Writ of Execution

by Perri O'shaughnessy

Sandy swayed in the doorway for a moment, and then, as if dislodged by a sudden wind, sat down in one of Nina’s orange client chairs. “You want to know after all this time.”

  “Yes.” When Sandy didn’t speak, just sat there drumming her fingers on her legs, Nina said, “He can’t stay away from me. He delights in insulting me in and out of court. I think he’s spreading rumors about me to other attorneys.”

  “No wonder. He’s after you.”

  “Ugh. You don’t mean—please. Take that back.”

  Sandy pursed her lips. “I told you once, it’s dog-eat-dog up here. Well, he’s the rottweiler. That makes you the chihuahua.”

  “I know he’s out to get me. When you came to work for me, I called him and asked him for a recommendation. And he said not to hire you. Remember?”

  “Sure. I remember. But you hired me anyhow.”

  “Well, why did he fire you?”

  “You sure you want to know this?”

  “Whatever you can tell me.”

  “You can’t tell anybody else.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Sandy said, “I guess it’s time you know what you’re dealing with. He’s a deep one, deeper than you know. Well, he had a client. A woman in her eighties. We handled the will. He’d come out and greet her with this big smile and get her into his office and shut the door. And I don’t know what all he would tell her then.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Yeah, she was a smart bird but he was smarter. She was lonely. That man was sending her flowers, practically standing on his head for her.”

  “Because she had money?”

  Sandy nodded her head emphatically.

  “But the lawyer who draws up a will shouldn’t be a beneficiary,” Nina said. “Not in this situation.”

  “Not in his own name. But he has so many corporate shells, he could string a necklace. I filed the corporate papers, I ought to know. And I saw one of the names again. Rose Crown Enterprises. As primary beneficiary under the will. No fingerprints of that man on those papers either. Or his wife. Used the name of some crony he planned to split with, I guess.”

  “The old lady died?”

  “He was at her bedside at Boulder Hospital. A week later, I’m filing his stuff and here’s her estate going into probate. That man was the executor. Rose Crown was the beneficiary. I think I was the only one at the firm who knew what he was up to. He has a personal secretary who does his typing, but she’s a dingbat.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Hey, no job is worth putting up with a crook for a boss. I went in and told him I knew what he was up to. Gave him a chance to straighten up. Next day I was demoted. New status. Disgruntled, powerless soon-to-be-former employee.”

  Nina waited.

  “So I stole the will,” Sandy said. “And the copies. I knew where they all were. File clerks know where the bodies are.”

  “You did what?”

  “I still had my key and they hadn’t had time to change the locks. I drove over there about ten at night and went in and took the will and all the copies. I went to work for you. And that was that.”

  “Where is the will now, Sandy?”

  “Around.”

  Nina thought about this. “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  Sandy’s expression didn’t waver.

  “You could have filed a complaint with the State Bar on the estate’s behalf.”

  “The governor had cut the State Bar’s funding so bad they wouldn’t have gotten around to it this century. You know that.”

  “You could have told his partners.”

  “Then the papers would disappear and I wouldn’t have any proof.”

  “He couldn’t probate the estate without the will,” Nina said thoughtfully.

  “You got that right. Her money eventually passed intestate. To her grandnephew in Arkansas,” Sandy said. “Heard that boy had a whale of a party when he heard the news.” She tapped her lip. “Yep, whale of a party.”

  “One thing I don’t understand, Sandy,” Nina said. “Why did you keep the will? Why didn’t you destroy it?”

  “So he won’t sleep good. He knows I have it.”

  Nina said slowly, “That’s actually a pretty good reason.”

  “Some of ’em, you have to keep a club handy so they don’t uncoil and sink a fang into you a long time later. So. You asked me what his problem is with you. Maybe part of it is, he thinks I told you.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before this? I’ve asked you enough times.”

  “Hey. It takes a while to get to know a person.”

  Nina took that as the high compliment it was.

