by Jim Beegle
He held the door for her and then went around to let himself in on the other side. He settled into the seat and sat still for a long moment trying to regain his composure. Amy interrupted his grief.
“Well, are you relieved and satisfied now?” she asked. Mark did not answer for a long while. He thought of several things he wanted to say to her at that moment, but chose not to voice any of them.
Finally, he responded. “Am I satisfied that you took the time to come with me? Yes, and thank you,” he said. At first, Amy had refused to come to Cecil’s funeral with Mark, claiming she was too busy. Mark lost his temper with her and told her she was either going to go with him “or else.” His brief show of temper convinced her that she did not want to know about the “or else” part of his statement. “But,” he continued, “am I happy about anything else? No, Amy, I am not. I just buried my friend, whom I will miss very much. I doubt I will be satisfied or relieved for a long time.”
He started the car and drove out of the cemetery and onto Valley Street. From there he turned right onto Marsh Street, which would take them back to the heart of the small town of Eastland. Once in town, Mark drove to Interstate 20 and headed the car east and back to their home in Dallas. They drove the two hours home without speaking to each other again. It was something they were both well practiced at these days.
As with most people, especially men, Mark figured that the best way to exorcise his grief was to lose himself in his work. After a long weekend at the ranch, he was back in his office in Dallas, concentrating on discovering where a loop in the software he was working on led, when the phone on his desk rang.
“Hello,” he said, speaking into the receiver while still looking at the screen of his computer.
“Mr. Vogel, please,” the voice on the other end said.
“This is Mark Vogel,” he responded.
“Mr. Vogel, my name is Winston Lawton, I am an attorney here in Dallas.” Mark shifted the focus of all of his attention from the computer screen to the voice on the phone as soon as he heard the word attorney. DECCO, like most companies in business, had learned to hate attorneys. A call from an attorney always meant two things—hard-earned profits lost and trouble.
“Mr. Lawton, I am more than likely not the person you want to be speaking to.” Mark had been around long enough to know that you said nothing to any lawyer as soon as they identified themselves. “Let me give you the name and number of our in-house counsel.” He began looking into his company phonebook.
“Actually, Mr. Vogel, I am not calling about anything related to your business,” the lawyer said. “I was wondering, sir, if you are acquainted with a Mr. Cecil Lawrence, recently of Dallas?” The mention of Cecil took Mark by surprise.
“Yes, I am, or at least I was. Mr. Lawrence passed away last week,” Mark told the man.
“Yes sir,” Winston said. “I am aware of that. You see, Mr. Vogel, I am Mr. Lawrence’s attorney. I would like to make an appointment to see you at your earliest convenience.”
“What about?” Mark asked, not knowing what else to say.
“It seems, Mr. Vogel, that Mr. Lawrence has named you his sole heir and the executor of his estate.”
Now both thoroughly surprised and confused, Mark sat trying to decipher this sudden revelation.
“Mr. Vogel, are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“Good. Well sir, if you could, I would like to set a time when you could come to my office and go through the will and other issues concerning the estate,” Winston said in a very businesslike, but friendly, tone.
“Are you sure about this?” Mark asked. “I mean about the will. I have no knowledge about any of this.”
“Ah,” the lawyer said with understanding. “Mr. Lawrence told me that you wouldn’t. But I assure you that you are the party and the only one he has named. What time would be convenient for you?”
Still stunned, but now also interested, Mark opened the Outlook calendar on his computer. “I am free about one o’clock tomorrow,” Mark said. There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“That would be just fine, sir. Now I must make a few … ah … requests of you, in accordance with Mr. Lawrence’s instructions,” the lawyer said, sounding a little embarrassed.
“I’m listening,” Mark replied.
“You are requested not to tell anyone that you and I are meeting, nor are you to discuss this meeting or the matter that we are meeting about with anyone.” There was another pause and a noise of papers being shuffled on the other end of the line. “This prohibition is extended to, and includes, members of your family as well. Is that all right with you?”
Mark sat quietly a moment. His mind was having a hard time following what he was being told. “Yes, I can do that,” was the best he could force himself to say.
“Good. There are two last things. You are instructed to bring an empty briefcase with you and to set aside four hours of your time for this meeting.”
“Four hours?” Mark said surprised. “What’s all this about?”
“To be honest with you, sir, I really don’t know. I am simply carrying out Mr. Lawrence’s instructions as I was given them.” There was a pause, and Winston Lawton dropped his lawyer’s tone of voice. “I will be honest with you, Mr. Vogel. This is one of the strangest wills I have ever probated.” Mark said nothing. Winston found his lawyer’s voice again before continuing. “I must remind you again to come alone and not to discuss this matter with anyone beforehand. I will see you at one o’ clock tomorrow.”
The lawyer gave Mark his address and Mark entered it into his Outlook calendar for the next day. As soon as he had repeated the address back to the attorney, Winston Lawton thanked Mark for his time and hung up the phone. Mark sat with the receiver to his ear, listening to the dial tone for a good minute before hanging up his phone as well.
