Death Benefits

by Michael A. Kahn

  He was nodding. “I remember,” he said softly as he reached across the table and placed his hand over mine. It was a strong hand, and it completely covered mine. I stared at the veins bulging under the brown skin, at the small scab across one knuckle, at the callous on his thumb. So different from the soft, pink hands of most lawyers.

  We sat there in silence. Finally, I lifted my espresso cup with the other hand and took a sip.

  “And what about you?” I asked. “Is there an artist in there?”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Not much of a spectator, either.”

  “What are you when you’re not a lawyer?”

  “A redneck bachelor.”

  “With a pick-up truck?” I asked with a smile.

  He nodded. “And a gun rack.”

  My smile faded. “Really?”

  “It gets even worse. I play poker. I fish. I fly planes. And I hunt.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sometimes all four together.”

  I said nothing.

  He calmly studied me. “I don’t kill Bambi. I don’t kill Thumper. For the most part, I eat what I kill. When I was at Sullivan and Cromwell, I lived on the Upper West Side. My liberal friends told me they were disgusted by my hunting.” He shook his head in wonder. “I would sit at the dinner table and watch them ooh and ah over their veal or venison. All a matter of perspective, I suppose. They had someone offstage—some anonymous blue-collar worker in an Iowa slaughterhouse—do their killing for them. Somehow that made it okay for them.”

  “I’ve never been hunting,” I finally said.

  “Not counting the meat section of the grocery store, of course.” He gave me a good-natured wink.

  “I suppose you’re right. I’ve just never understood the sport of it.”

  “Words can’t make you understand it. At least my words. You should try it once. You’d be a good hunter.”

  “I couldn’t pull the trigger.”

  “You might surprise yourself, Rachel.”

  “I wouldn’t want that kind of surprise. I got all the hunting I needed back in high school from Ernest Hemingway.”

  “But you can’t be just a spectator in life.”

  “But I’m not. I’m a lawyer, too. And a friend, and an aunt, and a sister, and a daughter.”

  “Have you been a wife?”

  “No,” I said as I looked down at my hands. “And never a mother, either. At least not yet. Although”—I smiled—“I already have most of the books. I’m a sucker for children’s books. It seems like every time I go into a bookstore to buy a book for my niece or nephew, I end up with one or two for me. Well, not for me, but for my kids. Oh, listen to me.” I blushed, my ears burning. “For my kids?” I repeated, embarrassed, still looking down.

  “I remember one book from my childhood.”

  I looked up, still red.

  He smiled. “It was already old and dog-eared when we got it. My mother used to read it to me when I was in elementary school. My father was dead by then. It was just her and me. She read it to me every night until it finally fell apart.”

  “What was it called?”

  “Horton Hatches an Egg.”

  “Oh, yes,” I murmured, flashing back to my own mother, seated on the edge of my bed, as she read bedtime stories to Ann and me. “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant…”

  He finished it: “An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.”

  We smiled at the shared memory.

  And so it went. It was such a wonderful evening. I almost never talk to anyone about myself. But that night I seemed to talk about little else. Rafe Salazar was so different from the men I usually meet—the ones whose idea of conversation is a recitation of their “accomplishments” or a soliloquy on life’s broken promises or a session of brandname-dropping (as in, how many ways can you work the phrases “my Saab” and “my Aspen condo” into the conversation). Rafe, by contrast, seemed to radiate calm strength and inner contentment. And not to be ignored—impossible to be ignored—he was absolutely gorgeous, at least if you like your men tall and dark and handsome. And he could quote Ralph Waldo Emerson from memory. Tall and dark and handsome and able to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson. I would have pinched myself but for the fear that I might have woken up.

  We took a stroll through the quiet surrounding neighborhood after dinner. It was a cloudless night and the moon was full. We had been talking and talking and talking, but now we were quiet, walking side by side.

  And then I remembered Benny Goldberg. I checked my watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Benny was probably at my sister’s house already.

  “I have to go,” I said reluctantly.

  He stopped and gazed down at me. “So soon?”

  “I’m sorry, Rafe. This has really been some night. First, I show up for dinner with Melvin Needlebaum. And now I just realized I have to meet this guy from Chicago who’s coming down to St. Louis tonight. He’s been worried about the stuff I’m doing, which I told him is really silly, but when he heard about Stoddard Anderson’s widow getting attacked, he insisted on coming down. He’s a friend. Well, he’s really my best friend.” Arghh. Come on, Rachel. “Not, you know, my boyfriend or anything like that.” Cut to commercial. Go to the video. “It’s just that I’m the reason he’s coming down—”

  Rafe mercifully interrupted. “I understand. You don’t need to explain yourself to me. Let me walk you to your car.”

  By the time we reached my car, I was feeling awkward again. Like a first date back in high school.

  “Maybe we could have dinner again,” I said.

  “I would like that, Rachel.”

  “Let’s see. Tomorrow night I’m taking my niece and nephew to the Cardinals game. I bought baseball tickets for them and for Benny Goldberg—that’s his name, the guy coming down—he had me get him a ticket too.”

  “Sunday would be fine, Rachel. And feel free to ask Benny, too.”

