The $82,000 he left behind was not designated for anyone. He had spent decades accumulating it, apparently through careful management of his Lubrizol salary and whatever pension or retirement income he had received after the layoff. He had no family he acknowledged. He had no friends he had allowed to become close enough to be remembered in his financial arrangements. The money was simply there — a residue of a life that had been carefully organized around not leaving traces, leaving a trace in the form of a bank balance that outlasted its owner.
—
## The Eastlake Apartment After the Death
The Eastlake apartment in which Robert Nichols died, and in which his body was found approximately a week after his death, contained the material record of his life under the Chandler name.
In the apartment: the packed suitcase. The television, presumably positioned where he had sat watching static for hours. The homemade electronic devices that had occupied some of his time. The calendar on which he had marked his approach to the date he had chosen.
The $82,000 was in a bank account, not in cash in the apartment. He had been careful with money in the way that a man who had learned not to trust his circumstances might be careful: maintaining a substantial reserve, keeping it in an institution, not drawing attention to himself through either extreme poverty or conspicuous spending.
His apartment was modest. Eastlake in the late twentieth century was a working-class to middle-class lakeshore community. An elderly retired engineer living in a rental apartment there was unremarkable. He would not have been unusual-seeming to his neighbors in any obvious way.