Rogue Divorce Lawyer

by Dale E. Manolakas

  Bonnie giggled as she wiped off her buttery fingers and offered her hand to Gary. “Thank you.”

  Gary took her hand gently as he drank in her sapphire eyes, high cheekbones and soft, plump fertile lips. He imagined her pussy was just as full and pillowy.

  The dinner went fast, but the limed-salty margaritas went even faster. The three “too-badded” about the incident in the courthouse. Gary didn’t mention he had been there.

  “Enough of being morose,” Mary announced. “How are my lobster enchiladas? I share recipes.”

  Saved by Mary, Gary smiled. “Wonderful, dear, as always.”

  Mike and Bonnie left late. Goodbyes were margarita-laced hugs, with Gary prolonging his against Bonnie’s solid C-cup breasts. No one noticed, not even her. Mary enjoyed being the perfect hostess and had particularly charmed Mike by engaging and befriending his wife. Mary offered to introduce her to the women’s golf league at the country club. Gary wanted to introduce her to a divorce in his office.

  As the young couple sauntered down the walk to their home. Mike grabbed Bonnie’s yellow-legginged ass. She giggled.

  * * *

  Gary waited in bed with the latest best-selling hard-boiled detective book while his wife finished her bathroom ritual. He could hear her gargling and opening the smelly, floral creams she slathered on to plump the aging loose skin hanging from her jowls.

  Gary was not reading the book or thinking of Bonnie’s yellow leggings and the toned ass underneath. Instead, he was looking forward to a nightmare-free sleep now Skip was dead.

  He stopped looking at the fallow book pages and turned off his lamplight. As Mary got into bed, the mattress shifted under her weight. It did the same with his body, but she was a woman—they should stay trim and attractive for their man, or whoever they were doing.

  “Night, dear.” Mary turned off her lamp, patted his chest asexually, and turned her back to go to sleep.

  This had been their ritual for years. He couldn’t remember when it started. He wasn’t even sure she had a pussy between her legs anymore—and didn’t care.

  “Don’t forget the kids are coming for Sunday dinner. It’ll be so nice to see their little ones.”

  “Yes, it will,” he lied.

  Gary was relieved when the Sunday dinners had gone from bimonthly to monthly, as their offspring got busier with their own kids and lives. He could barely endure the monthly circus as they the gatherings had grown louder and more hysterical with the marriages, procreation, and political debates pushed on him at election times. Mary’s wifely demand that he participate—participate—participate became worse too. She wouldn’t let him escape to a game in the den with the guys alone anymore. He had to dote on the grandchildren.

  * * *

  Gary’s son Lawrence was a Loyola Law School graduate and doing well in his estate planning practice. Their daughter Charlotte had married one of his son’s classmates, a litigator of some sort. What did Gary care?

  He was repulsed by his son’s wife Gretchen—the “big, powerful” attorney for none other than the L.A. Rapid Transit District or, in other words, for buses and the lite-rail. She never stopped talking about her work and her two brats who she said looked like her side of the family. To Gary, they looked like some interloper who had cuckolded his son. He liked Lawrence, but rarely saw him alone. Even when he did get a momentary conversation, his son’s mouth parroted more and more of his wife’s spew.

  Gary had enjoyed his daughter Charlotte until her own two daughters were born. Now, she was looking more and more like Mary and acting like her too. She kept teaching elementary school and didn’t quit like Mary had when the kids came.

  Gary wondered why Charlotte’s husband seemed so happy.

  Maybe I did too at that age? He couldn’t recall. Maybe I still do?

  He knew one thing. He wished she didn’t let those long sunny-haired cherubs run around naked after they took a swim. The older they got the more he looked. He now went out of his way to get up and grab a beer when he heard them giggling through the house naked, firm, and hairless.

