Free Death Benefits by Michael A. Kahn Page B

items of possible interest in his correspondence. One was a bill from the postal service for rental of a post office box downtown. I jotted down the PO box number and added a note to check that out. The other item was the monthly statement from the St. Louis Club that had been among the papers the police found in his briefcase. The only significant entry for that final month was a $145.78 charge for dinner on June 8, which was ten days before he disappeared. The size of the bill suggested that Anderson had not dined alone that night.
    I checked his appointment calendar. There was no entry for June 8. Maybe a spur-of-the-moment dinner with someone, I said to myself.
    Then I remembered his pocket calendar—the one the police had found among his papers at the motel. I pulled it out of the manila envelope Dottie Anderson had given me and flipped to the date of the dinner. He had printed the word “ParaLex” in the evening portion of that day. That was all. Maybe a new client?
    I mulled that over for a moment and reached for the telephone book. I found the number for the St. Louis Club. A man named Philip answered and identified himself as the maitre d’ of the main dining room. I told him briefly who I was and asked him to check his reservation book to see if he could tell who Stoddard Anderson had had dinner with on the night of June 8. A few moments later Philip apologetically told me that all that the reservation book showed was that Mr. Anderson had dined with another person that night in the Marquette Room, which was one of the club’s small private dining rooms. Claude was the maitre d’ on duty the night of June 8, Philip told me, but tonight was his night off. He would be back at the club tomorrow at noon, and Philip promised that Claude would call me then. I thanked him and gave him the office number.
    I pulled my legal pad over and jotted down “ParaLex??” I stared at the word. Then I circled it. There. A clue, I said to myself. Just like I really knew what I was doing.
    I pushed the legal pad away and looked at the two appointment calendars—the big desk one and the small pocket one. They seemed like a good source of people to contact. As I was getting up to make a photocopy of several pages from the calendars, my phone rang. It was Benny Goldberg, calling from Chicago.
    â€œSo, what do you have so far?” he asked.
    I went through everything I had found in the documents. Maybe Benny would see a pattern where I could not.
    â€œSounds like ole Stoddard was shtupping some babe,” Benny said.
    â€œYou think?”
    â€œSure. Just ’cause his labanzas go into vapor lock around his old lady don’t mean they don’t function around someone else.”
    â€œLabanzas?” I said after a pause, a smile on my lips. “Where did you get that one, Mr. Esperanto?”
    â€œPortuguese, I think.”
    â€œI thought you said fishteras was the Portuguese term.”
    â€œFishteras, labanzas, whatever. I’m telling you, the guy was shtupping some babe. What’s his secretary look like?”
    â€œShe’s pretty. But I don’t think so.”
    â€œShe’s a likely suspect, Rachel. They usually are. Ask around the office. It might be her. Or one of the paralegals. Yeah, probably a paralegal.”
    â€œMaybe. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Hey, have you ever heard of a company called ParaLex?”
    â€œParaLex? ParaLex…nah. Listen, kiddo, you need some help down there? I could always come down. It’s slow around the office, and there’s a terrific barbecue joint down there. It’s called Roscoe—Roscoe something or other.”
    â€œOh?”
    Benny was a barbecue fanatic. For years he had kept track of his favorites on a set of index cards that he continually updated, filling the backs and sides with arcane annotations. This summer he had transferred the entire file to a data bank in the personal computer in his