by Rod Helmers
“Yes! I’ve always wanted to see that place. My daughter lives in California. Can I bring my friend Helen?”
“Absolutely. And, well…” Brent leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’m not supposed to reveal any private information, but I don’t think she would mind. Mrs. Brody will be moving there next month.”
After Brent left, Dora shuffled a little more quickly than she had in weeks as she made her way to the telephone attached to the wall in the kitchen. She couldn’t wait to call Helen. This product or whatever Brent called it might just solve all of her problems. The whole thing seemed too good to be true.
CHAPTER 3
James Marcus “Marc” Mason, IV, did the “alpha dog” walk across the lobby of American Senior Security, Incorporated. This was now his company; he was President and Chief Executive Officer. He’d patterned his stride after another top dog - the big dog in the Oval Office. He’d even briefly considered calling himself “M”. Only thirty-five years old, single, and in his prime. At the top of his game. He winked at the nineteen-year-old receptionist speaking into her headset, and turned down the hall leading to his huge corner office.
Marc Mason had adopted what he considered a carefree yet suave style of appearance. Miami Vice updated for the new millennium. His hair was cut short but with just enough length to look disheveled. He usually allowed himself one or two days of beard growth. Italian made loafers, a snakeskin belt, and a silky pullover knit shirt completed the look. If he’d inherited his father’s tall and lean physique, it might have worked.
His success had surprised nearly everyone. He had created a vibrant new company out of a dinosaur that peddled over-priced term life insurance door-to-door to the underprivileged and the illiterate. The fat was cut. Employees that didn’t fit the new mold were fired. New employees were hired. The most cutting-edge technology was purchased. And it was all organized into four separate divisions.
The Data Mining Division was a high tech marvel of efficiency and high speed computing. It blazed through thousands of pages of public records and newspaper obituaries and collated the relevant information to identify the most motivated prospects. That information instantly appeared on the monitors of the Marketing and Sales Division. The Operations Division handled the routine day-to-day details of reverse mortgage payments, real estate transactions and sales, and contractual arrangements with assisted living facilities. All of it was highly automated to eliminate expensive personnel. The Finance and Investments Division put the hugely positive cash flow to work.
The Finance and Investments Division was essentially a highly leveraged hedge fund investing in risky but potentially very lucrative sectors. Assets with market momentum. Commodities including oil and gas, minerals and metals, and others. Real estate in hot markets. Equities in China, India and other developing countries.
American Senior Security was a closely held private corporation. Its shares were not publicly traded or listed on any exchange. Therefore, no pesky filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission were required. The shares were not owned by a private individual, however, but by another privately owned company. A holding company registered in the Cayman Islands.
Certain state statutes and regulations did apply even to privately held insurance companies like American Senior Security, however. Insurance companies were, for the most part, limited to stodgy and conservative investments. After all, the bulk of their funds were essentially being held in trust for the benefit of the policyholders. The purpose of these one hundred year old laws was simply to insure that the money would be there to pay the eventual claims.
But American Senior Security was a new breed. A hybrid - an insurance company mated with a financial services company. Neither fish nor fowl. The ambiguity allowed the legal department to take the position that it was exempt from these limitations. It didn’t matter that it was almost certainly incorrect - with appeals the issue would take years to be resolved. In the meantime, there was a fortune to be made.
Marc entered his office and strode over to the floor to ceiling windows. Tampa Bay was a brilliant blue and cars scurried across the distant causeway. He enjoyed looking down on the rest of the world. All it took was money. And money brought power. Money and power. It’s what he always wanted. It’s all that mattered. Everything else was its byproduct.
He wondered what his mother thought of him now. She had always wanted money and power, but not for its own sake. She wanted it for the envy it induced in others. Screw everyone else. Marc Mason thought his mother was pitiful, and his sisters as well. They had both married morons and were busy spitting out whining, sniveling brats in a vain attempt to fill the empty holes in their pitiful lives. And then there was his father. When it came to pitiful, James Marcus Mason, III, took the cake.
Marc Mason knew his father didn’t want money and power. He wanted respect. Respect of his wisdom. Respect of his integrity. Respect of his character. He was pitiful and an idiot. Now his father’s friends and associates wanted to invest. They wanted to get on the “M” train. And yes, he would take their money.
CHAPTER 4
A crescent of orange finally appeared above the Atlantic swells, though thousands were still asleep in the towers behind him. The wet sand was firm under yet another pair of New Balance running shoes. Marc Mason’s father had just completed his daily three-mile run. The sunrise was beautiful, but not the object of his admiration. This morning the unimaginable beauty of nature had been overshadowed by a 48 foot Bimini Cruiser that sat gleaming in the new morning light less than one hundred yards off the beach.
James Marcus Mason, III, took one last longing glance at the yacht before angling off to the condo apartment he had rented a few weeks before. These early morning runs had given him a chance to think through all of the changes that were happening. He also preferred the solitude for another reason. He wasn’t in the mood to talk, much less explain. And he was distinctive - his tall stature and the full head and chest of pure white hair that sprang from his perpetually tanned body made him instantly recognizable. He knew he was often compared to that actor whose name he could never remember. During a round of bed banter, Elizabeth told him the lawyers had nicknamed him “Toasty.”
