“Until?”
“One morning the call comes in. Joe Cranfield died in his sleep. Bam—just like that.”
We were walking more slowly now, and Gary was silent for a moment.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. It was a blow. Okay, he was eighty-one by then, but he looked like he’d make a hundred without breaking a sweat. Barely an hour after we find out he’s passed, we get a call from some firm none of us have ever heard of. Turns out he’d used another crew to handle his personal affairs. Okay, it happens—but this is a tiny outfit based half the country away, and we’re all like, What? The guy on the phone has instructions, however, and he wants us on it right away. And this is where it started to get weird.”
“Weird how?”
“The will. Two million to his wife, one million to each child, two-fifty K to each of his grandchildren. A little over eight all told.”
I didn’t get what he was driving at. “How much was he worth when he died?”
“Nearly two hundred sixty million dollars.”
I raised my eyebrows, and Fisher smiled tightly.
“Now you’re listening. Strictly B-list in global terms, but hardly destitute. It had been more, but it turned out he’d been unloading briskly over the last five years, to institutions, charities, schools. A hospital ward here, drop-in center there, Old Master or two on permanent loan to some tiny gallery in Europe. We knew about a lot of it, of course, because of tax issues, but no one had really had a handle on exactly how much he’d moved out. It was close to seventy million.”
I revised my opinion of the old man, and for the better. “So where was the rest of it destined for?”
“That’s the thing. The afternoon of Cranfield’s funeral, Lytton—one of the two named partners in this firm—turned up on our doorstep with a case of paperwork. Everyone with juice in the firm headed into the boardroom and went through it together. Cranfield left detailed instructions on how his empire was to be dismantled, and half of it was already started, triggered by Burnell & Lytton—who it turns out had overriding power of attorney. For the rest of it, Lytton basically deals with us like we’re junior clerks: Do this, do that, do it now. Joe had thought of everything—down to the dispersal of a roadside food shack in Houma, Louisiana. That was a bequest to the old woman who’d been running it all these years, and there were other things like that, random citizens getting a chunk here and there, but everything else was to be liquidated. Even his houses were to be sold. And the resulting funds, minus ten percent, were to be split among nine main beneficiaries.”
“Who were?”
“Battered women. Inner-city education and antidrug initiatives. Long-term medical supplies to godforsaken parts of Africa. Even a campaign to save the fucking sea otters, run by some hippie down in Monterey—who received six point five million dollars to keep up the good fight. I got to phone this guy with the news. He nearly heart-attacked right there on the line. He’d never met Cranfield in his life. Never even heard of him.”
“Where did the last ten percent go?”
“A trust administered by Burnell & Lytton, which fed into an international charitable network.”
“So how did the family take this?”
“How do you think? They went apeshit, Jack. I had men and women in their fifties, people who’d had everything on a plate since birth, coming into my office and screaming like crack addicts let down by the man. It went on for weeks. These people had lived their lives assuming they’d get a huge check someday, and now we’re telling them it was all a dream? They contested the will, of course, but it was signed, filed in triplicate, and quadruple-witnessed by judges and priests demonstrably in their right minds. We had guys who’d built entire careers drilling holes in this kind of paperwork, real wolves, and they couldn’t get their pencils sharpened. The only person who didn’t go nuts was Cranfield’s wife, and I’ll come back to that. Bottom line is that he knew what he wanted to do and he did it. Everything else was after the fact. So…the children sued us instead.”
We’d stopped at another intersection. Over the last minutes, my mind had found its way back to the photograph of Amy. I was trying to imagine what the man’s hand had done in the moments after the picture had been taken. Gary had about another minute of me playing nice.
“How did that pan out?”
Fisher’s face tensed, and I got the idea that the lines around his eyes had not been there long. “Ongoing. Everyone else in the firm has turned away from Cranfield’s affairs, like a bad smell. But I couldn’t do that. A month ago I came up against something that needed sorting out, figured what the hell, and flew here to Seattle. I went to the Burnell & Lytton office.”
“And?” I asked.
“It wasn’t there.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d been working with these guys for three months by then, okay? I know their address and phone numbers by heart. I landed at Sea-Tac, got a cab straight there. The neighborhood is more the kind of place I’d expect to find a bail bondsman, and when I walk up to the street address, I see it’s a storefront that’s been boarded up. And not recently. Before that, it looks like it was a coffee shop. There’s a fucking tree growing out of the roof. No sign for Burnell & Lytton anywhere. There is an entry system, but it’s really, really old. There’s ten buzzers, and only the second to last looks like it’s been used since I was born. So I press that one first. No response. I press all the others. Nada.
“By this stage I’m a little confused. I walk up to the corner, buy a coffee, call the office, double-check the address. So then I phone Burnell & Lytton. Lytton’s secretary picks up. I ask to speak to him. She says he’s out. I ask to check the address with her, say I have an important package. She reels off the same old zip code. So I ask her which buzzer you need to press.
“And she went quiet. Just completely silent. Then she said ‘You’re here?’ And she sounded weird, really imperious, not like a secretary anymore.”
“That’s a little strange.”
“Yes, it is. So I find myself saying no, I’m not in Seattle, but my assistant’s sick and I want to fill out the waybill properly. She’s all friendly again, tells me it doesn’t matter, just the street address is fine. I thank her, leave a message for her bosses to call me, put down the phone. I sit there thinking for a minute, and then my cell rings. It’s one of my colleagues, back in Seattle. Lytton has just called the office, asking for me. Luckily, my assistant only told him I was out, not saying I was in Seattle. It could just be a coincidence. But it’s odd. So I walk back to the address. Ring the buzzer, still no response. Then I call their number again. There’s no answer this time. But I realize I can hear something. A ringing sound, from above.”
“Your call being received?”
“You got it. I disconnected and tried again, just to check. I took a few steps back from the door, and I could hear a phone ringing somewhere in the building. I let it ring, but…In the end I walked away. Flew back home.”
He held his hands up, telling me he was finished and also asking a question. I wasn’t sure what it was.
“You’ve been in contact with them since?”
“Many times. Once I got back to Chicago, it was business as usual. We’ve ground through the remaining work. It’s almost done.”
“Did you mention your trip to either of the lawyers?”
“No,” he said. “I never could work out a way of phrasing the question: ‘Hey, dude—how come your office is in an abandoned building?’ I did mention it to one of the senior partners, but he did everything but stick his fingers in his ears and go la-la-la. No one’s interested in hearing anything hinky about Cranfield’s affairs.”