  “Well, he’s got the judgment,” she said. “I’d give us one chance in ten of stopping him.”

  Sandy opened the door. “Where’s your gumption today? Did he put something in your cereal?”

  She went out.

  Alex and his mother came. Visibly paler and thinner than two weeks before when he’d asked her to make the will, Alex sat down immediately. His mother was a blond soccer mom, a Tipper Gore of the ’burbs, the bubbly kind who takes the team out for pizza after the game. She pulled her chair in close to her son’s. She was making the best of things. Nina felt her own resolve coming back.

  Alex read the will and said it was cool. Nina went down the hall, passing Jessie, who was still reading, shanghaied the real estate ladies who worked in the office by the rest room, and brought them back with her. They stood by soberly and witnessed Alex signing his will, and then they signed. Alex thanked them and they left.

  “All done,” Nina said. “If you’d like, I’ll keep the original in my files and you can take a copy.”

  “Might as well,” Alex said. He shook hands and went outside. His mother stayed with Nina.

  “Don’t give up hope,” Nina said. “You never know.”

  “We’re down to praying for miracles,” she said. “He’s so calm. It helps me. I didn’t want him to make his will, to even think about what’s coming. He was right, though. He wants his leaving us to be as easy as possible.” She brushed away a tear.

  Nina hugged her. “Let me know if I can do anything else.”

  “Can you keep him from dying? I’m sorry. Sorry. Thanks.”

  Ten-thirty. Sandy came in. “Can you see Jessie now?”

  “Send her in. Anything else from Paul?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Hi,” Jessie said. “I thought the earlier I got here the better. Did the Englishman call last night?”

  “No.” Nina paused. It seemed implausible that this neat, trim young woman in her cotton windbreaker could be the center of such a whirlwind. It was hard to see the girl with the millions of dollars swirling around her.

  “I called Kenny this morning. My husband,” she said with a nervous laugh.

  Nina had forgotten about Kenny Leung. She sipped her latte, which was mostly hot milk, and which she considered a medicine, not a food—caffeine for energy, calcium for calm. Calm alertness, that was the ideal state, and she didn’t have time to get there via meditation. Chemicals would have to do.

  “He just can’t wait to get his hands on his share,” Jessie went on. “Anyway, he deserves it if this works out. Yesterday was great, really peaceful. I got some rest.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I feel much better with you helping me, and it’s all coming together.” She smiled.

  “Like a couple of seven-forty-sevens heading for each other above San Francisco Airport,” Nina said. She drew a couple of planes smashing into each other, wings flying everywhere, on her legal pad as she spoke.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s how it’s coming together. You’re an important figure in this town all of a sudden, Jessie. I warned you about that, but I don’t think anyone could be prepared for the storm that is blowing up.”

  “What do you mean? Is it the papers? I couldn’t stand to look at them. I had too much else on my mind.”

  “I’l
l try to summarize,” Nina said. “Then we’ll talk. We now have the following situation going on on this beautiful morning. One. There’s the jackpot and your marriage of convenience and those fellows in suits in that hospitality suite on Sunday night or actually Monday morning. And the media.

  “Two. There’s Atchison Potter. You have been found, Jessie. Those papers you were served with yesterday came from him.”

  “I see,” Jessie said, her voice small. “I saw that some of them were about Hawaii. I was afraid to read them.”

  “I’m going to be blunt. Brace yourself.” Nina watched the spine straighten, the face go impassive, the eyes focus on Nina’s face like parallel-track laser beams. This girl is not helpless, she thought.

  “Go ahead,” Jessie said.

  “Mr. Potter sued you after you left Hawaii. He obtained something called a default judgment. He claimed, just as you said he would, that you were the cause of your husband’s death.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I knew he wouldn’t quit. I knew it deep down.”

  “The judgment is for an enormous amount of money. He wants your winnings. All of it.”

  “No, he doesn’t. He just wants to destroy me.”

