Her own financial papers were wedged in pell-mell with the vet bills and newspaper clippings. There wasn’t much to them. She drew a monthly Social Security check, but apparently the box factory she’d worked in hadn’t been union. Or at least there didn’t seem to be any pension plan beyond the U.S. government. The Bank of Lake View had paid her real estate taxes for her and looked after her modest savings. They apparently had also paid her utility bills. I found a couple of copies of the quarterly statements they sent Byron Frizell in San Francisco detailing their transactions on her behalf.

Social Security doesn’t have an electronic transfer system. They had to send their checks to Mrs. Frizell herself, and she had to be responsible enough to remember to take them to the bank. She apparently was collected enough mentally to do this, since her passbook, which I found under a 1972 Jewel flyer advertising Purina at ten cents a pound, had regular monthly entries.

That was a feeble straw to catch at, that my self-appointed client was mentally alert enough to take her money to the bank. And it didn’t help deal with the painful condition she was in right now. Obviously no one could say she was competent to handle her own affairs today.

On closer inspection the passbook didn’t look like much of an ally, either. Mrs. Frizell had brought her check to the Lake View bank on the tenth of every month for eighteen years, but she’d stopped abruptly in February, when the balance stood at just over ten thousand. What had she done with them since? Was I going to find four checks floating in this paper sea someplace?

I rubbed the back of my neck and my shoulders with my filthy fingers. I felt hollow and depressed. I wasn’t finding evidence of Mrs. Frizell’s vibrant mental state. And certainly not of a cache of assets worth inveigling her estate for.

I went to the kitchen to rinse myself off under the tap. Even though the weather had broken with last night’s storm, I was stiff and sweaty from my work in the landfill. The sink was dirty enough that I didn’t want to drink from the tap, and I was pretty thirsty. I should have thought to bring a Thermos from home. One half hour more and I’d pack it in.

When I got to the living room and surveyed the mess with fresher eyes, I was tempted to quit on the spot, but a nagging sense that I’d invested too much time to go away empty-handed pushed me forward. Of course, that’s the classic mistake that drives businesses into bankruptcy: “We’ve put five years and fifty billion into this worthless product, we can’t abandon it now.” But the impulse pushes you deeper into the quag.