The Will and the Boy

There are men who keep the documents of other men, and there is nothing they know that they can use. That is the whole of the profession, and most of the time it is a privilege. Amos went back to the office that Monday and did the two things the profession allows: he read the file again, and he said nothing to anybody.

The file was thin, and it was not thin by accident. Adrian Voss had no wife, no children, no siblings worth naming. He had a house in Clintonville and the controlling interest in a laboratory he had built out of his own patents, which his documents called the Meridian Institute and everybody else called Voss's. Under the instrument in the file, if Adrian Voss died or, in the language of the thing, became permanently unable to administer his own affairs, everything he had went to one person. Not the institute. Not the scholarship at the university that carried his mother's name.

It went to a person called Dell Rusk.

Amos had executed that will. He had sat across a table from Voss while a notary in the next room watched through the glass, and he had said, as he said to everyone, you can change this at any time, but until you do, understand that this paper will be read out loud by a stranger after you are gone. Voss had said he understood. Amos had not asked who Dell Rusk was, because it was not his business, and because he had assumed, as one assumes, that the name belonged to a nephew with a bad year.

Now he looked at the name for a while and then he looked up the address that went with it, and found that the address was a loading bay on Fourth Street.

He did not go that week. He went three weeks later, on a Wednesday, at nine at night, in a suit that was wrong for the neighborhood and wrong for the hour, which he knew and did not care about. The service door was shut. The lights were on behind the glass. He stood across the street under a broken streetlamp for twenty minutes like a man casing a jewelry store, and then the door opened and the small man came out carrying a bag of trash, and Amos said, "Rusk."

The man stopped. He set the bag down and looked at Amos the way a doorman looks at a delivery.

"Mr. Rusk," Amos said. "I'm an attorney. My name is Whitlock. I keep certain documents for Adrian Voss."

"And?"

"And your name is in them."

The small man laughed, and the laugh was not the laugh of someone caught. It was worse than that. It was the laugh of someone who has heard the joke before and finds it better every time. He came across the street, unhurried, and stopped much closer than a stranger stops, and Amos stood his ground because there was nothing else to do with it.

"Old man Voss," Dell Rusk said. "You know what he'd tell you if he were standing here? He'd tell you he's grateful. He'd tell you he's a lucky man and you're a good lawyer and the weather's turning." His breath smelled of nothing at all, which Amos noticed and could never explain to anybody. "He says that to everybody. Do you know what I say?"

Amos said he did not.

"I say the money's mine because I earned it," Rusk said, "and the rest of it's not your business, and if you come down this street again I'll put you in the hospital and then I'll come to your house and we'll discuss it there."

Then he picked up his trash bag, and he walked it to the dumpster, and he went back inside, and Amos walked to his car with his hands in his pockets and his heart going, feeling exactly what he had felt only twice before in a long and careful life — the specific, unwelcome sensation of having been measured and found to be furniture.