The Legend of Kareem

by Jim Heskett

  She smiled at my story, even though I suspected I’d told her that one before. She smiled a lot more often now than she had on our first day out of the hospital.

  I watched her closely as we pulled into the neighborhood. Not sure what I was expecting. Sweaty palms at the sight of our street? Panic attack since this was the place she’d been kidnapped?

  Instead, she nodded at the house on the corner of our street. “Did I miss anything with the meth house lately?”

  “It’s funny you should say that because I met the guy who lives there.”

  Her eyes grew. “No.”

  “Yeah, I did. He pulled me out of the car when it crashed. He seemed alright, I guess, maybe I’d even call him friendly. I’m so used to him staring out from behind the blinds of the windows. Weird to see his whole face.”

  She reached out and put a hand on my belly, one of the many places on my body that still ached from the car crash and the other scuffles I’d had. “You feeling okay?”

  “Yeah, just sore. I was lucky, I think. No broken bones or serious internal bleeding.”

  We arrived at our cul de sac, and I carefully monitored her expression. She was staring right at Alan’s house. Her face looked flat, but her lips curled down into a bit of a frown. Couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind.

  “We don’t have to be here. We can go back to the hotel.” Not that we could afford that since I was still destined for unemployment in a few weeks. I was officially on medical leave until then. So, no work, but at least they were paying me for the time being. Or, maybe this thing about my dad’s inheritance might come through to bless my finances. I hadn’t looked into it yet since I’d been in and out of the hospital, attending to Grace.

  “No, I think I’ll be okay. I want to go home.”

  I parked in the driveway and raced around the car to help her out before she could open the door. She wasn’t pregnant enough to need help sitting and standing, but she did grunt a bit when changing positions.

  I took her by the hand and led her to the front door, keeping my body between her and the house where she’d spent a week drugged in the basement. She didn’t look at it.

  When I opened the door, Dog came rushing at us, bouncing across the living room.

  “Who is this?” Grace said in a baby voice, dropping to one knee. Dog loved her instantly. Tail in overdrive, licking the palm of her hand. He’d been living in a house that smelled like her for days, so he probably thought he already knew her.

  Kitty, on the other hand, hung back, not sure what to make of Grace coming home just yet. Kitty could be fickle like that.

  “He’s cute,” Grace said, ruffling the dog’s fur. “I approve.”

  “Good, because I don’t think we can get rid of him. Squatters’ rights or something like that.”

  I helped her to the couch, and she asked me to prepare some tea for her. I obliged.

  Just as I put the kettle on to boil, my phone rang. Dallas area code.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Tucker Candle?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Candle, my name is Luther Fredrick, and I’m an estate attorney down here in Grapevine. Sorry to call you out of the blue, but I need to discuss a legal matter.”

  My mouth felt a few degrees drier as the steam from the kettle began to billow out of the little hole.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Mr. Candle, I represent your father’s estate, one Mr. Heathcliff Candle. Am I correct in the statement that this man was your father?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “The thing is, Mr. Candle, that there are some irregularities in Heath’s finances, and as the executor of his will, we need to speak to you about them before we can proceed.”

  Smoky jets of steam pulsed and swirled through the hole in the top of the kettle. Executor? Why in the world would he have made me executor?

  I lifted the kettle off the stove, feeling the heat warm my forearm. “I see. What do I need to do?”

  “How soon can you get to Dallas?”

  ***

  After listening to Luther spout a few more details, I hung up the phone as I poured the tea into the mug, processing the conversation.

  Grace cleared her throat behind me. “What was that about?”

  I looked at my wife, her round belly, her face worn from days in the hospital and the events before that. She’d improved quite a bit in our few days lounging around in the hotel, but she still wasn’t right.

  I wouldn’t leave her. I couldn’t leave her.

  “My father’s attorney, or maybe not his attorney, but some lawyer who has something to do with his will. There’s a problem with it and they need to speak to me. In Dallas.”

  “They couldn’t do that over the phone?”

  “He said there are documents that can’t be faxed, or something like that. Plus items in his care that he needs to physically hand to me. It states that in the will.”

  She sat back, eying me. I set the tea in front of her and retreated to the chair across from the couch, and she wouldn’t take her laser eyes off me.

  “Ooh,” she said, then leaned forward. She reached out to grab my hand, then put it on her warm belly. Some little pushes—almost like vibrations—came back against my hand. “He was kicking non-stop in the hospital,” she said. “I guess he got tired of me laying around all day.”

  “Little Candle doesn’t do well with boredom, like his dad.”

  She smiled at me, then it slowly faded.

  “I’m not going to go,” I said. “This will stuff can wait.”

  She picked up the tea and sipped it. “Sure seems like the stars are aligning to drag you back to Texas one more time.”

  “Sounds like it, yeah.”

  “Will you go to your dad’s place in Corpus Christi, too? Pick up his personal items and that kind of thing?”