  “Benny’s kind of unusual,” I said, wondering why I was apologizing for him in advance. “Benny and I, we’re like brother and sister,” I stammered, looking up. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

  Rafe leaned over and kissed me softly on the lips. “He must be very special,” he said, slipping his right arm gently around my lower back for support.

  “Yes,” I sighed, kissing him back. “He…is.”

  Rafe pulled me against him as the kiss shifted from tender to urgent.

  When we separated, my knees were actually wobbly. “Well,” I gasped, my eyes wide.

  With a hint of a smile on his lips, he watched me fumble for my car keys. I rolled down the window when I got in the car.

  He leaned down to the open window and brushed his lips gently across mine. “Call me,” he whispered.

  “Okay,” I whispered back, inhaling his musky scent.

  I was still in a daze when I pulled into my sister’s driveway. An unmarried urban professional woman in her thirties is like a barmaid in a Navy port of call—we’ve seen or heard it all. We’re hard to impress. But when Rafe kissed me, I had felt like Lois Lane in Superman’s arms. He could make the president of NOW swoon.

  My reverie ended when I reached the den. Benny Goldberg and my brother-in-law Richie were seated on the couch in front of the television, a huge bowl of popcorn between them and several empty cans of Budweiser on the coffee table. They were watching the baseball game on cable. Benny leaned forward to grab a handful of popcorn, and as he did his shirt back pulled up from the waist of his jeans, exposing the top half of his large, hairy butt.

  I arrived just in time to see one of the Cardinals picked off second base.

  “Hah!” Benny shouted. “What a schmuck!” He turned and saw me in the doorway. “Hey, Rachel, you sure you want to go see these dogs tomorrow night? This ain’t no major-league ballclub, kiddo. These are
nine assholes in search of a colon.”

  “And nice to see you, too,” I said to Benny.

  And welcome back to reality, I said to myself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “It’s just not enough money,” Benny said.

  “I know,” I said glumly. “It’s been bothering me all day.”

  We were still in the den. Richie had gone upstairs about thirty minutes ago, after Ann brought down fresh sheets and a pillow for the pull-out couch, which would be Benny’s bed for the weekend.

  “Was he having financial problems?” Benny asked.

  “He was.”

  “Bad?”

  “Bad enough,” I said. “He certainly could have used the money. Even so, a quarter of a million dollars doesn’t seem near enough for that kind of risk.”

  “What do you think that guy was making?”

  “Managing partner of Abbott and Windsor’s St. Louis office,” I mused.

  “A BSD?”

  I nodded. “Definitely.”

  “Half a mil?”

  “At least that much,” I said.

  “You’re probably right about him. I just can’t see a guy making that kind of bread agreeing to smuggle that golden schlong into the country for two-fifty. Two-point-five million—maybe. But two hundred and fifty—no way, Jose.”

  “He probably didn’t think he’d get caught.”

  Benny shook his head. “Still not enough. At some point he’d have to weigh the risks. Jesus, look at the risks. If he gets caught, he loses his license, he’s out of the firm, his career’s in flames, he might even get to spend some time in the cross-bar motel.”

  “Panzer could have agreed to pay him a lot more than two-fifty,” I said. “Anderson would have had a good sense of the true value of Montezuma’s Executor. Two-fifty would have seemed small in comparison to that. Anderson worked on big deals with investment bankers—he’s seen the way those vultures calculate their fee as a percent of the deal.”

  “Maybe,” Benny said, leaning back. “Maybe the guy’s willing to take the risk for that kind of money. But I don’t know, Rachel. Don’t forget, the guy was a fucking corporate lawyer. Talk about weenies.”

  “Maybe he just wanted to finally do something,” I said, “instead of just writing it up. Corporate lawyers never get to do the deals, they just write up the papers that describe the deals. Maybe he wanted to get in on the action.”

  “Look, Rachel, to the extent Anderson got his rocks off doing deals, he got plenty of that action as the managing partner. He got to ‘do’ the office lease, ‘do’ the firm’s line of credit with the bank, ‘do’ the office supplies deal. For a corporate lawyer, that’s like an all-you-can-eat weekend at the Mustang Ranch.”

  I paused and shook my head. “I just had a truly chilling realization.”

  “What?”

  “I think that I’ve lost the capacity to be shocked by you.”

  “Now that,” he said with a grin, “sounds like a direct challenge.”

  “God forbid. I surrender. Let’s get back to Anderson. So you don’t like my theory. Okay, if he didn’t want the thrill of finally doing a deal, why did he do it?”

  “Hey, who do I look like? The Incredible Karnak? I have no fucking idea what made that guy tick. Now what about this ParaLex thing? Where does that fit in?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if it even does.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It has a post office box. It has a bank account. And over the past three years it’s been paid more than a hundred thousand dollars by the St. Louis office of Abbott and Windsor and close to forty thousand dollars by trusts administered by A and W. All in payment of invoices, each for two hundred dollars or less. Hundreds of invoices, apparently issued on a quarterly basis. And all for ‘services rendered.’ ParaLex sent invoices to Stoddard Anderson’s clients. It sent invoices to Reed St. Germain’s clients. It sent invoices to dozens of other A and W attorneys’ clients.”

