Innocent Spouse

by Carol Ross Joynt

“What do you mean, where’s the money?” The needle on my fight-or-flight gauge was now moving sharply toward fight.

  “There must be money somewhere,” he said. “He had to do something with the money. Is it in offshore accounts?”

  Offshore accounts? These people were his lawyers, for God’s sake! Wouldn’t they have known if there were offshore accounts? Wasn’t that their job? Obviously they didn’t know Howard.

  “Howard didn’t hide money,” I said. “He spent it. He liked to spread it around. He didn’t want his money stashed on an island somewhere. He wanted it close, and available.” The room was suddenly quiet.

  I finally worked up the courage to ask the question I wanted most not to think about: “What happens if I can’t pay?”

  That certainly got everyone’s attention. It was clear they’d never considered that possibility. I looked at them. They looked at one another and then back at me. I could hear the hum of the ventilating system. Martin Gray tapped his pen on the table. Someone cleared his throat. Finally, Julie, the only woman there from the firm, broke the silence. “Well, you could go for ‘innocent spouse.’ ”

  “What’s ‘innocent spouse’?” I asked.

  “It’s a code in the tax law that’s designed for cases where a spouse who has committed, say, fraud, dies, but the surviving spouse doesn’t know anything about the fraud. The surviving spouse can be declared innocent. When that status is awarded, the surviving spouse is absolved of responsibility for the debt.”

  That’s it! Thank God. That’s the solution! Before I could open my mouth, Julie added, “But you wouldn’t qualify.”

  “What? Why not? I am innocent.”

  “Because …” She paused, gathered her breath, then poured it out in a rush: “You had to know. How could you not know? Look at you!”

  Look at me? Look at me? I wrapped my arms around myself. I could feel the cloth of my expensive black suit but I felt naked and exposed. I felt like I was a criminal in the dock, charged with a crime I knew nothing about.

  “But I didn’t know,” I said. “The only thing Howard told me was he was being audited and that the lawyers told him not to talk to me about it. So he didn’t. You were his lawyers. You must have told him that.”

  They nodded but offered nothing else. I felt that in their eyes I was as guilty as my husband. Mr. Namarato said they would have better information in a couple of weeks, when we would reconvene. In the meantime I should start to get my house in order.

  I walked out of the office building back onto the same street and into the same daylight that was there when I arrived, but everything was different. The numbing fog of widow’s grief that had been present when I got up and dressed that morning was gone, replaced by blunt fear. I was hollow inside except for dread. My hands shook. Before starting the car I had to take a few deep breaths to calm down, to focus. For the first time in my life I felt trapped. And Howard, the very person I always went to, who would listen and understand and give me good advice and protect me, he was gone, too, leaving me to fight his tax fraud case. He left me in a minefield of his making. The irony that the very man responsible for this mess was the same man I yearned to run to didn’t hit me then, but it did soon enough.

  The IRS agent on the case was a woman named Deborah Martin. “She’s a junior agent,” Mr. Namarato explained. “That’s why she’s so eager to get a big dollar amount. This is huge for her.”

  Deborah Martin submitted her report on April 16, 1997, the day I returned to the lawyers’ office. I knew the damage done by my earlier appearance—the widow in the Chanel suit—couldn’t be undone and only emphasized the image of me as a coconspirator in a tax fraud, the client who “had to know.” This time I was the one who dressed casually.

  Deborah Martin, I was surprised to discover, was not present. When I asked about meeting her, Cono Namarato’s response was swift. “No. We’ll keep you away from her. No contact. That’s what we’re here for.”

  It was becoming clear that my lawyers viewed me as precisely the person Deborah Martin described in the opening of her report. I was a woman living a “lavish” and “luxe” lifestyle. Almost all the elements of my life she took to be incriminating. When she cited her damning evidence, it didn’t matter that I didn’t know we couldn’t afford the life we lived. I drove a Range Rover, for instance. Yes, I drove it. Still did. In fact, it was parked outside. I also had a weekday live-in babysitter and a weekend babysitter who doubled as a housekeeper. I had a demanding job, for God’s sake! And when we had a big dinner party I hired a cook who worked for a catering company. I thought we could afford it. It made sense to me.