  “I’m not going to go. No way. I’m not leaving you.”

  She considered this for a while, hot vapor from the tea blurring her face. “Maybe you should go.”

  “What?”

  “If you need to go down there and take care of your dad’s estate, then look up this Omar guy and tell him to get out of town, you can go. You’ll be gone a day or two? I’m feeling much better about everything than I did just a few days ago.”

  “I don’t know, baby,” I said. “It doesn’t seem right for me to leave you like this.”

  “Leave me like what? I’ll be fine here. It’s better now than going in a month to deal with it because my parents are here, my sister is here. I’ll have all the support I need.”

  The idea that Grace didn’t need me stung. But she probably hadn’t meant it in that way. She was trying to be generous and selfless.

  “And,” she said, “I’m twenty-seven weeks pregnant, not thirty-eight or nine. That would be a different story. If this is what it takes to move your dad into our past so we can get on with the present, then I’m all for it.”

  I shook my head.

  “Ask yourself… if you don’t go, and something happens to this Omar guy, will you be okay with it?”

  “I don’t even know him.”

  “That’s beside the point. You know about him, and you know you can do something to help him.”

  I sighed. “You’re right.”

  “Then you should go. I want you to do whatever you need to be okay with yourself. I’ll be fine, baby.”

  Well, shit. If I didn’t have that promise to hold on to, nothing else could stop me from going. “Are you sure about this?”

  “I’m positive. I know you have some… unresolved feelings about what happened to Kareem. If you can make it right while you’re there and clear your head so you can come back to me a hundred percent, then that’s what I want for you.”

  And just like that, I’d committed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As the flight attendant droned on about connecting flight information from the overhead speakers of the plane, I realized with a du
ll thump that I’d spent almost no time grieving for my dad. When I’d found out, I was right in the middle of a bloody mess of dead bodies and a presumed-dead spouse, and his passing had seemed less important than that.

  Would I grieve a man I barely knew?

  The fact that I was on my way to Texas to deal with the estate must have been evidence in his favor. Grief in action or something like that. But I couldn’t say that I felt sad about his passing since he was little more to me than the occasional letter or phone call when I was a kid. Not at all as an adult.

  A guy I barely knew from high school had died in a boating accident five years ago, and I’d found out about it on Facebook. We’d taken a few classes together, but we weren’t exactly friends. I felt sick when he died, experienced a brief moment of considering my own mortality. I also felt sorry for his wife and two kids and what they’d have to deal with. But I experienced more grief about that guy dying than I had my own father’s death. And guilt about feeling that way hung over me.

  But what had my dad ever done for me?

  According to Kareem, he’d left me some money. Or maybe not. Who knew if Kareem could be trusted. Hopefully, the will and the attorney would clear up all that mess.

  As we descended into Dallas, I watched a young mother with an infant across the aisle from me. The baby screamed bloody murder. The air pressure was probably squeezing his little brain, and I realized babies are all need and no agency. They don’t understand the world. They can’t affect the world. Keeping one alive and happy seemed like a daunting task.

  But I was also excited about doing it. I wanted to be a father, and I promised myself I’d be a good one.

  The woman eventually popped out a pink nipple to shove in his mouth, and I looked away as quickly as I could. Nipples as restaurants instead of amusement parks was a concept I was going to have to spend some time adjusting to.

  As I exited the plane and entered the maelstrom of the D-F-Dubya airport once again, I felt the strangest tug behind my eyes. The same feeling I had when Kareem left me standing alone at Ernie’s Bar the night I’d met him… that strange sense that something big was about to happen.

  ***

  The attorney’s office was in a brilliant glass building in the middle of a great big nothing. By that, I mean an enormous parking lot surrounded by twelve-lane highways crisscrossing like strands of hair clustered around the shower drain.

  That old familiar pulse of anxiety swirled as the elevator rose from the ground level, hurtling through space to reach floor twelve. Couldn’t say why. The numbers over the door blinked higher and higher, and I felt the inertia swell as it soared up. When the elevator finally slowed a half second before reaching the floor, I thought my heart might explode.

  Ding. Door opened. Smiling receptionist with a perm raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  Her smile calmed me, and the panic I’d felt in the elevator seemed so silly now. Hangover from the drama with IntelliCraft? Did I have PTSD now?

  “I’m here to see Luther. Luther Somebody-or-other.”

  “Mr. Fredrick, I assume?”

  I ran the name through my data banks. Seemed to check out. “Sure, Mr. Fredrick. He called me.”

  She tapped on a keyboard for a few seconds, then ushered me through a glass door and into a hallway. Compared to the IntelliCraft offices in Denver or Dallas, this place was the Taj Mahal. Everything was glass and silver and not a stray piece of paper or cardboard box lingered anywhere. From this height, I marveled at the view of all the other towering glass buildings in Dallas.

