Blind Luck (26 page)

Grayson took a stack of money from his breast pocket while he drove and placed it on the dashboard. Dave continued to stare out the side window.

“There’s your cut.”

Dave didn’t even look at the money.

“There’s twenty grand there. That’s half a year’s salary for some people. Sweeping floors, losing their souls. You should be more appreciative.”

Dave still didn’t pick up the money.

Grayson turned down the Japanese lessons. “I’m glad you’re with my sister, it’s been good for her.”

“Glad enough to make her doubt me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You told her I said I’d leave the city to stop this insanity.”

Grayson smiled far too easily, considering what they’d just witnessed. “That’s nothing, just more motivation.”

“It wasn’t nothing. It was enough to have her doubt me.”

“You’ll make it up to her. Buy her something with this,” he said, tapping the stack of money with an index finger.

Dave turned again to the window, causing Grayson to shake his head. “You’ve got twenty grand on the dash and a screw face, yet you act like it’s our fault. When you start embracing our relationship for the opportunity that it is, all these inconveniences you don’t like will stop, but until then we’ll fuel the business however we have to. It’s your choice.”

Dave pointed to the next corner. “Right here’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Grayson pulled the car over, and Dave got out. He stood outside the car with the passenger door open for a moment until Grayson tossed him the stack of money he’d left on the dash.

“We’ll be in touch.”

He wanted to throw the money back in the man’s face, but between what he owed Otto and the fact that his dad needed a new place to live, he knew he couldn’t afford to be so rash. Before he could give it a second thought, Grayson drove off. Dave stood for a moment on the corner and looked at the stack of money before walking along to an intersection, where he crossed. He had crossed that intersection thousands of times in his life, but now it felt like visiting a gravestone. He stopped and stood in front of what had once been his place of work. Plywood filled all the windowpanes. The metal frames and concrete were bent and chipped from the crash, but the site was otherwise clean.

It already looked more like another store gone out of business than the site of a bizarre tragedy.

A woman in her fifties with short hair and thin-rimmed glasses looked hard at the crash site before turning to Dave. “Do you know what happened here?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I live in Barrie now, but my husband and I lived in this neighbourhood for fifteen years, and he always had his accounting done here. It looks like some sort of accident, maybe a fire.”

He wanted to tell her about the truck. He wanted to tell her how horrible it felt to be the only survivor, and that part of him felt so guilty, it was hard to live naturally, but another part of him felt so grateful that it was impossible to forget. He wanted to tell her all of this, but he said nothing.

“I don’t know,” he said, just dismissively enough to stop the conversation.

He remembered how nervous he’d felt on the first day of work. Four coffees before eight didn’t help, but he wanted to be early, so he got up at six, then he found himself there at seven with the doors locked. He waited outside sipping coffees for half an hour until Mr. Richter showed up. Most bosses would have opened the door, given him a quick tour of the office and wished him best of luck, but Mr. Richter had insisted that they go for breakfast. And not once during breakfast had he mentioned accounting or business.

He wanted to know if Dave had siblings, where he went to school, what part of the city he lived in, and he told Dave about his four-year-old golden retriever and the new fence he was building in his backyard. Within ten minutes, he had Dave so relaxed that he wanted to work for Richter for the rest of his life.

A homeless man stumbled out from the alley beside the building, and Dave snapped into the moment.

“Spare some change?” the man asked. His teeth were crooked and purple.

Dave fished in his pockets for all the change he could find and put it in the man’s hands.

“Can you see them too?” he asked with a finger pointed at the boarded-up storefront.

“See what?”

“The ghosts. They’re everywhere in there.”

Dave looked at the way the man’s eyes bobbed in his head. What should have been the whites were veiled by thick, bloodshot vessels. Spittle stained the front of his shirt, and he smelled strongly of some sort of cleaning fluid. Dave gave him five more dollars and ushered him back down the alley. When he came back out to the street, two teenagers were stapling promotional posters for a rapper on the plywood. They had no idea what had happened to the property, and they didn’t care. The plywood made a nice frame for the posters.

