At one time Royce had hoped that he would never have to go into Charles Ashbury’s office again.

Ashbury’s well-appointed law office, which specialized in “family law” – which mostly meant divorce and custody issues – was located toward the top of a multi-story office block a few miles away from the Pafco headquarters. Because divorce issues often came up heatedly and with no notice, like Royce’s had, they tried to be very responsive to requests for appointments. They were this time; Royce had called the office at nine on Monday morning, and he was sitting down with Ashbury at ten.

“So, Royce,” Ashbury said as soon as they got the perfunctory greetings out of the way, “what brings you here? I’d hoped I wouldn’t have to see you again, at least on a professional basis. Not another divorce, I hope.”

“No, not this time. Just the same one, the visitation issue we spent so much time on a few years ago.”

Ashbury was the lawyer who had stood by his side throughout the whole divorce debacle with Maxine. They had only had moderate success overall. The local family court system was prone to give child custody to the mother in all but the most extraordinary cases such as the mother being in prison, so Royce and Ashbury hadn’t expected to win that one, and they didn’t. Even so, custody and visitation had continued to be a battle for a long time.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the attorney shook his head, “but isn’t your little girl over eighteen now?”

“Yes, she’s twenty-one.”

“Royce, I hate to say this, but we’re over three years too late to do anything effective with a visitation issue.”

“I’m aware of that,” Royce grinned, “but I want to take a different approach to it.”

“I don’t quite understand what you’re driving at.”

Royce leaned back in his chair and began to explain. “It was just a little over six years between the time that idiot in the family court made that visitation ruling and the time Petra turned eighteen, right?”

“I’d have to check the files to be sure, but something about like that.”

“OK, as you recall, the agreement was that I was supposed to have Petra four days a month, plus two weeks a year in the summer, plus one winter and one summer major holiday, right?”

“Again, something like that. It’s about the usual thing they order.”

“By my math, that works out to sixty-six days a year. I think I remember telling you at the time that it seemed like a reasonable figure to me, considering school, work, and everything else. I really wasn’t happy with it since under the circumstances I thought it should have been all the time, but that’s another issue.”

“People rarely are happy with it, but really, it’s pretty reasonable if both parents are working.”

“It would have been reasonable if it had been adhered to, but it wasn’t. Maxine could come up with the most outrageous reasons why it was inconvenient to let me have Petra for the day. It couldn’t be on a weeknight because it might interfere with school, or school sports practices or games, or Petra’s guitar lessons or some other thing. It couldn’t be on Saturday because it might cause her to lose an equestrian lesson or piano lesson. It couldn’t be on Sunday because it might interfere with church, not that either of them had been in church in years. In the summer, how could I be cruel to take her away from her camp and her friends and their programs for two weeks in the middle of things? And so on, and so on.”

“And so on, indeed. This is not the first time I’ve heard of this kind of thing, but it’s usually more trouble to fight it than it’s worth, and the family law court in this county is not very supportive of such complaints from the father.”

“True, and we did not get very much support when we brought it up to them way back when. They seemed to think that I ought to be able to confer with Maxine and work things out with her like she was an adult, when she was the one being childish.”

Ashbury shook his head. “I’m afraid I’m still missing your point.”

“I haven’t quite reached it yet. The point of this is that during that six-year period, I should have had a total of three hundred and ninety-six days with Petra. Charles, I’m a meticulous person and probably a little anal retentive, but I kept careful records that show that during the six-year period I managed a total of seventy-six days with Petra. Some of them were only for an hour or two with her mother present and usually sniping at me over every word I said. It does not count Petra sneaking over to see me after she got her car, but that was only five times. So I feel that I’m owed something for the three hundred and twenty days I missed.”

“You can’t force Petra to spend that amount of time with you now. She’s an adult, after all.”

“I couldn’t agree more. But it was her mother who blocked my having access to Petra, so I think her mother could be sued for compensatory damages, and considering her willful neglect of my interests, I think punitive damages would be appropriate.”

“You might have a point on that,” Ashbury smiled, seeing some of Royce’s thinking now. “It’s shaky. There’s not a lot of case law on that approach that comes to mind. I think it would be a long shot through the family court system.”

“Not really knowing that much about the details of the law, in spite of everything I’d assume that family court is the place to start. If I’m wrong, I want to approach it as a breach of contract issue through the circuit court, or at least somewhere in the normal legal system.”

