Death Benefits Read online

  “Fishteras, labanzas, whatever. I’m telling you, the guy was shtupping some babe. What’s his secretary look like?”

  “She’s pretty. But I don’t think so.”

  “She’s a likely suspect, Rachel. They usually are. Ask around the office. It might be her. Or one of the paralegals. Yeah, probably a paralegal.”

  “Maybe. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Hey, have you ever heard of a company called ParaLex?”

  “ParaLex? ParaLex…nah. Listen, kiddo, you need some help down there? I could always come down. It’s slow around the office, and there’s a terrific barbecue joint down there. It’s called Roscoe—Roscoe something or other.”

  “Oh?”

  Benny was a barbecue fanatic. For years he had kept track of his favorites on a set of index cards that he continually updated, filling the backs and sides with arcane annotations. This summer he had transferred the entire file to a data bank in the personal computer in his office.

  There was a pause as Benny was no doubt typing a Roscoe search request for his computer. “Ah, here we go,” he said. “Roscoe McCrary’s Hickory Bar-B-Que House. On 2719 Parnell. They serve hickory-smoked pig snouts.”

  “Snouts? As in piggies’ noses?”

  “Snouts, as in one of the best things you can put in your mouth without the consent of another adult.”

  “No wonder we’re supposed to keep kosher.”

  “Believe me, Rachel, if Moses had tasted one of Roscoe McCrary’s hickory-smoked pig snouts up on Mount Sinai, there’d be a special exemption in the laws of kashrut for certain parts of certain cloven-hoof mammals. God, my mouth is watering. What do you say, Rachel? I could be there tomorrow.”

  “I’m okay so far, Benny. I’ll check in with you tomorrow. I promise.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. But if I hear word of some tall, foxy white chick doing a pig snout carry-out at McCrary’s, I’m going to be crushed.”

  “Trust me, Benny. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  ***

  “Rachel Gold?”

  I was up at the Xerox machine copying pages from Stoddard Anderson’s appointment calendars. I turned and stared at the guy who had said my name. He looked about my age, and vaguely familiar.

  “Rachel Gold, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Sandy Feldman. We were in high school together.”

  I shook his hand. “Sure. Of course. I didn’t recognize you with the beard. How are you?”

  “Great. I heard you were coming down to do something on Anderson’s estate. I haven’t seen you since high school, Rachel. You look terrific.”

  “I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “I came over from Thompson and Mitchell last fall.”

  Sandy Feldman and I had been in the same homeroom together at University City High School. Back then he had been a shy, slide-rule type who wore black pants pulled high above the waist, as if his hips were fused to his rib cage. Other than an occasional hello in the morning, I doubt if we spoke ten words to each other throughout high school. The last time I saw him, which was probably graduation day, he had fierce-looking pimples on his cheeks and a clump of dark frizzy hair hanging over his eyes. The pimples were gone, and so was most of the hair on top, replaced by a dark beard. As I followed him back to his office, I marveled at how much better he looked. He had grown a few inches since high school, filled out some, and obviously retained the services of a tailor with a better sense of the whereabouts of his waist. He looked like a neatly coiffed Allen Ginsberg.

  “You have to remember,” Sandy said after we were seated in his small office, “we’re one of the colonies down here.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Abbott and Windsor started in Chicago back in the eighteen hundreds. Chicago is still the motherland. This is the hinterlands. We didn’t come of age singing the Abbott & Windsor fight song. Down here we didn’t start off as summer clerks playing tennis at the big firm outing on the North Shore.” He shrugged. “This is an office filled with opportunists. Speaking of which, have you met our new fearless leader?”

  “You mean Reed St. Germain?”

  He nodded. “There’s a piece of work. You should see the way he sucks around the BSDs from Chicago. Practically straps on the knee pads. Especially when Ishmael Richardson comes down to inspect the troops.”

  “Where did St. Germain come from?”

