Trust: A Jeb Stuart Johnston Novel

By Jesse Wimberly

The delta swamplands of South Louisiana are home to both abject poverty and fantastic wealth. Trust is a story of murder, greed, betrayal and the search for the elusive angel of justice.

Attorney Jeb Stuart Johnston is hired by the beautiful Justine Galatas who is the sole heir to a vast fortune which has been under the thumb of a trust controlled and manipulated by unscrupulous businessmen and their lawyers. As Jeb dives deeper into the facts of the case, he uncovers corruption and double dealing which would put Machiavelli to shame. The shadowy entities that control the vast wealth contained in the trust will stop at nothing to maintain their control of the huge fortune, including bribery, intimidation and murder. He soon finds that this case will not be won or lost in a courtroom and he has to use all of his contacts and street smarts to battle what are now his blood enemies.

Jeb crosses the line between lawyer and lover with the beautiful Justine and has to face not only the formidable array of opponents set against him but also his own demons and the ghosts of his past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Apr 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665756839

Jesse Wimberly

Jesse Wimberly is the author of Body of Deceit, Waterproof, A Prayer for the Penitent, Broken Chains, Louisiana Ghost Stories-Tales of the Supernatural from the Bayou State, Louisiana Ghost Stories II--Lagniappe, and Louisiana Ghost Stories III-Trilogy. He resides in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, with his wife Alysha, a recording artist.

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 Jesse Wimberly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Archway Publishing

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.archwaypublishing.com

844-669-3957

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover art by Jerrod M Courville.

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5682-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5684-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5683-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024903123

Archway Publishing rev. date: 4/17/2024

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife Alysha

qui confido omnino.

Trust

An unjust law is no law at all.

St. Augustine

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente

est un crime oublie’, parce qu’il a ere proprement

fait.—Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

Honore de Balzac

Louisiana Civil Code Article 1574:

An olographic testament is one entirely written, dated,

and signed in the handwriting of the testator.

The olographic testament is subject to

no other requirement as to form.

Arpent:

An old French unit of land equivalent

to 3,420 square meters.

Desire hates logic.

Jeb Stuart Johnston

Grief is the price of love.

Justine Galatas

Contents

Chapter 1     Old Habits Die Hard

Chapter 2     The Trust and Trustees

Chapter 3     A Little Background

Chapter 4     The Legatee

Chapter 5     The Client

Chapter 6     Terms of Engagement

Chapter 7     Petition for Probate

Chapter 8     Timing

Chapter 9     Laying the Cards on the Table

Chapter 10   For Every Action there is an Equal and Opposing Reaction

Chapter 11   The Counterpunch

Chapter 12   May I Drive You Home

Chapter 13   Justine’s Story

Chapter 14   A Thumb is Placed on the Scales of Justice

Chapter 15   A Dose of Boric Acid

Chapter 16   The Stakes are Raised

Chapter 17   Pillow Talk

Chapter 18   The Mansion as War Room

Chapter 19   Best Laid Plans

Chapter 20   An Ally

Chapter 21   Road Trip

Chapter 22   Shots Fired

Chapter 23   The Deck is Reshuffled

Chapter 24   Some Justice is Better than None

Chapter 1

OLD HABITS DIE HARD

56427.jpg

Friday

F riday was my favorite day of the week, and Friday afternoon was my favorite time of day. I was sitting in my high-rise office in New Orleans, the crescent city, looking out at the Mississippi River as it wound its course from a tiny trickle in the north to the huge and unstoppable muddy juggernaut, which in less than one hundred miles would fulfill its destiny and flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The river was always muddy with the drainage of the heartland of America, but today, in the evening light, it had a silver sheen as it flowed under the twin bridges built to traverse its broad expanse. I watched it flow past the impossibly sharp turn bordered on the East Bank by the French Quarter and on the west by Algiers Point, and marveled yet again at how the river pilots managed to make that turn day in and day out, for the most part without incident. I had heard that they began making their maneuvers miles ahead of the area, because once in the grip of the treacherous turn, there was nothing to do but pray. At least once in my lifetime the river, and not the pilot, had won the battle, and a freighter had taken out a riverside shopping center with loss of life and property. One of the old pilots once told me that the river was like gravity in that its power was always there whether you recognized it or not, and like gravity, it was completely indifferent as to whether you respected it or not. Its power was inexorable, and to fail to give it its due was a recipe for disaster. The beast of the current lurked beneath its surface, ready to pounce on the unwary or unprepared.