“Royce, I hate to say this, but a family court ruling doesn’t represent a contract.”

“Again, not being a lawyer it sounds like a contract to me, and I think a good attorney could argue that it represents a contract. The family court would probably not agree with my thinking, but there are higher courts that could be appealed to.”

“You might have a point on that, and if you were to win it might even bring a little sense to some of the more idiotic family court rulings I’ve seen. What kind of damages were you thinking of?”

“Something that will hurt,” Royce grinned. “I think I’d ask for, say, a thousand dollars a day in compensatory damages, and two thousand a day in punitive damages.”

The lawyer looked at him for a moment before he replied, “Just doing the math in my head, that’s a little under a million bucks.”

“Nine hundred and sixty thousand, to be exact,” Royce laughed with an evil glint in his eye. “Do you think I’m asking too low?”

“You’ll never stand a chance of getting it.” Ashbury shook his head. “Even if the court will go that high, and there’s no way a sane court would, if I remember the financial statements correctly there’s no way your wife and her new husband would have that kind of money or expect to be able to come up with it. It would cost you a ton of money to fight it through the court system in the first place. Like I said, there’s next to no chance of winning a suit like that.”

“Yes, there is a way of winning, but it takes some skewed thinking. Charles, let me put this as simply as I can. I don’t care if I get money from them. If I do, it’s fine, but I have enough money and I really don’t need theirs. My objective is to just take as much as I can away from them, and I don’t care if it’s me or some lawyer who gets it.”

Ashbury started to say something, stopped, eyed Royce carefully and smiled. “Royce, that’s sneaky, if I do say so myself. But you realize it’s going to cost you a lot of money to keep up your end of the fight.”

“Sure, and as far as I’m concerned, it would be money well spent. Charles, I have the money to spend and can spend it on something I really want. Unless they’ve hit the lotto or had a very rich relative die and leave them a fortune, they don’t. Maxine was the kind of person who had to have everything she wanted no matter if it left everyone in hock up to their ass, and from what little I know about Milton, I don’t think he’s much different. I can outspend them to defeat them. That’s what attrition warfare is all about. The last go-around we had, Maxine had possession of Petra, and that gave her all the advantage. She doesn’t have that advantage any more, at least if I can fight the kind of war I intend to fight.”

“Just to get this straight, rather than going for the win, you’re proposing a fight of continuances, appeals, trials and retrials, and so forth?”

“Sure, everything that it’s possible for a lawyer to use to drag things out, especially when he’s billing at over two hundred bucks an hour to sit around a courtroom with his clients for hours. Then when they finally get to the hearing, the other side has asked for a continuance because the attorney has a hangnail.”

“It’s not quite that bad,” Ashbury smirked. “I’ve seen it bad, but not quite that bad. How far would you want to carry this?”

“Well, I’d like to win it, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them living in cardboard boxes out behind some dumpster, either. If we do it right the end result will be the same, win or lose.”

“I think I understand. If it were me, I don’t think I’d go quite as far as you seem to want to, and you might not be as successful as you’re imagining.”

“Again, you have to remember the objective. If they can’t put up with the hassles and ask for a settlement, I don’t have to accept a settlement that’s less than ruinous to them, which is why I proposed a high dollar figure as a point to start negotiations. We can be magnanimous and adjust it downward to a point where it will still bankrupt them. If they don’t agree to that, they can keep on paying lawyers. Either way, they’re hurt and I win.”

Ashbury looked at him for several seconds without replying. “There’s a part of me that makes me want to tell you to take this somewhere else,” he said finally, “because this strikes me as being a little on the shaky side ethically. However, I’ve seen a lot worse in family law, but in a different context. There’s another part of me that would like to see this settled in court, because it would give aggrieved non-custodial parents like you another arrow to sling at a family court that all too often won’t do anything to enforce visitation issues. With that thought in mind, let’s take a swing at it. How soon do you want to get this going?”

“Not soon. I want you to do the preparation needed, the research, and anything else, but hold off on the actual filing until the time is right. I have a lot of evidence about the ways that Maxine blocked me from having access to Petra. Way back when, you suggested my keeping a diary about it, and I kept much better records than that, including recordings of a lot of calls when she did it.”

“Those are going to be inadmissible,” Ashbury pointed out. “You can’t bug your own phone without the other party being aware of it.

