Defiled Read online

  Everyone nodded. He said, “I’ll start with the defendant, see what we’ve got to divide.”

  Wanting to show us how tough she could be, de Castro objected. “The property is community property, not the defendant’s property.”

  Smallwood said, “Spare me the semantics lesson, Bobbie. This ain’t my first rodeo. I’ll get the lay of the land then come to you for the first proposal. How’s that sound?”

  Chagrined smiles popped up all around, then the teams split up and went to their respective rooms. Smallwood joined Tony and me and sat at the head of the table. He had a document in his hands that he referred to as he said, “Okay, Tony was good enough to give me a financial summary. Let’s work our way through that.” Without acquiescence, he read from the paper: “You have an IRA worth seventy-five thousand dollars, a CD for fifty thousand dollars, and a 401K with forty-five thousand dollars in it. State law says it all gets split fifty/fifty.”

  I was about to speak, but Tony beat me to it. “The IRA is premarital, Ross. Matthews-Bryant has already ruled on it.”

  Smallwood made a note and said, “Alright. That’s done. Easy peasy.” Going down the list, he further said, “You have two homes, both furnished. She’s in one, you’re in the other. You each get the home you occupy.”

  Again, Tony spoke before I could assemble my thoughts. “The home Mr. Marks occupies is premarital property. The home in Cortes County, where Mrs. Marks is temporarily lodged, is community property to be divided.”

  Smallwood said, “That ain’t gonna fly, Tony. You know that.”

  I decided not to mention that the beach house was sold. This was moving too fast, and I didn’t want to make a mistake.

  Tony said, “We’re willing to give up the house, but we need consideration in return.”

  Smallwood nodded in understanding. “You boys wanna act tough to start, that’s okay by me, but we know where we’re gonna end up, don’t we?”

  Tony said, “When we get to the debt part, you’ll see our point.”

  Smallwood said, “In just a minute. Let’s talk about the cars first. You got two, and you each drive one. We okay with that?”

  I had learned to wait for Tony, who said, “No, Ross. The Jaguar is on lease to Mr. Marks. Mrs. Marks can buy her own vehicle.”

  Smallwood sighed. “Thought this might be an easy one, but I guess not.” He used a pencil to scribble on the financial statement.

  Tony and Smallwood were discussing my future as though I weren’t even in the room. It felt as though I were in a hospital bed and doctors in the hallway were deciding whether to save me or let me die.

  Smallwood, motioning with his head at me, said, “All the debt is in his name, and they’ll want him to service the debt—that’s forty-five thousand dollars in credit cards, his car loan, his house, her house.”

  Tony said, “We’re okay with the credit cards, his house, his car. The house she temporarily occupies is a different story. There are two liens: the construction loan and a home equity line of credit.”

  Tony motioned to me, and I extracted the file I had stolen from Carrie’s nightstand. He opened the file, pulled out a statement, and slid it in front of Smallwood. As the old guy looked it over, Tony narrated.

  “The home is valued at five hundred fifty to six hundred thousand dollars. The original construction loan has a payoff of four hundred thousand dollars. On top of that, they have a home equity account. Mrs. Marks managed the account, wrote all the checks.”

  Tony slid two handfuls of checks toward Smallwood. “Mrs. Marks has spent the entire account limit of a hundred fifty thousand dollars and wrote the checks to herself, so there’s no way to trace the funds.”

  Smallwood’s eyebrows shot up, nearly touching his hairline. “So what’s your ask on the house?”

  Tony said, “If Mrs. Marks wants to live in it, she has to pay for it.”

  “All of it?” Smallwood asked. “Construction and home equity?” Already thinking of a compromise.

  “All of it,” Tony said. “We’ll deduct the outstanding amounts from her settlement and cure the debts to get Mr. Marks off the loans.”

  As though struggling to break out of a trance, Smallwood shuffled his papers and consulted a different sheet. He said, “Um-hum. And what’s your position on stock options? Judge ordered sixty thousand options apiece with eighty thousand still to be divided. What you gonna give her outta that?”

