Innocent Spouse (8 page)

A
FTER MEETING WITH
Howard’s lawyers, panic hit. Twenty-four hours earlier I had thought Howard’s death was the worst that could happen to us, and now I was a federal tax fraud defendant who owed the government almost $3 million I did not have. The lawyers—now
my
lawyers—didn’t believe I was an innocent spouse. They believed I was guilty.

The first stage of grief is shock, whether the loss is a person or everything you believed was solid in your life. I went into shock. I went off the deep end. With Spencer tucked in, I attacked Howard’s large mahogany partners desk. There were four drawers on either side and one drawer in the middle. One was mine, the others were his. I never went into them. Barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, I crouched on my knees and pulled out every drawer. My goal was to dig through everything. He was so amazingly organized. One drawer held only canceled checks going back years, but I didn’t know what to make of them. I slit open envelopes, pored over documents, fingered through manila folders—all without a clue as to what I was looking for.

I did find one seemingly relevant file that held a page from a yellow legal pad. In Howard’s precise prep school scrawl was a list of things we owned. Beside each item he’d jotted an amount of money, a value. At the bottom of the column was a total. It looked like he was calculating how much money he could come up with if we sold everything. And he listed every last thing: our Chesapeake Bay home, the two modest apartments in Georgetown, cars, art, antiques, boats, stuff. The total was $1.2 million. Distraught, I tossed the list across the room. “This is hopeless,” I said out loud. “Not even close.”

But who was I kidding? Whatever Howard had done wasn’t going to be found in a lockbox with a secret code attached explaining everything for me. I sat in the middle of the floor, haggard, hands covered in
grime, with all this crap around me, absolutely paranoid about what the IRS could rain down on me. The later the hour, the darker the fears. Would jackbooted IRS muscle kick down the door to drag me away in handcuffs, my sobbing child clinging to my ankles? I knew it had happened because at CBS News we reported on that very thing—IRS agents, minus the jackboots, coming in the night, carting people off to the slammer. That story made a lasting impression. It didn’t matter at that moment that perhaps my case didn’t qualify for prison (yet); I was in a panic.

It lasted through the night. The clock hands moved from midnight to two, then three. The dog looked at me, head cocked, wondering if we would ever go to bed. I took paintings off the walls and carted them to the basement storage bin. I took my few pieces of real jewelry and hid them in socks. Socks! It didn’t occur to me that this was a waste of time. Either the IRS wouldn’t care or they’d look first in the storage bin and sock drawer.

I didn’t understand what had happened to me, I didn’t understand how it had happened, and I certainly couldn’t ask Howard why it had happened. I had an emotional twofer—hopeless
and
helpless. The level of despair outweighed the fear I had felt at the hospital, where at least the doctors and nurses answered my questions and were on my side. Who was I going to call? Who could I tell? Why would I want to reveal this awful turn of events? And it’s three in the morning. Not a good time to call anyone. The normal emotion might be anger. But no, I wasn’t there yet. I was still in the stages of shock and denial.

At Nathans, once the floodgates were open, bad news began to cascade. A man arrived in the basement office who said he was the bookkeeper and there to take care of the quarterly tax payments for unemployment and other city and federal obligations. I welcomed him to do whatever it was he was there to do. When he was done, he asked to talk to me. Privately.

Upstairs in the bar, for the better part of an hour, we talked about what people had started to call my “situation.” The bar business, I discovered, is as gossipy as the news business, and word had begun to spread about Howard’s fraud and the mess he had left behind. None of the gossips knew details, but that didn’t stop the grapevine from growing and expanding like kudzu. The bookkeeper had factual knowledge
of the business, though, and talked about the different ways Howard wrote checks out of Nathans and what he wrote off or didn’t. He added that essentially Howard had run the business “in his head.”

I told him I had found a binder with daily numbers in it and comparisons to the year before. “It looks like a daily account of money earned or spent or both. To me, mostly a lot of numbers.”

“That’s your book,” he said. “I’m sure there are two sets of books. If you can find the other, try to figure out which one is real.”

Figure out which one is real? How was I going to do that? I knew the bookkeeper wanted to help, but the more he explained the more my mind began to slide into the fear zone. I wished I could dig deep into the crisis and hit the bottom, but there was no bottom. Digging deep meant only having to dig deeper.

