Never Enough

by Harold Robbins

  “Who’s behind it?”

  “Don’t ask. A guy who could buy you and me out of pocket change. He’s behind this deal, and he guarantees you can’t lose.”

  “A big promise.”

  “You can invest his money. He’ll transfer it to you.”

  “And I can make?”

  “Who knows? But you can’t lose.”

  “You didn’t steer me wrong before.”

  “After this deal, there could very well be others.”

  “Okay. I’ll put in some. And let your guy put in some more.”

  V

  Amy did come over to Manhattan and spend an occasional night in his little apartment. She was so anxious to please him and to hold him, she would do just about anything he suggested. Tonight he had taken a shower, and he was lying on the bed receiving a sensuous tongue bath—starting on his forehead and working down, sometimes starting on his feet and working up. She would always leave his hardening cock until last. She liked seeing him respond to her.

  She had just reached his nipples when the telephone rang.

  “Jesus!” he said.

  The caller was Leeman. Dave had long since learned that Bob Leeman had no sense of hours or of privacy but might call at three o’clock in the morning.

  “Hey, kid! We’ve made it. Nobody had to file a 13-D, but I’ve got enough stock, in the hands of a few of my guys, more of yours, to vote me in. Which, by God, I’m gonna do. Hey! Now our problem is how to market the goddamned stocks in the subsidiaries. I guess I can count on you for that.”

  “Right.”

  “None of our guys are gonna lose anything. McLeod closed today at 35¼. I can keep it there until all the loose ends are taken care of. Then tell them to bail out and take their profit. The ones who owe me money can pay from their proceeds. But time is of the essence, as the lawyers say.”

  “First thing in the morning,” said Dave.

  “First thing. After I’m named as taking over, that stock is gonna go south.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Amy had gone into the bathroom to refresh her mouth with Lavoris.

  “Do something for me, Bob.”

  “Apart from your making a million?”

  “Yes. Janelle. Make sure she goes to college and gets an education. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Hell … I’ve done the same for a lot of my girls. I’ll pay for it. A girl is only seventeen once. She’s got to have a life after … They understand I’ll take care of them, Dave … You’d be surprised if I told you the women who did their thing for me and then went on, because I sponsored them, to great things. There’s a magazine publisher … Well, never mind.”

  “Okay.”

  “I told you that when this deal is successful there’d be a million in it for you. Well … all we gotta do now is figure how we’re gonna transfer that to you. You pop up to my place, say, Wednesday evening, and we’ll settle that. And, uh, Janelle will be there. You didn’t take full advantage of her before. Maybe you’ll think about that again.”

  “Okay. Thanks for calling, Bob.”

  Amy returned from the bathroom and took up where she’d left off. “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “It was a guy calling to tell me that a deal we’d tried to swing didn’t work out.”

  “You lose a lot of money?”

  “Just what I’d hoped to make. I didn’t have anything committed.”

  Amy ran her tongue up his penis. “Can’t win ’em all,” she murmured.

  Dave stared at the ceiling.

  SIX

  I

  1984

  Cole and Emily had lived in an apartment in the East Sixties. With the toddler, Emily, crawling around and an infant, Cole, in a bassinet, their tiny apartment had been inadequate. This one had two bedrooms, a living-dining room, and a kitchen.

  Emily’s pregnancies had not made her lumpy. She didn’t even have stretch marks. The only change in her was that her beautifully pear-shaped breasts had grown a bit. She kept her pussy shaved and had lost her reticence about letting Cole see her pink, fleshy inner labia. She was on The Pill. They had decided that two children were all they wanted, at least for now. She had resumed modeling at the Art Students League but only did it one evening a week. She was one of the favorite models, and they asked her to do more. She said she had obligations at home.

  Cole worked long hours, and they were taxing hours. When he came home, the first thing he wanted was a drink, to relax him.

  The first thing, actually, was to play with his favorite little girl, Emily, and to cuddle Cole, but when Emily put the children to bed, Cole wanted to drink. He wanted to ease the tensions of being a trial lawyer.

  “I think you’re going a little heavy on that, honey,” Emily said to him several times. He had developed a taste for martinis, which he drank on the rocks, with twists of lemon.

  Cole blew a loud sigh. “There’s a saying about trial lawyers,” he told her. “They say we have significantly lower life expectancies than other people, other lawyers.”

  “Well, you’re not going to increase it by drinking too much.”

  “You got a point,” he said. But he finished his third martini.

  “What’s on your plate now?” she asked.

  “Well … you know the last thing any lawyer wants to do is handle divorce cases. And our firm doesn’t. But when you have a good client for other reasons, you can’t very well turn him down when he asks you to handle his divorce. So, I’m stuck with what’s going to turn out to be a notorious case. I mean, the tabloids are going to go ape.”

  “Whose case?”

  “You’ve heard of Jack Singer.”

  “The real estate guy?”

  “That’s him. He’s fifty-two. He married a chick. She’s twenty-seven. She caught him in flagrante delicto, as lawyers are supposed to say. And she’s decided, if he’s to be believed, to take him. to the cleaners. She wants half of everything he owns.”

