The Money-Market Coffin by Robb White

My Uncle Arman died while I was doing the “short-and-shitty,” two weeks short of my release date. 

The gig cost me five years of my life. I claimed to be a real estate developer from Escanaba, an expert on house-flipping. My target was the Lansing Housing Commission and my proposal intended for the state legislature involved converting whole neighborhoods of Brightmoor—a hideous, burned-out prairie desert—into the next Boca Raton, albeit without the adjacent turquoise water. 

I’d spent over a thousand grooming two members of the state legislature with influence over the Housing Commission. It came crashing down like a house of cards under strobe lighting when I miscalculated a row of figures on my spreadsheet. The result was an audit. Simple arithmetic. No complex mathematics, no tree structures, no embedded or rewrite rules, reverse mathematics, or termination of algorithm. Just simple math. Even my bone-headed brother could have done it. 

“I need to borrow your car, Cameron.”

“Got a hot date now that you’re a free man again?”

“I’m going to dig up that coffin,” I replied. “Uncle wrote me. He said he was taking it with him.”

“Taking what?”

“Money-market certificates,” I said. 

Uncle was batshit crazy toward the end. My brother looked at me as if I intended to do it with my own hands.

***

The drunk in the bar in the Cass Corridor was worth every penny of my prison salary. The sexton at Queen of Angels Cemetery wanted to make phone calls but my deputy was getting into his role and talked him down. The fake exhumation order looked convincing, even if not my best work.

The tow motor operator and groundskeeper barely had the coffin clear of the hole before I was jamming the beveled edge of my crowbar into the lip and popping the top. I was mentally prepared for unpleasantness. Prison helps with that.

The funeral home my mother used must have taught the stewmakers of the Mexican cartels. Having power of attorney during his last month would have allowed for a better outfit for the last rites. He shouldn’t have looked like that. He wasn’t dead long enough for the rictus grin, the hanks of hair fallen off the skull, the innards sloshing around with the swaying of the casket from the chain hoist. 

Even with gloves, I didn’t want to touch the notebook. The reek of formaldehyde was overpowering—another sign of that cheap outfit my mother hired. I had to ease it from his cadaverous grasp with the edge of my crowbar. The combination of urine release, gastrointestinal fluids, and bloody stool had blurred and erased his notations beyond any hope of legibility.

“I’m sorry, sir. What did you say?”

“I said, ‘there goes any chance I had of selling myself to talk shows as an idiot savant.’ Except for the idiot part. Put him back.” 

I walked off with my deputy in tow, whistling Puccini.

***

My brother took the "queen for a day” proffer from the prosecutor and turned state’s evidence in my mother’s trial. He thought using a fake Yahoo account to order Thallium for his dental equipment company was all the deception required. He got three years at the white-collar camp at FCI Milan. I tried to catch his eye when he was on the stand, but he hid behind a wad of tissues, sobbing.

Trial lawyers bore me silly. The same words. Smarmy winces at the jury box. Rinse and repeat. I entertained myself with numbers. Take the Mick, for example. Born on June 8th. Died on August 6th, after his liver transplant. Ignoring the fact he jumped the line because he was the great Mickey Mantle, 8s and 6s are everywhere. The eight month and the sixth month separated by sixty-six days in 1995. You can create a matrix of number systems out of those two integers beyond square roots, multiplications, inversions, and eigenvalues. While the dullards preened and droned on, making jurors blanche with the details of how my mother poisoned her only brother for his estate (which, by the way, would never have come to her as his only surviving relative since he bequeathed his two-plus-millions to math scholarships at U of Michigan), I built a castle of numbers in the air out of the Mick’s birth and death.

When the time comes, I’ll send my brother a letter advising him on the dos and don’ts of prison life. I’ll even throw in my hard-won experiences at three penitentiaries.

Mom got the full forty when the second toxicology report came back. They don’t test for exotic drugs like Thallium. She’ll die in the joint or, barring some soft-headed governor down the road, she’ll get compassionate release at eighty so the state doesn’t have to pick up her medical bills. 

Her con job might have worked if she’d let the Thallium in the saffron rice pudding she brought him do all the work. Bleed his bank account dry while he worked on his secret formula. Low risk, high reward. But she got greedy and hated having to shell out the monthly fee for that expensive clinic. Obtaining the services of a reputable mortician and using a better cutout than my thin-skinned brother would have been my other suggestions. When I saw the black lines on his fingernails, I knew. The assistant pathologist missed it when the putrid contents of the black bag rolled out. 

I plan on visiting her. As we used to say in the old neighborhood, we’re saazgaar now--compatible. 

Uncle Arman and I shared a love for numbers. Their pure, crystalline beauty. Everything messy in the universe boils down to numbers—a chemical number, a pattern of pixels, codes, data, information. Human beings are world lines, sine and cosine, particles and waves, fluctuations in the Higgs field. We appear and disappear like photons born in the bellies of stars only to die in our retinas without having traveled a single foot. Go figure.

​© 2026 Robb White

About the author:
Robb White is a Derringer-nominated author of genre fiction, he has three series detectives. The Russian Heist (2019) was selected Best Novel in Thriller Magazine’s competition. Betray Me Not was selected for distinction by the Independent Fiction Alliance in 2022. Recent publications include a suspense thriller, Jersey Girl (2025), a crime novella, Easy Money (2025), and a prequel to the Thomas Haftmann, p. i. series: The Dearborn Terrorist Plot.