“Because, dammit, she’s not going to get it. She – I-“
After a minute he said, “You know you’re not supposed to keep secrets from your attorney, don’t you? Of course you do. I’ve heard you give witnesses that lecture. I use it myself. There’s something else.”
“She’s got him in our house, Lew. She’s screwing him in our bedroom while the kids are sleeping a few rooms away. And knowing, Deb, or at least remembering when she still gave a damn about sex, she’s probably loud enough that the kids know what’s going on. We’re not even close to being divorced. That’s got to count for something.”
“It would, if you were fighting for custody of the kids. Having a lover in the house, engaging in activities that might cause psychological harm to the children, especially if they were younger, would give you a leg up in seeking custody, although even that would be an uphill fight. But, alimony? Doesn’t make any difference. She could be bringing them in in shifts of three, and she’d still have a claim for alimony based on her previous marriage history.
“Do you want to go for custody? If you could grab custody, that would knock out child support and balance off the alimony. Of course, alimony will go on long after child support is over, but it’s something.”
I scratched my head and wished Debbie would roast in some very hot hell.
“No. Look Lew, I know it sounds strange, but Debbie has been a good mother. I’ve been an absentee father. She went to their school events, took them to the emergency room, went to their games. She had obligations to her job too, but she always made time for them. They wouldn’t want to live with me, and to be honest, I’m working harder than I ever have. I’m in that tiny damned condo. I can’t take them.”
“Okay, you don’t want them. Moving on-“
“No, Lew, don’t take that damned tone with me. She’s their mother, and with the exception of letting her pussy do her thinking for her the last couple of months or so, she’s always been a better parent than me. Maybe I’m being selfish, but I’m thinking of them too.”
I heard him sigh on the other end.
“Alright Bill, I’m sorry to take that attitude. Look, the problem is, I’m a great attorney, but I’m not a magician. I can’t magically make things work out the way you want them, unless....”
“Unless...”
“Look Bill, I know what you’ve told me about how things went down, how you found them at that awards ceremony, your suspicions. I don’t like to say this, because you’re a friend, but you’re lying. You’re not telling me everything, you’re not telling me the most important thing. You’ve got dirt on her and you’re holding back.”
We were both quiet for a moment.
“Bill, look, level with me. I’ve been around divorces and I know you’ve handled cases where they didn’t divorce but wound up killing somebody. The cheated on party hates the cheater, but they still love them. You don’t stop loving somebody just because you divorce them, or kill them. Give me what you got and I might be able to give you what you want. You’ve got to trust me.”
“Meet me at my condo tonight. 9 p.m.”
When I hung up from him I dialed Debbie’s office at UNF. She might be in there for her planning period. Unless she was somewhere off with Doug’s cock inside her. Or she might even be doing it in her office. She had a lock on the door.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
“Professor Maitland.”
“What the hell are you up to?”
“Hmmmm...that sounds very much like Assistant State Attorney William Maitland. But it can’t be. That son of a bitch very forcefully told me a month ago that he was never going to talk to me again. And he’s hung up on me at least four or five times that I can remember since then. So who are you?”
“Why are you being such a bitch about alimony? I’m giving you the house and most of our savings and liquid assets. I make more than you but not THAT much more. I’m going to fight you on this. It will just make it that much longer before you can carry on openly with your boy toy. Oh, sorry, I forgot you were doing that already. Including, you bitch, screwing him in our house while the kids are there. That bastard must have a foot-long cock for you to behave like such a tramp.”
She laughed.
“Don’t be silly, Bill. All he’s got is a good, solid, very hard 8 inches. But that’s long and hard enough.”
“Alright, that’s a point for you. You think I’m going to break down sobbing to learn you’ve been having sex with him. I knew that.”
“Yes. You know that 14-year-olds can’t keep secrets. BJ told me about your call the same day.”
“You must be very proud of yourself, carrying on that way in front of our children.”
“Don’t lay that guilt trip on me, Bill. He didn’t start staying over until our marriage was over. Maybe not on paper, but it was over.
“And our children are not five years old. They know about sex already, Bill. You may not know about it, you probably don’t, but Kelly is on the pill. Has been since she was 15. That’s when that bastard Ricky Thompson down the street got her drunk at a party. And before you say anything, she was 15 and he was 16. I had her tested. I wasn’t going to drag her through court and humiliate her to have his wrist slapped. She begged me not to tell you and there was no reason to.
“And BJ already knows how to use a condom. That miserable slut college girl Wendy next door to us introduced him to the glories of sex when he was 13. He told me he had a hard time not laughing out loud when you gave him that damned birds and bees lecture. He had already practiced everything you were telling him about.
“You see what kind of fun stuff you missed by never coming home?
“So, anyway, the kids knew. I told them I’d never touched Doug, that there was no romance. We were just friends until you went crazy jealous and got so paranoid and suspicious. And then we were through.
“You forget, they live in the house. They’re young, but they knew neither one of us was happy.”
“I was.”
“Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough, because I wasn’t. They were ...upset...Bill, but they understood. I think they didn’t feel that bad about you because like BJ said, you already had a girlfriend. He was talking about your job. Your job always came first, ahead of me and them. They’re not blind.”
“Anyway, enough about me and what a rotten bastard and terrible father I am. The point is, I’ll tie you up in court as long as I can, just on the off chance that you actually care for the kid and want to adopt him. Unless you give on the alimony.”
“Not a chance in hell.”
I forced myself not to scream at her.
“Why, Debbie? I don’t mind paying for the kids, but I’m not going to pay you one penny in – what do you business types call it? – Fungible funds. Every penny I give you could be spent on little presents for boytoy, for condoms for his big dick, or something else that would turn my stomach if I knew about it.
“Lew probably didn’t tell you, but as much as I love this job, you force the alimony issue and I swear to God I’ll walk away and let you try to find me for the next few years. I’ve got enough savings and funds to vanish for awhile.”
“I don’t believe you, Bill. You can walk away from me, and abandon your kids, but you’d never leave that miserable job. The worst thing I ever did was let you take a job at the State Attorney’s Office. You weren’t this way when you were in private practice.”
“And I wasn’t 41 years old and 50 pounds overweight with a spare tire. But that has nothing to do with my job. I just got older and you stayed too damned hot. Look, just be honest with me – for the first time in a long time. Why are you fighting for alimony so hard?”
“Alright. Because you screwed me over that night at the awards ceremony. I’m almost 40 and still an Associate professor. I’ve heard enough gossip to know that President Myers is going to make sure I don’t get a favorable evaluation next time out. I can probably hold onto my job, by my fingertips, but no guara
ntees.
“If I lose this job, I’ll be a 40-year-old Associate professor job hunting against 28-year-old assistants who are either guys and have an edge on me or girls with tits a lot perkier than mine. I’ll wind up somewhere, but I don’t know I’ll ever have any real job security. The kids will out of the house in a few years and then it will be just me.
“If something bad happens, I get sick, wind up with a boss that insists on my doing him to keep my job, I won’t have any backup. And I’m not going to crawl to you for scraps, even if you were willing to help me. I’d rather starve to death than see that smug smile on your face when I come begging for help.”
“My heart bleeds, but if you’d been honest with me that night, or hadn’t acted like a slut in front of a thousand people, there wouldn’t have been a fight and your precious job wouldn’t be in jeopardy.”
“If…if...if… the fact remains, Bill, that I’ve got you by the balls. Joyce is a very good attorney and she tells me there’s no way I’m not going to get all the alimony I want, part of your retirement, and child support. Not even with your whiz kid Lew Walters doing his damnedest. And that’s another thing. Why did you bring Lew in on this? Lew was a friend of ours. Lew and Mona. Why bring a friend in to go after me?”
“Lew isn’t OUR friend, Debbie. He’s my friend. And while he’s a nice guy, in the courtroom he’s a shark. I – please...don’t fight me on this. You’re going to get hurt.”
“Why would you care, Bill? You told me we were through. I don’t know what you think you have as your big gun, but I know there’s no dirt you can use against me. But still, if you had something, why would you care if I got hurt? I’d think you would enjoy that.”
I didn’t say anything and finally she said, “You still there?”
“I’m sorry, Debbie. When...when this goes down, I want you to remember that you forced me to do it. You know what they say about rats. Even a rat will fight if you force it into a corner.”
Instead of her making some smartass comment about rats, she said, “Bill, I mean this seriously. Go out and get a woman. That’s probably going to be hard for you to do, but if you have to, pay for it. I don’t want you to stay hung up on me. I’m moving on with my life. I hope you can too.”
I could take anger a lot easier than pity and contempt. She probably didn’t think I could get a woman without paying for her. As to moving on, I had already moved on to a life quite different from the one I’d known three months earlier.
There weren’t any women because at this point I still wasn’t sure if I could get it up, much less make a woman happy that I was having sex with her. And I wouldn’t know that until zero hour. Which I wasn’t in any real hurry to arrive at. Because, what if she had managed to effectively neuter me? I couldn’t really see 30 or 40 years of eunuch-hood.
I was not real happy all day. My personal and professional lives intersected to make it a really shitty day all around.
It was Wednesday and I spent all day preparing a case I’d selected – or at least which had selected me – that was due to start Monday. Charles Bingham was 74 years old. His wife Mabel had developed lung cancer in 1992. It spread to her breasts or she developed breast cancer concurrently. The doctors didn’t seem real sure on the sequence. She had chemo and drugs and had her breasts cut off and she seemed to be one of the lucky ones that beat two types of incurable cancers.
Then in 2003 the doctors found spots on her lungs and she went the chemo/drug regimen again. Only this time there was no miracle. She dropped from 155 pounds on her 5-foot-7 frame to 85 pounds by early 2005. She was wracked with intolerable pain that the drugs couldn’t knock down.
