Burial of the Dead

PLOTS - 7

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Downtown Hartford in the football building, in an interior office of Cal Stevens’s one lawyer firm, with a MoMA print of Monet’s Water Lilies on the wall and open blinds on the reception area, Ann Dillon, paralegal, office manager, sits at her desk, littered with papers and files. She clears a space to set down a legal pad, to draw lines, boxes, abbreviations, symbols, runes, the essential etchings of abstract plots. She reviews the memo-to-self she drafted that morning. She makes notes:

Mrs. O’Neal dies:

1. Natural causes – Sullivan will take all under the will, including insurance $’s

2. Suicide – Sullivan will take all under the will, but no insurance $’s

3. (a) Murder (if Sullivan did it) –

(i) Sullivan’s out, insurance pays, and EITHER Manny takes all

(“cy pres”) by terms of “letter” from Mrs. O’Neal to Manny.

(ii) OR Kost-O’Neal Charitable Trust takes all under the will, plus insurance monies.

(b) Murder (if anybody other than Sullivan did it) –

(i) Sullivan will take all, plus ins. $’s (see Natural Causes, above)

She circles 3 (a) (ii), underlines “Charitable Trust takes all” and digs through a pile of papers on the right hand corner of her desk. It’s there; she remembers. The memory makes a vague image of paper, hi-toned script, CHARITABLE TRUST. She digs, a lawyer’s dig, strata of substance and time, clients remembered and forgotten, the perpetual “gotta-get-to-that” notion of things, things to be done, the mild anxiety of deadlines or the easy confidence of competence.

She finds it under an advance sheet from CCH and an opinion from the tax court. It’s a copy of the document that established the Kost-O’Neal Charitable Trust. She scans the title page and reads the paragraph designating Cal Stevens as Trustee. She flips the yellow pages of her legal pad and begins to draft a document to amend the Trust. She’s decided to make herself the Trustee, and she knows how to do it. She starts and stops. She’ll need a form book – ‘How To Designate a New Trustee.’ Will it require an election, a vote of the Board? Is there a Board? If so, who’s on it? How many votes to amend the trust? What will it take? How many documents will she have to place in front of Mr. Stevens for the signature that counts? One? Two? Or several in one of those marathon-end-of-the-day moments when Stevens’s Mont Blanc scratches his initials wherever she tells him to scratch his name – as if he were somebody important, scratching, writing, turning around to hand out another pen to an imaginary row of dignitaries standing by his side.

Manny, she thinks. Always Manny. And what kind of document will it take to keep the favorite great-niece in her place after Ann becomes Trustee? How many votes will it take to amend Manny’s career-path? She wonders: How will I profit if Manny succeeds in setting up Sullivan and then convinces the Probate Court to give her everything? I’ll keep her close to set up Sullivan, Ann says to herself, and then, when the time comes, I’ll out her for the fraud she is.

The front door opens a crack and the tip of an umbrella points to the floor followed by the polished round toe of one black shoe. There’s a little fumble; the door opens all the way, and Attorney Cal W. Stevens, Esq. enters his firm.

Ann watches him through the blinds of her interior window. Then she stands and greets him in the reception area.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Stevens.”

She adheres to the little formalities he appreciates, manners as a kind of code, beneficial to the proper placement of boundaries, a bulwark against unwanted and unpredictable emotions.