Wire-Pulling Pt. 01

"She didn't," he conceded, another insecure expression creeping on his face. "Nonetheless, after working with her during her initial trial, I have a few suspicions about the reasons for your reluctance. And we need your help."

"Well, then I'm curious how you plan on getting my help," I replied with still-raised eyebrows, causing him to sigh before he answered.

"Five weeks ago, your mother was arrested on charges of economic espionage. Allegedly, she sold some sensitive data regarding 'Schrader Bank & Trust', the privately owned bank your stepfather worked for before starting his political career. And, as she got arrested, your stepfather immediately started the divorce proceedings," he said, after fixing me with a determined look.

That actually did pique my interest.

"Huh. The divorce part didn't make it into the news." I mused. "Well, good for her."

That last comment caused him to show me a mirthless grin before he continued talking.

"The moment she was arrested, a server showed up to throw the divorce papers in her face. The grounds for the divorce were listed as adultery, which could explain the curious coincidence of having her served the very minute she gets arrested. Then, however, he must have made use of some special connections, because, after only a single court date, the divorce was granted and your mother is not getting anything."

I stared at him for a minute, trying to comprehend what I had just been told, before finding my voice.

"This doesn't make sense," I said, more to myself than to him.

"Indeed, it doesn't. I don't claim to know the woman especially well, but even to me, after spending only a few weeks as her defense attorney, it is clear that she would never dare cross that man." When he said that last part, he gave me a portentous look. "Which brings me to the reason for my visit, despite your mother's reluctance to involve you. I was hoping you could provide me with a... clearer picture of what we have to expect when dealing with the senator."

"I'm sorry," I said after realizing what he just said. "What 'we' have to expect? I sure as hell won't be included in that."

"Surely, you're going to help? Despite whatever happened between you two, she is still your mother," he exclaimed.

I was SO not going to discuss that part of my past with a total stranger. It didn't matter to me whether he claimed to be my mother's lawyer, since all I had to support that claim was his word. My apparently Ex-Stepfather was a U.S. Senator with sizable resources, and it wouldn't be beneath him to send a fake lawyer just to record me making defamatory statements about him that he could then use against me.

The simple truth was that I hated both of them. My mother and the bastard. I hated him for destroying our little family, and I hated her for letting him. She was all I had left after my father died, and we supported each other to get through that loss. It wasn't easy, given how my Dad lost his health insurance halfway through his chemo, and his life insurance had barely covered his piled-up medical bills, but we made it work. We still had each other, and that was enough for me. That is, until she met him.

Senator Richard Anderson. Or, how I liked to call him during my youth, the Dick.

She had always been the timid type. Emotionally needy, somewhat indecisive, and submissive. So, it wasn't exactly shocking that she felt drawn to the powerful and rich guy who liked to take control. But I simply couldn't understand how she could allow it to escalate that much.

When he started beating her, she just took it. When I tried to comfort her, she defended him. And it drove me crazy. I remember how powerless and desperate I felt when my pleas to leave him wouldn't reach her. So, I tried to defend her, but that just made it so much worse. Because, after he finally lost his patience and beat me down, both of us saw the conflict in my mother's eyes. The battle between her innate submissiveness and her need to defend her child.

And her submissiveness won.

From that day onwards, he knew he could do as he pleased with the both of us. I only learned that lesson after my first trip to the ER. A consequence of him once again "disciplining" me. I told the doctors exactly what happened, who then immediately called social services... but nothing ever came of it. Next, I tried to call the cops when he started beating my mother again, but, after they showed up, they just asked him what was going on. His story of me being a jealous child, rebelling against the man who tried to replace my dead father, was taken at face value because, to my horror, my mother corroborated it as soon as she showed up with a fresh coat of makeup on her face. After that, whenever I tried to make waves, it was just shrugged off as another episode of me "throwing a fit".

