Fraud on the Court
Page 7
It was almost Christmas, and everything was decorated for the holidays. Robert’s wife Jackie made a big display of being the charming hostess of our impromptu party, but whenever I caught her looking at me, her expression was reserved and cold. I felt instantly unwelcome in her home, but Robert and Winnie Faye made up for the discomfort.
That first night, my mother sat up with me as late as she could bear. She answered a few of my questions, but she had plenty of her own. I tried to be honest about the horrible treatment I’d received from my adoptive family, while trying to keep any hint of blame from falling on her. For her part, she tried to clarify her reasons for relinquishing me, and I told her that I knew a lot of it from the closed adoption record and the transcribed interviews.
One of my mother’s particular quirks was her penchant for swearing. Indeed, she could swear like a sailor, and usually did. She told me an incredible history of multiple marriages and lovers, and children born to each one. I began to appreciate my brother’s warnings that Winnie Faye was most certainly not like other people. She was a ball of fire trapped in a tiny human frame. Her mind jumped from one thing to another, like a hummingbird in the garden, flitting from one flower to the next.
“How long have you been in a wheelchair?” I asked her.
“A while,” she replied.
“What is it?”
“Damned if I know,” she said. “Doctors, either. They’re running more tests all the time. One of these days they’ll either figure it out, or it’ll just kill me.”
After a bit, she excused herself and went to bed. I stayed up at the kitchen table, and soon Jackie retired as well. Robert and I were left alone. For a while the conversation lagged.
“So how did you get the judge to give you your information?” he finally asked me.
Thus began my first attempt to explain the convoluted path that led me to my biological family’s doorstep. I took him through the interminable years of searching and dead ends, to the incredible events of the previous two months, and finally ended by telling him of my deep animosity toward the legal system that had ignored a baby selling police captain’s wife, clear evidence of fraud, and a department cover up so obscene as to constitute a gross negligence of duty.
Robert gazed at me for a bit. He said, “I know a man you should meet.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“He’s a lawyer, a very big name in this state. He’s in the Masons with me.”
“Ok.”
“If you’re interested in doing something about the wrongs done to you, he’d be the man to talk to,” Robert finished.
“Can you set it up?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied. “I’ll call and see what time he can get together tomorrow.”
* * * * * *
I fell asleep late that evening, in a strange bed, just a few steps away from my family who were little more than strangers to me. As tired as I was, I awoke early, with more questions on my mind and a strong desire to see my mother again just to confirm that the whole thing was real. I dressed and made my way to the kitchen.
Jackie and Winnie Faye were already at the table. Coffee was ready and a light breakfast laid out for people to come and go as they pleased. I took a seat next to my mother and asked her how she had slept. She replied that she had slept very poorly, as usual. At this, I saw Jackie grimace briefly.
Talk soon turned back to the topic of the various members of my family. I was having trouble keeping everyone straight.
“Did I tell you that you have a sister?” my mother asked me.
“No,” I said, shocked.
“We lost her when she was six,” Winnie Faye said.
“How did she die?” I asked.
“Not dead, just gone,” she replied. “And it damned near broke my heart, son.”
I was more confused now than ever. It must have shown, because Jackie intervened a bit.
“Carol Jean disappeared when she was six,” she told me.
“I always thought it was her father that did it,” my mother said.
“Her father?”
“Thomas Wagner was his name. He was my second husband. She was born just a year or two after you were,” she explained.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“He was from Europe, a handsome devil. The marriage didn’t last, of course. There I was busy being a single mother again. I still had Kenneth to care for.”
Kenneth, I had discovered, was my older half-brother, the oldest of all the siblings. He was about 18 months when I was born. How my mother had hidden his existence from everyone involved in the adoption was another of my life’s strange and inexplicable circumstances.
“So Carol Jean went out to California for a while. To stay with some of her father’s relations. We talked on the phone sometimes, and sent postcards, and then one day they told me that she had disappeared,” Winnie Faye said.
“There wasn’t anything you could do?” I asked.
“Nothing! And I tried. I called every day for the longest time. Then her father moved back to Sweden, and they said the cops out there had dropped the case, that it had gone cold. I’ve cried my tears over Carol Jean. Plenty of them,” she told me.
“Do you have any pictures of her?”
“Of course.”
“May I have a copy?”
“I’ll get Robert to make you one,” Jackie said, interrupting the conversation.
She set a fresh cup of coffee on the table.
“Here mother, I filled it back up for you,” she said to Winnie Faye.
Robert came into the kitchen then, grabbing a cup of coffee of his own.
“I got us a lunch meeting with Mallory Horne,” he told me.
“The attorney?”
“That’s him. If we’re going to make it, we should probably shower soon and head on out.”
* * * * * *
Mallory Horne had an office in Tallahassee, which is where Robert and I headed first. On the way, my brother gave me a little more information on the man we were about to meet.