  Nina drank some more coffee. Calm alertness. Alert calm.

  Jessie suddenly banged the desk with her hand, with enough force that the desktop actually shook and Nina’s carefully balanced coffee went over.

  “This is how you protect me? How did he find me?”

  “Be right back,” Nina said.

  She marched down the hall to the bathroom, took off her blouse, which luckily was not silk or rayon today, and rinsed it under cold water for a while. The coffee spot darkened, widened, and melted into the rest of the fabric until it disappeared. She held it under the hot-air hand-dryer for a couple of minutes until it reached an acceptable state of clamminess.

  Always the sticky strings, she thought. A vision came into her mind, of Jessie all wrapped up in a cocoon of slimy legal maneuvers like a colonist in an Alien movie, only her face exposed. Pleading, “Kill me.”

  It better not come to that. She buttoned her blouse and went back to work.

  11

  THERE IS ONLY one activity in life in which the reality principle has no advantage over the pleasure principle.

  Gambling.

  When we’re very young children, we think we are the pint-sized lords of the universe, that we can command the clouds to move, and they will. But time passes and after many humiliations we learn that we cannot have all we want simply by wishing for it. We learn to give up our craving for absolute selfish pleasure, to delay gratification. We accept that we are not gods and that we have to work. We learn that actions have corresponding consequences and that there is no free lunch.

  That is maturity. Accepting the reality principle relieves much frustration and suffering.

  Gambling, however, revives these infantile fantasies of omnipotence. The gambler wins or loses without relation to any rule or reason. He feels godlike if he wins. He has commanded the clouds, and they have moved for him. The pleasure is the pleasure of the infant, deep within and ordinarily well suppressed.

  And the sooner Red got his infantile fixation stuffed deep down again, the sooner he could stop compulsively betting everything he owned.

  A psychologist had told Red all this the year before, when Donna made him seek counseling. And it was all true, just the conclusion was dead wrong.

  “Seek counseling.” How he loved that phrase, which encapsulated the whole bourgeois schtick. Melt into the mainstream. Submit to the authority of some dimwit who couldn’t make it through medical school. Admit he was powerless over his addiction and surrender and get humble and hold hands in a circle and drink coffee in a roomful of losers. Give up the only thing in life that was truly his, private, thrilling, and more important than anything else.

  Gambling was even more than that. The scare when he was watching the roulette ball about to sink into the slot was the only time he felt truly alive. During those moments he connected to the flow of fortune through the universe. Intuitions and portents moved through him like currents. Sometimes he knew for sure he would win.

  And when Red was fortune’s child, when fortune smiled on him, he knew it. He could do no wrong. He could hit on an eighteen at blackjack, bet the double zero on the roulette table, throw chips onto the inner crap lines where nobody wins, bet in a daze. His hands would tremble and the sweat would break out all over, and he would be gripped by that uncanny certainty—he just knew! And he would win. That moment was everything. He rode the real power and it was ghostly, ghastly, indifferent, like white lightning.

  When he lost, of course, that was bad. Then there was anguish, the feeling that he was no longer fortune’s favorite. But that was when he felt the urge to gamble the most. Because all that mattered then was to get it back.

  That was how Red had started out two years before, winning. What started the gambling off was a longer story, which he didn’t mind telling to the psychologist because he didn’t want her sifting through nasty Freudian junk in her mind when she looked at him.

  He had it figured out. It was his mother. The “precipitating event,” as the psychologist put it, was that his mother died before he had a chance to tell her what he really thought of her. She knew, though. She didn’t leave him a dime. It all went to the old folks’ home where she’d spent the last five years.

  She was a German Russian. Her folks had emigrated from the Volga region to Kansas in the twenties to get away from Stalin and the gulags, just as their ancestors had emigrated from Germany to Russia when Catherine the Great invited them to come visit in the seventeen hundreds. Over and over they started, with nothing but their Bibles and their backs. After all these centuries of wandering and persecution and poverty and making something out of nothing, all Red’s people wanted was to build square houses and stay put and live rigid, safe, controlled lives.