“Would you like to see a copy of the letter I sent Maxine early on warning her that I would be recording her phone calls? Even better, would you like to see the certified return receipt?”

“I think you have that one covered,” Ashbury laughed. “How long have you been planning this, anyway?”

“Not long, but I realized way back when that I would have to gather evidence just in case the opportunity to use it arrived. I could work out how to use it when I needed to. At one time I had hoped to be able to turn this into a hearing in front of the family court to force them to enforce the visitation, but things didn’t work out that way. Anyway, as I was saying, I want you to get ready to start the lawsuit. Exactly when, well, there are other things to work out.”

“Other things? What now?”

“Not really a great deal for you to be concerned with,” Royce smiled. “Charles, have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Nibbled to death by ducks?’”

“Somewhere, I guess.”

“Charles, you are just one duck in this flock. The mama duck, perhaps, and I’m still working on having the papa duck and all the little baby ducklings to get them all nipping and quacking and chewing at the same time. This is kind of like cooking for a banquet in that everything has to be ready at the same time, and I’m not quite sure when that time is going to be. Right at the moment I’m thinking it will be early June, mostly since Petra will be getting married and I’d just as soon have her out of the crossfire. But other things could come along to change the target date.”

“You really want your pound of flesh, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Maxine and Milt, mostly Maxine, took my daughter away from me, and I want them to pay for it. Even though I’ve lost my daughter, I still don’t want her hurt if I can help it.”

“I can appreciate that. All right, since we have that much time let me spend some of it researching case law since there might be some little something somewhere that could be of help. At some point we’re going to have to sit down and figure out how to collate and use the evidence and records you’ve collected. That evidence will probably include the complaints you made both to me and to the family court over the visitation issues. What do you say we get together and work on that after the first of the year sometime?”

“I think that will be in plenty of time, so long as we don’t waste too much of it.”

“Good enough,” Ashbury smiled. “You sure have managed to make my Monday morning interesting. Is there anything else I can do for you today?”

“As a matter of fact, there is. Charles, I know you specialize in family law. I have other lawyers who handle other aspects of my business. They mostly specialize in corporate law, and thankfully I don’t have much need for them. I think I need another lawyer for a different aspect of my plans. Do you know anyone who is basically an ambulance chaser? I mean someone who specializes in injury lawsuits, nuisance lawsuits? Someone who is a little hungry, maybe a little bit of a shyster who won’t mind getting his hands dirty and pushing the limits a little?”

“God knows there are enough of them running around. What do you have in mind?”

“What I have in mind is just nuisance lawsuits, something that will cause Maxine and Milton to have to spend money defending against pointless lawsuits. There might be some other odds and ends. I think the right person might have better ideas about that kind of thing than I do.”

“I ought to be able to come up with someone who’s fairly reliable but fits your description. Let me think about it for a day or two, and then I’ll get back with you.”

“That will be good enough. Charles, I might as well come right out and say it. I don’t want to do anything that’s illegal, but fortunately there’s a lot that I can do that is legal. The morality of it is immaterial to me, so long as it’s legal. I can’t see where forcing someone to spend money on lawyers is illegal.”

“If it gets too far out of hand, they could defend by suing you for something.”

“True, but the same rules apply. I can afford to spend more money on lawyers than Maxine and Milt.”

“That sure is different from what I normally hear around here,” Ashbury shook his head. “Usually it’s something to the effect of ‘Get me out of this marriage without the costs killing me.’ Sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t.”

“It would have been that way for me if Dad, rest his soul, hadn’t insisted on having Maxine and me sign an ironclad pre-nup, not that I hesitated for an instant because I had an idea of the kind of money that would be involved in his estate. Maxine didn’t like the idea of our having a pre-nup, but I wasn’t going to get married without it. That may have been what started all the trouble in the first place.”

“You might be right,” the attorney conceded. “So is there anything else you need from me?”

“Possibly. I think I need a private investigator to look into a few things for me. I mean, I don’t want to get too far down this road only to discover that Milt is sitting on a hundred million dollar lottery ticket and can outspend me ten to one or worse. There are a couple other things, but that’s the big one. There are things I could find out for myself, but I don’t want to let them get the idea that I’m sniffing around them so I need someone to do it for me. I want to keep things secret until the bomb drops on them, but when it happens I want them to know who dropped it.”

