Never Enough

by Harold Robbins

  That night in bed she asked him, “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I’m not sure if I do or don’t.”

  “Let’s put it this way. In all modesty, I’m doing damned well with Harcourt Barnham.”

  “And a hell of a lot better on your own.”

  VI

  In the morning over breakfast, before they went to the beach, he read the Times, and she scanned the Wall Street Journal.

  “Better take a look at this one, my friend,” she said, handing him the Journal. She pointed to a story.

  MEAD, BOISE CASCADE TENDER OFFER UNDER INVESTIGATION

  By David Link

  Journal Staff

  Unusually heavy trading in Boise Cascade shares in the week preceding the announcement of the Mead tender offer has generated speculation and an investigation on the part of the SEC and the office of the New York District Attorney.

  The sharp rise in the price of the stock, occasioned by the announcement of the offer, seems to have been anticipated.

  “It’s not a major deal,” said Ralph Eddy, spokesman for the SEC, “but there is a clear suggestion that a few investors at least were working on the basis of insider information.

  “We have no reason to believe,” he went on, “that either corporation or the underwriter intentionally leaked the information. We think they are entirely innocent. We think it more likely that a dishonest or careless employee tipped a few friends, who then invested through delegates and probably made a maximum of a million dollars. It’s small-time stuff. Nonetheless, we are continuing to look into the situation, which we will be doing in cooperation with the office of the New York District Attorney.”

  The district attorney was far more sanguine. “This is déjà vu all over again, as Yogi used to say. We have been on a crusade to root out this kind of thing and protect honest investors. I intend to get to the bottom of it.”

  Dave shrugged his shoulders insouciantly. “Good luck to Rudy,” he said.

  NINE

  I

  JULY, 1988

  For Christmas, 1987, Emily had bought Cole a painting. With the help of the art school where she had last posed as a model, she located a young woman painter and bought from her a nude study she had done with Emily as a model. The young woman was an excellent painter, a disciple of realism, and she had begun to make her living painting portraits. Her portraits hung in the lobbies of banks and the reception rooms of law offices. Her studies of children were especially appreciated.

  Emily’s painting was a rather chaste nude. She sat on a rumpled dark green drape, with her legs folded back under her. She looked out of the painting with a faint smile on her face. Her breasts were of course bare, and a fringe, no more, of her pubic hair showed.

  Emily had meant it to hang in their bedroom, but Cole insisted it must hang in the family room behind their living and dining rooms, where casual visitors to their home would not see it but their friends would.

  Emily and Cole had to explain to the kids that they were not to take their friends back to the family room to see it. The kids took their friends to their own playroom in the basement, and in fact their friends never saw much of the house at all, much less the family room.

  Friends did see it and without exception admired it.

  Among the friends who did see it were Dave and Alexandra. Dave brought Alexandra over to New Jersey to introduce his bride to his friends. They went to dinner, and after dinner and brandies they settled in the family room where the painting hung.

  “It is so beautiful!” Alexandra exclaimed. “Do you think this artist would do one of me?”

  “Oh, I’m sure she would,” said Emily. “That’s how she makes a living.”

  Alexandra stood before the painting and admired it. “Do you look just like this?” she asked. “Did she paint you exactly as you are?”

  Emily grinned and glanced back and forth between Cole and Dave. “The likeness of the face and the likeness of the boobs are the same.”

  Alexandra nodded thoughtfully. “You did pose as a nude model for some time, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it embarrass you terribly to—”

  Emily looked at Cole.

  “Well … I can understand that it would be embarrassing. So—I’ll tell you what, Emily. You take off your top, and I’ll take off mine. Then you won’t be the only one—”

  Emily laughed. “What the hell. Hundreds of people have seen me.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Cole muttered.

  Emily lifted a pink cashmere sweater over her head and unhooked and dropped her bra, exposing her small, pear-shaped white breasts with vivid pink areolae and darker pink nipples. Alexandra had to remove a black knit dress, then her bra, to show breasts that were three times the size of Emily’s: firm and shaped like half melons, with brownish areolae and hard, wrinkled, dark nipples.