I later learned that he had already risen to a position that allowed him to make powerful friends, and they covered for him. There was shit-all I could do. I was too weak to stand up to him, too poor to offer my mother a viable alternative, and too insignificant to get help. It was a dark chapter in my life that I had thankfully left behind. At least that's what I thought until this damn lawyer knocked on my door.

I shook the memories off and turned back to Breston.

"Listen," I said, getting audibly annoyed with his continuous demands. "There's only one thing you need to know. The day before I turned eighteen, my loving mother showed up in my room, handed me an envelope containing four grand in cash, and told me to get out of their house. So, I happily did. By now, I've made a life for myself as Paul White, and I will not risk that to help her out of the mess she created. I tried, I failed, I moved on!"

He stared at the papers in his hands for a few seconds. For an untrained person, his eyes darting around may have looked like he was searching them for a specific piece of information. For me, however, it was clear that he was frantically trying to figure out how to appease me.

"Don't you think it is possible that your mother had been... coerced or forced into compliance?" he asked quietly.

True to my resolve, I didn't actually say anything to answer his question. I did, however, lift a single eyebrow and gave him a look that surely answered his question regardless.

"But then, why..." his voice trailed off, but the question in it sounded genuine. That confused me. He obviously wasn't used to this kind of situation. I got the distinct impression that he wasn't a particularly good lawyer if he lacked that kind of experience and insight.

"I work security, Mr. Breston. I have seen my share of abusive spouses and parents. And, no matter how insensitive it may sound, at the end of the day, staying in an abusive relationship is a choice you make. She chose to stay with the man who beat her. And then, when he..." I caught myself mid-sentence. I had to remind myself again not to get caught in my anger, and not to reveal too much to this man until I knew for sure who he was. "She chose to rather send me away than to leave with me. A friend of mine, who also had to live with a set of assholes as his family, once told me that the worst punishment you can hand out to people is to simply let them suffer the consequences of their own actions."

He thought about my words for a moment, before he nodded and spoke with newfound conviction.

"Sounds reasonable. But here's the deal, Paul." I noted the sudden shift to being on a first-name basis when he tried to appeal to me on an emotional level, but chose not to comment on it. "I am convinced that your mother didn't do what she's being accused of. So, if I'm right, you would let her suffer the consequences of someone else's actions. Your stepfather's actions, to be precise," he said, and he undoubtedly saw how these words had the desired effect on me before he hurriedly pressed on. "Look at it this way. If you don't want to do this to help your mother, then do it to hurt Senator Anderson. If we can prove that this is all a ruse to get rid of his wife for some reason, he will have to take responsibility for what he did."

I just stood there with an expression that showed how unhappy I was with the situation, but, again, he knew he had me as soon as he mentioned the possibility of sticking it to the asshole. After a minute, I released a frustrated groan before walking into the kitchen, got two beers, and plopped myself down into my armchair.

He accepted the beer with gratitude, though I noticed that he never touched it while he informed me of my mother's fate.

She was arrested on August 28th, and he had spent most of the month since then trying to locate me. On September 16th, after merely five hours in court, the divorce was granted. It was clear to the court that she had betrayed her husband, a widely respected political figure, in every conceivable way. Not only did she have an affair with another man, whom she apparently met multiple times per week on a regular basis, but she also stole sensitive data from her husband's former employer and sold it to a competitor in exchange for four million dollars.

Of course, both, the "traitorous wife" as the Senator's lawyer called her, and the competing bank, denied their involvement in these illegal activities. At the same time, however, neither of them was able to explain the money that was transferred into an account in my mother's name, from an account registered to a former employee of the competing bank. And as if the whole thing didn't already look bad enough, that former employee who allegedly made that transfer has been dead for over a decade, so the bank must have had a hand in this transaction.

Displaying his great suffering, the "betrayed husband" then described his disappointment upon his wife's actions, causing the entire courtroom to feel sorry for the respectable, loving, and caring man, who even took it upon himself to care for her child as his own until I fled the nest. I had to scoff as Breston relayed that part to me. Naturally, the court did not grant my mother even a penny in maintenance, nor did she get a share of their marital assets.

