Death Benefits

by Michael A. Kahn

  “We were high school sweethearts,” she said in answer to my question. “We were married after Stoddard graduated from college. I taught kindergarten at the Flynn Park School while Stoddard went to law school at St. Louis University. I haven’t worked since my son was born.” She looked down at her hands in her lap. “I’ve been an active volunteer, though. In fact, I have a Red Cross committee meeting tonight, and tomorrow is my day at the gift shop at Barnes Hospital. I do that every week.”

  She gave me a tour of the house. The upstairs seemed like a series of museum period rooms. The bedrooms of her dead son and institutionalized daughter looked the way they must have looked on the day each had departed.

  “This was Stoddard’s bedroom,” she said as she opened the door.

  My head involuntarily turned toward her bedroom, which was at the other end of the upstairs hallway. She caught the look, and I saw a brief glimmer of pain, or shame, in her face.

  “Would you mind if I looked around Mr. Anderson’s room?” I asked. “It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Take your time, dear. I’ll be downstairs in the kitchen.”

  I spent fifteen minutes searching his bedroom. If it contained a clue to his mental state, I missed it. The room was bereft of personality, and seemed more like a room in a residence hotel. The only reading materials were several Fortune and Forbes magazines on his nightstand and a pile of old Wall Street Journals on the corner of his desk. The only personal papers were neat stacks of old bills and magazine subscription notices in the center of his desk. The faded English hunting prints that were framed on the wall seemed as anonymous as the rest of the room.

  “What were his work habits the last week or so?” I asked Dottie. We were seated at the small table in the kitchen.

  “He worked late most of those nights. But that was hardly unusual.” She shook her head sadly. “Stoddard worked late most nights.”

  “Did he have any drinking or drug problems?”

  “No. He liked a glass of wine with his meal. And he often made himself a highball before dinner. When he came home before dinner, that is. I’m afraid that an attorney’s wife gets used to cooking for one. As for a drug problem, I would be shocked if he did. He wrote articles about the need for longer jail terms for drug offenders. He was chairman of the ‘Say No To Drugs’ campaign in St. Louis under President Reagan. I met Mrs. Reagan, you know. We had tea together at Old Warson Country Club.”

  “Did you see him the night before he disappeared?”

  “We had dinner here. I made my pot roast.” She tilted her head to the side, remembering. “He seemed moody. And distracted. I remember I was in the middle of telling him about something that happened at the hospital gift shop when he just…got up and…and just walked out of the room. He wasn’t angry, or any such thing as that. He just wasn’t even aware I was talking.”

  “Did you see him again?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “By the time I cleaned the dishes he was in his bedroom and the door was closed. He left for work the next morning while I was in my bath. I never saw him again.”

  “Did he contact you before he died?”

  She looked down. “No.”

  “Were you afraid he’d been kidnapped?”

  After a moment of silence, she looked up, her eyes moist. “I was frightened, but not that Stoddard had been kidnapped. I’m…I’m so ashamed of myself, Rachel. I was afraid that he…that he had left me for another woman. Every time that telephone rang after he disappeared, I was afraid it would be Stoddard, calling from one of those horrible places like Reno or Tijuana—calling to tell me he wanted a divorce.” Her lips quivered.

  I said nothing.

  “I’m so ashamed of myself for thinking those thoughts,” she continued, her hands tightening around the teacup. “There I was, worrying only about myself. All that time I had no idea he was in such pain.”

  I reached across the table and placed my hand over hers. We sat there quietly. The only sound was the humming of the air conditioner in the dining room.

  “What made you think he might want a divorce?” I asked gently.

  “Oh, nothing in particular.”

  “How about in general?”

  “I don’t know. A woman just…” She stopped, head down.

  I waited.

  “We…we hadn’t made…had relations in years,” Dottie said, eyes downcast. “Although it had never been an important part of our marriage, it stopped completely about ten years ago.”

  “What happened?” I asked softly.

  “Stoddard had problems with…with his functions.”

  “He became impotent?”

  She nodded. “I thought it was my fault. I know I’m not a beautiful woman, Rachel. I tried to overcome that. I went on a diet. I bought some…some daring undergarments.” A tear rolled slowly down her cheek. “It didn’t help. I encouraged Stoddard to seek medical help. I cut out an article on male problems from Readers’ Digest. I left it on his nightstand. That just made him angrier. He told me it was just a phase and that it would pass.” She sighed, her shoulders sagging. “It never passed. He moved out of our bedroom into his own room down the hall.”

  She looked at me. “My husband and I never slept together again after that, Rachel. I don’t mean just not having relations together. I mean not even sleeping together. Back when we were young, when we were newlyweds, we used to cuddle together, sometimes for hours.” Her eyes had a faraway look. “We were poor as church mice back then, but we had each other. The happiest memories of my life were those winter nights back when Stoddard was in law school. After I finished my lesson plan for the next day and Stoddard finished his homework, we’d just cuddle on the couch together while the wind howled outside.” Her smile seemed to hover there for a moment and then it faded. She glanced at me and then looked down. “Those are old memories. Stoddard and I stopped cuddling many years ago.”

