You Ain't Doin' Nothing For Me! - Chapter 16

“I had a weird dream last night,” I said as I casually added half and half to my coffee in the office kitchen.

“Oh,” asked my partner, Katy, feigning interest.

“Yes,” I continued, ignoring her eyeroll. “I dreamt that I was telling a group of people about a time when I was telling a different group of people a story, but I forgot the punchline.”

Katy looked at me blankly. “In the story, or the story that you were telling about telling the story?”

“That’s just the thing,” I said. “I can’t remember. Or, I couldn’t remember. I was completely flummoxed in my dream, but I can’t remember if I was actually flummoxed, or if I was only flummoxed in the story that I was telling in my dream.”

There was a pause accompanied by another blank stare. “You lost me,” said Katy.

“The thing is,” I blundered on, “when I woke up, I suddenly recalled that the punchline had something to do with a priest. But, and here’s the crazy part, in my dream I could remember the story but not what the punchline was about, but when I woke up, I could remember that the punchline was about a priest, but I couldn’t remember what the story was about.”

“You’re not planning on telling this story in court, are you?” she asked.

“No….” I said. “But I was just curious if you had ever heard me tell a story about a priest?”

“You mean like,” she began, “A priest, a rabbi and a car salesman walk into a bar?”

“No, no,” I said, “Not a joke, so much. More of a… a… humorous anecdote…?”

“No.” she said and started to leave.

“Wait,” I replied, “Tell me the one about the priest and the rabbi and the car salesman.”

Katy turned back toward me at the doorway and said, “I forgot the punchline.”

I went back to my office to find Margie dropping off a manila envelope. “What’s this?”

I asked.

Margie put her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes for a moment and then said, “Nope. My powers of clairvoyance must be off today.” She dropped the envelope and left.

“Everyone in this office is a smartass,” I muttered after her. I opened the envelope and pulled out a thick stack of papers. It was the response to my subpoena I had issued to the Skin Deep salon for their payroll records.

I wanted to see who was on duty the day of Lilith’s murder. I already had a pretty good theory about Suzy Abbot’s involvement, but I was hoping that whomever Lilith interacted with that day could shed some light on how Lilith was behaving that day. If she suspected her best friend of stealing from her or that some kind of funny business was going on, she might have seemed nervous or angry or even just preoccupied. She may have even said something. Sitting in a salon chair for an hour with a beautician, maybe they got into small talk. Maybe Lilith said something in passing that might sound innocuous, but that could be the clue I needed to tie my theory together. Or pull it apart. Either way, I needed to know.

I had requested just the records for who was working that day. The salon’s attorney had responded with three months’ worth of records. The jerk. He could plausibly argue that he was simply ensuring that his client was in complete and total compliance with my subpoena request and that over-producing was safer than having me haul his client before a judge for failure to answer, but I knew that this was his way of sticking it to me for making the request. “Oh, you want a document? Yeah? Here’s a thousand pages. Good luck finding it!”

I thumbed the edge of the stack and flipped the pages. Somewhere, buried in that stack was the one page I was looking for, but I was going to have to roll up my sleeves and find it.

I had a Will signing in an hour, so the fishing expedition would have to wait. I began printing out the documents on our “good” paper and organized them into a neat stack for Margie to proof-read one last time. The drafts I’d prepared had been proofed, as had the client’s changes. The corrected versions had been proofed and now the final versions would be proofed again. Yet, invariably, the client would find something to change or correct.

This particular client, Arlen Mandelstam, was something of an odd duck. He was a small, wiry Jewish man in his nineties. He was born somewhere in Eastern Europe, but he does not know where. The entire rest of his family had been sent to the concentration camps, but a family friend had managed to smuggle him to unoccupied Spain, where he was put on a cargo ship as a cabin boy with false papers, and he wound up in Cuba. He caught a fishing boat to Miami as a teenager weeks before the communist revolution and just stayed in the USA. From there, he worked his way up the Eastern Seaboard doing odd construction jobs as a laborer, finally ending up in Arlington, Virginia.

This was in the 1970’s, before Arlington was the bougie haven for defense contractor millionaires and government workers that it is now. At the time, Arlington was a decidedly blue-collar area. Not so much a bad area or a high crime area, but definitely a place where the hard people lived. He got an apartment in an older building where he continued to live for the rest of his life. The old building had somehow survived the gentrification of Arlington County that took place in the 1990’s (or had simply been overlooked), and its few residents were, like the building itself, mostly old, poor and fading away.

Mr. Mandelstam was old and fading away, but he was not poor. He had lived a life of miserly frugality, never spending more than was absolutely necessary to pay his modest monthly bills. So, though he never owned any property or held any investments, and never made more than laborers’ wages, he had accumulated a seven-figure fortune, all of which sat in a simple savings account in a neighborhood bank.

