Part Fifty

Gary Parks lied to me. Of that I'm fairly certain.

When I came into his office in San Diego I saw pretty much what I had anticipated. A bland office in a bland building near downtown. Unimaginative in decor. A frame on the wall of his inner office with various Marine badges and medals.

Parks was pretty much what I had anticipated, too. Early sixties, close-cropped hair, military bearing. I was expecting someone a little beefier. He was rather slender.

I already had access to the facts and figures, so I know what Parks did with the Haywood trust while he managed it. He was candid about being more lucky than good. In the late 80s, when he figured Preacher needed income more than growth, he invested in nice stable government bonds, and in those days interest rates were high. Then when Preacher got out of college he figured Haywood would want to cash in the trust, so he moved into nice stable blue chips and not only rode out the recession of the early 90s in good shape, but made a good profit off of the Gulf War. Parks had no problems investing in defense contractors. Then when Preacher started drifting around the country and expressed no interest in getting to the trust income, Parks got really speculative and aggressive and caught the very front wave of the dot-com boom. Then when Preacher emerged from the desert Parks started moving out of the dot-coms and into real estate, and not only dodged the bubble bursting but then started to clean up when the housing market started climbing.

Dumb luck. Parks admitted it. But dumb luck worked in Haywood's favor so often you began to wonder if it wasn't something more.

At any rate, Parks lied to me, not about the money, but about the conversation he had with Preacher when Haywood finally showed up in his office.

Haywood had called Parks from Gesthemane. Assured him he was who he said he was. Assured him he would, eventually, make it to San Diego. Then a few months later Parks got a postcard from San Francisco. Be there soon. Then a phone call from Los Angeles a few months after that. Be there really soon. Then a phone call from a downtown hotel. When they finally were face to face, Haywood summarized the past decade of his life in three sentences; Parks recalled him saying something like "well, you know I traveled a lot, working odd jobs and searching for inspiration. Then I settled down upstate for a few years and waited for inspiration to find me. And, well, here I am."

Parks said to him "it's a good thing you called when you did. Although it cost the school system some money. I was seriously considering having you declared dead."

Preacher chuckled. "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," he said. "But why did that cost the school system money?"

"You've got no will and no heirs," Parks told him. "If you die intestate, the local school board gets the money. In fact if they knew how close they were to getting your trust, they might have put a hit on you."

"Whacked by a school safety," Haywood said. "What a way to go. But you know, there are worse things to do with the money."

"There are better things, too," Parks said, picking up the folder he'd prepared with financial statements and the like.

And Preacher said -- according to Parks -- "You know, the truth is, I was going to tell you go just give the whole thing to charity. And I guess the schools are as good a charity as any. I noticed on the way in here that the baseball diamonds are all in bad shape. Could we ask them to use it to fix up the baseball diamonds?"

Parker swallowed hard and said "give all of it to the school board? The whole thing?"

And he claims Preacher said -- and this is the part that makes me think Parks is lying -- "sure. I mean how much could be left in there? A hundred thousand dollars or so?"

And Parks said to him "Preacher, there's around forty million dollars in your trust right now."

See, this doesn't ring true. I would believe that Preacher was inclined to give the money to charity, but I don't believe he didn't know how much money was in there. When he went into the desert there was close to ten million in there. Even assuming he didn't get any information about it between leaving Kerith and getting to San Diego, he had to have know there was more money than that in there. Yes, aside from his stint in Chicago, he didn't access it very often, but he still signed tax returns and other statements from time to time. And Preacher was a guy who never forgot anything. So I can't believe he thought the trust was that small.

Why would Parks lie to me about this? To make Preacher sound good? I don't get it. I dutifully recorded the interview and refrained from calling Parks a liar to his face, but I don't believe him when he says Preacher didn't have any idea how much money was in the trust.

Then Parks compounded that lie with something else that didn't ring true.

After thinking about it for a second, Preacher allegedly shrugged and said, "well, they'll be nicer baseball diamonds. I need $40,000,000 like I need a hole in the head." Preacher did say that queer "hole in the head" saying a lot.

Parks then says he explained to Preacher that the trust could easily generate $150,000 a month in income. And still grow. And so even if he wanted to do something for the local ball fields, he could just dedicate a portion of the income the trust generated and have everyone playing on first-class diamonds. And that while $40,000,000 was a hell of a lot of money, it would just vanish into the operating budget of the school system. (He was right about that. I checked. Roughly 1/10th of the annual budget for the San Diego County public schools. I'm sure they would have appreciated a forty million dollar gift, though.)

