The Cradle Robbers (7 page)

“Which milk do I use first?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Peter! Listen,” I recited the instructions again, and watched the haze of confusion descend more firmly on his face. I sighed. “How about if I write it all down. How about that?”

“Good idea,” he said, slurping his coffee.

While I was digging around in the kitchen drawer for a pen that had not had been chewed past the point of utility, the doorbell rang.

“Who could that be at seven in the morning?” I said, going to the front door.

I pulled open the massive oak door with the bronze knob the size of one of my children’s heads. The man standing on my front steps towered over me. He was close to two feet taller than I am, and three times as broad. My kids could have used his large white sneakers for kayaks and his belly jutted so far out in front of him that he had to extend his
ham hock of an arm way out past it to reach the gong that served us as a doorbell.

“Stanley?” I said. “Stanley, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Morning, Juliet.”

“Stanley, please tell me this is a social call. Please tell me that you’re dropping by to thank me for the Dodgers tickets Al gave you last season. Please do
not
tell me you are standing on my front steps because you are about to serve me with a subpoena.”

“No, Juliet. I’m not serving you.”

“Thank God. Because that is
all
I need.”

“I’m serving your husband. Is Peter home?”

I glared at him. Then I called over my shoulder, “Hey, Peter, remember I told you about that process server Al and I refer business to sometimes? That old
friend
of Al’s from when he was on the force?”

Peter grumbled something unintelligible.

“Well, you’d better come out here because he’s got a little present for you.”

“What?”
Peter came flying through the front hall, his ratty old fleece bathrobe flying out behind him like a Batman cape. He grabbed the papers from Stanley.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t come in, Juliet,”
Stanley said. “I’d prefer if my first visit to your home were under different circumstances.”

“I am
so
not asking you in, Stanley.”

“I didn’t remember until I saw you standing there that your husband’s name was Peter Wyeth. Otherwise I would have called. I sure would have. You know I would have.”

I sighed. “You want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you. Excuse me, Mr. Peter Wyeth?”

“What? What?” Peter said.

“You’ve been served, sir.”

“He knows he’s been served, Stanley.”

“I am aware that he knows that, Juliet. But you know I’ve got to verify service for the record.”

I shook my head. “You’re going to be picking up the lunch tab next time, Stanley.”

“I am certainly aware of that, yes I am.”

“See you later, Stanley.”

“Good-bye now. Have a good day, Mr. Wyeth.”

I watched Stanley heave his massive body down the path to the canary-yellow Cadillac DeVille he has been driving for as long as Al has known him, and probably for a lot longer than that. When I turned back to my husband he was holding the wad of stapled documents out to me with a trembling hand.

“I’m being sued!”

“I know.”

“What do you mean you know? How did you know?”

“Calm down, honey. It’s not like Stanley works for Federal Express. He’s a process server. Ergo, you’re being sued. Who’s suing you?”

“A maniac! A maniac I’ve never met. I can’t make heads or tails of this. Read it. Read it right now and tell me what the hell is going on.”

Having a criminal defense lawyer for a spouse gives a person the opportunity to see the justice system in all its baroque and bureaucratic glory. Before he met me, Peter did not understand how long a case can drag out, how much is involved in a trial, how much can be at stake. Civil litigation is hardly the same as criminal: still, watching me prepare obscurely worded motions dealing with barely comprehensible concepts like habeas corpus, forfeiture, motions for preliminary injunction, and the like, convinced Peter that the American legal system is far more like the absurdly haphazard Court of Chancery of Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House
than it is like the home of reason and logic that we all learned about in grade school.

I took the complaint out of his hands and scanned it quickly. “Okay, first of all, it’s not just you who’s being sued. It’s you and your production company and the studio. So that’s nice. You’ve got some company. Not to mention indemnification.”

“But what is this crackpot claiming?”

I flipped the pages, walking back to the kitchen with Peter trailing behind me. “Hmm.”

“‘Hmm’?” he shouted.

