Paradise (44 page)

"How do you feel about the growing number of hostile corporate takeovers?" Barbara Walters asked him, and Meredith noted with disgust that even the journalist was leaning forward in her chair, as if fascinated by him.

"I think it's a trend that's bound to continue, until such time as guidelines are set up to control it."

"Is anyone immune from a forced merger with you— friends, and so forth? I mean," she added
with
joking alarm, "is it possible that our own ABC could find itself your next prey?"

"The object of a takeover attempt is called the
target,"
Matt said evasively, smiling, "not
the prey.
However," he said with a lazy, disarming smile, "if it will set your mind at rest, I can assure you that
Intercorp
does not have an acquisitive eye on ABC." The men in the room chuckled at his quip, but Meredith kept her face perfectly blank.

"Can we talk a little more about your private life now? During the past few years you've reportedly had torrid love affairs with several movie stars, a princess, and most recently with Maria
Calvaris
, the shipping heiress. Were these widely publicized love affairs real, or were they invented by the gossip columnists?"

"Yes."

Meredith heard again the appreciative laughter that filled the library at Matt's sangfroid, and her eyes sparked with resentment over the ease with which he could win people over.

"You've never married, and I was wondering if you have any plans to marry in the future?"

"It's not out of the question."

His brief smile emphasized the impertinence of the question, and Meredith gritted her teeth, remembering how that smile had once made her heart hammer. Abruptly, the television cameras switched back to the local newscasters, but Meredith's moment of relief was squelched by the senator, who turned to her with friendly curiosity. "I imagine all of us here read Sally Mansfield's column, Meredith. Would you care to satisfy our curiosity and tell us why you don't like Farrell?"

Meredith managed to imitate Matt's lazy smile. "No."

They all laughed, but she saw the heightened curiosity in their faces, and she hastily busied herself plumping up the sofa pillows as the senator said to her father, "Stanton Avery has put Farrell's name up for membership at the country club."

Mentally cursing Matt Farrell for coming to
Chicago, Meredith shot her father a warning look, but his temper had already overruled his judgment "I'm quite certain that those of us in this room have enough influence among us to keep him out—even if everyone else who belongs to
Glenmoor
wants him in, which they won't"

Judge
Northrup
heard that and broke off his conversation with another guest. "Is that what you want us to do, Philip? Blackball him?"

"You're damned right it is."

"If you're convinced he's an undesirable, that's good enough for me," said the judge, looking around at the

others. Slowly but emphatically, all her father's guests nodded their unanimous agreement, and Meredith knew that Matt's chances of belonging to
Glenmoor
were now zero.

"He's bought a huge tract of land out in
Southville
," the judge told her father. "Wants it rezoned so he can build a big high-tech industrial complex on it."

"Is that right?" her father said, and Meredith realized from his next words that he planned to squelch that, too, if he could. "Who do we know on the
Southville
zoning commission?"

"Several people. There's Paulson and—"

"For heaven's sake!" she interrupted with a forced laugh, sending her father a pleading look. "There's no need to roll out the heavy guns just because I don't like Matt Farrell."

"I'm certain you and your father must have excellent reasons to feel as you do," Senator Davies said.

"You're damned
ri
—"

"Not at all!" Meredith said, cutting off her father and trying to stop a vendetta from getting under way. With a bright artificial smile, she told everyone, "The truth is that Matt Farrell made a pass at me years ago, when I was eighteen, and father has never forgiven him for it."

"Now I know where I've met him!" Mrs. Foster exclaimed, looking at her husband. Turning to Meredith, she said, "It was years ago at
Glenmoor
! I remember thinking what an extraordinarily attractive young man he was
..
. and, Meredith—
you
were the one who introduced us to him!"

Whether by accident or design, the senator spared Meredith the need to reply by saying, "Well, I hate to break up my own birthday party, but I have to be on a plane to
Washington
at
midnight
...."

A half hour later the last of the guests departed, and Meredith was bidding them good-bye beside her father when she saw a car turn into the drive. "Who the hell is that?" her father said, scowling at the headlights swooping toward them.

She peered at the car and identified it as a light blue Mercedes when it passed beneath one of the lamps along the drive. "It's Parker!"

"At
eleven o'clock
at night?"

Meredith began to tremble with foreboding, and that was before the porch lights illuminated his tense, grim face. "I was hoping the party would have broken up by now. I need to talk to both of you."

"Parker," Meredith began, "don't forget my father's been ill—"

"I won't distress him unduly," Parker promised, almost propelling them down the hall with a hand against both their backs, "but he needs to be apprised of the facts so that they can be dealt with properly."

"Stop talking about me like I'm not here," Philip said when they entered the library. "Facts about what? What the hell is going on?"

Pausing to close the library doors, Parker said, "I think you both ought to sit down."

"
Dammit
, Parker, nothing upsets me
more
than being kept in suspense—"

"Very well. Philip, last night I happened to have a look at Meredith's divorce decree, and there were several irregularities about it. Do you recall, about eight years ago, reading of a
Chicago attorney who was accepting fees from clients, then pocketing the fees without ever filing their cases?"

"Yes. So what?"