Parks said he told Preacher: "Besides, why on Earth would you give away that money? Your parents wanted this to be for you. Young man, you have a chance to do something most people would kill for -- and that is to do anything you want. I'm not talking about living off of the interest and wasting your life. I'm talking about never having to think about salary when you go to work. If you wanted to run your own charity, you could do that and pay yourself. You could go work at something really noble and poorly paid, like being a school teacher or a social worker, and still have a very comfortable living. And let me tell you something, Preacher, while you still look like a young man, you're not. You're over 30. Someday you're going to want to settle down. Sooner rather than later. You're going to have a wife and a family and even if you don't think you want or need this money, you have them to think about. Don't you want your children to have advantages you didn't have?"

In short, according to Parks, he not only had to tell Preacher how much his trust was worth, but he had to teach him about interest income. And then manage to dissuade him from giving it all to charity.

Here's Preacher Haywood as I understood him at that point in his life: he was way smarter about money than he came across, he did not just blindly sign papers without reading them, and if he decided to give away $40,000,000, Gary Parks was not going to talk him out of it.

The fact of the matter is that Haywood didn't give the money away, at least not then and there, which tells me he didn't intend to. But why would Parks lie?

This weighed heavily upon me.

At any rate, according to Parks, Preacher agreed to think about the charity idea some more. Then they went through the portfolio together. And that was how Preacher discovered he had inherited a house in St. Michael's, Maryland.

I know. You're saying to yourself, wait, I thought he didn't have any relatives. Well, he didn't. But if you were paying attention during the whole Miami Beach thing, you would remember that he became friends with an old man named Hank Feldman, who regaled Preacher with stories of the Roaring 20s and his life on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Well, it turns out that he died (no surprise there) and in his will, Haywood got the big old house. In which, it turns out, nobody had lived for nearly a decade, and for a decade before that had been rented out to a series of people who really didn't give a damn about it. It was an abandoned dump in the middle of nowhere, slowly collapsing near where the Tred Avon and Town rivers emptied into the Chesapeake Bay. Parks had sent someone to appraise it recently and was wondering how low he would have to price the land to get rid of it -- it was far too close to wetlands to be commercially developed.

And Preacher said that he knew that area, right across the bay from Annapolis, really, and that he was thinking about heading out to the East Coast, so don't sell it; I want to take a look at it before it goes. He was thinking, I know, of all of Feldman's stories about the literati hanging out there in white duck and straw boaters, with bathtub gin going in and bon mots flying out.

After I interviewed Parks I drove around the city. If I had grown up there, I thought, I would be a much different person. Or maybe I would have opened my wrists in high school. I can't imagine living in a place where it was always sunny and pleasant.

And as I drove around I found myself wondering about Haywood's return. Was he the nostalgic type?

When I was engaged to Sarah we went back to my folks' house for the holidays and she insisted on a tour of what she called "the old neighborhood." I lived in a suburb, which doesn't really have a neighborhood feel. "Come on," she said, smiling, "let me see where you went to school, where you hung out with your friends, where you lost your virginity, that kind of stuff."

The trip took about ten minutes in our rental car. "That was school," I said as we zoomed past. "I hated it. That was where a kid we called Trank lived. He was the closest thing to a friend I had. We hung out in his basement and listened to the Cure. "

"Trank?" Sarah said, laughing.

"Yeah. He picked it out. His real name was Philip Navin."

"I like Trank better."

"Yeah, me too. Anyhow, that's the tour. I lost my virginity in Ocean City, Maryland, which is not anywhere near here."

She looked at me for a moment. I looked back. We both laughed. She was one of the few people who could make me laugh at myself. Sometimes I still miss her.

But was that Preacher? Maybe before the whole desert thing. I could see him going back to all the old haunts. If I had been the Golden Child in high school, I would have more reason to be nostalgic. I understand that. But the post-desert Preacher was so much about living in the present. I wonder.

I do know that he looked up the Abuelas, had dinner with the people who'd taken him in when his parents died. Met his old friend Manny's wife and two toddlers. He was only in town for a few days, though.

I stayed in the same hotel he stayed in. More by coincidence than anything. I mention this because it was while staying there that I got laid for the first time in years. I was sitting at the bar waiting for a table and nursing some soda water and this woman sitting there next to me started talking. She was there for some sort of Human Resources convention. We ended up sharing a table. I've never picked up a woman while sober before. I nearly botched it. At some point I tried to say something suave and suggestive and witty and she gave me a tired smile and said "you're already going to get lucky tonight, unless you screw it up." I kept my conversation to a polite minimum at that point.

She was probably in her early 40s. I'd never been with a woman older than me before. Her body was surprisingly soft and smooth. At the risk of sounding like an old lady, it was good just to feel some weight on the mattress next to me.

I told her she could stay the night but she didn't want to. I thought I caught a glimpse of her when I was checking out. If it was her she didn't make any effort to say anything to me.