“You have a couple of problems here,” he continued. “There’s the unreported income, that’s one thing. But what really gets under their skin is not paying the withholding taxes, especially since he was taking the money from the employees and using it for his own purposes.”
A woman charged into the room. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she said, coming to a full stop in the middle of the room. She was slight, with short blond hair, modest jewelry, wearing a trim tan pantsuit, and smiling. She was much younger than Sheldon but, like him, all business.
“Let me introduce you to Miriam Fisher,” Sheldon said. “She works with me. I asked her to take a look at the report. I wanted her to be in here with us.” We shook hands.
“Bob and Elsa think I should go to court and fight,” I said. Sheldon smiled.
“There are many things Bob is smart about,” Sheldon said, “but he’s not a tax lawyer. That’s why he has me. It would be wrong for you to go to court. You could lose. This is not an example of the IRS being mean-spirited or wrong. In this case the IRS was doing their job. They got the evidence and they got their man.”
Miriam paced back and forth and then perched herself at the edge of Sheldon’s desk. “Even with the atmosphere as it is right now on Capitol Hill,” she said, “where everyone is down on the IRS, where everyone is crying for reform, this would stand as an example of the IRS behaving properly.”
So the IRS was right about Howard. Would they see me the same way? I didn’t care about court. What I cared about was survival.
“This is what I’m afraid of,” I said. “If I settle with the IRS, if I sell what we have, my son and I will have nothing. If I lose the restaurant, too, we’ll be in a very bad way. It supports us. When I went to work at CNN they agreed to let me work part-time and, because I was subsidized by Howard, I accepted a part-timer’s salary. I try very hard to be a full-time mother. My savings are nil. I’m getting a salary from Nathans but I’m having to use money from Howard’s estate to make ends meet. I know that’s money the IRS wants but it’s all we have. The situation is spiraling out of control. Every day we have less—and we didn’t do the crime.”
“I know it looks bad to you,” Miriam said, “but I read the report and I see a lot of opportunity.”
Miriam resumed pacing. She tossed out ideas that had to do with the ins and outs of tax law and asked me a lot of questions. She wanted to know about my work, my involvement with Nathans, to what extent I’d been involved in the business, if at all. I tried my best to answer, but any tax questions were over my head. I was mesmerized by her, though. Even when she didn’t talk she was still in motion. She was younger than me but that wasn’t a divide. Miriam and Sheldon traded ideas in the language of the law, but then they’d turn to me and try to explain. They didn’t talk down to me. They were struggling to find a solution to my crisis. I watched and listened. Even though I didn’t understand all of what they were saying I was overwhelmed. Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I was so grateful. Sheldon and Miriam were compassionate; they gave me hope, and the more hope they gave me, the more relief I felt, and with the relief came the tears.
Sheldon leaned forward in his chair, resting his arms on his knees, hands clasped in front. “I think you have a colorable argument for innocent spouse,” he said. It was the first time he had uttered those words of hope that I was clinging to.
I told them that innocent spouse had come up at Caplin and Drysdale. “That’s the first I’d ever heard of it. But they said I didn’t stand a chance.”
“I disagree,” Sheldon said. “I think you do have a chance, and I should know because I wrote the innocent spouse code when I was commissioner.” He gave me a brief history of the code, which was written specifically to protect a widow who was unaware of her husband’s tax fraud. In that case the woman didn’t know her husband had another family and that he was using his income to support them, too, but not paying taxes. When he died, the whole mess landed on her.
“Sheldon, are you sure?” I asked. I was afraid to get my hopes up too high.
“We have to learn a lot more about you. We have to prepare a defense. We’re going to have to fight for it. But we will fight.”
“When I tell you I knew nothing about this, really nothing, I’m telling you the truth. I had no idea this was going on,” I said, looking from Sheldon to Miriam and back to Sheldon. “I know I signed the tax forms. That’s my signature and I remember signing them. I just assumed if an accountant prepared them they were okay. It never occurred to me to question them. I don’t think I even looked at them.”
“It happens all the time,” he said. “Wives never read the documents; they just sign them. My wife used to be like that, but I told her she ought to start reading what she signs. You should too, from now on.”
“You know,” I said, “financially we led separate lives. I wasn’t involved in his business. I never saw his books. We had separate checking accounts, separate credit cards. Howard paid almost all the bills, and that was fine with me. I liked it.”
“Did you take money from the business?” Miriam asked.
“Not really.” I paused. “Well, I guess, sure. Sometimes I would need some cash and Howard would tell me to ask the bartender. I didn’t question it.”
“Were these large amounts of money?”
“No. A hundred dollars here or there and very infrequently, months apart, and this was several years ago, when I wasn’t working. I assumed it was our money.”
“That’s okay. There was no reason for you not to think that,” Sheldon said. “What they look for is a pattern of abuse, of regularly taking money, of knowing you are living off ill-gotten gains.” On that score I knew I was clean.
I jumped ahead. “Can I switch law firms from Caplin and Drysdale?”
“Yes, you can,” Sheldon said.
“I feel like a criminal there.”