“You’re going to wake the baby.” After nursing pretty much nonstop from five to six in the morning, Sadie was asleep, not that I cared. I was leaving. If Peter woke her, it was his own problem. “The crux of the claim seems to be that he pitched an idea for an animated cannibal TV series to the studio about ten years ago, and he says you ripped off his pitch.”

“But my animated series is based on my movies!” Peter’s series of cannibal horror movies have been pretty successful, as far as B horror movies go; they have a devoted cult following. A live-action TV series once made it all the way to a pilot, but it was never picked up. Now there was an animated version in the works, and for the past few months Peter had been consumed with critical decisions like whether to go with CGI or traditional animation.

“Yes, well, he seems to be saying that you stole your movies from his pitch to the studio.”

“But that’s insane. My first movie came out years ago. And it was a script that I shopped around all over town. And it wasn’t even made by this studio. They just bought the distribution rights!”

“The plaintiff claims that all that was an elaborate ruse. He claims that the studio got so excited by his pitch that it secretly contracted with you to write a screenplay, which you then pretended to make with a small independent production company but really made with the studio’s money just so that you could make the sequels large enough so that you could go forward with the animated TV series. Which was the plaintiff’s idea. Which you stole.”

Peter collapsed into his kitchen chair. “This is insane. It’s is going to go away, right? Please tell me this is going to go away.”

“It’s going to go away. It’s going to cost the studio some money to litigate, and I hope to God they don’t decide to settle, but yes, it’s going to go away.”

“Settle? Settle? But it’s all a lie! How could they settle?”

“In order to avoid spending a quarter of a million dollars in legal fees. But let’s not go there, okay? I mean, your studio is famous for not settling, otherwise it would end up a constant target for these kinds of extortionists, and it’s a patently false claim. Don’t worry, honey. The lawyers are going to take care of it. It’s going to be all right.”

Peter groaned.

“Sweetie,” I said. “Chiki and I have to get going or I’m going to miss my flight. Are you going to be okay here?”

He groaned again.

“Peter,” I said. “Let’s focus now, okay? Sadie? Ruby? Isaac?” I kept the words very simple. “Can you handle this? Do you want me to stay?” I made my unwillingness to do that so clear by the sound of my voice that the hopeful expression on his face immediately faded.

“No, I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Call Lilly if you’re in trouble,” I said. “She’s in town this week, and I’m sure she’ll let you come over this afternoon and hang out by the pool.” Our friend Lilly Green is a movie star with a full staff of
nannies. When left on his own, Peter often resorts to Lilly’s beneficent companionship. But then, so do I. It’s a lot easier to kill a day with three children at
her
house than at ours. Especially since at her house you get to lie on a chaise longue drinking iced tea while a nanny takes care of your children.

“You are going to help me with this lawsuit, aren’t you, Juliet?” Peter said.

“Of course I am. And there’s not going to be anything to do. Tomorrow I’ll call the studio’s legal department, but I’m sure they’re already dealing with it. They’ll make it go away. I promise.”

He stood up and gave me a hug. I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Honey, Chiki and I really have to go. See you tonight.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

T
HE
visiting room of Dartmore Prison made an attempt at cheer that somehow served only to highlight how grim the place really was. The long tables had been pushed back from the walls in one corner to allow some floor space to be transformed into a play corner where a few children played listlessly with broken plastic toys. The Duplo buckets contained too few building blocks to make a satisfying castle, and the ride-on fire engine was missing a wheel, so the toddler using it had to cling to the seat at a perilous angle, pushing with his chubby sneakered feet and squeaking along half-heartedly across the dingy tiled floor.

The attorney visiting rooms were located along one wall of the main room. They were even more bleak than the main visiting room—claustrophobically small, with glass doors so that the guards could be sure that no untoward activity was taking place inside.