  Tony gave him an exaggerated shrug, both palms up and lips pursed. “Maybe ten thousand? She already got fifteen thousand more than she should have.”

  Smallwood said, “Yeah, Phyllis may have gone overboard on the shares that vested before the marriage. But if you don’t give her any more, Phyllis will do it for you.”

  I was impressed that Smallwood felt comfortable calling the judge by her first name. Maybe there’s an age at which decorum and courtesy can be abandoned, like a reward for growing old. Neither Tony nor Smallwood knew that the IPO date had slipped into next year, and I wasn’t ready to tell them.

  I said, “I’m not going to give her any more options. Her share is already worth nearly a million dollars, and she didn’t earn it as a wife, believe me.”

  “Lotta money,” Smallwood said, nodding his head and scribbling on his yellow pad. He looked up. “But this is just the division of assets, so there’s alimony to consider as well.”

  Tony said, “We don’t believe Mrs. Marks requires any alimony since she’ll get a boatload of stock. She’ll be wealthy, won’t require monthly maintenance.”

  Hoping the old guy was a churchgoer with a traditional sense of propriety, I added, “She violated the marriage contract by committing adultery.”

  The room went dead as a scowl formed on Smallwood’s jawline and crept slowly upward, clouding his eyes. Morality had been injected into a cut-and-dried division of wealth, and he didn’t like it. He said, “You established a very high standard of living for the young lady, and she has a lot of years to live. Judge is goin’ ta give her something, young man.”

  Tony shot me an “I told you so” look, which I ignored. How does it make sense that the better you treat a woman during a marriage, the more you have to pay her when divorced? That just encourages golddiggers, doesn’t it?

  I said, “Our lifestyle wasn’t established by me and was never supported by my income. The lifestyle was funded by debt, and my wife created all the debt.” I lifted a thick file folder out of my briefcase and dropped it on the table with a thud. Recreating that file had cost me an entire night’s sleep, and it only contained monthly statements from credit cards and joint bank accounts. I riffled the documents like a Vegas card dealer and said, “If I have to fund the past by paying the debt, I shouldn’t have to enable the future as well. Shouldn’t she get what she deserves now as opposed to what she didn’t deserve in the past?”

  Smallwood considered me with a measure of respect. “Good point, young man. Let me go see what they’re thinking. They’ll be nervous about how much time I spent with you.”

  I hoped they were as nervous as I was. My strategy before entering this room had been to hold the moral high ground and take a hard line on all issues. But now that we were engaged, every organ from my intestines to my heart trembled with fear.

  After Smallwood left the room, Tony went to work on his BlackBerry. Just a routine day of billing for the lawyer. I paced the small room, regarded the litter in the alley through the window. In sympathy with my mood, the weather had turned overcast and was threatening rain.

  I couldn’t stand the silence. “Well? What do you think?”

  Tony looked up, annoyed at the interruption. It took him a minute to rewind and playback what I had said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about their first proposal. They know we’ll counter, and we know they’ll counter and then we’ll accept. That’s the way it works.”

  Tony resumed typing with his thumbs, a guy caught in the digital past. I leaned against the wall, tried not to count the seconds. After an e
ternity, Smallwood burst back into the room without knocking. He dropped into the chair, but I remained standing. You should stand in front of a firing squad.

  Smallwood said, “We’re pretty far apart, but I’m going to give you boys a chance to make a good faith counter.” He gave me a look as though I were being discourteous, but I didn’t think I could control the shaking of my legs or the bouncing of my knees if I took a seat.

  Smallwood gave up and said, “We’re okay on the investment accounts, but they say the debt is all in Mr. Marks’s name, so it’s all his. I told ’em you’ve got the records, and Bobbie goes, ‘He let her spend the money.’”

  Tony gave me the same “I told you so” look.

  I said, “I’m a scientist, not an accountant. I trusted my wife to handle the money, and now I’m saddled with her malfeasance?”

