Final Option

attention to the other item in the box—a yellow envelope, five inches by eight.
    I laid the envelope on my lap. I put the smaller, empty box back into the larger box and laid the stationery on top, just as I’d found it. I set the money on the desk and closed the drawer. Then I opened the envelope.
    Inside were pictures, very different from those of the cherubic toddlers that grinned back at me from the desk-top. I saw more than a dozen in all, black-and-white snapshots, all of the same person, a young woman in her late twenties who wasn’t wearing any clothes.
    In the first one she was on all fours with her bottom foremost to the camera as she struck an almost feline pose. She looked back over her shoulder toward the camera so that only one eye and the bridge of her nose were visible. Her body was lithe, her hair, long and dark. These, I concluded after flipping through them all, Were not the slick product of a professional photographer trying to coax erotica out of a bored model. There was an air of intimacy about them, and the amateurish hand of family photos.
    And yet, whoever it was, had allowed herself to be photographed in all the centerfold poses back arched, with one hand covering her face in mock ecstasy, the I other reaching down between her legs; standing, legs apart, turned away from the camera and bent at the waist so that her dark hair hung to the ground....
    It was clear that it was not the woman’s face that the photographer had been intent on capturing. There was not one frame in which it was fully visible. And so I sat, looking. Repelled and fascinated, trying unsuccessfully to discern her identity, wondering who had been at the other end of the lens.
    When the door handle turned I jumped a foot out of my chair.
    “I didn’t mean to startle you,” stammered the dead man’s son, Barton Jr., apologetically.
    Quickly, I slipped the photos back into the envelope.
     
    The last time I’d seen Barton Jr. I was nine years old, and he and my brother Teddy were stealing bourbon out of my father’s liquor cabinet. Back then he’d been a gangly teenager who’d peered down at me from under a mop of unkempt black hair, dressed in bell-bottoms I and a grimy T-shirt, with a scraggly and unsuccessful attempt at a beard.
    Time had conspired to turn him into his father. Barton now wore his jet-black hair short, and it was beginning a slow and inexorable retreat from his forehead. He had his father’s eyes, the same fair skin, and bushy brows. He was slighter than his father, less burly, and there was a trace of mischief in him that even grief could not completely suppress. Still, the resemblance was eerie.
    But the similarities between the two men were purely physical. Black Bart had grown up with nothing and spent a lifetime trying to put as many dollars as possible between himself and his impoverished beginnings. Barton Jr. had grown up in a sea of materialism and had chosen a path for himself where money and possessions counted for very little.
    A professor of theoretical mathematics at Northwestern University, Dr. Barton Hexter, Jr., was an expert in the emerging field of chaos theory, which focuses on the modeling of large, complex systems. While futures markets represent one such system, Barton’s interest in his father’s business had, much to the elder Hexter’s dismay, never gone beyond the academic.
    “Ken Kurlander told me I should try to find you,” he said after I’d expressed my condolences. “He said you’d want to talk to me.”
    “I hate to be the one to do this,” I began, very conscious of the fact that it was my job to lay a very large burden on the shoulders of a man who had, just an hour ago, learned that his father had been brutally murdered. “I know that Ken will be meeting with all of you in the next day or so to discuss the details of your father’s will, but in the meantime, your mother said that you are the executor of the estate.”
    “I know. Ken told me,” he replied. “So what does that mean?”
    “Quite a lot of things,” I answered slowly. “But right now it means that you’re the one who has to call the shots when it comes to Hexter Commodities.”
    Barton Jr. took a minute to let that one sink in. Hexter Commodities was worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This was not going to be like stepping in and inning the family dry-cleaning business.
    “I am not a businessman,” he said, finally, in a hollow voice.
    “You’ll have lots of people to