“You know,” he said, “Mallory is quite famous in these parts, and in all of Florida.”
“He’s that good of a lawyer?” I asked.
“Well, yes, he is. But that’s not why he’s famous. Not the only reason, anyway. He was on the state legislature for many years. Speaker of the House and President of the Senate both. He saw us through a lot of changes in Florida. And faced down the feds, too.”
If Robert had wanted to impress me, it had worked. I was impressed, too, that we could so easily get a last minute appointment with someone like Mallory based on nothing more than my brother’s phone call.
“So why is he willing to meet with me?” I asked.
“Because I asked him to do it,” Robert replied.
I remembered, then, that my brother had let it slip the night before that he and Mallory were in the Masons together. I didn’t know much about the organization, except that I had heard they were a tightly knit group with a long history which frequently included some of the nation’s most influential leaders. If this group membership was at the heart of our hastily scheduled meeting, some of the rumors must be true.
“I could tell you more about him, but he’ll just do it himself again anyway when we get there,” Robert said.
He grinned.
“Mallory is a character. You’ll see.”
We parked his truck and entered the respectable old offices that housed Mallory Horne and his partners in law.
And yes, Mallory Horne was quite the character.
He was a tall gentleman, older but not elderly. He spoke like a politician—loud, assured and affable. He had silvery hair and piercing eyes that creased at the edges when he laughed or smiled. But his jokes were anything but grandfatherly. He had a sharp wit, a wicked sense of humor, and an authoritative opinion on everything under the sun.
He offered us a seat in his office, but frequently stood and paced while we visited. He didn’t have much t
ime that first day, so after introductions, we got straight to the point.
“Your brother says you have a story he wants me to hear. That you recently represented yourself down in Gainesville and got your adoption records released,” Mallory said.
“Yes sir, I did.”
“Why? And what more do you think a lawyer could do for you?” he asked.
I had thought about that same question for a long while the night before. I was ready with an answer.
“I want my adoption reversed. And I want our mom, Robert’s and mine, to be restored as my legal parent.”
Even though I hadn’t breathed a word of these thoughts to Robert prior to that revelation, he didn’t seem surprised or fazed at all by my request.
Mallory on the other hand, was tempted to laugh me out of his office.
“It’ll never happen,” he said.
“You don’t know the details,” I objected.
“Doesn’t matter. No one has ever done such a thing before, not to my knowledge. Not even if the parents starved you, killed your dog, made you share a room with the pigs. The courts don’t annul adoptions just because the grown adoptee wants to cut his ties.”
“Well, they were horrible people, it’s true. But that’s not the basis of my case,” I said.
Mallory stopped pacing for a moment and looked at me curiously.
“All right then,” he said. “What is?”
“The whole adoption was based on fraud. Someone down in Gainesville told me it was called ‘fraud on the court,’ what the social workers and baby broker and doctors all did.”
Mallory sat down. He put his hands on his desk and said, “I guess you better tell me the story. But keep it short if you can.”
He listened quietly while I gave him the briefest possible synopsis of how I came to open my court records and what they contained. Sometimes he closed his eyes while I was speaking. Sometimes he gazed at the wall above my head, eyes narrowed in concentration.
When I finished, he still didn’t say anything. So I quickly brought up my trusty folder, now stuffed full with both my letter from Josette and the hefty adoption record. I sat it on his desk.
“It’s all right there,” I said.
“Fraud on the court,” Mallory repeated.
“Yes sir.”
Mallory looked at Robert. “Did you put him up to this?”
Robert shrugged.
“What do you know about me,” Mallory asked me, although he was still looking at my brother.
“That you’re well known and well respected. A good lawyer, and once a politician.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Before I tell you that I’m considering helping you, I guess you better know a little bit more. I’ve got my own history that has to do with a fraudulent court case, one that nearly cost me my freedom and my career.”
“Oh,” I said.
So Mallory proceeded to tell me about the year when federal investigators tried to destroy him and his highly successful legal practice. It was a powerful story, one in which he ultimately proved the prosecution’s case was fraudulent and almost completely fabricated. But the victory cost him dearly. Not even the satisfaction of seeing some of the investigators stripped of their positions and incarcerated was adequate repayment for the damage to his finances, reputation and career.
“I wrote a book about it,” he said.
“I’d love to read it,” I told him. (He later gave me a signed copy, which I own to this day).
“I’ll have my secretary take photocopies of your file here,” he said.
“I have originals back at my home, you can keep them.”
But he was already on the phone to his secretary.
“Rita,” he said. “Can you come in for a moment?”
The secretary showed up a few seconds later. She briskly took the papers to another room, and returned with the copies still warm in her hands. One set she handed to Mallory, the other to me.
Our time was done and Mallory had another appointment. We stood up and shook hands. I thanked him for his interest.
“Leave your contact information with Rita on your way out,” Mallory said to me.