  “See?” Emily asked. “She painted my boobs with just as much accuracy as she painted my face.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Cole repeated.

  Dave smiled and watched to see what would happen next.

  “C‘mon, honey,” Emily said with a smile. “I mean, c’mon. We’re grown-up.” She turned to Dave. “Y’ like?”

  He nodded. “I like.”

  Alexandra turned to Cole and tipped her head.

  “I like,” he said.

  Alexandra was sitting now in a half slip. She pulled it back, showing her legs above the tops of her dark stockings and the black garter straps that held them up. Emily pushed back her skirt. She was wearing panty hose, so showed only her legs.

  II

  One of the duties that fell to the more junior members of the bar was to represent indigent criminal defendants by appointment. It was in the Miranda warning: “ … if you can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.” Only in exceptionally difficult cases, or cases that required appeal, did the young lawyer receive more than a hundred dollars for conducting a defense.

  Most of the accused were pitiable wretches. Cole would never forget a man accused of forging a check telling him that he couldn’t be convicted. “I didn’t write the man’s name on the check. I just wrote his first name. She wrote his last name. Neither one of us wrote his whole name.” The man grinned through the bars of the jail. He refused to believe and asked for another lawyer when Cole told him that he and his wife would both go to prison for the forgery.

  Almost none of the dozen or so criminal defenses he conducted on appointment generated any sympathy except one.

  A nineteen-year-old girl named Rosaria Lopez, a seamstress who lived in lower Manhattan and worked in a sweatshop, was under indictment for burglary. If convicted she faced years in prison. Her story was that her boyfriend had taken her to a house he said was his uncle’s. He told her to sit on the front porch while he went around in back and got a key from under a flowerpot, after which he would come through the house and let her in. He did come to the front door and let her in, and they gathered up and put in his car a portable television set, an electric coffeemaker, a toaster oven, and some silverware—all of which he said his uncle had told him he wanted to give him. They were stopped and arrested within a mile of the house.

  Cole had heard a lot about the case, was inclined to believe the story, and suggested to the judge that he be appointed to defend Rosaria Lopez—that is, for once to be appointed to defend someone who might not be guilty.

  He went to the jail, where she sat disconsolately on her cot, smoking a cigarette and talking listlessly to a fifty-year-old black woman on another cot. It was a four-cot cage, barred on three sides, one of two that constituted the women’s jail.

  “Miss Lopez.”

  She crushed her cigarette, got up, and came to the bars.

  “My name is Cole Jennings. I’m a lawyer and have been appointed by the court to defend you.”

  “Yeah?”

  She was a li
ttle pudgy but otherwise was an attractive young woman. It was summer-warm in the jail, in spite of the open windows outside the cage, and she was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of skimpy blue-denim shorts cut down from jeans. He had been told that deputies and others came in to have a look at her. Two or three had taken pictures of her.

  “I’m going to try to get you out of this mess.”

  She gripped the bars in tight fists and nodded. “I don’t like it in here. I hate bein’ locked in. And I’m scared!”

  “Scared of—?”

  “Bein’ sent up! I don’t want to go …”

  “I’ve heard your story, that your boyfriend lied to you.”

  “He did! An’ you know where he’s gonna be tonight?”

  “Where?”

  “Drinkin’ beer someplace. Drivin’ around. Prob’ly seein’ some other girl. He’s out on bail. An’ I’m locked up in here, like a animal! His family could put up the bail for me, too. But—” She shook her head. “But they wouldn’.”

  “You’ve been in jail … three months?”

  “Three months an’ some.”

  “Okay. The deal is probably going to go something like this … Rosaria. The district attorney is going to want your testimony against your boyfriend Darryl.”

  “If I testify, does that get me outta bein’ sent up? Does it get me outta here?”

  “I can’t promise. I’ll work on it.”