  When Gary gave his kids the down payments for their homes, he was ordained generous. Only he knew his generosity was solely to assure they, and their broods, were ensconced geographically a prohibitive distance away given the Southern California traffic— in Agoura Hills in the West San Fernando Valley. It was an oven like San Bernardino but all they could afford, down payment or not. Now, with another housing bubble, Agoura Hills was deemed “hip” with the nearby Ventura Boulevard bistros and boutique shops and a better class of people.

  * * *

  After the gathering, Mary slept her usual after-dinner-party, deep-liquored sleep with the intermittent snort of a snore.

  In bed in the pitch black, Gary moaned and twisted as he had been doing for months. But this time, instead of Kim’s face coming at him, or Skip’s, it was Zaida’s.

  “Gary. Gary. Wake up,” Mary turned on her lamp and shook his shoulder. “Wake up. You’re dreaming again.”

  “Huh … what?” Gary’s eyes popped open, wide and wild.

  “Take an Ambien. I need my sleep.”

  Mary was not patient and concerned as she had been when his nightly nightmare ritual began. She was angry and spent most days tired. She finally went to her internist and feigned non-Gary originated sleeping problems. She rationalized the lie because Gary was her sleeping problem. Just because he was stressed out didn’t mean she had to ruin her days with no sleep. She ran a household, played duplicate bridge, and golf was not as easy as it had been when she was younger.

  “I have my library fundraiser tomorrow. I can’t be tired. You know how hard it is on me now to do all that stacking and … I should quit and leave it to the younger women. I’ll get you a pill.”

  Gary looked at his clock.

  “No, it’s too late. I’ll be groggy all morning. I can sleep now.”

  “Then go to sleep.” Mary turned off her lamp.

  Gary stared into the dark and listened until his wife’s breathing was regular and deep with no intermittent snore this time.

  He lay there replaying the events in court. Then he thought of Eliana pressed against him in his office. He wished he had just taken her there. What could she have done? It would have been he-said, she-said. He lay there smoldering in anger. He would have the last word and would have both her and more of her money.

  The morning after the courtroom massacre, he fell asleep just as dawn lit the windows behind their plantation shutters.

  ⌘

  Copyrighted Material

  Chapter 27

  The afternoon of the courtroom bloodbath, Kurt billed like a machine and then left at six for home. It was earlier than usual but he had no choice. He had to be at that damn dinner for Angela’s sister who was prissy, dull, prosaic, but needed help—his help, his free legal help because he had nothing else to offer.

  Kurt had made up for any down billing time on his commercial litigation client matters caused by the shooting. That’s what litigators did. Ignored everything personal, put their nose to the grindstone, and billed for the good of the firm, for the good of their careers, and, lastly, for the good of their clients.

  * * *

  The traffic was light on his drive to Santa Monica on the westbound 10 Freeway. The eastbound was packed with workers and employees headed to their affordable neighborhoods as extended and heavy rush hour traffic sucked up more of their lives. Fewer and fewer people could afford to live on the Westside—let alone Santa Monica, north or south.

  * * *

  As Kurt opened his townhouse door, he heard sobbing in the kitchen. He wanted to leave, but the faint beep of the alarm system announced he had arrived.

  “Hi, baby.” Angela ran to the entry hall, with her gray feline following, and gave him a big kiss. “I’m so glad you’re here. This is more than I can handle.”

  “What’s going on?” Angela’s cat wound around his pants legs.

  “Come on in. It’
s bad.”

  “Let me change.”

  Kurt kicked the cat away with his foot. He hated that damn thing that came with Angela when she moved in. He had never seen a cat hair on Regina.

  “Sorry.” Angela picked up her cat. “Flower’s just glad to see you and hungry.”

  “I’ll be down.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Kurt took the carpeted steps two at a time with his ripped six foot one body. He shut the door on what he had established as a “cat-free” zone, the master bedroom. He got in the shower to hide from the problems that waited for him downstairs. As he did, he remembered Regina with her skirt up and legs spread sitting on his desk as he took her. He loved the way she came with a vibrato whimper barely audible. He wondered what she was like out of the office. He had committed to Angela just a few months too soon. He couldn’t stop thinking about Regina. She was problem free, ambitious, could handle herself, came well-heeled, and she liked him—at least she said so.

