Weave a Murderous Web

By Anne Rothman Hicks and Ken Hicks

No good deed goes unpunished. When Jane Larson—a hot-shot litigator for a large firm in New York City—helps out a friend, she is sucked into the unfamiliar world of divorce and child support.

Jane's discovery of the deadbeat dad’s hidden assets soon unravels a web of lies, drugs, and murder that keeps getting more dangerous.

Soon, Jane is involved in a high stakes race to recover a missing suitcase of cash and catch the murderer before she becomes the next victim.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781680462517

Anne Rothman Hicks

Anne Rothman-Hicks and Kenneth Hicks have been married for a little over forty years and have produced about twenty books and exactly three children so far. At press-time, they still love their children more.Their most recent novels have been set in New York City, where they have lived for most of their married lives. Anne is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College where, in nineteen sixty-nine, as the fabled Sixties were drawing to a close, she met Ken, who was a student at Haverford College. They don’t like to admit that they met at a college mixer, but there it is!Together their books include Theft of the Shroud, a novel; Starfinder, a non-fiction book about the stars for children; a series of books on individual names for children (for example Michael’s Book, Elizabeth’s Book, John’s Book, Jennifer’s Book, David’s Book, Amy’s Book); and, most recently, Kate and the Kid and Mind Me, Milady, two novels, and a middle reader/tween novel, Things Are Not What They Seem.Ken and Anne have a website with the address set out below. There they have links to some of their books and display images that they hope will be used in future efforts. In case you were wondering about the website address, “R” is for Rothman, “H” is for Hicks, and 71 is the year of their marriage. No secret codes or numerology anywhere. Sorry.

Book preview

WEAVE A MURDEROUS WEB

by Anne Rothman-Hicks and Ken Hicks

No good deed goes unpunished. When Jane Larson—a hot-shot litigator for a large firm in New York City—helps out a friend, she is sucked into the unfamiliar world of divorce and child support.

Jane's discovery of the deadbeat dad’s hidden assets soon unravels a web of lies, drugs, and murder that keeps getting more dangerous.

Soon, Jane is involved in a high stakes race to recover a missing suitcase of cash and catch the murderer before she becomes the next victim.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

When first we practice to deceive!

Marmion Sir Walter Scott

We dedicate this book to our three children, Brendan, Zachary and Alice, whose support means the world to us, and give a special thanks to Alice who read and edited every word.

Chapter One

I was in my office at Adams & Ridge talking on the telephone when Francine entered. At the moment, my friend, Lee, was on the other end of the wire, yakking up a storm in my ear. Her rant covered already familiar terrain. My man, my David, was drifting dangerously away from me while I did nothing to win him back. As we say around the courts, Oy.

Francine tiptoed forward and placed on my desk a two-day-old copy of The Daily News opened to the item concerning Mark Samuels’ death.

I gotta go, Lee, I said.

While Francine waited for me, she had backed into a corner of my office, leaned against the wall, and tried to make her six feet of lanky body less noticeable. Two large metal buttons were pinned to her heavily braided cotton sweater. One read Stop Fracking New York and the other protested against the annual Canadian seal hunt with a scarlet X through an image of a baby seal whose brains had been battered to a pink pulp.

I pointed at the newspaper and gave her a questioning glance, but she quickly averted her eyes to stare at the floor.

Have you been listening to me at all? Lee demanded. Her voice rose to a kind of exasperated wail. David has been dating someone. I think he may be getting serious.

David was born serious, Lee, I said.

Stop it, Jane, she shouted so I had to hold the phone away from my ear. Even Francine raised an eyebrow. You know what I mean.

I’m sorry, Lee.

I don’t understand why you’re taking this so nonchalantly. You know you still love him. You could get back together in a heartbeat if you’d just spend a tenth as much time on a relationship as you spend on your career.

I’m a lawyer, Lee. Not a—

A sharp intake of breath followed. Not a baby maker? Lee demanded. Anger replaced the plaintive wail. Is that what you were going to say?

Would I ever admit that the word had been on the tip of my tongue?

No. I was going to say, ‘not a librarian’, or the owner of some other nine-to-five job. The hours come with the territory, Lee. David knows that, but deep down in that wonderful heart of his, he also thinks the hours spent at the office are A-okay for the guy, but not for the girl. In any event, Martha didn’t raise her daughter to compete over a man.

The sound of a whale breaching the surface erupted from the phone. You’re maddening, Jane.

No, I’m busy, I replied.

