Wade looked into her eyes and gazed at the beautiful person he had loved since childhood, eyes as familiar to him as his own hands: in a series of transparent overlays he saw the child, the girl and the woman and mother she had become, and in a thin voice he said, “I wish we weren’t doing this, Lillian, honest to God, I really do.”
She took a step back and viewed him from his black hightopped work shoes to the V of his tee shirt at his open collar, and she pronounced, “You look just like you are, Wade.”
Then she turned away and resumed talking with her lawyer, the tall handsome Jackson Cotter, of Cotter, Wilcox and Browne, a man with gray flecks in his charcoal-colored hair and wearing a three-piece navy-blue pin-striped suit. Clothes make the man, Wade thought. Clothes make the man, and the lawyer makes the client. He saw himself in his clothes the way a stranger would, and he saw a stupid unimaginative man, and he noticed that his lawyer, Robert Emile Chagnon, wore an ill-fitting kelly-green corduroy suit with a yellow knit shirt and no tie and had on a pair of old blue canvas deck shoes with white soles and laces. The man Wade had hired to represent him looked ridiculous and incompetent and dishonest. No doubt just as Wade himself looked.
Well, this time, by God, things would be different. This time his lawyer would be a man who cut the figure of a distinguished genius, a man wearing a three-piece suit, yes, but entering the courtroom in a wheelchair — a man so obviously skilled that he needed only his brain and his dark melodious voice to obtain justice for his client. This time that sexy tall lawyer of Lillian’s would find that his good looks and clothes worked against him. Wade resisted an impulse to smile and rub his hands together with relish, as he followed Hand’s secretary from the outer office to the familiar paneled room in back, with all the books on the shelves and the leather-covered chairs and sofa. This time, by God, Wade Whitehouse was going to have his day in court.
“I’ve taken a look at your divorce decree,” Hand said. “And frankly, Mr. Whitehouse, if you want the custody terms changed, I think you’re going to run into a few problems.”
“What do you mean, ‘if? What the hell do you think this is all about? Of course I want the custody terms changed!” Wade pulled out his cigarettes and lit up, inhaling furiously. The lawyer pressed the reverse button on the control panel with his left hand, and his chair zipped away from Wade to the middle of the room, where he watched Wade like a guard dog.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Hand said. “In this state, a judge is going to be very reluctant to change the terms of custody, unless conditions in the life of the child now are radically different from what they were when the divorce was granted—”
“You don’t understand!” Wade interrupted him. “I thought we were going to nail her on the lawyer thing.”
Hand continued quite as if Wade had said nothing. “… and unless they have changed in such a way as to be deleterious to the child’s health or emotional well-being. Except, of course, when the original terms of custody appear to have been clearly and unjustly onerous — which frankly is not the case here — or when it can be shown that the judgment depended on information that was based on perjured testimony. Something like that, sometimes, can convince a judge to reconsider. But they hate to do it. They hate reconsidering divorce terms.”
“I thought — what I thought was we were going after this guy.”
“Who?”
“Cotter. Her lawyer. Her boyfriend. Remember?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And what about her smoking marijuana? What about that? In her lawyer’s company, even. What about that?”
Hand sighed. “Mr. Whitehouse, let me ask you a few questions that you yourself would be asked in court if you tried to push this.”
“Shoot.” Wade exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed.
“Have you yourself ever smoked marijuana?” He paused. “You’re under oath, remember. Or will be.”
Wade hesitated, as if trying to remember. “Well, I mean, yeah, I guess so. Who hasn’t?”
“And you are a police officer, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. I get the drift.” Wade waved him off with his hand.
“Let me go on. How much do you drink, Mr. Whitehouse? How much a day do you drink?”
“What the hell’s that got to do with anything?” Wade bristled.
“Never mind that. Just answer the question, please.”
“I don’t know how much I drink. I don’t keep count.”
“Too many to count?”
“Jesus Christ! What the hell are you trying to prove? I haven’t done anything wrong! Whose lawyer are you, anyhow?” Wade rubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray next to him. “Look, I’m just trying to make it so I can see my own child when I want to. That’s all. I don’t want to have to get permission from my ex-wife to see my own daughter!”
“You don’t. The divorce decree says that you can have your daughter one weekend a month, except for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and for one week in the summer.”
“Yeah, I get Halloween, she gets Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s wrong, you know that! Wrong. The whole thing is wrong.”
“It’s unusually restrictive, I admit. But there are reasons.”
“Such as?”
“Apparently, you were physically violent with your wife on several occasions?”
“That’s in there? That’s not in there.”
“No. But the divorce was granted on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. And I did speak with her attorney about the case. Jackson Cotter.”
“You did what? I thought you were on my side in this! I thought you were working for me!”
“Mr. Whitehouse, it’s not unusual to communicate intentions like yours to the attorney of the other party.”
“You mention his hanky-panky with Lillian? You mention that?”
“I didn’t think it appropriate to threaten him,” the lawyer said.
“You didn’t think it appropriate.”
“No.”
Wade slumped in his chair and looked at his shoes. “You’re telling me to drop this thing, aren’t you? Forget about it.”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me I’m dreaming.”
“Not exactly. But yes.”
“I’m going to get married, you know. Soon. To a very nice woman, very motherly and all. And I have a house now, a regular house, the house I grew up in. That makes a difference. Doesn’t that make a difference?”