I called down both Fidelia and Sandra, and while I waited for the guards to find them, frisk them, and bring them in, I thumbed through a
Vogue
magazine I had bought in the airport. Every prisoner was subject to a thorough body cavity search both before and after a visit, and depending on where she worked in the prison, and how long it took to locate her, it could take as much as an hour for a visit to begin. I had time to read all about how it took Kate Hudson
weeks
to get back into her size 28 jeans after having her baby, and how she still needed to lose twenty more pounds. Since I couldn’t fit one of my
breasts
into a pair of size 28 jeans, let alone my behind, I wasn’t feeling all that sorry for Ms. Kate. Still, her fat little naked baby caused me to get one of those dangerous nursing mother reactions, and I had a terrible feeling I was going to have to run outside and use the breast pump I had left in the rental car in the parking lot. I’d pumped once in the bathroom
on the airplane, a decidedly unpleasant experience (what
is
that smell in airplane bathrooms?), and once in the parking lot before I’d come in the prison. That had been fairly comfortable, the cigarette-lighter adapter easy to use, and I would have been fine if a small boy hadn’t popped his head in the passenger-side window I had rolled down for air, causing me to shriek and spill breast milk all over my pants. He had been nearly as frightened as I, and his grandmother even more horrified. The stain on my slacks made me look like I’d wet myself, and I had a feeling that if the air-conditioning in the visiting room didn’t start working soon I was going to begin to smell pretty funky. Just the way to inspire confidence in a client. Well, I reminded myself, it wasn’t like I was being paid for my work on this case. They’d have to take me as I was. Stinky, the eighth dwarf. Although if it took them much longer to get down here I was going to have to be rechristened Leaky.

Fidelia was the first to arrive. She was a tiny woman, even shorter than I am, with rabbity features and a broken front tooth. She passed her tongue over that tooth over and over again as she
talked, as if irresistibly drawn to the sharp edges of the angled crack.

“Chiki, he tell you what I’m in for?”

“No, of course not.”

Fidelia was happy to talk about it. She had been a senior in high school, two months past her eighteenth birthday, when a boy, someone with whom she’d “hooked up” on a fairly regular basis, decided that he didn’t like the fact that she was hooking up with other guys. Or maybe he just didn’t like her smile that day. Whatever it was, he came after Fidelia with his fists, broke her nose, and gave her two black eyes. Fidelia showed the purple of her bruises to her brother, and her brother showed the silver of his automatic pistol to the boy. Fidelia’s brother got twenty-five to life for murder. Her sentence was lighter; she could get out in as little as fifteen years.

“Fifteen years,” I said. “That’s a long time.”

“Yeah. But I got my friends. Sandra, she’s a good woman. She’s smart, too. She helps all of us with our cases. She’s better than a lawyer, you know? There’s another lady inside who’s a real lawyer, like went to law school and everything, and Sandra does a better job on our appeals than Clarisse does. And
Sandra don’t charge nothing. Clarisse, you got to pay her, or get someone on the outside to pay her. Sandra, she don’t even ask the girls for cigarettes or shampoo or nothing.”

“Have you two been roommates for a long time?”

“Since before Noah was born. That’s her baby. Noah Anthony. We from the same neighborhood in L.A., Eagle Rock, but of course we never knew each other on the outside. Sandra, she had a white bunkie before me, but that lady she got all hooked up with the Aryan Women, and Sandra, she hates them. She fought that girl until they put her in the SHU and then they sent her over to me. That was messed up; Sandra, she could have been killed. The Aryan Women, they’re part of the Aryan Brotherhood, and those guys run the prison, you know? But Sandra, she didn’t care. She said they could kill her, but she wasn’t going to spend the next five years living with no Nazi lady.”

When I was done talking to Fidelia, and had sent her back up, they let me see Sandra. In normal company, she would not have seemed so gargantuan, but in the land of the Lilliputians, compared to Fidelia
and me, she loomed like a basketball center. Despite the pits of acne scars on her cheeks, Sandra was beautiful, blonde, and regal, with a long nose and aquamarine eyes, like some kind of Nordic princess. She held her feet splayed, her back straight, and her small bosom thrust out, in that stately posture of a woman whose childhood included years of ballet lessons. She was carrying the usual pile of legal papers and envelopes.

After we introduced ourselves, I asked her about what Fidelia had said.

“I never said anything about not wanting to be bunkies with that woman.”