Pete-Bob Dix called Ben’s law office and got Joanne, whom Ben called PIC (for Person in Charge). He wanted to schedule a meeting with Ben for the children of Albert Chance, whose obituary had appeared today in the Thomasville Times-Enterprise. Albert had owned Murmuring Pines Plantation, having bought it after a “Liquidity Event,” the sale to Amazon of the warehouse company he had developed over a fifty year career.
“What do they want his advice about?” Joanne asked.
“They will have to explain that to Mr. Ben. It’s complicated,” Pete-Bob replied. Joanne could hear distress in Pete-Bob’s voice, not his usual huckster lilt.
She gave Pete-Bob a time two days off and got the children’s contact information.
Pete-Bob was a larger-than-life figure and a source of recurring amusement in the lives of Ben and Sam and other observers of the strange goings on in the Quail Belt culture.
The Quail Belt consisted of the lands between Albany and Tallahassee, occupied by a hundred plus grand estates, once cotton farms but bought up in the late 1800s by Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. It supported a unique culture in which very rich owners of the estates, in residence through the quail season, November through February, relied on native crackers and blacks to serve their sporting and domestic needs.
Pete-Bob had fit into the culture from his youth, working first as a dog trainer-hunt manager’s assistant, then moving up to trainer and plantation manager, before moving to auto sales, then land sales, his current declared occupation, but through it all involved on the side in bizarre get-rich-quick schemes of questionable ethics, like hosting a weekly floating high-stakes poker game, dog and horse trading, and pen hooking timber tracts from uninformed farmers’ widows. Ben had extracted Pete-Bob from legal scrapes arising from these schemes many times over the years.
When the meeting time arrived, Ben was in the library-conference room working on a brief. To Joanne’s surprise, Pete-Bob accompanied the Chance children, middle aged son Robert and daughter Jill. Distress was apparent on their faces, as it was on Pete-Bob’s.
Joanne showed the three into the room where Ben greeted them and motioned them to seats around the long table. On Ben’s end of the table rested a stack of law books. They declined Joanne’s offer of coffee, water, or Coca-Cola, the Quail Belt’s traditional soft drink honoring Mr. Robert Woodruff, a local legend.
“What can I help you with?” Ben asked, expecting the usual request for assistance with the administration of the father’s estate. Instead, Robert asked, “What claim has a woman claiming to be married to our father got against his estate when his will does not provide for her? “
“One third,” Ben answered without hesitation. Mortification filled Pete-Bob’s face. Robert and Jill turned their faces toward Pete-Bob and glowered. From that, Ben knew that another one of Pete-Bob’s schemes had gone awry.
Then he recalled when just after the concept of “portability” was put in the federal estate tax law, Pete-Bob had approached him about a partnership scheme with a retirement home manager involving arranging marriages between old, infirm and poor residents and wealthy elders with a view to transferring the estate tax exemption of the former to the latter. Pete-Bob and the retirement home manager wanted to earn commissions on arranging the marriage deals.
Ben had refused to advise Pete-Bob but warned him gratuitously that pursuit of the scheme would likely end Pete-Bob up in serious trouble. Apparently, Pete-Bob had pursued the scheme anyhow.
The plan had contemplated that the penniless retirement home resident would die before Albert Chance, who would inherit her estate tax exemption of $5 million +, saving Albert Chance’s children $2 Million+ of estate tax when he died. Of course the scheme contemplated, and required for success, that the bride die before the groom (Albert Chance). From Robert’s question it was apparent the bride of Albert had survived him and now stood to inherit at least a third of Albert’s considerable fortune.
“Can we have our father’s marriage annulled?” Jill asked. “We are confident the marriage was not consummated.”
“I am not going to advise you on that,” Ben said.
Pete-Bob’s distress grew visibly, as did the anger of Robert and Jill. Ben stood and by this gesture signaled the meeting was over. The three dejected visitors filed out.
***
That afternoon at five Sam Nixon MD arrived at Ben’s office for the curmudgeons’ daily drams of The Macallan, prescribed for them by Sam for their “tired old arteries,“ a quote Sam borrowed from the late stand-up comedian Georgie Jessel.
Ben invited Joanne to join them so she could hear his telling of the latest Pete-Bob Dix fiasco. She refused a libation because she had a five-thirty appointment to have her hair and nails “fixed.”
When Ben began his tale of woe, Sam smiled knowingly. Ben could tell Sam knew more of the Albert Chance marriage story than he did, and invited his friend to go first.
“Millie Chance, née Millie Chambers, was a long-time patient and friend. She was resident at the Methodist Retirement Home, a charity resident sponsored by her church where she had sung in the choir all her life. Her first husband had lost his retirement nest egg thanks to an incompetent broker who had him in bank stocks when the financial crisis and Great Recession hit. He’d died right after his portfolio collapsed, of shock or shame or both.
“When Millie was approached by Albert Chance with a proposal of marriage she asked my advice. I knew Chance had money and a quail plantation. I checked his reputation — Ben you may remember I asked you about Chance but you didn’t know him. Those I asked who did know him thought he was a pretty good guy. I told Millie, why not. She agreed. She said that she and Albert Chance never discussed money or a prenuptial agreement. She was five years older than Albert and by appearances not in great health though in fact she was and still is. She expected to die before him and obviously he expected that too.”
“The Chance children want to get the marriage annulled on grounds the marriage was not consummated,” Ben said.
Sam smiled. “No chance of that. Millie consulted me about that. I know for a fact it was, and evidence in her medical file in my office and probably in Albert Chance’s file in his physician’s will prove it.
“Millie insisted (on my advice) that she and Albert be tested for STDs before the marriage. And after the honeymoon Millie came to see me for advice on how to avoid discomfort from sex.”
“Too much information,” Joanne said as she blushed, stood and departed for her beauty shop appointment.