“I’ll be seeing you later,” he told Robert.
Back in the truck, I asked my brother, “Do you think he’ll really take it?”
He nodded.
“I do,” he said.
We drove back to his home in silence, while I mentally shifted gears and prepared to spend a few last precious hours with my mother.
* * * * * *
There were still plenty of questions I had about my family history. I didn’t want to pressure Winnie Faye to continue exploring an often painful past, but I knew that her age and health meant that if I went home without getting all of the answers, the chance might feasibly never come again.
She was in a good frame of mind that day, though, and didn’t balk at the conversation.
“Your natural father?” she said, unhappily, when I asked about the mystery of my paternal origins.
“Well, his name was John. He was a tall man, came often to the bar where I was working in those days. He liked to drink, was a little rowdy. But he was smart and good looking. He told me he was single, but that was a lie,” she added.
“What was his last name?”
“All right, son. All right,” she sighed.
“Kirchaine. His name was John Kirchaine. And I was so mad at him I just stopped speaking to him. And that was all. I hid the pregnancy. He never knew a thing about it.”
“I read that in the files. Do you think I look like him a bit?”
She glanced at me, irritated.
“Well I suppose, but I think you look more like me and the Higginbotham side. And that’s a good thing,” she said.
I hastily assured her that it probably was a good thing. Since she seemed inclined to talk about her own family, I steered the conversation in that direction.
It turned out that the Higginbothams had been in Florida for a long time. A very long time.
“Mike, there are characters in our family line that you just wouldn’t believe,” she said with a laugh.
Stories abounded of famous deeds, of royal charters granted to us in the colonial days, and of rum running pirates and other nefarious individuals, and while she told the stories I made a resolution to look up my family tree back in the genealogical forums to see what I could confirm, now that I had my mother’s true identity.
“Your grandfather, he was famous in his own right,” she said.
“You mean your father?”
“Yes, my father. His name was Morris, and he ran the biggest moonshine still in Florida, back when I was a girl,” she said.
So this is my biological heritage, I thought.
“I’d like any pictures you have, when you are able,” I said after the stories were over. “Pictures of you, your parents, anyone really.”
“I’ll make sure you get some,” she agreed.
Eventually, she relaxed a bit, and came out with a story about my birth father.
John Kirchaine, so the legend went, was a formidable man with a wild and unpredictable temper. He had returned from his days as a soldier in WWII with a bit of fire in his bones.
At a bar one night, a few men decided to pick a fight with my father. They harassed him repeatedly while he tried to enjoy a quiet drink.
In the end, John Kirchaine walked out to his vehicle, grabbed a gun, and came back into the bar to blow the heads off of the unsuspecting men.
“But he got off of the charges,” Winnie Faye said. “He was friends with someone, a sheriff or judge. Anyhow, he was never found guilty of anything.”
I shook my head in awe and more than a little horror.
We stayed up late again that night, as we found more and more things to ask one another.
The next morning, I said goodbye and Robert took me back to the airport.
My leave-taking was low key and remarkably un
emotional. We had worn ourselves out and it would be a while before the impact of the last few days would be fully absorbed.
In the truck, Robert and I made light conversation. He asked about my upcoming move to Colorado. I thanked him for everything he had done to arrange my reunion with the family, and for introducing me to Mallory. We parted ways congenially at the airport curb.
Chapter 7
Christmas of 1998 hardly registered on my calendar at all. I had met my family in the weeks prior, and the unexpected trips around the state had left me short on time to pull off the planned cross-country move. So Christmas Day found me busy dealing with moving trucks, boxes and the various complicated logistics of leaving one place of residence in order to occupy another. I hadn’t spent an actual Christmas holiday surrounded by parents or siblings in my entire adulthood, so I didn’t suffer any overwhelming sadness that another solitary day was upon me. I wondered briefly how my family might be celebrating. Then I went back to dealing with the moving boxes.
I didn’t give Mallory Horne much time to get through the holidays before I was calling him to follow up on our possible court case. The longer I had to think about it, the more appeal I found in the idea that I could take all of the fraudulent, destructive and negligent behavior of the Florida adoption system and use it as a basis to ask them to give me back my birth identity, at least in name. That much I believed the system owed to me and Winnie Faye both.
So I admit it; I pestered Mallory. I wanted to know what I could do to help make sure I had the strongest possible case, while he decided if he wanted to help me pursue it.
“Document everything,” he said.
“More than what’s in the record?” I asked.
“There’s plenty that’s not in that record, Mike. The caseworkers discussed the Chalek’s previous divorces, but those records aren’t copied in the file. And they make reference to your mother’s missing divorce from Thomas Yarber, but what if it actually happened and the state just missed it? If Thomas Yarber signed off on your consent and he wasn’t actually the legal father, it would make just one more nail in the coffin,” he said. “You can never have too strong of a case, Mike. Never.”