When We Were Married Ch. 02C

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I was not real happy all day. My personal and professional lives intersected to make it a really shitty day all around.

It was Wednesday and I spent all day preparing a case I'd selected – or at least which had selected me – that was due to start Monday. Charles Bingham was 74 years old. His wife Mabel had developed lung cancer in 1992. It spread to her breasts or she developed breast cancer concurrently. The doctors didn't seem real sure on the sequence.

She had chemo and drugs and had her breasts cut off and she seemed to be one of the lucky ones that beat two types of incurable cancers.

Then in 2003 the doctors found spots on her lungs and she went the chemo/drug regimen again. Only this time there was no miracle. She dropped from 187 pounds on her 5-foot-4 frame to 85 pounds by early 2005. She was wracked with intolerable pain that the drugs couldn't knock down.

No matter what doctors tell you, there are some types of pain no narcotic will really work effectively again. I had a grandmother who developed ovarian cancer when I was 13 and they had to eventually dope her into unconsciousness because her 24-hour screaming from the pain was driving other patients and even medical staff crazy. A few days later she was dead. I always thought some merciful doctor or nurse gave her a little too much pain medicine.

Mabel Bingham was incontinent and although he had assistance, Charles was the one who usually had to clean her shitty diapers and change the bedsheets after she pissed through them again and again. He had to listen to her scream day and night They had two grown daughters, but he was her husband and it was his duty to care for his wife. So he did.

Until the day she stopped screaming and when a nurse's aide came in, she found Charles sitting beside a pale and colorless Mabel, holding one of her hands in both of his. It would have seemed a merciful end until a routine medical exam showed five times the level of pain killing narcotic in her body that could be explained by the action of the automated narcotic drip by her bed.

A quiet and unemotional Charles Bingham confessed that he manually gave Mabel the overdose when she momentarily came to a state of consciousness and begged him to release her.

"I had to," he said, and then began crying.

A trial on a charge of manslaughter was to begin Monday. Everyone knew he'd be found guilty and then it was up to Judge Anne Carroll to decide if he'd be given a five year suspended sentence or a one-year suspended sentence. Only in rare occasions did a husband or wife in that type of situation ever receive any kind of real sentence. Usually

there was too much public sympathy for the murderer to hit them with any real time.

Judges, of course, are apolitical creatures and don't follow the elections. Sure...and if you believe that I have the proverbial bridge for sale. No one was going to hit a grieving senior with real jail time and have that come back to bite them the next time they came up for election. And in Florida, circuit judges have to be re-elected.

Of course, no SA wanted the trial. There was no excitement, no points to be made and if by some chance you managed to get a conviction, who the hell could brag about sending a 70-something grieving criminal to prison? So nobody wanted the case and while I could have dumped it on somebody, I decided I'd take it. Maybe get a few points back among the staff for the points I'd lost by the way I'd treated Carlisle on the drug-dealer child murdering case.

Unfortunately, I'd had too much time on my hands and I'd actually done some digging. Some I did myself, some I had one of our office investigators handle, and I called in one of the detectives who had been assigned the case and gave him a few extra chores.

So I leaned back in my chair and examined a few documents on the desk in front of me. I didn't think anything could make me feel worse about life in general than what I'd gone through over the last three months, but somehow Charles Bingham had managed that stunt.

No matter what I did, I was going to feel like absolute crap at the end of the day next Monday. There are days of triumph as a prosecutor. Those are the days when you bring evil-doers to justice or strike a blow for some poor soul and ensure there is at least retroactive justice.

And then there are days like next Monday promised to be. I didn't know who I felt more pity for – poor Mabel Bingham, or poor Charles Bingham. And the worst of it all was, as happened so many times, the decision on which way to go rested in my hands.

Talk about where the buck stops. When prosecutors go bad, become drunks or suicides or use their position for sex or profit, I think it's that weight, the responsibility that eventually breaks them.

That's what most people don't understand. The people with real power in our system aren't cops. They just investigate and arrest. The people with real power aren't judges. They have a lot of power, but who they see and what charges they deliberate on don't come from them.

