by Belva Plain
“I don’t know exactly. A lot. I’d have to figure. It’s complicated. I can’t do bookkeeping in my head.”
Martin frowned slightly. “But you must have some idea. Rathbone says one of the counts against you is that you played the stock market with your clients’ funds. Haven’t you any conception of your personal stock holdings?”
“I don’t know. Maybe thirteen million. It varies, fluctuates. The market’s been down the last couple of months. You know that.”
“I know that,” Martin said somewhat dryly. He nodded toward a Cézanne that was propped against a chair. “How much did that cost?”
Eddy followed Martin’s glance toward the luminous blue-green Provençal hills. “About six million,” he murmured, and wiped his forehead. “God Almighty,” he blurted then, “I saved fortunes for my clients all the same! Everybody rushed to me. Didn’t they love my four-to-one tax shelters? And now these same people will remember only my mistakes and won’t give me the time to correct them. All I need is some time! God Almighty, I haven’t committed murder, have I?” he demanded of the three who faced him.
“Well, if you’ve ruined people, that’s almost the same thing, isn’t it?” Connie said, sounding bitter. “Some of my good friends that I sent to you too.”
Again Martin stopped her. “There’s no point in that sort of talk,” he admonished.
Pam sat rigidly, looking toward the window where lights twinkled across the street. Holding tears back, she blinked, and Eddy knew that the truth had finally just reached her.
“I don’t understand,” he said, “what started this government crackdown in the first place. What happened all of a sudden?”
“Somebody wrote an anonymous letter,” Martin replied. “It was mailed from Vancouver to the SEC. Somebody who’d apparently lost money because of insider trading. I heard it from a man who has a brother with the SEC. Oh, it wasn’t about you at all. But it started the ball rolling.”
“Do you think I really have cause to be terribly worried?” Eddy asked.
Martin stood up. “I think I’m glad you have a top-notch attorney. Meanwhile, watch your health and use your head. Head over heart, you know.”
Eddy nodded ruefully. “My mother used to say that, but she never did it.”
“Well, you do it. Take a stiff Scotch and go to sleep.” When Martin gave Eddy his hand, the grip was comforting. “Call me if you need me. Come on, Connie.”
When they had left, Pam let a few tears fall, whispering into Eddy’s shoulder, “Life was a ball, wasn’t it? Such fun, being young and healthy and with no worries, just two hours ago. And now I feel a hundred years old.”
“Remember what Martin just said, head over heart?”
“I know.” Pam wiped her eyes. “I will. I just had to get it out of my system.”
“Of course you do.” And he understood that there must be within her, even as within himself, a turmoil of struggling contradictions, pity, fear, and anger. Of course.
“Life will be a ball again,” he said.
“What happens next? To you, I mean.”
“A trial. In about three months, Rathbone estimates.”
“And he really thinks you’ll win?”
“Lawyers have to think so, don’t they?”
Smile, Peg always told her children. Smile even when you don’t want to and it’ll actually make you feel like smiling.
“Life isn’t over,” he said again. “Hey, I’m only thirty-four years old, and there’s a long way to go. Let’s see that photo of the Kentucky place. It’s there on the desk. Looks like Gone with the Wind, doesn’t it? Columns and all. And that copper beech on the lawn must be a hundred fifty years old.” He hugged Pam closely. “Listen. I’m going to work out of this. And if I don’t right away, if—if anything happens, why, you just go down there and live in the sun and wait till I get there too.”
“He swindled people, didn’t he? Tell the truth,” Connie said on the way home. “I’m furious! How could he have been so stupid?”
“One word,” Martin said. “Greed. It came too easily when he started, and he got too greedy.”
“How will it end?”
Martin shrugged. “I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that it’ll end badly. From what I can see, he’s committed four or five felonies.”
“I’m angry at him, but I’m heartbroken too. Poor Eddy! He’s got to be terrified. And I’m awfully sorry for Pam. Whatever will she do?”
