The Stark Truth

by Peter Israel

  “Tell me now,” I said up to her.

  “What?”

  “Did you in fact break the law?”

  I heard her start to laugh, a deep, uncontrollable sound not only of humor but of her own helplessness when she had what she wanted.

  “Yes, you silly,” she said, her arms now shaking and losing strength. “Of course I did.”

  PART TWO

  10

  Wanda Russell had been a great beauty in her day, and you could still see it, despite the fact that she was past seventy, drank too much, took too many pills, and tinted her hair blue. Round-faced and heavyset, she said the secret of her looks was that she had never been afraid to take on weight. Most of the debs of her year, she said, those who were still around, looked like so many scarecrows, dieting all the time, going to spas. Wanda wanted to be thought of as outspoken, outrageous, and jolly, and she liked to tell people that she still enjoyed sex. She was also a widow, rich, and, I suppose, lonely.

  Wanda Russell became, by a couple of days, the first client of Stark Thompson, Attorney-at-Law, P.C.

  As I was careful to document, the move was strictly Wanda’s idea.

  “Congratulations, Tommy, darling!” she’d said heartily when I’d called to announce that I was leaving the firm. “Where are you going?”

  I’d told her I was planning to open up on my own.

  “Superb!” she’d said, using a favorite word of hers. “I want to be your first client.”

  Elated, I’d nonetheless counseled her against making any rash decisions. The firm, after all, had served her and her late husband for a long time, and well, I said.

  “Nonsense!” she’d retorted. “They’re nothing but a bunch of old windbags, Mac Coombs and your father and the rest of them. They’d have retired long ago if they didn’t have old fools like me to pay their fees and young ones like you to do their work for them. I could use a breath of fresh air, Tommy. I want you to take over all my affairs, not just the estate.”

  “I can’t tell you how flattered I am,” I’d told her, “but please don’t do anything yet. Once I’ve actually left, I’ll be glad to come up and discuss the prospects with you. If, that is, you still want me to.”

  “Horseballs, Tommy,” she’d boomed back at me. “You just go in there and tell them Wanda’s leaving with you. Or I’ll do it. But you count on me, as long as I’m the first. I insist on being your first client. I assume I’m the first one you’ve called …?”

  I’d assured her on both counts, and if I fudged a little on whom I’d called first, I don’t suppose that mattered. Wanda Russell was too excited. She even promised to get rid of her blue rinse for the occasion. (I had often teased her about that in the past, telling her she was too young for it. To which she’d invariably replied that I might not like it but—with a wink—there were those who did.)

  The process of opening up on my own turned out to be as easy as Kitty had predicted. The minute I announced my departure from the firm, she’d said, my blue-haired widows would flock to me like bees to the rosebush. And not, needless to say, for my skills as an attorney but for my other “services”—as confessor, psychotherapist, and general hand-holder. I was careful to point out to one and all, orally and in writing, that a large firm offered resources and services I couldn’t hope to match and to recommend that their decision be made carefully. As it happened, few were as impulsive as Wanda Russell in turning over all their legal affairs, and several balked when I explained that my fee structure would, if we were successful, cost them a good deal more money than they had been paying the firm. In the end, though, over half the clients I’d dealt with came along with me, on my terms. This, along with new business, meant that before my first year was out I had to expand my offices in the new tower on Fifty-sixth Street by buying out my neighbor. All of which, as will become clear, had the practical consequence of putting me ever more in Kitty’s debt.

  That I was so meticulous in the paperwork—to the point, I imagine, of pleading the firm’s case a lot better than the firm itself ever did—exasperated Kitty to no end.

  “Do it,” she’d say. “For God’s sake, Tommy, just do it, and then you can futz with your papers all you want to.”