Ever since her arrest, the media had dragged her name through the dirt in every way they could. Breston had brought the recording of an interview with Mom's supposed lover, in which he maintained his story of her being a resigned housewife that barely suppressed her hatred for the man she was married to. He also claimed that she had repeatedly promised to leave her husband for him, to then spend the rest of her life by her lover's side.

Then Loverboy said something that made me perk up.

"I truly loved the woman. But... I guess she wasn't who I thought she was." He sounded somewhat saddened, but the way he looked at the floor while shaking his head made it look like a scene from a soap opera. Or, maybe, like he wanted to hide his face from the cameras while reciting lines. "Selling those bank secrets... I can only guess she wanted to hurt the man as much as possible before leaving him. If I had known, I'd never 've gotten involved with her."

"You know..." I said, pointing at the TV screen. "That sounds more like an accomplice trying to save his own neck than someone who was genuinely in love and now learns that he was being played. What do you know about him?"

"Steven Carver," Breston responded while reading from his file. "Thirty-five-year-old car mechanic who also deals with used cars he fixed up himself. Not wealthy, not very smart, not special in any way I could tell. Apart from his looks, that is."

"Yeah, that's another thing. He's...what? 6'3''? Lean, muscular build, freshly tanned..."

"Not to mention sixteen years younger than your mother," Breston threw in.

"Yeah, he's the embodiment of the word 'Gigolo'. So, it's clear he's in this for the money, and it would seem reasonable for a woman to fall for an attractive younger guy. I still don't believe his story," I sighed.

"Why?" Breston questioned me, clearly hoping I would finally open up to him.

"She would NEVER betray that prick she married. Her entire life revolved around the guy! She was the pinnacle of the obedient 1950s housewife. The idea of her having an affair is just... No. Fucking. Way!"

"Well, I'm afraid her... demure nature even worsened during the four years you were gone. So, again, I fully agree with you. And yet..." Breston nodded along in a careful tone while handing me a shoe-carton-sized package from his pilot's case. "...the senator was able to present photographic evidence of her affair."

When I opened the carton, I found out that it was filled with 6x8s in disturbingly high definition. There must have been around a hundred photographs documenting the development of my mother's affair with Mr. Carver.

The pictures showed them at different leisure activities in public that, apparently, went on for months. This wasn't just apparent because of the timestamps printed onto the pictures. Thanks to the high quality, the clearly visible surroundings supported what the timestamps told me. I could see the budding in the trees and bushes the first few photographs showed, placing those in the springtime. Then, based on the changes in the clothes the depicted couple wore, the series of pictures moved on into early summer. And, finally, it showed them in late summer, as they entered a movie theater advertising a movie that came out just a few weeks ago. That photo must have been taken mere days before her arrest.

I felt an involuntary pang of sadness as I saw how much my mother had changed since the last time I saw her. Her black hair, which had always hung down to her waist since I was a child, now reached just to her shoulders. She was still curvy but had clearly lost weight, which was emphasized by the new stylish business attire that framed her body, while I had always known her in leisure clothing. What grabbed my attention, though, were her formerly piercing and expressive blue eyes. Now, even when she was laughing in those pictures, they seemed less colorful and were surrounded by a lot of small wrinkles.

Throughout the stack, there were four pictures that made me quite uncomfortable. They were taken either in a sparsely decorated apartment or a pricey hotel room. They showed the couple from two different perspectives each, as they were entangled on the bed, in the middle of their adulterous activity. I couldn't look too closely at those and just shook my head.

"Fine, this really does look like she had an affair," I conceded. "What was her reaction to these pictures?"

"She admitted to having intercourse with Mr. Carver," he responded.

"Come again!?" I deadpanned after a moment of silence, not believing my ears.

