Making Waves

by Catherine Todd

  I couldn’t help looking at his. They were very white and perfectly manicured. I sighed. “I meant to say, would it be a conflict of interest, because my husband’s firm sends you work?”

  He stiffened and pushed the edges of a stack of papers on the desktop into perfect alignment with the palms of his hands. When he looked down, I could see that he had the beginnings of a double chin. “I prefer to think of myself as a mediator rather than simply an advocate,” he said at last, when the pile was perfectly precise. “If I do my job, you and your husband will stay friends, and the usual adversarial role a divorce lawyer plays will not be necessary.”

  “You mean that Steve will be happy with the terms of the settlement,” I translated.

  “Mrs. James, in this state we have no-fault divorce,” he said patiently, as if I were an obtuse young associate. “You ladies wanted that—fought for it, even. However, there are certain realities we have to face. Women are no longer helpless creatures who can’t support themselves, so now we divide the property pretty much equally and go from there. I’m not saying we can’t get you a nice settlement, but there are no more free rides.”

  Oh, great, a reactionary. “I’m not looking for a free ride,” I told him, trying to stay calm.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said with a benign smile. “Look, there are lawyers out there who will advise you to fight for every last dime, who’ll start up the war by filing liens on the husband’s property or getting court orders to copy documents. We lawyers like to win and we don’t like to get sued by our clients, so it’s natural to go for the jugular.” He stretched his arms over his head. “Needless to say, that is a very expensive approach.” He looked virtuous, as if such a strategy would never have crossed his mind. “I always tell my clients, why not buy a Mercedes for your wife instead of for your lawyer? Be generous, and you can get out sooner and get on with your life.” His smile slipped. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was tactless. But I’m sure you see what I mean.”

  “I do, but what if my husband doesn’t see it that way? He’s already hinting strongly about asking for custody of the children, and—”

  He folded his hands on the desk. “Asking for custody is often a bargaining strategy. In my experience, if you show that you are reasonable, that you’re willing to be flexible and generous, the issue rarely comes up.”

  “But what if he insists?” I was starting to feel panicky. “What if he manipulates his assets so that my portion isn’t fair? What if his lawyer doesn’t believe in generosity?”

  He reached across the expanse of gleaming wood and patted my hand, no mean feat. “My dear, forgive me for saying so, but aren’t you being just a little bit paranoid? I know that a separation brings out hostile feelings, but don’t forget that I know your husband well enough to have faith in his reasonableness, even if you are temporarily blinded by your anger at him.”

  Boy, was I getting tired of that word, “paranoid.” “Do you know Barclay Hampton, too?”

  His expression grew more wary. “Why, yes. Why?”

  “Do you think he would have done any of those things?”

  “Of course not. But we are not discussing—”

  “Well, I think he did. As a matter of fact, I’m certain of it. His ex-wife was collecting evidence against him before she died.”

  His mouth shriveled into a little moue of distaste. “The dreadful Eleanor, I know. The case is famous. It’s one of the reasons so many of us have left family law for less stressful practices. My dear Mrs. James, let me caution you against repeating any such thing about Barclay Hampton. You should not take anything Mrs. Hampton might have said quite so seriously.”

  I took a deep breath. “Well, someone took it seriously enough to try to steal some documents she left with me out of my garage,” I said, a bit recklessly. I sketched briefly the story of the break-in.

  He heard me out with growing impatience. “Do you seriously believe that your husband or Barclay Hampton or someone from Eastman, Bartels would stoop to something like that?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” I confessed, feeling it incumbent upon the circumstances to be scrupulously honest. “But there is too much coincidence for comfort.”

  He folded his arms into the classic body language of rejection. “Preposterous. In fact, absurd.”

  “Why?” I fought the urge to stick out my tongue at him.

  “There’s no reason for anyone to take such a stupid risk. Even if everything you say is true, at this point—although such revelations are undoubtedly embarrassing—they’re not criminal. Barclay would just say it was a misunderstanding, and after a while no one would care. Nobody,” he added firmly.