  The Yiddish futz (for fuss, I suppose? Or fidget?) had, the way she used it, the connotation of fussbudget, of Dickens and the clerks on high stools with paper cuffs and green eyeshades. As I explained to her, though, I had good reason to “futz.” For one thing, if the old unwritten rule among attorneys—“Thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s clients”—had long since gone by the boards, there had been too many recent cases of Lawyer X suing Lawyer Y over fees and clients and alleged tampering. I wanted a complete paper trail if and when the firm ever woke up to the fact that I’d pretty much single-handedly decimated their Trusts and Estates practice.

  More serious was a second consideration. Anyone active in trusts and estates has a so-called fiduciary responsibility and that responsibility, at least in a formal sense, is watched over by the courts. Even the fees I charged were, theoretically, court-approved. All this may have come about historically to protect innocent widows from being gouged and swindled out of their inheritances, but the practical effect had been to make professionals in the field archly conservative.

  “But that’s just the point, Tommy,” Kitty said. “What you’re selling them is just the opposite. You’re going to be their partner. You’re actually going to make them money, and you’re going to do it together!”

  “But making money involves risk, doesn’t it? Taking some gambles? The possibility of losses?”

  “Not the way we’re doing it, love.”

  “And I suppose you want me to tell them that?”

  “Not in so many words, Tommy, of course not. All I want you to do is convince them that you’re smarter than the next guy. It’ll be easy, you’ll see.”

  Finally, there was my fee structure. In essence, I made nothing if the estate in question failed to appreciate more than it would have in the hands of a bank or fiduciary trustee. If, for example, a million-dollar estate failed, in three years, to grow beyond $1,158,000 (that is to say, at a five percent annual increase), then whatever work I had done would have been at my expense. If, however, the estate outperformed the index, then I’d be cut in for an escalating percentage of profits, which could—and actually did in one or two cases—reach fifty percent.

  There’s nothing new or, strictly speaking, illegal about the contingency fee. In dealing with the rich and their inheritances, though, it’s just not “done.” And needless to say, I’d never have done it myself had it really involved the high risks I had to warn against so carefully in my client agreements.

  Kitty was right, though: Like bees to the rosebush. The reasons nonetheless remained complicated. After all, Wanda Russell could have lived the rest of her life with her money sewed into her mattress and never have known want. What possible difference could a few million more or less have made to her? Did it let her boast to her friends about her net worth? Or was it greed? Or stinginess? Or whatever that secret ingredient is that moves some people to accumulate wealth upon wealth?

  None of the above, with Wanda. In fact she spent money freely and never, to my knowledge, kept track.

  I even asked her about it once, obliquely. We were in that room of her Park Avenue apartment, a cluttered hymn to Victoriana, which she called her office. It contained a secretaire—a massive mahogany antique—but also tables set in little groupings of chairs and settees, and heavy drapery, tall oriental screens, and palms growing out of ceramic tubs. I’d gone up to review the quarterly results with her—a particularly successful quarter, too, because several oil stocks had gone haywire at once in a takeover war, and we’d been riding every one.

  “Well, I get a kick out of it, Tommy, don’t you?” she said, pointing with a bejeweled finger to her bottom line. “It’s exciting, it’s fun. It makes me feel like we’re a pair of evil geniuses plotting the fate of the world.”

&
nbsp; Fun, then? Excitement? The sense of riding a fast track in a world that was otherwise slowing down?

  Or (Kitty’s old pronouncement): Money is sexy?

  But Kitty herself had a different version.

  “It’s you, my love,” she maintained. “The partnership, remember? ‘You and I, Wanda, we’re going to make money together,’” mimicking my voice. “It’s the pair that counts, the pair of evil geniuses. Do you think for a minute that if you were thirty years older, with false teeth and prostate trouble, she’d still get a kick out of it? Believe me, darling, she’d rather do it with you even if it meant losing every penny.”

  “What do you mean, ‘do it with me’? I don’t have to sleep with her, do I?”

  “You screw any of them you have to, sweet. All of them, if you want to. But nobody under fifty, remember? Any female clients under fifty and I’ll put a padlock on you.” Then, smiling, her eyes alight: “On second thought, better make that sixty.”

  Witty, I thought. But she meant it too.