No matter what doctors tell you, there are some types of pain no narcotic will really work effectively again. I had a grandmother who developed ovarian cancer when I was 13 and they had to eventually dope her into unconsciousness because her 24-hour screaming from the pain was driving other patients and even medical staff crazy. A few days later she was dead. I always thought some merciful doctor or nurse gave her a little too much pain medicine.
Mabel Bingham was incontinent and although he had assistance, Charles was the one who usually had to clean her shitty diapers and change the bedsheets after she pissed through them again and again. He had to listen to her scream day and night They had two grown daughters, but he was her husband and it was his duty to care for his wife. So he did.
Until the day she stopped screaming and when a nurse’s aide came in, she found Charles sitting beside a pale and colorless Mabel, holding one of her hands in both of his. It would have seemed a merciful end until a routine medical exam showed five times the level of pain killing narcotic in her body that could be explained by the action of the automated narcotic drip by her bed.
A quiet and unemotional Charles Bingham confessed that he manually gave Mabel the overdose when she momentarily came to a state of consciousness and begged him to release her.
“I had to,” he said, and then began crying.
His sentencing hearing on a charge of manslaughter was to begin Monday. He’d already pled guilty and it was up to Circuit Judge Dominic Dellaro to decide what he’d be given, probably a five-year suspended sentence or a one-year suspended sentence. Only in rare occasions did a husband or wife in that type of situation ever receive any kind of real sentence. Usually there was too much public sympathy for the murderer to hit them with any real time.
Judges, of course, are apolitical creatures and don’t follow the elections. Sure...and if you believe that I have the proverbial bridge for sale. No one was going to hit a grieving senior with real jail time and have that come back to bite them the next time they came up for election. And in Florida, circuit judges have to be re-elected.
Of course, no SA wanted the trial. There was no excitement, no points to be made and if by some chance you managed to get a conviction in a mercy-killing case where the defendant hadn’t already confessed and there was a shred of suspense to the whole thing, who the hell could brag about sending a 70-something-year-old grieving criminal to prison?
So nobody wanted this case where there was absolutely NO suspense at all, and while I could have dumped it on somebody, I decided I’d take it. Maybe get a few points back among the staff for the points I’d lost by the way I’d treated Carlisle on the drug-dealer child murdering case.
Unfortunately, I’d had too much time on my hands and I’d actually done some digging. Some I did myself, some I had one of our office investigators handle, and I called in one of the sheriff’s detectives who had been assigned the case and asked him as a personal favor in return for a few favors I’d done him over the years to take on a few extra chores.
So I leaned back in my chair and examined a few documents on the desk in front of me. I didn’t think anything could make me feel worse about life in general than what I’d gone through over the last four months, but somehow Charles Bingham had managed that stunt.
No matter what I did, I was going to feel like absolute crap at the end of the day next Monday. There are days of triumph as a prosecutor. Those are the days when you bring evil-doers to justice or strike a blow for some poor soul and ensure there is at least retroactive justice.
And then there are days like next Monday promised to be. I didn’t know who I felt more pity for – poor Mabel Bingham, or poor Charles Bingham. And the worst of it all was, as happened so many times, the decision on which way to go rested in my hands.
Talk about where the buck stops. When prosecutors go bad, become drunks or suicides or use their position for sex or profit, I think it’s that weight, the responsibility that eventually breaks them.
That’s what most people don’t understand. The people with real power in our system aren’t cops. They just investigate and arrest. The people with real power aren’t judges. They have a lot of power, but who they see and what charges they deliberate on don’t come from them.
I decide that. In my hands is the power to decide who is arrested and who is released; who
faces death or 25 years or who gets mercy. And there really is no oversight, nobody looking over my shoulder.
Cops can bitch, but my decisions are final. Judges can bitch and threaten to take action, but they never do. The only person with any real power over me is the Big Man, and he had given me the Keys to the Kingdom and he had never in five years countermanded any decision I’d made.
Most of the time it doesn’t bother me. I’ve made mistakes, but it comes with the territory. Surgeons kill people. It’s how they learn. I had sent people to prison who didn’t deserve what they got and let people go free or out early and regretted my actions. But it was part of the job.
Monday was going to bother me. For the first time in a long time I wasn’t sure which way I should go, what I should do about a case. Having a great deal of power can be a good thing, except when you don’t know what to do with it.
Lew knocked on the door and I got up from the little kitchen/dinette table in the alcove that served as a kitchen/dining room and opened the door.
Lew was Lew. Tall, about six-foot-one, sandy colored hair, that same crooked grin as if he was into some private joke that you weren’t aware of. But it was a good smile. He was one of those people you like from the first moment you see them, even though I couldn’t have explained exactly why.
I read a book one time that said when you meet people like that, people you ‘fit’ with either in terms of friendship or romance, it’s a case of people who known each other in a prior life meeting up again. I’m not sure I believe in reincarnation, but I know we’d been good friends almost from the first day we’d met at UF.
He looked at me oddly. I realized we’d done all our communicating by telephone since I’d asked him to handle my divorce. It had been, what, maybe five or six months since we’d laid eyes on each other.
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