  “Mr. Jennings … I got a little sister by my mama’s second marriage. She kept askin’ where Rosaria was. Finally they had to tell her I was in jail. She cried! She sends me little pictures she draws with her crayons on poster paper. Some of them are me, behind bars, with big tears on my face.”

  She stepped over to her cot and reached under it, retrieved a picture childishly drawn with red and brown crayons on yellow paper.

  Real tears swelled out of the girl’s eyes. “I didn’ do nothin’ wrong,” she wept. “I didn’ do nothin’ wrong. I just believed that son of a bitch! An’ here I am! Here I am. I wanta go home!”

  When Cole met with the district attorney a problem arose.

  “I can’t just drop this case in return for her testimony, Cole. You believe her. I don’t. I think she knew perfectly well what she was doing. She’s a pretty worldly girl. So far as her value as a witness is concerned, her testimony isn’t going to add much to anything. We know they were in the house. We know they stole what they stole. Her little story that he lied to her doesn’t do much.”

  The district attorney smoked a cigar as they talked. His desk was covered with a sheet of heavy glass, under which he had pushed a dozen photographs. Framed, autographed pictures on his walls were of prominent politicians, including—to Cole’s surprise—a personally autographed picture of Hubert Humphrey.

  “You’re saying her testimony—her cooperation—isn’t worth anything?”

  “Not a hell of a lot. She can testify they were inside the house. We have fingerprint evidence of that. She can testify they stole a TV set. We know that; they had it in their possession when they were arrested.”

  “What if she’s telling the truth?” Cole asked. “It’d be a tragedy if the kid goes to prison for a long term.”

  The district attorney studied the ash on his cigar for a moment. “The reformatory is full of Hispanic girls. She’ll be at home there. But tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “In return for her testimony I’ll let her plead guilty to breaking and entering.”

  Cole frowned. “She’ll have a felony record.”

  “If she keeps her nose clean, that won’t make much difference. She’s not going to apply for a job in a bank or as a schoolteacher.”

  “And what kind of a sentence?”

  “Six months. She’s already done ninety-eight days, more than half of it. Of course, she might win a jury’s sympathy and get acquitted. Chance she can take.”

  Cole tried to explain it to Rosaria. “If you plead guilty to breaking and entering, which is a reduced charge, you’ll have to spend eighty-two more days in jail. But you won’t, as you put it, get ‘sent up.’”

  Her lips trembled, and she sobbed. “Eighty-two more says!”

  “You’ll be out in October.”

  She leaned on the bars as though she could somehow squeeze through them. Her breasts hung out over the cross brace.

  “Let me explain this,” he said. “You can plead not guilty to burglary and get maybe five years if a jury finds you guilty. Or you could be found not guilty.”

  “You don’t think I got a good chance for that.”

  “I’m afraid I have to say I don’t.”

  She gripped and tugged as if she could shake the unyielding steel bars. “Eighty-two more days! I’ll miss my little sister’s birthday.”

  “One more thing. With a guilty plea, you’ll have a criminal record. It’ll be with you the rest of your life.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you could never get a job in, say, nursing or teaching school.”

  She sneered. “Who’s gonna?”

  “Well … the decision is up to you.”

  She began to cry. “All I want is to go home! It ain’t much—jus’ a crowded apartment on Eighteenth Street—but it’s home. I don’t like it in here! All I want is to go home. Eighty-two more days! Jesus!”

  On the day when she entered her plea, Cole met her in the jury room to rehearse what she was to do and say in the courtroom. She was wearing a very plain white blouse and a dark blue skirt. Only when the time came to go into the courtroom did the matron take off her handcuffs.

  “Miss Lopez,” the judge said in as kindly a manner as he could, “you have been represented by able counsel. I know he has explained your rights. But you must understand that a plea of guilty is final. You cannot appeal. Do you understand?”

  She glanced around the courtroom. For her it was undoubtedly more frightening a place than the jail. The judge wore a stern black robe. The big room was paneled with dark wood. People stared at her.