  “He started at his dad’s firm, Harris and St. Germain. He joined Anderson’s old firm two years before the merger with A and W. Hard to figure him out. Guy meditates almost every day after lunch, flies off to Nepal every other year, a strict vegetarian. And do you know what the end product of all that inner harmony bullshit is? He cheats on his wife, keeps a secret bachelor’s pad in the Central West End, and usually takes some girlfriend with him on his business trips. He can be a real prick with everyone, except for Mrs. St. Germain.”

  “Oh?”

  “Apparently, she’s a real ballbuster. I hear he’s a real wimp around her. She tries to keep him on a short leash.”

  “Not too successfully, I gather.”

  “I guess not. I don’t know how he hides all those extracurricular expenses from her. She’d kill him if she found out. Maybe that tension makes him mean. I’m telling you, I’ve seen that guy in a negotiation. When he senses a weakness, he’s like a shark scenting blood.”

  “Be glad he doesn’t eat red meat.”

  “You’re right. He’d probably grab an Uzi and head for the nearest highway overpass.”

  “So you don’t like him, eh?” I said with a smile.

  Sandy shrugged. “He’s a fellow member of the bar. If I wanted to work with saints, I’d have become a social worker. His clients love him.”

  “Your wife looks familiar,” I said, gesturing at the photograph of his wife and two children on his credenza.

  “Rhonda Jaffe. She was a year behind us.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. I didn’t remember her.

  “She’s lost some weight since that picture. She really ballooned up with the second pregnancy.”

  “What’s your area?” I asked.

  “Corporate tax.” He gave me a sheepish smile. “Planet of the nebbishes.” He shrugged. “Once a nerd, always a nerd. It’s the curse of high school.”

  “Don’t say that, Sandy. I can’t get over how good you look.”

  “Me? Look at you.”

  “Please.”

  “I gotta tell you, Rachel, I had a terrible crush on you back in high school. When you used to walk into homeroom in your cheerleader outfit with that micro-miniskirt I would practically swoon.”

  “Don’t start,” I said, embarrassed.

  “You should have been homecoming queen,” he said. “I voted for you.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Sandy.”

  He waved his hand in dismissal. “It was all those Jewish boys voting for that blond bomber.” He shook his head in wonderment. “High school. It’s amazing the way it stays with you, isn’t it? So tell me, are you married?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No,” I said, deciding to change the subject. “Is your middle initial ‘A’?”

  He sat back with a puzzled look. “Yes,” he finally answered.

  I had recalled several “Office Conference w/SAF” entries on Anderson’s time sheets from last January and February. “How much did you work with Stoddard Anderson?” I asked him.

  “Not much. I did a few things for him over the last six months or so.”

  “On what?”

  Sandy tugged on his beard in thought. “Mostly run-of-the-mill tax stuff. You know, structuring a merger or acquisition to take advantage of some tax angle.”

  “How about last January and Fe
bruary? Did you have any unusual projects from him?”

  “January and February,” he mused. “Well, I had one weird assignment from him sometime last winter. Maybe it was then.”

  “What was it?”

  “Anderson had me do a big research memo on importing art objects.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “Yeah. I had to look at Mexico’s law on—what’s it called—on cultural patrimony.”

  “Which is what?”

  “The kind of artifacts that all those nineteenth-century British dudes hauled back to England from Egypt and Greece and places like that. Mummies, ancient Greek statues, that kind of stuff.”

  “What was the issue Anderson wanted you to look at?”

  “It was a good one. That Mexican law prohibits the export from Mexico of anything that could be considered part of its cultural patrimony. If someone breaks that law, other countries, including the U.S., have agreed, by law or treaty, to help Mexico retrieve the property. Problem is, the Mexican law isn’t all that old. I think it got enacted back in the 1960s.”

  “Why’s that a problem?”