“He told me once that everything belongs to her. Six of those paintings alone will give her at least twenty million. So I wouldn’t worry.”
“All the same, I’m sorry for her. They’ll be ruined socially. Utterly ruined.”
The federal district court was a far more imposing chamber than the one in which Eddy’s first scene had been enacted. Everything seemed larger, the ceiling higher, the windows wider, the flag more prominent, and the bench more elevated. The judge had the stern expression of the cancer surgeon who is about to operate. The jury’s twelve chairs looked solemn in their rows, even when they were vacant. This was the place where severe punishments were meted out. Eddy’s facetious remark about the guillotine did not seem absurd here. He wondered whether his heart, which had ceased to hammer—after all, how could it have kept hammering for the last three months?—and had merely subsided now into an irregular beat, would ever beat normally again.
All the chairs behind him, in row after row, were filled. He wondered why, and who the strangers might be who filled them. Directly in back of him in the second row sat his wife and his sisters; Lara, during the whole five weeks that his trial lasted, kept going back and forth from Ohio, although, knowing what effort it must take, he wished she wouldn’t. Connie came in a sable coat, at least fifty thousand dollars’ worth of coat, he knew, and hoped the judge and jury would not think this expensive lady was his wife. Pam, most sensibly, had worn her camel hair coat. She had remembered, too, that he had once said he felt uncomfortable when strangers sat directly behind him, where they could stare at the back of his neck, and so she took care to sit behind him herself. Pam was a princess, no doubt of it, in her dignity and reassuring calm. Pam was royalty.
Sometimes there appeared a few other familiar faces, friends and clients who had once been friends and were now enemies. Once he saw the puzzled, mournful face of Mrs. Evans, who probably was not sure now what she should think of the man she had served and protected from every small annoyance. In a brief passage of words during the court’s recess, he gathered from her that Osborne and Company had been taken over by the government’s examiners, who occupied almost every desk. And he hoped, although he did not say so, that no one would put his feet on his private desk, which was a treasure brought from an ancient house in Yorkshire. At the same time he knew perfectly well that the thought was foolish.
Nevertheless, his mind wandered foolishly again, veering between the closest, most tense observance of events and a dreamy escape into the changing sky, that was sometimes gray with a threat of rain and sometimes a cloudless, vibrant blue. In such moments, although he was seated beside Rathbone and his young associates with their boxes of sober documents on the table, he was entirely removed from them, not even there in the room at all. Then suddenly a word or an altered nuance of voice would jar him back into the time and place. He would let his eyes rove across the jury box, over the twelve who had been in turn challenged, faced rejection, and finally chosen with so much care. He wondered what it had been about each that had caused either Rathbone or the prosecutor to want him. He himself couldn’t tell much of anything from their faces, although he tried to imagine what each might be apt to think about him. There was a very plain woman who could well be a social worker; there was a girlish-looking woman in her sixties who was probably rich; there was a black man in a suit that had come either from Brooks Brothers or J. Press; there was a seedy man with thin gray hair who reminded Eddy of his father. He had a flower in the buttonhole of his cheap suit. Pop had liked to wear one, too, go
odness only knew why. Probably he had wanted to look carefree or jaunty, but he had only looked pathetic instead. That man would either understand Eddy or he would despise him. And Eddy had to look away.…
The hours dragged and the voices droned. The judge made a lengthy explanation to the jury about the securities business, giving them almost an elementary course in finance. They will never understand, Eddy thought. The only things that will stand out in their collective memory are the most simple terms: false information, altered dates, tax evasion. If you decide that this is true. If you decide that this is not true, then you will not find him guilty. Tax evasion is what would stick in their minds, the dollars deducted from their little paychecks. This would strike home.