  “Nasty case.”

  Cole nodded. “Ugly. All full of emotion.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I hate to admit it, but I’ve hired a private investigator.”

  II

  Five months later the case came to trial before a judge—no juries on divorce cases.

  Mrs. Singer testified on her own behalf, describing how she had come home one night, unexpectedly early, to find her husband in bed with a black prostitute.

  Cole Jennings cross-examined.

  “Mrs. Singer, is this the only time you ever observed your husband in such circumstances?”

  She was a stunning classic blond, demure in a black knit dress. She crossed her legs at the ankles and did not allow her skirt to creep up. “Once is enough, don’t you think, Mr. Jennings?”

  “But it was the only time?”

  “I figure he did it all the time. This was just the only time I caught him.”

  Cole smiled at the judge. “I’ll ask the court to disregard the speculation.”

  The judge nodded. “Confine your testimony to what you have observed and know, Mrs. Singer.”

  “Now …” said Cole. “May we assume that you never strayed outside your marriage?”

  “Absolutely never. I’ve been married to Jack for seven years and have never—Well, you know what I’ve never.”

  “No. Tell us. What is it you’ve never?”

  “I have never been intimate with another man,” she said, giving Cole a dirty look.

  “Has another man ever stayed overnight with you, when Mr. Singer was absent on a business trip?”

  “Never,” she said vehemently.

  “I believe you have an apartment in the East Thirties and a home in Scarsdale.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Singer.”

  When Cole mounted the case for the defense, he called for a witness, the sixty-year-old night-desk man from the apartment house where the Singers lived.

  “May I assume you have a general knowledg
e of which tenants are present in the building and which are away?”

  “In a general way, yes.”

  “Would you know when Mr. Singer was away?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How would you know?”

  “When he comes down carrying a suitcase, I figure he’s going somewhere.”

  “And when he comes back carrying the suitcase, you would know he is at home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you ever observed … gentlemen visiting the Singer apartment when Mr. Singer was away?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did these gentlemen stay all night?”

  The witness nodded. “They had to sign in. Which they did before I came on duty. I saw them leave in the morning, early.”

  “Are we talking about one gentleman?”

  “No, sir. I think about three.”

  The lawyer for Mrs. Singer rose. “Your Honor, this testimony is at least as speculative as was my client’s when she said she believed the defendant—”

  “If the court please,” Cole interrupted. “We have subpoenaed and will submit the sign-in books for several months. We can prove—and will prove if we must—that these ‘gentlemen’ signed in under false names. Mrs. Singer may be able to identify them.”

  Cole detested private detectives. But, when the time came, he offered testimony—

  “Under my instructions, you kept the Singer house in Scarsdale under surveillance for a week, at night.”

  “And until daylight, sir.”

  “I believe you took some photographs, did you not?”

  “I did, sir.”

  “We will submit those photographs in evidence, Your Honor. Is it your testimony that these pictures are true representations and have not been doctored in any way?”

  “It is, sir. They were shot with infrared flashbulbs, on infrared film. The subjects didn’t know their pictures were being taken.”

  In one picture Mrs. Singer appeared in a sheer shorty nightgown, standing tippy-toe to reach and kiss a man. In another she appeared entirely nude, again kissing, in the doorway of the Scarsdale house. The private detective testified that he had taken these photographs just at dawn, when he was hidden in a hedge.

  “I call to the attention of the court that these pictures are not of the same man.”

  III

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” Cole said to Emily as he sipped his martini. “There’s no honor in scrutinizing personal lives. If they had accepted the settlement I suggested before they went to trial, he would, have paid her a hundred thousand dollars a year for the rest of her life and no one had to know the details. As it is—As it is, both of them hate me because of what I had to do in court.”

  “And what does her lawyer get?”

  “Nada. It’s a dumb lawyer who takes his client’s word. Hell, Singer lied to me, and she lied to her lawyer, people always do in divorces. I knew he was lying. I have to wonder if her lawyer knew she was lying.”

  He lifted his martini and drained it.

  “You’ve got to get out of this line of business, honey,” Emily said. “It’s going to kill you, like you said. Think of going back over to New Jersey. You’re admitted to the bar there. Let’s find a little town where we can live in peace, and you can open an office of your own. We don’t want to bring up our kids in Manhattan.”

  “It’s where the world is, Emily.”

  “What world, if you kill yourself in it?”

  IV

  In October Cole and Emily left the Manhattan apartment and moved into a small house in Wyckoff. He opened an office in a building on Franklin Avenue and—as lawyers say—hung out his shingle. To his surprise, Harris & Pickens asked him not to disaffiliate with the firm but to designate himself on his letterhead as “of counsel” to Harris & Pickens. The partners said they would send him some business and might occasionally call him back to Manhattan to work on a case.

  The idea of a New York City lawyer coming home and opening a local office in a small town intrigued many, and it didn’t take long for him to build a thriving practice, drawing clients from all over northern Bergen County.