  And so it went. Deborah Martin’s report read like the tumescent tabloid profile of a frivolous, spendthrift airhead. That was not me. Everything she wrote was technically true, although highly embellished. It documented every dime Howard had spent in the past five years. All his credit card charges, all the checks, money he’d deposited, all his investments. She made our very comfortable but comparatively low-wattage life sound like high-rolling pornography costarring me and my son. According to Martin’s report, when I wasn’t off on a luxurious holiday, aboard a private jet or yacht, I sunbathed by the pool at my “estate” on the Chesapeake Bay while relying on my domestic staff to attend to my needs. That wasn’t how I saw my life but it was how a young IRS agent looking to make her first big haul chose to describe it. I thought we were living within our means. I didn’t pay the bills. I didn’t know that Howard couldn’t pay for the life we were living. My protests either didn’t register with my lawyers or simply sounded lame to them. They painted me with the same brush they’d used for coloring the guilty party, Howard.

  Deborah Martin’s report explained how Howard ran his expenses through Nathans and thus operated the business at a loss. Essentially the only annual income reported was mine, which created a discrepancy of at least several hundred thousand dollars. While Howard withheld about two hundred thousand dollars in federal taxes from his employees’ paychecks, he didn’t send that money to the government. He kept it for himself, for Nathans, and for some favored employees. There was a section of the report that listed which employees got money “off the books,” with their names and the amounts documented because Howard had given them the money in checks, pink checks.

  As I continued reading, each page of the report felt heavier than the last. When I got to the part where it detailed that my husband wrote off the live-in babysitter’s wages as “trash collection” and some of my Christmas presents as “uniforms,” I stopped reading. I had reached my threshold of humiliation, embarrassment, shame, and guilt—and before an audience, too. Deborah Martin caught a man who had broken the law, who’d committed tax fraud against the U.S. government. It was as simple as that. The crook was my husband. It didn’t matter that he was ashes; the investigation stood on its merits and she had a case. The government wanted its money and since dead people don’t write checks, I would be the one to pay. I was the defendant.

  Mr. Namarato slid a single sheet of paper across the polished table. It broke down what was owed. The debt to the feds came to almost $2.5 million, and the meter on interest and penalties was still running. The total was a breath shy of $3 million, an amount of money that was incomprehensible to me. Amounts owed to the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland hadn’t yet been calculated. I stared at the numbers, speechless, as the lawyers and accountant talked about my options. My inner voice begged: Don’t cry, don’t cry, not here, please don’t cry, not here, don’t cry, don’t cry.

  “Well, she still has the issue of the promissory note.”

  “We’re going to have to comb through that, but I don’t think it will fly.”

  “The withholding is the big issue, and that’s where most of the debt is.”

  “But we can try to flip that one issue with another.…”

  “No, it won’t work.”

  “I think we go back to Deborah and ask for some backup on a few of these numbers.”
r />   “At least Carol has her job at CNN. That looks good.”

  “You can’t take this into a courtroom. It’s a slam dunk against her.”

  They debated while I sat there, invisible. No one asked my opinion. As the shock of the numbers wore off and I began to tune into the words of the lawyers, something inside me clicked, some little gear shifted from frozen to boiling.

  “Wait!” I fumed. “Stop! Listen to me.” All eyes shifted in my direction. “I don’t understand any of this.” I gestured at the documents on the table, the pages of evidence, and the numbers that toted up the debt. “And I don’t understand half of what you’re saying.”

  They were silent.

  I looked from one lawyer to the next. “Doesn’t anybody understand that I didn’t do this? They’ve got the wrong person. The person who did this is dead! This is all news to me. I found out only two weeks ago that we even have mortgages! There wasn’t anything about our lives that struck me as inappropriate. Yes, we lived well, but it wasn’t outrageous, it wasn’t ridiculous, it wasn’t gross and over the top. My husband had a successful business. He had an inheritance. It all made sense to me. There were no bags of money lying around the house, piles of cash stacked in the closets. There weren’t trips to Vegas. There weren’t shady characters. I’m to be condemned because I had live-in help for my son? I work! I’m allowed to have a babysitter. I can pay her. Is that criminal?”