  I gently probed for other observations of her husband, but it became clear they had been strangers for years, leading separate lives under the same roof. She didn’t know about the added life insurance he had purchased four months before his death. She didn’t know what he had been working on during the last weeks of his life. She knew where he went when he traveled, because his secretary would send her his trip itinerary, but she didn’t know why he went where he went. She assumed they were all business trips.

  Although she paid the bills, she knew nothing else about their financial affairs. Whenever the balance in her checking account got low, she would call her husband’s secretary, Nancy, and tell her she needed more money in the checking account. Nancy would ask her how much she needed, and then handle the transfer of the money. Dottie literally had no idea where the money came from. All she knew was that she paid the bills and Stoddard handled all the investment decisions, because “he was a man and knew about those things.”

  “Did he leave a note?” I asked.

  “He did,” Dottie said. She stood up. “I’ll get it for you.”

  She left the room and came back a few moments later with a thick manila envelope, out of which she extracted a folded sheet of paper. “This is a photocopy,” she said as she handed the note to me. “The police have the original.”

  “What else is in the envelope?”

  “These are the papers that the police found in the motel room. Most of them were in his briefcase, they said. You’re welcome to take them with you, Rachel. Perhaps they can help your investigation.”

  I unfolded the suicide note and read it:

  The Quest has come to an end. The Executor is safe underground. I have become my own Executor. Dottie, this is a dying man’s last request:

  Forgive me.

  Stoddard Anderson

  “What does it mean?” I finally asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I stared at the note, read
ing it again. “It doesn’t make any sense.” I started to copy the words down on my legal pad.

  Dottie reached across the table and grasped my arm. “Please find out what it means,” she said fiercely. “Find out what my husband was trying to tell me.”

  I put my hand over hers and looked into her eyes. Surely she had once chased her own milk truck. She had once been a young bride. And now? She had buried her only son and placed her only daughter in an institution. She had waited alone as an empty marriage ended with a suicide note she didn’t understand from a stranger she had once loved.

  “Take the note with you,” she told me. “I don’t want it until I know what it means. Find out what it means, Rachel. Please help me understand his death.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised her. “I’ll try to find out what your husband meant.”

  As I walked to my car I peered into the manila envelope. There was a fresh yellow legal pad, the front section of the Wall Street Journal from the day he disappeared, a pocket calendar, a calculator, a monthly statement of his account from the St. Louis Club (which was in an envelope postmarked two days before he disappeared), and a marked-up photocopy of an article from Business Lawyer on sale-leaseback transactions in the aviation industry.

  As I unlocked my car door, I heard a truck in the distance shift gears. It made me think again of that milk truck. I turned toward the Anderson home. Had the milkman ever handed little Dottie one of those big chunks of ice? At first, as you cradled it in your hands, the ice would seem as clear as glass. But then you would notice that your hands were distorted by the ice. Studying the ice as you tilted it this way and that, you could sometimes spot outlines of ice chunks within ice chunks within ice chunks, each invisible unless sunlight hit a surface just right.

  Chapter Seven

  When I returned to Abbott & Windsor, there were several boxes of Stoddard Anderson documents in my office: his time sheets, his phone messages, his correspondence files, his travel logs, and the contents of his office. Reviewing all of the documents would take several hours.

  I checked my watch. It was almost five o’clock. I called my sister Ann to tell her I wouldn’t be home until late. With a sigh, I lifted the first box, lugged it over to the desk, and opened the lid.

  If my friends from law school and my friends in practice are any indication, a fairly high percentage of lawyers in America were encouraged as children to become lawyers because they were “great with people” or “had the gift of gab.” It is one of the many ironies of the practice. Contrary to popular belief, the legal profession is a lonely occupation. Even a trial lawyer’s typical day can often resemble that of a cloistered monk. You spend hours, even days, alone in a room reviewing documents or alone in a law library researching legal issues or alone at your desk drafting court papers. And when you do have that rare opportunity to engage in an extended conversation with a living, breathing human being, more often than not he is under oath, his lawyer is at his side, and a court reporter is taking it all down.

  I finished the last of the boxes of documents three hours later. I had learned several intriguing things about Stoddard Anderson, although whether any of them was important was not at all clear. Settling back in my chair and stretching first my arms and then my legs, I looked over my notes, which covered six pages of my legal pad.

  Item # 1. The first gap in Stoddard Anderson’s time sheets occurred two weeks before he took out the extra insurance, which was four months before his suicide. That juxtaposition could be purely coincidental. Or it could mean that during the missing days something happened that made Anderson either believe his life was in danger or decide to kill himself.