  Ironically, having set out to “earn” Kitty and having turned my life on its ear with her encouragement, I saw rather less of her than before. Further irony, I found myself working harder than I ever had. For one thing, I was obliged to hustle for new business. For another, we now required a far more sophisticated knowledge of investing than I’d ever gained at the firm, because there was no way (as Kitty, for once, agreed) that we could repeat the model of the Sprague account, where all available resources had gone into, then out of, Manderling stock. To try to do the same on this large a scale would surely have attracted the attention of anyone investigating insider trading. Rather, we had to “launder” our coups within much broader investment programs, which, for additional security, we decided to spread as widely as possible in the marketplace. I therefore spent considerable time allowing myself to be cultivated by traders and brokers, that Wall Street breed whom, I think, I’d always looked down on slightly even though I’d been to school with a number of them. In addition, there was all the traditional, or Dickensian, work to do—the records, the endless court filings, the tax reports and negotiations with IRS auditors—which drudgery, having done it for long enough, I was happy to dump on an associate as soon as I could afford one.

  Kitty’s capital floated me at the beginning and paid for the office expansion, as well as the condominium I moved into the following fall, within walking distance of both my office and her apartment. All such transactions were duly recorded in our files, not only, she pointed out, in case anything happened to me but as an utterly reasonable justification for her fifty percent share of my profits. But her real value to the firm lay elsewhere.

  The information came in sporadically. Weeks, sometimes months, would go by, the markets rising, falling, and nothing from Kitty, to the point where I’d ask her if she’d lost her source. But then, one day: “Start buying X. Go slow for now. I’m not sure, but I think something’s going to happen.” Then, as little as a few hours later but sometimes several weeks: “Go now, Tommy. Buy. Up to your limit.”

  Invariably we beat the professionals to the upswing. I once did a study that showed we were never first—presumably our source himself had beaten us to it and/or our source’s source—but always well before the stampede of buyers that always preceded announcement to the public.

  And the same at the selling end. While we seldom stayed in for the final round, we never got caught in a bailout situation.

  It bothered me, I confess, that she would never tell me who her source was.

  “Why is it so important for you to know?” she’d say. “Why make such a big deal out of it?”

  “Because it bothers me. It’s got to be somebody you’re pretty intimate with. How do I know you’re not sleeping with him, too?”

  She’d make a tsk-tsk sound and shake her head exaggeratedly.

  “You don’t know, do you? Does the idea make you jealous?”

  “You know it does,” I’d say hoarsely.

  “And you know that excites me, making you jealous, the idea that you could be jealous. Here, Tom, show me how jealous you are, for God’s sake.”

  Other times she’d ask me what made me so sure it was a him. Or just one person, for that matter. In fact, I wasn’t. I tried over and over to connect her “crystal ball” to a single source by tracing the principals involved in the deals we made money on—the investment banks, the law firms, the proxy houses, the buyers, as well as the underwriters of junk bond issues—but I could never do it. Some of our coups seemed even to have bypassed Wall Street—the oil deal, for one, and then a variety store chain on the West Coast whose stock suddenly started to jump after we’d bought in.

  “It’s strictly business,” Kitty maintained. “Look, suppose there was just one person, who knew certain things before the rest of the world did. Put yourself in his or her shoes. What would you do? You can’t get away anymore with using it yourself, not even trading overseas. Sooner or later they’d catch up with you. The next best thing is to seed it, let it seep into the market through other people’s money. If you control the people carefully, you control the risk, and if you can get enough capital working for you, you’ll make as much money in the long run as you would have on your own.”

  This was as close as she came to admitting she was paying for information.

  “You make it sound like some kind of irrigation system,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what it is. And what makes Stark Thompson, P.C., an ideal conduit is that, while you control a very large investment pool, it’s broken up into a number of smaller accounts, each of which trades independently through different brokers.”

  “Meaning that it’d be pretty hard for anyone to link up all the pieces?”

  “Exactly.”

