Defiled Page 2

  Sitting with my legs crossed on the Cool-Crete surface surrounding the pool, I dialed the power company and navigated the maze of menus until I reached a customer service representative, who informed me that the electricity had been disconnected because the bill hadn’t been paid in three months. As a result, I would have to pay past due charges, plus late fees, and make a new deposit to reopen the account. A succession of calls to the gas company, the cable company, and the municipal utilities produced the same results. Carrie paid the routine bills, so I had no idea the utilities had been turned off.

  Just to be doing something other than wallowing in pity, I grabbed the pool skimmer and removed the leaves and seedpods from the pool. Then I drained the hot tub and carried the wineglasses into the kitchen. Lipstick smeared the rim of one glass but not the other. A quick tour of the interior revealed that Carrie had taken the guest bedroom furniture as well. Her closets and dresser drawers were empty. The glass-doored wardrobe in the living room had been emptied of keepsakes and statuettes. The only rooms that were still furnished were the small living room and the cramped master bedroom. Behind my back, Carrie had taken everything she wanted from the beach house.

  As I moved from room to room, my footsteps echoed in the empty spaces, drowning the echoes of an ex-girlfriend’s laughter. Several murals painted by the girlfriend, Susanne, dominated rooms now devoid of furniture and turned them into small museums. An underwater scene of a coral reef and colorful fish decorated one wall in the family room; dolphins played between windows in the guest bedroom; and yellow seahorses hid behind the shower curtain in the guest bath. For me, the murals added a touch of class to an otherwise classless bungalow. To Carrie, the murals were my way of holding onto a former girlfriend and a former lifestyle. She was probably right; I had allowed the conflict to cause friction between us like a pebble in a shoe.

  I dialed my wife’s cell phone and reached a recorded message informing me that the number had been disconnected. Smart girl.

  The refrigerator contained moldy food and spoiled milk, so I drove to the local Publix and bought a cooler, a bag of ice, and a case of beer. In the garage, I found a ratty old folding chair, placed it in the shade of the screened porch, and took stock of the situation. While pretending to work on our failing relationship, it was apparent that my wife had prepared for today’s events over a long time. Carrie had shared the hot tub with someone who hadn’t worn lipstick. Instead of sharing the financial windfall that was on the immediate horizon, Carrie had opted to run off with as much as she could grab and pull the center pole from the rickety tent of our marriage.

  All my dreams dissolved like cotton candy on my tongue, except there was no sweet aftertaste. Yes, they had been dreams—a crowning success after a career studded with entrepreneurial failures, enough money to cut my commercial business ties, enough money to devote my time to writing and lecturing—and finally they had been within reach. Until there came one soft knock on my office door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tony Zambrano looked up from the file on his desk with something like alarm in his sleepy brown eyes. “You look like something that crawled out of a sewer,” he said.

  I flopped into the client’s chair and said, “There’s no electricity or water at the beach house. Carrie hasn’t paid the bills in months so last night I slept on a lawn chair in the backyard because it was cooler outside than inside. She probably had a good laugh about the housewarming gift she left for me.”

  Tony leaned back in his leather chair and fingered his tie knot. One of his many affectations was dressing like a Cambridge professor: striped tie on a striped shirt under a chalk-striped suit.

  He shook his finger at me. “We’re not going to retaliate, Randle. We face stiff competition, and the judge’s sympathy will be with the plaintiff until you tell your side of the story. Assuming you have a story to tell.”

  The large window behind Tony’s desk overlooked The Vinoy hotel on the left, the city marina dead ahead, the city pier to the right, and Tampa Bay in the near distance. At the municipal marina, my cabin cruiser rocked in its slip on gentle swells off the Bay. The morning sunlight caused me to squint, and Tony came in and out of focus as he leaned forward or back.

  I said, “Do you know this lawyer, Roberta de Castro, that Carrie has hired?”

  “Oh yeah, a ballbuster. She has a reputation for winning outlandish awards for her female clients. Around the courthouse, opposing attorneys call her ‘Bobbie the Castrator.’ She likes the nickname; it’s good for business.”

  “Is she just intimidating, or is she good?”

  “Both. She’s very expensive, but she’s very effective, so someone gave your wife good advice about who to hire. Your wife’s legal fees will cost you an arm and a leg.”

  “I’ll have to pay her to divorce me?”

  “It’s customary.”

  “Terrific. What does the summons say?”

  Tony flipped through the file on his desk. “Nothing unusual. The only legal grounds for divorce in the State of Florida are that the marriage is ‘irretrievably broken.’ They’ll want to prove that you broke it. So what do they have on you, Randle?”

  “Like what? I’m clean as a whistle.”

  “No one is ‘clean as a whistle,’ Randle. I never met Carrie; never saw her with you at the club. Describe her for me.”

  I shrugged. “We don’t have any mutual friends. If you had met her, you’d remember her—she’s sexy, eye-catching, in her prime. She’ll be forty-five in November.”

  A big smile played across Tony’s face. “And you’re older than dirt.”

  “I’m only fifty-eight, Tony. The gap isn’t important at our age.”