“At least you gave me an easy one,” Ashbury smiled. “In this part of the business it’s not uncommon for someone to want a detective to snoop around for them.” He reached into a desk drawer and rummaged around for a bit before pulling out a sheet of paper. He scribbled on it for a moment, then scaled it across the desk. “Here’s a list of several agencies we have used in the past, and they’re all fairly reliable. Since you’re looking more at a background check, I’d go with one of the ones that I’ve marked. These are all small agencies and you never know when they’re going to be too busy. If you can’t get any of the marked ones, any of the others will probably be just fine.”

“Good enough. I think that will hold me for today, but I’ll keep you posted.”

“I’ll get you the name of your ambulance chaser in a day or two. I want to think about that one a little bit.”

In a few minutes Royce left the office, leaving a large check behind as a retainer. That had gone about as well as he could have expected, he thought. As he had indicated, what he intended to do was a little shaky on the ethical side even though it was legal, and he had wondered if Ashbury was going to go along with it; if he didn’t there were other attorneys he could have called on. But Ashbury had seen that he would be billing a lot of easy hours out of this one, and Royce was well aware that money often had an interesting effect on morals.

Three hundred miles away at the college Petra attended Barry Keller was talking with his roommate Mike Gearing in their dorm room. “This has gotten way out of hand,” he shook his head. “I guess Petra and her mother spent all weekend talking about the wedding. I mean, they’re really going all out. Damn, I never figured on letting things get this far.”

“You’re saying you don’t want to get married?”

“Let’s just say that I’m having second thoughts. Don’t get me wrong; Petra is cute and she’s fun, especially fun in bed. I don’t know the details, but her old man has got money. Her real one, that is, not her stepdad. From what I can figure out, he’s thrown a lot of cash at her to piss off her mother, and I can’t help but think that he might be willing to throw around some more after we’re married.”

“You mean, like helping to buy a house or something?”

“Yeah, something like that. I haven’t met the guy, but it sounds like he’s an easy touch for her.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Barry leaned back on his bed and shook his head. “I don’t know that I’m ready to get married yet,” he said after a moment. “I mean, at one time I’d figured on getting out of college, getting a good job, and spending some money on having fun. I don’t know that I’m ready for that whole house and kids thing, at least not yet. I mean, I ought to have some fun before I get buried in that stuff.”

“You had plenty of fun before you got going with Petra,” Mike pointed out. “I mean, God, it was the chick of the week club there for a while.”

“Yeah, and then I got going with her, and that stuff had to come to an end, at least around here where she might hear about it. But I could still have some fun elsewhere. I mean, last weekend I was at a party with some buddies, and Vicky Bogardus was there. She was in my high school class and she always was a stone fox. I always wanted to tear off a piece of that, but I never got a sniff. It turned out she was on the rebound from some guy and we were both feeling pretty good. I found out that she was just as much fun in bed as I always thought she would be.”

“I don’t suppose you’re thinking about dropping Petra for her?”

“No, she wants to stay around home and I want to get as far away from there as I can, but it made for a fine couple of evenings. The heck of it is that if I get married, it’s going to be a lot harder to have that kind of fun.”

“That would put a crimp in that kind of action, that’s for sure.”

“No fooling. I mean, there are girls on this campus I would have loved to have taken a run at, and I think they’d go for it pretty easy, but I can’t do it with Petra hanging over my shoulder. When we get married, it’s going to be that much worse, and I’m not sure it’s going to be worth it.”

“That’s something to think about, all right,” Mike smiled. “But you know, there are some compensations. Suppose you get married, and her old man more or less gives you a house like I was just saying. Then, after a year or so she divorces you because you won’t leave the toilet seat down or some damn thing. If you’re in a state with good community property or no-fault divorce laws, you wind up getting a half or a third of the house. That strikes me as pretty easy money.”

“Yeah, I was thinking something like that, but the heck of it is that it gets a whole lot more complicated if she gets pregnant, and no matter what she says I’ll bet she tosses her birth control pills away at the wedding along with a bouquet. Then I would be in a world of hurt and I’m not sure I want to take the risk.”

“That’s a tough call to make, buddy, but you’d better be making up your mind pretty soon.”

“Yeah, I know. I know that all the way back yesterday I was thinking I might be better off to keep my options open. There are a lot of other girls like Vicky out there, and it sure would be nice to enjoy them.”

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