That was a fairly unusual thing to do: meant someone was really pissed off. There was considerable speculation about whose names might get dragged into it, how many other divorces there'd be, if theirs ever came to a trial."
"I recall that," she said, a lot more calmly than she had lived through it.
"And then when it didn't," Robey said, 'when it settled word was she cleaned him out then the word was that was the reason.
That he'd done the right thing and given her everything she asked for, so she wouldn't raise such a stink that he'd have to leave town maybe along with a lot of other people. Bad enough he was washed-up in politics; if he let that stuff hit the fan he would've had to forget the college job, too."
He paused. "I think Geoff Cohen might've even had that case."
"He did," the judge said. "Sam Evans from our shop represented Dan.
Sam was the divorce specialist. He was extremely good at it. Up until that case, consensus was he was the very best around He couldn't make divorce fun, but if you had to go through one and you could get Sam Evans, at least you could relax a little knew you were in good hands.
Top-notch negotiator; meticulous about details; scrupulously honest and a complete gentleman to boot.
"After the Hilliard case was over, Sam was almost inconsolable He said with all the sexual misconduct Hilliard had against him there'd been nothing he could do; he'd never had a chance The only hope that he'd had was that Geoff d make the kind of dumb mistake young lawyers sometimes make out of inexperience, and give Sam something he could use.
"Didn't happen. Sam said Geoff d known exactly what he had to work with; played his cards perfectly; made no mistakes at all and as a result ended up cleaning Sam's clock for him. After that in this part of the world there were two "best divorce lawyers around." In fact what Sam said about Geoff was what made me hire him. Sam'd gotten close to Ray during that racetrack deal-I thought it'd be too hard for him."
Then she frowned. "Who's the poor guy they're trying to make sink Dancin' Dan? Anyone else I might know?"
"I don't know," Robey said, 'you might. His name's Ambrose Merrion.
Canterbury District Court clerk. Ever got a speeding ticket on the way north to ski on something steeper than you've got right where you live?"
"I don't ski," she said. "People fall down doing that. Break their legs and stuff."
"Not if they know what they're doing," Robey said. "Anyway that's how I met him. Trooper wrote me up for eighty on Route Three-ninety-one in Cumberland. The other way to meet him's being active in politics. All the real Democratic insiders around here, all the way up to the state, even national, level: all of them would know him, know him very well. I doubt any one of them's ever paid a ticket in Amby's district."
"Did you pay yours?" the judge said.
"Truthfully? No, I didn't," Robey said. "It went, away. But not because of my secret life as a Democratic honcho. And not because I tried to fix it, either. The time when I got stopped up there for being in a big hurry, Marie and I were on our way to Montreal. Some friends from when she was at McGill; she hadn't seen most of them since she'd graduated, so naturally she was all keyed up. But I was excited too. This was going to be the best vacation wed ever had. Couldn't wait to get there's why I was driving so fast. I told the cop that in fact I hadn't realized how fast I had been going. Either he didn't believe me or that wasn't a good-enough excuse he wrote me up.
"I probably put being stopped completely out of my mind before we even crossed the state line into Vermont. And when we got home from those two-glorious-weeks-of-packed-powder, I didn't have the ticket. It was gone. I don't know what I did with it. I may've figured I'd get a summons in the mail; when it came I'd pay the ticket. But the summons never came. And of course I didn't notice because who thinks about a bill that never came? Then about, I dunno, three or four years ago, 'fore I started working for you, I got stopped again. On the Mass Pike on the way to Worcester. Paul McCartney concert at the Centrum:
Marie's a big fan of his. We're running late, as usual, so I was speeding, as usual. Got bagged for eighty-five. Suddenly it all comes back to me. Cop's back in the cruiser with my license, registration, punching his computer, and I'm thinking: "Oh my God, I never paid the one I got going up to Montreal. This cop's going to see there's a warrant out on me and he's going to put me in jail."
"But it didn't happen. Except for the fact I was getting another ticket costing me about a hundred-fifty bucks, and now we're really late for Paul McCartney, everything's perfectly fine.
"I couldn't understand it. The next day I called up the court in Canterbuaf and asked about it. Not that I like paying speeding tickets so much I go out looking for 'em when they get lost, but I was worried.
I didn't want it hanging over me.