"But she insists that it only happened once. And she had planned on telling her husband about it, though she was arrested and presented with the divorce papers the very next day, only minutes after he returned from a work-related trip."

I thought about this little piece of information for a minute and, while I couldn't point at anything amiss, the whole development seemed just so... streamlined. Or, better yet, like it was planned out. The longer I contemplated the information I got, the more convinced I was that there was something hidden I could use against the bastard who had become my stepfather.

And I had to admit: If she really had an affair, which, given her total submission to the guy, I would've thought to be impossible, then maybe...

"Did you have anyone check these photos? Are they even legit?" I finally asked Breston, to which he looked at me confused.

"Uh... No? Why would I?" he stuttered. "She admitted to having intercourse with him."

"One time, she said. These four pictures show at least two... sexual encounters on two different dates," I pointed out, despite feeling quite uncomfortable with the topic, holding up the pictures in question. "And the encounters are apparently months apart, so why wasn't she served after the first time?"

"Well..." Breston started in a contemplating tone. "Maybe he just... Maybe he decided to forgive her first offense."

I felt my suspicion of Breston being a shitty lawyer immediately confirmed.

"Two things. First, if that would be the case, I'd expect him to at least confront her about it. If he had her followed, as the photographs imply, he was already doubting her. So, why would he suddenly overlook her infidelity once he got confirmation of his suspicions, and then even think her affair would just stop? Of course, it's possible he didn't suspect her, and he had the divorce papers drawn up after receiving these photos unexpectedly from some informant. But then again, why would someone else follow her around, silently document her affair for months, before only sending the evidence to her husband just as she's about to be arrested for the data theft?"

I paused to let him think about that but quickly continued.

"Secondly: Since when is it the defense lawyer's job to make up explanations for the opposing side's suspicious behavior?" I couldn't stop myself from pointing out his blunder. To my surprise, he actually looked a little embarrassed about that. "It also still doesn't make sense that she would steal from him. They were married for more than a decade, Breston. Since before the senator made his fortune at Schrader, and long before he became a senator. If she finally heard the music and decided to leave him, all she had to do was file for divorce. Last time I checked, the guy was valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. She could've walked away with half of that! Why risk that for a measly four mill and a fleeting fuck with a car mechanic!?"

"THAT..." Brexton called out while pointing a finger at me like he was proud of having done something right. "...is exactly what I thought as well. Hence my visit to get some insight into their relationship beyond what they are willing to surrender."

"And yet you never bothered to question the evidence," I said under my breath before continuing in a normal voice. "Mind if I keep the pictures for a few days?"

Breston blinked at me for a moment before catching himself.

"Does that mean you're willing to help?" he asked.

"I'm interested in the opportunity you laid out. Let's see if there's something to work with." I didn't want to commit myself to my mother's defense, but I knew I would go All-In if it meant I could pay that bastard back.

"Then, yes! You can also keep the other files I brought with me. They're copies I made hoping you would want to take a closer look at them," Beston called out enthusiastically. "You have my card. Let me know what you find out."

With that, he gathered his remaining belongings, grabbed his pilot's case, and started towards the door. Before he could step outside, however, I stopped him.

"Breston." I waited for him to turn towards me so I could fix him with a look. "Don't tell anyone about my involvement. At least, not yet."

He thought about it for a moment, but ultimately just nodded without a comment before leaving.

I stood in the hallway, looking at the closed door, for another good ten minutes before I finally decided on a course of action. Then I moved back into the living room, grabbed my phone, and made the call.

"Save it, Paul," the gruff voice on the other end of the line said instead of a proper greeting. It instantly made me grin. "I know what you're thinking. No, you don't get to call in sick."

"As much as it pains me to hear that, it's not why I'm calling, Boss," I finally replied to Bill's taunt. "I need to ask you something."

"Fire away!"

"Do we have someone who can verify the legitimacy of photographs?" I asked, a little insecure.