“The suicide bothers me.”
“What! What do you mean?”
“Look, Hark, how can a man be of sound mind seconds before he jumps to his death?”
Hark’s edgy voice rose an octave, and the words carried even more anxiety. “But you heard our psychiatrists. Hell, they’re on tape.”
“Are they sticking by their opinions, in light of the suicide?”
“Damned right they are!”
“Can you prove this? I’m looking for help here, Hark.”
“Josh, last night we examined our three shrinks again. We drilled them, and they’re sticking like glue. Each signed an affidavit eight pages long swearing to the sound mental capacity of Mr. Phelan.”
“Can I see the affidavits?”
“I’ll courier them over right now.”
“Please do.” Josh hung up and smiled to no one in particular. The associates were marched in, three sets of bright and fearless young lawyers. They sat around a mahogany table in one corner of the office.
Josh began by summarizing the contents of Troy’s handwritten will, and the legal problems it was likely to create. To the first team he assigned the weighty issue of testamentary capacity. Josh
was concerned about time, the gap between lucidity and insanity. He wanted an analysis of every case even remotely involving the signing of a will by a person considered crazy.
The second team was dispatched to research holographic wills; specifically, the best ways to attack and defend them.
When he was alone with the third team, he relaxed and sat down. They were the lucky ones, because they would not spend the next three days in the library. “You have to find a person who, I suspect, does not want to be found.”
He told them what he knew about Rachel Lane. There wasn’t much. The file from Troy’s desk provided little information.
“First, research World Tribes Missions. Who are they? How do they operate? How do they pick their people? Where do they send them? Everything. Second, there are some excellent private locators in D.C. They’re usually ex-FBI and government types who specialize in finding missing people. Select the top two, and we’ll make a decision tomorrow. Third, Rachel’s mother’s name was Evelyn Cunningham, now deceased. Let’s put together a bio on her. We’re assuming she and Mr. Phelan had a fling that produced a child.”
“Assuming?” asked one of the associates.
“Yes. We take nothing for granted.”
He dismissed them and walked to a room where a small press conference had been arranged by Tip Durban. No cameras, just print media. A dozen reporters sat eagerly around a table, tape recorders and microphones scattered about. They were from large newspapers and well-known financial publications.
The questions began. Yes, there was a last-minute will, but he could not reveal its contents. Yes, there’d been an autopsy, but he couldn’t discuss it. The company would continue operating with no changes. He couldn’t talk about who the new owners would be.
To no one’s surprise, it became obvious that the families had spent the day chatting privately with reporters.
“There’s a strong rumor that Mr. Phelan’s last will divides his fortune among his six children. Can you confirm or deny this?”
“I cannot. It’s just a rumor.”
“Wasn’t he dying of cancer?”
“That would go to the autopsy, and I can’t comment on that.”
“We’ve heard that a panel of psychiatrists examined him shortly before his death, and pronounced him mentally sound. Can you confirm this?”
“Yes,” Stafford said, “this is true.” So they spent the next twenty minutes picking and prying into the mental exam. Josh held his ground, allowing only that Mr. Phelan “appeared” to be of sound mind.
The financial reporters wanted numbers. Because The Phelan Group was a private company, very tightly held, information had always been hard to come by. This was an opportunity to crack the door, or so they thought. But Josh gave them little.
He excused himself after an hour, and returned to his office, where a secretary informed him that the crematorium had called. Mr. Phelan’s remains were ready to be picked up.
FIVE
_____________
TJ nursed his hangover until noon, then drank a beer and decided it was time to flex his muscle. He called his principal lawyer to check on the current state of things, and the lawyer cautioned him to be patient. “This will take a little time, TJ,” the lawyer said.
“Maybe I’m not in the mood to wait,” TJ shot back, his head splitting.
“Give it a few days.”
TJ slammed the phone down and walked to the rear of his dirty condo, where, thankfully, he couldn’t find his wife. They had been through three fights already, and it was barely noon. Perhaps she was out shopping, spending a fraction of his new fortune. The shopping didn’t bother him now.
“The old goat’s dead,” he said out loud. There was no one else around.
