Free Undue Influence by Steve Martini Page A

inclusion in this group. “I can’t talk,” she says. “I gotta run. Gotta hang up now.” All of a sudden frenetic noise on the line. “Call you later,” she says. “Laurel. Hello. Hello.” What I hear is a melodic noise, like scrape-and thump, scrape-and-thump. I listen for several seconds until I sense what this is the pendulum of the receiver on the other end, left to dangle against a wall by its cord as Laurel walked away. When I return to my office, there’s a small pile of messages on my desk. I paw through them quickly. There is one from Gail Hemple, others are the usual, calls on cases, except for the one on the bottom which catches my eye. A pink slip with Jack Vega’s name and number on it. I pick up the phone and dial Hemple first. Gail warns me that Jack is on the warpath. He is demanding to know from his lawyer why he’s compelled to pay spousal support to Laurel, who is now, in his words, a fugitive. Whoever said that alimony is the ransom a happy man pays to the devil has never met Jack. According to Gail he’s demanding that his lawyer go back to court, an order to show cause on changed circumstances, the fact that the kids are now abandoned, to seek temporary custody until the matter of their missing mother is resolved.
    “Vega has called me,” I tell her. “Any idea what he wants?”
    She has scuttlebutt from Jack’s lawyer. It seems the attorney-client relationship with my brother-in-law is not all the man could have hoped for. “Jack found out that Danny and Julie were at your place the night Melanie was killed,” she says. Playing the wounded father, Jack’s now busy trying to sever all links.
    He has left strict written instructions at his kids’ school that I am to have no contact. Vega has an antiquated notion of teenagers and how to deal with them.
    In an age when kids are packing Mac-tens in the classroom and pistol whipping teachers who look at them cross-eyed, Jack sees a note from home as something on the order of the Great Wall of China. “The man doesn’t miss a beat,” she tells me. “We’re noticed for a hearing on temporary custody in five days. Got any ideas?” she says. Jack has found the soft underbelly. Laurel is not likely to show in court, and her lawyer, having already appeared on the custody matter, can’t avoid service. Jack will take a default on Laurel, grab the kids, and cut off support, all in one fell swoop. It is what you notice first about Jack, not his blinding intelligence, but his devotion to the rules of opportunity. Facing Melanie’s funeral, and a sea of grief I do not deny, he still finds time in a busy day to sort out the silver lining in his wife’s death. As much as a lawyer can be, Hemple is depressed by all of this.
    To Jack there was never anything sacred about taking care of his family.
    For a guy with a woman in every room, support payments were viewed as nothing but an exorbitant stud fee. I tell her this. But she doesn’t laugh. There is a dark cloud, something unstated, hanging over our conversation, the sense that Gail is waiting to unload something more on me. We tiptoe around it for several minutes, mostly lawyer’s small talk, adventures in divorce land, a ride on every theory, none of them with a cheerful ending. Then she punches my ticket. “I may as well tell you,” she says. “I’m not going to be able to go on representing her.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I’m filing a motion to withdraw as counsel,” says Hemple.
    A lawyer leaving a case unfinished conjures all the images of Fletcher Christian lowering the longboat to put you over the side in this case, given my limited grasp of things domestic in the law, without benefit of compass or charts. At this moment there is a sick feeling at the pit of my stomach not unlike what you would get out on the rock-and-roll of the bounding main. “You can’t do it,” I say.
    She’s got a million reasons. A waste of Gail’s time and Laurel’s money, what it