I was just about to call it a day when my intercom buzzed.

Yes, I said.

Do you want to take a call from your buddy Rod? asked my secretary of many years, Darla.

Ordinarily, I would have said I’d get back to him later, but I always enjoyed talking with Rod and knew if he called this late in the day on a Friday afternoon, it wasn’t just to chat. Rod and I had been in the same class and the same division throughout law school, and so we shared a bond like soldiers who had seen combat together—a case of shared trauma and all that. When we caught up, no matter how long it had been, we picked up just where we had left off.

Hi brother, how have you been? How is the big firm life treating you? I asked.

Rod and I had both taken the same job path upon graduation from law school and had both taken jobs at prestigious law firms in New Orleans. I lasted through one miserable year and resigned in favor of hanging up my shingle and becoming a sole practitioner. I never regretted the move. The grind of billing unreasonable hours to get on the track to a partnership, which would have given me the bleak opportunity of billing even more unreasonable hours for the rest of my life, just did not appeal to me. I never looked back and never lamented that I had decided not to sell the largest slice of my life like an hourly hooker.

In fact, I’d often thought about the similarities with the oldest profession. The partners at the big firms were the pimps, the drone associates were the hookers, and the clients were the Johns. The entire enterprise was like what the sex workers called a date, except without an exchange of bodily fluids. The money shot, at least for the partners, was the presentation of the bill for services rendered and, of course, payment.

Rod had stayed running on the wheel of the hamster cage that is the partner track at a big law firm. I knew he hated it, but he had taken the cheese, an early marriage, children, a mortgage, health care, and dental, and he knew he couldn’t get off the wheel now even if he wanted to. It was a shame really. He was a great talent and a good soul, and his abilities could have been put to much greater use representing real people instead of corporations. Now he specialized in trusts, estates, and tax planning. Good and important work to be sure, but stifling.

The big firm life is living the dream, Jeb, he lied unconvincingly. We both knew he hated it, and he envied the choice I had made years ago.

You always have a desk here, brother, I said truthfully. We can break you of those twelve-hour days.

"It’s a nice thought Jeb, but it sure won’t be right now. I’ve got two in private high school now, and when that’s over I get to pay for college and hopefully grad school. No, I’m tied to this desk for at least another ten years.

But I didn’t call to hear you gloat, he kidded. Do you still have that big white horse you like to ride into town on and shoot the bad guys?"

Well, I do have a big white horse that I play, but if you are referring to the symbolic big white horse that the good guy rides into town on, that horse is out to pasture right now.

I bet it comes when you whistle, he said. I could hear the smile in his voice.

Sometimes I wish she wouldn’t, I said truthfully, thinking about the fights I’d had in the past with scary windmills.

You know, when I hear that quote from Winston Churchill about how it’s good that you have enemies, that means you stood for something. I always think about you.

I’ll take that as a compliment then.

It was meant to be.

"So, what’s up? I’m sure it’s not a legal question because you have fifty high-priced lawyers in your firm who can answer anything. What can I do for you?

Well, I have a client who we can’t represent. We have conflicts out the wazoo on this one. It’s also one you might not want to touch because, trust me brother, the players in this one are the big hitters in the area. But I thought of you first because you seem to like the role of underdog, and if I recall correctly, you never refuse a damsel in distress.

Rod knew me well. I did like to have the role of representing the underdog, and I was, if not a sucker for it, certainly a willing accomplice to any case that involved fighting against a legal system that was stacked in favor of the rich and powerful. The law was supposed to apply equally to all but tell that to a litigant who could barely scrape together the money for a low-tier attorney who had to tee it up against a major firm with basically unlimited resources. It didn’t take many examples to know the law favored the wealthy, as does life and just about every other aspect of our existence. Only death seemed to be the great equalizer, and who wanted to wait for death to break even?