“Don’t do that,” Dave said, stepping towards them.

“What?” the one with a backwards baseball cap asked.

“Don’t put these up here.”

“Why not?”

“There was an accident here. People died. This shouldn’t be advertising space.”

The teen looked at him for a moment then over to his friend, who was too into the music pumping from his headphones to notice the conversation. “Sorry, I didn’t know.” The teen tapped his friend on the arm. “Not here, man.”

“What? Why not?”

“There was an accident here, people died.”

They moved on, and Dave stepped closer to the building, then regret hit him hard enough that he had to steady his legs. He missed the place. He’d complained about it daily, considered leaving regularly, called it boring, a waste of his life and lame, but with it gone, he wanted nothing more than to have it back so he could live just one of those days over again. He missed reading the paper on the bus ride every morning, the smells from the dessert shop on the corner, the Korean woman who had served him coffee every day, who always had a kind word despite not knowing his name, and the Jamaican food across the street that he ate every Wednesday. He missed the birthday cakes that people at work took turns buying once a month, whether it was somebody’s birthday or not, he missed Shannon’s acerbic rants about her neighbours’ complaints and poor taste in flowers, Irene’s running fashion commentary and how she’d teased Todd for his terrible taste in clothing, and Mr. Richter’s steady smile and easy-going nature that made every moment with him as unthreatening and pleasant as listening to music from the Fifties. He even missed Todd. Because despite their dislike of each other and despite his piggish eating habits, Dave had always known that Todd was the best accountant at the firm.

He’d learned more about accounting from working with Todd than he ever had at school, and he missed that very much. He regretted not appreciating the place more, and the shame of disrespecting his colleagues that way made his eyes sting. Then a hand touched Dave’s shoulder and startled him.

“Dave Bolden?”

“Yeah.”

“My name’s Phil Bryer, I’m Mr. Richter’s attorney.”

The name made Dave wince. Phil Bryer, the man who’d left him a message a week since the accident. From Dave’s perspective, the man was a shark turning tragedy into business. Phil was in his forties. No taller than five-seven, his heavy frame made him bull-legged, but he had a smile that was disarming. He extended his hand, which Dave shook.

“I could have used you here a half-hour ago. Those vultures from the insurance company are low-balling us, and it would’ve been nice for them to hear an employee’s perspective.”

Dave’s eyes didn’t leave the storefront.

“Have you received any of my messages?”

“I got them.”

“Well, I don’t blame you for not calling back. I’m sure you’ve got a lot on your mind, but we really do have some things we need to discuss. Why don’t I take you out for a quick beer, and we can seize the moment?”

Resigned to the situation, Dave nodded and led the way to the Saunders pub on the corner.

“Do you mind if we take a booth at the back?” Dave asked, hoping to go as far into the shadows as possible.

“Not at all.”

Dave was relieved to see that the waitress was new, and no more than twenty. She could care less about the history of neighbouring businesses.

“Stella fine?” Phil asked.

Dave nodded and kept his head down.

“A pitcher of Stella, please.”

The waitress smiled and walked away without looking at Dave.

“Is this your first time back to the building?” Phil asked.

“No, I need to come back sometimes.”

“I understand. The press really didn’t want to leave this one alone. You would have thought it was a conspiracy murder with how many calls we received about Mr. Richter’s history. They really wanted to run with it, but we held our ground. You must have got a few calls.”

“I ignored them.”

“Goodman.”

The waitress delivered the pitcher and two pint glasses, and Phil paid before Dave could reach for his wallet.

“Thank you,” she said as if he’d given her a two hundred dollar tip instead of five.

“You’re welcome.”

The waitress moved to the next table while they both sipped their pints, until Phil broke the silence. “What would you say she is, nineteen, twenty?”

“About that.”

“It’s a great age. Everything in front of you.”

Dave took a longer drink from his pint and glanced at the bar to make sure the bartender wasn’t staring.

