Free Death Benefits by Michael A. Kahn Page A

chair and stretching first my arms and then my legs, I looked over my notes, which covered six pages of my legal pad.
    Item # 1 . The first gap in Stoddard Anderson’s time sheets occurred two weeks before he took out the extra insurance, which was four months before his suicide. That juxtaposition could be purely coincidental. Or it could mean that during the missing days something happened that made Anderson either believe his life was in danger or decide to kill himself.
    Item # 2 . He took six trips during the last three months. Three overnight trips to Chicago, one to New York (two weeks before he died), one to Argentina (eight weeks before he died), and one to New Mexico (nine weeks before he died). He stayed at Hyatt Hotels each time, and all of the expenses he submitted appeared routine: restaurants, bars, dry cleaners, cab fares, tolls, parking, rental cars.
    Item # 3 . His time sheets did not reflect Dottie Anderson’s description of his work habits and long hours. He rarely recorded more than eight hours of work a day on his time sheets. There were several possible explanations, most of them innocent. Perhaps Stoddard Anderson failed to keep track of his hours during the day, or consistently underestimated those hours. Every major law firm in America has a few workhorses who lose hundreds of hours of billable time a year by simply forgetting to write them down on their time sheets. Another possibility was that Anderson didn’t record his nonbillable activities; as managing partner, he would have had a heavy load of administrative tasks on top of his billable client work. This explanation seemed less likely, however: His time sheets did include many entries for firm administration, client development, and other nonbillable matters. Then there were, of course, less innocent explanations for the long hours away from home that were not reflected on his time sheets, the most obvious of which would be charged to the nonbillable category “other woman.”
    Item # 4 . Neither his correspondence files nor his telephone message slips contained any apparent clues other than to confirm his secretary’s recollection of the three main clients he was involved with during the last few weeks of his life: There were numerous messages from, and an occasional business letter to, Albert Weidemeir (of the Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District), Remy Panzer (of the Panzer Gallery), and M. Salvatore Donalli (of Donalli Construction Company). The letters were entirely unremarkable examples of typical attorney-client correspondence.
    Item # 5 . The estate of Stoddard Anderson was much smaller than one might ordinarily assume. Ishmael Richardson’s comments about his stock market losses and the decline in the value of his real estate investments, along with Nancy Winslow’s observations, were borne out in the financial statements. Excluding the home in Clayton and the proceeds of the life insurance policy, the remaining estate was less than three hundred thousand dollars. He had by no means died a pauper, but it was clear that his widow needed the insurance benefits.
    Item # 6 . His personal appointment calendar included meetings with all three main clients during the last two weeks, along with a speaking engagement before the women’s auxiliary of a local hospital, a doctor’s appointment six days before he disappeared, a couple of board meetings, a golf date, and numerous luncheon engagements. Conspicuously absent from the calendar were many evening meetings.
    Item # 7 . The box of his personal correspondence consisted almost entirely of bills, solicitations, legal publications, and newsletters and similar correspondence from literally dozens of professional organizations, charitable institutions, trade associations, and the like. Nancy Winslow was right: The task of keeping track of Stoddard Anderson’s correspondence was enough to keep a secretary busy almost full time.
    There were, however, two