This fictional story eventually includes descriptions of sex between adult males. If you are a minor or if this material is illegal where you live, do not read this story. Go away. If this material offends you, do not read it. Go away. Please donate to Nifty to support their efforts to provide these stories. Remember that authors depend on feedback for improvement and encouragement.
The Schuyler Fortune-4
Then I realized I was still busy overthinking things, got tired of the emotional roller coaster, showered, and fell into bed. I slept very well. Until I was pleasantly wakened by Marcus-tender kisses at my navel and places.
The trust had given me enough money to hire my own interior decorator. I didn't want Wyoming rustic for SoHo nor did I want Tennessee pine-knot planks on the floor.
I didn't want Danish slink or old Louis XIV pieces getting older without use and I certainly could have cared less about ambience until a knock on the door one day changed the way I thought about a few things.
A drop-dead gorgeous woman, perhaps thirty-five years old, honey blonde, this side of Rubenesque, along with what I guessed was a slightly younger male assistant, at least older than I, dressed well, stood at my door at three p.m. and introduced themselves as the Curator of European Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her assistant.
I, forewarned by their secretary some days earlier, invited them in and asked them if they desired a drink of anything. They declined.
Ms. Elizabeth Zachary, the curator, told me about herself in terms of her resume, which she handed to me. At the bottom of the first page was a private Met website with initial password for VIP patrons and friends of the museum. A curator at the Met for twelve years, she knew every major donor by sight and addressed them by their first names. She and my mother had been buddies. She began by expressing her own sorrow over our shared loss and I sensed a kind, tender, person with a genuine interest in life and art. I liked her gentle, intuitive way of relating.
She reviewed the relationship of the museum and her department with my mother and hoped that I would be amenable to continuing the relationship. She paused for an answer and I decided I shouldn't refuse the offer. So, I didn't. Refuse it, that is.
We spoke for an hour that day about the business of art, the three of us. We had a lot in common. We approached art with different passions at first. Their approach was about conservation, education and accumulation for collection and display. I began with collection and investment, open to education and conservation. They inquired about insurance and storage money eventually and crucially, in my case, whether I planned to continue the right of first refusal on my mother's contracts.
I told them that I had funding to continue my mother's art commitments and would do so, except for those art objects with expired rights, naturally.
Those contracts with enforceable language had to be honored. Of those art objects with expired contracts, choices loomed for me to make. There were some pieces that I just didn't relate to. Others didn't present a long-term investment prospect.
My advisory panel had assured me that I had the right to sell those and spend the money as I wanted.
She interviewed me, for heaven's sake. She really did. I had the constant feeling that if one answer wasn't right, I would be deemed unsuitable or something. After a half hour or so, I caught up with the flow having decided that both sides for very specific business and art advantages desired the relationship with the Museum. To be more specific, the business of art was on both our minds.
Elizabeth Zachary then asked me the question that defined one of those moments in life where you look back and see a turning point.
"Do you want to keep your art at home or in a vault?" she asked.
"At home where I can see it."
"Do you want to live in a museum or a house or a combination?"
I blinked, thought about it and decided it was a fair question that deserved a dignified answer.
I always wanted to live at home, not in a museum. I understood the difference as she presented it. If I simply chucked these fabulously expensive and irreplaceable pieces side by side on a jam-packed set of walls, I would indeed be living in a museum of sorts.
I didn't want to visit all of my art objects (in other words never see them) and wasn't about to donate them. For one thing, it wasn't the Schuyler or the Ross mentality to just give stuff away, unless there dangled a tax deduction for some unwanted object on the line as bait.
On the other hand, I didn't see a future for a Rembrandt in my kitchen either.
"A combination, I guess."
She looked around the loft, looked at me again, then asked me if my interior decorator had experience in showcasing important pieces of art into a home setting. I had to say no. We decided to have her assistant, Bill Lucca, to find the appropriate people to interview. I was eager to work on a project with Elizabeth and Bill. I liked them and enjoyed their company.
Nearly a week later, Bill called with the name of a Metropolitan museum curator's wife who had done some work in similar circumstances for a client. He asked me to meet him on the Upper West side at an address within a mile of the Cloisters.
When we met there, Bill told me he had already seen her work at this address a few years ago at a party there and he was impressed enough to remember the circumstances precisely.
A twelve-year-old boy opened the door cautiously after a couple or three locks rattled open from the inside. He called out to his mom, "Visitors!" A pretty brunette woman in a creamy-yellow jumpsuit came into the foyer and invited us in.
A Goya sat enshrined straight ahead along with a Stuart and a small Monet in an eclectic non-cluttered way on the far wall on a fiery red background. The noisy visual blow in an otherwise off-white room stunned me in a good way. The effect combined with comfortable furniture and a blooming, fragrant Coelogyne orchid somewhere was an understated and comfortable place to view millions of dollars of art.
I fell in love that day with the notion of ambience. I wanted to give my art a real home, my home.
That summer I spent much of my time off work planning the Sotheby sale of dozens of pieces that didn't fit with my ideas about art investment and were mine to sell since the museums involved had not invoked their first refusal rights to buy. That sale was attended well by collectors and dealers from around the world.
The trust lost a motion in court asking that all proceeds from the auction be paid to the Schuyler trust. My attorneys were able to produce overwhelming evidence obtained in large part from Mary that the art had belonged to my mother personally outside the trust's knowledge, control or ownership, producing contracts with museums and dealers signed by Carol Schuyler-Ross herself personally without trust assistance. The court denied the trust's motion and awarded the Sotheby proceeds to me directly as Carol's heir.
The judge in the case shook his head and wondered aloud why the case ever came to his courtroom as I was to be the trust's sole beneficiary in `full' control of all of the trust's acknowledged art holdings soon.
The upshot of the court's ruling on the motion left the full proceeds in my hands minus the trust's overhead costs. The court ruled that Carol's objects and private cash had been specifically left to me, not the trust.
I remember thinking at the time that the court motion by the trust was more than odd. Why would `my' trust go after something that was so obviously mine?
Who at the trust was behind the proceedings that weren't free, that required legal fees to be spent for nothing? I wasn't happy about it and after consulting a high-powered, urbane, tall, astonishingly good-looking attorney in Manhattan named Paul who specialized in arbitration that I had known in college, a letter was fired off to the trust promising a cease and desist order if the behaviors recurred.