  Sandy leaned forward, warming to the story. “The issue Stoddard asked me to check out was whether that law would apply to an art object that had been taken out of Mexico a long, long time ago, like back a couple hundred years, but which had somehow briefly returned to native soil.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Say some guy back in 1885 visits Mexico, finds some sort of a pre-Columbian artifact—an Aztec pot. Maybe buys it off an Indian. He brings it home to New York with him. Then, a hundred years later, someone brings that same pot back into Mexico, maybe to get it appraised. Assume that if that pot had never left Mexico in the first place it would be considered part of the cultural patrimony of the country. In other words, if it had always been in Mexico, it would be illegal to take it out of Mexico.”

  “So the issue is whether the law applies to something that returns to Mexico?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “As long as it stays in the United States, it’s legal. But if you bring it back to Mexico, even for just an hour, and then go back home, can the Mexican government legally ask U.S. Customs to seize it and return it?”

  “Can they?”

  Sandy shrugged. “The Mexicans think they can. So do their courts. It’s not entirely clear what Customs would do if asked.”

  “What kind of artifact did Anderson have in mind?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. He never told me.”

  “Who was the client?”

  “I don’t know that either. He handled the whole thing in a strange way. Anderson told me to bill my time to the office rather than to a client. When I was done with the project, he told me I had to give him all of my drafts. I wasn’t even allowed to keep my notes after I finished the project.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What did he do with it?”

  “I don’t know. He never talked to me about the project after it was over.”

  I thought it over. “Do you have a copy of the memo you gave him?”

  “No, he told me not to keep any copies.” But then Sandy smiled. “Ah, but there has to be a copy. I did it on word processing. It’ll be in the word processing department’s computer. C’mon,” he said as he stood up. “We can have them print out a copy.”

  But we couldn’t. As the head computer operator on the night crew told us after she had completed her search through the computer files and back-up disks, there was no record of Sandy Feldman’s memorandum. Stoddard Anderson, or someone else, must have issued instructions to delete all copies of the memorandum from the computer records.

  Sandy followed me back to my office, where I was gathering my notes and papers and stuffing them in a large trial bag. It was close to nine o’clock. He still had several hours of work on an SEC filing. I was done for the day.

  “Have you ever heard of ParaLex?” I asked him as I flicked off the light in my office.

  He frowned. “No. Why?”

  “I saw it in Stoddard Anderson’s calendar. I thought it might be a client.”

  “We can check on your way out. Follow me.”

  Lugging the trial bag, I followed him down and around several corridors to a small room with a bank of facsimile machines. He reached under the counter and pulled out a bound client and matter list. It was several hundred pages long and arranged alphabetically. I found the right page and ran my finger down the column of client names:

  Paradigm Incorporated

  Paraform Manufacturing Corporation

  Paragon Investment Research Co.

  Paramount Pictures, Inc.

  Paraquest Limited Partnership, Ltd.

  “Is this a current list?” I asked.

  “Give or take a couple weeks,” Sandy said. “You can have them run the name through the computer tomorrow if you think it might be a brand-new client.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Hey, let me show you something on your way out,” Sandy said. “You’re going to get a kick out of it.”

  I followed him down the hall to the darkened employee lunchroom. He flipped on the lights and walked over to the support staff’s bulletin board.

  “You’re famous down here,” he said, pointing to a photocopy of the article from the National Law Journal on the sexual harassment jury trial I had won, the same article Nancy Winslow had mentioned earlier. Someone had circled my name in red ink and written in the margin: She will be here next week!!

  “It’s a great article, Rachel.”

  I shrugged. “The reporter got a little carried away. I wasn’t crazy about the cowboy metaphors.”

  “Really? I loved that part. That Stanford Blaine sounds like he deserved it. Did he really act like he was a cowboy?”

  “He had some cowboy stuff in his office,” I said. Stanford Blaine had been the defendant in the lawsuit. At the time he had been chairman of a mid-sized Chicago law firm. He was now “of counsel” at a smaller firm. “He was born in Wyoming,” I added.

