A Knife Edge

TWENTY-SIX

It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the offices of Wright's attorney. The guy sat in a one-room office over a chemical-supply warehouse. The room smelled of unwashed-body odor and bleach. Under Juan Demelian's arms, half-moons of perspiration had stained his yellowing business shirt gray. He chewed gum aggressively while his right leg vibrated with nervous energy under the desk. A pack of NicoDerm patches lay open on top of a collection of folders. An ex-smoker near breaking point.

Demelian looked South American, perhaps Uruguayan. His brown eyes bulged with what looked like a thyroid condition, the gray skin beneath them wrinkled with lack of sleep. He was the compact type, small and swarthy. I didn't need a sixth sense to know business was going no place for Juan Demelian, except down the drain. Maybe that accounted for the bleach smell.

“Wright, Wright, Wright… yeah… File's here someplace. Got a reading of the guy's will next week,” he said as he chewed, staring at the voice recorder in my hand, its red light flashing. He sifted through the desktop sea of paperwork with his fingertips. I sat back and let him get on with it, feeling the vibration of his jiggling leg through the floorboard under my foot. Demelian and I had already gone through the prelims. He knew who I was, where I was from, and what I wanted. This wouldn't take long.

I made use of the time by checking it; it was after 3 p.m. By now I'd hoped to have received a call from Boris down at Elmer's, letting me know that Amy McDonough had arrived for what was left of her day's work. Maybe she hadn't come back. Maybe Boris was holding out on me.

“Okay, here we go.” Demelian lifted a pair of bifocals onto the end of his oily nose. He picked out a folder that had been used many times over, earlier titles scribbled on it in black pen and subsequently crossed out with red. He flipped it open and scanned the contents. “Yeah… Notes here say he called seven weeks ago, made an appointment that was rescheduled a few times. He was on my calendar for an appointment ten days ago. Next I heard, he was dead.”

“Who told you?”

“The Air Force.”

“So you knew he was in the Air Force.”

“Of course.”

“Do you know what Ruben Wright wanted when he called you?”

He shrugged. “I handled the guy's will — that's all. I can only assume it had something to do with that.”

A reasonable assumption. “Is this the will you handled for Sergeant Wright?” I took a copy out of my pocket, unfolded it, and then passed it to him across his desk.

He took it, scanned it, then compared it with a copy in the folder that had Ruben's name scrawled across it. “Yeah, that's the one.” He handed it back.

“What might he have wanted to change, do you think?”

“Do I look like a mind reader?”

“Guess.”

“The law doesn't guess.”

“Humor me.”

Demelian rolled his goldfish eyeballs. “As I said, I only handled his will. He might have wanted it altered, even just a change of address, for example. He might have wanted to change the beneficiaries — maybe leave everything to a Romanian orphanage, or something. After I got the call about his untimely demise, I sent a copy of the will to Hurlburt Field by registered mail.”

“You think it likely he made an appointment just to change his address?”

“Nope.”

I wasn't getting far. “Was there anything you noticed about his will that was at all unusual?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“I don't know. You do wills; I don't. Use your imagination.”

“I don't have an imagination; I'm an attorney — I have process and precedent.”

I stared at him like I had all day to do this.

Demelian took a resigned breath and shook his head. He pushed a pellet of gum from a blister pack and dropped it in his mouth. “An unusual will? No. As you know from reading it, Wright had a distant relative in Gainesville. He left a few family photos to the guy, but everything else he had he was going to hand over to an Amy McDonough, who I assume was his squeeze. She lives here in Pensacola. You should go talk to her; maybe she knows.”

“Good idea,” I said. “I'll keep it in mind. Had Wright changed his will before?”

Demelian thumbed through his notes. “No. Not in the last two years.”

“What did you change back then?”

He called up a file on his laptop. “Um… made McDonough the sole beneficiary.”

“Nothing from him after that?”

“Not a peep until seven weeks ago.”

“Did you know Wright had been diagnosed with MS?”

“Wright had multiple sclerosis?” asked Demelian. “Shit…”

“You didn't know?”

“Nope.”

“He was diagnosed a couple of months ago, about when he called you for the first time in two years. Is that the kind of news that prompts people to change their wills?”

Demelian shrugged. “Beats me. Why don't you ask him?”

The attorney's concern for his late client's health and state of mind was touching. I had to admit, though, my line of questioning was a reach — and I wasn't even sure what I was reaching for. Two years ago, Ruben Wright made a new will that gave everything he owned to Amy McDonough. And then seven weeks ago, he wanted to make another change, not long after discovering the spasms in his legs were the first signs of MS. Coincidence? Or was there another reason for the decision to alter his will?

“Well, thanks for your time,” I said, standing to leave.

“Don't thank me. Just pay my bill when you get it.”

“The name of your firm — Demelian and Partners…”

“Having partners gives clients a sense of security.”

“Where are they?”

He gave me a snide twist of his lips, which I took to be a smile. “I got three partners — Me, Myself, and I.”

“Have you ever been in a bank with a lawyer buddy while it was being robbed?”

“No, why?”

“Never mind.”