Phil leaned forward like it was time to talk seriously. “I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not,” he said, pointing at Dave with his pint glass, “but Mr. Richter didn’t have any living relatives.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Mr. Richter’s love was his business. As he says in his will, ‘The smell of the office, the importance of the work, and most of all, the employees.’ His business was his life, and he thought of anyone he worked with as his family. This may come as a shock to you, Dave, but it was Mr. Richter’s wish that in the event of his death that his assets would be divided equally among his employees. But as a result of the extraordinary circumstances, you become the sole beneficiary. The sole beneficiary to ten million dollars.”

“What?”

“Mr. Richter left you his inheritance. Which means all of his personal assets, his life insurance policy and the insurance claim on the business.”

“That can’t be.”

Phil put a folder on the table and turned it so that Dave could see the paperwork. “It’s all right here for you to digest as the shock wears off. I’ll leave it with you, and of course I’ll be in touch to sort out some of the administrative bureaucracy. Until then, my only advice is this, do the man justice, you just inherited his life’s work.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s a lot to process, and being the man Mr. Richter was, he knew it would be, so he included this letter.” He slid a sealed envelope along the table. “It’s not addressed to you personally, because he assumed the money would be divided, but you’ll get a feel for the spirit it’s written in.”

“I can’t take his money.”

Phil finished his beer. “This isn’t an offer, Dave. All this paperwork makes his wishes official once he’s dead, and his wishes were for you to have the money. Now, if you want to speak to someone about how to manage the money or how to invest it, I’ve got a number of people you can call. And if you decide you want to give it away, I’ve got some opinions about where to give, but if you ask me, and I knew the man for over thirty years, he didn’t leave it for you to give away. He could’ve done that himself.”

Thirty-Three

Home was not home any more, so Dave didn’t want to open the letter there. After leaving Phil Bryer, he walked a few blocks. His thirty-five years in the city had conditioned him to respond to the word “millionaire” with euphoria, but his mind told him that the inheritance made things worse. He didn’t want to profit from anyone’s death, let alone Mr. Richter’s. A coffee shop with a rusty sign reading DINER felt private enough, so he went to the back of the place, ordered a coffee from an obese man with a moustache and set the envelope on the table. Circumstance overwhelmed him. If Mr. Richter’d had a wife or children, the envelope wouldn’t have been in front of him; if he had decided to apply to any of the larger accounting firms his dad had wanted him to, the envelope wouldn’t have been in front of him, and if he hadn’t slept in because of a hangover that fateful morning, the envelope wouldn’t have been in front of him. He opened the envelope from corner to corner. If he didn’t embrace the moment, he’d risk throwing it in the garbage. The paper smelled like a cologne Dave didn’t know the name of, but he was sure was reserved for understated people over fifty. He held the paper close to his nose and inhaled. He hoped to be half that gentle one day. With the letter spread out on the counter, he began to read, and as he read, he couldn’t help but adopt Mr. Richter’s voice.

Good morning, afternoon or evening,

You are all probably more than a little confused right now. Why would the boss that never gave you more than a three per cent raise leave you all the money he had in the world? Was he that alone, disconnected or pathetic? Those would all be fair questions, seeing as people don’t leave ten million dollars to their employees everyday, but none of them are the right questions.

The right question would be: Did he really care that much about his business? And the answer to that is a heartfelt yes. You were the remaining people that drove the business I dreamed of, and as a result I want to leave my money to you. Nothing came close in life to making me as happy as my business, and as my love, soul and passion, it wouldn’t have happened without you. Many people left the business as their careers grew over the years, but you are the ones that kept it running until my end. I do ask, however, that you embrace the spirit that just made you rich. Go out and spend, make your loved ones happy, then decide how you can use this money to start your own legacy. Start your own business, pour your soul into it and live the dream. Each of you helped me to live out my dream every day, and for that you should be rewarded with the opportunity to live your own. Thank you for your diligence, care and passion in making Richter Accounting my one and only home.