  Smallwood said, “You gonna get the debt, son.”

  I sank into my chair.

  “Your wife wants the house and everything in it,” Smallwood continued. “Wants you to sign a quit claim on the deed, put it in her name.” Getting revenge for the incident with Puralto. “I got her to accept the home equity debt on condition the alimony and stock are right.” Smallwood gazed at me. “It’s a good compromise. Is that three points solved?”

  Tony had nothing to say, but I did. “No. My wife stole the money from the home equity account. We need to count the hundred fifty thousand dollars as a joint asset to be divided. That means our assets are two hundred forty-five thousand dollars to be divided equally. I’ll settle for the ninety-five thousand dollars we know about, and she can keep the money we’re not supposed to know about. The equity account shouldn’t be a part of a deal for the house.”

  “You’re pretty slick, young man. You keep the money and punish her for her sins.”

  “Eye for an eye, Mr. Smallwood.”

  “Do you read the Bible, Mr. Marks?”

  “Not very often,” I admitted.

  Smallwood nodded. He seemed to be trying to decide which party should have his sympathy. Then he found his place and said, “I got her to give on the car. She’ll pay for it and buy the insurance, but she needs the right to use it—she doesn’t have credit to buy one of her own.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Smallwood, that’s not a solution. I am not going to stay connected with that woman through her car. We’re cutting all the ties today. Her credit rating is her problem.”

  Smallwood gave a disgusted grunt and a loud deprecating sigh. “Okay, let’s talk about the really hard parts. They want permanent alimony at eighty thousand dollars a year, assuming you’ll pay the construction loan on the house in perpetuity. State law gives them the right to ask for it.”

  “They’re just negotiating, pounding a stake in the ground,” Tony said. “Matthews-Bryant won’t grant permanent alimony on a short marriage.”

  I said, “Alimony is like a jail sentence for me, Mr. Smallwood. I can’t quit work until the alimony expires.”

  “She’s gonna get some alimony, son. You plannin’ to retire on your stock shares? You pretty young to retire, lay around.”

  I guessed I looked young to a seventy-five-year-old guy who still worked for a living. “No,” I said. “I plan to write a book about my work, maybe lecture. But within a couple of years the concepts will be stale or in the public domain.”

  Smallwood rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Your wife claims you wouldn’t let her work, so her career has been interrupted. She says it would take her time to find work.”

  Feeling the stress now, I shot back, “That’s a joke. She was a clerk in a medical clinic, filed insurance claims, paid the electric bill. Is that a career?” Before Smallwood could respond, I continued. “When I met her she was being treated by a psychiatrist for anxiety and depression.”

  I pulled Carrie’s medical file from my briefcase and plopped it on the table. “I have all the medical records right here.” Tony and Smallwood traded looks. “I took pity on her, told her she didn’t need to work. Now she wants to claim I did something bad to her?”

  Tony said, “We could get a court order to have her tested for occupational skills.”

  “You boys just spoiling for a fight, aren’t ya? Mrs. Marks has files too. One with all the receipts for her expenses, the standard of living you established for her. So what do you propose?”

  I said, “Three years at sixty thousand dollars. I’ll pay the construction loan, but the house goes up for sale and we split the upside when it sells. How’s that?”

  Smallwood shook his head in disgust as he wrote it all down. “You can expect they’ll come back in the middle. That what you’re looking for? If so, we could save time by offering that now.”

  I said, “Too many open items to give anything yet, Mr. Smallwood. For example, she can have the furnishings in the house, but only if she returns what belongs to me. She stole property from the beach house, and she stole personal things from the country house before I moved.”

  Tony said, “I’m sorry, Randle. We got into the house as soon as we could.”

  Smallwood took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He continued down his list and said, “They want to split the remaining options fifty/fifty.”

  They think I’m up against a November 1st IPO date, but I’m not. I said, “As part of a satisfactory overall agreement, you can offer the ten thousand Tony suggested earlier. Added to the fifteen thousand she shouldn’t have gotten, that’s twenty-five thousand, equal to half of the IPO shares. The last thirty thousand won’t vest until March.”

