There was no case number because there was no case.

Nothing had been filed in any court.

It was, in the plainest possible terms, a man typing a deadline on his own letterhead.

And there is a second thing, which is worse, and which is Part Twenty-Six.

The estate did not own that house.

Noreen Schatzberg told me all of this on the first of December, in about four minutes, for free, on the telephone, because she had got my message and called me back between appointments.

And what she said at the end of it was: