Authors: Michael A Kahn
Firm Ambitions
Copyright © 1994 by Michael A. Kahn
Copyright © 2015 Poisoned Pen Press
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464204432 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
For my special, wonderful Hannah
Despite the allegations in the petition, fellatio is no longer included on Missouri's list of infamous crimes against nature. It remains, however, “deviate sexual intercourse,” which the criminal code defines as “any sexual act involving the genitals of one person and the mouth or tongue of another.” The code calls it a class A misdemeanor. Vicki MacDonald calls it a Big Mac with Special Sauce.
Over the course of her two-year relationship with Stanley Webster, Vicki had 204 Big Macs. She kept track in her general ledger. Under the final settlement decree, the Estate of Stanley Webster paid her an amount equal to $1,715.69 per Big Mac. You could build a franchise on numbers like that. And with a few more fees like the one Vicki paid me, I could almost get used to the peculiar path my legal career seemed to be following since I had moved back home to St. Louis from Chicago.
Vicki MacDonald had been the very first client to walk into my St. Louis law office, which was on the first floor of a converted Victorian mansion in the Central West End. She was, as the host of the old
What's My Line
would put it, self-employed in the service industry. She had been referred to me by a Chicago client who practiced the same trade in the Windy City.
Vicki earned a handsome living through her mastery of certain physical skills and her understanding of the keys to success in any service industry. Unlike her physician clients, she made house calls. Unlike her attorney clients, she came to your office. Unlike her CPA clients, she took Visa and MasterCard. (The $549.99 charge showed up on the monthly statement under something called Professional Relief Systems, Inc.) And unlike most of her clients, Vicki brought genuine ability
and
enthusiasm to her craft: she was good at what she did, and she clearly enjoyed doing it.
As a result, Vicki was weathering the recession quite nicely when Stanley Webster died in a freak airplane crash outside Detroit. Although the stock of Webster Industries fell seven points in heavy trading the following day, it bounced back by the end of the week and was actually up a point and a half when the market opened on the day of his funeral. In short, things seemed to be returning to normal.
And then the fourth codicil to Stanley Webster's will was revealed. In it, Stanley bequeathed to Vicki MacDonald enough stock in Webster Industries to entitle her to a position on the board of directors. Under the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission, that sort of transaction is known as a material event requiring public disclosure.
When Rosalind Webster, former president of the St. Louis Symphony Society and current member of the Washington University board of trustees, learned of her late husband's codicil, she did what any wealthy widow would do in response to that sort of material event: she instructed her lawyers to obliterate it. Specifically, she hired three vicious and expensive St. Louis litigatorsâbarracudas with Rolexesâand told them to do whatever needed to be done to nullify the codicil and destroy “that blow-job bimbo.”
Vicki MacDonald was no bimbo. That was obvious when she arrived at my office, grim and determined. She had brought along the petition delivered to her by Rosalind Webster's attorneys. It was the so-called hammer draftâdesigned to make the other side crater at the prospect of having such a lawsuit filed. The hammer draft alleged that the stock bequest should be invalidated on the ground that Vicki had already been “vastly and unconscionably overcompensated for her infamous crimes against nature, as more fully detailed on the decedent's monthly Visa statements attached as Group Exhibit A.” Highlighted in yellow on those Visa statements were 112 charges over the past eighteen months to Professional Relief Systems, Inc., each for $549.99, for a total of $61,598.88.
It was a nasty ploy by Rosalind Webster's lawyersâespecially the part about the monthly Visa statements, since they knew that Vicki would realize that public disclosure of the Visa statements would give a prosecutor an easy road map for a quick prostitution conviction. The ploy, especially the risk of criminal prosecution, would have worked against most people. Vicki MacDonald was not most people.
“I really liked Stanley,” she told me that first day in my office, “and he liked me. He treated me special. We had fun together. I'm not some floozy his wife's lawyers can force back under a rock. I've thought it over, Rachel. I don't want you to get me on the board of directors, and I don't want to get into an alley fight over the stock. You know what I want? Two things. First, I want you to make her lawyers start pissing in short jerks. Second, I want you to make that bitch back down and apologize.”
So that's what I did.
I started by upping the ante: I sent Rosalind Webster's lawyers a draft response to the hammer draft. My best buddy Benny Goldberg called it the “Yo' Mama Answer.” Among other things, it attached as Exhibit C an excerpt from Vicki's journal quoting Stanley Webster's graphic and disgusted descriptions of a few of Rosalind Bingsley Webster's rather unusual sexual preferences, which included, among other things, an occasional “golden shower.”
Four days later, one of Rosalind's lawyersâthe middle barracudaâcalled to suggest that it might make sense for the parties to explore an amicable resolution of their differences before anyone rushed off to court.
I told him that my client was not in an amicable mood. “Nevertheless,” I said nonchalantly, “cooperation isn't out of the question. For example, it might make sense for us to coordinate a joint press conference at the outset of the lawsuit. By the way, Ron, I'm willing to recommend to my client that we consent to having the photographs filed under seal. Of course, I can't promise that Vicki will agree, but she might.”
“Which, uh, photographs would those be?”
“Of your client. The golden-shower shots.”
He called six times over the next twenty-four hours. I took the sixth call after having my secretary put him on hold for ten minutes. His voice sounded a full octave higher since our prior conversation, and his speech mannerisms did indeed suggest a man with blockage in the urinary tract. I laid out my settlement demands. Miss Manners herself would have been pleased with the tone and substance of his response. Two days later we signed the settlement agreement: Vicki surrendered her claim to the stock in exchange for (1) a cash payment of $350,000 and (2) a notarized written apology from Rosalind Bingsley Webster.
Little did I know that the Big Mac case was the beginning of my descent into that level of domestic hell known as divorce law. Vicki sent me the next divorceâone of the CPA clients. Three others came through the door based on what they had heard through the divorce-case grapevine. Vicki's lucrative settlement seemed to have catapulted me onto the St. Louis short list of prospective lawyers for high-stakes, bad-blood divorces. It was a list I had no desire to be on. Although the fees were lavish, my daily sorties into the war zone of crumbled marriages, shrill emotions, revenge schemes, and creepy lawyers became increasingly oppressive. The practice of law just wasn't fun anymore.
So when June Greisedick came along I decided that she would be my last. June was a farmer's wife from Jefferson County. Her husband Bob's idea of carnal bliss was to sit naked on the edge of the bed while Big Sal licked his nether parts. Big Sal was a purebred tricolor collie. All in all, it was a vision of the American farmer somewhat at odds with the Jeffersonian ideal. I proceeded to file what I assume is the only divorce case in America in which the correspondent has papers from the American Kennel Club. It was, to say the least, an unusual case for a nice Jewish girl from Harvard Law School. My only consolation was that I would never handle another divorce case.
***
Never say never, I reminded myself, as I sat behind my desk and watched Eileen Landau reapply her lipstick. She was a friend of my sister Ann, and Ann had begged me to see her.
Eileen checked her lipstick in the mirror of her compact, dropped the compact back into her Louis Vuitton bag, and looked up at me. “And another thing,” she said with a shudder. “He sheds.”
“Your husband?” I asked uncertainly as a vision of a tricolor collie in heat flashed through my mind.
She nodded in disgust.
I stared down at my hands and sighed. A dull mechanic's lien case sounded good about now.
“Eileen, I'm not quite sure I'm following you.”
“He's physically repulsive,” she said. “When's the last time you saw Tommy?”
I had a vague memory of Tommy Landau from a summer evening many years ago, maybe all the way back to high school: a long-haired rich guy revving the engine of his Jeep convertible as he waited for the light to change. There was a smirk on his face as he turned toward the car I was in. He was wearing wraparound sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. The light changed and he roared off with a screech of the tires.
“I don't know,” I said. “Maybe ten or fifteen years.”
“I bet he's put on fifty pounds since then,” Eileen said. “And he keeps getting hairier. After we have sex and he finally rolls off of meâhe's always got to be on top, you knowâhalf the time he falls asleep up there as soon as he comes, which usually takes thirty seconds max, and then I have to shove him off meâanyway, after he rolls off I go right into my bathroom, turn on the light, and stand in front of the mirror. It takes me half an hour to pick all the hairs off my body. It's totally gross.”
