Uncle Warren’s probate attorney, a Mr. Dodd, had asked me to come straight to his law firm. He had something to give me, he said. No, he couldn’t tell me over the phone what it was.

The “something” turned out to be a 1940s-era Army footlocker with “Harper, W G” stencilled on it. It was padlocked shut. Mr. Dodd handed me a little brown envelope, saying, “That’s the key to the padlock.”

“Why all the secrecy for a footlocker?” I asked.

“I truly do not know,” he said. “Nor can I tell you what’s inside. In fact, Mr. Harper went to great pains to keep the existence of this box a secret.”

“Oh?”

Mr. Dodd handed me a piece of paper. Though the paper had been notarized with three witness signatures, the words themselves were handwritten—

“To David Dodd: If I am hospitalized before I die, I wish it reliably reported when/if any of my relatives visit. If at least one relative visits me in the hospital, I direct that upon my death, this box is to be given to the relative who had visited most. If none of my relatives visit, then Mr. Dodd, I direct you, upon my death, to take this box to a garbage landfill, a) without opening the box yourself, b) without letting anyone else in your law firm see you remove the box from the building, and c) without letting my relatives know that you possessed this box but gave it to none of them.”

That chunk of text was followed by some lawyer language, and then came Uncle Warren’s signature and a February 2010 date.

Then Mr. Dodd handed me a notarized piece of paper, in which Sherry Benson and Marie Nguyen both swore that last Monday, Warren G. Harper had been visited by “one of his brother Herbert’s great-grandsons, Marvin Harper.”

I tapped the sworn-statements paper. “How did you get these two to `reliably report’ about me?”

Dodd replied, “I visited the hospital during every shift and promised the nurses there that if one of them found Mr. Harper with a relative, and that relative could be named in a sworn statement, then I’d pay the nurse a thousand dollars.”

“And how much for Uncle Warren’s stripper girlfriend? I’ll bet she was expensive.”

“No, Miss Benson did it for free. Mr. Harper told her to come to my office and sign the paper in my presence, and that’s what she did, though she told me afterward that she was missing work.”

“He told her to miss work to sign a paper and, bada-bing, she went?”

“Yes, it does seem odd, doesn’t it?”

I dug out my car keys from my pocket, threw them on top of the footlocker, and was just about to pick everything up, when a thought occurred to me. “So we relatives of Uncle Warren, none of us is getting any of his fortune? Not a dime?”

Mr. Dodd gave me a “What can I do?” shrug. “That’s correct. Everything of his that’s worth having, except for that box, is going to the Eisenhower Library.”

Twenty minutes later, I arrived home, without mentioning to my parents my detour to Mr. Dodd’s office. Then I let the footlocker sit in the trunk of my car for several hours, until my parents left to see a movie. (It was something about a shipful of Caribbean pirates battling a killer robot from the future. Sounded hokey.)

It was dark twilight when I brought the footlocker from my car to my bedroom. I keyed the padlock open, and opened the footlocker’s lid.

Inside were two old photo albums, and a brass oil lamp.

If you’ve read any “Aladdin” story, you know what the lamp’s shape was. But the oil lamp had nothing special about its metalwork, and its finish was mottled and lusterless.

In short, I was unimpressed with that oil lamp.

But hey, I figured I might be able to sell it for a few bucks on eBay, or use it as a prop for Halloween parties.

I set the lamp aside.

I started leafing through the photo albums, and figured out quickly that they were the reason that Uncle Warren had wanted the footlocker kept secret from his relatives.

The pictures in the first album started in 1942. There were yellowed black-and-white photos of Uncle Warren in uniform, and photos of young uniformed men who had to be his war buddies. There were photos of palm-tree’d Tunisia, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx, and of lions and hippopotamuses. All G-rated stuff, right? But there were also photos of naked young women, black- and brown-skinned, and photos of young Warren getting blowjobs from young women.

Actually, there were lots and lots of photos of Warren getting blowjobs from women.

About three quarters of the way through the older photo album, I turned the page and—I freaked out.

On the left-side page were two photos of a serious young woman who was looking at the camera. She was fully dressed (unlike many of the women in the album), wearing Middle Eastern clothing. Oddly, while her hips and everything above them were in focus, her legs were out of focus. Uncle Warren had captioned her photos with the puzzling words, “Fatima, who changed my life. June 3, 1943.”

Immediately below these photos, and their strange caption, were these words that had been written in 1943: “I will die on May 7, 2010, a Friday.”

What the hell is going on? I wondered.

The rest of that first photo album, and all of the second, were naked women posing for the camera, and Uncle Warren getting sex. But now the women were gorgeous (by Forties and Fifties standards), and the sex was outrageous. Uncle Warren was getting plenty of blowjobs now, from breathtaking beauties, but now he also was involved in bunches of threesomes. Uncle Warren had a photo of himself in 1944, appearing onstage at a Victory Bond rally in Hollywood with a blonde actress whose name you might know, and appearing with a line of brunette chorus girls; Uncle Warren’s next photo showed this same blonde naked, cocksucking my uncle, while a brunette dancer ate the blonde out.

I looked at every photo in both albums. It didn’t help; I couldn’t figure out how what I was seeing in the photos, had happened. How had Uncle Warren suddenly become a sex god? Who was this Fatima, and what had happened between her and Uncle Warren? I couldn’t begin to guess.

So this was my “inheritance”: two pornographic yet puzzling photo albums, and a souvenir-stall “Aladdin’s lamp.” Very likely, I couldn’t ship the photo albums to anyone without violating postal obscenity laws, so ebaying the photo albums was out. Meaning, my only hope of gaining any money from my “windfall” was through the lamp.

Bottom line: If I wanted money, I needed to polish this sorry excuse for a lamp before I could hope to sell it.

I drove to the store, bought some brass polish, came home, and reassigned my rattiest pair of briefs to brass-polish duty. I dipped the cloth in the brass polish, and rubbed everything against the right side of the lamp. The result?

The lamp shook in my hand as if a frantic rat were trapped inside of it. Then green smoke came out of the lamp’s spout—lots and lots of green smoke.