“Well, I’m going to bill you, but Howard always gave me a periodic $5,000.” That snapped me back to attention. I’m sure my jaw dropped.

“Can I afford that?” I asked.

“I don’t know if you can,” he said, adding, “He also let me run a tab.” All I could do was mumble, “Let me talk to the manager and get back to you.”

I didn’t immediately find the Nathans “book” but I found Howard’s personal checkbook. In all our twenty years together I’d never looked in his checkbook. He had his, I had mine. He balanced both. He liked doing that. The book was big, brown, and covered in leather. I took a deep breath before lifting the cover. I flipped through the pages going back a year or so. Most of the entries were conventional, normal. But there were also entries for a few men I knew to be, well, characters around town. I didn’t know them personally, but Howard would mention them—with a salty anecdote and a groan—from time to time. One or the other was always down on his luck, in need of a loan. “But are you actually going to give him money?” I would ask, incredulous. “No fucking way,” he’d say. But now I noticed he’d written them checks. Not one, not two, but several. Five thousand here, three thousand there. I was certain they were loans rather than gifts. I wondered if they would offer to repay me, but they never did.

I welcomed the company of friends and took advantage of every opportunity to be with them. In the early months after Howard’s death they were my core support. They included Howard’s only sibling, his
sister, Martha, a presidency scholar, who had the advantage of being available almost on the spot. Her husband, Vijay Kumar, lived full-time at their home in New Castle, Delaware. Martha, who was camped at the White House and taught one night a week, commuted home on weekends. My other girlfriends lived up or down the street or around the corner, but they had husbands and children to tend to and were not available on demand. I would see them for lunch or at children’s parties and the occasional weekend gathering of all the married folks. I didn’t feel it then, but I was already becoming the odd one out: the widow, the business owner, the defendant in a tax fraud case. Most of all the defendant.

I liked these men and women who were almost all a decade younger than me. Many of the women had come to the hospital and had helped out in the immediate aftermath of Howard’s death, bringing food and flowers to our apartment, inviting Spencer for extra playdates with their children. Their husbands were business owners, developers, lawyers. At one particular dinner party in the suburbs, I sought business advice from some of the men. They spoke the new language I was trying to learn, and I had to learn it fast.

“Well, Carol, now you know why they called Nathans ‘the Bank of Howard,’ ” said the fellow who owned the linen company that provided Nathans’ napkins, tablecloths, and kitchen uniforms. The men laughed. I didn’t. “Howard did it so smoothly, everybody figured he would get away with it forever.”

One of the businessmen told me, “Just remember, your lawyers work for you, you don’t work for them. If they aren’t serving you, fire ’em.” He was talking about firing the lawyers and I hadn’t even hired them. I was in so far over my head.

A chilling encounter with a complete stranger made me fully grasp my vulnerability and see that there was a bull’s-eye on my back. It was at a small neighborhood cocktail party for Anthony Williams, the expected next mayor of Washington. I was invited not as a journalist but as the owner of a prominent small business. Knowing only the hosts, I was a wallflower, but was rescued by an attractive man with European deportment and a distinct appealing accent. “Can we sit somewhere quiet?” he asked, leading me to a sofa in a far corner.

It was Anthony Lanier, a native of Austria, and a Washington developer
who even I knew was managing impressive makeovers of old buildings in Georgetown’s commercial area, buildings just like mine. The word was he had $800 million investor dollars to play with and that a large chunk came from George Soros, the Hungarian-American businessman and financier worth many millions, even billions.

Our conversation was all business. He knew more about my building and my landlords than I myself knew, and a fair amount about my predicament, and he made clear that he wanted my building because it was the jewel in the crown, “on the best corner of the most powerful city in the world.” I was intimidated but listened closely.

“Everybody wants your space,” he said. “They will come at you from every direction. No one thinks you can survive. You are not in a position to trust anyone—your staff, your landlords, your lawyers. The landlords are worried about you, they live entirely off that building, and they will go in another direction if they can, but they don’t move fast, which is in your favor.”

I sighed. “So, what are you going to do to me?” I asked.

“I could steamroll you, but I’m not going to,” he said. “Your husband left you in a mess. I want your building but I will try to work with you rather than against you.”