In addition, the letter promised a full review at the appropriate time of such actions by one Michael Schuyler-Ross (I had nearly split my mouth open grinning when I read my copy of the letter), when he, (me, myself and I) reached the age of responsibility for the trust and implied that heads could roll. I wondered what the trust board would think of that letter.
The proceeds after taxes mounted into the high hundreds of millions of dollars. I, in my Levi jeans, white wife-beater, and tan cowboy hat with high brown leather cowboy boots swaggered into the Fidelity investment house on 3rd avenue one Wednesday afternoon in late August and asked to see Marcus. The receptionist by that time knew me on sight and we were friends, having overcome the awkward first meeting and sent me on up to Marcus.
"Marcus", I began, after locking his door behind me, "I need you."
I said this while looking at his junk and was rewarded with a vision, a giant twitch of his cock struggling to achieve full height under his Armani suit-pants.
"I believe we could figure something out." He turned and picked up a few stacks of papers off his desk and neatly laid them on a credenza near the desk. He then turned his laptop off and came over to me, took me in his arms and I inhaled the Marcus scent in the nape of his neck.
There was a long couch along one wall of his office. His suit pants came down quickly as did my jeans, both of us being unencumbered with briefs or boxers... and after a few minutes I sat comfortably on his cock, facing him, kissing him, panting, physically and emotionally thrilled. He leaned over to suck my nipples, then inserted a really active finger alongside his cock, his other hand jacking my marble-hard dick until we both quietly came. He dressed. I waited a bit, playing with myself, waving my cock at him.
After we came back down from that peak and were breathing normally again, he stepped into his private bathroom and brought a warm, wet small towel and wiped me. He threw the towel in the laundry, I pulled my outfit together and I sat in front of his desk, he behind it.
"How may I be of service to you today, Mr. Schuyler-Ross?"
We both cracked up.
For a minute.
"Marcus, I love you."
"Thank you, Michael," he replied. "I love you too. Will that be all?" More hysterics.
It might have been at that point where we both became aware of some voices and shuffling outside his office door. A tentative knock, then a louder thunk on the door at the same time his intercom buzzed.
"Sir, the Managing General Partner needs to speak with you."
"I'm with a client. Please hold my calls. I will be out when we are done."
He turned his laptop on again and a tone sounded, announcing an urgent message. He read it...read it again...then looked at me with a question in his eyes.
"Michael," he began frowning a little, "did you know a wire was due here from Sotheby's Art Auction House or an affiliated financial institution this afternoon?"
It was too good to not let this one play on and play out. I had overlooked the fact that I had known long enough to get used to the total. Marcus had not known.
"Oh," I mumbled, "I guess I had heard they might send one."
Marcus clicked into his email from Fidelity's Office of the Controller, read it once, read it twice...his pupils dilated but his face otherwise, to his everlasting credit, showed zero trace of any struggle to suppress visible emotion, no emotion at all as first he read out loud:
"The Office of the Controller to Mr. Marcus Jones, Managing General Partner, Fidelity Investors Third Avenue location, New York City: a wire for 829 million dollars has just been received from Sotheby's Art Auction House affiliate banking, New York to the account of Mr. Michael Schuyler-Ross. We will notify Mr. Ross separately per Fidelity Investors policy. Congratulations!"
The only time I was ever spanked as an adult, at least that day, was when Marcus with only a little malice aforethought, slowly unplugged the intercom, stood up, came around the desk, kissed me, removed my jeans, pulled my briefs down, laid me across his lap on the couch and spanked my ass really hard as I laughed uncontrollably.
Then he fucked me again gently rubbing my scarlet-red ass, then slapping it hard again with each thrust into my hole; my cock bigger and harder from being spanked, an unbelievable turn-on, my cock rubbing against the couch as he lambasted my butt. It hurt and turned me on all at once.
He came so hard I thought briefly of calling 911 but decided I would resuscitate him by sucking his cock. Sure enough, there was enough nerve action left in the tip of his cock to communicate with his brain and he woke right up.
"Anything else I should know about in advance or perhaps expect in order to give you better broker service, sir?", Marcus asked with mock vehemence.
"Ooooooh, daddy, I'll be sure to let you know everything...sometime."
"Unbelievable the things I have to do twice over because you don't keep me informed as your broker."
This game went on over time to become one of our favorites until our inventive minds found even more fun things to do.
I told him about mom's gem collections then, but not its extent or value and he asked me if there were any more surprises he should know about. I just smiled at him. He knew there was a trust looming in a few years. He had no clue about the size of the trust.
Then he passed out on the couch. I let him sleep.
Marcus and I took a day or two to brainstorm the investing strategy for that windfall. There followed some tax implications, but the caliber of our tax attorneys was such that they earned their salaries many times over that year.
From all that cash, I decided to purchase loose gems purchased from dealers in New York and Amsterdam including a felt bag that I had our buyers fill with flawless pink diamonds, a few very large, perfect, blue sapphires and not subject to property taxes. These I added to the gem collection in the Manhattan repository. I also decided to close the Philadelphia repository and move all of its contents to the Manhattan facility along with its staff. I controlled access to both and the dual expenses didn't make sense anymore now that dad was dead.
Marcus had asked me to consider some gold bullion. I had not seriously thought about gold as an investment since it wasn't portable in the mass and value I was considering. It was subject to a sometimes-volatile risk of loss in value, didn't return a dividend, and the purchase price wasn't always ideal at the ideal time of investment.
I still wasn't used to the idea that all investments acted as a partial hedge to loss in another sector or type of investment. We agreed to a possible future purchase but left the storage location up for grabs.
I had other ideas for the bulk of that money. I would need cash for my home/museum.
I was worth many billions of dollars through the trust and more through my mother's inheritance and my earned funds. These funds grew faster than I could spend them even at very low rates of interest. I didn't advertise that fact to anyone at that point, not even Marcus.
Loss didn't scare me, precisely, but I didn't welcome it either.
I was more afraid of being alone, of not being cared about, of faith, of looking stupid, of human losses, of looking like a hayseed, of my sexuality, of my blooming understanding of my gender preference, of not ever having children, of having children, of marriage, of life. But I wasn't afraid of not being able to pay my bills.