  Amy Shea was not one of his clients exactly, but she came to see him, to consult. They sat in his office, where windows overlooked the street from the second floor. His desk was a big table. Behind him, serving as a sort of credenza, sat a handsome old cherry rolltop desk. Amy wondered if Cole had not consciously arranged the office to look something like the Abraham Lincoln office in Springfield, Illinois. He was very old-fashioned, not like Dave at all.

  “He’s involved himself with a man called Leeman. Have you heard the name?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I suspect he’s a crook.”

  “Well, Amy …” Cole said cautiously, “Bob Leeman is a voracious corporate raider. He acquires companies, appropriates their best assets, and leaves them unprofitable shells. He skates along the fine edge of the law.”

  “And ethics,” she suggested.

  “Yes.”

  “Then so is Dave. What I’m afraid of is that this Leeman will make Dave take the fall for something he does, the way Dave did to you in the Amos case.”

  “Dave’s too smart for that.”

  Amy paused and looked around the room. On one wall he had hung a framed print. It was a portrait of Lincoln, with a quote from Lincoln as a caption—

  A LAWYER’S TIME AND ADVICE ARE HIS STOCK IN TRADE

  “I’m going to ask for your legal advice,” she said solemnly. “This may shock you, but I’m wondering if I could divorce Dave and if I did what could I get out of him?”

  “What would be your grounds, Amy?”

  “He had a girlfriend. He told me.”

  He had heard about Dave’s girlfriend.

  “What can I say?” Amy had tears in her eyes.

  “I think he’d fight you. Very hard. Suppose you won. You’d get custody of the kids—but with liberal visitation rights. You’d get child support. Alimony … probably. You’d get the house. What do you think he’s worth?”

  “God knows. He used to tell me everything. He doesn’t anymore, I mean about business. That’s another point. I was once his partner, so to speak. I’m not now.”

  “You married him because you loved him. Do I understand you don’t anymore?”

  “I don’t know … I don’t think he loves me—I mean, like he used to. Anyway he’s the father of my children. I go the whole nine yards to please him, meaning with sex. But—it kills me to think he’s got somebody on the side.”

  “You say ‘the whole nine yards.’ Are his demands sadistic or … ? I’m not asking you to be graphic.”

  “Why not?” She paused. “The only thing you might call cruel is that he’s decided it’s fun to tie me up. Of course … he’s only home two or three nights a week.”

  “If you don’t like it, have you asked him to stop?”

  “I want to please him, how can I?” she said.

  “Scanty grounds for divorce,” said Cole. “Of course, if a divorce humiliated him—”

  “It would humiliate me, too. And the kids would hear about it sooner or later.”

  “I can’t recommend you try it.”

  “I’m not seriously thinking about it.”

  V

  When Tony DeFelice’s father died, Tony became executor of the will, and he asked Cole to handle the legal matters. Probate fees are fixed by rule of court, so there could be no question as to what Cole would charge. The estate was appraised at more than a million dollars, so Cole received a nice fee.

  The practice in Bergen County was not as challenging as his Manhattan practice had been, but it wasn’t as demanding either.

  Except that he found himself drawn into community activities that occupied many of his evenings. He was invited to join the Rotary Club. He was expected to be active in the Junior Chamber of Commerce. He was assigned to collect contributions for the United Way, from a motley collection of professionals: accounta
nts, architects, and veterinarians.

  “Fair-share giving is not an option,” the chairman explained to him. “We know how much they make and therefore how much they owe. And we can make it tough for a man who doesn’t give his fair share.”

  Cole sometimes wondered why he had left New York.

  Dave invited him to lunch. They met in a Chinese restaurant with bowing and bobbing waiters who incessantly inquired if everything was all right or if they needed anything more. They both drank saki. A feature of the place was a huge aquarium in which large and colorful fish glided back and forth among the bubbles of the filtration system.

  “I’m told,” said Dave, “that in China you go in a restaurant, point at a fish in a tank, and say you want that one on your dinner plate. Of course, they’re not that kind of fish.”

  “Those don’t look very palatable,” Cole said.

  “You surprise me, Cole. Here I am, struggling to get over to the City, and you were established there and moved back.”

  “Maybe when you get over there, you’ll move back.”

  “No. No way.”

  “From all I hear, you are doing very well.”

  “I’ve put together some good deals,” Dave said modestly.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “I was wondering, Cole, if you would be interested in investing some of the cash in the DeFelice estate.”

  “In what?”

  Dave grinned. “Junk bonds. No, listen. There’s a lot of money to be made there.”

  “Well … In the first place, Tony is the executor. That’s a fiduciary position, and the law is very clear. He can invest the estate’s funds only in some very secure things, like federal notes.”

  “Hell, he’ll never make any money that way.”

  “His duty is to preserve the assets of the estate. I’m surprised you didn’t know this, Dave. Tony could not put estate funds into junk bonds, even if he wanted to. There are very few things he can invest estate assets in.”

  “How about you? Would you like to take a flyer, say for a small amount?”