The prosecutor struck home in his own way. “… the life-style, ladies and gentlemen, made possible by these defalcations is something one reads about, and, as ordinary working citizens, can only wonder at. This man maintains throughout the year, merely for occasional use by himself or his friends—palatial suites in the finest hotels to which he can go at a moment’s notice and as the spirit moves him, in Florida, and in Arizona, in Cannes—that’s a beach resort on the French Riviera—and in Gstaad—that’s in Switzerland, a ski resort—and, oh, yes, I almost forgot, in Morocco too! Although what one does in Morocco, I certainly wouldn’t know. Perhaps one goes there just for a change of atmosphere when one is bored.” There were smiles from the jury at that.
“This man”—now he points at Eddy so that all twelve faces in the jury box turn their blank eyes toward him—“this man owns one of the finest art collections in this city, possibly in the entire United States. Just one of his automobiles, just one, mind you, cost over one hundred thousand dollars. You could probably fit all twelve of your homes and mine, too, into his East Side apartment and have room left over. And whose money bought all these marvels? I’ll tell you: Not his! No, it was for the most part the money he received from investors who trusted him, whom he strung along, using fake account statements, so faked and fraudulent that his own accountants refused to serve him any longer. And I’ll tell you who else’s money.” Here, the long finger swiveled back toward the jurors themselves. “Your money! You, the taxpayers of this country, whose taxes are paid out faithfully every fifteenth day of April. Oh, we’re all too familiar with that date! But what did he do on that date? Well, I’ll tell you. He did some fancywork, some juggling, deducting phony losses so that it turned out he didn’t owe anything to Uncle Sam at all this year. It was put off till next year. Always next year. Only, next year never came! Do you see? Year after year, no taxes, or very, very little, a joke when you consider what his profits were. Yes, you can well sigh, for you were cheated. I was. We all were.”
In back of Eddy a chair creaked, and there was a faint restless movement from his wife or from one of his sisters. And wondering what they were really thinking, he knew that because of their love for him, he would never be told what they were really thinking.
It was then Rathbone’s turn. “I am going to rely on your common sense,” he told the jury respectfully and persuasively. “These financial transactions are very complicated, but you are all intelligent people, and you will not be misled by name calling. The practice of deferring taxes is quite legal. It is standard, normal practice where losses have been incurred; neither my client nor his firm are the only ones who do this. It is by no means an evasion of taxes.” He directed one of his young men to hold up a large chart, boldly printed on cardboard. “Let me show you. It will be quite clear.…”
But it will not be quite clear, Eddy thought, feeling his frail hopes ebb. Or rather, it will be clear in the wrong way. Rathbone is fighting a losing battle. Even if he is right about the tax shelters, what about all the other counts? No, it’s no use. The girlish, sixtyish lady in the jury box was having a struggle to keep awake. The black man in the Brooks Brothers suit had a sardonic expression; he understands all too well, Eddy thought. Rathbone will get nowhere with him.
And so it went on and on, day after day. Eddy, well primed and well rehearsed, went on the stand and was carefully led by Rathbone. He performed well. On cross-examination he kept his calm demeanor, but he knew that he was floundering, and he was forced to answer some questions that condemned him.
“And did you on this date remove two hundred and sixty thousand dollars from the account of Mr. Marple and place it in your own?”
“Yes, but I replaced it a week later.”
“I asked whether you removed it. Answer yes or no.”
“Yes.”
Why is all this taking so long? Get it over with! Eddy thought. These interminable hours were a torture, facing those twelve pairs of eyes and sometimes even meeting a passing glance from the judge, the sphinx in the black robes. And every day when it was over came the worst of all when, as he descended the courthouse steps, the reporters waited, and the photographers leapt to follow him, prancing like wild children playing horse, sticking the ugly snouts of their cameras into his face, so that if he had dared, he would have smashed their cameras and them too.
“Why don’t you get an honest job?” he wanted to shout. “Vultures! Buzzards! Circling the ground where the animal lies dying. You can’t wait to tear him apart, can you?”
