Fresh Disasters (10 page)

S
tone arrived at Bernie Finger’s office fifteen minutes late, just to annoy him. As he waited for the receptionist to announce him he looked around Finger’s waiting room. Everything was tasteful but with an extra coat of gloss, which pretty much described Bernard Finger, Esquire, Stone thought.

A shapely young woman materialized before him. “Mr. Barrington? Will you please come with me?”

Stone resisted the riposte and, with pleasure, followed the young woman. He was led to a large conference room, where Bernie Finger and a younger man awaited. The huge table was completely bare.

“Morning, Stone,” Finger said, as if they were just meeting for coffee. “Would you like something? Coffee? Tea?”

“Thanks, no; I’ve already had coffee this morning.” He set his briefcase on the table.

“Allow me to introduce my colleague, Samuel Teich,” Finger said, waving a hand at the man next to him.

The table was too wide for Stone to reach across and shake hands, so he just waved. “Hi, there.”

“Sam is one of our bright young men around here,” Finger said, “and, following your advice from last evening, he’s going to represent me.”

Stone regarded Sam Teich for a moment. He was on the small side, with thick, black, close-cropped hair and dark eyes under heavy eyebrows. Stone thought he could pass for either an Arab terrorist or a Mossad agent. He didn’t doubt that young Mr. Teich was bright, perhaps even brighter than advertised, and he was happy that Finger had come so well armed.

“All right, Mr. Barrington,” Teich said, “let’s get to it. What does Mrs. Finger want?”

“It’s very simple, Mr. Teich,” Stone replied evenly. “She wants the Fifth Avenue apartment and the house in the Hamptons. Bernie can have Park Avenue and Telluride. She also wants the six and a half million dollars from the sale of her company, plus interest at eight percent a year, and half of the rest of Bernie’s assets. Oh, and all her legal costs.”

Sam Teich permitted himself a tiny smile. “Oh, and is that all?”

Finger spoke up. “Not half my blood?”

Teich quieted his client with a raised hand. “Mr. Barrington, unless you can make a reasonable proposal, I’m afraid we’re going to have to see you in court, and then Mrs. Finger will have to see her personal life laid bare. I don’t expect she’s told you about her personal life, has she?”

“Mr. Teich…”

“Please…call me Sam.”

“Sam. My dear Sam. I think it might be helpful if I run down our court case for you, just to give you some idea of what you’ll be facing. We have a woman who gave up her career to marry Bernie and sold her business far too cheaply on Bernie’s advice, just to make him happy; we have a seven-year marriage, dare I say it?—the best years of Bernice’s life?—with a man who took her money, then committed flagrant adultery for years; a man who actually bought an expensive penthouse for his current paramour, though the deed remains in his name; a man whose net worth has appreciated from four million dollars to thirty-eight million dollars during the marriage, and that figure does not take into account the undervaluing of his assets on his financial statement or the large sum in his Cayman bank account—an account, incidentally, unknown to the Internal Revenue Service—on which no taxes have been paid. Finally, Mrs. Finger has had to endure the shame and humiliation of seeing her husband’s nude photographs with his lover in a gossip column, seen by everyone she knows, something every woman on the jury—and it will be a jury trial—will find disgusting in the extreme.”

“Are you finished?” Finger asked.

“No, Bernie, not quite. I should tell you that everything I have just mentioned can be substantiated with your own files, to which Bernice has legal and proper access, and of which she has availed herself.” Stone opened his briefcase and slid a handful of file folders across the table. “Of course, if we go to trial, there’s just no telling what my investigators will come up with when they start pawing through your law firm’s files and, of course, your personal life. I don’t think that will play very well with your firm’s clients, Bernie, particularly with those clients on the criminal side of your practice, when they start reading their names in the newspapers.” Stone snapped shut his briefcase. “And you and I both know that any court is very likely to give Bernice half of everything, even without Bernie’s outrageous adulterous behavior.” He stood up. “I think that about does it for now, Sam. Have a chat with your client and get back to me.” He turned and began walking toward the conference room door.

“Just a moment,” Teich said.

Stone turned and looked at him.

“Would you mind waiting outside for a few minutes while I confer with my client?”

Stone noticed that Finger had turned a peculiar shade of red. “Not at all, Sam. Take your time.” He walked outside, took a seat in the waiting room, picked up a copy of the
Times,
turned to the Arts section and started working on the crossword puzzle. He was a little more than halfway through when the conference room door opened and Sam Teich walked toward him, a sheet of paper in his hand. Stone stood to meet him.