  I continued to fight back the tears. The last thing I wanted was to let these people see me crumble.

  “I don’t know what Howard did,” I said, calmer now. “I hope that whatever it was, he didn’t do it on purpose, that it was a mistake. But I can’t ask him. He’s not here. But I do know this: I didn’t do it and my son didn’t do it. I’m innocent!”

  There was silence. Finally, Mr. Namarato spoke up. “But you signed the tax returns.”

  “I know, but they were filled out by an accountant.” I looked at the accountant, who looked away. “Why wouldn’t I sign them?” I asked. “I assumed they were properly put together. I didn’t feel I needed to pore over them.”

  Martin Gray shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “I was working with the numbers Howard provided me,” he said.

  “So was I!”

  “We’ve got a long way to go,” Mr. Namarato said, obviously trying to calm me down.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “We’ll talk to Deborah Martin,” Julie said. “They can put liens on your accounts. We’ll try to stop that. You should find out how much you can come up with. What if you sell your house? What will you get for that? And the art? You have a lot of antiques, right? What would that add up to?”

  “My house? Just sell it?”

  “That’s one way of paying this off,” someone added.

  “I want to keep my house.” It was our safe harbor. It was my little boy’s home.

  “What about the life insurance?” one of the lawyers asked.

  “There is no life insurance,” I said.

  “What? How can that be?”

  “Howard didn’t believe in life insurance,” I said. “Look, I only got him to sign a will a year ago. He didn’t want to do it because he thought it would jinx him, that he would die.…” I smiled weakly at the irony. “It looks like he was right.”

  That was that. The meeting ended with a refrain of “We’ll make some calls and get back to you. We’ll meet again next week.”

  Mr. Namarato casually wrapped his arm around my shoulder and walked me to the elevator. “Now, Carol,” he said, “don’t leave here depressed.”

  Was he mad? All my worst fears had come true. Spencer and I were going to lose everything. Our lives would be ruined. I was beyond depressed.

  That night I had a fitful sleep, but that I slept at all was probably the bigger surprise. What kept me awake was not simply the perplexing bad deeds my beloved husband had done, but the sheer magnitude of what had landed on us. There was my frightening ignorance of this dangerous new world of cash flows and taxes, criminal fraud and lawyers. I had to get sophisticated fast. Grief, I knew, would have to wait. Tears could come later. First, I had to save us.

  TWO

  Chapter 6

  HIS FULL NAME was John Howard Joynt III. He was many things I was not: a child of money and privilege, casual about work but serious about living well. If there was anything we had in common it was that we were both shy. It wasn’t obvious. After all, his game was the restaurant business and I worked in broadcasting, neither of them known as a refuge for the timid. But for both of us work provided protection. Howard’s poise and the alcohol-infused bonhomie of his bar masked his shyness. Hard-charging television journalism masked mine. I was a different person at work. I don’t think anyone would have described that person as shy. When we first met I was dazzled by Howard’s star quality but fell in love with the sensitive man I saw within. I know, that’s what every woman says. That doesn’t make it a lie. Despite everything I learned about Howard after his death and my fury at what he had done to us and the frightening mess he had left me to clean up, when Howard and I were in each other’s company I was most myself and he had seemed most himself. I felt we were transparent to each other. There were the little fibs that happen in any relationship, but never lies. I didn’t lie to him and I didn’t believe he lied to me, though after the lawyers, I knew there was one huge and hugely important exception: where the money came from to support the way we lived. The answer was simple and disturbing: Much of it wasn’t ours.

  I thought I had good instincts, but my radar didn’t extend far beyond the heart. I knew Howard loved me—but transparent? No. I may have been transparent to him, but clearly there was a part of Howard, the larcenous part, that he kept opaque. Looking back now I realize that his deception was in plain sight. He had a good BS detector for a reason. My eyes were dazzled by Howard’s brightness, blinding me to the whole man.

