First of all the papers were very cold and there weren’t quite as many of them as he had expected. Much of the bulk of the briefcase was made up of three books: Schlinkert’s Modern Investigative Techniques, a lawyer’s manual on federal income tax regulations, and a popular title on business crime in paperback. I can’t read all this shit before Tuesday, he thought, like a complaining sophomore. The business crime title had the attraction of a florid cover with a bikini-clad floozy sitting on a tycoon’s lap. The tycoon smoked a stogie with a blurred grin and one of the girl’s thighs was out of proportion, Warlock saw with his artist’s eye. The first folder contained the sort of holdings he was familiar with through the foundation, mostly in a revokable trust agreement with a large bank in New York. Why not Detroit, he wondered? There were a few millions in ordinary blue chips, and an additional smaller folder carrying Rabun’s active trading account with E. F. Hutton, plus three hundred grand in their Money Management Fund, the limit, Warlock recognized. There were also several pages containing a series of orthodox tax shelters, and crypto-tax-dodge delayed retirement funds.

It was the second folder marked Private Holdings that held the surprises, a CPA’s nightmare, a mishmash of smaller venture schemes including timberlands in the Upper Peninsula, a shipping pallet manufacturing company, thirty percent of Vergil’s think tank, three motels, half of a marina on Singer Island, more than half of a weight reduction clinic in West Palm Beach, half a Ford garage in Kansas that named another Rabun as copartner. Toward the end of the folder the holdings diminished in Rabun’s share. At the end was a sucker-punch note from the good doctor. “Don’t be discouraged. Lunch at my house at noon, Tuesday. May I have a page, double spaced, of your insights?”