Wildcat Wine (22 page)

Shuddering internally at the thought of handling all the endless and precise tasks in settling Kenneth's estate if I became the PR, I asked, “Cristal found this?”

“Yeah, you didn't hear me say that? How'd you think all of us missed that in his office?”

Good question. I tried to read something from Jackson's face, but he stroked his beard and studied me back as if waiting for me to crack.

I didn't have time for a staring contest with Jackson, who always won anyway, so I just asked him, “What do you think this means?”

“Beats hell out of me, doll. But you be sure to let me know when you figure it out.”

Ever the Zen master of delegation, Jackson then left my office with no words of farewell.

Okay, let's give it a whirl, I thought, but first I checked to make sure the will had the standard provision for fees and expenses for the PR. Then I pulled out my time sheet, entered “Estate of Kenneth Mallory” as the client, and jotted down “conference with Jackson, ten minutes.” Then I picked up the will.

Oh, and what a read it was.

Ping, ping, ping. The sound of things falling into place, yet not falling into place.

Kenneth had left his Hummer, his wardrobe, his coin collection and his Rolex to his brother, Joseph of the last-known address a lavender farm in Washington state. But the great bulk of his worldly belongings Kenneth left to his only other blood relative—to her he left his Oak Ford home, the damn teak sailboat, a heretofore wholly unknown to me small plantation in Costa Rica, a stock portfolio, and other assets including proceeds from some contract with a French company. This list of personal assets included, I noted with just a tiny pang of guilt, an antique silver set and some rings that had once belonged to the grandmother they had shared. I guessed I would have to return the silver and rings I had taken from Kenneth's house, maybe just ease them back into a general inventory at some future date.

But the will said not a word about his butterfly garden.

Beyond the mystery of what was to become of his butterfly garden, it was that other surviving relative who captured my attention.

A first cousin.

Catherine Susan Mallory Stallings.

This was definitely something both Tired and Philip should know. But before I called them with the glee of knowing something they didn't know, I wanted to find out more about Mr. Mallory's estate, with which, on a temporary basis, I was more or less entrusted.

A few phone calls later—one to Edith, our office manager, regarding the state of Kenneth's profit sharing, 401(k), and other firm goodies, and one to Kenneth's strangely chatty CPA, whose name and number Edith gave me—and I knew Kenneth wasn't as rich as he pretended to be, but he still had a few buckets of money.

After a cursory exchange of professional niceties with his accountant, I told the CPA I was the personal representative on Kenneth's estate, assuming, as had Jackson, that switching Ashton to me would be a perfunctory act by the probate judge. After running through the basics first, I had eventually asked the CPA, “What's with this French contract?”

“Not sure. I just got a copy of it myself. Kenneth had some tax questions, you know, with a foreign corporation and all. There's a lump sum and then yearly percentages.”

“Send me a copy of that, will you?”

“Soon as I get the court papers on you being the PR.”

Okay, he wasn't that casual after all. “So what's with the Costa Rica property?”

“You didn't know him well, did you?” the CPA asked.

“No.” I had tried not to.

“Kenneth had this master plan. He was going to retire at fifty, with a minimum of five million, to his plantation in Costa Rica. Got the Costa Rica real estate at a good price, with some slight-of-hand nonsense I can't really tell you about, CPA-client privilege and all. But you ever want some Costa Rica property, you give me a call.”

“Costa Rica,” I said, thinking of green volcanoes and big birds. Where Kenneth could have been the king of the butterflies.

“Good plan,” the CPA said. “There, he'd be a rich man still in his prime, in a country with universal health care and excellent coffee. He was even studying Spanish and the culture.”

Wow, I thought. Not a bad dream. A tropical version of my own aspiration to retire early to my north Georgia apple orchard.

“So, how was he doing on the five mil?” I asked, lulling myself between visions of butterflies and a few million in blue chips.

“Well, you know. He was going great guns until 2000. Took a bad tumble.”

“Lot of tech stocks?”

“You got it. Lost about sixty-five percent of his portfolio. Then he did these panic buys—against my advice, I might add—with junk bonds, which made things worse. I mean, he was a long way from poor, but with his current income flow and his market losses, he was going to need another decade to meet his financial goals for retirement. He wasn't happy when I charted that out for him.”

Okay, retirement at sixty to a Costa Rica plantation didn't have quite the same ring for him. That probably explained Kenneth's desperately grabbing at clients and billable hours and trying to force Jackson and the firm into giving him a huge midyear bonus. I took a deep breath. There might be some similarities I didn't like between Kenneth and me—a certain tenacity of focus, the plans for an early retirement, the quest for a bucolic place in which to live out peacefully the last few decades. But I didn't cheat my clients. And I didn't buy Hummers.

Kenneth could have learned something from me about conservative investments and frugal lifestyles. Too late for that. But I'd learned something from him. The modern replay of the old question: “What profits a man to gain the world and lose his soul?”

I felt unbelievably sad at the waste that Kenneth had made of his life.

“Listen,” the chatty CPA said, breaking my contemplation. “Nice talking to you, but I need to run. Time's money and all. You need a CPA for yourself, give me a call.”

'Bye and 'bye and there I was.

Cat Sue shimmered in as a mirage of a suspect. I sure liked her better for it than Bonita or Benny. She killed her cousin for his money. And to reclaim that nice set of silver.

But that left the mystery of her own husband, Earl, dead beneath his own farm equipment while Cat Sue was three hours away in Orlando and its neighboring cities marketing organic wine.