  “But he prepped at Choate and earned his law degree from NYU. Some cowboy.” He squinted at the text on the bulletin board. “Here’s my favorite part: ‘But it was on the morning of the third day of cross-examination that the Marshall Dillon facade began to crumble,’” he read. “‘Firing questions like bullets, Rachel Gold stalked Stanford Blaine across the sagebrush, methodically cutting off every avenue of escape. That afternoon she lured him into a testimonial box canyon, and then backed him into a corner no larger than the witness stand. Finally, at twenty minutes to four, with a rapt judge and crowded courtroom looking on like witnesses to a hanging, she moved in for the kill.’” He paused, shaking his head in admiration. “Oh, yeah, the next part I love.”

  “Enough,” I said as he was about to start reading aloud again.

  He turned to me with a grin. It was as if we were back in homeroom again. “I love it,” he said. “Did you really make him turn to the jury and admit that he lied?”

  I nodded, unsmiling.

  “Great stuff.”

  “It generated a lot of hate mail.”

  “Really?”

  “A lot of male attorneys—anonymous male attorneys—didn’t think it was so great.”

  “Well, they’re pathetic. I wouldn’t worry about them.”

  I nodded again, unsmiling.

  ***

  I thought about that hate mail as I rode the elevator down to the lobby. The letter writers called me everything from “a castrating cunt” to a “miserable dyke.” One Neanderthal sent me a rubber dildo wrapped with barbed wire; the note told me to “shove this up your twat, bitch.”

  What upset me most was that the hate mail authors succeeded. I was devastated b
y their horrible letters, by the curses they hurled at me from their anonymous rat holes. I couldn’t sleep at night, I dreaded venturing out of my office during the day. When I rode an elevator in the courthouse or sat in a courtroom, I scanned each male face, trying to make eye contact, trying to determine whether I was staring at one of my correspondents. If a strange lawyer smiled at me, I stiffened. It took months before it passed, before I was able to be around unfamiliar male attorneys without flinching.

  And the irony was that it had all stemmed from representing a woman I didn’t particularly like or trust in a lawsuit against a man I didn’t particularly dislike or distrust. Brandy Holmen was the former secretary of Stanford Blaine, the senior partner whose reputation she ruined—I ruined, we ruined—through the trial. In her occasional unguarded moments around me during the trial, I saw her use on other men the seductive, manipulative charm that she must have used on her boss over the years, that must have led him to believe she was sexually available. Now I’m sure that up there in the rarefied atmosphere of the Pure Sisterhood, Brandy Holmen’s secretarial fan dance is just further proof of her status as victim of a male culture. But down in that courtroom after the jury returned its verdict—after Brandy let out a war whoop and jumped into her new boyfriend’s arms while Stanford Blaine buried his head in his hands—things didn’t seem quite that black and white.

  I ran into Stanford Blaine earlier this summer in the cafeteria line at the Chicago Bar Association. The jury verdict had just been affirmed on appeal. He shook my hand, no hostility apparent. Blaine is a trial lawyer. He understands. Better than I do.

  Chapter Eight

  As I drove my car out of the parking garage and onto Highway 40 heading west, I realized that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. No wonder I was so hungry. I decided to have dinner at one of my favorite high school hangouts: the Steak ‘N Shake on Olive Boulevard in University City.

  Back in high school I used to go there after football games on Saturday nights with my boyfriend, who was the quarterback. On Friday nights I’d go there with my girlfriends, with our hairbrushes and Juicy Fruit gum and packs of Marlboros. There would be dozens of parked cars on the lot, each filled with high school kids, while an endless parade of cars cruised through, checking out the scene. Horns would honk, there’d be shouts from one car to another, and above all the sounds of rock music blaring from car radios. The delicious smells of french fries and catsup would drift into your car windows as you turned off the ignition. Carhops weaved between the cruising cars to deliver food on trays that hooked onto the car windows.