  All they knew was the reality principle. No pleasure for them. Red’s grandparents had worked his mother almost to death before she ran away to Nevada. And had him eight years later, by some long-gone cowboy sonofabitch whose picture Red had never seen, since she tore them all up.

  “Bose Junge,” she used to call him in her Volga German dialect. No umlaut. Bad boy. And she had started working him to death.

  In her mind, she would always live on the Volga, in a dirt cave dug into the banks, only a potato to eat here and there, freezing. She always refused him anything to make his life easier, always made him pay with chores for every bit of clothing, every school fee, made him work himself through a crummy college because she said she didn’t want him spoiled, when he was smart enough to go to Yale. No comfort ever came from that downturned mouth. He ate baloney sandwiches for fifteen years for his school lunches.

  Her crowning achievement had been the guilt. She treated him like shit and then made him feel like it was all his fault. The guilt was like a sickness she passed on to him from her dementedly hard-working ancestors.

  He explained all this to the psychologist. The psychologist wanted him to be sympathetic, rise above. Forgive her! “It was hard for you. You weren’t sure of her love.”

  “She didn’t love me. You don’t love your slave.” Red was picking his teeth with a mint toothpick. He saw the psychologist make a note about that.

  “There was something in my teeth,” Red said. “Do you have to turn everything I do into a symptom?”

  “You do that a lot. You clean things. Remember those dreams you told me about, where your teeth are falling out?”

  “So what? This is not a dream, this is something from lunch in my teeth.”

  “Okay. Let’s leave it at that for now.” The jerk stole a glance at the gloves Red wore, because of the germs everywhere.

  “Let’s leave it at that forever,” Red said. “I’m having a slight upthrust of aggression and hostility.”

  “All right. Let’s get back to your feelings. She wasn’t able to nurture you. She
made you feel lost and lonely.”

  That was the last time he saw the shrink.

  Red was not lost and lonely!

  His mother gave Donna and him a casserole dish for a wedding gift, while her Cisco stock was zooming. She got rich in her old age scrimping and working and investing. Salt of the earth, her neighbors would say when they saw her sweeping up every last dust molecule from the rickety steps outside the cottage in Reno where she lived even after she could have bought the whole block and never missed the money.

  She never bought herself anything. She just swept the steps, wiped the lid on the ketchup bottle, scrubbed the walls, bleached the clothes, wiped the doorknobs with Lysol. That was her pleasure. It was like she had to wash things for the rest of her life to make up for the ancestral mud of Russia. She swept the steppes!

  He used to lie awake at night thinking about burglarizing her place, maybe even killing her somehow. But then she went into the home and it was too hard. And then she died peacefully in her fucking sleep before he even had a chance to tell her off. She escaped and he was left twisting impotently . . . no. He wasn’t impotent.

  This Bose Junge could still get it up. He could even make the clouds move sometimes.

  Red had worked around casinos all his life, starting in security. He knew more than anybody about gambling. Up until then, he had never gambled himself.

  But after she died, he started. He started dropping quarters into the slots at the Sparks Nugget, where nobody knew him. After a while, quarters bored him and he moved to the dollar slots. He learned blackjack. He was good at it. The jump from two-dollar to five-dollar tables took about three months. The roulette came later.

  It was the kind of pleasure he understood, fear-pleasure, the pleasure and the dread all mixed up together. Once he got used to it, he couldn’t live without it. It was the vice he had been made for.

  So he gambled, and he won at first. He won much more than he lost. For the first time in his life he really enjoyed himself, stealing silver from the sky, cheating the odds, doing it all on the sly.

  Donna figured it out early. At first, when he was winning, when he came home with bouquets and nightgowns and electronic equipment, she was right there with him. Then when he went into the losing streak she started looking at him and checking the accounts and noticing things.