  Item # 2. He took six trips during the last three months. Three overnight trips to Chicago, one to New York (two weeks before he died), one to Argentina (eight weeks before he died), and one to New Mexico (nine weeks before he died). He stayed at Hyatt Hotels each time, and all of the expenses he submitted appeared routine: restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, cab fares, tolls, parking, rental cars.

  Item # 3. His time sheets did not reflect Dottie Anderson’s description of his work habits and long hours. He rarely recorded more than eight hours of work a day on his time sheets. There were several possible explanations, most of them innocent. Perhaps Stoddard Anderson failed to keep track of his hours during the day, or consistently underestimated those hours. Every major law firm in America has a few workhorses who lose hundreds of hours of billable time a year by simply forgetting to write them down on their time sheets. Another possibility was that Anderson didn’t record his nonbillable activities; as managing partner, he would have had a heavy load of administrative tasks on top of his billable client work. This explanation seemed less likely, however: His time sheets did include many entries for firm administration, client development, and other nonbillable matters. Then there were, of course, less innocent explanations for the long hours away from home that were not reflected on his time sheets, the most obvious of which would be charged to the nonbillable category “other woman.”

  Item # 4. Neither his correspondence files nor his telephone message slips contained any apparent clues other than to confirm his secretary’s recollection of the three main clients he was involved with during the last few weeks of his life: There were numerous messages from, and an occasional business letter to, Albert Weidemeir (of the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District), Remy Panzer (of the Panzer Gallery), and M. Salvatore Donalli (of Donalli Construction Company). The letters were entirely unremarkable examples of typical attorney-client correspondence.

  Item # 5. The estate of Stoddard Anderson was much smaller than one might ordinarily assume. Ishmael Richardson’s comments about his stock market losses and the decline in the value of his real estate investments, along with Nancy Winslow’s observations, were borne out in the financial statements. Excluding the home in Clayton and the proceeds of the life insurance policy, the remaining estate was less than three hundred thousand dollars. He had by no means died a pauper, but it was clear that his widow needed the insurance benefits.

  Item # 6. His personal appointment calendar included meetings with all three main clients during the last two weeks, along with a speaking engagement before the women’s auxiliary of a local hospital, a doctor’s appointment six days before he disappeared, a couple of board meetings, a golf date, and numerous luncheon engagements. Conspicuously absent from the calendar were many evening meetings.

  Item # 7. The box of his personal correspondence consisted almost entirely of bills, solicitations, legal publications, and newsletters and similar correspondence from literally dozens of professional organizations, charitable institutions, trade associations, and the like. Nancy Winslow was right: The task of keeping track of Stoddard Anderson’s correspondence was enough to keep a secretary busy almost full time.

  There were, however, two items of possible interest in his correspondence. One was a bill from the postal service for rental of a post office box downtown. I jotted down the PO box number and added a note to check that out. The other item was the monthly statement from the St. Louis Club that had been among the papers the police found in his briefcase. The only significant entry for that final month was a $145.78 charge for dinner on June 8, which was ten days before he disappeared. The size of the bill suggested that Anderson had not dined alone that night.

  I checked his appointment calendar. There was no entry for June 8. Maybe a spur-of-the-moment dinner with someone, I said to myself.

  Then I remembered his pocket calendar—the one the police had found among his papers at the motel. I pulled it out of the manila envelope Dottie Anderson had given me and flipped to the date of the dinner. He had printed the word “ParaLex” in the evening portion of that day. That was all. Maybe a new client?

  I mulled that over for a moment and reached for the telephone book. I found the number for the St. Louis Club. A man named Philip answered and identified himself as th
e maitre d’ of the main dining room. I told him briefly who I was and asked him to check his reservation book to see if he could tell who Stoddard Anderson had had dinner with on the night of June 8. A few moments later Philip apologetically told me that all that the reservation book showed was that Mr. Anderson had dined with another person that night in the Marquette Room, which was one of the club’s small private dining rooms. Claude was the maitre d’ on duty the night of June 8, Philip told me, but tonight was his night off. He would be back at the club tomorrow at noon, and Philip promised that Claude would call me then. I thanked him and gave him the office number.

  I pulled my legal pad over and jotted down “ParaLex??” I stared at the word. Then I circled it. There. A clue, I said to myself. Just like I really knew what I was doing.

  I pushed the legal pad away and looked at the two appointment calendars—the big desk one and the small pocket one. They seemed like a good source of people to contact. As I was getting up to make a photocopy of several pages from the calendars, my phone rang. It was Benny Goldberg, calling from Chicago.

  “So, what do you have so far?” he asked.

  I went through everything I had found in the documents. Maybe Benny would see a pattern where I could not.

  “Sounds like ole Stoddard was shtupping some babe,” Benny said.

  “You think?”

  “Sure. Just ’cause his labanzas go into vapor lock around his old lady don’t mean they don’t function around someone else.”

  “Labanzas?” I said after a pause, a smile on my lips. “Where did you get that one, Mr. Esperanto?”

  “Portuguese, I think.”

  “I thought you said fishteras was the Portuguese term.”