The Jezebel Remedy

by Martin Clark

  “Damn,” Joe said. “Ugly business.”

  “Where exactly was she when you found her?” Lisa asked.

  “Well,” Perry replied, “most of her, what we recovered, was at the far end over there.” He pointed.

  “Sad,” Joe mumbled.

  “Price you pay,” Hatcher chirped.

  Joe locked on to him. “Shut the fuck up. You’ve made your point, Agent Hatcher.”

  “Show some respect,” Perry quickly added. “No reason you can’t be professional.”

  “Hey, one less scourge making poison is the way I see it.” Hatcher smirked, not the least chastised. “World’s better off. You have your opinion, I’m entitled to mine. So, Mr. Stone, you can shut the fuck up. You make your dollars helpin’ criminals, I make mine puttin’ them in jail.”

  Lisa had seen her husband walk into a barn stall and hold his own with a headstrong mare, and she’d seen him ejected from a Myrtle Beach bar for thrashing a letch who put his hands on her after twice being warned off. Joe possessed a big man’s casual nature, was difficult to provoke and wasn’t a tongue wagger, his size and build all the threat he needed in most instances, but once he was riled it came on him potent and feverish, and when he started to remove his coat and took a step toward Hatcher, Lisa realized it was serious, his dander genuine, and she jerked his arm, told him to knock it off, and Clay Hatcher’s quick retreat toward the sheriff showed he realized there was no bluff in Joe’s mood.

  “Why’re you so attached to the old shrew?” Lisa asked Joe as they were driving back to the office. “I’ve never understood it.”

  “Nothing more than I’ve told you before,” Joe said. “She was a character, and the very first client to ever walk through my door. And there’s a lot to be said for taking in stray animals, and hell, occasionally the shit she complained about deserved it. The world needs its agitators. Needs a few wasps and yellow jackets to keep things from going stale. As a bonus, you got the unvarnished truth from her—Lettie VanSandt was, if nothing else, a perfectly honest woman.”

  Lisa smiled. “Yeah, in the tradition of Savonarola or the Oracle at Delphi. Or the Wicked Witch. Probably most of those dogs and cats can fly.”

  Margaret Jane Carter was called Pug as a child, a curious nickname that didn’t suit either her appearance or her personality. Growing up in Henry County, she was a pretty enough girl, maybe even on the outskirts of beautiful, and an excellent student, even if she wasn’t the absolute very brightest among her classmates. Her mom pulled second shift at the textile mill, and her dad drove a route truck for the Lance company, stocked Nabs and peanuts in vending machines and emptied trays of silver pocket change into a cloth bank bag, started his snack deliveries at dawn and did some nighttime mechanicing on the side, mostly brake and transmission repairs. Margaret graduated from Bassett High School and received a substantial scholarship to Ferrum College, where she earned magna cum laude grades, changed her hair color from brown to a modest blond and shed the name Pug for good, becoming Meg.

  During her sophomore year at Ferrum, she met a Virginia Tech student named Alton Warner Gold IV, a handsome frat boy from a rich Delaware family, and they married in 1995, only a few months after they both finished college. The wedding was a six-figure spectacle, but the Golds were snotty to Meg’s parents, snickering about her daddy’s accent and her momma’s Sunday-best church clothes. Meg and Alton settled in Arlington, Virginia, because she’d accepted a job at a health insurance company and he didn’t care where they lived; geography was no restriction for a layabout’s universal skills.

  Three years later, Alton had spent all the money his parents and grandparents were willing to waste on him, he’d jacked up credit cards and bogged down equity lines, and he wouldn’t work, hell no he wouldn’t, though he did declare himself, at various times, a day trader, a financial adviser, a consultant, an entrepreneur, a freelance journalist, a life coach and a corporate troubleshooter. He printed impressive business cards and squandered money on office space. He leeched off Meg’s paychecks and stole cash from the zippered slot inside her purse. His true gift was a passion for top-shelf highballs and Las Vegas, Tunica, Atlantic City and any cruise ship, backroom or Indian casino that offered green felt and a pair of dice. He stayed gone, rambling and carousing. He wrecked their car. He was arrested for shoplifting hair gel from a mall department store. He cheated on Meg. He charged a diner waitress’s West Virginia abortion to their MasterCard and busted the account’s credit limit, tacking on an extra thirty-five dollars and a collection call from the bank to the already dreadful insult.

