Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

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“I met Cedric at a cocktail party, soon after I moved down here. We struck up a conversation. He seemed interested in my work—I told him about the seminars I’d done out west and about the book. And—I guess I rattled on a little too long about the end of my marriage. He was sympathetic, and it was clear he was attracted to me…”

Paula looked directly into the camera. “I know this sounds incredibly lame—but at the time I had no idea he was married. If I’d known then—I would never have started an affair. Not after the way my own marriage ended. That’s no excuse, I know. I should have made it my business to ask more questions, when he never wanted to meet me in public, insisted on meeting at my place. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. Cedric is the first man I’ve been intimate with since my divorce.

“Maybe a month after we’d started seeing each other, he confessed he was married. I was shocked, tried to break it off, but he seemed committed to ending his marriage and being with me. I gave him my book and suggested he read it. Not long after that, he suggested that he should refer clients to me—clients whose divorces he was presiding over.

“It didn’t occur to me that this was a breach of ethics. I was flattered and delighted that a distinguished judge thought I could assist these people.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Camryn said, pausing the video. “Paula, are you trying to tell us that it never occurred to you that you’d hit the motherlode with Stackpole making these counseling sessions mandatory? Come on! You were making fifteen hundred dollars a week just from the people in my little group.”

Paula bit her lip and looked away. Rochelle brought her iced tea. She took a long sip. “I’ll answer that on camera, if you like.”

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“When I moved here, I was very nearly destitute. I’d been in rehab and lost my license to practice in Oregon. When my husband and I divorced, we sold our home there at the very bottom of the market, for what amounted to pennies on the dollar, and, of course, he got half of that. I moved to Florida with my clothes, my car, and very little else. I was living in a motel room and working part-time as a social worker in a nursing home when I met Cedric.

“Cedric thought I should go into private practice again. He suggested I could get around Florida’s tough licensing laws by not calling myself a therapist or a marriage counselor. He loaned me the money to rent my office space and buy a computer and some secondhand office furniture. Start-up funding, he called it. He was hearing so many divorce cases. He said there was a real need for the kind of therapy I offer. And he said it could very lucrative.”

“I’ll say it was lucrative,” Harriett put in. Camryn swung around in her seat and focused the camera on her. “With what I paid you alone in the past six months, you could have bought a nice midsized sedan. And yet you’re still driving that dinky little toy car and operating out of that dump office. What happened to all the money? We heard you had a drug problem. Is that where it all went?”

Camryn chuckled, as did several other women at the table, although not Grace and not Suzanne.

Paula winced.

“That’s a fair question, Harriett. I’m guessing by mentioning my drug problem you’re referring to my arrest for forging prescriptions for tranquilizers in Oregon. I completed my court-ordered rehab out there, and I was doing reasonably well until I got involved with Cedric. And then … well, I can’t sugarcoat it, can I? I had a relapse. Obtaining drugs is much easier in Florida. I went to a storefront clinic, got a script, and I was in business again.

“You want to know where the money went? Not to drugs. I’m clean again. Most of it went to Cedric. Right off the bat, he told me my fee schedule was a joke. He said the patients he was referring to me were screwed up and desperate to get out of their lousy marriages. Why shouldn’t they pay, and why shouldn’t he be compensated for all those referrals? Especially since he’d already ‘loaned’ me all the money to get on my feet again.”

“Kickbacks,” Mitzi said succinctly. “You were paying him kickbacks? How much?”

“I can’t give you a precise figure,” Paula said. “But I only kept roughly a third of my fees. The rest I handed over to Cedric.”

“How did you pay him?” Mitzi asked. “Cash, check? Do you have any records?”

Paula looked puzzled. “You mean receipts? Don’t be absurd. Remember, Cedric was a lawyer before he was a judge. He’s really quite brilliant.”

“Then, how did you pay him?” Camryn asked from down the table. “If we’re going to be able to make charges stick against Stackpole, Mitzi here is going to need some proof.”

“I understand,” Paula said. “I was getting to that, Camryn, if you’ll just be patient.”

“Sorry.” Camryn flashed a grin and started filming again.

“Cedric’s wife kept all their household accounts. He said she watched every penny he earned or spent. I know she was pretty wealthy in her own right, and he resented that—she didn’t work, but she controlled the purse strings. He was very careful. He set up a janitorial business called Clean Sweep. All the money I paid him, I wrote out the checks to Clean Sweep. It was supposed to be for nightly cleaning and paper supplies, things like that.”

“But it was a dummy corporation?” Mitzi asked.

“As far as I know, I was Clean Sweep’s only client,” Paula said. “And I never got any janitorial services. I cleaned the office myself.”

“Sounds like you got taken to the cleaners yourself, girlfriend,” Thea chimed in.

Paula sighed. “He said he loved me. But he’d signed a prenup