With so many chunks of the puzzle in front of me, I needed a sounding board, someone to verbally fit the pieces into at least part of a picture. I called Philip, who did not answer his private line. “Call me,” I said to his answering machine. Then I called his secretary, who told me he was in a hearing. “Have him call me soon as he gets in,” I said, and then I dialed every one of Tired's four numbers and left a trail of messages even Kenneth Mallory could have followed from the great beyond.

I peered out to Bonita's cubbyhole, but she was among the missing. Biting back my irritation, I buzzed the front reception desk from Bonita's phone. Cristal answered.

“What are you doing at the front desk?” I asked, more snippily than Cristal deserved. It wasn't her fault Bonita had disappeared.

“Edith has me working here part-time now. Because cleaning up after Kenneth isn't a full day's work, Edith says. I mean, come on, I'm a certified paralegal. Did you know that? You need any work done, just let me know. I'd
really
like helping you and Bonita.
Really
.”

Edith the office manager from the jackal school of efficiency had a highly qualified legal secretary and certified paralegal spending her mornings answering a phone? I wondered if I could convince Jackson to hire Cristal as our new office manager.

“Thanks, Cristal. I'll keep that in mind. Right now, I need you to page Bonita. Tell her to get back to her desk.”

“Oh, she left the building a few minutes ago. Didn't say where to. Anything I can help with?”

“No. But thanks.”

We said our good-byes, and I continued to stare for a moment at the space where Bonita was not. While standing there as if I could make her reappear by simply willing it so, I picked up the photo on her desk—the happy family, Bonita and Felipe, the last year of his life, and their five children. Carmen little more than a babe, Felipe Junior holding his daddy's hand, and Benny stretching out his neck, trying to look taller and older. And Javy and Armando, the unmatched twins, looking like they wanted to punch each other. I put the photo down, sat in Bonita's chair, and riffled through her personal filing drawer until I pulled out paperwork from her lawsuit with the bottling company. Flipping madly through paper and more paper, I finally found the company's in-house counsel's name and number and began the odyssey of calling a lawyer.

Five intervening and snippy women later, after I had given the full name and the file number of Bonita's case at least ten times, along with my own name and law firm, the company's in-house attorney finally came on the phone. I identified myself as Kenneth Mallory's law partner and got blank air for a response. “You know, the lawyer from Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley that your company hired to reopen—”

“Right. My assistant pulled up our file summary on my computer when you identified it to her.”

Well, that would explain some of the wait, if not the rudeness.

“We don't have any record of a Kenneth Mallory. The Bonita Hernández de Vasquez case is a closed file. What do you want?”

“You weren't looking to reopen it?”

“No. Why?”

“I guess I made a mistake.” Or had he? “You would know, wouldn't you? I mean, would someone else—”

“If we had retained outside counsel for anything, anything at all, on any case, I would know. All that goes directly through me. We had no contact with anyone from Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, and we had no contact with a Kenneth Mallory. Do you need anything else?”

Not from you, bud. “Thank you. Good day.”

So, what, Kenneth was making it all up? That was the only conclusion I could come to. Exactly why Kenneth threatened to file a lawsuit for a client who disavowed any knowledge of Kenneth or the suit remained a huge mystery.

Bewildered, I grabbed up Kenneth's will from my desk and wandered out into the hallway of my own law firm, desperate for a soul mate to help me think. I think best when I'm talking. And I talk best when there is at least one other person in the room, although in a pinch Bearess will do.

With Bonita still among the missing, tired, inarticulate, frumpy Angela won the honors to act as my personal sounding board. Having tracked her to her own office, and freed from the etiquette of polite chatter because she was long used to me, I explained the various connections.

While I was mostly hoping for that miracle of insight that often happens when I talk out something, I was also open to any ideas from Angela. She was a smart young woman, after all.

With the burden of all that random information floating in the room, Angela rubbed her belly and stared at the air in front of her nose. Then Angela pointed at the will I had brought with me and said her first word of our meeting: “Patent.”

What Earl's patent had to do with Kenneth's will didn't immediately connect in my mind, but then I didn't have all those pregnancy hormones floating through my body. When Angela declined to explain further, I didn't know if she had a specific notion in mind, or a general guess was at play. Either way, I decided we should see if we could learn if Earl had a patent.

Angela, being the on-line research queen of Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, soon had the official government website for patents—www.uspto.gov—up and humming.

“Try Earl Stallings,” I said when I saw that the options included searching the patent database by name, date, topic, or number.

Angela harrumped, indicating, I guessed, her viewpoint that she probably could have thought of that herself.

Type, type, type.

Nothing under Earl Stallings.

And about four thousand things under Stallings alone as a surname.

“Try wine.”

Another four thousand hits.

“Try sulfite-free wine.”

A few dozen hits, but none that had any of the four thousand Stallings names attached to it.

“Try every other spelling of Stallings you can think of,” I said, hovering and badgering poor Angela at the computer. But I mean, how many ways can you spell Stallings?

At the sound of soft steps, we both turned around. Bonita stood in the doorway. “I thought I might find you here,” she said to me.

Angela struggled out of her chair and she and Bonita hugged each other.

Stifling the urge to feel left out, I asked, “Where've you been?”

“Seeking the mail-room clerk to request that he hand-deliver your change-of-hearing-date notices.”

“Where was he?”

“I do not know. To save time, I walked a couple of them over to the lawyers' offices myself.”