That summer I met Jill Staceworth a few times, she the Upper West Side decorator whose living room creation and other ideas about making art an integral part of a home had inspired me. She talked about security, preservation in different climates, ways to create microclimates in the home for certain pieces, and about rotation of pieces at intervals to temperature-controlled, dry storage.
She explained that the museum had giant rooms with great master's works next to each other and that each room had a prescription for a climate that matched the object's age, the pigments generally used by that artist and the average frame type in the room. One would not, for example, use the same humidity and temperature for wood frames versus titanium frames. Security might vary from one artist's works to another's.
In one's home, those problems were multiplied since the rooms were smaller. Security, backup systems and personnel training needs were changed. I was confident those challenges could be met. The fact that one's great aunt Martha had a John Singer Sargent piece over the mantel in her Boston home subject to food riots and thunderstorms for sixty years with no apparent damage didn't matter. I wasn't going to come up with coherent art policy from someone's single experience.
Ms. Staceworth told me that the loft wasn't going to provide what I envisioned, even had the landlord been willing to let me carve it up into rooms with complicated environments.
The search for more suitable digs was on.
I combed the real estate maps of Manhattan planning on a ten-foot rise in sea level by 2020 and hoping it didn't happen. I focused on building a museum where I could live and display mom's (well, now my art) in a world-class venue. Again, I wasn't out to build another Metropolitan Museum of Art and especially not another Guggenheim. I wasn't out collecting funds for the next major piece to own.
I could afford any real estate. The problem was availability. Small Fifth Avenue townhouses were out. Hotels were out. Many skyscrapers were old and out. Not everyone wanted to sell the properties that were on my shortlist.
I decided to pick a square block just north of Central Park, had the Trust contact all of the owners and make them a very attractive offer including free relocating, free new digs, and contracts with existing service businesses in the block. Not long after, I owned one square block of Manhattan and demolition of every building on the block had begun.
The architects and city planners were involved early on. The city was thrilled at the prospect of a major art collection adding to their cultural treasures for tourists and academic study--more fervently because Elizabeth and Bill had convinced the Metropolitan Museum board to back the idea because acquisitions for the large museum were frequently facilitated by Schuyler money. The board and the city talked to each other.
Everyone's back was scratched in some way. The architects listened, cooperated, and appointed two of their principal partners to form and lead two separate competing projects.
After months of intensive work by the two teams, Jill and Elizabeth, Bill, the Trust principals, and I met at the Trust offices again and interviewed the architect partner leading each project.
One of the consultants on team A was listed as Jack Darnell, a name that I recognized as a kid from Flourtown and my childhood. I remember reading the name and looking at the team photo out of idle curiosity and thinking there were a thousand guys with that name most likely...his team photo didn't look like the kid I once knew except for perhaps the hair color, the eyes and the grin...I plunged back into the details of the project, not ready take on the elephants, in retrospect.
The winning project happened to be team B. Their interpretation involved a maximum-security museum/home in the center of that leveled city block. The surrounding park with a supervised children's playground, a grand fountain at one corner with wonderful white marble statues of the Nine Muses of the arts in the center, provided a friendly welcome to the surrounding community.
The corners of the block were blunted just as the Eixample in Barcelona with angled corners so that drivers could see on-coming side traffic better. The resultant cobblestoned corners formed a triangle of sidewalk, each with a drinking fountain and several comfortable benches. Other benches were scattered through the park.
The house was very large. It resembled a classic English manor of four stories on steroids with three enormous wings, center and two side wings angled slightly back designed with only a hint of Inigo Jones updated four hundred years or so. Unseen to the public were the 4 stories below ground.
On massive concrete pylons reinforced with steel placed deep into bedrock, a floor of thick reinforced concrete was elevated three feet above the rock.
Sensors for moisture accumulation, humidity, motion, foundation movement and temperature were placed in the space just above the bedrock.
A very thick layer of titanium was placed three feet above the concrete. Another group of sensors below the titanium monitored the space above the concrete.
Another thick concrete layer formed the basement floor and walls, encased in several layers of impermeable thick plastic.
Solid marble and granite blocks were placed to build the mansion's doubled-walled foundations. Multiple redundant security, air conditioning, heating, Internet, communications, plumbing, electrical, and lighting systems were installed. I wanted the park, its entrances, and the museum to be able to stand alone if every utility was temporarily or permanently down.
We had anticipated problems. Like every other New Yorker, we expected strikes, crime, looting, riots, arson, terrorism, and hosts of unfortunate outcomes that rarely happened. We contracted with private garbage removal specialists. We had fire suppressant systems (both chemical and oxygen-depleting varieties).
A new Spanish system for filtering air at the Prado Museum made sense to me for a couple of reasons. First, dust motes in sunlit rooms distracted viewers of fine art and perhaps more important, any dirty bomb in the local area carried ionizing radiation not by air molecules, but by dust and debris particles. A system of multiple intake vents in the park servicing an enormous system of self-cleaning air filters was installed.
I had seen a system in Zurich meant to prevent damage from riots and looting which I was eager to try.
The architect's design for the park included fourteen-foot high closely-spaced vertical titanium fenceposts, beautifully spiraled, each post bisected and diverging in direction at the top, inward and outward curves to sharp points at the top.
This fence was placed some fifteen feet from the curb all around the block. Grass for a five-foot strip inside the fence was laid and then formal hedge-plantings were created just inside the grass strip. There was enough room for guards with dogs to patrol in that space. As it turned out, we never needed those.
Some fifteen feet inside the hedge, a wide ditch was dug to Manhattan bedrock all around the block. A waterproof cement was poured onto the bedrock to a depth of twenty feet. Vast sheets of a new very thick transparent ceramic material many times stronger than steel were then lowered into the cement, vaulting up in height vertically through the ditch, and after overshooting the ground level by three feet began to gracefully angle outward over the hedge and grass strips at twenty degrees from the vertical to a height of eighteen feet all around the block.
This transparent ceramic wall in its ditch was then stabilized with more waterproof cement up to about fifty feet below ground to allow for utilities to pierce through the wall, but well below ground and each piercing was waterproofed as well.
Inviting park entrances were cut into the corners of the block, the mid-block on four sides and the formal, the vendor and staff driveways. Ceramic gates for all entrances were hydraulically operated to close each entrance watertight at night.