  Tony just smirked at me. “What I meant was describe who she is as a person. If you had to use one word to describe her, what would it be?”

  It took only a moment to think of an appropriate word. “Amoral. If it’s good for Carrie, it’s right; if it’s bad for Carrie, it’s wrong. She has very high standards for the rest of us but not for herself.”

  Tony wore a lascivious grin. “So she was young and sexy and you fell for a honeytrap. How’d you let that happen?”

  I flushed with heat. “I was in love, my friend. You should try it sometime.” Tony’s wife had left him a year ago.

  Tony held up two hands, palms facing me to ward off an attack. “Sorry.”

  I got out of the chair and walked to the window behind his desk. Of course, I had asked myself that question many times. My first wife, the mother of my daughter, was a free spirit, the owner of a New Age store, an experimenter with religions, into Zen and yoga and vegan diets. Nothing wrong with that for many men, but I couldn’t relate to it. Our relationship was pure Teflon—no arguments, no ups and no downs. Carrie was the opposite: uneducated but street-smart, provocative, pigheaded, alluring, uncontrollable—a tantalizing challenge. We disagreed about almost everything, but sorting through the issues drew us closer and connected us like two pieces of Velcro. I had always wanted a Ferrari, and one day I woke up with one in my driveway, so to speak. And like a Ferrari owner, I soon found I couldn’t drive it anywhere to exploit its speed and handling, couldn’t afford the gas and maintenance. But I still wanted the car.

  Tony looked over his shoulder at me. “Okay, we’ll assume they’re trying to scare us into accepting an outrageous settlement. De Castro only takes cases where the husband has a boatload of money. Are you hiding a fortune I don’t know about?”

  The company I had helped found—Atlanta Medical Analytics (AMA for short)—had pioneered the mathematical modeling of relationships between DNA, disease, and therapies, and our imminent IPO had Wall Street buzzing with anticipation.

  “I’m cash poor and carrying more debt than is healthy, but I hold stock options that will be worth a couple million when my company goes public. I’ll get royalties once my patent applications are approved.”

  “There you go,” Tony said, as though he had confirmed the Big Bang Theory. He position
ed a yellow legal pad in front of him and grabbed a Mont Blanc pen from his drawer. “Okay, tell me about your income, the stock options, the royalties, and all of that.”

  I quoted him all the numbers: two hundred thousand dollars per-year base salary; one hundred thousand dollar annual-incentive bonus; and two hundred thousand stock options. Thirty thousand options had vested when we formed the company, before I met Carrie. During the marriage another ninety thousand had vested on company anniversaries, and thirty thousand would vest in six months, on the fourth company public and would vest on the IPO date.

  Head down, writing, Tony asked, “What are the options worth?”

  “We’ll go public at twelve to fifteen dollars a share, so the options could be worth as much as three million dollars before taxes. The royalties on the patents could pay me another million over ten years. Depends upon how successful we are at licensing other companies to use our technology.”

  Tony wrote that all down, then scratched his head with the pen. “The base salary isn’t enough for de Castro to chase. Even base plus bonus wouldn’t get her panties wet, so it’s the options and royalties they’re after. We’ll argue that the stock has no value until your company goes public and that you have to be present to win, like at a church raffle. The thirty thousand shares that vested before you married are certainly a premarital asset. We’ll say that the royalties are post-divorce ordinary income.”

  Tony sucked on his pen, deep in thought. I waited. As though to himself, he said, “When does your company go public?”

  “In sixty days. Can we get this done before then?”

  Tony rubbed his chin and raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Afraid not, my friend. The average Florida divorce takes six and a half months.”

  “So, she wants the IPO to happen before the divorce goes final.”

  “Sure. If the IPO happens before the divorce is final, the remaining shares will become community property. Maybe the royalties too.”

  “Whoa! Wait a minute. How are the royalties a part of this? I haven’t earned that money yet.”

  Tony tapped the pen on his legal pad and gave me a sad look. “They’ll argue that you earned the royalties while you were married, you just haven’t collected the money yet. Anyway, the court will include them in the calculation of future income when establishing alimony.”

  That stunned me. I had worked for peanuts for twenty years, refining my theories of medical predestination, before joining a high-tech startup that could commercialize the science and provide me with the vehicle to disseminate the science broadly and not just to people who could afford to be healthy. Simplistically, I had assumed that our wedding day and our divorce date would be definitive brackets around my financial obligations to Carrie Marks. Now I had the sensation that I was tiptoeing through a legal minefield and I could lose a figurative arm and a leg.

  “You can’t let that happen, Tony. This is my future we’re talking about.”

  “Of course we’ll fight it,” he said. He leaned on the desk, moved closer to me. “Once the money is in the bank the split is straightforward, but the division of future earnings is tricky. So why did Carrie file now, Randle?”

  I leaned back in my chair, not wanting to be more intimate with Tony Zambrano.

  “We argue about money,” I said. “The credit cards are maxed out, so I took them away from her and cut them up. I moved our savings, fifty thousand dollars, out of a joint account and into a CD in my name so she couldn’t spend it.” What I hid from him were the arguments about how to support her parents. They were old, retired, and destitute, a condition I hoped wouldn’t befall me. Since Carrie spent all our free cash, there was nothing to give her parents until the stock options could be cashed. Another pebble in the shoe.

