Chapter 11: The Lawyer Who Whistled
Owen rang at seven the next morning.
He's hired Paula Merritt, he said.
I know the name.
You should. She's the best divorce lawyer in this city who still reads her own post.
Her first email arrived while he was telling me so, and it was one line long.
REQUEST FOR COMPLETE HALE FAMILY TRUST INSTRUMENT.
Grant had finally engaged somebody who understood the difference between a large number and the document that decides what the number does.
At half past eight Paula rang Owen and he joined me with her consent. Grant was in her conference room and objected before anyone had finished the introductions.
She has to produce it, he said.
Paula stopped him with three words.
I am speaking.
He didn't make another sound for eleven minutes.
Mrs. Hale, she said. Your verified disclosure identifies a premarital trust, lists both disputed properties as assets of it, states my client holds no marital interest, and discloses a nine-figure valuation.
That's correct.
It does not include the trust deed.
Also correct.
How long has your client known that I control it? I asked.
Paula let him answer, which told me something about how she runs a room.
I knew Hale was her name, Grant said. I knew Victor had investments. I found out this week that she's sole trustee and that both houses sit inside it.
Scale and control, then, Paula said. Not the surname.
He didn't answer that.
We'll be requesting the instrument, its amendments, the schedules and the authority provisions, she said to me. I need to test the ownership characterisation and look for marital commingling. That's the whole of my interest in it.
Send it to me in writing, Owen said. You'll have a written answer.
I'd like to avoid unnecessary motion practice.
So would I.
Neither of them raised their voice by a semitone. They didn't need to. It was the most restful eleven minutes of my month.
Then Grant found a gap.
Nora. If this document's so clean, why have I never seen it?
You signed four documents describing it before our wedding.
That's not the same thing.
No, I said. Reading them would have been the same thing.
Paula ended the call before my marriage could eat any more of her billable hour.
The formal request came through at eleven past ten. Three pages, courteous, precise, and noticeably wider than the question she'd asked out loud: the complete deed, every amendment, the trustee succession provisions, the asset schedules, and all communications concerning the two houses and concerning Wexler Voss.
Owen read it twice.
She doesn't expect to get the deed, he said.
Then why ask for it?
Because asking costs her nothing, a refusal creates a record she can use later, and her own client has just admitted on a recorded line that he doesn't know what's in it.
Helen rang while I was still standing at the window.
Tell me he's suffering.
He has competent counsel now.
That sounds worse.
For him, probably.
After she hung up I took Victor's red pencil out of the contract box. He made me read the trust deed before I signed my acceptance of the trusteeship — the whole thing, at that table, over two evenings, with the pencil, while he answered questions and refused to summarise.
Somebody will tell you one day that it's only paper, he said. That's the moment you ask him why he's afraid to read it.
Grant was never afraid of that document. He was bored by it, at a dinner, in 2011, while the steak arrived.
Boredom has turned out to be the more expensive of the two.
Owen forwarded Paula's request to the trust's independent counsel and copied me, with one line underneath.
There's something you should understand about this request, he wrote. She isn't only asking because she wants a judge to order production.
What else does she want?
She wants her client to see what he never bothered to learn.
Somewhere across the city my husband was paying one of the finest lawyers alive to request, in writing, on his behalf, the document that had governed his house, his privileges and his largest client for the entire length of our marriage.
He wanted to read it now.