  “And this ParaLex outfit doesn’t even have a listed telephone number?”

  “Nope. And according to Nancy Winslow, the State of Missouri has no record of its existence. Same with Illinois.”

  Benny leaned back and crossed his arms. “That dog won’t hunt.”

  I nodded. “I know. And someone else discovered that, too.”

  “Anderson?”

  “Or St. Germain. They had a private dinner meeting ten days before Anderson disappeared.”

  “How do you know they talked about ParaLex?”

  “An educated guess,” I said. “I checked Anderson’s pocket calendar. He had penciled in the word ParaLex on the night he met with St. Germain at the St. Louis Club. One of them left some papers there that night. They were three quarterly statements of account for A and W trusts and estates clients. Someone had circled the ParaLex payment on each statement.”

  “What does St. Germain say about the meeting?”

  “He doesn’t recall anything specific. He said that he used to have dinner meetings with Anderson. They would talk about management committee matters.”

  “What’s he say about ParaLex?”

  “When I first saw the name, I thought maybe Anderson was having dinner that night with a client or maybe a prospective client named ParaLex. That was before I knew that Anderson had dinner that night with St. Germain. So when I asked St. Germain, all I asked was whether ParaLex was a new client.”

  “And?”

  “He said he didn’t think so.”

  “Have you gone back to him since?”

  “Not about ParaLex. I want to first pin down the facts. St. Germain’s a slippery guy. I want to have as clear a picture as possible before I go back to him.”

  Benny rubbed his chin. “Hundred and forty grand over three years. What’s that? Forty-seven grand a year?”

  “Roughly.”

  “That’s chickenshit. What do you think the annual revenues of the St. Louis office are?”

  “Fifty lawyers in the office,” I said. “At least fifteen million in revenues.”

  “Forty-seven grand.” Benny mulled it over. “So you think Anderson caught him?”

  “Maybe he caught Anderson,” I said.

  “Or maybe they were in it together.”

  “Or none of the above,” I said. “But I just don’t see the connection to Montezuma’s Executor.”

  Benny shook his head. “You figure it out. Me, I’m like Rick in Casablanca. I came here for the waters. Speaking of which, you want a beer?”

  “Maybe some apple juice. I had a lot of Mexican beer at dinner.”

  “Where do you have all those drafts of the suicide note?”

  “In my briefcase. I’ll get ’em and meet you in the kitchen.”

  ***

  “So how’s your brother-in-law like the view in silicon valley?”

  “What?” I asked, clinking a couple ice cubes into my glass of apple juice.

  We were in the kitchen. Benny was at the table studying photocopies of the suicide note and the drafts that Mouse Aloni’s people had found in the hotel room. I yawned as I closed the freezer door. It was close to midnight and I was feeling the lack of sleep. I’d been up for almost twenty hours.

  “Your sister’s new balcony.”

  “Oh. I haven’t asked. Knowing him, I’m sure he loves it.”

  “Did you talk to Ann about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why’d she do it?”

  “Benny, it’s none of your business.”

  He looked up, his nose scrunched. “Benny,” he mimed, “it’s none of your bees wax.” He took a gulp of beer. “How much you think those knockers cost her?”

  “I have no idea, Benny.”

  “I bet all her friends are getting theirs done, too.” He leaned back and
shook his head. “God, think of the money. I was a visionary, Rachel. A fucking prophet. Admit it. It was the best new franchise idea of the eighties. I could have put one in every city in America. By now I’d be on a first name basis with Robin Leach.”

  “Not with a franchise name like ‘Breasts ‘R Us.’”

  “That’s where you were always wrong, Rachel. It’s a user-friendly name. Look at the stats. Most of the women getting boob jobs are mothers in their late thirties, early forties. Baby boomers. Growing kids and shrinking tits. They’re looking in the mirror after the shower, maybe feeling a little depressed. Then they hear a radio commercial for ‘Breasts ‘R Us’—with a catchy little jingle. The name makes them smile. All those good memories come rushing back.”

  “Just think, Benny, you could have been the Ray Kroc of boobs.”

  “More like Burger King,” he said. “Home of the Whoppers.”

  “I still think you would have had trouble staffing up the franchises with that name.”

  “That was always the easy part, Rachel. Plastic surgeons? Shit, those guys have no more shame than those baboons at the Lincoln Park Zoo that jerk off in their cage while everyone watches. Plastic surgeons are made to order for franchising. You think a self-respecting physician is going to do a liposuction? I mean, can you picture Marcus Welby or Dr. Kildare standing there holding something that looks like one of those Hoover vacuum cleaner accessories—one of those crevice tools—standing there sucking globs of fat out of some old lady’s butt? Plastic surgeons? ‘Breasts ‘R Us’ would have been a step up for most of those jackals.”

  He leaned forward to study one of the drafts of the suicide note, instantly shifting gears. “The River Styx, eh?”

  “The actual suicide note said it was ‘safe underground.’ Maybe he buried the Executor.”

  “Now this is the strangest one,” Benny said, studying the version that had taken Mouse Aloni so long to puzzle back together:

  Equation for ME