Chapter 11: The Lawyer Who Whistled
Owen called at seven the next morning.
He hired Paula Merritt, he said.
I know the name.
You should. She is the best divorce lawyer in the city who still reads her own mail.
As he spoke, her first email arrived.
REQUEST FOR COMPLETE HALE FAMILY TRUST INSTRUMENT.
Grant had finally hired someone who understood the difference between a large number and the document that controlled it.
At eight thirty, Paula called Owen. He joined me to the line with her consent. Grant was in her conference room; I heard him object before anyone finished introductions.
She has to produce it, he said.
Paula stopped him with two words.
I am speaking.
Grant went silent.
Mrs. Hale, Paula said, your verified disclosure identifies a premarital trust, lists the disputed properties as trust assets, and states that my client has no marital interest in them. It also discloses a nine-figure valuation.
That is correct.
It does not include the trust deed.
Also correct.
The disclosure fit into three lines aloud: premarital trust, zero marital interest, nine figures. The number had made Dale whistle. Paula moved straight to the machinery behind it.
How long has your client known I control the trust? I asked.
Paula let Grant answer.
I knew Hale was her name, he said. I knew Victor had investments. I learned this week that she was sole trustee and that the houses were inside it.
Scale and control, then, Paula said. Not the surname.
Grant did not answer.
Paula returned to me.
We will request the instrument, amendments, schedules, and authority provisions. We need to test the ownership claims and any marital commingling.
Send the request to me, Owen said. We will answer in writing.
I am trying to avoid unnecessary motion practice.
So am I.
Neither lawyer raised a voice. They did not need to.
Grant tried to enter the conversation again.
Nora, if this document is so clean, why have I never seen it?
You signed documents describing it before our wedding.
That is not the same thing.
No, I said. Reading them would have been the same thing.
Paula ended the call before the marriage could consume her billable hour.
Her formal request arrived at ten eleven: three pages, courteous, specific, and broader than the question she had asked aloud.
Complete trust deed. Every amendment. Trustee succession. Asset schedules. Communications concerning the houses and Grant's firm.
Owen read the list twice.
She does not expect the whole deed, he said.
Then why ask?
Because asking is free, refusal creates a record, and her client has admitted he does not know what the document says.
Helen called while I was still standing at the lake house window.
Tell me he is suffering.
He has competent counsel now.
That sounds worse.
For him, possibly.
After we hung up, I took Victor's red pencil from the contract box. He had made me read the trust deed before I signed it, page by page, at the same kitchen table.
Someday, he had said, someone may tell you this is only paper. That is when you ask why he is afraid to read it.
Grant had not been afraid then. He had been bored, which had proved more expensive.
Owen forwarded Paula's request to the trust's independent counsel and copied me.
There is something you should understand, he said. Paula is not asking only because she wants a judge to order production.
What else does she want?
She wants Grant to see what he never bothered to learn.
Across the city, my husband was paying one of the best lawyers alive to request, in writing, the document that had governed his home, his privileges, and his largest client for fifteen years.
For the first time, he wanted to read the life he had already signed.