Ladies' Night (7 page)

When she reemerged, she handed her daughter a well-worn business card.

“Mitzi Stillwell, Attorney at Law?” Grace asked, lifting one eyebrow. “Who’s she?”

“A lawyer I know,” Rochelle said. “Give her a call.”

*   *   *

Mitzi Stillwell didn’t waste much time with niceties. She’d been practicing domestic law for a dozen years, and she generally believed her clients needed the truth more than they needed coddling.

She listened for fifteen minutes while Grace recounted her tale of what she now thought of as the meltdown, nodding and occasionally jotting some words onto a legal yellow pad.

“So,” Grace said, when she’d finished. “What do you think? Can you help me?”

Mitzi tapped the pen against the legal pad. “You walked away from your own home—even though your husband was the one screwing around on you?”

“Yes,” Grace said.

Mitzi cocked her head and a strand of gray-flecked dark hair fell across one eye. She was in her early fifties now, but when her hair started graying twenty years earlier, she’d chosen not to color it—just to give herself the look of an older, more experienced jurist. At home, she favored bright colors and clothes designed to show off the figure she worked hard at maintaining, but in the courtroom, Mitzi mostly chose expensively tailored business suits in neutral colors, with just enough feminine detailing to remind her clients—and prospective jurors—that she was a woman in charge.

“You know, Grace, it’s supposed to work the other way around. You’re supposed to kick his butt out of the house.”

“Sorry,” Grace said. “I’m new at all this. It never occurred to me to ask him to leave. Anyway, after I sank his car, I’d pretty much made the statement I needed to.”

Mitzi laughed. “I’ve handled hundreds of divorces over the years, but you’re my first client to drown a car.” She half stood and bowed in Grace’s direction. “Awesome. Although probably not prudent.”

She sat down again and looked at her notes. “How are you for money?”

“I’m broke,” Grace admitted. “Ben froze our bank accounts. He canceled my credit cards. I had to borrow money from my mom to buy gas to drive over here today.”

The lawyer nodded. “Nothing unusual about that. We’ll have to try to get the court to order your husband to come to a temporary financial agreement between the two of you.”

Mitzi doodled something on her legal pad, then considered whether or not to share some unhappy news with her client. She hesitated to pile more bad news on Grace Stanton, whose life had taken an ugly turn for the worse ever since she’d drowned her husband’s sports car two weeks earlier.

Grace caught the meaning of her lawyer’s pitying glance.

“What?” Grace said, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear. “You’re giving me that look.”

“What look?” Mitzi asked.

“It’s the look doctors give their patients before they tell them they’ve got an incurable disease. The look my college professor gave me right before he announced I’d pulled a D in statistics. The look that Ben gave me right before he admitted that night with J’Aimee wasn’t the first. Come on, Mitzi. Spit it out.”

Mitzi sighed. “Your divorce case has been assigned a judge, and we’ve got a date for an initial hearing.”

“But that’s good news, right? The faster we get things settled, the faster I can get my life back on track.”

“It would be good news,” Mitzi agreed. “Except that you drew Stackpole.”

“Who’s he? One of Ben’s old drinking buddies?”

“If only,” Mitzi said. “If we could prove he had some kind of association with your ex, that would be grounds for recusal, which would be great. But I doubt Ben and Cedric Stackpole have ever met.”

“Then, why is he bad news?”

“Because,” Mitzi said, “Cedric N. Stackpole Jr. is unofficial head of the He-Man Woman Hater Club.”

“Why?”

“Nobody knows. Stackpole just hates women in general and women plaintiffs specifically.”

“But, he’s a judge. I mean, judges are impartial, right?”

“Supposed to be,” Mitzi said. “Only Stackpole never got that memo. He’s a notorious misogynist. I’ve been lucky. I’ve only had one other divorce in front of him in the past.”

“How did that go?”

Mitzi’s eyes strayed to the row of framed diplomas on the wall opposite her desk. “Hmm? Don’t ask. My client got shafted. Her husband abandoned her and her two small children, left them basically penniless while he lived it up, funneling their marital assets into a dummy corporation. We had clear proof that he’d hidden assets, but Stackpole refused to hear a word of it. But because she finally had to go out and get a job to support herself and the children and eventually hooked up with a decent guy and allowed him to move in with her and the kids before the divorce was final, Stackpole decided she was an unfit mother. Gave the ex custody of the kids, forced her to move out of the house and sell it and split the proceeds with the ex, who was already a millionaire several times over.”

