Willie and Indy are selling some property.
Indy fancied himself a land baron back in the 60s. By the time he married Willie, he owned three properties, which Willie only discovered once the tax bills began arriving.
After their wedding day.
But now, Willie and Indy are looking forward. They realize they have more days behind them than ahead.
Which, incidentally, could also be said of me. Because Willie and Indy most definitely have shaved years from my life.
Willie and Indy want their deaths to be as straightforward as possible for me, their executor.
If only they’d treat their lives the same way. I could maybe get back a few of those years I’ve lost to false alarm emergency room visits and false alarm middle-of-the-night phone calls.
To simplify their deaths, Willie and Indy have decided to unload the properties they still own. One is in Maryland, the other El Paso.
Well, getting Willie to sell the El Paso land took some effort.
“Sell it!” Indy said, which is great. Technically, I only need his approval. Neither piece of land is in Willie’s name. Just Indy’s. I think that was his version of a prenuptial agreement because Willie is obviously a gold digger.
“We don’t have to sell it,” Willie admonished. “The taxes are so low!”
I reminded Willie they were selling the properties to make my life easier. But Willie is no fan of making my life easier.
“It’s fine,” Willie assured me.
So I reminded her of her brother, who spent the last few years of his life penniless in a nursing home. He died thirteen months ago. As executor, Willie is still dealing with his estate.
And, of course, driving around with his ashes in the trunk of her car.
I reminded Willie that her brother didn’t even an estate, but his death managed to give her a year’s worth of work. Indy has three estates. I’m bad at math, so I’m not sure how a ratio of zero estates to one year of work translates for three estates. But I know it’s a lot.
With an exasperated sigh, Willie agreed to off the El Paso land.
Willie retrieved her file on the Maryland property. “I don’t even have a file on the El Paso land,” Willie said, like the El Paso land was a child unworthy of her consideration.
I feel you, El Paso.
Sorting through her Maryland paperwork, Willie noticed she had no tax payment receipts after 2019.
That was the year Willie and Indy moved. Meaning it’s entirely possible the bills are still going to their old house, the land had been repossessed, and this conversation had sucked down an hour of my life I could have devoted to The Falcon & The Winter Soldier.
But I didn’t and then I saw a spoiler, so I knew how The Falcon & The Winter Soldier ended before I watched the final episode. All because Indy bought some land in 1962.
I went to the town website for the Maryland property to find Indy and Willie’s tax records.
Paid in full, and the municipality has Willie and Indy’s current address.
With that property in the clear, I turned to El Paso. In the Maryland file, Willie found a letter. With a flourish, she laid it before me.
“Ha! I do have paperwork on the El Paso property!” She proclaimed, triumphant at her organizational skills.
“Willie,” I sighed, “this isn’t about El Paso. It’s for the Maryland property.”
“No,” Willie said. “It says Texas.” She nodded knowingly.
Not so much. The letter was from a Texas real estate agent, offering to sell and even buy the Maryland property.
Willie dismissed my arrogance, producing another piece of paper.
Unfolding it, I saw that it was a map of the El Paso neighborhood hosting Indy’s plot.
Relieved that I had something to go on with the El Paso land, I set about looking it up online. But El Paso, Texas had no record of Indy being a landholder.
“It’s El Paso, right, Indy?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Indy assured me.
The development is called Sunland Estates. I Googled it.
And that’s how I learned Indy’s property was sold as a scam and is now a potential nuclear waste disposal site.
It’s also how I learned that I am undoing yet another scam involving Willie and Indy. A scam that began decades before I was born.
I appreciate Willie and Indy’s attempts at making things come full circle.
Except not really.
The first thing that popped up in my Google search was this article, which explains how back in the 60s, a real estate company sold plots of land in eastern El Paso, knowing full well these plots were not ready to be built upon – they lacked sewers, water, other basic utilities.
This is no longer legal to do in Texas. But now, large swaths of eastern El Paso sit unused, the owners lost to the sands of time, if not to the sands of El Paso itself.
Land here is difficult to develop due to so many delinquent and dead owners, and difficult to sell for the same reason. No one wants to buy a single plot when there’s no water and miles of nothingness.
Indy’s land is in Hudspeth County. That’s eastern El Paso, the setting for the scam in this article. The real estate company basically fleeced him into purchasing a property no one intended to develop.
Because of the difficulties with construction on that land, the idea has been floated to use the area for nuclear waste. But all of Hudspeth County’s 3211 people – as of 2014 – are against their backyards hosting depleted uranium.
My sleuthing also uncovered Indy’s tax records, which – like the Maryland property – showed Indy’s current address and taxes paid in full.
Willie was indignant when I announced this. “Notice she gives me no credit for updating our address and paying the taxes,” she whispered to Indy.
The “she” here would be me. I was supposed to be impressed that Willie and Indy had, you know, not committed tax evasion.
Willie’s brother – the one in the trunk of her car – committed tax evasion. It’s a long story.
Anyway, whispering was pointless. For starters, Willie, Indy, and I were sitting at a three-foot square table. Also, Indy is hard of hearing and refuses to wear the hearing aids it took me four phone calls and two visits to the VA clinic to procure, not to mention the nine months of paperwork I completed to make sure the VA gave Indy those hearing aids for free.
But Indy is the best. So I let that go. Sort of.
“I can hear you,” I told Willie. “Indy can’t.”
“What?” Willie asked.
Indy laughed.
“I’m not giving you credit for paying your taxes and notifying the government that you moved,” I told Willie. “You’re supposed to do those things, you know.” Which I know she doesn’t know because when she was sick, I was paying the bills and discovered the tax bill for both properties was six months overdue.
I rattled off the tax information I had found online for each property. When I got done, Willie began sorting through the Maryland folder’s paperwork. “Where are they?” she muttered.
“Where’s what?” I asked.
“My tax-paid receipts,” Willie said. “I want you to have them for the real estate agent.”
“Willie,” I said, “I just explained that I have all the tax receipts here online. There’s this new thing called the internet…”
Willie was not amused.
“You know,” she said, “I may not be tech-savvy compared to you kids,” – which means me and my siblings, all far from being kids – “but around here I am a god when it comes to tech.”
Last year she went on a tirade about Uber not having a phone number. I’m just going to say that and let you ponder what, exactly, constitutes a tech god in the retirement village.
Sorting through the paperwork at home, I found the original bill of sale. It’s made out to Indy, Senior.
This was sixteen years before my brother was born. And while he’s an Indy, he’s not an Indy, Junior. They have different middle names.
So Indy’s deed of sale begs a question.
If he was Indy, Senior in 1960, who was Indy, Junior?
And would he like to buy some land?