The detective snorted, shook his head, then began to write again. “Okay, you got it. One drunk comin’ up. I have an actor friend who—”
“What’s he look like?”
“A two-headed green Martian in his last play, but I think he could easily manage being a drunk.” The detective smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“What next?” he asked.
After that Ellie had given him all the details that she could think of that he’d need to help her prove that her ex had been hiding money from her for years. If she could find that money, he wouldn’t be prosecuted for stealing; oh, no, taking money from his wife was purely legal. Most people would agree that it was immoral, but she’d seen that the law didn’t care about immoral, only illegal. No, all Ellie could do, if she could prove that he had the money, was to force him to share it, to give half of it back to her, as the community property laws required money to be divided equally.
And, maybe, if she could show that Martin was the type of man to hide money, just maybe the judge wouldn’t believe that Martin was being honest when he said he helped Ellie to write the books.
After her first meeting with the detective, she’d driven her red Range Rover back home, to the house that she shared with Martin. The first time around, the judge had said that Martin was to get the house, but Ellie had to pay the mortgage. The judge’s “reasoning” was that Ellie was now “forcing” Martin to return to the profession he’d abandoned to manage her career, and since the house had a small recording studio in it, he had to have that house.
When Ellie first entered that house again, she was glad that Martin wasn’t there; she didn’t think she could bear to look at him. In fact, she wasn’t able to look at the house because she knew she’d see all the personal possessions that last time became Martin’s: her cookware, her photography equipment, years and years of photos, cookbooks, even some of her clothes. Instead, she ran through the house, out the back door, then down the hill to her studio. She knew that if history repeated itself, the judge was going to take away her beloved studio too. Take it from her and give it to him because they believed his lies. But Ellie also knew that just a few months after she signed the property settlement, Martin would rent the house and move to Florida, where he would live in comfort on the money that Ellie had to pay him.
During those first three days after Ellie returned to the past, she’d been so busy that she’d looked at nothing. It had felt so very, very good to work again! She’d had three long years of doing nothing but going over the horror of what had been done to her. She’d spent months asking herself why the judge had believed Martin.
Truthfully, she didn’t think she’d ever understand why it had been done to her, but maybe, this time, she’d be able to head it off. The first time, she’d been unprepared for the accusations that had been hurled at her. All she’d done that first time was cry at the injustice of it all.
When she’d first reappeared in the small town outside of L.A. where she and Martin had lived for years, it had taken Ellie a while to remember that after she’d filed for divorce, she’d moved into a hotel to wait for the proceedings to take their course. During that time she had done little but cry and talk on the phone to her lawyer. Her pride hadn’t let her dump on her friends or relatives, so she’d stayed alone in a room and waited.
But this time around she wa
sn’t going to sit and wait. And, she reminded herself, she still had as much right to be inside the house as Martin did, and if she saw him, so be it. But so far, even though she’d returned to the house several times, had even spent hours inside it searching for papers, she hadn’t seen him.
She’d spent a great deal of the three days writing letters and requesting documents. She wrote her publisher asking for an affidavit swearing that her husband had never negotiated a contract for her. She asked her money manager for a document swearing that her husband had never called or written her about a single investment.
For three days Ellie dug through documentation and put together all that she could. It was going to be said in court that she lied about her income, therefore she requested that her publishing house give her financial summaries for every year. These were faxed to her within minutes, so Ellie stapled them to copies of past tax returns.
So now, Ellie was sitting on the bench waiting for the PI to return so she could go over her list with him again. And she wanted to talk to him about her sanity. Or at least see if he had any ideas about how she could prove that she was sane. During the first divorce Martin had said that since Ellie had twice spent time with therapists during their marriage, this was proof that she was insane—and therefore incompetent to handle her own money. When Ellie had heard this, she’d laughed. It was too ridiculous to contemplate. But no one else had laughed.