I decide that. In my hands is the power to decide who is arrested and who is released; who faces death or 25 years or who gets mercy. And there really is no oversight, nobody looking over my shoulder.

Cops can bitch, but my decisions are final. Judges can bitch and threaten to take action, but they never do. The only person with any real power over me is the Big Man, and he had given me the Keys to the Kingdom and he had never in five years countermanded any decision I'd made.

Most of the time it doesn't bother me. I've made mistakes, but it comes with the territory. Surgeons kill people. It's how they learn. I had sent people to prison who didn't deserve what they got and let people go free or out early and regretted my actions. But it was part of the job.

But Monday was going to bother me. For the first time in a long time I wasn't sure which way I should go, what I should do about a case. Having a great deal of power can be a good thing, except when you don't know what to do with it.

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Lew knocked on the door and I got up from the little kitchen/dinette table in the alcove that served as a kitchen/dining room and opened the door.

Lew was Lew. Tall, about six-foot, sandy colored hair, that same crooked grin as if he was into some private joke that you weren't aware of. But it was a good smile. He was one of those people you like from the first moment you see them, even though I couldn't have explained exactly why.

I read a book one time that said when you meet people like that, people you 'fit' with either in terms of friendship or romance, it's a case of people who known each other in a prior life meeting up again. I'm not sure I believe in reincarnation, but I know we'd been good friends almost from the first day we'd met at UF.

He looked at me oddly. I realized we'd done all our communicating by telephone since I'd asked him to handle my divorce. It had been, what, maybe five or six months since we'd laid eyes on each other.

"What? You look like I've grown horns or a second head."

He looked me up and down and then said, "Have you been in a third world country? Or imprisoned in a Mexican prison where they make you pay for your own food? God, I hope you haven't got cancer."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

He gestured with his hand, up and down.

"You look like you've lost 50 pounds. I can actually see the beginnings of cheekbones and, dammit, I think you're down to two chins. There used to be three of them. And where's the gut?"

"Very funny. I've lost a couple of pounds in the last few months."

He walked around me, inspecting me as if I were a model. I was wearing shorts and a tee-shirt.

"If I didn't know better, I'd swear I actually could see the beginnings of a rib cage under that fat."

"Alright, enough frat boy humor. I haven't had much of an appetite, I've been eating mostly protein, and I've started working out. I may have lost 20 pounds or so, but I'm still pretty much a Pillsbury doughboy."

He grinned and tried to kiss me. I bopped him on the forehead with an open palm.

"You're hot. Give me a kiss."

"Go fuck yourself. Now get serious."

"Don't get your panties into a wad, Bill. Just playing with you. But God, you really have lost weight. I've never seen you looking like this. Have the secretaries started hitting on you yet?"

"I have just lost my wife, nobody of the female persuasion is hitting on me or even acknowledging that I'm alive, and you have to start making jokes? What kind of friend are you?"

"Seriously? It's been nearly two months plus since she threw you out. How long since you've gotten laid?"

"Three, three and a half months."

"My God, I know you're an old man but you haven't laid any pipe in a quarter of a year. You know if you don't give it any exercise, it'll fall off."

"Funny. With your schedule, when's the last time you got any?"

"Last night. You know how Mona gets when I come back from one of those trips. I thought I was going to need transfusions. God, she is a hungry bitch."

"Go ahead. Rub it in. Be a friend."

He sat down a the table and gave me a serious look.

"I'm sorry, Bill. I know it must be a sore point. But Jesus Christ, she's balling this guy and getting her jollies every night. You don't owe her any loyalty or fidelity. You and I both know how easy it would be for you to grab a piece. You never did it before because you were married and in love with Debbie. The same reason I don't cheat on Mona, although God knows I'm tempted sometimes. There was this blonde back in Omaha... but that's another story.

"But the point is, she's one over on you. You oughta go fuck someone just so you will feel even."

"I appreciate the thought, Lew, but I'm not ready or even interested."

He shook his head.