  “Do you understand, Miss Lopez?”

  She nodded, mouth open.

  “Then, how do you plead to the charge of breaking and entering: guilty or not guilty? And you must say it, Miss Lopez. I cannot accept a nod.”

  “Guilty, I guess,” she whispered hoarsely.

  The judge smiled tolerantly. “I’m sorry. It can’t be ‘I guess.’ Do you plead guilty or not guilty.”

  “Guilty,” she croaked, then began to sob.

  “On your plea of guilty, the court sentences you to imprisonment in the county jail for a term of six months. The hundred and seven days you have already been confined will count against your sentence. In view of the fact that you seem to be without means, the court will not fine you and will waive the costs.”

  The matron stepped up, handcuffed the sobbing girl, and led her out of the courtroom.

  III

  Cole sat with Emily over martinis and sticks of celery and carrot. He was despondent.

  “I have just taken part in sending a nineteen-year-old girl to jail—back to jail, actually—saddled with a felony record, when she was not guilty.”

  “You’re sure she’s not guilty?

  He shrugged. “Judges charging juries on the definition of ‘reasonable doubt’ say, ‘Everything in human affairs is subject to doubt.’ But I’d make book on this one.”

  “What were your options?” Emily asked.

  “That’s the system. If she’d gone to trial, I have to say I think she would have been convicted by a jury—because she would have been the only witness for her defense. Her boyfriend Darryl could have testified that he lied to her, but you couldn’t trust him to do that. He’d have figured that made him look worse.”

  “If she took her chances—why couldn’t she have pleaded not guilty to breaking and entering?” Cole shook his head. “Not an option. The DA offered the reduction of charge in return for a guilty plea. Anyway, if she’d pleaded not guilty to breaking and entering and had been convicted, she�
��d have got a year at least, instead of her six months.”

  “Why? Why a bigger sentence?”

  “Every judge I ever heard of will do it. They say confession is good for the soul, a step toward rehabilitation, I suppose. Well, it’s good for the sentence, too. Judges like to talk about ‘owning up to it.’ If you ‘own up’—plead guilty—you do less time than you do if you insist on your right to a jury trial.”

  “In other words, there’s a penalty for asserting your rights.”

  “Exactly. That’s the way it is.”

  “What about Darryl?”

  “He pleaded guilty, too, but to burglary. He’s going to do five years. But there’s something damned wrong with a system that sends Rosaria Lopez to jail for six months for a crime I’m just sure she didn’t commit.”

  “What about a lie-detector test?” Emily asked.

  “There is no such thing as a lie detector,” Cole said firmly. “It’s a myth. They say a lie detector can be manipulated. That’s why the so-called evidence it produces is not admissible in court. No. Rosaria got snared in the system. It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose, but she’s going to miss her little sister’s birthday party. She’ll still be in jail, until October.”

  IV

  Emily had become a little leery about the social relationship that had developed between her and Cole and Dave and his new wife. She had bared her breasts in their family room that evening, in the presence of the painting, but now it seemed that Dave or Alexandra would suggest they do the same whenever they were together. For Alexandra it was a completely casual thing to do. Emily, who had after all posed many, many hours as a nude model, was not prudish about it but wasn’t entirely easy, either.

  Cole accepted the idea with restrained enthusiasm. Obviously he enjoyed the sight of Alexandra’s big boobs and saw no reason why Emily should not let Dave see hers.

  Alexandra hired the artist who did Emily’s nude to do one of her. It hung prominently in the living room of the apartment she and Dave still shared. It was very different. She stood facing out of the painting, her hands interlaced behind her head, her hips tilted slightly. She faced the viewer with an open, amused smile. The picture had been painted in the apartment. Alexandra’s behind touched the marble top of an antique Russian sideboard, and one of her ballet. posters hung on the wall behind her—all meticulously painted and clearly fixing the place where the painting had been done.