The transparent ceramic wall, I thought, would take care of any rise in sea level for the foreseeable future, and assist in riot conditions and some terrorist threats without interfering with park views in or out.
We had installed vehicle barriers at the edge of the park entrances, which might have kept a Bradley tank out. These large, round nine-foot high three-feet diameter ceramic posts rose from underground, again using hydraulic pressure, emerging and disappearing at the click of a computerized mouse in the security office. All were located near the curbs of the block including a double row in front of each gate and provided world-class security.
The entire block and buildings took four years to plan, build, and then landscape.
The four underground floors served primarily for art storage with large elevators on call to move palletized containers of art up to appropriate levels in case of flooding and further down in case of violent surface weather.
Backup electrical and hydraulic systems ensured that these elevators worked when they were needed.
The rest of the basement space was filled with generators, backup and control systems for every system in the house, and racks for art in waterproof cases. Many cases had fittings for connections by tubing to outlets that provided the best environment for the wood and paint of the specific painting. All of the cases connected to outlets for proper humidification and temperature. We provided a curated 'prescription' of different gases for each piece. We could use air, nitrogen, or one of the inert gases (argon) if required. Sensors in every case provided real-time data about temperature, humidity and the composition of the gas environment for the monitoring computers.
Handicapped access for the public, a gift shop, escalators and large salons helped to fill floors one and two. Floor three contained formal, ornate very large multi-purpose rooms for large and important social, political and diplomatic gatherings.
Think very thick carpets, large mirrors, old tapestries, spaced marble plinths with gleaming white statues or giant crystal vases for grand floral arrangements, ornate gold-plated wainscoting, large center ovals of hardwood flooring for dancing, orchestra seating, high ceilings and you would have a great start to imagine those rooms.
On the third floor one smaller dining room for the family and guests was located near the staircase.
From the third floor to the fourth floor, a formal wide staircase rose in the center wing.
A lot of external light was made available to some rooms and not so much to others.
Some art objects presented and endured well in rooms with lots of high-energy photons around. Other, older and more fragile art pieces needed less exposure to survive and avoid rapid deterioration.
There were a few secure rooms where, when night came, metal grill doors closed and tempered glass doors just inside those metal grill doors, so the room could stabilize completely before the next day.
Tiny radio frequency devices were woven into the back of every painting and inside every sculpture or other work of art.
Computers monitored hidden RFID tags for precise, instantaneous localization of every art object in the building and compared these changes in location to expected routes of travel through the building to and from the basements.
Floor four contained my private suites at the end of the South wing and a Presidential Suite at the end of the North wing off-angled from the North corridor from a circular, widened anteroom to the Presidential Suite.
Thirty spacious guest suites sat between the two end suites in the central and immediately adjacent portions of the South and North wings, each with a small kitchen, huge walk-in closets, huge bathrooms with huge tub and shower, specially plumbed to overflow elsewhere than straight down and a movie theatre for twenty on the same floor.
Complete with a popcorn machine. With melted butter capabilities. Not to mention the ice cream and soda options.
Hey, it was my house. The chocolate factory wouldn't fit.
Hiring staff was a large project of its own. I hired the retired director of Museum security at the Guggenheim to return to work, hire crucial people and provide policies and procedures for the security staff. Elizabeth and Bill agreed to get a one-year leave from the Metropolitan Museum to categorize the art objects, provide comprehensive storage policies, approve preservation, and develop showcasing policies.
They also agreed to recommend professional museum quality restoration services if the Metropolitan was unable to take on the work.
I thought it would be in that museum's best interest to help me with preservation and restoration work for, at least, those paintings they planned to buy from my collection.
As it turned out, they agreed. They knew the value of first-hand knowledge of an object's issues before purchase.
The house staff worker's roster didn't change much. All of the staff from Pennsylvania agreed to help at the "palace" in New York, as they called it. All were vetted by the Secret Service. All passed, as it happened.
I moved in to the private quarters overlooking Central Park on the fourth floor one day. Those servants who helped me move in were puzzled at how little of this world's junk I brought to the owner's suite.
They knew what brands of toothpaste to stock and where I kept my razors in the bathroom. They knew where to park my shorts, shoes and suits in the large walk-in closets.
But where was the furniture?
There wasn't anything on the walls!
They appreciated the hardwood floors with antique Oriental carpets. They watched armored trucks with security escorts bringing some pieces from the Manhattan storage facility to the basement levels of the house in sealed, dehumidified, temperature-controlled pallets.
The mystery of the missing furniture and art was solved one day by the arrival of trucks accompanied by interior decorators. Load after load of European antique furniture for the fourth-floor suites from a New Jersey staging warehouse arrived and were placed to finally fill the suites.
The staff soon noted that they could not change temperature and humidity controls in the building, as these were computer controlled. We trained the staff to keep the doors and windows closed, but had anyone left one open, alarms would have sounded before dust or humidity or cold or heat had done damage.
The servant's quarters were right next door to the mansion. This taller building rose to six stories with two basement floors.
The top floor of the servant's quarters housed administrative services. The fifth floor housed redundant security, monitoring and backup generator power systems for the building.
Floors one through four were designed for staff suites. The basements housed all of the laundry, dry cleaning, freezers, pantries, industrial dishwashers and much of the kitchen equipment for large groups were located there. Elevators connected these floors; the third and fourth floor elevator lobbies were tiled to permit the catering and housekeeping carts easy access to the third and fourth floors of the museum albeit on separate levels of the skybridge.
The supplies and services of those units could be brought over to the main building through carts wheeled across a scenic glass skybridge serving two floors of the museum through two separate walkways in the skybridge. Small meals were prepared in the kitchen in the museum and larger catering projects were serviced from the staff quarters' resources.
Supplies for the house were delivered to the staff building through a vendor's driveway and a gated portal with security and screening appropriate for the museum's contents. On the roof of the servant's quarters sat hidden satellite Internet dishes and a functioning heliport.
Jill Staceworth's team was the last team to join the move-in process. They hung pricey and priceless art treasures both in the public-accessed portions of the home and in my private and other guest suites on the fourth floor.