Teich handed him the paper, on which there was a handwritten list. “Is this everything you asked for?”

Stone read the list carefully. “Everything except one hundred percent of Mrs. Finger’s legal costs,” he said.

“And what do you estimate those will be?”

“Thirty percent of her settlement.”

A tiny grimace of pain crossed Teich’s face. “She signed a contingency agreement? How did you get her to do that?”

“It was her expressed wish, with no suggestion from me.”

“We’ll give you everything on the list and ten percent. It’s not as though you’ll have put in a lot of hours.”

“Fifteen percent, if we have a signed agreement before the end of the business day.”

Teich sighed. “Done. Send me your draft.”

“It won’t be a draft,” Stone said, “it’ll be final, and it will include a provision for hidden assets that may be uncovered at some later date.”

“Bernie will sign an agreement for the real estate and half of the assets contained in the file you showed us,” Teich said.

“And half what’s in the Caymans account. I’ll want to see a bank statement.”

“It’s not the kind of account that produces a monthly statement, and for legal reasons, Bernie does not want any document to exist that mentions a balance. We’ll add a million dollars to the settlement to cover the Caymans account and any assets not mentioned in the files.”

“Oh, then there are unnamed assets?”

“All right, two million.”

“Five million.”

“Three million, and no more.”

“Bernie signs the agreement first.”

“All right. We have an agreement.” Teich offered his hand.

Stone shook it. “It’s a pleasure doing business with you, Sam; you gave Bernie good advice.”

“I know,” Teich said, then he turned and walked back into the conference room.

Stone left the law firm in a rosy daze of elation. He forced himself to breathe normally as he hailed a cab and went back to his own office.

“So?” Joan said, as he walked into the office.

“Come in and bring your pad,” Stone said. “I want to get this thing wrapped up today.”

He called Bernice Finger and gave her the news.

“He agreed to
everything
?” she asked incredulously.

“Everything, plus your legal costs. I cut my contingency from thirty to fifteen percent.”

“If he agreed so quickly, he must be hiding a
lot
of money,” she said. “We should ask for more.”

“I got you three million to cover any hidden assets.”

“Wow!” she said softly.

“It’s a good deal, Bernice, and without the pain of a trial. I’ll have it ready for your signature by the end of the day.”

“I’ll sign it,” she said.

Stone hung up with his heart pounding.

Joan came into the office. “What did you get for her?”

“The earth, sun and moon,” Stone said, hardly able to believe it himself. Bernie’s net worth was going to run to at least forty million dollars, and he was going to get fifteen percent of half of it. That was…he did the arithmetic…good God, three million dollars! Stone’s mind spun out of control; he started thinking about one of those new, very light jet airplanes.

S
tone had a dinner date with the lovely, rangy Celia, but first he had promised her he would perform a chore. He got out of the cab in front of the SoHo gallery and peered through the window at the very good crowd that had assembled to see the artist’s work. A very large sign in the window read:

DEVLIN DALTRY

“Wait for me,” Stone said to the cabbie. “I won’t be long. He walked into the gallery, grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing tray and looked around for the artist. He located him at the center of a small group of women who were at least as fascinated with him as with his sculpture, so Stone passed a little time peering at the lumps of marble and steel arrayed on pedestals throughout the large room. They were uniformly uninteresting, Stone thought, the product of an empty mind.

Shortly, he spotted Devlin Daltry, slim and dressed entirely in black and momentarily alone, so he set his champagne glass down on a pedestal next to a lump titled “Doubt,” walked quickly over to the man and offered his hand. “How do you do, Mr. Daltry,” he said, squeezing his hand, and with his other taking him by the arm and steering him out of the hearing of others.

Daltry followed, because he had to. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“My name is Stone Barrington, and I am the attorney representing your former friend, Celia.”

“I don’t have to talk to you,” Daltry said, attempting and failing to free himself from Stone’s clutches.

“That’s right, you don’t,” Stone replied. “But you have to listen for just a moment, or I’ll break your hand.” He squeezed it for emphasis.

Daltry winced. “All right, get it over with.”