The phone rang. My secretary answered it on the second ring. Maybe it was a new client with a really boring insurance coverage dispute. Better yet, a property tax appeal.
“Have you tried marriage counseling?” I asked, hoping for an escape route.
“Rachel, I don't want marriage counseling. I don't want this marriage. I've spent the last fifteen years of my life married to Tommy Landau. I'm sick of him. That's why I'm here. I don't want to be his wife anymore.”
I studied my newest client. The Eileen Landau seated across the desk from me in no way resembled the Eileen Cohen who had graduated from University City High School eight years ahead of me. Back then her nose was hooked, her breasts were small, her hair was brown, her teeth were crooked, and she wore glasses. Back then she was treasurer of the student council. Now she was a homecoming queen. Plastic surgery, orthodontia, an expensive hairdresser, and tinted contact lenses had converted Eileen Cohen into a striking redhead with high, round breasts, a small retroussé nose, and capped white teeth. She was wearing the mandatory daytime shopping outfit for the wealthy ladies of Ladue: a white tennis dress, a diamond tennis bracelet, and a diamond pendant.
Like the Jaguar she drove, Eileen Landau looked expensive to maintain. She hadn't always been that way. Her fatherâSid Cohenâowned Cohen's Drugs, a gloomy little pharmacy with trusses and prosthetic devices and sun-faded posters in the front window. Cohen's Drugs was sandwiched between a kosher deli and a dry cleaner in a strip shopping center in University City across the street from the small Orthodox synagogue where Eileen had been confirmed in a dress sewn by her mother.
That was many years ago, long before Sid Cohen's daughter married into one of the oldest and most prestigious Germanic Jewish families in St. Louis. She had adapted quite nicely to the ways and means of the Jewish country-club set. Indeed, Eileen Landau seemed more of a Landau than her husband, Tommy, who was something of a black sheep in a family whose name adorned a building and a professorship at the Washington University School of Law, an elementary school in north St. Louis, and an endowment fund at Temple Emmanuel.
Tommy Landau was the son of a prominent St. Louis attorney and the grandson of a judge on the Missouri Court of Appeals. Tommy Landau, however, hadn't even graduated from college. As I recalled, he was expelled in the aftermath of some sort of date-rape scandal at his fraternity. From there, he moved into drugsâfirst as a consumer, then as a retailer. By the time he was arrested on drug charges in his mid-twenties, he was allegedly dealing cocaine to the yuppie stockbrokers, bankers, and lawyers he'd met during his formative years at the St. Louis Country Day School. After Tommy beat the drug charges, he moved into a field more receptive to his talents and tendencies: he became a real estate developer. He currently owned a dozen strip shopping centers throughout metropolitan St. Louis and southern Illinois.
“When did it start going bad?” I asked.
“When I heard him say, âCeltics by six.'”
“I'm not following you.”
“Everything I needed to know about our marriage I learned on my wedding night,” she said with a sad shake of her head. “When we got to our hotel room, I ordered champagne and caviar from room service and went into the bathroom to put on my nightgown. I bought it especially for our first night. I so wanted it to be romanticâa typical young bride, I guess. What did I know? All I'd been up to then was a kindergarten teacher. When I came out of the bathroom, he was on the phone and had the TV and the radio on. You know why?”
“No.”
She rolled her eyes. “We got married in the middle of the NBA playoffs. He had one game on the tube and another one on the radio. I came out of the bathroom just in time to hear him place a five-thousand-dollar bet with his bookie. Five thousand dollars. âCeltics by six.' Those were the first words I heard. He looked up when I walked out of the bathroom, but I could tell he didn't even notice me or the nightgown. âBe with you in a moment, babe,' he said, and then he placed another bet.”
I winced. “You must have been so disappointed.”
“It was a nightmare. The West Coast games were still going when I fell asleep. We never even made love that night.”
“Does he still bet on sports?”
“All the time. He dropped eighty thousand dollars on the Super Bowl last year. He missed half of our son's bar mitzvah because he was out in the hallway at a pay phone placing bets on college basketball games.”