“I’ve been named executor of a will written by a person I don’t know.”
“No clue?”
“None. I’m guessing Louise Thomas is someone I brushed against when my business was healthy.”
“But you’ll be paid?” She was looking at me intently, inspecting my eyes for visions of dancing sugarplums. Amanda likes it when I’m solidly grounded.
“Seven hundred clams,” I said, before she could test the point. “The lawyer told me lots of executors are not personally acquainted with their decedents.”
“What’s to do if there are no beneficiaries?”
“I’m guessing the estate has just enough money to pay all the outstanding bills. Should be a quick seven hundred.”
“You didn’t really discuss what’s involved with the lawyer, did you, Dek?” Her eyes sparkled from the candle burning atop the wine bottle.
“Just the important part: the seven-hundred-dollar fee. I’ll drive up tomorrow morning, and then the rest will be known.”
She smiled at my foolishness, and we talked of other things. Afterward, we went back to her condominium on Lake Shore Drive. That was still one of our places, too.
Two
I set off for Michigan at ten the next morning. The sky was low, and a light snow was falling, but it was not enough to slow the Illinois Tollway. By February, toll road pilots are a brazen lot. With months of winter driving behind them, they blow through whiteouts and icy patches, balancing coffees, croissants, and cell phones, with barely a twitch of a thumb on their steering wheels. I breezed to the state line.
Things slowed, though, in Indiana. Winter grows potholes along its northernmost interstate the way summer grows weeds in its fields. My Jeep is nine years old, its shock absorbers and springs long retired, and I had to back off on my speed to keep my teeth in the places I was accustomed to finding them.
Slowing things, too, were the billboards picturing surgically perfected women with come-hither pouts, who danced naked at gentlemen’s clubs. So many of them smiled under banners proclaiming that truckers were especially welcome that I began to wonder how long it took long-haul drivers to pass through that part of Indiana. If a gentleman trucker stopped at even a third of the clubs where he was sure to be welcomed, it might take months. I left Indiana understanding why over-the-road shipping had become so expensive.
…
West Haven was right on Lake Michigan, two miles due west of a Wal-Mart. It was an old resort town of ice cream parlors, beachwear shops, and sandal stores, set on a main street that sloped down to a shore lined with curled ice cliffs of waves that looked flash frozen, as if by an instant’s touch of an ice goddess’s wand. Everything was white and shiny-the sky, the lake, the beach-except for a small red lighthouse at the end of a pier that stood like a crimson exclamation point against the vanished horizon.
I parked the Jeep in an angled space and walked along the sidewalk. Most of the shops were closed, their bright awnings rolled up tight against the gray of February. Attorney Aggert’s name was lettered in gold leaf on a second-floor window in the next block, above a lit-up discount store named Fizzy’s. The discounter’s window featured a display of black hydraulic automobile jacks nestled on a scattering of fluffed striped beach towels-everything one would need for a festive day of tire changing at the beach, SHOP EARLY, the banner exclaimed. I accepted the universality of that, even though I had never thought to combine beach time with auto repair, for never had I seen a banner proclaiming SHOP LATE.
I had an hour before my appointment with Aggert, so I opted for lunch in an exposed-brick-and-fern place across the street. I enjoy opting for lunch, though it’s not something I can afford to do often. But today was a special day. I was about to come into seven hundred dollars for very little work.
The hostess smoking a cigarette at the little table by the door appeared to have undergone the same flash freezing that had trapped the waves along the shore, right down to the curl of smoke that hung suspended in the air above her head. I made a polite cough and she looked up, crushed out her cigarette in a black Bakelite ashtray, and told me I could sit anywhere I wanted. She lit another cigarette as I headed to a booth against the wall.
There was only one other diner in the place, a blond fellow frowning at the stock market pages of the Wall Street Journal like a man reading his own obituary. He was about my age, too young to be wearing a red-checked shirt with a blue necktie and blue suspenders.
I was hungry but ordered responsibly-only a Diet Coke and vegetables consisting of a Cobb salad and the house specialty, a foot of fried onion rings, stacked on a pole. While I waited, I sipped the Coke and studied the old photographs on the wall. They were from the days when ships carrying commerce used to float over from Chicago. In the century that had passed, shipping had gone high speed, but I wondered if goods from Chicago might have arrived faster in those old days, given the proliferation of gentlemen’s clubs slowing trucks in Indiana. Still, I allowed there might have been ladies in high-button shoes, feather hats, and little else back in those old days, too, dancing along the shore in Indiana, pouting at the ship captains. Indiana might always have been that kind of place.
The salad was excellent. So, too, were the onion rings, served twelve inches high as advertised. At five to one, I paid the bill and tiptoed away, careful not to disturb the hostess nodding by the smoldering ashtray at the front door.
I popped Tic Tacs, climbing the stairs next to the discount store, so I’d arrive smelling like a candy cane. The frosted glass door at the top opened right into Aggert’s office, and there sat the man in the red-checked shirt and blue suspenders I’d seen in the restaurant, still reading his Wall Street Journal. He set down his newspaper and stood up, and we shook hands across his desk. He was chewing breath mints, as well-Altoids-from a little red and white tin centered on his desk. He motioned for me to sit in one of the visitor’s chairs.
He ground up a last fragment of Altoid and handed me a tan envelope. “Ms. Thomas’s will, and her keys. The estate doesn’t appear to be very large. It shouldn’t require much of your time.”
I opened the envelope. Inside was a folded single sheet of paper and a key ring. I unfolded the sheet of paper. “LAST WILL,” it read, in slightly uneven manual-typewriter letters. “I, KNOWN AS LOUISE THOMAS, BEING OF SOUND MIND, HEREBY LEAVE ALL MY ACCOUNTS, POSSESSIONS, 1983 DODGE, CONTENTS IN THE HOUSE ON COUNTY ROAD 12, RAMBLING, MICHIGAN, AND ANY OTHER ITEMS AS MAY BE OF VALUE TO MY EXECUTOR, VLODEK ELSTROM, OF RIVERTOWN, ILLINOIS, TO DISPERSE AS HE SEES FIT IN THE RESOLUTION OF ANY MATTERS RESULTING FROM MY DEATH.” Her signature was at the bottom. Aggert and somebody else had signed on the two witness lines.
I looked across the desk at the lawyer. “Odd sort of will, counselor.”
He shifted in his chair. “I didn’t draft it. She brought it in the morning of New Year’s Eve. All she wanted was for me to witness it.”
“Just witness?”
“That, and hold it for her. After I signed, we walked downstairs to get one of the clerks at Fizzy’s to be the other witness.”
“She didn’t ask you to look it over or offer advice?”
“She didn’t even want a photocopy. It was very strange.”
I looked at the document again. “The wording seems odd: ‘I, Known as Louise Thomas.’”
“Sounded to me like she was just trying to lawyer it up. People do that sometimes, to make it sound more legal.”
“Known as? Sounds like she’s admitting it’s a fake name.”
He shrugged.
“What did she look like?”
“I don’t know.”
“Surely you must-”
He held up a palm to stop me. “She came in with her coat collar up, a wool beret pulled down low on her forehead, a scarf around her mouth. I wondered if she was sick, because she never took off the hat or the scarf. It was bitterly cold that week, lots of wind.”