I minimized the window and moved on to Accurint.
Several addresses for Rory Vandervelde came up, the most recent being the mansion I’d just left. Built in 2013. No previous owners and all the personalization said Vandervelde had commissioned the house. He also owned property in Sonoma and Lake Tahoe.
Associates included Martha F. Vandervelde, born in 1952, and Sean C. Vandervelde, born in 1980.
I stood up and hung over the cubicle wall. Harkless was typing. The pleather estate planning portfolio sat on his desk.
“I can get started on that.”
Without taking his eyes off the screen, he handed me the binder.
Fastened to its inside cover was the business card of a Palo Alto law firm.
A cover letter, dated May 13, 2020, detailed the portfolio’s contents: Rory Vandervelde’s living trust, his last will and power of attorney and healthcare directive, plus numerous codicils and revisions thereto. The list of documents ran to three pages, allowing me to chart his emotional ups and downs with bleak precision.
The original will had gone into effect on April 17, 1983. In it Rory William Vandervelde declared himself a resident of Santa Clara County. He had married Martha Frances Vandervelde (née Roberts) on July 12, 1975. She was his sole beneficiary and personal representative, and vice versa. They had one child, Sean Charles Vandervelde, born on December 4, 1980.
By the early nineties the Vanderveldes had amassed enough wealth to establish a charitable foundation, to which they apportioned ten percent of their estate.
For a while that was all. Starting in 2013, however, the pace of change picked up.
First, a codicil transferred the Vanderveldes’ place of residence to Alameda County. A house of that size didn’t get built in a day. You had to get approvals, attend hearings, submit revisions. You proceeded on faith, dreaming of the future, like the architect of a medieval church that took centuries to complete.
Martha Vandervelde had never seen her dream realized: In November of that year, she died. A new will was accordingly drafted.
Eleven months later Rory amended his healthcare proxy, empowering Dr. Nancy Yap to make decisions on his behalf should he become incapacitated.
Two years after that, he cut Nancy in on the estate. Her ten percent came out of Sean Vandervelde’s share. Soon that was upped to fifteen. By 2019 Rory had made Nancy Yap his executor and granted her burial rights. He declared for the record that he wished to spend eternity lying between the two women who had brought him joy in life. To that end, he had purchased an additional plot, next to his and Martha’s, earmarked for Nancy.
The coup de grâce was a radical change to the estate distribution. Now Sean got a third, Nancy got a third, and one-third went to the foundation.
Even Sean’s reduced portion would be more than most people earned in their lifetimes.
That wasn’t the point. He’d been knocked down several rungs.
I found a Sean Charles Vandervelde living down in Pacific Palisades.
I dialed the law offices of Turlock and Bain, LLC. The receptionist patched me through.
“Deputy.” Sterling Turlock’s booming voice commanded attention with a single word. I could imagine the effect on a courtroom. “What brings you my way?”
“Good afternoon, sir. I’m calling about a client of yours, Rory Vandervelde. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Mr. Vandervelde’s passed away.”
Silence.
“Sir?”
“Oh no. Rory?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“God. Another heart attack?”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t discuss that before we’ve had a chance to speak to his next of kin.”
“Right. Right. That’d be Nancy. You need her number? I can give it to you.”
“It’s Sean Vandervelde I’m trying to reach, actually.”
Turlock cleared his throat. “He’s not the one in charge.”
I explained that I had been to the house and read the estate documents. “I’m not seeing anything about Mr. Vandervelde and Dr. Yap being married.”
“No.”
“In that case, we’ll speak to Sean first. I was hoping you could confirm that I’ve got the right person.” I read Turlock the phone number and address in Pacific Palisades.
“That’s him.”
“Thank you. We will speak to Dr. Yap, too, but for the time being I’d appreciate it if you’d hold off on informing her.”
A beat. “Of course.”
I had no more confidence in his of course than in Detective Cesar Rigo’s. “I was also hoping to ask you a couple of questions. How long have you worked with Mr. Vandervelde?”
“Good grief. Forty years? Forty-five?”
“You must have known him well.”
“Quite. We were good friends, all four of us, Rory and Martha, Diane and I. We belonged to the same club. That came later, though. When I first met them, they were living on peanut butter sandwiches.”
“I’m not sure what he did professionally.”
“How he made his money, you mean.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” Turlock said, “it’s something of a Horatio Alger story. Rory and Martha had this little mom-and-pop shipping store over in Sunnyvale. One day a fellow walks in carrying a circuit board. It so happens the store’s down the block from one of the big microchip companies. This fellow’s an engineer. He needs to send a prototype to Washington, DC. Lightweight, very fragile. Their mailroom already broke two of them in transit. He’s so fed up he decides to go out-of-pocket.
“He asks Rory, ‘What do you have that I can pack this up in?’ Rory shows him newspaper and Styrofoam peanuts. The engineer says, ‘No, that’s no good, we tried that.’ Rory’s about to tell him sorry, no dice. Then he remembers he’s got a packet of balloons, extras from some promotion they ran. He blows some up, and they wrap the thing in tissue paper and snuggle it in there. Rory sends it off and forgets about it. I don’t think he charged him for the balloons.
“Next week the engineer comes back. Rory’s afraid the thing arrived in pieces and the guy is going to ream him out. Turns out the balloons worked like a charm, he’s ecstatic, like Rory’s some kind of genius. Rory thought that was hilarious, because the guy’s an engineer, after all, and here he is, going wild about balloons. Now he’s got another prototype he needs to send. So Rory does it the same way. This time he charges him for the balloons. Day after that, two more engineers come in. ‘Can you pack this up for us?’ You get the picture. Pretty soon Rory’s buying balloons in bulk, and he realizes there’s a business there. As an added benefit, there’s less waste, and it keeps shipping costs down, cause it’s mostly air. You ever order from Amazon? Those air pockets they use? You know the ones I’m talking about.”
I did. I rarely took the trouble to deflate them, so they constituted half the volume of our weekly household trash output. “Yup.”
“Rory’s idea.”
“Good idea to have.”
“You bet your boots,” Turlock said. “He wasn’t what you’d call educated, but he had a head for things you can touch and feel. He got into manufacturing. That’s about the time he brought me in. From there he branched out, cargo, trucking, storage, import-export, you name it. Did a lot of business overseas. Next thing you know he’s joining the golf club, and the same computer fellows who used to ask him to pack their boxes are begging him for seed money.”
He let out a gale of cathartic laughter.