  The day my beautiful Romanian mother met Howard, he drove up in a white Jaguar XKE convertible like a character out of The Great Gatsby, wearing white pleated flannels and a blue and white striped shirt, with a tennis sweater tied casually around his shoulders, a Kent hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in his hand. Howard was a master of the grand gesture, and my mother ate it up. She had an instant crush.

  “Let’s have some champagne, Olga,” Howard said, the bottle still in his hand—he cocked his head in my direction—“and ignore her.”

  My parents lived in Warrenton, Virginia, a small country town an hour outside Washington where my father, Richard Ross, after time in the military and a stint as a dean at George Washington University, ran the Airlie Foundation, a think tank used by the federal government, Washington-based corporations, and academia. The job came with a lovely yellow stucco four-bedroom house, a pool, a pond, gardens, and bucolic views. From almost the moment we met, Howard and I would spend weekends there with my family. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed, only to wake in the wee hours to find Howard and my mother still at the kitchen table, drinking, smoking, debating politics, discussing history, and gossiping about movie stars. My mother had moved to Hollywood as a girl; her role models were movie stars.

  Before the move to rural Virginia, the Ross family’s usually happy suburban home life had become increasingly emotionally chaotic. My parents fought a lot over money—the lack of it—and over my older sister, who had had too many run-ins with the law because of drugs and other misbehavior. The chaos was the main reason I moved out at age eighteen. But with the job at Airlie, which was a virtual fresh start, my parents and younger brothers regained a sense of calm, and the spirit of fun and affection prevailed. When I was growing up, my father, a native of Minnesota, was a Barry Goldwater Republican, an Episcopalian, and traditional to the core; my mother, the immigrant, was a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, raised a strict Catholic but with the soul of a gypsy. She had few boundaries and didn’t care about possessions except, perhaps, animals. I think s
he was happiest when Dad had new assignments and we camped in hotels or some kind of temporary housing. She taught us how to travel with very little baggage.

  She was wedded to the notion of ghosts and we routinely had to visit houses thought to be haunted. We were raised on goulash and chicken paprikash. Her philosophy of raising my sister, brothers, and me was “Water you and you will grow.”

  My parents met on a Friday in Los Angeles, when my father, an Army Air Force pilot who dropped paratroopers over Normandy on D-day, had exactly one week’s leave in the United States. They married at the end of that week. In the early years of their marriage, and while my brothers, sister, and I were little, my dad continued his air force career, ending up a full-bird colonel. We lived part of the time in the United States and part of the time in Europe, chiefly Wiesbaden, Germany, where he worked on the postwar cleanup. Our assigned housing in a nineteenth-century hotel had been Hermann Göring’s personal quarters when he was in Wiesbaden. The rooms went on forever, with high ceilings, gilded moldings, and beautiful crystal chandeliers. I loved to twirl on the parquet floors in the ballroom. Still, Mother made our spaghetti dinners on a hot plate. Hotels felt like home. We would bounce on the beds, go to the lounge and get fruit drinks with paper parasols, and generally charm or terrorize the staff. We traveled to Berlin a lot, which was among the more exciting aspects of living abroad. It was before the Wall went up, and my father would take us by car to tour reconstructed sections of East Berlin. It seemed like a movie set—a row of restored buildings and behind them acres of rubble.

  Back in the States we moved a lot—Ohio, Maryland, Virginia—and that was before I turned fourteen. Furniture came and went, nothing stayed the same. We were always in debt, about to fly off the rails. Money management was not a particularly important part of my parents’ style. It was the postwar boom. Let the good times roll. Borrowing money was just what you did. I was too young to know what debt was, but I knew it followed us wherever we went. The money ups and downs, the travel, and the fluid living arrangements combined to make me, as a teenager, an expert at arriving in new neighborhoods and schools and quickly finding friends. Even when we moved to a home of our own near Mount Vernon and stayed for all four years of my high school, I didn’t entirely buy into the seeming stability. It always felt elusive. There was a lesson here, but I didn’t learn it.