Dick Francis's Gamble - Felix Francis [39]
“So Herb collected eighteen thousand dollars’ worth of pounds from MoneyHome?”
“Yes,” she said.
“When?” I asked.
She looked at the reconstructed slips carefully. “Last week, but not all on the same day. Eight thousand on Monday and five each on Tuesday and Friday.”
“Who from?” I asked.
“These only tell you which MoneyHome office it was collected from, they don’t say who sent the money.” She drank more of her tea. “What’s all this about anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just found those torn-up sheets in the wastebasket.”
She sat drinking her tea, looking at me over the rim of the cup.
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“I was a friend of Herb’s and a work colleague,” I said, giving her one of the business cards from my wallet. “He made me the executor of his will.” I decided again not to mention that he had also made me the sole beneficiary.
“I didn’t know he even had a will,” Sherri said, reading from my card, “Mr. Nicholas Foxton, BSc, MEcon, DipPFS.”
“He made it five years ago when he first arrived at Lyall and Black,” I said, ignoring her reference to my qualifications. “Everyone in the firm has to have a will. The senior partners are always saying that we can hardly advise our clients to plan ahead if we aren’t prepared to do the same. But I have absolutely no idea why Herb chose to put me in his. Maybe it was just because we sat at desks next to each other. He’d only just landed in the country and perhaps he didn’t know anyone else. And none of us really expect to die when we’re in our twenties anyway. But he should still have named you as his executor, even if you were in the United States.”
“Herb and I weren’t exactly talking to each other five years ago. In fact, I’d told him by then that I never wanted to see or hear from him again.”
“Wasn’t that a bit extreme?” I said.
“We had a flaming row over our parents.” She sighed. “It was always over our parents.”
“What about them?” I asked.
She looked at me as if deciding whether to tell me.
“Our Mom and Dad were, shall we say, an unusual couple. Dad had made a living, if you can call it that, acting as an unlicensed bookie round the back side of Churchill Downs. He was meant to be a groom but he didn’t do much looking after the horses. He spent his time taking bets from the other grooms, and some of the trainers and owners too. Sometimes he won, but mostly he lost. Mom, meanwhile, had worked as a cocktail waitress in one of the swanky tourist hotels in downtown Louisville. At least that’s what she told people.”
She paused, and I waited in silence. She’d say it if she wanted to.
“She’d been a prostitute.” Sherri was crying again.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said.
She looked at me with tear-filled eyes. “I’ve got to tell someone.” She gulped. “I’ve bottled it all up for far too long.”
Between bouts of tears she told me the sorry saga of her and Herb’s upbringing. It amazed me that I had sat next to him for all those years without realizing the hurdles he’d had to overcome to be a financial adviser.
Herb and Sherri’s father had been an abusive drinker who had seemingly treated his children as unpaid slave labor. Both of them had excelled in school but their father insisted that they drop out, aged sixteen, to go work, Herb as a groom in the Churchill Downs stables and Sherri as a chambermaid in one of the tourist hotels where her mother had plied her trade.
Herb had rebelled and run away to Lexington, where he had secretly applied for and won a free place at a private high school. But he’d had no accommodations, so he’d slept on the streets. One of the trustees of the school had found him there and offered him a bed. The trustee had been in financial services, and hence Herb’s career had been decided.
He’d stayed in Lexington after high school to attend the University of Kentucky on a scholarship, then, as the top graduate, had been offered a job at J.P. Morgan in New York.
I wondered how such a highflier had come to move from one of the global assets management giants to a firm such as Lyall & Black, a relative tiddler