She’d been told that she was going to have to get letters from those therapists swearing that Ellie was sane and therefore capable of managing her own money. Since Ellie had parted company with one of the therapists in anger, she knew that that letter would never be forthcoming.
Ellie had gasped at this. “This is not the Victorian era!” she’d said. “A man can’t do that!” But she’d been told that in a community property state, all the property, in this case, the books, was considered as much his as hers, so, yes, the judge could indeed decide who was more competent to handle the money, she or her ex.
Even now, with her knowledge of what was going to happen, this sanity thing was a sticking point. How did one prove that one was sane?
She had been concentrating on this question so hard that she hadn’t noticed that someone had walked up the carpeted stairs and down the hall. When she glanced at the doorway and saw the man leaning against it, she jumped. “Oh!” she said, then, “Sorry. I didn’t see you come up.”
He was a tall man, in his mid to late sixties, or maybe in his seventies and well preserved. As with many men in California, he was dressed in cleaned-up cowboy gear. Usually this was an affectation, but Ellie had an intuition that this man was real. This man probably spent most of the day on horseback and his favorite animal was, no doubt, the longhorn steer.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said softly. He was one of those men who inspire jealousy in women because age looked good on him. Those sun creases radiating out from the corners of his eyes probably made him more handsome than he had been when he was a younger man. He wore Levi’s, a cream colored cotton shirt with pearl inlaid silver buttons, cowboy boots with deep undercutting, and he held a tan cowboy hat in his hands. “But you were thinking so hard that I could have run a herd of cattle through here and you wouldn’t have seen a thing.”
She smiled at him. There was something about him that made her feel at ease, as though he were an old friend. “I was just thinking about how to prove that I’m not crazy. Any ideas on how to go about that?”
She’d meant the statement to be taken as a joke, the way she had always coped with serious subjects and intense emotion, but the man didn’t smile. Instead, he looked at her with serious eyes. “If you’re here to see Mr. Montoya, then I guess this is a court case, and if you’re trying to prove you’re sane, then you must have money. Nobody cares about the sanity of a poor person. So who’s trying to get control of your money?”
For a moment Ellie just looked at him with her mouth hanging open. “Yes,” she finally managed to say. “My ex-husband. Will be ex, anyway.”
“Makes sense,” the man said. “What’s he doing? Saying that he’s always ‘managed’ your money and since you’re crazy, he has to keep on managing it even after you dump him? And since you’re a woman and he’s a man, the court is probably listening to him.”
Maybe it was the way he said it, maybe it was the horrendous amount of work she’d done in the last three days, or maybe it was just being back into it all again, but Ellie put her hands over her face and burst into tears. Like a knight of old, the man sat down on the bench beside her, pulled out a clean, blue bandana handkerchief, and handed it to her. “I’m sorry,” she said, still crying. “I don’t usually cry in front of people, but it’s all been so awful and no one believes me! People think that the courts of America are fair and just and that if someone goes to trial, she’ll get a fair shake. And people think that because I’ve earned so much money that I have power. But I have no power because no one believes me. They all believe him. I don’t understand it. Whatever I say, they think is a lie, but whatever he says, they believe. I told them he has a lot of money hidden somewhere, but neither my lawyer, his lawyer, nor the judge believed me. But he said he cowrote my books and they accept that as fact. The man couldn’t name three titles of my books, much less tell the plots, but they believe that he wrote them with me. Yet I said that if I was sane enough to earn the money, then I was certainly sane enough to know how to put it in a bank, but they said no, that wasn’t true. After all, writers are really just glorified liars, aren’t they? And now I can’t believe I’m saying all these things to someone I’ve never met!”
Ellie was trying to stop the tears as she wiped at her eyes with the handkerchief. It would be her luck that her ex had hired this man and he would testify against her in court. The first time she went through the divorce, it seemed that every person she’d ever met had been willing to testify against her.
“That’s where I’ve seen you before,” the cowboy said, leaning back to look at her.
Ellie sniffed. “What? Where?”