Mitzi shook her head at the memory. “The ex didn’t even want the kids. He just didn’t want to pay her child support. It was brutal.”

“How can a judge get away with that kind of thing?” Grace asked, horrified. “Can’t you report him or something?”

“That’s not how it works, unfortunately,” Mitzi said. “We’re just going to have to hope for the best. We’ll lay out the facts; Gracenotes is your business, carries your name, and is written and photographed solely by you. By locking you out of your own Web site, Ben has essentially hijacked your name, which is trademarked, right?”

Grace shook her head. “I was
going
to trademark it, but I just never got around to it. I guess I assumed Ben would take care of that.”

“Unfortunate,” Mitzi said. She scribbled a note to herself. “All right, the good news is, at least we know what we’re dealing with.”

“If that’s the good news, I don’t want to hear the bad stuff,” Grace said. She gathered her papers and went home to figure out her next move.

6

They’d gotten there early. The courtroom was half-full, and another hearing was still under way. Mitzi Stillwell led her up the right-side aisle and gestured at a vacant seat toward the front third of the room.

Grace studied the judge, who sat erect in his high-backed chair, listening intently. He looked to be in his late forties, with receding strawberry-blond hair combed straight back from a high forehead, steel-rimmed glasses, and a long, narrow, unsmiling face. “Is that our judge?”

“That’s Stackpole, in the flesh,” Mitzi said.

“I thought he’d be older,” Grace said.

“He was two years behind me in law school at UF,” Mitzi said. “And he was a pain in the ass, even then. But a politically connected pain. He was appointed to the bench at forty.”

A uniformed bailiff, a young black woman with startling platinum marcelled hair who was standing at the side door to the courtroom, caught Mitzi’s eye and gave her a very slight shake of the head.

“We gotta keep quiet,” Mitzi murmured. “Or he’ll have that bailiff toss us out.”

*   *   *

A lawyer standing at the table on the left front side of the room stood and spoke into a microphone. “Judge, we’d like the court to view this video my client shot of her husband, while he was terrorizing my client.” Grace couldn’t see the lawyer’s face, just the back of his balding head, and his neat, dark suit.

An older woman sitting at the opposite table stood. “Your honor, we have not seen that video, so we’re going to oppose that being introduced into evidence.”

The judge gave her a mirthless smile. “We’ll all see it together right now, shall we, Ms. Entwhistle?”

“My client was deliberately goaded into an altercation by Mrs. Keeler’s boyfriend. For months now, she and Luke Grigsby have repeatedly violated the terms of their custody agreement by either delivering Bo hours late, or not at all, at times when my client was scheduled to have Bo.”

“Well, Ms. Entwhistle, I don’t see where you’ve notified the court about that,” Stackpole said evenly.

“No sir,” Ms. Entwhistle said. “My client was trying to keep things amicable and civil, for the sake of the child. On the day that video was shot, Bo was to have been dropped off at his father’s house before lunch. Mrs. Keeler was aware that Bo had a T-ball game at four that afternoon. My client even sent her a text message reminding her of that fact. But she was a no-show. She never notified my client of Bo’s whereabouts, instead dropping him off at the park half an hour after the start of the game, and without his team uniform or his glove. The child was distraught, in fact, in tears, because he thought he’d let his team down.”

The opposing lawyer stood up. “Judge, if you watch our video, you’ll see that if there were indeed any tears, which my client states there weren’t, it was probably only because Bo was afraid that Wyatt Keeler, who also happens to be his coach, and who obviously has a volatile temper, might be angry at
him
.”

The man who’d been sitting at the table beside the female lawyer shot to his feet. He was coatless, but dressed in a pale yellow long-sleeved dress shirt and a blue necktie. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. His clean-shaven head was deeply tanned and gleamed in the glow of the courtroom lights. “That’s not true,” Wyatt Keeler called out, his voice cracking with emotion. “My son has never been afraid of me. He was crying because it was a big game, and Callie and Luke couldn’t be bothered to get him there in time to play.”