  There was, maybe, one other reason for her secrecy. It came out oddly. All that summer I’d worked on convincing Kitty to go away with me just for a weekend, but summer was the hot season in the party business and I couldn’t budge her. Finally, when I found out she had a hole in her schedule several weekends after Labor Day, I simply showed up with the plane tickets in my pocket and determined that there be no arguments.

  Surprisingly, she put up only token resistance. She was tired, she admitted. Maybe she could use a weekend on a beach, in the sun. She’d never been to the Caribbean either. What would the weather be like? What should she wear? And though I half expected an eleventh-hour cancellation, even after I picked her up at her office, our luggage already in the trunk of the car that would take us to JFK, she came along docilely enough.

  September is a lovely, if chancy, moment to visit the West Indies. The summer crowd has gone, the high season won’t start for several months, the hotels are half empty. The chanciness, of course, has to do with the weather, and I’d experienced it both ways: a glorious hot sun one year, but forty-eight hours of torrential downpour and gale-force wind another.

  This time the weather cooperated, but clearly my past “experience” unsettled Kitty. She wanted to know how many other women I’d brought to that hotel, that island, the Caribbean in general. She asked me repeatedly how she looked in her bathing suit and wouldn’t venture out without a floppy-brimmed straw hat to protect her from skin poisoning. The water was a problem, too. She was, she said, a mediocre swimmer, and even though you could wade a good fifty yards out and still be in water up to your waist, how could I be sure there were no sharks?

  Mostly we sat under a thatch umbrella at the hotel’s beach bar, watching the gently lapping surf, the coco palms bending gaily under an eastering breeze, the occasional pelican making a strafing run across the bay. Kitty sipped at some nonalcoholic concoction in a hollowed-out pineapple while I stuck to the local rum and lime. The food, she had to admit, was first rate—dolphin and flying fish, simply prepared but elegantly served, and a steamed mélange of local vegetables tinged with a spice or spices neither of us could identify, and the glorious tropical fruit which somehow tastes different in the Caribbean than anywhere
else in the world.

  We slept in what was just about the most romantic setting imaginable—a separate thatched cottage just off the beach, with a terrace where breakfast was served and where, at night, you could watch the white sand veritably light up under a shining moon. But we didn’t make love the first night. Kitty didn’t like the night sounds she couldn’t identify, or the slow-turning ceiling fan over our heads, or the fact that there were no windows, only shutters. She couldn’t help herself, she kept saying, she felt strange, out of her element. And the questions kept coming: Who were you here with before? What did she look like? What did you do all the time besides fuck? I fielded them as gracefully as I could, stressing the athletic (the tennis, the snorkeling, the sailing—all true enough), saying (truthfully, too) that that was all another time, place, another life, retreating meanwhile into an increasingly rummy haze.

  I remember thinking, though, on the deserted open-air dance floor that second night, that I’d had about enough. We’d dressed for dinner, I in a white dinner jacket with red accessories, Kitty resplendent in gold shoes and a glittering sequined outfit, pants and overblouse, but it was all I could do to coax her into dancing.

  She said she couldn’t dance.

  Of course she could dance.

  Then she said: “Who else have you danced with, on this floor, to this music?”

  We were the only couple on the floor. I remember stopping her, holding her firmly, staring down—angrily, I guess—into her sullen eyes.

  “No one, as it happens,” I said acidly. “Not one damn living soul. But maybe now you’ve an inkling of how you make me feel sometimes.”

  “What do you mean, how I make you feel sometimes?”

  “Like when you won’t tell me where we’re getting our information.”

  She stared back at me, uncomprehending. Then, as quick and violent as a tropical storm, she burst into tears—hysterical, convulsive tears—and how this was the first time we’d ever gone away together and now she’d wrecked it, ruined it. Then she pulled me by the hand off the floor and down the moonlit beach, stumbling in the sand on her heels, all the while going on about how she couldn’t help herself, she hated all those other cunts I’d been with before, all those pinched Wasp cunts with no hips, they enraged her, she hated them, she’d scratch their eyes out, she’d …