Skunk Hunt (33 page)

Article 2 - Specific Bequests and Devises

I give my entire interest in the real
property which was my residence at the time of my death, together
with any insurance on such real property, but subject to any
encumbrances on the said real property, to my spouse, Elizabeth J.
Neerson. If said devisee fails or devisees fail to survive me, then
this gift shall lapse and become part of the residue of my
estate.

I give my entire interest in
any personal automobile(s), household goods, furnishings, tools,
jewelry, clothing, and tangible articles of a personal
nature
....

My eyes wavered. Boilerplate legalese gives
me brain cramps, as I learned when I identified Skunk's corpse. As
soon as I had signed off on a slew of forms, including a consent
for Skunk's autopsy, I had been required to stand by while the
morgue attendants fixed ID tags to his toe and the sheet that
covered him. I thought I saw his big toe twitch, as though Skunk
was summoning me for one last trim. You could have stood me before
a firing squad and I couldn't have told you what was on those
forms. After reading five or six sentences, I went into a spin.
What was I signing? I almost didn't care. I checked every box under
the list of infectious diseases the old hold-up artist might have
been harboring, up to and including leprosy. I patted myself on the
back, as though I had performed a public duty. Better safe than
sorry. But what was this about an autopsy? What was the point?

The coroner had said:

"An autopsy is required in any violent death,
including starvation, strangulation, suffocation, burning,
stabbing, drowning, gunshot. We don't actually need your
permission, seeing as the cause of death is apparent."

"If it's apparent, why the autopsy?"

The ME had not expected polemics from an
allegedly grieving son. She swelled up like a toad and declaimed:
"It's the law."

Society's inability to put its collective
finger on the obvious without generating a heap of fetid paperwork
left me in a slump. Some guy gets toasted, but the ME wouldn't say
how he died until they had put the body on the table and spread the
butter and jam. The will was only marginally more reasonable,
seeing as you had to dispose of the property some way if you wanted
to prevent the logicians of the state from hauling it away in their
pockets.

Barbara was looking from the will to Flint,
then back to the will, squinting so hard at the words her mascara
practically dripped. I caught her eye.

"Don't you see?" she whispered.

I couldn't believe she was actually reading
the document. It was sort of like watching a neighborhood cat sing
an aria from Aida. I leaned down, following her crimson fingernail
to Article 6: Testamentary Trust for Minor Child(ren).

If any beneficiary under this Will is under
the age of 18 at the time of my death, and if in the Executor's
reasonable opinion holding any assets gifted to such beneficiary in
trust will be of benefit to the minor and of the estate, I give
said Executor full and absolute authority and discretion to direct
that any, part of or all of said assets bequeathed, transferred or
gifted to such minor beneficiary be held in trust until such
beneficiary reaches the age of 18. In the event the Executor elects
that such assets are to be held in trust for benefit of such
beneficiary, I hereby nominate my spouse, Elizabeth J. Neerson, to
serve as the trustee of such Testamentary Trust. If this person for
any reason is unable or unwilling to serve as trustee, then I
nominate Anthony Flint Dementis to serve as the trustee of such
Testamentary Trust....

"We have several $50,000 questions here,"
Flint nodded. "You've got someone else's will mixed in with
pictures of Jeremy..."

Flint's interest in the will and its
provisions appeared to have waned after the first sentence of the
first declaration. He had pulled away from Barbara and me and was
running his thumbs over one of the pictures of the Jeremy twins, as
though trying to remove a blotch from a painting. Meanwhile, my
hair played a rift on my nape. Our mystery benefactor had drawn a
solid link between Skunk and Flint. Flint...who might have been
able to supply some of the personal details in the letters we had
received, and which had sucked us into this godawful game. I felt
sympathy for the curiously unnamed and unnumbered Neerson children.
Who in their right mind would have made this doddering skinflake a
trustee over his own dead bladder, let alone a major estate?

"Either of you ever hear of Ferncrest?" I
said.