"You poor bastard. You got it bad. Well, they tell me there's life after divorce and since 50 percent of marriages end, I tend to believe it, but...anyway, give me the dirt."

I looked at him for a few moments. I don't know why it was so hard to show the emails to anyone. Maybe because I felt ashamed of what it showed about me. Or, only God knows why, I hated for anyone else to know just what a miserable bitch she was. How screwed up was that?

I went over to the bed and pulled a drawer out and took a manila folder out that was bulging with printouts.

"The ones that are pertinent are starred and on top. The rest are trash, although I might have missed something."

I handed it to him and poured myself a cup of coffee. He started reading. He was close to a speed reader and smarter than any other two men I'd ever known. I asked him if he wanted anything to drink and he just shook his head and kept flipping through the printouts. A few times he stopped, apparently re-read, and shook his head.

Finally he closed the folder, laid it down on the table, stood up and tapped me on the chin with the back of his hand.

"You know I ought to kick your ass for sitting on these. We could have wrapped this case a month ago if I'd known about them."

"They make for heavy reading, Lew, but what are they? It's just the record of a flirtation. I don't think she was fucking him until after our marriage fell apart. And even if she was, as you well know, it wouldn't have made any difference in how the case went.

"Adultery, even sex outside of marriage, isn't a factor in who gets what or who gets the kids. I don't know that even if this had been a fault-state that a judge would have considered a chaste romance grounds for divorce or denying alimony."

He shook his head.

"You've been a prosecutor too long, my friend. This gives us all kinds of ammunition. You don't have to prove she had sex to prove she was cheating. Marriages have dissolved over on-line romances where the parties never even saw each other in the flesh."

"So what. If I wanted a divorce and she was fighting it they might be worth something, but she started things. She wants out."

"Well, true, Bill, but it still puts her in a bad light in the eyes of the judge, and judges are human, even though sometimes it's hard to tell for sure. But forget about that for a moment.

"You can go after the boyfriend for alienation of affections. We can go at it from a contract law approach. Even if they don't call it that, a marriage is a contract and boytoy interfered in your contract with your wife, deprived you of the normal marital rights you should be getting – like sex. You can put a dollar figure on the value of the sex you're not getting, and the marital support that has been withdrawn.

"I know you read about it a lot more than you actually see it in real life, but it does happen. The bastard seduced her, or maybe they seduced each other, but he destroyed your marriage before he ever got into bed with her. Anybody with an IQ above 5 would read those emails and see what he was doing."

"Proving it-"

"Isn't important. He's already on thin ice at UNF from what you said. You bring a court case against him and it gets coverage in the press, and it will because I know too many reporters who owe me favors, and he's toast. He'll be more trouble, much more trouble, than he's worth to them. If you never got a penny, you'll hurt him bad. And if you actually got a judgment against him, that's just gravy.

"Now it doesn't matter whether you actually want to go after him. If he means anything to her, other than a good fuck, you can use it as a club to make her back off with the threat of ruining him. Of course, if he is only a good fuck, then it won't matter and she threw her marriage away for some strange cock.

"You can also go after the university. I know you don't want to cause her to lose her job, but she doesn't have to know that. These emails prove she was seeing him, having intimate meetings, doing things a wife and a single guy shouldn't be doing, and people around them had to be aware of what was going on. You said it yourself, most people there seemed to already think of them as a couple.

"Even if the administration wasn't aware of what was going on, didn't encourage it, they're still ultimately responsible for the work environment they foster. They'll argue that adultery and romance is a personal issue and not their concern, but they're talking out of their asses.

"There have been too many cases where a business or company allowed sexual harassment or sexual behavior that led to marriage breakups and the company got dragged in. They can say all day long it's not their problem, but their human resources departments know better.

"And UNF knows this. Besides, they know me. I've sued them a couple of times on other issues. They see my name on the paperwork and they will crap, get rid of boyfriend and Debbie, and throw money at you to make ME go away."

Despite feeling like shit, I couldn't help smiling.

"You know, Lew, if you were only half as good as you think you are, you'd be a hell of a lawyer."

