The Ditto List Page 3

  “The day it ain’t, I let you know.”

  “How’s Heather?”

  “Sweet as a sugar lump, like always.”

  “Give her a squeeze for me. Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  “You bet I will.”

  “Take it easy, Mirabelle.”

  “You, too, D.T. Wish you’d come around here more. You an amusing man, especially when you had a few belts.”

  “See you soon,” D.T. said, and thought for a mostly pleasant minute about his ex-wife and for a wholly pleasant minute about his daughter, then hung up and pulled out of his In Box the small stack of freshly typed statements that Bobby E. Lee had left for him.

  They were the bills about to be sent to clients whose obligations had not been entirely satisfied in advance of D.T.’s services, despite his sworn policy to the contrary. D.T. reduced the amount due on the ones whose recipients either could not pay or for whom he had done less than either of them expected, and increased the amount due on others for whom both the results and the ability to pay were exalted. He went through them quickly, abashed as always at having to make his living by dunning women. When he had finished, he ran a quick total on his calculator, multiplied the result by 45 percent, which was roughly the coefficient of collectability in his practice, and applied the product to the outstanding balance on his note at the Citizens Bank and Trust. A drop in the proverbial and gargantuan bucket of his debt.

  When the lady in the next room had been waiting long enough to suggest her prospective attorney was a man of frantic and colossal accomplishment, D.T. went out to retrieve her. As he approached the couch she put down her outdated Vogue on the exact spot from which she had obtained it and rose to meet him.

  She was forty, perhaps, laboriously neat and hyper-alert, as though applying for a job for which she was unqualified. Her hair was short and shaggy, the color of collies, a tattered curtain across her forehead. Her brown eyes were outsized and ill-defined, doubtlessly sculpted with one of those long hairy tools promoted on TV. She was tall and slender, simply dressed and slightly sexless, careful. The ceramic glaze over her eyes would have caused some to wonder if she were drunk or drugged, but D.T. saw that look every day. His clients wore it like a mandala.

  The woman wiped her hand on her slacks, then extended it toward D.T. along with a firm smile. D.T. smiled back. Her name, she said, was Mareth Stone. After a minute of greeting and small talk while they walked to his private office, her firm rein of intellect upon emotion led D.T. to suspect she could serve as an exemplar of his First Principle of Modern Matrimony—at any given point in any marriage, the wife is more intelligent than the husband on any subject of importance.

  As she took her seat, D.T. glanced at the metal indicator in the top drawer of his desk. She was divorce client number 998. He was fast coming on a landmark. He clicked to the next digit and closed the drawer, uncertain whether he was cheered or depressed by the number of scalps he had accumulated.

  He offered Mareth Stone a drink and a cigarette and she declined them both. He mentioned the weather and an event of current controversy and she had interest in neither. He looked her over carefully and obviously and she neither squirmed nor preened. She made no effort to seem devastated or blasé. At which point curiosity drew him out of his doldrums. After twenty years he still wondered what had finally killed their marriage.

  “So, Mrs. Stone. What seems to be the problem?”

  “I seem to need a lawyer.” Her lips didn’t quiver and her eyes didn’t leak. Unusual, but not unprecedented.

  “What makes you think so?”

  “I’ve been served with divorce papers. Haven’t I?”

  She reached into her bag and brought out an unsealed manila envelope and handed it to him. On it was the word “Divorce,” written with savagery in what he suspected was her hand.

  He removed the contents and scanned them quickly. “So you have,” he said. “Your husband’s lawyer is the best in the business, by the way, present company excepted. Was it a surprise?”

  “Totally.” She closed her bag and clasped her hands and adopted the clueless expression she seemed determined to wear no matter what.

  “He hadn’t moved out, hadn’t found the secret of life in the form of a controlled substance or a teen-age swami or a woman half his age? Hadn’t smacked you on the nose? Nothing?”

  “Nothing. At least nothing that conclusive.” Her lips disappeared momentarily and he guessed what curled them against her teeth was fury.

  “Where is he now?”

  Her narrow, charmless face seemed to harden by the moment. “I have no idea.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “This morning at breakfast.”

  “And he said nothing about this?”

  “Not a word. And not a word last night, when we made what I foolishly assumed was love.”

  The disclosure was not premeditated and its candor seemed to alarm her. D.T. thought it possible she had never previously made public acknowledgment of her own participation in the sex act. The memory of profaned embrace jellied her eyes, but only momentarily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, after but a single sniffle.

  “Don’t be.” She was so quickly composed D.T. began to worry that she had bent her demeanor so unnaturally it would eventually shatter.

  “I never thought it would happen. Not this way. I always thought we could work it out, I guess. I had all these little speeches ready, for when he wanted to talk about it.” She laughed dryly. “He seems to have skipped that stage.”

  D.T. leaned back in his chair. “I was struck by your phraseology, Mrs. Stone. It seemed to suggest that perhaps you considered filing for divorce yourself.”

  “I … well …”

  He maintained his easy smile. “I imagine ninety percent of married women have considered shedding their spouse at one time or another, Mrs. Stone. It’s not a sin. Or even silly.”

