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“Wait, what?” Cock Worldwide is our joke whenever we pass one of the gigantic Locke Worldwide cranes that dominate the construction site of every giant project. I assure you, we’re not the only ones who make the joke, not the only ones who look at the logo of circles in the shape of a building and see quite a different image, not the only ones who think it’s funny to combine the sighting of a Cock Worldwide crane with erection commentary. “He and Bernadette are that Locke?”
“How many Lockes do you think fund New York hospitals?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Umm…”
She snorted, disgusted with my ignorance of New York’s leading luminaries. Billionaire Henry Locke is one of New York’s top ten most eligible bachelors, according to another image she showed me, this one from This Week NY.
Judging from the scowl he wears in the photo, Henry wasn’t any happier about being named one of New York’s leading bachelors than he was finding a fake dog whisperer in his mother’s hospital room.
“Most eligible bachelor if you’re a masochist,” I said, handing the phone back to her. “Did you call him starchitect?”
“It means star architect,” she’d informed me.
All in all, my little sister was far more enthused about the personage of Henry Locke than I was.
I’m draining the last of my champagne when the team of lawyers enters the room. They don’t say they’re lawyers, but I know lawyers when I see them. They take a table set up near the fireplace.
Members of the Locke clan take the front chairs that face the lawyers’ table. I take the back, the disreputable kid with her fluffy sidekick.
Members of the Locke clan wear nice outfits and they’re impossibly beautiful. The women all have amazing blowouts, though it’s possible they just have good hair genes. People with good hair genes tend to marry other people with good hair genes, and through the generations end up having kids with even better hair, and those kids find each other.
Like Pekinese noses, but far more desirable.
So that’s the theory I’m spinning as the reading of the will begins with a distribution of money from various overseas bank accounts.
Every time I think the bank accounts portion of the will reading is over, there are more overseas bank accounts for the lawyer to list off. It’s like a clown car of overseas bank accounts.
I really am pleasantly surprised Bernadette thought of Smuckers. It would be good if I could take him to the Park Avenue vet who has known him since puppyhood, and if there’s money for his fancy food, I’m all there. I’m guessing there will be some bill submittal process, which is fine with me as long as I don’t have to interact with these Locke heirs.
The lawyer has moved on to real estate parcels. I pull out my phone and check Twitter.
That takes forever, of course, and then we move onto the listing of unoriginal corporate names portion of the reading. It seems the Locke empire stretches far beyond Locke Worldwide. There is Locke Companies, Inc., Locke Holdings, Locke Capital Group, Locke Asset Management, Locke Architectural Services, and more.
I’m in the middle of an important operation that involves me retweeting a meme of a raccoon in a ballerina skirt when the listing of unoriginal names concludes with, “To Smuckers, whose intentions and decisions in all matters will be interpreted by Victoria Nelson.”
I look up to find a dozen threatening glares. Except Henry. A man like Henry doesn’t need to expend energy on things like a threatening glare. He just flicks his fingers and you’re destroyed.
The lawyer is continuing. Something about a term of Smuckers’s natural life or ten years, whichever comes first, and then something something something stipulate something.
“Um, could you repeat the whole Smuckers part?” I ask.
“This is ridiculous.” Henry stands. “I contest this. All of it.”
The lawyer holds up his hand. “Henry.” He says it in a calming tone, a warning tone. “Please recall that any challenge to the will nullifies the real estate and holdings provisions. Upon any legal challenge…”
“She can’t do this,” a woman says.
I stand. “Please, can somebody explain…”
“Come off it,” an older man says. “You know exactly what happened.”
After my dad died, one of Mom’s less scummy boyfriends took us to Cocoa Beach one spring, and at night we’d shine lights into holes in the sand and little crabs would pop out and scurry away. I feel the way those crabs must have felt, suffering the glares on every inch of my skin, wanting to scurry away.
But I know not to obey that instinct. It just makes things worse. You have to stand up for yourself, or at least try.
“Can I just get that last part repeated? Whatever came before the To Smuckers?”
“You don’t know?” Henry asks, all steely calm. “Are you sure you didn’t help Bernadette write the will herself?”