His two children were away at college, their tuition paid for by Lillian, who still had some of the money she’d taken from
Troy in the divorce decades earlier. So TJ lived alone with Biff, a thirty-year-old divorcée whose two kids lived with their father. Biff had a real estate license and sold darling little starters to newlyweds.
He opened another beer and stared at himself in a full-length mirror in the hall. “Troy Phelan, Jr.,” he proclaimed. “Son of Troy Phelan, tenth richest man in America, net worth of eleven billion, now deceased, survived by his loving wives and loving children, all of whom will love him even more after probate. Yes!”
He decided right then and there that from that day forward, TJ would be ditched and he would go through life as Troy Phelan, Jr. The name was magic.
The condo had a certain smell to it because Biff refused to do housework. She was too busy with her cell phones. The floors were covered with debris but the walls were bare. The furniture was rented from a company that had hired lawyers to recover everything. He kicked a sofa, and yelled, “Come get this crap! I’ll be hiring designers before long.”
He could almost torch the place. Another beer or two, and he might start playing with matches.
He dressed in his best suit, a gray one he’d worn yesterday when Dear Old Dad faced the psychiatrists and performed so wonderfully. Since there would be no funeral, he wouldn’t be forced to rush out and buy a new black one. “Armani, here I come,” he whistled joyfully as he zipped up his pants.
At least he had a BMW. He might live in a dump, but the world would never see it. The world, however, noticed his car, and so he struggled every month to scratch together $680 for the lease. He cursed his condo as he backed away in the parking lot. It was one of eighty new ones wrapped around a shallow pool in an overflow section of Manassas.
He’d been raised better. Life had been soft and luxurious for the first twenty years, and then he received his inheritance. But
his five million had disappeared before he reached thirty, and his father despised him for it.
They fought with vigor and regularity. Junior had held various jobs within The Phelan Group, and each ended in disaster. Senior fired him numerous times. Senior had an idea for a venture, and two years later the idea was worth millions. Junior’s ideas ended in bankruptcy and litigation.
In recent years the fighting had almost stopped. Neither could change, so they simply ignored each other. But when the tumor appeared, TJ reached out again.
Oh, what a mansion he would build! And he knew just the architect, a Japanese woman in Manhattan he’d read about in a magazine. Within a year he’d probably move to Malibu or Aspen or Palm Beach, where he could show the money and be taken seriously.
“What does one do with half a billion dollars?” he asked himself as he sped along the interstate. “Five hundred million tax-free dollars.” He began to laugh.
An acquaintance managed the BMW-Porsche dealership where he’d leased his car. Junior walked into the showroom like the king of the world, strutting and smiling smugly. He could buy the whole damned place if he wanted. On a salesman’s desk he saw the morning paper; a nice bold headline about the death of his father. Not a twinge of grief.
The manager, Dickie, bounded from his office and said, “TJ, I’m very sorry.”
“Thanks,” Troy Junior said with a brief frown. “He’s better off, you know.”
“My sympathies anyway.”
“Forget it.” They stepped into the office and closed the door.
Dickie said, “The paper says he signed a will just before he died. Is that true?”
Troy Junior was already looking at the slick brochures for the
latest models. “Yes. I was there. He divided his estate into six pieces, one for each of us.” He said this without looking up, quite casually, as if the money were already in hand, and already becoming a burden.
Dickie’s mouth slipped open and he lowered himself into his chair. Was he suddenly in the presence of serious wealth? This guy, the worthless TJ Phelan, now a billionaire? Like everyone else who knew TJ, Dickie assumed the old man had cut him off for good.
“Biff would like a Porsche,” Troy Junior said, still studying the charts. “A red 911 Carrera Turbo, with both tops.”
“When?”
Troy Junior glared at him. “Now.”
“Sure, TJ. What about payment?”
“I’ll pay for it the same time I pay for my black one, also a 911. How much are they?”
“About ninety thousand each.”
“No problem. When can we take delivery?”
“I’ll have to find them first. That should take a day or two. Cash?”
“Of course.”
“When will you get the cash?”
“A month or so. But I want the cars now.”
Dickie caught his breath and did a squirm. “Look, TJ, I can’t turn loose two new cars without some type of payment.”