Chapter Two
Just as the old timers so often predicted, the winter weather in Dallas had changed. The second week of November sported temperatures in the low 60s. The cold gray skies of the week before, for the most part, had given way to clear and cloudless days. The tall office buildings of downtown Dallas emptied their occupants outside at noontime and into the warm sun, like ants running from an anthill stirred up by mischievous boys. When he was in town, Mark usually stayed in his office during lunch. Occasionally, he would ride the elevator down to the basement level of the building and grab a sandwich in the small deli located there, but today he skipped the meal. The weather was just too nice to miss being outside, and Mark decided to walk the half-mile or so to Winston Lawton’s office; empty briefcase and all.
As he left his office, Mark told his secretary, Sandy, whom he shared with others on the floor, that he would be gone for the rest of the day. He left instructions for her to text him if anything important came up.
Sandy, an attractive woman in her late twenties, had been assigned as Mark’s secretary soon after the DECCO buyout. He had resisted the idea of a secretary until the new president insisted and instructed HR to make the assignment. Relinquishing, Mark had worked out the rules with her early on. He could and would answer his own phone and fetch his own coffee. He would type, instead of dictate, things he was required to. Only then would he let her edit and correct them. Furthermore, if he happened to be going by the mailroom, he was just as apt to pick up her mail as well as his. This caused her to complain, jokingly, that some days it was hard to tell who was working for whom.
Sandy liked Mark a lot, despite the fact that he was one of the founders of Micronix, and the rumors that were whispered around the water cooler held that he had done pretty well for himself in the buyout. Even after all the changes to the company, he was, for the most part, the same fellow he had been when the entire staff was comprised of Mark and his three college buddies. For her part, Sandy watched after him in ways only a good secretary could. He was sure that if something catastrophic happened, she would find him. She knew tha
t nothing would.
The phone had been another compromise with the new owners of Micronix. It was their policy that all their “senior people”—as the Vice President from Phoenix had once told him—carry mobile phones with them at all times. Although he had agreed that it could come in handy sometimes to have one, Mark promptly ignored the hint that he should get one and, a few weeks later, arrived at work one day to find the phone and a charger laying on his desk.
“What’s this?” he asked Sandy, as she followed him into his office.
“It’s a phone,” she told him.
“I can see that,” he replied. “Whose phone?”
“Yours,” Sandy told him.
“Who decided I wanted that without even asking me?” he asked in a mock tone of demand.
“Communications sent it to you from Phoenix,” she said.
Mark just groaned and pushed the phone aside without another word. It sat on the bookcase behind his desk for a week, until one day he got a call from the President of DECCO, Mr. Ness. Ness wanted to know why he could never get Mark on his cell phone. Mark told him it was because the phone, to his knowledge anyway, had never been turned on. It did not take Mr. Ness long, or too many words, to make it clear to Mark that he was expected to keep the phone available, actually “on him” and turned on at all times.
Over the course of the next eight weeks, Mark had to have his phone replaced five times. For some reason, it kept shorting out. When Mark was on his sixth trip to the AT&T store to get yet another replacement phone the sales guy on duty expressed real surprise at Mark’s recent troubles with the phones.
“Those are damn tough phones. I ain’t never had so many of them fail like that before,” the salesman told him.
“Oh, I’m not surprised at all,” Mark told the man.
“Why not?” the salesman asked as he scanned the barcode to activate the newest phone.
“I know exactly what was causing those things to short out,” Mark said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.
“You do?” the installer asked.
“Sure. You see, every time I would sit down to eat lunch that damn thing would ring. I discovered that, if you put it in a glass of water, it would stop ringing.” Mark smiled at the man.
Shaking his head in disbelief, the salesman asked Mark if he planned to go through a car wash with his windows open to solve the problem he was now programming. Mark assured him he would learn to live with this one.
As he went out the doors of his office building and into the bright sunlight, Mark chuckled at this memory. It felt good to be outside and moving around, as he had sat through a planning meeting for most of the morning. With the usual collection of power points explained in a dull monotone that, on most days, would have sent Mark daydreaming about his ranch. Mark had fought an endless battle trying to stay awake through the entire meeting.
He had not slept much the night before. All the way home from his office, Mark had replayed the conversation he had had with Cecil’s lawyer. It worried him and, at the same time, piqued his interest. When he got home, he had tried for several hours to avoid getting into another fight with Amy. The combination of the anticipated meeting with Winston Lawton and the tension that always accompanied an argument with Amy caused him to toss and turn most of the night.
About four in the morning he gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed—being careful not to wake his wife. He dressed in jeans and a pullover sweater and went to the kitchen, where he started a pot of coffee. While it brewed, he spent twenty minutes searching for his briefcase.
