny reached out his hand. “Yes. I'm sure everything is fine. I'd just like to skim through them.”

The older lawyer didn't budge. “Renny, did you study holographic wills in law school?” he asked, staring past Renny at a spot on the wall behind him.

Renny stopped. “Of course. It's a will in the testator's own handwriting, usually without all the legal boilerplate language and the formality of witnesses.”

“That's correct.” McClintock paused. “I don't know how to say this except to ask you point-blank. Did your father ever tell you he had prepared a holographic will?”

A cold chill ran down Renny's spine. “No. He gave me a copy of the will you prepared for him a few months after my mother died.”

“I see,” McClintock said. “He never gave you an updated will prepared by another lawyer?”

“No. You were the only lawyer he used. Tell me, Mr. McClintock, what's going on.”

McClintock sighed. “After your father's death I had my secretary pull his file to prepare the documents for the probate court.” He opened the folder on his desk. “Inside was this.” He held up a plain white envelope. “As you know, in the will I prepared you were the residual beneficiary of almost all your father's estate. Apparently, a month later he brought this envelope by the office and asked my secretary to put it in his file. I don't know what he told her—she doesn't remember and probably thought it was a list of assets or the location of important records.” He handed the envelope to Renny. “Read it.”