"Past the University of Richmond," said Flint
with blunt authority. "Somewhere off River Road."

Barbara and I stared at him suspiciously.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"River Road isn't for squatters," Flint
continued. "Last time I was there it was all mansions."

"When was the last time you were there?"
Barbara asked in a tone gritty with disbelief. She couldn't imagine
him wandering out the door in a fit of senility, let alone covering
the ten miles to the riverside enclaves.

"Used to date a girl out there," he
answered.

"I'm sure things have changed since Richmond
burned," I commented grouchily.

Flint accepted this with polite
misperception. "I guess anything looks like a mansion after Oregon
Hill."

"I guess so," said Barbara. She was beginning
to fidget. Were the helicopters bearing down on her? The last time
Flint had allowed Barbara to use his bathroom he'd been forced to
evacuate his house with his mother.

"Flint, what is it you're not telling us?" If
he had not been so old and pin-legged I would probably not had
dared ask that question. Frail senior citizens and children (so
long as they aren't accompanied by their care-givers) are the two
demographic groups around whom I can throw my weight with impunity.
I'm lucky Skunk hadn't nicknamed me 'Chickshit' instead of 'Mute'.
It's a sad fact that in this world most moral suasion comes down to
brute force. In spite of his gruff demeanor I felt at ease around
wiry old Flint. Life had failed him, his body was failing him, and
his mind did not seem all that sharp. A member of the Pushover
Club, the only organization that would ever welcome me with a free
lifetime membership.

The problem being that, when he gave me a
glance of vague incomprehension, I couldn't tell if it was real or
an act.

"You're the one standing with Skunk in the
picture," I persisted. I had already told him about the photograph
that had triggered our little outing to Belle Isle. "You and Skunk
look younger. You're standing in front of the power plant."

"I'd like to see it," Flint answered
reasonably.

"I left it back at the house. What were you
doing together? Who took the picture?"

"We used to go fishing up the James," Flint
said doubtfully. "But we avoided the island 'cause it was too
public. Neither one of us ever got a license."

That made sense. Skunk would have jumped off
the bridge before voluntarily paying the state's fee to partake in
Nature's bounty. The government that regularly incarcerated him
didn't deserve a break. I scrutinized the Jeremy pictures more
closely. An ad currently running on TV showed a disapproving mother
doctoring her family photo into something more congenial than the
dour children of reality. The software company proudly announced
the final result to be indistinguishable from the original.

My eyesight was getting worse by the
moment—I couldn't believe anything I was seeing. Or hearing, come
to think on it. It's one thing to accept the relativity platitudes
we harp on these days, quite another when it comes to your family.
I'm not talking about the usual alternate lifestyles, but
fundamental disintegration of the family tree. Hell, the
family
limb
. Relativism is
calorie-free comfort food. Flint's assertion that I was the victim
of a digital joker was a little more filling.

That Flint and Skunk used to go fishing
together wasn't inconceivable. Old Oregon Hill residents had been
pretty sociable. If they weren't beating each other over the head
or committing armed robbery, they were just as likely to be rutting
or interacting in reasonably civilized ways. That most of us had
the attention span of a snail nixed any long-term projects that
would have improved our minds or benefited civilization. An
old-fashioned barn-raising would have resulted in a tumbledown shed
littered by the comatose bodies of the drunken construction crew.
As a kid I had been on the reclusive side, but had still taken my
place in the wolfpack of kids when there was an abandoned house to
be vandalized or basketball game to disrupt. We had enjoyed hanging
out on street corners and giving VCU students a collective evil
eye, and I had helped hound more than one pedestrian of the wrong
complexion out of the neighborhood.

Flint was denying that he and Skunk had ever
gone fishing on Belle Isle. But lying was in our blood. Any of us
would have denied ever eating Kissmecanoe Ice Cream, just to be
contrary.

"He's watching..." Barbara said with spooky
emphasis.