“Fine. Then we’ll look at Jaguars. Biff’s always wanted a Jaguar.”
“Come on, TJ.”
“I could buy this entire dealership, you know. I could walk into any bank right now and ask for ten million or twenty million or whatever it would take to buy this place, and they would happily give it to me for sixty days. Do you understand that?”
Dickie’s head rocked up and down, his eyes narrow. Yes, he understood. “How much did he leave you?”
“Enough to buy the bank too. Are you giving me the cars, or shall I go down the street?”
“Let me find them.”
“Smart man,” TJ said. “Hurry. I’ll check back this afternoon. Get on the phone.” He tossed the brochures on Dickie’s desk, and strutted from the office.
________
RAMBLE’S IDEA of mourning was to spend the day locked in the basement den smoking pot, listening to rap, ignoring those who knocked or called. His mother granted him an absence from school because of the tragedy; in fact, she excused him for the rest of the week. If she’d had a clue, she would’ve known he hadn’t been to school in a month.
Driving away from Phelan Tower yesterday, his lawyer had told him the money would go into a trust until he was either eighteen or twenty-one, depending on the terms of the will. And though he couldn’t touch the money now, he was certainly entitled to a generous allowance.
He would form a band, and with his money they would make albums. He had friends in bands going nowhere because they couldn’t afford to rent studio time, but his would be different. His band would be called Ramble, he decided, and he would play bass and sing lead and be chased by the girls. Alternative rock with strong rap influences, something new. Something he was already inventing.
Two floors up, in the study of their spacious home, Tira, his mother, spent the day on the phone chatting with friends who called with their halfhearted condolences. Most of the friends gossiped long enough to ask how much she might be getting from the estate, but she was afraid to guess. She had married Troy in 1982, at the age of twenty-three, and before doing so she signed a thick prenuptial which gave her only ten million and a house in the event of a divorce.
They had split six years earlier. She was down to her last two million.
Her needs were so great. Her friends had beach houses nestled in quiet coves in the Bahamas; she was relegated to luxury hotels. They bought their designer clothes in New York; she picked them up locally. Their children were away in boarding schools, out of the way; Ramble was in the basement and wouldn’t come out.
Surely Troy had left her fifty million or so. One percent of his estate would be around a hundred million. One lousy percent. She did the math on a paper napkin as she talked on the phone to her lawyer.
________
GEENA PHELAN Strong was thirty and surviving what had evolved into a tumultuous marriage with Cody, husband number two. His family was old money from up East, but so far the money had only been a rumor. She certainly hadn’t seen any of it. Cody was beautifully educated—Taft and Dartmouth and an MBA from Columbia—and he considered himself a visionary in the world of commerce. No job could hold him. His talents could not be constricted by the walls of an office. His dreams would not be cramped by the orders and whims of bosses. Cody would be a billionaire, self-made of course, and probably the youngest in history.
But after six years together, Cody had yet to find his niche. In fact, his losses were staggering. There had been a bad gamble on copper futures in 1992 that had taken over a million of Geena’s money. And two years later, he was scalded by naked options when the stock market dipped dramatically. Geena left him for four months, but returned after counseling. An idea for “Snow-Packed Chickens” turned sour, and Cody escaped with a loss of only a half a million.
They spent a lot. Their counselor recommended traveling as
a means of therapy, so they’d seen the world. Being young and rich soothed many of their problems, but the money was drying up. The five million Troy gave her on her twenty-first birthday had shrunk to less than a million, and their debts were mounting. The pressure on their marriage had reached the breaking point when Troy leaped from his terrace.
And so they spent a busy morning looking for homes in Swinks Mill, the place of their grandest dreams. Their dreams grew as the day progressed, and by lunch they were making inquiries into homes worth over two million. At two they met an anxious real estate agent, a woman named Lee, with teased hair, gold rings, two cell phones, and a shiny Cadillac. Geena introduced herself as “Geena Phelan,” with the last name pronounced heavy and uncheated. Evidently, Lee did not read financial publications because the name missed its mark, and well into the third showing Cody was forced to pull her aside and whisper the truth about his father-in-law.