“That’s enough, Mr. Keeler,” the judge snapped. “Anything else, and I’ll have the bailiff remove you from this courtroom.” He closed his eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. “All right,” he said, gesturing to the same bailiff who’d already shushed Grace and Mitzi. “We’re about to be running late. I want to see this video right now.”

A moment later, a projection screen had been set up at the front of the room and the overhead lights dimmed. The video, grainy and depicting jerky movements, obviously shot from a cell phone.

As Grace and the other observers in the court watched, they saw Wyatt Keeler, dressed in a bright turquoise T-shirt with
MARASOTA MAULERS
in script lettering across the front, come storming toward the camera, his eyes narrowed, jaw set angrily, fists clenched.

“
Hey, man,” he called. “I’m not done with you.”

Now the camera showed a second man, with dark, slicked-back hair, wearing khaki slacks and a red polo shirt, walking hurriedly toward the camera. He wore dark sunglasses.
“Make sure you get all this, Callie,”
he called, glancing over his shoulder. An unseen female voice said. “
I got it.”

Now Wyatt Keeler charged toward the other man, grabbing him from behind by the shoulders and spinning him around. It looked like he was saying something, but their voices were muffled.

The woman’s voice rang out. “
Get your hands off him, Wyatt.”

Sunglasses man easily shook himself free of Wyatt Keeler’s grasp and went jogging away with Wyatt Keeler following at a steady clip.

“Back away, Wyatt,”
the woman’s voice called.
“If you put your hands on Luke one more time, I am calling the cops. I mean it, too.”

Wyatt Keeler looked right at the camera, stricken. His pace slowed and his facial expression softened, slightly. The camera moved back a little, now showing a gleaming white Trans-Am in the foreground.

“Don’t do this, Callie,”
Keeler pleaded.
“Bo needs me. You can’t just take him away like this. I won’t let you. This is his home.”

“Not anymore it ain’t,”
Luke Grigsby taunted. He was almost at the driver’s side of the Trans-Am.
“You call living in a double-wide trailer a home? The kid doesn’t even have his own room. He’s coming with us to Birmingham, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”

“Fuck you, Luke,”
Wyatt Keeler’s voice rang out crystal clear. He was advancing again, his face menacing.

“Get in the car, Callie,”
Luke said loudly.
“Come on, before this maniac hurts somebody.”

Luke opened the driver-side door and started to slide onto the seat. The camera was moving now, so the footage was even jerkier and out of focus. Even with that, Grace watched, appalled. Grigsby’s head popped up above the car door. “
See you later, alligator,”
he said, smirking, just before he closed the door.

Wyatt Keeler lunged toward the car.
“The hell you say,”
he bellowed, smashing his fist into the rolled-up car window.

“Stop it, Wyatt,”
the woman yelled. Her shrill scream pierced the cool courthouse air. The video stopped abruptly, and a moment later, the lights in the courtroom were turned on again.

Grace stared, wide-eyed with horror at the now-white screen.

“Ms. Entwhistle?” Judge Stackpole’s face was deadpan. “I can see why you didn’t want the court to view that video.” He turned toward Wyatt Keeler. “You, sir, are lucky that gentleman did not file assault charges against you. Frankly, what I’ve just seen here turns my stomach.”

Wyatt Keeler bowed his head and buried his face in his hands.

His wife’s lawyer saw an opening and dove right in. “Judge, as you can see, Wyatt Keeler is not a fit father or role model for a young child. We’d ask the court to grant my client’s application to go ahead with her planned move to Alabama with her fiancé, Mr. Grigsby, and of course, we want to have the previously agreed-to custody settlement amended to reflect that. Mrs. Keeler would be willing to allow Bo to visit his father for monthly supervised weekend visits, and she’d also be open to discussions about alternating holidays and, possibly, summer visits of up to a week. Again, to be supervised by a neutral party.”

Wyatt Keeler raised his head. “One weekend a month? This is my son we’re talking about.”

“Quiet, Mr. Keeler!” Stackpole boomed.

Betsy Entwhistle stood and placed a warning hand on her client’s shoulder. “I apologize for my client’s outburst. He won’t do it again. And I’ll add that he is not proud of his behavior that day. But judge, that video was choreographed and shot by Mrs. Keeler and Mr. Grigsby. It’s just as important to note what you don’t see as what you do. For instance, that video doesn’t show Mr. Grigsby deliberately baiting my client…”