Sheldon folded his hands. “On their behalf, I would say this: They were used to working with Howard. He’d been with them for months. He was the client. He was the one who did it. And then you walk in the door. Suddenly they have a new client but the same old case. It’s not easy to change gears like that.”
“Innocent spouse is a tough code,” Miriam said, “but it’s changing. It’s being debated on Capitol Hill at this very moment. There is a move to liberalize the interpretation of innocent spouse and I think it will happen. You could benefit from that. Your timing couldn’t be better.”
“Innocent spouse has been granted thousands of times,” Sheldon said, “but it’s not given away. It doesn’t work most of the time because the wife knows the income isn’t being reported or she participated in the business. She’s involved. In that case, no dice.”
Sheldon paused then leaned forward in his chair. “If you come to us with the case, this is what we will do,” he said. “I will build a wall around you and Spencer and try to save the two of you. The business won’t matter. After we save the two of you, then we’ll decide whether we want to save the business. But the first fight is to save you and your son.”
I had one final question. “How do I pay you?”
Miriam explained the money could legitimately come out of Howard’s estate and Nathans. If I won innocent spouse, that arrangement would hold. If I didn’t, all bets were off.
The next day I called Sheldon and said, “I want you to represent me.” Caplin and Drysdale were understanding about my decision. Now, with Sheldon and Miriam on my side, I was ready to fight.
Chapter 11
IN LATE MAY, Washington was postcard beautiful. The whole town came alive, and I did, too, because for the moment the IRS was not hitting me right between the eyes. The case was in transition from one law firm to the other, and Sheldon Cohen and Miriam Fisher were getting current. Deborah Martin at the IRS agreed to stand down until they were ready. The white and pink dogwood blossoms sat delicately on their leafy branches. I ran hard each morning, skirting the Potomac River, passing below the Watergate apartm
ents and the Kennedy Center, up and around the Lincoln Memorial. Sometimes I stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to touch a few of the fifty-eight thousand names of the dead inscribed on the black granite wall that rises from the earth as if pushed up by some elemental force of nature. It may be the simplest monument in this city full of monuments, but its simplicity is stunningly beautiful and very moving.
I shuttled between home and the restaurant in Georgetown and the CNN building near the Capitol on the other side of town. Driving a car had never been part of my routine. My father discouraged me early on when he sat fretting and stewing beside me in the front seat, until I pulled over, got out, and said, “Here, you drive.” Howard always drove—always—and I was always the passenger. In too many ways, I was the passenger. But now the car was my sanctuary. I listened to music. Listened to my thoughts. And when I needed to, I cried. Sometimes at a stoplight the driver in the next lane would notice me, blubbering at the wheel. If it was a good enough cry I arrived at my next destination—home, school, restaurant, show, lawyers—refreshed and ready to move on.
I asked Martha, “Do you cry?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Where do you cry most often?”
“In the car,” she said.
After Howard died, Martha and I spent a lot of time together. It was odd that Howard and I had been together for twenty years and only now were Martha and I getting to know each other. Howard loved her, as he did his parents, calling on their birthdays and on holidays, but we saw them rarely. Howard wanted it that way. Now I think he was afraid of what they might tell me about him. I had to push for more frequent visits. When Spencer was born we got together with Martha more often, but by then Howard’s father was dead and his mother was lost to Alzheimer’s. The visits would usually be at the family home in Alexandria, or later in Delaware, after Howard and Martha had moved Mrs. Joynt there so she could be closer to the home Martha shared with Vijay in New Castle. They had one son, Zal, who was at Vanderbilt. But only now did Martha and I have time alone together. The more I looked at her—across my kitchen table, or across booth 26 at Nathans—the more I saw Howard’s face in hers, the same brown eyes, the same white hair. She was trim and fit, a dedicated rower.
One night Martha and I were in the kitchen having a glass of wine before dinner. I’d just tucked in and given a kiss good night to Spencer. Suddenly I spontaneously blurted out that Howard had hit me. More than once. I leaned against the kitchen counter and looked down at her, sitting at the table, expecting to see her jaw drop.
But, no. She didn’t appear surprised. Instead, looking down at the floor, she said, “It happened before.”
My jaw dropped. I stopped what I was doing and sat down. “No! You’re kidding!” I couldn’t tell if Martha did or didn’t want to talk about it, but I had to know. I needed her to help me bring this stranger, this intimate stranger I’d lived with for twenty years and once thought I knew, into focus. Howard was like an iceberg. The dangerous part was beneath the surface. That was the dark part I had glimpsed only in alcohol-fed rages. But I was not going to be the Titanic.
There were bits and pieces he had told me along the way, about feeling alienated from his parents, about fearing his mother’s wrath, but weren’t these normal feelings of a child toward a parent? I know he felt he had never lived up to his father’s expectations, that he was told he was a disappointment—and often made the disappointments possible, getting kicked out of boarding school and then college for a range of shenanigans, including drinking. There was a lot of in and out of therapy, at his parents’ insistence, but he had said, “I just sat there and said nothing until the session was over. It was pointless. I hated that they made me go.” His self-esteem was low but he masked it so well—with the clothes, the posture, the good manners, the wit. Until, of course, the deep rage bubbled up to the surface. I needed Martha to tell me what had happened before.