Some of my sympathy for the underdog probably came from some of my summer job experiences after my senior year of high school and during summers in college. I held a string of labor-intensive jobs, including a deck hand on a commercial fishing boat working the midnight lumps in the Gulf of Mexico, forty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi; a common laborer in a lumber yard and saw mill in Gretna, and as a roustabout on a production rig in the main pass, also in the Gulf of Mexico. The experiences had taught me a great deal about the value of work and human nature. I learned quickly that the old saying was true. Working from the neck down could make you filthy, and working from the neck up could make you filthy rich.

I also learned a lot about human nature in a strata of society I did not come from. Most wealthy people believe they are successful because they are smarter or have better genes. While that may be true in some cases, it is not so in all. Many of the men I worked with at what would be called by all blue-collar jobs were very intelligent, just in a way that did not necessarily translate into success in an academic world. While the tool pusher on my rig might not have been able to work through a calculus problem, he was able to run his crew and his rig with military precision. I doubted any academic could have done his job, and vice versa. To say the academic was the more intelligent of the two would have been a gross mischaracterization. If the rig is about to blow, do you want the tool pusher with twenty plus years of hands-on experience to save the day or your college math teacher? I know where I’d put my confidence.

Quite a few of these men would surprise you with their depth of knowledge. Some were voracious readers and would have made a good showing on Jeopardy. They just decided that their lives would proceed out of the mainstream of an academic career path. I often wondered if the entire academic game was just a hype for those who had the wherewithal to finish the challenges of college and grad school. The finishers were usually the ones who did the hiring, and by keeping the myth of a college education being essential, they validated their own existence and kept the game rigged in their favor.

I knew one thing for sure, and that was that my experiences in the real world made me a better trial lawyer and increased my empathy for those who had chosen a different path.

In the past, I had taken on several difficult cases with good results and felt like I had, in my small way, contributed to the adage that karma is a bitch by snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and from the briefcases of the big firm hired guns. Someone once told me I was too stupid to realize I was supposed to lose.

Rod, I don’t know much about your areas of expertise, I started.

"You don’t have to. If you take this case, I’ll get you up to speed right away if you need me, but the issues aren’t really that complicated. But it can’t be known that I’m helping you in any way.’

Well, then let’s hear it. What’s the case?

Do you remember anything from the Civil Code about the acceptable forms of last wills and testaments? he asked.

Damn little. I’m pretty sure they have to be dated, signed on each page, and probably notarized.

Well done, Jeb. That’s pretty much it, but there is one will which doesn’t have to be notarized. The Civil Code used to call that a ‘mystic will’, but now it’s termed an olographic testament.

Vaguely. But I thought no one did those anymore.

I don’t think they do as many, at least I’ve never probated one, but we usually get big estates to handle here which have gone through the hands of tax lawyers, so more formal wills are the norm. That is until now, he finished cryptically.

Before I could reply, he continued. A mystic will was designed so a testator could state his wishes, seal the document, and it would be opened on his death. That way, nosy witnesses and the notary wouldn’t know what was in the will until the testator had died and gone on to his or her reward. That kept the legal maneuvering between heirs and potential heirs to a minimum because none of them knew what the testator had bequeathed. I’m sure this made for more peace in the family and probably more visits from potential beneficiaries of the estate during the lifetime of the testator.

OK. Now I know just as much as I did in law school. I’m assuming that someone has left us, and a mystic will has been produced for probate. Am I getting warm here?

You always were a quick study, Jeb. That’s exactly what happened here.

So, who is the client? The offspring of someone of note, I assume, hence your conflict situation.

Yes, a child of a prominent citizen of the area. It seems the will was either never produced or, at least, never probated during the lifetime of the legatee of the testator. The daughter of the testator is now the holder of the will, and she wants to have it opened and probated.

Does she even know what’s in the will? I mean, she might not even be a legatee.

True, but the chances the old guy cut his common-law wife out of the will, I would think, are very small. The testator lived with the mother for over forty years, even though there is no record of them ever being legally married. They had one child, and that child will be your client if you decide to take this case.

"Well, you’ve got my attention. May I now ask who the testator is and who my client might be if,