  Meg quickly moved into her own apartment and did all she could to salvage her finances and dump her no-count spouse. Still, untangling herself from a crybaby cad like Alton Gold was complicated. He’d surface at odd hours and pound on her door, sometimes penitent, sometimes enraged, occasionally promising rehab and religion but most often threatening to cut her throat or punch a screwdriver through her skull. She wouldn’t even peep out at him, so he’d stand in the hall arguing with dead bolts and double locks until security arrived to remove him. Between disappearances with new druggie girlfriends and craps junkets financed by rubber checks, he’d ambush her in the parking garage at her job and insist—snarling, fussing, pleading—she owed him another chance, and he’d impulsively send flowers and, better still, store-bought cards with ponderous snatches from The Prophet printed across the front in fancy script. “Love, Alton,” he’d usually scribble in red ink, a shaky, deformed heart drawn underneath.

  She visited a lawyer, but most of her options were Byzantine and costly, and injunctions and protective orders meant time away from work, more lost wages and more contact with her dumb-ass husband, whose family, no matter how dismal his behavior, considered it a matter of status and clan pride to ensure he was utterly lawyered-up in any legal proceeding, even though they well understood he was a bum and a spendthrift. And all those court orders and official documents with seals and certifications were just sound and fury, little paper tigers that wouldn’t mean diddly-squat to Alton Gold and would probably serve as a goad and a dare rather than any kind of effective restraint.

  The worst of it came in March 2000, after she’d finally managed to pay an attorney for a divorce filing and the papers had been served on her husband. She arrived home to discover that Alton—drunk or high or both—had wormed inside her apartment and was waiting for her, and he rushed directly at her, grabbed her and rammed her hard against the wall, and her arm tangled in her purse strap and she lost her balance and twisted her ankle as she fell, and he was cursing and shouting and spit glommed on to every word coming out of his mouth. She smelled alcohol, stale cologne and a spike of rancid breath. He tore her blouse and jammed a knee into her thigh, making a red impression that turned blue, black and yellow in the days that followed. She tried to roll and twist and squirm away, and she pushed against his chest with both elbows, and she screamed, screamed again, and this only made him more combative. When he finally fought her pants down and then her panties, he couldn’t have sex, humped her limp-dicked and slithered and ground and clawed her shoulders and scratched her neck, bit her nipple, drew blood. He was furious, enraged, and he slapped her and blubbered and caterwauled and said more than once, “Look what you’ve done to me, you bitch.”

  He wrestled her into the bedroom and crashed down on top of her. Muttering and groping her, he soon passed out, his dead, worthless weight smothering her, and when he awakened, his wife, bruised and with a cracked rib and two broken fingers, wearing a pair of sweatpants, barefoot, still in her ripped blouse, was standing above him resting a .38 caliber Taurus revolver against his lips. The gun was a gift from her daddy. Big-city protection.

  “Alton,” she said, calm as could be, “I’m done with this.”

  He was groggy and sluggish. He closed his eyes. She inserted the short barrel of the gun into his mouth, felt the steel bump against his front teeth. He blinked, grunted, began to focus.

  “Here’s ho
w this is going to work,” she said in the same deliberate voice. “We both know I’m not going to kill you, though you deserve it, and I could pull it off pretty easy. The cops would take a look at me, talk to whoever you bribed to let you in and discover you’re full of dope and liquor. It’d be self-defense.”

  “Whoaammm, uh, lisnnn.” The sounds stuck mostly in his throat, clogged there. “Lissn.”

  “No. You listen.” She glared at him. He appeared to be rejoining her, his expression starting to animate. “First off, you’re going to apologize. Say you’re sorry.” She raised the gun slightly.

  “Am. I am.”

  “And next you are going to humiliate yourself, just like you’ve humiliated me.”

  He narrowed his eyes, unsure. His lips twitched.

  “You and your shriveled little penis are goin’ to say, ‘I’m a piece of shit and a failure as a man.’ ”

  He stared up at her. She noticed he was breathing through his mouth.