Together with the loads of furniture that kept coming, the moving pace picked up quickly. The process ended soon enough and relative peace descended over the `palace'. A few days afterward, one could not detect anything but a smooth current of activity. Early on, the maids had a spate of work to do making beds and cleaning up after construction and learning the layout of their assigned floors and suites. Soon after, since most of the suites were yet unoccupied, the maids and housekeeper had a little more time to relax.
I had asked the architects to limit my personal garage space. I needed no place for a fancy foreign car, I supposed. I wanted space for limousines and a maintenance shop. Both teams presented a ninety-car parking garage however. I was glad they did. We had visitors and friends who needed covered parking at times. The city had also reminded us that we needed to supply handicapped parking and access to visitors and staff at the museum.
The grounds crews did not live on the property but were vetted and hired by teams that included experts in the plants and trees planted on the property. We had located American chestnuts and had them replanted in the park. We also decided to showcase other tree species not often seen in the city. Redwoods, Japanese maples, Douglas fir—we tried them all using microclimates to encourage survival.
The flower gardens were extensive and worth a visit from tourists along with the art tour. The inside staff managed the orchid collection inside the Museum.
The end result wasn't very satisfying.
I still didn't have a family.
None of the art objects carried on a conversation with me.
The huge amount of effort and work had been just that. I still felt like I was floating around in the center of a hurricane in some ways. My digs were more than nice. They always had been. Food still tasted the same. I had expected more than I felt, a greater push toward happiness and now there was a taste in my mouth that slightly sour.
We had taken great pains (triple-paned windows, noise-cancelling systems, white noise systems, background wind, et cetera) to minimize noise inside the mansion, but Manhattan had a background noise from sirens and taxis and motors and people that never ceased. It later became apparent that the decibel contrast between the museum and the park heightened the awareness of too much quiet inside and too much noise outside.
I bought memberships in some honest-to-goodness gentleman's clubs in the city. One went there to sit in a comfortable leather chair and read the Times or something.
"Whoop-de-doo," as my father the Judge used to say. I had gobs of people who wanted to be friends. The only guy friend I had was Marcus and he had to work. I was pretty sure there were billions of reasons, all green, why girls thought I was cool, so I decided to trust none of them.
The unvarnished truth was that all I really wanted was Marcus and my family back. I went to Marcus' condo several times a week for mind-boggling fucking, but still hadn't tumbled to the possibility that he could be my family. It didn't actually enter my head. Which isn't to say we didn't enjoy sex. The day I asked him if I could give him the same pleasure he gave me, he was surprised.
He looked at me with a poker face. I saw right through it.
"What took you so long to ask? Did you not want me, Michael?"
"Nope. That there's icky, you know. By the way...in that same vein...are ya running low, Marcus?"
"Bout a quart."
Fifteen minutes later, I made the required deposit in the right place, a handsome, slender, swimmer's built milk-chocolate tight-end, and I think the procedure drained both of us that warm spring day in New York City in his apartment high above the noisy taxis, lying naked together on cool cotton sheets with only a light wind from the central air drying our sweaty skin as we kissed and licked and sucked and told the other about loving each other.
Looking back, that was the first time Marcus and I hadn't rushed to wipe our cum off after making love. We both wanted our seed to dry and stick us together...so we did.
I missed him when he was working. He and I met for the Michael and Marcus mutual admiration society meeting at night every two or three days and ate out sometimes. He was astonishingly oral, loved to bite and lick and suck and kiss.
None of which took the shine off his sword skills.
Marcus' mother Blossom loved lunch in a park. It was a warm day in a newer small park surrounding the new-to-her Schuyler museum just north of Central Park. Blossom sat on a bench near a fountain thinking nothing in general after munching on a sack lunch and Carol in particular. Blossom watched the skaters and passersby then did an internal double take.
Her son Marcus walked past on her on his way to a park bench facing away from her. He was not alone and was holding hands with a guy.
He did not see her and sat down with the young man about his age just in her sight. She was beyond curious about what she saw. Marcus and the young man started a spirited friendly discussion about something Blossom couldn't quite hear from her bench. She knew Marcus was a private kind of guy and didn't have friends. Something had changed.
Blossom didn't finish her sack lunch and quickly chucked the rest into a nearby garbage can when the two men headed for the entrance of the enormous museum. She made a quick decision. She followed them. She had heard the saying about curiosity killing the cat, but dismissed it, not willing to compare herself to a cat.
She approached the front door, noted a sign that introduced an art home museum and art collection tour, saw it was open and even free, registered at the security booth at the front door, checked her purse, received a name tag, and entered the great entry hall.
Where Marcus and the young man stood smiling at her.
"Mom, we wondered how long it would take for you to get here," Marcus laughed, "I want you to meet a really good friend of mine from Grinnell.
We are working together on some business projects. Mrs. Blossom Jones let me introduce Mr. Michael Schuyler-Ross, owner of this park and museum. He lives here."
"How do you do." Both uttered the words and shook hands.
"We are taking the tour. Please join us."
Blossom knew she had to get back to work. The lunch hour had passed quickly.
"I must get back to my patient," Blossom replied, "and I want to take the tour on my next day off."
She meant it.
She was nothing but curious about what that was all about.
Blossom had no reason to connect Michael to her patient.
Michael had a question for Marcus after his mother went back to work.
"I know you have a condo. I know you picked it out and like it. I'm comfortable visiting you there. Would you consider moving in with me here permanently?"
"Yes, I will baby."
Over the past three days, Joseph Weber had applied his time and energy toward solving a problem.
An inmate at Rikers Island had gotten his sentence reduced and was happy to share rumors of Albert's story.
A few bucks passed to a car rental attendant summoned up memories of the night that a limousine arrived and how money had passed for quiet on the case. The name of the quiet cops who had passed by the scene that night was obtained. Most importantly, some paramedic suddenly remembered, having seen five-hundred dollars in Joseph's hand, that a tall man was dead at the scene, but a boy and a girl had survived and been taken away in two separate directions in ambulances. A woman had been taken by private pre-scheduled ambulance to Cherry Hill Hospital.
Six weeks later Joseph called Blossom one evening to report that he had been unable to find Michael or Barbara Roberts.
In my friend, I find a second self.