When the end came in the fifth week, the verdict was guilty. Eddy, standing erect, did not look at the foreman who delivered the verdict, but met instead the bleary, weary eyes of the little man who reminded him of his father, and was sure he saw pity there; this was a man who knew what it was to be humbled and humiliated, who knew what it was to lose. And he slumped down, shaken, and reached up to grasp Pam’s hand that rested on his shoulder.
Rathbone had approached the bench to speak. “I would like to ask, Your Honor, that in sentencing you consider that my client has been an exemplary citizen. He is known for his many philanthropies. If Your Honor please, I would like to say that it would serve no purpose for him to be imprisoned. A substantial amount of time to whatever worthy cause might best profit by his intelligence and energy, such as a drug rehabilitation program or service in a city hospital, would be far more meaningful in every way. I hope very earnestly that Your Honor will consider such an alternative.”
The austere face revealed nothing. “I hear you, Mr. Rathbone. Bail will be continued and sentencing will be”—here the pages of a calendar were turned—“in six weeks. You will be notified.”
The same courtroom, even in the absence of the jury, looked as formidable as it had six weeks earlier. Eddy rose when instructed to and stood with Rathbone beside him to hear the sentence.
The words were meted out with no inflection and no emotion. “I suppose he can’t let it show, but surely he must feel something,” Eddy thought as the words fell into a thick silence.
“You have been found guilty on eight separate counts of conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service … your greed has been inordinate and without conscience … however, I do take into some account the number of letters I have received from character witnesses who testify to your charitable acts … there have been letters from simple citizens describing your personal generosity.”
The janitor, Eddy remembered. He’d paid his wife’s hospital bill. And Arthur Pyle. He’d saved his house from foreclosure.
“… I take note of your counsel’s request that you be permitted to render community service in lieu of imprisonment. But there has to be some deterrence of crimes like yours, which are occurring far too frequently in the investment community. Therefore, I sentence you to four years’ imprisonment on each of the eight charges, the sentences to run concurrently. At the expiration of your sentence you will perform twelve hours of community service every week for one year, terms to be arranged. You will then have five years of probation. Furthermore, you will pay a fine of one million dollars in addition to back taxes. And you are forbidden ever to engage in the securities business as long as you live. Have you anything you wish to say, Mr. Osborne?”
“Nothing, Your Honor.”
What was there to say?
“Court is dismissed,” said His Honor.
There was a scrape and shuffle of chairs and feet. Pam kissed him. Lara and Connie were stricken, as if they were seeing a bloody accident on a highway.
Rathbone asked softly, “Are you okay?”
Eddy nodded. “Okay.”
“We’ll appeal, of course.”
“And if we lose?”
“I don’t believe in thinking in those terms, you know that.”
“But if we do,” persisted Eddy.
“You’ll be out in two years. You know, you could have gotten a lot worse.”
“You’re saying I got off easy?”
Rathbone shrugged.
“I didn’t say that, Eddy. I only meant that it could be worse.”
The two men, followed by the three women, moved downstairs and out onto the sidewalk.
“If I do get sent up,” Eddy questioned in a low voice, “where will I go?”
“Minimum security. I’ll ask for Allenwood—it’s in Pennsylvania—and I’ll probably get it. It’s the least harsh. Not harsh at all,” Rathbone added quickly.
“How long before the appeal will be heard?”
“It’s hard to say, but maybe a year.”
And Eddy blurted, “What the hell will I do with myself for a year, not knowing what comes next?”
Rathbone’s reply was rueful. “There’ll be no lack of activity: the government’s suit for back taxes and penalties; suits by individuals to recover their losses; your own bankruptcy. The court will appoint a receiver for your assets, and I’ve already promised that you won’t remove any of your possessions from the apartment. Is that understood?”
“Understood.”
“Good.” Rathbone gave him a slap on the back. “You’ll get through this thing, Eddy. You’re a good man, and you can’t keep a good man down.”
Platitudes, Eddy thought, and thanked him nevertheless.
They rode uptown in Connie’s limousine. Eddy brought up the question that was in all their minds.