  “But wouldn’t it be fraud? Couldn’t he go to jail or at least be forced to reopen the settlement or…” I just couldn’t believe that no one would really care.

  He sat back so far in his chair that he almost hit the window. “Mrs. James, I fear you are in ignorance of the law. The relevant section of the Family Code does provide for setting aside final judgments on the grounds of perjury. But you have one year to file your case. After that, nada. Zip. Rien. Do I make myself clear?”

  I nodded, stunned. I had been so sure that someone wanted Eleanor’s documents back, someone who wanted to protect Barclay from what they revealed. But if Patrick Dunn was right, the documents were useless once more than a year had passed since the divorce and settlement. No matter what Barclay had done, he had been safe from any legal recourse on the part of his ex-wife.

  Maybe he and Gene and Steve were right after all. Maybe Eleanor was just crazy. Maybe I was getting to be paranoid. Maybe…I lifted my head. Maybe there was something else among those papers, something I had overlooked. I had been over almost everything in the box, but there was a sheaf of legal and financial documents that put me to sleep every time I looked at them. I had no idea whether they were significant or not. Maybe there was something damaging there…

  “Mrs. James, did you hear me?” Patrick Dunn said, recalling me from my reverie.

  “I’m sorry?” I said, blinking at him.

  “I said I’m afraid that based on our discussion here you might not be a very good candidate for mediation,” he said briskly. “Has Steve engaged a lawyer yet?”

  “He hasn’t informed me officially, but I have reason to believe he is talking to Jay Thompson,” I told him.

  He flinched. He tried not to let me see it and turned away quickly, but I did. My stomach turned over. “Well, ahem, I think the best thing for you to do might be to get another attorney,” he said hastily. “It’s like a marriage—somewhere out there is the perfect match for you.” I thought this was singularly tasteless under the circumstances, but he continued undaunted. “If you call the Bar Association, they have a referral list.” I knew about that. It wasn’t very helpful; they just gave you the name at the top.

  He rose. So did I. “And naturally, we will waive today’s fee,” he said, apparently a practitioner of his own strategy of generosity. Or maybe he was so anxious to be rid of me, no price was too high.

  “Thank you,” I told him.

  He gave me a cheery little wave as he saw me out. “Good luck,” he intoned solemnly and closed the door behind him.

  Now that Patrick Dunn had fired me as a client, I was panic-stricken about finding someone to represent me before Steve and Jay turned their legal ammo in my direction. I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t have a lawyer soon. I was afraid of what would happen when I did have a lawyer.

  What I didn’t count on was how hard it would be to actually get one. I had a list of every family law attorney I had ever heard of, but after a while I began to wonder if I should cast my net wider, say to Los Angeles or Orange County. Nobody in San Diego wanted to touch me with a ten-foot pole.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. James,” the first person I called told me, “but I’ve worked with your husband on bar committees and I just wouldn’t feel right about going up against him in a divorce action.” You would have thought
they had been bosom pals from law school, supporting each other through all the hours of preparation for a moot court triumph. As far as I could remember, Steve hadn’t served on a bar committee for at least five years, because he was too busy making money at Eastman, Bartels.

  Another, a starchy-sounding inmate of Pompous, Self-Important, and Tweed, told me his wife had once worked as a paralegal at my husband’s office and he would feel “conflicting loyalties.”

  After a couple more of these, I began to get the picture. Thanks to Naturcare, Eastman, Bartels was a rising star in the corporate-service firmament, and a lot of divorce attorneys weren’t terribly eager to take on one of its partners, particularly not one represented by a heavy hitter like Jay Thompson, in court. Eleanor had warned me; it had happened to her.

  The last name on my list was a woman one of my friends had recommended when we met in the produce section of Jonathan’s. It was a very unscientific way of going about finding an attorney, but she was so careful about holding each organic tomato up to inspect it for blemishes that I figured she wouldn’t just be talking off the top of her head. By the time she had sorted through every oyster mushroom in the bin, I was doubly convinced.