Lee sighed. Well, I have to go too. Laurie is home sick and I’m taking her to the doctor. We’ll talk more later, Jane. I’m not going to sit back and let this happen to my two best friends in the world. I’m going to fight, Jane.

Goodbye, Lee.

She disconnected.

Actually, I wasn’t busy at all, or I wouldn’t have spent even that much time on the phone being lectured by Lee. She’s an old friend from Columbia Law, but enough is enough.

A major litigation I had been working on had settled just a day before and the client and powers-that-be at Adams & Ridge were very happy with me—especially Seymour Ridge. The old man himself had hammered out the settlement shortly after I made the CEO of the party suing our client look like a doofus on the witness stand. So, I had some time on my hands until I was given another assignment.

More to the point, I wanted to know why Francine was still standing in my office, staring at the tips of her shoes. She was a legal assistant with the firm. I had gotten her the job. However, she didn’t work on any of my cases. That was a rule I had laid down from the beginning.

Hello, Francine, I said.

Hi, Jane. She looked up shyly, smiled her timid smile, gave a meaningful glance in the direction of the paper and resumed looking at her shoes. I had known her for so long that she was more like a relative than a friend, in the sense that one does not choose one’s relatives. She was really really shy but also effective in getting her way with me. I read the article.

It was as depressing as I had expected. Mark Samuels was a single practitioner who worked out of a small office above a bodega on 116th Street. He wasn’t married and had no family to speak of. The exact date and hour of his demise were uncertain. The body was discovered only after fellow inhabitants of his East Village apartment house reported a foul odor during the last week in June when a heat wave had sent temperatures rising into the high nineties. Those same conditions had made his remains swell like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

How can a person die without anyone knowing for a week or ten days? Did he have no friend or family member who cared to check on him? Were all of them as completely egotistical as he was?

The cause of death, however, was easy to determine. When the cops broke down his door, three short fat lines of cocaine were still in place on the old fashioned hand mirror Mark used to chop the drug fine enough to snort. The coroner confirmed Mark died of severe heart arrhythmia, which is to say his ticker skipped a few too many beats before stopping altogether. Testing of the merchandise showed the stuff he’d inhaled had been nearly pure—several times the strength of what is normally available on the street. As the cops put it, either he had chosen to depart this green orb flying on nose powder or he was inordinately careless. I suppose it didn’t much matter which alternative was true. The result was the same. An overdose had killed him.

I looked up warily, unwilling to reveal I had the slightest interest in the entire subject.

Why are you showing this to me, Francine, I asked.

Didn’t you know Mark when you worked for Legal Services for the Poor?

Did she expect me to burst into tears?

Yeah, I said, and he was just as big a screw-up then. They put him in the Family Law area because he could do the least harm there. At least no one could lose their apartment or get sent to jail because of him.

Francine winced. You might think this resulted from a superstitious aversion to speaking ill of the dead. You would be wrong. Francine had an aversion to speaking ill both of the living and the dead.

He kept doing matrimonial work after he left Legal Services, Francine added. She nodded, as if agreeing with her own words, then fell into silence. Silence was her friend.

And? I said.

Francine pulled up her sweater, which was being dragged low by those protest buttons and exposing her collarbones and the top of her boney chest. Her stringy hair, a field mouse brown, had no discernible style. She had never chosen to master the art of makeup despite my efforts with pencil, rouge, and lipstick back when we were teenagers. The only jewelry she now wore was a pendulous locket with gold thread tying it together. She said she’d purchased it in a wild moment at an uptown thrift shop. Of course, those buttons and their slogans were a kind of jewelry, I suppose, in that jewelry also says, Look at me. This is what I am.

Francine smiled at her shoes and continued. Well, he had a client, Gail Hollings, who is a very good friend of mine, Jane, and—

Now I saw where this was going. Would this friend of yours be in need of a lawyer?

She’s in an awful fix, Jane. She has a court appearance at two o’ clock this afternoon. She gave Mark three thousand dollars, which was all she could scrape together. She has no money left at all.

Ridge will be glad to hear that. No money. Great.

Francine rummaged in the front pocket of her cargo pants, pulled out a wallet, and then drew from inside it a picture of a young child with long blond pigtails that dwarfed her diminutive round face but did not steal the scene from her toothy grin.

She has a little girl, Francine added, glancing from the snapshot to me and back again to emphasize her point.

No money, no lawyer, and a kid. This just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?