As James entered the apartment he could hear the shower. He sat down on the edge of the bed and peeled off his shoes and low-top padded running socks. His hips ached and ankles hurt. After his last physical, the doctor told him to stay out of the sun and find a less punishing form of exercise. The shower was still running as he slowly stood up.
Transfixed by the rivulets of steaming water winding their way down her body, he stood statue-like admiring the twenty-something body. His wife Lorna had looked like that once, though her hair was a deep red. It may have been seconds or minutes, but finally Elizabeth Hayes pushed the water from her face and turned. She peered through the fog-covered and water-splattered glass door with vividly blue eyes and smiled.
“How was your run, baby?”
“Fantastic. Beautiful sunrise this morning.”
“Are we late?”
“Yeah. But the ship can’t sail until the captain’s on board.”
He climbed the steps more slowly than he had 28 years earlier when he was first sworn in as a magistrate of the United States Federal District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Although he was still graceful in his movements, the granite steps to the Miami courthouse seemed steeper after all the years. James Marcus Mason, III, was only 32 years old when he first climbed those stairs as a federal magistrate. The federal trial bar justifiably assumed that James Mason would receive a lifetime appointment as a federal district court judge before he turned 40. It never happened.
Magistrate Judge Mason, or Judge Mason as he preferred to be called, was tired. In the federal court system, the magistrate judges conducted the routine hearings and waded through the vast filings of paperwork that flooded in. Quite often, the decisions of a magistrate were critical to the resolution of a case. This was especiall
y true of a magistrate who had been on the bench longer than all of the federal judges for whom he labored. The most clever and successful trial attorneys appearing before the federal bench understood this, and had carefully cultivated the friendship and loyalty of Judge Mason. The rest and vast majority of the Bar considered his position to vaguely lie somewhere between a clerk and a “real” judge.
For years Judge Mason had worked tirelessly on behalf of several charities and, particularly, as an advocate for the elderly. This effort sprang from both real concern and a desire to reveal the qualities that would help him ascend to the position he so desperately coveted. But James Mason was politically tone deaf, and receiving a Presidential appointment to the federal bench was all about politics. The winds of change were always blowing. Despite switching parties, at the critical moments Magistrate Judge Mason always found himself on the wrong side of the political fence.
Several neatly stacked piles of paper covered the huge oak desk that his father had sat behind for decades. The Masons were one of a few “almost” founding families that had arrived in Miami relatively early in its history. James Mason, II, had been a state court judge for 41 years and had ruled with an iron fist. The Judge, as he was known to nearly everyone, had bequeathed his only son a desk and a heritage, but little else.
James Mason ran his fingers through his full mane of white hair and sighed. His clerk Elizabeth laid his telephone messages on a pile of paperwork and brushed the top of his hand with her fingertips as she breezed out of the room. The top message was from Stanley Rosen, his divorce attorney.
James Mason and his wife, Lorna, had been happily married for two years; the other thirty-four varied between quiet desperation and pure misery. Lorna had always wanted more. More money and more prestige. Her focus in life had generally been three-fold: the Junior League, the Floridian Garden Club, and The Miami Lakes Country Club. Against all odds, their two daughters had turned out well, and lived out of state. Their only son, James Marcus Mason, IV, known throughout his childhood as “Jimmy”, was a different story.
As he looked down at the telephone message, James ruefully recalled an episode that had taken place more than two decades earlier. Lorna had taken Jimmy to the country club for swimming lessons. Unfortunately, Jimmy ignored his mother’s admonition that children should be seen and not heard. One of the other ladies had asked Lorna how “the Judge” was doing. Everyone knew Lorna took a great deal of pride in being married to a judge. Unfortunately, little Jimmy felt it necessary to correct the apparent misconception.
“My dad’s not a real judge. He’s just a magistrate. He does all the shit work.”
Lorna was horrified. She marched her son out to the car and called him a little ass. She told him that she wanted nothing to do with him; he was his father’s responsibility now. Jimmy cried himself to sleep that night. James tried to console him, but Jimmy locked his door and refused to talk. Lorna didn’t return to the club for weeks. Somehow the whole thing ended up being James’ fault. She had refused to enter the doors of Miami Lakes Country Club with Jimmy again. Jimmy learned to swim at the YMCA.
As sole male heir to the Mason family legacy of achievement, Jimmy went on to commit an unpardonable sin - the sin of mediocrity. God and genetics had given Jimmy neither the physical athleticism of his father nor the mental horsepower to meet his expectations. Throughout his childhood, little Jimmy strived to be like his father. The inevitable failures eventually caused him to resent the man he admired most and had repeatedly tried to imitate.
College was a struggle, with Jimmy essentially majoring in his fraternity at a small but exclusive private institution. James spoke at the graduation ceremony; Jimmy was drunk. He did eventually graduate from an unaccredited law school in South Carolina, but failed the Florida Bar Exam on his first three attempts. Lorna swore everyone to secrecy, but Jimmy didn’t take his oath seriously and the word got out. As usual, Lorna was horrified.