  * * *

  “Kurt, what are you doing?” Resounded up the stairs.

  He turned off the shower.

  What the hell could be that wrong with Eliana, anyway? She was the average semi-silent housewife and broodmare breaking up with a philandering hubby. That was life—at least the life of today. He was glad he wasn’t a divorce lawyer. He dreaded this one evening reassuring her that her life would be fine—even though it wouldn’t. Neither would her finances or her sons. Angela and her mother would have to shoulder the brunt of this—not him.

  The warm water calmed him from his flashbacks of the bloody courtroom and readied him for the female hysteria downstairs. His family didn’t have problems, or if they did they handled them practically and quietly. Not with this mass grouping and cathartic courage-building behavior of Angela’s Greek family.

  “Kurt … where are you?” Angela bellowed as she put Flower out on the patio with her dinner.

  Galvanized by that female howl, Kurt slipped on black sweats and a maroon t-shirt with U.S.C. Law on the right sleeve. Getting in at the last minute from the wait-list to the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He had made the most of it, becoming Managing Editor of the Southern California Law Review and graduating Order of the Coif.

  With sweptback wet hair, he advanced on the kitchen, which exuded the smell of fish and female. He knew to shut up about his own day—his bloody, abbreviated billing day. Besides, he had shared it with Regina, the uncomplicated, confidently competent woman he liked more and more.

  * * *

  “Eliana! Hi. It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah, Thanksgiving … too long.” Eliana smiled and gave Kurt a chest-high hug.

  Kurt reciprocated as he signaled Angela for a glass of wine. The two perched on the stools with their wine as Angela finished the salad. Kurt took a long drink and then focused his blue eyes on Eliana with sincere interest, just as he did all his legal clients.

  “So what’s up?”

  Kurt was disarmingly good looking, especially with the scruff from the day. He had used his looks and his studied, sincere gaze his whole mature life. It instilled trust and confidence in everyone. Why not? Though as he listened, his thoughts wandered and he judged everyone, from his parents to his clients—but they never knew. He only needed a part of his brain to analyze the average person’s problems, laugh at their jokes, or just feign interest in the most boring of conversations.

  At this point, Kurt gulped his Chablis to face Eliana’s drama, her tear-stained face, and red puffy eyes.

  Even relaxed from the shower and wine, he wasn’t prepared for what he heard. The Gary Stockton story began.

  * * *

  There was too much detail, but Kurt, a lawyer, sifted the relevant from irrelevant facts and cut to the chase. The twenty-five thousand billed was outrageous, but the question was how well Stockton had documented and fictionally justified his billing. In a waterfall of tears, Eliana ended the story with Gary’s sexual advances, especially the attempted rape and the courthouse incident last Friday afternoon.

  “He what? He threw you against the wall? In the courthouse? He tried to …”

  “Yes,” Angela said. “A blowjob!”

  “Really?”

  “But I got away,” Eliana said. “Just like at the office.”

  Kurt stopped drinking his wine and stared at her—first in disbelief and then in amazement. He knew that divorce lawyers were considered the bottom feeders of the legal profession, along with a few other specialties, but this? He saw now why the small Family Law Department in his firm was so lucrative and powerful, if this Gary Stockton was a typical example of the family law bar. His firm’s department prospered because it was stellar, ethical, and discreet.

  “He actually said he wouldn’t do any more work unless … well … I … I … well … put out?”

  “Yes,” Angela said. “He wanted her to … you know.”

  “I get the picture.” Kurt hated dancing around something both of them, as mature adults, could name and had done their whole mature sexual lives. “That’s insane. This guy is risking disbarment and criminal charges just to get his cock sucked or inserted. Is he that hard up?”

  “Kurt! Eliana’s embarrassed enough.”

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.”