  “We’ve had some problems,” she conceded finally, “though I was never certain he realized it. I suppose this means he did.” She gestured toward the papers she had given him.

  D.T. decided to thrust for the rot. “Did these problems, as you call them, ever send you to another man for solace?”

  Her eyes swelled like baking muffins. Her fingers curled. “Of course not. No. Not that it’s any of your business.”

  D.T. sat up straight and held up his ringless hand. “Let’s get one thing clear right now, Mrs. Stone. If you want me to represent you in this matter then absolutely everything in your life is my business, from your bowel movements to your taste in millinery. If you don’t buy that, I suggest you go find some lawyer in a fifty-man firm who makes a quarter of a million a year and thinks that means he knows everything he needs to know about divorce work even though the only one he’s ever been involved with is his own.”

  D.T.’s anger surprised them both, and they both stayed silent while it cooled. When she spoke again, Mareth Stone was frowning, still leery of discussing private matters with a man who looked like an assistant basketball coach at a religious college somewhere in south Georgia. “Everything I tell you will be confidential, won’t it?” she asked, her voice smaller, more youthful and entreating than before. Which immediately made him like her. Which made him glad.

  “It will unless you break the confidence by telling someone else. Or unless you’re using me to commit a crime or you tell me you intend one. Or unless you refuse to pay my fee and I have to sue you for it. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  D.T. got comfortable in his chair. “Is he a bastard?”

  “Chas? No. You mean Chas?”

  “Chas? Jesus.”

  She smiled. “Short for Charles. When I married him he was Chuck. And he isn’t a bastard, exactly. Ambitious and insensitive, yes. And maybe a little bit stupid.”

  “Does he gamble?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  “Booze? Drugs?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Her back
stiffened as she sensed the implication might eventually pass through her husband’s character and splash on hers.

  “Then who’s the other woman?”

  “There is no other woman.”

  “Eight to one there is, the way it’s gone so far. So indulge me. If she exists, who is she?”

  Mareth Stone frowned and pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it with trembling fingers, her second hint that the day was an anomaly. “I don’t know who it would be,” she said finally. “I don’t think Chas has the energy for an affair any more, if you want the truth. His money saps his strength.”

  D.T. stood up and began to pace the room, beginning his examination. The client chair creaked as she twisted to keep him in view. “An affair’s their last gasp, sometimes. Like a fish jumping out of the boat.”

  “Is it important? Who she is? If she is?”

  “Not really. Not right now. Are there children?”

  “Two. Eight and thirteen. Cristine and David.”

  “Is there money?”

  “Now there is. Chas has been quite successful, if money is the measure.”

  “Was he rich when you married him?”

  She shook her head. “He had to borrow money to buy the ring.” She looked down at her hand, at the thin gold band that lived there. “He kept wanting to buy me a diamond after he made his money,” she mused quietly. “I kept thinking it was important to keep wearing the ring he gave me when he proposed. When we were poor and struggling. I guess it wasn’t important enough.”

  She cried silently. D.T. had long ago learned better than to try to interfere. “How much do you want?” he asked when she stopped.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come now, Mrs. Stone. I’m sure you know something about the law. You’re entitled to half the assets accumulated during marriage, and if there wasn’t any money in the beginning all the assets you have are presumptively marital. Unless he inherited a bundle or unless you have money of your own.”

  She shook her head. “Neither of those.”

  “Did you live together before marriage?”

  “Why?”

  “That can increase the marital period and entitle you to more money.”

  She sighed. “We were very proper. Apparently even that was a mistake.” She fingered her hair absently. “It’s very difficult for me to think of this in terms of money, Mr. Jones. I mean, I know I have rights, and I want to assert them, but it’s like putting a price on fifteen years of life. Of love. And I always believed love was priceless.” She started to smile at the cliché, then to say something else, then stopped and closed her eyes.

  “In this jurisdiction love goes for about two hundred bucks a month per year of marriage, Mrs. Stone,” D.T. said, loosely calculating an alimony formula employed by at least one judge in the southside division. “What does your husband do for a living?”

  “He’s an investment advisor.”

  “With a firm?”

  “He has his own business.”

  “What’s his income, roughly?”

  “Eighty thousand last year. Or so he said to someone. Lately, most of what I know about Chas has come through eavesdropping. And of course he might have been boasting.”

  “How do you contribute to the business?”

  “Not at all, I suppose. At least that’s what Chas would say.”

  “Never entertained any clients?”

  “Only a few hundred. I’ve made barrels of paté in my day.” She smiled sadly. “And I just hate paté.”

  “Never packed his bag for trips or drove him to the airport at six a.m.?”

  “Several times. Yes. I get the point, and I do feel entitled to something … tangible out of all this. I mean, it’s not that Chas doesn’t have enough for both of us.”

  “Good,” D.T. said. “I may not get you what you’re entitled to, but I can get you enough to keep you off relief and make him afraid of going on it.” He walked to the file cabinet and opened the second drawer from the bottom. “I keep a bottle of brandy on hand for sipping upon the birth of an attorney-client relationship, Mrs. Stone,” he lied. “Will you join me?”

