Dead Certain

case it was some kind of nut.”
    “She actually used the word nut ?”
    “Let’s just say in each case the perpetrator’s motivations were apparent only to themselves.”
    The waiter came and cleared our plates and took our orders for dessert. I took the opportunity to tell Elliott about my conversation with Laffer and the fact that he’d promised to change his vote provided I could bring him proof of HCC’s wrongdoing.
    “Then I guess you’ll want to hear what we turned up on the fab four.”
    “Who are the fab four?”
    “Our four front-runners for HCC mole: Gavin McDermott, Carl Laffer, Kyle Massius, and Farah Davies. You’ll be happy to hear that I finally remembered where I know Dr. Farah Davies from,” Elliott said. “It came to i me when I was driving back from Springfield tonight.“
    “Where?”
    “She was the third party in a divorce case I was involved in.”
    “I didn’t know you were ever married,” I remarked. “Involved as an investigator,” he corrected me.
    “I also didn’t think you did divorce work.”
    “I did in the beginning. When I was just starting out, I did anything that would help me make my rent. In this case the client was a doctor who was a friend of mine, so when he asked me, I didn’t say no.”
    “So was Farah Davies the wife or the girlfriend? „
    “Neither. She was the wife’s girlfriend.”
    “You’re pulling my leg.”
    “Scout’s honor,” he replied, holding up his hand in a two-fingered salute while the other held his champagne glass. “Apparently the client’s wife had a very difficult pregnancy with their third child, lots of complications, and Dr. Davies was her OB.”
    “And?”
    “Over the course of the pregnancy the two women became close.”
    “I’m good friends with my dentist,” I protested, “but that doesn’t mean I’m sleeping with her.”
    “Let’s just say they became closer than you and your dentist.”
    “So how did the husband find out?”
    “Well, he figured there was something going on. All of a sudden the wife starts acting weird, staying out late, going away on the weekends. He was afraid that she was seeing another man. That’s when he came to me.”
    “So what did you do?”
    “I followed the client’s wife on a weekend trip she was taking to the Kohler spa in Wisconsin.”
    “And?”
    “And it turns out she wasn’t meeting another man, she was meeting Farah Davies.”
    “Maybe they were just going up there for the facials and the massages.”
    “I guess that’s one way to describe what they were doing,” declared Elliott with a look of amusement on his face. “If you want, you can look at the pictures yourself and decide what they were doing.”
    “No thanks, I think I’ll pass.”
    “As you might expect, my doctor friend was absolutely devastated. It’s hard enough when your wife is sleeping with another man, but this...”
    “So did he leave her?”
    “No. She left him. Told him that she’d decided that she wanted to live openly as a lesbian.”
    “What about the kids?”
    “That was the problem. Given the circumstances my client felt he should be granted custody of the children. His wife, needless to say, thought otherwise.”
    “So how did they resolve it? Did they end up fighting it out in court?” I asked, thinking that for all its perceived drama, I actually led a very boring life.
    “It never even got that far,” said Elliott. “As soon as my client filed his custody petition, two lawyers from one of the big national gay-rights organizations paid him a visit at his office.”
    “What did they say?”
    “They told him that if he persisted in seeking full custody of his sons through the courts, they were prepared to fight him with every means at their disposal. As far as they were concerned, his assertion that he was the more fit parent was a blatant example of discrimination based on sexual preference. They told him that they welcomed the opportunity to turn his custody claim into a test case for lesbian rights, make a public issue out of it, put it on the front page.”
    “So what did he end up doing?”
    “He hired an attorney and quietly negotiated a shared custody arrangement with his ex-wife. It wasn’t what he wanted. He didn’t think that it was in his sons’ best interests, but he was afraid of what the publicity would do not just to his boys, but to his practice. I never met his wife, so I really don’t know her side of it, and Lord knows in my line of work