Jimmy passed the exam on his fourth attempt, and was hired and let go by several small and medium sized Miami firms with a federal trial practice. All were trying to curry favor with his father, and all decided the potential damage to their reputation outweighed any possible benefit. Then he became assistant general counsel to a small insurance company writing term life policies.
The company was headquartered in Tampa, but primarily serviced the rural areas of the Southeast. Jimmy seemed to come into his own and began calling himself “Marc”. He eventually became general counsel, and had recently been named President and Chief Executive Officer. He immediately took the enterprise in an entirely new direction, and renamed the company American Senior Security.
James broke off his mental stroll down memory lane, and decided to get the most distasteful task of the day out of the way. He had Elizabeth place the call.
“Hello Stanley. I only have a few minutes. What do you have for me?”
“I received the settlement proposal from Jason Sloan. The guy is a shark. Order the clowns, because this mediation is going to be circus. I think…”
“What does she want, Stanley?”
“The house. The condo in the Keys. Half your federal pension. More than half. Half of the stocks, bonds, and money in the bank. Oh, and the best part. Five thousand a month in alimony until you reach age 70. You get to keep the boat and your Caddy.”
“I’m retiring in less than two years, Stanley. I’m retiring come hell or high water. There can’t be any alimony. Nothing else matters, but there can’t be any alimony.”
Several seconds of silence passed. Stanley Rosen didn’t have a reply. Magistrate Mason wouldn’t be making the decisions in this case.
“Set the case for mediation, Stanley.”
“Whatever you say, Your Honor.”
“Oh, and Stanley.”
“Yeah, Judge.”
“Do you still have a couple of discreet friends in the press?”
“Of course.”
“Have them give Lorna a call and ask for a comment about the settlement proposal.”
Stanley snickered. “You want this thing in the papers?”
“No. And neither does Lorna.”
Elizabeth saw the red light blink off on James’ private line, and slipped back into his office and closed the door.
When Elizabeth Hayes came to work for him two years earlier, James never imagined how things would develop. He was a star athlete in his college days, and with regular exercise had remained fit and trim. But Elizabeth was younger than his oldest daughter, and their trysts felt incestuous at first.
When James learned that her father had committed suicide when she was still a teenager, he’d become more than a little concerned about the psychological implications of their spring/winter relationship. It didn’t take Dr. Freud to put that one together, and James had an undergraduate degree in psychology, so he understood the potential pitfalls in their relationship better than most. Yet time had proven Elizabeth to be strong, and he’d come to rely upon her.
“Is everything okay, baby?”
“Oh, it’s just Lorna. She wants to chain me to this desk until I’m dead. She wants everyone to be as miserable as she is.”
“Do you think she knows?”
“No. No. She doesn’t have a clue. Believe me, we’d know it if she did. She can have it all as long as we walk away from this place with no strings attached.”
“Don’t let her screw you over, James. Everything will be all right. We just have to tough this thing out.”
James leaned his head back and ran the fingers of both hands through his thick, white hair. “I know. I know.” He paused. “I should probably have you check on Jimmy. I mean Marc.”
“I did, James. Everything is fine.”
“You sure.”
“Everything sounds like it’s on track. The investment by your friends apparently got Marc past the cash flow crunch, and now the real estate sales are taking off. Everything sounds good.”
“I was happy to make the calls,
but he can’t know I was involved, Elizabeth. Its okay if he thinks those guys were trying to curry favor with me by investing, but he can’t know I was involved. He won’t accept any help from me.”
“I know, James. We’ve talked about this. You need to relax.”
“It’s my good name on the line, Elizabeth. I need to know what’s going on. I need to know what’s happening.”
“I know, James. I know.”
CHAPTER 5
Sam awoke curled in the fetal position, trying to conserve warmth. October was cold in the early morning at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. He slowly moved his toes across the bed seeking out a warm leg, but there was no warm body to be found. Sunlight slashed through the glass double doors on the other side of the loft bedroom. He opened his eyes tentatively and found the heavy robe he had thrown across the end of the bed. As he stood his thighs protested. He soon became aware of several other aches and pains from the long mountain hike of the previous afternoon.
As he peered out the double doors, Sam noticed a figure in the distance. He found the binoculars he kept on top of the dresser and stepped onto a small wooden balcony. The figure was now moving across the small mountain stream that ran next to the cabin and then wound its way to the San Luis River below. The binoculars revealed Ellen effortlessly making her way from one rounded grey stone to another, seemingly oblivious to the bone-chilling water gurgling all around her. Her breath was steaming - the result of a strenuous run and the chilly morning air. Sam focused on her skimpy running shorts and shook his head. As he turned, there was only one thing on his mind. Coffee.
The aroma alone was worth living for. Freshly ground beans and plenty of them. Sam took his first sip from the steaming hot mug. Jeans and a heavy sweatshirt replaced the robe, but fluffy slippers remained. He shuffled over to the wood stove in the middle of the big open room that served as both an eating area and living room, and began to build a fire. Crumpled newspaper, pine kindling, and two chunks of split oak. The pine was beginning to take when Sam heard gravel crunching and then footsteps on the back porch.