  I dialed fast, as if the clock were already ticking on the legal fees.

  Rachel Fenton, however, was in Florida visiting her mother. “We expect her in a day or two,” her receptionist told me on the phone. “She hates the humidity, so she never stays long. Can I have her return your call?”

  I liked the sound of it—friendly, but not desperate for business. “Please,” I told her and gave her my name and number. As an afterthought I added, “Do you think she would mind taking on a case where she’d have to go up against Jay Thompson?” I didn’t really expect that she could give me an answer. Still, I didn’t want to waste two days on a hopeless prospect.

  The receptionist laughed. “I imagine she’d relish it,” she told me.

  Dear Caroline, Eleanor had written in the letter she enclosed in her box of materials, Maybe you haven’t been separated long enough to understand what I was trying to say to you the other day, but sooner or later you’ll find out. If you do decide to write something about how lawyers screw their ex-wives along with their clients and the general public, you’ll find plenty here of interest.

  People are always telling me to pick up the pieces and move on, to forget about what that cocksucker Barclay Hampton did to me. They advise me to join a singles group, for God’s sake, and go out on dates. They say there are lots of divorced women out there who have made new lives for themselves.

  Well, I have seen those women at the singles table at the ball, with their too-tight dresses and their bleached hair, and I can tell you right now I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. I WILL NEVER BE ONE OF THEM. I would rather die than spend my evenings wondering if some new man will overlook my stretch marks and my cellulite. So I will not join a singles group. And I WILL NOT FORGET.

  I hope this helps you, she concluded. Call me when you have finished reading the contents, and we’ll talk about where to go from here. Yours sincerely, Eleanor Mary Hampton.

  I put away the phone book and took two aspirin. I was too spent to call any more lawyers, so for the moment I was pinning my hopes on Rachel Fenton. It was time to get on with the next order of business. Where to go from here…The kitchen was empty except for Melmoth, who was snoozing on his cat blanket in the corner. The cat blanket, a hand-knitted wool throw inherited from Steve’s mother years ago, had been appropriated by Melmoth at an early point in his history, and his ardor for it was so intense nobody had the heart to take it away and return it to the closet. It was supposed to stay out of the “public rooms” in case of drop-in visits by my in-laws, who presumably would not take kindly to its current use, but Megan had a habit of laying it out wherever Melmoth plopped himself down. The last time I had seen it was upstairs in one of the bathrooms.

  The cat blanket reminded me that Steve’s parents hadn’t been over to see the kids in some time. I hated calling them and getting into all the awkwardness of a conversation in which the chief areas of interest couldn’t even be broached, much less discussed. Their idea of tact was to withdraw completely, so that the people who had insisted I call them “Mom” and “Dad” for more than a decade, whose birthdays and Christmases I had shopped for, and who had been at my bedside after the birth of my children, were now more remote than strangers. I don’t think they sided with Steve particularly, but it was easier to deal with the pain by cauterizing it, so in effect they cut me off. Still, they had been close to their grandchildren, and even if Megan and Jason occasionally groaned and rolled their eyes at the prospect, they were happy enough to see them. Another pang of guilt smote me, and I vowed that I wouldn’t put off calling them for more than another week.

  I needed time. Time to pick up the pieces of my faltering family life, to comfort my children and patch up their emotions the best I could. Time to figure out what I was going to do to earn some money. Time to discover why somebody had broken into my garage. Time to deal with the contents of Eleanor’s files and decipher their secrets, piled up like little volcanoes all over my office floor.

  Sighing, I bent over to put on my running shoes. If I’d been wearing socks, I would have pulled them up. My back protested. I really would have to take up yoga again before age and osteoporosis set in and cemented my posture into a permanent vertical.

  I locked the door carefully behind me and crossed the street to Rob and Kenny’s.