"Skunk?" I said angrily. "Can't you be a
little more helpful than that? He's dead as sure as I'm standing
here."

"I didn't say he was alive, just that he's
watching."

Was that anything worse than being pursued by
surveillance cameras? The ghost was in the details. If our
forefathers aren't looking over our shoulders, the workers at the
spook palace are watching our every transaction.

"Well, I'm watching you, too," I carped.

"Yeah..." Barbara gave me a long, doubtful
look. "Pervert."

The idea of humping my sister was enough to
trigger serious gastric disturbances, and I'm sure the feeling was
mutual. Barbara was just getting back at me for showing her up as
an idiot. Perfectly understandable, until she continued:

"I saw you watching me at the PFZ." She gave
me a hooded glance and I could tell she thought she was telling the
truth. "I wasn't serving drinks—I was dancing. You were in the
audience, slobbering like all the other..." She stopped, as though
realizing she was putting down herself when she put down her
clientele.

"I think you mean 'slavering', and you're
wrong about me, too. Give me a break."

"I
saw
you," she insisted. "You, and not that other—" She cut
herself off.

"What other?"

"No one important, " she said.

"Sweet Tooth, I can't even afford the
cover charge for a dump like that," I said. I caught Flint giving
me a wry look. "Hey, maybe it's
you
she saw."

"We all look like shit or shinola," he said,
turning to Barbara. "Did he have his sausage out? Was he squeezing
his tube?"

My sister eyed him warily, as though
warning him to keep
his
sausage under wrap. She took the precaution of covering the
ear nearest to him.

"You saw someone who looked like me," I said.
"Maybe you wished."

Whatever gentility remained in our old
Southron blood (and it was precious little) threatened to boil off
in a moment. We all seemed to sense this and reduced the heat to a
simmer. I couldn't believe Barbara would make such a claim about
me, and was reluctant to leave Flint with the notion that I stalked
my own sister.

"You planning to go out to River Road and
check that address?" Flint said.

"I'm thinking of it."

"Going to knock on the front door?"

I was thinking that I might sneak around the
yard, check the mailbox, go through the garbage. I shrugged.

"You driving?"

I had thought of that, too. If my house was
being watched, Barbara and I would be spotted going to our cars.
Before I could elucidate my intention of driving my car to a remote
spot and searching it for any transponders, Barbara raised her
hand.

"Can I use your little girls room?"

Flint eyed her warily. "What for?"

Barbara pared down three fingers, leaving the
number 2.

"I only got one life to live, and not much
left of that," Flint said, thumbing her towards the front door.
"The little lady with the big dump can gas her brother's
house."

"But—"

"You can hold it in for two blocks," the old
man asserted. "If you can't, use one of the empty lots."

We needed Flint's good will, which was
obviously in short supply. I began to pry my house key off the
ring.

"I found my copy," Barbara said sulkily,
patting her tote bag. She must have discovered it while excavating
a hole for the money. She looked uncertain. "We don't know who
might be there."

"Give 'em a whiff and your worries will be
over," Flint said, bending over and tapping his ass.

"The older the shit, the worse it smells,"
Barbara said tartly.

"The only thing that comes out here is Chanel
No. 5," Flint beamed wickedly, straightening his skinny frame and
giving her a silent hoot.

This elevated conversation came to an end
when Barbara grimaced and slapped her hand to her forehead. "You're
really not going to let you use your precious bathroom with the
chipped tiles and moldy bathtub and rusty toilet?"

"It's not much, but it's dear to my
heart."

Barbara hastened out the front door. I felt a
touch of remorse for not accompanying her. We might very well be
throwing her to the lions, or dogs. And if Dog got her, we would
never again see the $20,000 that we had found on the island. But I
was reluctant to leave Flint's side. He had a smirk up his sleeve
that annoyed the hell out of me.

"You want to tell me what you know, now?" I
said.

He lined up his wrinkles in a show of prunish
surprise. "You think I'll have more to say with your sister
gone?"