  “No more of that,” Tony said as he pointed a crooked finger at my face. “One of the exhibits to the filing is an injunction against financial changes. It’s mutual. Your assets are frozen, and neither of you can buy anything more expensive than groceries.” He paused and then added, “You can pay your legal fees of course. Ha ha.”

  “Of course.” I didn’t laugh.

  “Her complaint asks for temporary maintenance as well as permanent alimony, so the filing gets her financial relief.”

  “Does ‘permanent’ mean forever?”

  “That’s how Webster’s defines it.”

  “Dammit!” I slammed my fist on the desk.

  Tony gave me a disgusted look. “You sound like those billionaires who get taken to the cleaners. You flash your money around to attract sleazy younger women, and you expect them to love you just because you’re you. Then you make the mistake of marrying them and you never give a thought to what the divorce will do to you, but you expect your lawyer to work a miracle and make it all go away.”

  “Okay, I deserve that, but I’m drowning and you’re my life preserver.”

  Tony puffed his cheeks and blew stale air into the room. “Any other reasons she might want to file in a hurry?”

  Lots of them. The straw that broke the camel’s back may have been an incident in late June or early July. I was watching a golf tournament in the family room—my designated space—when Carrie waltzed in and said, “I want you out of this house.”

  I had feigned a dumbfounded look and replied, “I must have missed the memo, the one that said you’re in charge here.”

  “Go live in the beach house. You’re happier there anyway.”

  “No,” I said, “I’ll hang around here and keep an eye on things.” Meaning an eye on her.

  She flushed crimson. “I have friends who can throw you out of here.”

  I shrugged. “Good luck with that. I lock my door and keep my pistol cocked and loaded on the bedstand at night. You should do the same thing.”

  She growled and kicked an end table, toppling and shattering a three-hundred-dollar lamp. I never cleaned it up and neither did she.

  To Tony I said, “I refused to move out of the country house. Southern women believe they can kick their husbands out of the house whenever they get angry and make them crawl back asking for forgiveness. It’s a game they play.”

  “It’s not a game anymore. Another exhibit to the filing gives her possession of the Cortes County house and a restraining order against you. You can’t come within one thousand feet of the house. Means you can’t even drive by on the road.”

  “Gee, Tony, this is all going so well. Any other legal gems I should know about?”

  “Nope, that’s pretty much it: standard grounds; temporary and permanent alimony; you pay her legal fees; she gets possession of the country house; restraining order; your assets are frozen. Now it’s our turn at bat.”

  “Finally. What’s the plan?”

  “I’ll file an answer ASAP, ask for expedited mediation. The answer will be simple; we’re not contesting the divorce, are we?”

  “No, not this time.”

  Tony was surprised—his eyebrows danced and his eyes twinkled like a midsummer Santa Claus. “You were separated before?”

  “Yes, during our first year of marriage. I convinced her to get help and give the marriage another chance.”

  “Psychological help or marriage counselor?”

  “Mental health counseling for her erratic behavior, mood swings, violent reactions.”

  Tony frowned. “Tell me about the violence.”

  “She throws things at me when she’s angry. She dumped a serving bowl of salad on me once, and another time she threw a heavy crystal ashtray at my head.”

  Tony smirked.

  “It knocked a hole in the wall.”

  Tony stifled a laugh.

  “One time I returned from a business trip and found that she had emptied every drawer in the house, gone through all my clothing, dumped the clothes on the floor of the closet, and tipped my filing cabinet over. I said, ‘What the hell?’ and she said, ‘A wife can look anywhere she wants.’”

  Tony flipped his hand. “Legally, she was right.”

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nbsp; “Tony, the slightest hint of criticism provokes an explosive reaction. There’s a name for it in psychology: avoidant personality disorder.”

  Nodding, Tony said, “You need a psychiatrist’s professional opinion for any mental diagnoses.”

  “She takes meds prescribed by a psychiatrist. She filled out an application for employee benefits through my company, and she listed the medications she was taking. I looked them up and found they were antidepressants and pills to prevent anxiety attacks.”

  Tony leaned his head to the side, interested. “Did she take her meds?”

  “Not always. She said they made her gain weight.”

  “Hmm.” The lawyer cocked his head again. “So she’s mentally unstable and it was impossible to maintain a marital relationship.”

  “That’s right. She’s looney tunes.”

  “We’d need a third-party opinion, not yours.”

  “Then let’s get one! Let’s fight back.”

  Staring off into space, he recited lines he may have read as a second-year law student. “There’s a law called the Baker Act that regulates all mental health facilities, practitioners, treatment regimens, and processes in the State of Florida. Under the Baker Act, as a close relative, you can petition a judge to have your wife examined involuntarily. You would have to show proof that she is a threat to herself or to others. It’s like a probable cause hearing in a criminal case.”

  “I have plenty of evidence.”

  Tony leaned back, gazed at the ceiling, calculating. “If she were adjudged insane, she’d lose credibility. You’d get a better deal on alimony and fringe benefits too.”