He smiled back.

"Never believed in false modesty. After all, I was –"

"Yeah I know, first in your class. Where have I heard that before? Oh, from you about five million times. You do realize modesty is an attractive quality, even if you have to fake it."

"Not my style, Bill, Anyway, those are all peripheral. What really makes these gold is nothing legal. We don't have to do anything, except make copies available. You really think Debbie wants her parents, your parents, your friends, to learn what she was up to when she was supposed to be a loving wife. And your kids, when they see-"

"NO. I'm not going that route. Use the other threats, but you don't threaten to release these. I'm not going to tell you twice, Lew. I know you. You're a fucking shark in the courtroom and you've got no limits. You'll do anything to win, and you're not going to do that to her. I've been your friend a long time, but we're through if you even threaten her with that."

"Even after she threw away 20 years of marriage and a relationship, threw you out of your house so you have to have a cop with you to go back in, started sleeping with a young guy while your kids are in the house, lied to your kids to make them think you were crazy when she knew you were right to be suspicious. Oh, and remember that shaved pussy?"

"Yeah, so?"

"How can you be that stupid? You said yourself, she wasn't shaving it for you. You never knew anything about it. Who was she shaving it for? That's right, the stud. And what does that tell us? I'll bet you any amount of money that he knew she'd shaved it. Probably because he asked her to. Remember, you only know what they put in their emails. They were meeting every day and who knows what was said and done at those little get-togethers.

"And even if he didn't touch her, she was sitting there having lunch with him knowing he knew she had shaved it, and he knew she'd shaved it for him. That's as close as you can come to having sex without actually having sex. Call it Flirting on Steroids or Flirting 2.1.

"That's the woman whose image and reputation you want to protect? God help me from ever being that stupid about any woman, even Mona."

He was right and I couldn't even answer to myself why I wasn't willing to destroy her. I just knew I couldn't.

"Just don't use it that way."

"If we introduce them into court for the divorce or sue the boyfriend or the school, it will still all come out."

"We won't do that. Just make her believe we will."

He was silent for a minute.

"And what if she won't bluff, Bill?"

I hadn't thought that far ahead.

"Then she'll win. She'll get her alimony. Even if it makes me want to rip my eyes out every time she gets one of those alimony checks. That's the way it will have to be."

"You are too fucking good for her, Bill. Way, way too good. And the sad part is, she will never know."

"We had 17 – maybe 16 – good years...ten really great years...maybe that's all we're entitled to in this life."

"And on that cheery note, I'm going to take you out. Get some 'picking up slut' clothes on and I'm buying the drinks. I might just get you laid tonight."

He didn't, but we had a great time getting buzzed at Pelicans and despite what Sergeant Hastings had said, we still had an honor guard of two cops bring us home, unload us on the bed and couch in the condo and we slept it off like two good friends who are totally bombed should do.

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She was thawing out a large Tombstone Pizza when she heard him coming into the house. Bill Jr. was out at a friend's house for the night and Kelly had gotten her things together to go over to a friend's house to "study." But she had known their parents since Kelly was in first grade with their daughter and they'd keep her in line. It would give her and Doug some alone time, even though she didn't really feel much like it right now.

Kelly came in and gave her a hug. As Doug walked in, throwing his briefcase on a chair at the kitchen table, Kelly turned to him and reached up to kiss his cheek. Doug looked at her with a bemused expression, then started grinning as she dropped her bag and began to tickle him.

He grabbed her wrists and held her out away from him.

"Whoa, cowgirl. That's no-go territory."

"That wasn't what you said when we were in the pool the other day."

He shook his head and said, "Truce. Stop the tickling. I've had a long hard day and tickling isn't on the agenda tonight."

Kelly made a face at him.

"Spoil sport."

Looking at the two of them, Debbie suddenly wondered when Kelly's breasts had gotten so damned big, or was it just that her blouse was extra tight tonight. Her heart sank a little when she realized her daughter's nipples were stiff and pushing out against the fabric. And Doug noticed. That bulge between his legs made it clear he noticed.