I pick up the phone and dial Hemple first.
Gail warns me that Jack is on the warpath. He is demanding to know from his lawyer why he’s compelled to pay spousal support to Laurel, who is now, in his words, a fugitive. Whoever said that alimony is the ransom a happy man pays to the devil has never met Jack.
According to Gail he’s demanding that his lawyer go back to court, an order to show cause on changed circumstances, the fact that the kids are now abandoned, to seek temporary custody until the matter of their missing mother is resolved.
‘Vega has called me,’ I tell her. ‘Any idea what he wants?’
She has scuttlebutt from Jack’s lawyer. It seems the attorney-client relationship with my brother-in-law is not all the man could have hoped for.
‘Jack found out that Danny and Julie were at your place the night Melanie was killed,’ she says.
Playing the wounded father, Jack’s now busy trying to sever all links. He has left strict written instructions at his kids’ school that I am to have no contact.
Vega has an antiquated notion of teenagers and how to deal with them. In an age when kids are packing Mac-tens in the classroom and pistol-whipping teachers who look at them cross-eyed, Jack sees a note from home as something on the order of the Great Wall of China.
‘The man doesn’t miss a beat,’ she tells me. ‘We’re noticed for a hearing on temporary custody in five days. Got any ideas?’ she says.
Jack has found the soft underbelly. Laurel is not likely to show in court, and her lawyer, having already appeared on the custody matter, can’t avoid service. Jack will take a default on Laurel, grab the kids, and cut off support, all in one fell swoop. It is what you notice first about Jack, not his blinding intelligence, but his devotion to the rules of opportunity. Facing Melanie’s funeral, and a sea of grief I do not deny, he still finds time in a busy day to sort out the silver lining in his wife’s death.
As much as a lawyer can be, Hemple is depressed by all of this.
To Jack there was never anything sacred about taking care of his family. For a guy with a woman in every room, support payments were viewed as nothing but an exorbitant stud fee. I tell her this. But she doesn’t laugh. There is a dark cloud, something unstated, hanging over our conversation, the sense that Gail is waiting to unload something more on me. We tiptoe around it for several minutes, mostly lawyer’s small talk, adventures in divorceland, a ride on every theory, none of them with a cheerful ending. Then she punches my ticket.
‘I may as well tell you,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to be able to go on representing her.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m filing a motion to withdraw as counsel,’ says Hemple.
A lawyer leaving a case unfinished conjures all the images of Fletcher Christian lowering the longboat to put you over the side — in this case, given my limited grasp of things domestic in the law, without benefit of compass or charts. At this moment there is a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach not unlike what you would get out on the rock-and-roll of the bounding main.
‘You can’t do it,’ I say.
She’s got a million reasons. A waste of Gail’s time and Laurel’s money, what it comes down to in the end.
She can hear me fuming on the other end, the silent thought that a lawyer should never cut and run. Though in this case, with Laurel on the lam, I must admit that it is an open question who has abandoned who.
‘Listen, if it’s a question of money …’
‘It isn’t the money. That ran out a month ago. Laurel passed me two bad checks since,’ she says. ‘Bounced and skipped like flat stones on a pond,’ she tells me. We are siblings under the skin, Gail and I. Like the criminal bar, it seems rubber is the stock-in-trade of divorce.
‘I kept going for the reason that a lawyer always keeps going,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know how to say no.’
I tell her to send me her rubber checks and I will give her cash.
‘You’d be putting good money after bad,’ she says. ‘It’s not just the money. It’s the case. There is no way,’ she says. ‘How do I tell the court that my client hasn’t abandoned her kids? “Your honor, she’s a fugitive from justice, the cops can’t find her, but she is a good mother. She cares for her children. She just does it long distance.” It isn’t gonna wash,’ she says.
I bite my tongue. I want to tell her about my conversation with Laurel, but disclosure has implications. As absurd as it might seem, at this moment Laurel could claim that she was just traveling, some urgent mission with a purpose, unaware that the cops were after her. I am the only one who knows from her own lips that this is not the case. For the moment I must keep it that way.
‘They haven’t charged her with anything,’ I say. ‘If she turns up, what then? There could be a logical explanation for her disappearance.’
Some pained breathing on the other end. Gail Hemple trying one more time to muster the sand to say no.
‘Vega’s getting ready to turn a paper blizzard,’ she says. ‘And right now he’s got a monopoly on all the wind machines. If she came back today maybe, with a good story, I’d have time to prepare. After that, anybody appearing on the merits is nothing but a punching bag. There would not even be a basis for the slightest compromise,’ she says. ‘In a way she might be better off unrepresented,’ says Hemple. ‘If she beats the criminal charges, or they don’t bring them, a court on review might be more sympathetic revisiting custody.’
I have no answer for this.
‘If you hear from her before five, and she has a good one’ — Gail means a story — ‘give me a call,’ she says and hangs up.
The State Capitol building is a showcase, historic rooms preserved on the main floor like museums and gilded elevators with live operators, at least when the Legislature is in session. The hundred and twenty men and women officed here live like rajas, with personal attendants to cater their every whim. There is no money for schools or hospitals, but austerity is not part of the decorative scheme here. As the boundless party-line goes, the dignity of the people demands that their elected leaders operate in opulence. The political class of this state are about as out of touch as the fops of yore whose heads rolled from the guillotine.
To get to Jack’s office I run the gauntlet of a rogues’ gallery, framed oil portraits the size of small houses, spaced along the walls leading to the rotunda. These are pictures of former governors, mostly robber barons from the last century who bought respectability with their public office. Mixed in with these are the feckless oily smiles of a few contemporaries, actors and the sons of political nobility, official portraits of men bearing expressions of constipation, straining to look like they belong to the ages.
What Jack wanted to talk about when I returned his call could not be discussed over the phone. I trek to his office in the Capitol, more from curiosity than anything else, the thought that any information, even that which Jack wants me to have, is better than none.
His receptionist offers me coffee and a chair to cool my heels while Jack holds forth behind the closed door of his office. I can hear the rumble of voices, men belly-laughing.
As a chairman of a standing committee, Vega rates a suitable office and a battalion of publicly paid minions, mostly young, each striving to look more important than the other, and all off on their own urgent mission to prop up the world.
Twenty minutes go by and the door to Vega’s office finally opens. I hear Jack’s voice, but it is lost in a well, behind a bull of a man who fills the doorway. The guy’s back is to me. There is nothing fat about him, just big, more cloth on his suitcoat than the Graf Zeppelin. The guy’s shaking Jack’s hand, talking the jargon of this place, something about legislation, a ‘juice bill,’ meaning there is money in it. The wonders of politics in the free-market world.