Isabel Norton
I called Marcus and asked to meet up at the Museum on a Thursday for lunch and a tour. He hesitated, and then agreed. It was as if he had come up against an internal obstacle in his thinking that he wasn't wild to face. We had met when we could a few times each week in the City at night to play mostly, but not usually during the day.
That was going well. I was aware that he must have had some vague idea that there was more to my net worth than the money he handled for me outside the Schuyler trust, but could not have known what he was in for if the relationship continued. This created for me an information vacuum that I wanted to fill but couldn't decide when.
The next level, so to speak, was to find out if my wealth was a barrier to the kind of "us" I dreamed about. We had a history...college, shared financial and art interests, a sexual relationship. He was deeply fond of me and I was pretty sure I loved him.
My job in SoHo was over, law classes had begun, and he worked hard at Fidelity Investors downtown on a meteoric career path, but for some reason Marcus had become fresh air to me and I needed to take a deep breath of that. He had become my family.
We sat in the park talking, watching skaters, a guy on stilts and some lovers. We talked and laughed for a few minutes, and then Marcus gave a grunt of surprise.
"That's my mom over there on that bench!"
"Should we go over and meet her?"
"Nah, if we just go inside your house, she'll follow. Guaranteed."
He laughed.
After meeting her, she went back to her private-duty nursing job. Marcus and I took the tour, he was suitably impressed and overwhelmed, then we finished an agreement in principle to learn everything there was to know about our family's accident and how it was caused. It wasn't a new subject.
He had brought it up at Grinnell. I had matured a little, time had passed, and we were ready to put some real thought into the mystery part of my pain.
Funny, I thought, how a good friend could help one figure out important things in one's life. We had a shared purpose, a joint cause and an excuse to spend more time together as if we needed one.
We both thought it more than strange that no police report had been filed after my accident, that no one of the servant staff in Pennsylvania had been contacted by a hospital or morgue, not to mention the fact that two attorneys seemed to have spent a lot of time on our jet, spending my money, and running our businesses.
So, we agreed to work and get together for unspoken reasons because we were like school buds and we both had needs for touch and company, love and understanding, family, perhaps comfort, possibly hope and for me, murky thoughts of a future whose form I could not touch or describe, perhaps some glimpse of me. A second self.
Marcus called me daily with updates. I called him daily with questions. We called each other if the other didn't call and met frequently as time allowed to eat and drink and see the King Tutankhamen exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum and the Early French Pointillists, one dot at a time.
We avoided movies, craved protests in general, hated sports of any kind, were neutral on all forms of music after 1945, and might have killed for another flight to Paris, a journey for which neither of us had the time. That year we got to know each other's mind better.
We had blended our bodies long ago and he could read me like a book in bed. And vice-versa. I knew when he was on the edge and he recognized my 'signs' very well. We knew when the other wasn't 'in the mood', we knew when the other was trying to hint that they were ready for action, and we knew when to be tender and when to be rough.
I always liked rough and he must have had a master's degree in rough. I loved to be spanked hard and he loved doing it, never inflicting terrifying pain, however. He never wanted to injure me and didn't. I didn't want to be injured and didn't ask to be.
At the same time, physical sex was more fun for me if there was some muscle and energy behind it. Fortunate for me, he was a fucking animal when he decided to be, laughing the whole time.
Blossom knew that some patients emerged suddenly from comatose states and others crawled out of theirs. Carol was a crawler. Her multiple injuries, her previous accident, her long coma, her age coupled with the emotional loss of her family and absence of normal cues like place, surroundings, food, and art had resulted in very slow progress toward recovery in spite of the best nursing and medical care money could buy.
Physical therapy was helpful and its various sub-disciplines such as neuro-psych PT and cognitive PT. Blossom had friends in the City who did all that and she called in favors like crazy.
Unplanned behaviors had occurred. Carol had been informed that the two attorneys had begun to vary the timing of visits and she decided to hedge her bets.
A few minutes before they arrived, the doorman would notify Blossom that Cooper and Stutlin were on their way to the elevator. Carol edged over to the bed, climbed in, and Blossom arranged the linens and pillow. Carol then played possum.
Cooper and Stutlin talked by the bedside, unable to tell the difference between a fake coma and their toupees, left convinced their ongoing Trust robbery was still undetected.
Carol had figured out what they were up to. She had decided to fight back. She didn't care about the trust as much as she once had, especially one day when she finally recalled a safe deposit box in Pennsylvania with a bag of loose diamonds that were hers.
She phoned the bank, spoke with the manager in Philadelphia, and was told that a photo ID and the key to that box would gain access.
Blossom arranged for a neighbor who worked at DMV to come to the hospital and take a picture of Carol.
Blossom had cared some years ago for a woman whose son worked in the New York state Records office. A birth certificate for Carol arrived in Blossom's mailbox two weeks later. Blossom downloaded the Pennsylvania ID application, Carol filled it out, it was notarized, and along with the birth certificate, Carol had her paperwork ready to get a Pennsylvania ID card.
Blossom coordinated and wheeled her out for a risky long day trip to Flourtown where Blossom grabbed the set of keys just inside a certain garden shed and they drove away to Philadelphia. At the close of the day, Carol had the bag.
She also remembered her gem and art collections in storage and figured those had been passed on to surviving children or were now belonging to the State of Pennsylvania and hadn't the courage, heart, or energy to inquire. Not that she didn't care.
Those gems in her organized collection had begun to rival the exhibition in the Tower of London in uncut and loose cut gems. She had, through agents, shopped at Tiffany's jewelers, Cartier and purchased sapphires, rubies, large perfect diamonds of all colors.
Her husband had been unaware of these and she had managed to have agents bidding at Sotheby's and Christie's Auction's, and other auctions in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Cape Town, Rangoon, Sydney and London. This collection had been, in case of her demise, willed to her son with Barbara following as the second child.
With the exception of the C&S visits, Carol became more and more upright, her awareness increased, and she finally walked after more intensive treatment. Over time, her steps progressed from an assisted limp to a short confident sally around the suite. She kept the wheelchair handy, out of sight, with its receiver charged in the suite.
She did not wear makeup lest a sudden visit was to happen, and the hospital bed was kept clean, but not made. All signs of care including a taped on IV for sudden C&S visits were kept at hand ready for immediate use.
"It seems, "Blossom ventured one morning, "that the time may have come to bring this business to an end."