He still spoke with a thick, Eastern European accent despite not having lived there since early childhood and had never married or had children. It was obvious after speaking with him for only a short time that he was a closed, solitary person who had few personal contacts and, likely, no real friends. His demeanor was grouchy and he wore a perpetual scowl on his scrunched, wrinkly face.

Yet, he had chosen to be conspicuously generous with his life savings. He had no natural heirs and no friends to leave his considerable fortune to, nor did he belong to any synagogue or house of worship, so he had decided to donate it to a “college serving underprivileged minorities” as a scholarship fund. The problem was that he did not go to college himself and therefore had no alma mater, and he didn’t really know what colleges were out there that actually served underprivileged minorities.

Mr. Mandelstam asked me for my advice on which college he should leave his fortune to. For many reasons, both personal and ethical, that is the one piece of advice I cannot give: telling someone to whom they should leave their estate. Instead, I gave him a list of institutions of higher learning and suggested that he check them out. He picked three from the list and I contacted their administrations on his behalf. I told each of them that I had a client who was considering leaving a “substantial legacy” to them in his estate and that he wanted to come by and see the campus for himself.

Each institution responded enthusiastically. The two local ones sent limousines to pick him up for his tours. They wined him and dined him and one of them put on a whole presentation featuring alumni who had, purportedly, accomplished great things. He got to sit in on a PhD level lecture and was treated to seats in the president’s suite for a basketball game against a rival university.

The institution in Tidewater, Virginia outdid them both. The university provost came to get him in his private jet and assigned a stunningly attractive grad student to be his “personal assistant” for the entire weekend, during which he was put up at a four-star hotel on the river-front, treated to dinner at the private club of a major university donor and generally given the red carpet treatment.

This is a man, mind you, who owns two sets of clothes, and only because he needs something to wear while washing the other set. He eats canned food and lives alone and refuses to go to the doctor because he is convinced (and rightly so) that they will just prescribe him a bunch of expensive medications instead of actually treating him for anything. I was picturing in my mind what these limo drivers and maître d’s were thinking when they saw this rumpled, scowling little man in old clothes getting treated like royalty by all of these university bigwigs.

In the end, he decided to leave his entire fortune to a fourth school that was not on the list. It was a small college that he had read about in the newspaper years before. He reached out to them on his own and they had simply written him a very nice letter explaining that they did not have a football program or wealthy board of trustees, but that they felt like they were doing good work and would be honored to be considered by him. He did, however, thank me for setting up the other meetings and told me that he had a great time with each of them.

Margie stepped into my office to tell me that Mr. Mandelstam had arrived and was waiting patiently in the conference room. The documents required two witnesses and a notary stamp. Mr. Mandelstam had no one in his life and had brought no one with him to serve as witnesses. Margie could serve as notary, but I couldn’t serve as a witness because I had drafted the documents. Katy was in the office, but Alan was out. That left us one short.

I sent Margie over to the real estate office around the corner to see if they had anyone available to sit in on the signing. She was gone for longer than I expected, and I was getting ready to call her on her cell phone when she walked into the office with the woman who worked at the gas station across the street. She was a large, beefy woman of about mid-forties wearing a dirty blue uniform shirt with a nametag sewn onto the chest pocket: “Raylene.”

I eyed her for a moment. “Great!” I said enthusiastically and gestured toward the conference room.

“How long is this gonna take?” Raylene asked without budging from the front entryway. “I didn’t close up the shop and people will be stealing gas,” she continued. “’Course, it’s not like they pay me enough to give a damn. Let’s do this.”

The signing took longer than expected. Mr. Mandelstam insisted on reading every document line by line, mumbling along as he read. When he got to something he didn’t understand, which was often, he stopped and asked me questions. They were, of course, questions that we had gone over several times when we reviewed his drafts, but I dutifully answered each question as patiently as I could. If he didn’t understand something in the estate documents, I could not allow him to sign. Finally, he laid the papers down in a neat stack on the table in front of him and told me that he was satisfied and ready to sign. Raylene had fallen asleep with her head back and was snoring loudly. Katy was frantically texting with someone on her cell phone and only Margie seemed to be paying any amount of attention.

I cleared my throat loudly to get everyone’s attention and began. When we were done, and Margie had checked and notarized everyone’s signatures, I was about to thank everyone when Mr. Mandelstam spoke up.

“NOW” he said in an unexpectedly commanding voice, “Now, vee have drink of visky!”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Excuse me?”

“Drink of visky!” he repeated.

“I’m sorry, I don’t…” I began.