  When we reached the open door bearing Luther’s nameplate, she retreated behind me, and I entered the room.

  Luther Fredrick stood, a giant of a man at least 6’6”. Since he was so tall, I fought the urge to ask him if he played basketball.

  “Mr. Candle?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Please come in,” he said as he waved at a chair, something curvy and ergonomic and expensive-looking. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and realized I wasn’t used to hearing it. Over the last few months, it had mostly been congratulations on the impending birth of our child. This was the other one, the other thing strangers would reach out and offer when they didn’t know what else to say. Birth and death.

  He started shuffling through papers, arranging them on the desk in front of me in rows. He launched into a fast-paced speech about writs for this, affidavits for that, and none of it made any sense.

  “Luther, I’m not sure what’s going on here,” I said as I perused documents. “My dad and I weren’t close, so I have no idea what the state of his affairs was like. You said something about financial problems?”

  Luther leaned back, picked up a ballpoint pen from the desk, and clicked it a few times. “Well, here’s the thing, Tucker.”

  “Everybody calls me Candle.”

  “Here’s the thing, Candle. Your father left nothing but a mountain of debt. It appears that he hadn’t paid taxes in over twenty years.”

  My face scrunched. “What? How is that even possible?”

  “Your father had been off the grid, so to speak. Most everything in his estate will likely be seized for back taxes. Those details will be worked out in the coming months.”

  My brain buzzed. I thought about what Kareem had said before he died, about them working together. “Does that include my father’s stock portfolio?”

  Luther frowned. “We haven’t been able to uncover any records of him owning stocks or bonds. That’s the strange thing, Candle… we don’t have any record of your father ever having been gainfully employed as an adult. I looked him up in some databases, and he apparently hasn’t registered a W-9 since a job he had in high school.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “There is no stock portfolio. Here’s what we have, and where you’re responsible as the executor of his will. His house in Corpus Christi will likely be seized.” He passed a house key and a note with the address across the table. “If you’d like to go collect any personal belongings, you should be able to get in. But I’d hurry if I were you.”

  I opened the paper, read the address. I already knew it by heart, even though I’d never been to that house.

  “We do have one item that was left in our care, to be given to his daughter.”

  My throat tightened. “His daughter?”

  “Susan Palenti, of Brownsville. That’s near the Mexican border.”

  I knew where it was. Close to Padre Island, spring break destination. I knew it well from college.

  Luther removed a lockbox from his desk and set it on the table. It was a small wooden thing, about the size of a shoe box.

  “What’s in it?”

  He handed me the key. “Nothing of value, or the government would have taken it already.”

  “What do I do now?”

  “That’s up to you. Once you sign the paperwork, it’s in your hands.”

  ***

  At my hotel, I set the box on the bed. Bounced the key in my palm. I’d never heard of Susan Palenti. Dad must have had some other family, which didn’t surprise me at all.

  But the absence of records of him ever working, that was strange. I had distinct memories as a little kid of my dad, in a suit, holding a briefcase. He’d worked in sales for some manufacturing company, or at least, that was what I recalled.

  Maybe he’d found a way to erase his employment records, and that’s how he evaded taxes. I didn’t know how that would function, but it seemed to make sense.

  But what did Kareem mean about some money coming to me in the event of my father’s death? Had he been simply babbling, knowing he was dying and not caring? Or had my dad made some arrangement so his inheritance would go to his daughter instead of me?

  I called my Aunt Judy, the one who’d been trying to inform me of Dad’s stroke while I had been a little too busy attempting to find where the hell Wyatt Green had imprisoned my w
ife. She didn’t have anything useful to tell me about Dad or Susan Palenti. She’d never heard of this Susan person. She did, however, scold me for a few minutes for missing Dad’s funeral. I was expected to give a eulogy, it seemed.

  Next, I called Grace, still staring at the key in my hand. Grace didn’t usually like to talk on the phone, but this was a special occasion.

  “What are you going to do?” she said after I’d explained the visit to the attorney’s office.

  “I have no idea. I have so many more questions now than before I came, which wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Oh, I just remembered: a detective came by this morning, looking for you. I told him you were busy.”

  This irked me. “I’ve already given them a million versions of the statement. How many times do I have to rehash the same story over and over again? He can call me if he needs me so bad.”

  “This one seems pretty determined to talk to you, but I’ll pass along the message if he shows up again.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Did you open the box the guy gave you?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to,” I said, twisting the key between two fingers and staring at the box.

  “If it were me, I’d open it.”

  I thought about it, sitting there. Something that could possibly answer some of my questions. “Maybe so.”

  Grace sighed. “Are you going to go find this woman?”

  “I told you I’d be here two days. I don’t have time to go down to some little border town to hunt for a woman who may or may not be my half-sister.”

  “But if you’re the executor of the will, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? I thought it was some kind of sacred duty.”

  “I told you two days.”