She reviewed with Carol some research that a friend had set out to do and Carol, after some questions and contributions to the plan, approved.
Another late summer day in New York City found Joseph Wasserman doing some unlicensed investigative work. His neighbor, one Blossom Jones in 9A, over the laundry downstairs had talked about a lady she knew that needed some investigative work done.
Joseph told her he knew a little about this line of work and told her he would be happy to check some things out. He made an appointment with a forensic accountant of his acquaintance.
Joseph asked the taxi driver to deposit him near Canal and Mercer, walking the rest of the way.
On the thirty-second floor Joseph entered the forensic accountant firm and presented the notarized power of attorney that Blossom had obtained from Carol.
The accountant sat for a moment, not sure how to begin and then began to speak. It should take me a week or so to get usable information. "Come back next week, same time, same station and we'll talk."
He asked about the Salvetti brothers and Joseph said they were OK but out of town on an unscheduled break. Joseph was nothing but truthful.
On Joseph's return on the following Thursday, the accountant told Joseph that Carol's access to much of the multi-billions of assets of the trust corporation had been frozen should she emerge from her coma. "I found a smaller account at New York Trust and Savings Bank in Carol's name only that the attorney's people must have missed."
Joseph sat up straighter.
"It isn't a billion dollars," said the accountant, "but if seven hundred fifty million dollars will be helpful initially...minus my fees, of course..."
Joseph decided it would be. Helpful, that is.
The trick will be, the accountant told him, for Carol to actually present herself and a copy of her birth certificate or passport to the banking center close to Cherry Hill without looking like she is dying. Presentation will be critical. She can have an attendant/nurse with her without raising questions.
The account may not be frozen but there may be a person paid to watch over the `store' to report activity to C&S should someone inquire about the account. The accountant added that an interview with the bank manager at that location first would be preferable, so things would go smoothly.
Joseph smiled, disagreed silently and thought his own thoughts.
Within a few minutes after leaving the accountant he was on his way to the New York Passport office where he was able to speak with a friend who greased the way for an emergency replacement passport for Carol.
Nick's office had prevented the man's sister from jail by finding the "guy who done it." Joseph was not surprised to see the fee waived and walked out with the passport.
He headed for Blossom's apartment that evening and they outlined a plan. Joseph hand Blossom Carol's passport, in the name of Carol Schuyler-Ross.
Now that Carol was up in a wheelchair, speaking and clearly so, Blossom would wheel her down to the elevator at precisely one hour after the attorneys left the hospital room for the day. Joseph had a contact at the fire department that had a key to the elevator car in question. Carol would be wheeled quickly to the elevator by Blossom and met on the street near the emergency department in front by Joseph.
Carol got her money back at eleven a.m. the next morning.
Dressed to the nines with the passport in her new purse, she rolled into a waiting ambulance without checking out. She smelled the acrid fumes of the city, cool and slightly salty.
Carol was wheeled into the bank without previous interview, without anyone at the bank having had time to talk to anyone, minimizing the risk of interference with the transaction. She presented her passport and ID care.
The bank officer smiled, unaware of Carol's efforts to control her breathing. Blossom managed to act bored in her nurse uniform and attentive at the same time. They waited for twenty tense minutes in line to see the next loan officer.
The moment was at hand. Pennsylvania ID card. Check. Passport. Check. Account information. Check. They waited, a study in nonchalance that did not attract attention to themselves.
Carol signed a wire transfer form filled out by the young bank officer in a nondescript cubicle. The man attempted to keep his jaw from dropping below the desk. The form directed the wire transfer of the net amount of her account minus a large bank fee and a cash withdrawal of $200,000 to a new account located in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
The bank officer did check with his supervisor as required, but she saw no reason to deny the request and initialed the transfer request. The supervisor briefly considered delaying the cash withdrawal using the `too much cash for the bank to handle out of the vault today' line but decided this wheelchair-bound lady was a VIP customer.
The vault had the bills.
Since the New York branch of the Federal Reserve was less than ten miles away, she figured the vault would be replenished the same afternoon.
The bank in Cheyenne had been previously notified of a large incoming deposit. The wire transfer funds hit her account in Wyoming within seconds.
On the way to the Teterboro New Jersey Executive airport in the ambulance, Carol took her wire transfer receipt and called the bank in Cheyenne using Blossom's cell phone.
The bank manager there fell all over himself being polite to this, his new biggest customer. Carol sweetly extracted a promise of personal delivery of her ATM and credit cards along with personal access online to her new account the next day to her hotel in Denver. She also made one other request, with which he was happy to comply.
Later that afternoon the ambulance drove into the private jet hangar areas of Teterboro Airport in New Jersey where her G650 had been located.
She was wheeled to the entrance of the Schuyler-Ross hangar and rang the bell.
"Carol? I thought you were, well, not coming back!" The flight attendant, who turned pale and nearly fainted, recognized her.
Carol laughed and after the co-pilot went through the same experience, she became businesslike.
She reminded them that her husband, Judge Ross had predeceased her. She explained that Attorneys Cooper and Stutlin were no longer employed by the Trust, were barred from using Rainier and other trust assets and asked them to promptly get ready for a flight to Denver with a to-be-filed flight plan without communicating with the two attorneys.
They were not sorry to hear any of that news and complied promptly.
Along with Blossom and Joseph, she boarded and was made comfortable.
The plane was already fueled and serviced and ready. Carol, informed of the meal choices from the catering department of Cipriani in the city, chose a drink after considering her long abstinence from alcohol. She ordered Amaretto straight.
Blossom blinked, raised an eyebrow and ordered Fiji water, silently noting the Amaretto order.
Joseph asked for the apple, walnut and arugula salad with both tangy orange vinaigrette dressing and bleu cheese bits on the side followed by an entrée of lamb.
Blossom ordered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on sourdough with sliced bananas and a salad she was certain this flight attendant could not produce.
It was produced with a flourish and it was exactly what she wanted: a serving of a mixture of one cup of fresh sour cream, one cup of small marshmallows, one cup sliced mandarin oranges, one cup shredded coconut and one cup of fresh pineapple chunks with a sprig of fresh mint to garnish (which she had not ordered).
Carol looked at the 'five-cup salad' as presented and asked for the same. Her first entrée after years of hospital cuisine was at hand and she chose a lightly grilled mahi-mahi filet encrusted with ground macadamia nuts with a sweet and sour tamarind sauce on the side.