He cut me off by pounding his small, withered fist on the table. “Not finish until drink of visky!”

I was about to explain that we do not generally keep bottles of whisky in the office and that we certainly did not drink at 10:30 in the morning. But I did not get the chance because Raylene slapped me backhanded in the shoulder and said loudly, “The man wants a drink of whisky. Give him a damn drink of whisky!”

I looked at Margie, who just sat there, smirking. Katy had gone back to texting on her phone.

Raylene gasped in exasperation and fished around in her pants pocket until she pulled out a dented flask of dubious cleanliness. She opened it and took a swig, then handed it to Mr. Mandelstam. He nodded appreciatively, wiped the spout with his shirt cuff, and then took a sip, before handing it to Margie, seated on his other side. She looked at me, still smirking, shrugged, and took a long draft. She then handed it to Katy.

Katy, looking up from her phone, eyed the flask as if someone were handing her a cold dead fish. Her face contorted into a look of disgust and she started to say, “Oh, no….”

“DRINK OF VISKY!” demanded Mr. Mandelstam.

“Drink of visky!” repeated Raylene, badly imitating his accent. Mr. Mandelstam smiled at Raylene as if they were old friends.

Katy closed her eyes tightly and took the smallest of sips before quickly handing the flask to me. What could I do? I gave the spout a good wipe with my sleeve and took a guzzle. Whatever the contents of the flask were, it was not whisky. At least not any kind of whisky I had ever encountered before. But it was alcoholic, whatever it was, and was very, very strong. I could feel it trying to peel the paint off the inside of my stomach.

But Mr. Mandelstam appeared to be satisfied. After he and Raylene had left, I turned to Margie and said, “Take the company card and go get a decent bottle of bourbon to keep on hand from now on. You never know when this sort of thing might come up again.”

It was after eleven when I was finally able to return to the thick stack of payroll records from the Skin Deep salon. The documents were confusing to read and only vaguely organized and I was interrupted repeatedly by urgent phone calls, a question from Katy about a statute of limitations on an easement dispute, and at least twice by Margie popping into my office to sign something or field a client query. At one point, I had read the same line at least fourteen times.

I looked at the clock and realized that it was almost two in the afternoon and I had not eaten since breakfast. I decided to take a lunch break and get back at it once I had some food in me and I could concentrate better. But, when I returned from lunch, Margie reminded me that I had a responsive brief due the next day, so I set the payroll records aside once more and spent the afternoon researching case law on Lexis for use in my brief.

The payroll records remained in a haphazard pile on the corner of my desk for two more days and were soon buried under a plethora of other documents relating to other cases. I never really forgot about them; I had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that I needed to get back to them, but some other “pants on fire” emergency always seemed to pop up, diverting my attention and distracting me.

On Friday morning, I was preparing for a ten o’clock motions hearing on a continuance matter in a minor construction dispute when Margie interrupted me with a phone message.

“She said her name was Sally Burton. Said that she heard you were looking to talk to her.”

“Sally Burton???” I thought. I was so focused on my upcoming motions hearing that I’d forgotten all about Sally Burton. She was the owner of the Skin Deep salon as well as sitting on the Leesburg Town Council. I looked at the pile of payroll records on the corner of my desk.

“Do you want her number?” Margie asked.

I did, but I was not ready to call her back. Not yet. I had questions for her, but I realized that I needed to go through her payroll records first. “Put it on the call log. I’ll ring her back after court.”

It was an especially crowded docket that morning. It was two weeks before Christmas and everyone who had any kind of civil case pending in the court was looking to get their various motions and matters resolved before the end of the year. My case was called near the end of the docket and, as a result, I did not return to the office until almost noon. Katy and Margie were heading over to China King on King Street to get lunch and they asked me if I wanted to come along. I almost said ‘yes’ before suddenly remembering the payroll records. I politely declined and headed straight for my desk.

It took a while, but I finally found the record I was looking for. Or rather, didn’t find it. As I suspected. There was no record for any employees having clocked in on the date that Lilith was murdered. I verified that against the weekly and monthly report for the same time period. There was no record of anyone having worked that day, and there was no time missing from the weekly or monthly reports. According to the payroll records, it looked as if the shop was closed on the day Lilith was killed, yet the police report indicated that Lilith’s credit card had been charged for an eyebrow treatment on that date.

The records had been generated using whatever accounting software the shop used to keep its books, and I am no one’s CPA, so I could not tell if the records had been altered. That begged the question: did Lilith really go to the salon that day? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was one of those things where the charge shows up on the bank statement a few days after the fact due to… merchant processing.. or …. something…. Or did someone alter the salon’s records?

There was one person who could answer that question. Sally Burton.

Copyright © J. Parris Magner, 2025