  As always, Rob overwhelmed me with feelings of inferiority. He answered the door in a perfectly pressed shirt that screamed “Ralph Lauren” and jeans that displayed what he assured me was a very cute ass to suitable advantage. He wore such outfits for cleaning out his garage. “Hi,” I said to him. “Is this a bad time?”

  “Not at all,” he said, eyeing my round-the-house clothes with small enthusiasm. “I’m charmed by your informality. Come in.” He opened the door wider.

  Had he not succeeded in selling very large houses to people with incomes to match, Rob might have made it as a decorator. The interior of the house was in various shades of white—white rugs, white walls, white Haitian cotton couches—that served as the perfect frame for the spectacular view of the Pacific coastline outside his oversized picture window. His genius came in the little touches—terra-cotta pots with orchids, tropical wood frames on perfectly selected artwork—that he mostly made up himself out of things he found anywhere from Cost Plus to Rodeo Drive. As he read absolutely nothing that didn’t have big celebrity pictures on the front cover, despite his intelligence and background, there were no messy books or newspapers to mar the perfection of the decor.

  “Can I get you anything?” Rob asked me.

  I didn’t want anything, but the kitchen was so beautiful that I considered asking for something just so I could go in there. I resisted the temptation to ask for passion fruit iced tea or whatever the giant ivory-colored side-by-side might disgorge. “Nothing, thanks,” I said regretfully.

  Rob looked at me expectantly as I settled in for the long haul on the sofa. It was fabulously comfortable. I did not let my running shoes touch the fabric. “Is Kenny home?” I asked him.

  “Certainly not. No self-respecting policeman is home in the middle of the day.”

  “What about real estate agents?” I asked with a smile. Rob was notoriously quixotic about his hours, but he would get up at three in the morning if some client wanted to see Cassiopeia from a prospective backyard.

  He made a face. “I was supposed to take someone out today, but she wanted to look at houses in Rancho Las Golondrinas, for God’s sake, so I sent my assistant instead.”

  “Where is that?” I asked him. The pace of development had slowed down since the eighties, but these communities could sneak up on you almost overnight, like particularly fecund jungle plants.

  He waved a hand in a vaguely northerly direction. “Up there, where all the second-rate ‘Ranchos’ are. They think that if they have four floo
r plans and a Spanish name with a ‘Rancho’ in front of it, people will think they’re getting the real thing instead of Levittown with tile roofs. I won’t sell anybody property in one of those developments. It would wreck my reputation with the clients who count.”

  “But you’ll take a cut if your assistant sells it, right?” I asked him.

  He raised his eyebrows. “I may cling to my principles, Caroline, but I haven’t taken leave of my senses.”

  “Good. I came to ask your advice, and I want you to be as cynical and world-weary as possible. I wanted Kenny’s input, too, but I guess I’ll have to wait.”

  “Kenny is never cynical, much less world-weary; you know that.”

  “Yes, but he is a policeman.”

  He sat back a little, looking surprised and amused. “Are you thinking of pursuing a life of crime?” Then, before I could say anything, he stopped smiling. “Oh, God, Caroline, I’m sorry. Is there some kind of trouble? It’s nothing to do with Jason, is it?”

  “Relax,” I told him. “It’s nothing like that.” Now that I had arrived at the point of telling him what it was, I wasn’t sure how to begin. “It’s Eleanor Hampton,” I said finally. “I told you Barclay screwed her on her settlement. I think she might have proof of something pretty awful about Barclay, and now somebody wants it back. The trouble is, I think I have it, whatever it is.” I shrugged. “Or maybe not.”

  He blinked at me. “You aren’t making any sense.”

  At least he hadn’t said I was paranoid, or not yet, anyway. I gave him an edited account of my conversation with Eleanor, her hints about Barclay, and a summary of the contents of the box.

  He was most interested in the lurid details of their correspondence. “Did she really throw an ashtray at him at the Sport and Water Club? It sounds like a Tracy and Hepburn movie, without the style.”