  Smallwood said, “I already mentioned that number. They won’t take it.”

  “That’s my best offer,” I said.

  Tony shook his head. “We’re going to be here longer than I thought.”

  “Look, I understand you’re angry about the divorce, but if you were married you’d be splitting everything every day,” Smallwood said. “That’s how you should look at it. She’s just a sweet little thing from the country, and you’re a big-time businessman, so you should feel some obligation here.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Smallwood, you have no idea who she is under that innocent façade.”

  Smallwood considered that and then said, “There’s one last thing I wasn’t aware of: They want you to split your royalties with her.”

  “Hell no!” I screamed. “That’s my reward for inventing a tool that will benefit mankind. She had nothing to do with it.” I swept all the papers off the table in one swift, unexpected motion, and Smallwood had to roll his chair out of the way to avoid being buried in the avalanche. “I’m done with this prejudicial process.” I got up and headed for the door.

  Tony shouted, “Stop, Randle!”

  Smallwood leapt to his feet and grabbed me by the arm. He peered into my eyes. “Lemme go back and give it my best try.”

  After a dramatic pause, I returned to my seat and the mediator left the room. As though nothing had happened, Tony immediately went back to his BlackBerry, unaffected by my outburst.

  I jotted down some numbers. In the worst-case scenario, my share of the options would be worth one point two million dollars—in other words, six hundred fifty to seven hundred thousand dollars after taxes. Paying off the house, Carrie’s car, credit card debts, and her lawyer would leave me with about one hundred thousand dollars. An alimony obligation meant I’d have to work for AMA into my mid-sixties. After truing-up the money for the beach house sale, my IRA would be drained. Not only would the pursuit of my dream be impossible, I would have nothing to fund retirement.

  I walked around to Tony’s side of the table, rested one haunch on it, and looked down at my lawyer. “We need to go to trial, Tony. She stole my possessions, she spent all my money, and she committed adultery. Why should she walk away with a soft life funded by my hard work?”

  Tony was too nice to say “Duh!” so he said, “Because you put a ring on her finger. When you do that, you either make it last or you end up here, in mediation, giving half your life away. That’s the
way it works. When we hear their counter, we’re going to accept it. Then we’ll get drunk. You can put your mistake behind you, but not until you pay for it.”

  “Why am I the only one who has to pay for the failure?” I knew the answer, of course: I was the husband and I had the money. I moved back to my side of the table, paced back and forth, head down, thinking about how to get out of my mess. If mediation failed, the obvious next move would be to ask for a trial, but I had no naked pictures and hotel receipts to sway the judge.

  Smallwood wasn’t gone long. He entered the room, sat at the table, and said, “They’ve compromised. Let’s get this done.”

  Convinced by his confident tone, I took a seat and waited for him to continue. Using his notes as a checklist, Smallwood said, “She says she doesn’t have anything that belongs to you, but that you stole her medical records and her pistol.” He pointedly looked at Carrie’s medical file, lying on the floor. “Says you took those things the day you moved out of the house, and she wants them back.”

  “Carrie is lying. A Cortes County Sherriff’s deputy was with me the whole time I was in the house. His name is Dobbins. Ask him if I stole anything. Carrie told him she didn’t have a gun, now she says I stole the gun.”

  Smallwood said, “Whatever. She doesn’t have your stuff, and you don’t have her stuff, so you’re even. You both keep what you’ve got.” He made a check mark on his list.

  “Swift justice,” I said, “like in the Old West.”

  He ignored me. “They want the judge to divide the remaining options. They know they won’t get half, but they’re hoping for twenty-five thousand.” He put a check mark next to options.

  Continuing down the list, he said, “They asked for half the royalties for five years. I told ’em that wouldn’t fly, so I’m just going to cross them off the list.” Smallwood made a big show of striking a line through that item on his sheet. I watched impassively.