“It will only help me understand him better,” I said. “It won’t make me love him less.” She told me there had been “incidents” with the wife before me. “I don’t know a lot, but I know in one case she ended up in the hospital. There was a split and talk of divorce but it didn’t happen. They patched it up.” She made a bitter face that told me she didn’t want to go any further—like discussing Howard’s tax fraud.
“I almost called the police once,” I said. “I picked up the phone, started to dial, but couldn’t go through with it. He stood there practically daring me, and then I hung up. It was my weakest moment.” I always thought I could turn it around, that the next day would be better, that when he sobered up he’d see my reason and get help, get fixed, get something. And eventually, he did.
“Well, if it’s any comfort to you,” I said, “when he got on Prozac his rages stopped. It calmed whatever needed to be calmed. It was a total turnaround.”
Martha’s revelation meant I wasn’t to blame for Howard’s outbursts. It was him, not me. I know that’s what the books say, and it’s what my psychiatrist told me, too, but learning that I wasn’t alone, that he’d hit another woman who was close to him, a woman he must once have loved, the mother of two of his children—that took away some of the shimmer and gloss I had given the man. Slowly a more realistic portrait was beginning to emerge.
Every time we got together Martha asked, “So, what’s the latest on Nathans?”
“As we sit here I’ve got spotters at the bar. I hate to do it but all the big boys tell me I have to track the theft. It’s always going on but apparently, just as Howard had often said, there are acceptable levels and unacceptable levels.” At that moment I didn’t appreciate the irony.
I should have had spotters trained on Howard. “I’ve got a lot to learn,” I said to Martha.
Customers I trusted told me that Bob Walker, the night manager, was knocking back the Grand Marnier on the job and often appeared drunk by the end of his shift. He had a wife and children, and he drove home every night. “I don’t mean to sound like a nanny but I worry that he’s on the road like that.”
“What does Doug say?” Martha asked.
“ ‘Not my problem.’ That’s what he says.”
I told Martha that I needed to hire my own bookkeeper to get the books together—a straight set of books, because “Howard kept two sets and I don’t know if the one I’ve got is the straight one or the crooked one.” We laughed about that. But the laughter was thin. In fact, there was nothing funny about it.
Invariably Martha would ask, “What was he thinking?” I had no answer to that. She also said, “You’ll make mistakes. You know you’ll make mistakes. But you’ll figure it out and pull through.”
At my age, a few years shy of fifty, I was experienced enough to avoid the big blunders, and if I did mess up I recovered quickly and smartly—but that was in journalism, the profession I understood. In the restaurant business I wasn’t sure I’d recognize a mistake until it hit me in the face, or the backside. There were no tutorials. I asked myself, What would Howard do?—a foolish question. All I had to do was look at what Howard had done to see how foolish the question really was. The ruins were all around me.
SLOWLY I GOT settled in at Nathans. While the office, and what went on in the office, confused me, there was a greater comfort level with the dining room and the kitchen. If I brought any restaurant expertise to the business it was that for twenty years Howard and I had dined out at the best restaurants in the world, and by exposure I had developed a sophisticated palate and an appreciation for a wide range of foods—from the street to the highest end. I could talk the talk. Also, we had eaten at Nathans occasionally and I liked the food. After a few months I felt comfortable getting more involved.
I met with the kitchen staff in the empty dining room between shifts, our chairs in a circle. Apart from the senior cook, Lore, no one spoke English. I talked. They nodded. A lot of smiling and nodding. Lore translated from English to Spanish. I spoke effusively about my appreciation of their work, my love of restaurants,
and my vision of Nathans’ role in the community, and asked if they had questions about my thoughts on food, the menu, or how I wanted the kitchen to operate. They nodded and smiled. There was only one question. Lore translated: “Do we keep our jobs?
Doug seemed reluctant to help me understand how Nathans worked so I went for a tutorial to Fred Thimm, president of the hugely successful Palm restaurant chain. It had started small in New York and grew to a megamillion-dollar corporation on a winning formula of huge servings of steak and potatoes with the occasional supersized lobster. Nobody messed with the formula. The headquarters were now in Washington. Fred and I sat across from each other in puffy leather chairs in the company’s conference room, Nathans’ financials spread out before us. He looked through the profit-and-loss spreadsheets and copies of the “daily sheet,” which showed a more specific breakdown of day-to-day business. “This doesn’t even tell you how many covers you did! How do you find that out?”
I didn’t know what a “cover” was.
“It means the number of tables served,” he said. “You need more information. What’s on this spreadsheet just makes the job easier for the guy counting the money. Do you know what it costs to open each day? Has anybody told you that?”
I shook my head.
“I wonder if anybody knows,” he said. I was beginning to feel woefully stupid.
“Well, you’ve got to find that out. You’ve got to know what you’re paying for rent, for food, for payroll, wine and liquor, taxes, all of that. That has to be inside your head. You have to know the numbers and understand them.” I didn’t tell him that I’d flunked high school math.
“Right now, these numbers look to me like you have some days where you’re just working for your staff and the landlords. You open up for the courtesy of paying employees and vendors, but not yourself.
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