Some of these meals had been picked up by the flight catering crew in specially cooled vans to apparently ease the arduous flights of the attorneys as they consumed time, space, food and drink that didn't belong to them. The rest was prepared on the jet from fresh ingredients by an experienced flight chef.
The flight took four hours after a smooth takeoff and three worked hard making plans for the future over their food and again after a brief nap.
Blossom speculated silently about the plane, its cost and how hard it was for rich people to get into heaven, then decided more thought needed to put into that, because the same Bible said that "the love of money" was the root of all evil.
Not just money itself.
Besides, her chair was comfortable and as far as she knew her salary and college education for the boys was and had been indirectly paid for by these generous people in return for hard work.
Blossom remembered that she was a widow of sorts by virtue of divorce anyway and that she had just been fed by the kindness of strangers who had become friends.
Carol and Joseph manned their telephones during much of the flight. There was business to do.
Blossom slept most of the way. She had brought her patient through again with God's help, she decided. It was time for her to rest.
Joseph made a call to a partner in a New York legal firm which specialized in the logistics of company takeovers. Joseph talked to the partner for a minute and instructed him to execute Plan A, a plan drawn up by the law firm and which she had approved. The law firm had been, at first, bemused over a re-takeover plan. That, apparently, was a first for them.
An hour later, Joseph received a call from them that he kept to himself. A call that shocked him even more than the surprises of the last week. The trust ownership, along with a large art and gem collection had passed over to one Michael Ross after certification of her death by absence in Pennsylvania.
Before he presented this to Carol, he would pass it by Blossom at the earliest opportunity to make certain Carol was physically up to the news.
There was another short list of calls to make including one to a precinct Captain in New Jersey and his brother, a precinct Captain in New York with instructions to apprehend and press charges against Attorneys Cooper and Stutlin for fraud, murder and grand larceny in the appropriate New Jersey jurisdiction with a friendly judge.
Immediate arrest and no bail were requested and granted.
Murder and kidnapping conspiracy charges against one Albert Thomas were requested and protective custody of the defendant granted. The location was given as Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York City.
Mr. Cooper was found after his mother chirped the fact that he spent this weekday each week learning Spanish on Sixth Avenue and was eager to help the two young, nice and polite NYPD officers reach her son "for the return of a lost cell phone."
She had offered to attempt to reach him, but the officers assured her they loved to surprise people. The Spanish escort and Mr. Cooper seemed to be undressed and wrestling with some of life's issues when the officers found them.
Mr. Stutlin, on the other hand, was a bit harder to locate. His cell phone was on, however, and a brief check of its location backed by a warrant obtained from a cooperative judge who forgot to ask for anything in return, yielded the fact that he was in a visible location dining at Tavern on the Green, surrounded by important brokers, movers and shakers, socialites and legal partners in the best firms in the City.
He was yanked from his booth by two of New York City's finest, handcuffed after a really loud announcement that the deafest could hear that he was under arrest for fraud, murder and grand larceny.
This immediately preceded another loud announcement right away which consisted of his certain Miranda rights: to an attorney, along with a warning that anything he said could and would be used against him in a court of law, and something about if he could not afford an attorney, etc.
From that moment, Mr. Stutlin was not really welcome anywhere near anyone who was anyone in New York. Mr. Cooper and Mr. Stutlin, who had never dreamed of Rikers Island as a home, now found themselves near-permanent residents therein.
Their attorney made representations to them that becoming songbirds might diminish the great retribution that he saw coming their way like a desert sand storm high above the Sahara Desert.
Carol turned her attention to her family. She was aware of her losses, wanted to know details, and was ready to spend time, money and attention in that search. She was in emotional pain, barely past the denial stages, near anger. The days had slipped by in the hospital. Why had she not instituted a search for them? Her family losses and uncertainties weighed on her mind. She told Blossom that she was afraid to know what happened to her family.
Blossom hugged her and told her that she, Blossom, was dying to know what had happened to Michael. The previous introduction of her son and a Michael Ross had entered into one ear, but not processed yet in all the commotion. This encouragement from a friend had the effect of freeing Carol from her fear and a few hours later she had asked Joseph to unleash the Salvetti firm on the problem at hand. "I don't care what it costs," she said.
She put off many decisions that might have sped her search. She saw no reason to call the household staff or her half-sister in Philadelphia, a place where only unpleasant memories existed and where, she supposed, no good news would be found.
Much later that same evening, Carol, Joseph and Blossom checked into the Four Seasons hotel in Denver. Joseph sat down with Blossom after Carol retired and had a long talk about the Trust and its new owner, Michael Ross. For the first time, a little red flag waved in the back of Blossom's trusting soul but due to fatigue and restlessness, the thought was put on hold.
Blossom found an enormous vase of red roses along with a handwritten note from Carol.
"Blossom, I want you to know that I credit my recovery and happiness to you and your care for me these years. Hope you will continue on for as long as you are able! Thank you so much!"
All slept well in luxurious rooms on the top floor that night.
After breakfast in a private dining room, a knock on the door at nine a.m. revealed the Cheyenne bank team who sat down with Carol for a few minutes and explained the ATM no-limit debit card and other credit cards including the black Centurion AMEX card the manager had fought to expedite for her overnight. Checks for the account were also enclosed. Carol wondered aloud whose airplane had shuttled between Miami and Denver and Cheyenne to make all this possible.
The delighted bank manager laughed, "A lot of people worked hard all night to make it happen. We wanted to let you know that you are more than welcome and that the bank appreciates your business!"
After the bank officials left, Joseph invited the group to his ranch north of the city close to the Idaho-Wyoming border. After hiring a personal maid, a group of ex-Seals for security and a shopping trip or two, they left for the airport and her G650 and were soon in the air to nearest airport to Angelo's ranch.
When Carol saw the large entry room at the ranch, she liked the place right off. She had suffered a good deal being married to the Judge after being consigned to a wheelchair and then the long coma and escape.
She wanted to know more about the two attorneys and their connections. Information about the New York family who hired them and their daily activities was pouring in through Joseph and friends.
The first stages of her grief had passed. She was now angry. She wanted revenge and had the resources to effect it.