  She looked at him over her shoulder. “I … is this customary?”

  “Customary drives a Mercedes and works downtown.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s all right. Somehow I thought you would be much more … somber somehow.”

  “Probate lawyers are somber; divorce lawyers are clowns. Death is serious business; the rest of it’s a joke.”

  D.T. poured into polished snifters. They both drank, eyes on each other, exchanging the silent promises that are the consideration for future services.

  “I’m going to ask you some questions now, Mrs. Stone,” D.T. said as he refilled her snifter and put away the bottle. “To advise you properly I must have honest responses. If I sense you’re passing counterfeit, our relationship shall terminate, the brandy notwithstanding. Understood?”

  “Of course.”

  “Incidentally, my meter, as they say, is running. From here on, each hour I devote to your welfare will set you back a hundred bucks. I hope to defray most if not all of it through a court-ordered contribution from your husband when the matter is finally concluded, but that, of course, is contingent. You are and will remain the primary obligor.”

  D.T. watched carefully for her reaction. A hundred an hour was his penultimate rate. Mrs. Stone would have been charged more only had she proved herself, upon the initial interview, to be despicable.

  The stated fee, such as it was, seemed not to faze the woman. She asked if he wanted a retainer. He considered momentarily whether any other client had ever used the word.

  “One thousand dollars, please,” he said.

  “Will you take a check?”

  “I will take beads and trinkets.”

  She wrote on the negotiable rectangle with no more thought than she would give to the purchase of bulbs from the blind. Watching her do it was more fun than D.T. had had since Cheerio came home at twelve to one and he’d pulled square with his book for the first time in the decade.

  When she presented him the check he read it carefully, noting the baroque script, the designer imprint and coloration of the paper, the elegant face amount. “I notice this is drawn on your individual account,” D.T. said. “What kind of balance do you maintain?”

  She shrugged. “A few thousand. Sometimes less. Why?”

  “Any other accounts in your name alone?”

  “I … no. I don’t think so.”

  “How about your family? Parents? Are they still living?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wealthy?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  D.T. nodded. “Listen to me, Mrs. Stone,” D.T. said as he placed the check beneath the corporate seal of an enterprise that had once cost him half his net worth and thereby convinced him to abandon corporate law. “This case already has a certain smell to it, the smell of one that will go to trial and appeal, so listening to my questions will be good practice for things to come. First, how long have you been married?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  He positioned himself in front of her. His eyes grabbed hers and held on. “Do you love your children?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why do you love them?”

  Once again her decorum stumbled aside. She plucked at her clothes and twisted her legs and inspected her nails. It was the one he always hit them with, the mothers, and it was surprising how few of them had an answer ready. It was grossly unfair, but it was his first and best sense, often, of their behavior under fire.

  “I’m their mother,” she stuttered finally. “I mean, well, mothers love their children. It’s … it’s nature.”

  “The hell it is,” D.T. snarled. “I had a client wanted me to peddle her kid for a sixty-eight pickup and she’d throw in diapers and a sleeper on the deal. So let’s not wax misty about motherhood. Why do you
love your kids?”

  Mareth Stone stiffened. A bulge appeared over the hinge on her jaw. “Because they’re neat, that’s why. Because they make me laugh and cry and want to hug them. Because they teach me things. Because they’re the only thing of consequence I’ve ever done on my own, the only nice things I’ve made since the days when I went to Bible school and wove lanyards and drew pictures of Jesus with finger paint. Is that enough, Mr. D. T. Jones? And what the hell does D.T. stand for, anyway?”

  D.T. watched her dab her eyes while he wondered when she had last sworn at a total stranger. “Doubting Thomas,” he answered. “And that will do just fine. Question two. I see from the Petition your husband wants the kids. Do you think he’s serious?”

  She sniffed and thought about it. “Probably. He said he would fight me for them once, when we had a quarrel. And I think he will. I think he needs for me to come out of this a loser in as many ways as possible.”

  “I have to warn you then, the law no longer prefers mothers to fathers in custody cases; the sole standard is the best interest of the child. I also have to warn you that in a majority of cases in this state, when the father is serious about wanting custody, he gets it.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “I’m afraid not. The good news is that most judges ignore the law and try the case as though the husband has the burden of showing the mother is unfit.”

  “That’s good news?”

  “It gets messy, if that’s what you mean. Also, if it’s a true custody fight then you have to go to mediation. It’s the law.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You and your husband get together without your lawyers in the presence of a mediator—not a lawyer or judge but a lay mediator—and try to work out a custody arrangement.”

  “Does it work?”

  “If the parents can simmer down long enough to negotiate a deal. If they both have the best interests of the kids at heart. And if the mediator is competent and the lawyers don’t come in afterward and mess it up and if the kids don’t object to the deal. Among other things.”

  “You don’t sound optimistic.”

  D.T. shrugged. “It works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, we go to trial. Now. Why did you marry your husband?”