Dead Winter Read Free Page A

meant.”
    “A myocardial infarction. Minor, they tell me. But I’m fifty-nine years old. A small lesson on mortality is not lost on me; Do you see?”
    “You want to put your affairs in order, so to speak.”
    “Yes. Should the Boss decide to give me the pink slip, Marc and Kat would be left with a terrible mess. Connie, of course, is the beneficiary of all my insurance. Virtually all my assets are in our joint names. I want the kids to have what’s coming to them when I die without a protracted legal hassle. And I want to get this squared away without a protracted hassle from my attorney. Protracting hassles is what Flynn and Barrows are best at. Florence Gresham said that this sort of thing was right up your alley.”
    “It is. It’s the sort of thing I do.”
    He held out his hands, palms up. “Well?”
    I frowned. “It’s kind of interesting, actually.” I looked up at him. “Easiest thing would be to get yourself a divorce.”
    He recoiled from this as if I had shaken a fist at him. “Never. Absolutely not.” He sighed. “I guess I’ve made a mistake. I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you, Mr. Coyne.”
    I smiled at him. “Ah, take it easy, Des.” I reached across the table and put my hand on his wrist. “I was testing you.”
    He blinked. “I don’t get it.”
    “You have insisted that you continue to love your wife. That you’d accept her back, no questions asked. I assume that if she should return upon hearing of your death, you’d want her well taken care of.”
    He nodded. “I thought I told you that.”
    “You did. And if you were telling me the truth, you would refuse a divorce.”
    “Which I did.” He frowned for an instant, then widened his eyes at me. “You doubted my veracity.” There was a note of incredulity in his voice, as if the idea was inconceivable.
    “Your sincerity, Des. I’m big on sincerity. It’s not something that is necessarily required between a lawyer and his client. But it is required between this particular lawyer and his clients. Of course,” I added, “it works both ways.”
    He gave me a smile, the first genuine one he had allowed himself. “Florence said you’d find a way to check me out.”
    “It’s a weakness of mine. I insist on knowing where I stand with those who want my services. In the short run, it costs me some business. In the long run, it makes the business I do have more pleasant for me. My own pleasure is important to me.”
    He rolled his eyes. “And I thought I was straitlaced.”
    “I prefer to think of it as principled.” I smiled and extended my hand to him. “If you still want me, I’d be happy to work with you,” I said.
    He grinned and grasped my hand. “I absolutely do.”

2
    R EARRANGING DESMOND WINTER’S ESTATE posed no problem. It was simply a matter of asking him the right questions, figuring out what he wanted, and translating it into words that others trained in the peculiar argot of the law would all understand the same way.
    To accomplish this, one simply has to find ways to say things that those not trained in the language of the law find impossible to understand. It’s what makes us lawyers necessary. We’re about the only ones who can figure out what any of the others are saying.
    It’s not hard. They teach us how in law school. Wherebys and whereases, a few parties-of-the-second-parts. Judicious use of semicolons. The odd Latin phrase.
    This was my work, my chosen profession.
    It usually bored the hell out of me. Since my peculiar niche in the legal scheme of things failed to interest me, I tried to compensate by selecting clients who did. Clients like Des Winter.
    Fortunately, my chosen profession didn’t interfere too much with my pursuit of brown trout and golf scores in the seventies. In fact, my profession subsidized those pursuits. It also paid Gloria’s alimony, the college tuition for Billy, my number one son, who tended to squander it, and it would take care of Joey’s in a couple years,