As a rule, Mark’s training and practice as an engineer carried through to most of his personal life. He folded socks and underwear before filing them away in his dresser. His desks, both at home and at work, were kept in order as well. He never allowed things to pile up on them and usually had only one project at a time on each desk. He preferred things in a digital format to paper documents. Even though he was neat and organized most of the time, there were two areas of his life that eluded this orderliness. One was that he did not keep a rigid schedule about things. You could not set your watch by his comings and goings. If he were absorbed in a project, and was not particularly tired, he could, and often did, work into the wee hours of the morning. The second exception regarded taking care of his briefcase. Try as he might, Mark could never keep up with it. If someone happened to stop him on the way to the office and talk to him long enough for the briefcase to become a burden, he would set it down. Wherever he put it down was usually where it stayed until either he or Sandy went looking for it, or until someone returned it to him. Because most of the people in the Dallas office knew about his habit of misplacing his briefcase, and would see to it that it was returned safely, Mark was never too concerned when he couldn’t find it.
When Mark’s search finally produced his briefcase from the back seat of his car, he brought it into the house and began sorting through the files contained in it. When the coffee was brewed, he poured himself a cup, transferred the remains of the pot into a thermos and headed out to the patio. There, while the new day began, he sipped his coffee, smoked his pipe and made a half-hearted attempt to focus on the information he needed to understand before the business meeting later that morning.
<<<<<<>>>>>>
Feeling rejuvenated from the fresh air filling his lungs, Mark savored every moment of the walk to Mr. Lawton’s office and tried to imagine what the lawyer Cecil had picked would look like. He had pictured a man in his early fifties sitting in a dark office surrounded by law books. As it happened, he was only partially right. While Mr. Lawton turned out to be pretty much as Mark had envisioned him, the office was just the opposite. Winston Lawton, Attorney at Law, was just one of sixteen partners. However, the spacious office had a modern motif, was well kept, and took up the entire fifth floor of the Southland Building.
Mark entered through the double glass doors into a large and brightly lit waiting area flanked by a curved reception desk. The young lady behind it reminded Mark a little of Sandy. When he told her who he was and whom he was there to see, she informed him that Mr. Lawton was still out to lunch, but was due back any moment. She offered him something to drink, which he declined, and invited him to take a seat while he waited.
He had just settled into a leather wing-backed chair with that day’s edition of the Dallas Morning News when a middle-aged man in an expensive navy-blue suit walked in. Mark immediately noticed an air of professionalism about him and correctly guessed him to be Mr. Lawton. The man stopped at the reception desk and the young lady spoke to him, indicating towards Mark. The man turned and walked to where Mark was sitting.
“Mr. Vogel, my name is Winston Lawton,” the man said, extending his hand as Mark stood to shake it. “Won’t you come with me, sir?”
Lawton led Mark past the receptionist, through another set of glass doors and down a hallway to a big room behind the reception area. Stopping about halfway down, Mr. Lawton opened a door and ushered Mark into a small conference room.
“I think we will be more comfortable in here instead of in my office. Please make yourself at home while I get the things we’ll need.” He left, closing the door behind him. He had been gone several minutes when a woman entered the room carrying a silver tray loaded with a crystal pitcher with ice water and two matching glasses. She set the tray on the polished oak conference table and turned to leave. As she was leaving, Mr. Lawton returned. Carrying a brown accordion file case sealed with a green string, Mr. Lawton smiled and nodded a thank you to the woman as she left the room.
The attorney removed his jacket and laid it across the back of one of the unused chairs. He took a seat at the table directly across from Mark and arranged a yellow legal pad and the case in front of him. “Mr. Vogel, I don’t want to seem rude, but would you mind showing me some identification?”
Without saying anything, Mark opened his briefcase, removed his passport and slid it across the table. Mr. Lawton wrote down
the number on the legal pad and slid it back to Mark. “Thank you. I am truly sorry about all that, but we have to be careful these days.”
Mark said he understood, even though he really did not.
Mark’s identity now established, Winston Lawton began, “First, I must ask you if you have adhered to the instructions I gave you yesterday?”
“Yes, I have,” Mark assured him. “I have told no one that we talked, and when I left my office this afternoon I simply said I was leaving for the day.”
“Good. Very good,” Mr. Lawton said, making another note on the pad.
“Would you mind telling me what all this is about?” Mark asked.
“No, sir. I would be glad to,” said the lawyer, removing the string that held the accordion folder closed. He took out an envelope from the folder and opened it. From the envelope, he pulled out a document that was folded in thirds and had an outer blank page of the blue paper. Mark recognized this as a will, and assumed it was Cecil’s. Not long ago, when Micronix went public, Mark had gone through the process of preparing one himself.
Mr. Lawton extracted a pair of glasses from his shirt pocket and fitted them on his face before beginning to read the will. It said the usual things and was pretty short: Cecil Lawrence, being of sound mind, did will everything to one Mark Vogel. The money from his estate was first to be used to pay any outstanding bills, then the remainder would be Mark’s.
When he finished reading the document, Mr. Lawton asked Mark if he understood everything he had just read to him. Mark acknowledged it was pretty straightforward and he understood. This prompted the lawyer to take out a file folder and remove two pages from it. He slid one of the papers across the table to Mark and referred to the one he kept.
“What you have in front of you, sir, is an accounting of Mr. Lawrence’s personal property, his real property, and his bank accounts—in short, the sum total of all his assets. Would you take a moment and look over the list to see if there is anything, to your knowledge, missing?”