"And about five years ago there was another batch of stories about an alleged attorney on the South Side named Joseph
Grandola
who was convicted of fifty-some counts of fraud for misrepresenting himself as an attorney and charging fees to handle cases that never actually went near a courthouse." He waited for a comment, but short of a sudden rigidity in Philip's stance, there was no response, and so he went on. "
Grandola
had a year of law school before they kicked him out. A few years later he opened an office in a neighborhood where most of his 'clients' were undereducated. For over a decade he got away with his scam by taking only cases that wouldn't require a trial and that were unlikely to ever involve an opposing attorney—such as uncontested divorces, wills that needed to be drawn up, and so forth—"

Meredith sank down onto the sofa, her stomach beginning to churn, her mind already numbly accepting what Parker was going to tell her father, while her heart screamed a denial that it couldn't be true. Parker's voice droned on as if from a great distance. "He'd had some law school training, and he knew just enough legal jargon to draw up a fair representation of a legal pleading. When a client came to him wanting a divorce, he first made certain the other spouse was either in full agreement—or nowhere to be found. If that was so, he charged his client whatever he could get them to pay him, then he drew up a petition for divorce. Knowing he'd never be able to pass himself off as an attorney long enough to get a judge to sign the petition, he signed them himself."

"Are you trying to tell me," Philip said, his voice strained almost to the point of
unrecognizability
, "that this lawyer I hired eleven years ago was
not
a lawyer?"

"I'm afraid so."

"I don't believe it!" he said in a low shout, as if he could frighten the possibility away with his own fury.

"There's no point in giving yourself another heart attack over it, because it won't change anything," Parker pointed out quietly and reasonably, and Meredith felt a mild sense of relief as she saw her father make an effort to calm himself.

"Go on," he said after a moment.

"Today, after I verified that
Spyzhalski
isn't a member of the bar association, I sent an investigator over to the courthouse—a very
discreet
investigator we use for bank matters," he reassured Philip, who had clutched the back of a chair. "He spent the day and part of the night verifying and
reverifying
that Meredith's divorce is nowhere in the court records."

"I'll kill that bastard!"

"If you mean
Spyzhalski
, you'll have to find him first. He's vanished. If you mean Farrell," Parker continued in a resigned voice, "I strongly suggest you reconsider your attitude."

"like hell I will! Meredith can solve the whole thing very simply by flying to
Reno or somewhere and getting a quiet, quick divorce."

"I've already thought of that, and it won't help." He held up his hand to silence Philip's angry outburst. "Listen to me, Philip, because I've had time tonight to think this thing through. Even if Meredith did as you suggest, it wouldn't unsnarl the legal tangle of their property rights. That would still have to be done through the
Illinois
courts."

"Meredith would never need to tell him that there is a snarl!"

"Besides being morally and ethically wrong, it's also completely impractical." With a frustrated sigh, Parker explained. "The
ABA has already had two complaints against
Spyzhalski
, and they've turned the matter over to the authorities. Let's assume Meredith did as you just suggested, and
Spyzhalski
is arrested and he confesses. The minute he does, the authorities will notify Farrell that his divorce isn't legal—assuming he doesn't read about it in the newspaper first. Do you have any idea of the lawsuit he could slap against you for all this? In good faith, he allowed you and Meredith to assume the responsibility for handling the divorce, and you were negligent; furthermore, you've exposed him to bigamy all these years, and—"

"You seem to have the problems figured out," Philip snapped. "What do you suggest we do?"

"Whatever we
have
to do in order to pacify him and make him agree to a quick, uncomplicated divorce," Parker replied with calm implacability, then he turned to Meredith. "I'm afraid that job is going to fall to
you."

During the entire discussion, Meredith had been sitting, reeling from it all, but that remark served to stir her out of her blank stupor. "Just exactly why does he have to be pacified by me or by anyone else?"

"Because there are enormous financial implications here. Like it or not, Farrell is your legal husband of eleven years standing. You are a wealthy young woman, Meredith, and Farrell, as your legal husband, could conceivably demand a share of what you have—"

"Stop calling him that!"

"It's true," Parker said, but gently this time, "Farrell could refuse to cooperate in getting a divorce. He could also sue you for negligence—"

"Dear God!" she cried, standing up and beginning to pace. "I can't believe this! No, wait—we're overreacting," she said after a moment. Forcing herself to start thinking logically, as if she were dealing with a problem at work, she paused and then said, "If what I've read is true, Matt is far wealthier than we are—"

"Far wealthier," Parker confirmed, smiling approvingly at her for the calm logic she was exercising. "In which case, he would have a hell of a lot more to lose in a fight over property than you do."

"So there's nothing to worry about," she concluded, "because he'll want to get this thing over with just as badly as I do, and he'll be relieved that I don't want anything from him. In fact, we have the upper hand—"

"That's not quite true," Parker denied. "As I just explained, your father and you assumed the responsibility for obtaining the divorce, and since you failed to do it, Farrell's attorneys could probably convince the courts that the fault is yours. In which case, the judge might even grant him punitive damages. You, on the other hand, would have a hard time getting any money out of Farrell, because you were supposed to handle the divorce from here, and I suspect his attorneys could convince the court that you deliberately failed to do that out of some premeditated belief that you might later be able to squeeze him for money."

"He can rot in hell before he gets one more cent out of us," Philip snapped. "I already paid the bastard ten thousand dollars to get out of our lives and forgo any money of Meredith's or mine."

"How did you pay it to him?"

"I—" Philip's face fell. "I did what
Spyzhalski
told me to do which wasn't extraordinary—I wrote a check made jointly payable to Farrell and him."

"
Spyzhalski
," Parker pointed out sarcastically, "is a swindler. Do you honestly think he'd have scruples against forging Farrell's endorsement and cashing it himself?"