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"I hate to admit it,"I said with a smile, "but I am." I showed her my plastic American Bar Association card-the one with the Hertz #1 Club logo on the back. I positioned my thumb so she couldn't see my name. The card had expired, but she didn't notice. Or didn't care. "Not from around here," she remarked. "Doing some work for an insurance company," I lied. "Just a moment." She disappeared, and I was left to exchange small talk with her protégée, a wholesome cutie excited about her upcoming marriage to a rodeo cowboy. Edna reappeared two minutes later with a thin file in her right hand. Before entrusting it to me, she slid a checkout card across the counter and instructed me to fill it in. I scrawled something illegible and she handed me the file. "File's due back at four," she said as she tapped a sign with the eraser on her pencil. Attorneys who didn't return files on time would lose their checkout privileges. "T'll have it back in an hour," I said. I winked at her, took the stairs back down to the first floor, bought a cold diet Coke from a vending machine, and returned to the library. I had never been fond of probate work, but I knew what to look for. Fontaine had executed his last will and testament more than ten years prior to his death. A will executed shortly before his death might have indicated that he had anticipated trouble, but a will made more than ten years ago suggested he probably hadn't had any reason to believe his life was in danger. His will left everything to his parents, both of whom were still living at the time of his death. The only other document of inter- est was the inventory of assets. In addition to a home valued at more than $200,000 and his half-million-dollar interest in the wheat operation, Fontaine had owned stock in nineteen corpora-