Anthony was a man of his word and became an invaluable ally. His insider information often scared me out of my wits but it made me stronger and braver as I struggled to get that bull’s-eye off my back.

T
HE YACHT YARD
near us on the Chesapeake Bay sent out a periodic newsletter. It was not something I usually read, but when the new issue arrived it got my attention. On the cover was a tribute to Howard. It saluted his sailing skills and commended his attention to detail when he refurbished a boat. At the end it said: “We will always remember his lovely Hinckley Pilot 35,
Penguin
, and how beautifully he spruced her up.”

Penguin?
A Hinckley Pilot 35? We didn’t own a Hinckley, and the sailboat we did own, a little eighteen-foot day sailer, was named the
Carol Ann
. There had been a Hinckley Pilot 35 at the yard a year or so earlier. Howard took me out on her one beautiful sunny day, put her enthusiastically through her paces, even brought a picnic lunch, and
when I was happily relaxing he announced she was for sale. “Should we buy her?” he asked. She was a lovely black-hulled gem, and I knew he considered Hinckley to be the ultimate in boatbuilding, but we already had a sailboat.

“No,” I said. “Not now. We don’t need another boat.” And, as far as I knew, that was that.

I dropped the newsletter and called the yacht yard. I thanked the yard manager for the nice tribute to Howard.

“I’m going to ask you a question that may sound dumb, but please answer me honestly.” He was silent. “You mentioned the Hinckley Pilot 35,
Penguin
, in your write-up.” I paused. “Do we own that boat?”

“Well, yes, you did. Mr. Joynt had her here for a while. He had a lot of work done on her. Made her really sweet. Sold her at a good price, too.”

“He sold her?”

“Yeah. Sold her up in Maine. That was earlier last year.”

Clearly, when Howard took me sailing on the boat and asked me whether we should buy her, he already had. That’s why the fabrics that covered the cushions and bunks down below were from a manufacturer we used for our home. At the time, I considered it an appealing coincidence. What a dunce!

The discovery rattled me. The IRS, a surprise sailboat, big loans from his checkbook, guys who have tabs at the bar, “the Bank of Howard,” two sets of books—how much more didn’t I know about my husband? One stage of grief is denial, but it’s tough to be in denial when there’s so much evidence to the contrary.

To ease my pain and confusion, I would lose myself in Spencer. He needed me but I needed him, too. I felt normal when I was alone with him, even if our moments together were anything but. I’d tuck him into bed each night and curl up beside him. “Tell me stories about Daddy,” he’d say, and I’d try to pull something up to enchant him. While I talked he would suck his thumb, hug his cuddle toy Baby, and stare into the middle distance. When I stopped he would plead, “More! More! Tell me another story, Mommy. Tell me about Daddy.” Sometimes he would cry and I’d hold him until the tears were dry and he was asleep.

N
OTHING IN MY
background prepared me for the three-ring circus my life became after Howard’s death. Lawyers and the IRS in one ring, Nathans and
Larry King Live
in another, and in the center ring, my son and our home life. The big top was lit up, it was showtime virtually round the clock, and I had to lead the action in each ring simultaneously.

For the moment, the lawyers at Caplin and Drysdale got the most attention. We spoke often over speakerphone. Much of our conversations had to do with their discussions with Deborah Martin at the IRS. The message was clear: I was not gaining ground.

At
Larry King Live
, I tried to keep the productive pace I was known for before Howard’s death. In early 1997, I was in the middle of negotiations for several big-ticket projects: Rosie O’Donnell, who’d started a new TV talk show the year before, the notorious Leona Helmsley, who’d been mum since she got out of prison for tax evasion, fashion mogul Calvin Klein, and the Christie’s auction of Princess Diana’s dresses. These were front-burner gets. I had another dozen or so long-term projects: Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Doris Day, Sting, the Duchess of York, Marv Albert, Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford, the pope, and Queen Elizabeth. My get list, particularly the pope and Queen Elizabeth, made friends laugh, but I assured them that in the talk-show game we were motivated by the fact that, sooner or later, almost every celebrated person would give an interview. The show’s hard-charging executive producer, Wendy Walker, was deadly serious about every pursuit, even the most far-fetched.