“I’ve come here to tell you that your relationship with Celia is over from this moment and that, should you attempt to see her or even contact her ever again, I will see that a world of legal and financial problems falls on you from a great height and makes your life not worth living. This will be in addition to the criminal penalties that will follow, and follow you they will, right into Rikers Island. And finally—and this is entirely personal, not legal—after all that is done, I will find a quiet moment with you alone and leave you in a condition that will prevent you from making any more of these awful little things you dare to call ‘sculptures.’ Is all that perfectly clear?” He squeezed Daltry’s hand again for emphasis.

“Yes,” Daltry grunted.

“I hope I won’t find it necessary to see you again.” Stone released the sculptor from his grip, walked out of the gallery and got into his waiting cab. “Sixty-fifth and Madison,” he said.

H
e walked into La Goulue, one of his favorite non-Elaine’s restaurants, twenty minutes later to find Celia waiting for him at his usual table, sipping a glass of wine. He gave a kiss to Suzanne, who ran the place, then slid into his seat. “Sorry to be late,” he said. “It’s a long trip from SoHo.”

“You went to the opening?” she asked.

“I did,” he replied, waving at a waiter and making drinking motions. “His stuff is awful, soulless.”

“I can’t disagree. Did the two of you talk?”

“I did all the talking,” Stone said, “but he seemed to get the message.”

She looked doubtful. “Devlin is not very good at getting the message. I’m afraid I haven’t been completely truthful with you.”

Stone took a sip of his drink and wondered what was coming next. “I’m listening,” he said.

“I mean, it’s not that I’ve lied to you; it’s just that there’s more to Devlin than I’ve mentioned.”

“Tell me about him.”

“He’s wilder than he looks.”

“How do you mean, ‘wilder’?”

“He’s capable of attacking men twice his size and of doing damage.”

“And has he found attacking men twice his size a profitable activity?”

“He hits unexpectedly, then runs, and he can run very fast.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Stone said, taking another sip. “Anything else?”

“He’s also capable of hiring people to do his dirty work for him. A couple of weeks ago, I was followed out of a restaurant I used to frequent by two men, and it was obvious what they had on their minds. Fortunately, I made it into a cab before they got to me, and I lost them. This is why I don’t want Devlin to know where I’m living. These days, I make it a rule not to go anywhere I usually go. I’ve even dropped two clients that he knew about, because I was afraid I’d come out of their buildings and find Devlin or those two men waiting for me.”

“I think that’s very wise,” Stone said. “Our next move is to get a temporary restraining order against him.”

“I told you before, that won’t stop him.”

“It often doesn’t stop the aggressor, but violating it has legal consequences up to and including jail time, depending on how pissed off the judge is.”

“All right, if you think that’s best.”

“I do. Tell me, can you take a couple of weeks off work without going broke?”

“I suppose so. Why?”

“I think it’s best if we get you out of town for a little while, during which time we can let this business play out.” He took a slim leather notebook from his pocket, placed it on the table and gave her a pen. “Give me Devlin’s address and phone number.”

She wrote it down.

“What sort of daily schedule does he keep?”

“He works in his loft, so he’s usually there during the day. In the evenings he goes out, often to a bar called Crackers and a restaurant called Emile’s, both downtown.”

“Anyplace else he frequents?”

“Wherever I am. When he knew where to find me, he used to devote a good part of his day to tracking me down, then following me around, just to let me know he was still after me. It was unnerving, because I never knew when he might cause a scene in some public place or even attack me.”

“That’s good to know about,” Stone said. “I’ll put it in your petition for the TRO.”

“Will I have to appear in court?”

“No, I can represent you.”

“Oh, good. I don’t want to see Devlin, even in court.”

The waiter brought menus, and they devoted themselves to choosing among the dishes.

S
tone signed the check. “Ready?”

“Would you do me a favor?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Would you take a look outside and make sure he’s not out there?”

“If it would make you feel better.”

“It would.”

“I’ll be right back.” Stone slid out of the banquette, walked to the front door and went outside. He looked up and down Madison Avenue. Traffic was light. A car was double-parked in front of the building next door, and two bored-looking men sat in the front seat.

Stone hailed a cab. “Start your meter. I’ll be right back,” he said to the driver. He went back inside and got Celia. “There are two men waiting in a car outside, and there’s no back way out of here, so we’re just going to have to brazen it out the front way.”

“Whatever you say.”

He led her outside and got her quickly into the cab. “Take your next left, then left again on Fifth Avenue,” he said to the driver. He positioned himself so that he could see the rearview mirror.

The car with the two men followed.