  “Right now.”

  “Ha. Uh-uh. No.”

  “I’ll ask you once more.”

  “You won’t do anything.” His hair was oily, messy, every which direction. One thin black strand stuck against his forehead and reached to his eyebrow, as if a fissure had begun, a dark split. He still had on socks and a shirt, which was mostly unfastened. She noticed he was tan to the middle of his groin, then pallid, then tan again, the different hues born of years spent lounging around in various tanning salons, a vanity he never neglected and bought with fraud and slick lies.

  “Last chance.”

  He flickered a grin, smug and spiteful, then lurched toward her, and in a smooth, quicksilver sweep she swung the gun sideways, set it at an angle against the thick of his biceps and pulled the trigger, bang, and she felt relief and satisfaction and a wicked, tit-for-tat joy, and it was a chore to stop at the single shot. Alton screamed and clutched his arm and blood started to color the bed, and it seemed to her the harsh explosion from the .38 stayed with them in the room for several seconds, loud, lingering, echoing, commanding.

  “Alton, I’ll shoot you again.”

  He was whimpering and cursing, saliva dribbling from the corner of his mouth.

  “Come on, Alton: ‘I’m a piece of shit and a failure as a man.’ Easy to say. And oh so true.”

  “I hate you, you awful whore,” he shouted, but for the first time ever the words were puny and inert, their menace waning.

  “The sooner you finish, the sooner I can call for help. For all I know, you might bleed to death.”

  “I swear to god, you’ll pay for this,” he yelled. He partially sat up, still holding his arm. Blood leaked from between his fingers. Crimson streaks and splatters stained a white pillowcase.

  “I’m sure I will, Alton. I’ve paid for everything else.” She was standing, her knees at the edge of the mattress. She aimed at his leg, gripping the gun with both hands, dramatically closing an eye as she peered through the sight.

  “I’m a piece of shit,” he recited. “And a failure as a man.”

  “Say it again. Slower. Listen to yourself. Let it sink in.”

  He repeated the words, and she called 911, told them she’d been attacked and was injured and had been forced to shoot her husband. “Please help me,” she sobbed to the operator, the hurt in her voice completely genuine and heartfelt, the catharsis so deep that no cop or attorney or juror could ever doubt her circumstances.

  Alton located his pants in the den. Holding them as best he could with a bullet hole bored into his flesh, he hopped and wiggled them on but wasn’t able to hook the clasp at his waist, and with the cuffs still below his heels and his shoes left behind, he scrambled through the door, realizing there wasn’t much hope of explaining away his battered, beaten wife, especially when he was full of booze and had brazenly lied to the building’s new manager to get inside Meg’s apartment. She told the police he’d tried to rape her and, somehow, thank the Lord above, she’d been able to grab her pistol from the nightstand drawer and wound him in the arm. As simple and horrific as that. His partial handprint was visible on her cheek when the cops interviewed her, a lowlife’s pink abuse.

  Despite the fervent urgings of well-intentioned volunteers and the warnings from a slew of professional advocates with catchy acronyms—S.T.O.P., CAFV, WEAVE, NOW—on their business cards, Meg declined to cooperate with her husband’s prosecution. “I have my reasons,” she informed an assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Alexandria.

  The attorney, an office veteran named Andy Minchew, removed his glasses and twirled them a time or two and didn’t show any emotion. “Your decision,” he said. “We can still go to trial, you understand. We can subpoena you and call you as a witness. Put you under oath and make you testify. I’d do that if I thought it was the wisest choice. If I thought it was in your interest.”

  Meg scooted her chair forward. The gray, public-servant carpet snagged one of the legs, so she ended up closer to the desk but slightly crooked. “Alton Gold,” she said firmly, “is a bastard who has beat me and threatened me and stolen my money. He’s a drunk. A womanizer. He used our credit card to pay for another woman’s abortion. Ruined years of my life. He views legal proceedings, this whole world of yours, Mr. Minchew, as a chance to manipulate me. To prolong these awful things. To have me badgered by his high-priced lawyers. In a strange way, he’d probably enjoy court. Might even make him—how to say it?—more determined. He’s not afraid of lawyers and judges—he has nothing to lose.” She leaned in Minchew’s direction. She put her elbows on his desk. She laced her fingers, touched her chin with her thumbs. “But right now, sir, he’s afraid of me.” She bent her neck enough to talk around her hands. “I don’t want that to change. And I don’t really want to spend a lot of time on the details of, you know, how he was shot.” She untangled her hands but kept leaning toward Minchew. She never quit looking at him, never broke off.