  Kurt looked at Eliana. He couldn’t blame the guy for a try. Eliana probably sent out mixed signals. But Stockton’s refusal to do the necessary casework after the rejection was inexcusable to him. Rejection is every guy’s middle name—even Kurt with his good looks and life-time cachet of football, partying, and now earning the big bucks.

  “So what’s the bottom line here? You’re rid of him and, I guess, a hunk of money he claims he billed away and … what else?” Kurt curbed callousness. “Of course, besides the horrible advances.”

  “Attempted rape.” Angela gave Kurt a nasty look.

  “Yeah. Attempted rape.” Kurt was cowed and knew he had to be less male—females needed sensitivity and handling. But not Regina. She was different.

  “Look,” Angela took a letter from the island where they were sitting and she was making the salad. “Now he says she owes him another five thousand one hundred and he’s threatening to sue her!”

  Kurt skimmed the letter. It was short and devoid of detail, just attaching a bill listing an amount for “legal fees” and “costs” he supposedly incurred in Eliana’s dissolution proceeding. He also skimmed the unsigned draft of a settlement agreement Stockton had prepared.

  “Remind me. How much did you give him so far?”

  “Twenty-five … twenty-five thousand.”

  “I’m in the wrong specialty.” Kurt finished his glass of Chablis.

  “This is serious.” Angela topped all their glasses.

  “I know. I know. But let me get my head around it.”

  Kurt drank his wine as he analyzed. This guy wanted to get even. Or he wanted Eliana to come crawling back. Or he was desperate for money. Any one, or all three, would do. It didn’t matter. The result was Kurt was stuck—stuck helping the doe-eyed mother-of-three.

  “Grab your iPad, Angela, I want to have a look at this guy.”

  Angela Googled him and handed the iPad to Kurt.

  “I know this guy,” Kurt said.

  “What?” Eliana said.

  “I mean I don’t know him, but I saw him at the courthouse this morning.”

  “What was he doing?” Angela asked.

  “Just leaving. In the parking lot.”

  * * *

  As Kurt read Gary’s website bio, his anger mounted. Stockton was a punk good old boy in the insular San Bernardino hick-town morass and a leader in the local bar. His website was a honed snapshot of a stellar pillar of the community and noted family law attorney.

  Kurt enlarged the flattering photo, obviously older than Gary’s years. Even though it was professionally touched up, the guy’s weight and profligate lifestyle showed on his sagging face, c
reased skin, and deep puffy eyes—blue eyes set in a loose, undisciplined face that screamed average—if not stupid and lazy.

  Kurt thought out loud. “A letter demanding your files be forwarded to me on my firm’s letterhead might get him to back down. He looks lazy and undisciplined. If not, he could sue you, and expenses and hours will shoot up.

  Eliana looked at him with the innocent eyes. “But if he does that, Angela said you do pro bono cases.”

  Kurt snapped a cautionary glance at Angela. “We do if the firm approves. I’ve never heard of our accepting a pro bono case that dealt with divorce or taking down another lawyer.”

  Angela ignored Kurt’s hints. “You can do it on the side. For God’s sake, he tried to rape her.”

  “That’s a wild card. He said, she said.” Kurt gave Angela back her iPad. “Eliana, did you tell anyone about this or go to the police?”

  “No … I … was too embarrassed.” Eliana teared up.

  “Too bad.”

  Angela frowned. “Kurt?”

  He retreated. That sensitivity thing again. Damn.

  “I meant too bad you didn’t go to the police from the standpoint of your legal position.”

  Kurt shifted the conversation from him helping on the case to him helping her find another lawyer—a good L.A. divorce lawyer, not some San Bernardino pervert.

  “I can’t get another lawyer. William’s lawyer blocked all the accounts. I don’t have any money. He’s even frozen my credit cards. And Mom barely has enough to live on herself.”

  “She needs your help.” Angela tossed the salad with her homemade blue cheese dressing Kurt loved.

  Kurt said, “You’re right. She needs to do something before William’s dear little blonde secretary starts popping them out. Then, he’s not going to give a hoot about the boys.”