  Minchew returned his glasses to the bridge of his nose and closed a file on his desk. “Good for you, ma’am. I see your point. Good for you. Well handled. Best of luck to you.”

  She didn’t say anything else, nor did he. He sent her a wink when she hesitated at his door to thank him, and she rode an elevator to the ground floor and walked the full length of a bright hallway, through the chatter and commerce and ordinary bustle of the courthouse building, her fingers splinted but the harsh ache in her ribs healing, breaths coming easier.

  Two weeks later, Meg returned home to Henry County, and that’s where she met Lisa Stone for the first time, went to see her about completing the divorce and recovering some of her money. “The truth is,” Meg confessed after they’d discussed her horrendous marriage, “I can’t pay you, and I don’t want to ask my parents for help. But when I’m on my feet, I’ll see that you get every penny you’re owed. I promise you.” Meg said it without tears and without begging. She’d made an appointment and sat there—not even thirty years old—dressed in the clothes she used to wear to her job.

  Lisa nodded, smiled. She stood and reached across the desk to shake hands. “Fair enough. Deal. No worries. I believe you.”

  Immediately, she called Alton’s highfalutin, prick attorney in Washington, and his secretary left her stranded on hold listening to looping Brahms and finally reported that Mr. Broaddus was “too engaged” to accept her call but would try to find a moment for her later. Lisa waited three days, heard nothing, then filed a dense, explicit, firebomb lawsuit against Alton and his parents for assault and battery, breach of contract and intentional infliction of emotional harm. She filed it in Alexandria but hired a seedy Delaware process server to deliver the papers during Mr. and Mrs. Gold’s cocktail hour at their country club. Broaddus called within hours of the suit hitting, and she ignored him, and he and his minions flooded her with motions and interrogatories and threats and bluster and forty-page faxes, and she enlisted Joe and they stayed late at their office and kept the coffeepot busy and drafted reams of their own bullshit, didn’t flinch or buckl
e, and soon the case filled two entire boxes in the clerk’s office.

  When she finally decided to talk with Broaddus, he was full of piss and vinegar and began by warning her that not only would she and her client lose their case but also he’d see to it that she’d forfeit her law license.

  She listened but didn’t respond. Broaddus raged and bullied, and she kept quiet until there was an empty, vacuous silence on the line. In several minutes, she’d uttered a total of five words: “Hello, this is Lisa Stone.”

  “Are you still there?” Broaddus was forced to ask.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand, Mrs. Stone, that filing a frivolous lawsuit against Mr. and Mrs. Gold is going to land you in a very undesirable place? I promise you the considerable weight of my firm will be dedicated to this case. You need to realize this isn’t some hick dispute about cows and chickens that we’ll pitty-pat around in general district court on Wednesday afternoon. If you persist in this, I’ll pulverize both you and your client. You damn well know you have no valid claim against Alton’s parents.”

  “Well, Oscar,” she said, using Broaddus’s familiar name, “we pitty-pat around the livestock cases on Tuesdays, not Wednesdays. Item next: I was law review at Virginia; you were evidently a middling student at a middling school. And lastly, the case is sound. Alton’s selfishly enabling parents promised my client they’d enroll their son in rehab if she would stay with him and not embarrass the family. They would ensure he received help. Twice they made that commitment. His mother put it in a letter to my client. Wrote it on expensive lavender stationery. Instead, they did nothing. Nothing, Oscar, not a damn thing. Didn’t even hand their shiftless boy a brochure or a hotline number. Nope—they gave him cash when they knew he would use it to buy drugs and alcohol and further abuse his wife. That’s a contract, Oscar. Offer, acceptance, consideration. Next we have a breach by Mr. and Mrs. Gold. His trying to rape her and ruining her credit, we call those damages, Oscar. The damages come from their failing to honor their agreement.”