My mother, Martha, who insists I call her by her first name, always says Francine faces a bright future if Jesus’ prediction about the meek is really true. Believe me, the meek have power, especially over those of us with guilt. Martha would love that. Guilt. I was like a fish nibbling at a big juicy worm and getting closer and closer to the hook. Francine was the fisherwoman, waiting patiently for the slightest pull on the line.

Look, you know I can’t take on this case, Francine. However, I have some free time today, so I can at least go down to court and adjourn the matter until we can find someone to help Gail and little...

Courtney, Francine said with a rush of breath that made the name seem like a prayer. An expression filled her eyes that reminded me of an early Renaissance image of a martyr at the moment of supreme sacrifice, pain mixed with a kind of bliss that seems to make it all worthwhile.

The hook was set. That much was obvious. Francine had only to slowly reel me in.

I opened a drawer and pulled out a legal pad to record the names of mother and daughter.

There’s just one thing maybe you should know, Francine said.

My pencil poised in midair and then wrote one thing with an exclamation point. I still have that piece of paper in the top drawer of my desk.

Yes?

Well, Carmen Ruiz has kind of taken an interest in this because of the women’s rights angle and what happened to Mark and all.

Carmen Ruiz? Last time I heard of her, she was spending time at a fat farm.

This was code. Everyone knew that the ‘fat farm,’ as I had injudiciously put it, was also a place where people could lose other bad habits, such as drugs.

Francine winced again and swallowed hard. That’s unkind, Jane.

Chalk one up for the meek.

You’re right, Francine. How is Carmen doing?

She’s got a new gig on cable. One of the local news stations.

I nodded. I was safe from unkind remarks if I kept my mouth shut. At one time the cognoscenti had called Carmen the female Wolf Blitzer because she had enjoyed asking the hard questions, especially of men who were not used to being pushed around. The fact that she had the flashing good looks of a gypsy queen didn’t hurt, but now she was scuffling on cable news.

She said she called you a couple of times.

Yeah, well, I’ve been busy.

I was on the verge of getting back the advantage, never easy in a conversation with humanitarian types like Francine, especially if your mother always places such types on a pedestal, a very high pedestal.

Martha has not been affiliated with any organized religion since her mind began to function at age eleven. Still, she shares Jesus’ distrust of wealth and is fond of quoting both his advice to sell all you have and give it to the poor and his adage that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

You don’t even believe in Jesus, I argue.

I don’t have to believe in Jesus as God to know he’s telling the truth, she retorts.

When I had accepted the job at Adams & Ridge, Carmen had had some unkind things to say to mutual friends about my going for the gold. Her whole premise that Martha’s goodness had gotten lost in one generation to my grabbiness had cut a bit too close to the bone. I hadn’t forgotten.

Carmen’s working on a series about children and the courts, Francine said. Kids falling into poverty are a very big problem.

I’m aware of the problem, Francine. I’ll skip over the question of what has made Carmen give a good hoot in hell about children all of a sudden. What does any of this have to do with that coke-head Mark?

Oh, nothing much. Nothing at all really.

She was hedging, worried that the prospect of helping Carmen might have made me shut the whole thing down before it ever began.

Go on, Francine.

It’s just... she knew Mark fairly well and doesn’t think his death was accidental. She says Mark did drugs too much to do something that stupid.

So she thinks he did it on purpose? Is that it? He committed suicide over the predicament of his client and child?

Not exactly, Francine said.

In hindsight I can see clearly how nonchalant she wanted to seem, playing with the gold locket and dropping it inside her sweater, glancing in the direction of the window as if a pretty bird had alighted there.

Carmen thinks Mark was murdered.

Chapter Two

Before going any further, maybe I should explain the unusual route I had taken to my current post at the Park Avenue firm of Adams & Ridge. During my third year in law school, I researched what life was like for young lawyers at the New York firms that paid top dollar. I soon discovered most of the legal dinosaurs that ran these places were of the opinion associates one, two, and even three years out of law school should spend their billable hours doing research in the library or reviewing piles of documents. If they were really lucky, they were the third lawyer at the counsel table, handing exhibits to the senior associate who, in turn, handed them to the partner. This was a grim prospect.

At that point, Martha was diagnosed with cancer for the first time. Although her prognosis was good, I was convinced if I announced I was going to practice law on the side of corporate America, she would have suffered a deadly relapse. A girl can only stand so much guilt in one lifetime.

So, I took a job offered me by one of the more active pro bono legal services entities. On the down side, they paid about on the level of McDonald’s, without the benefit of overtime or an inexpensive uniform. However, Martha had never spoiled me with a lot of money and the salary didn’t much bother me. I had the long view, you might say. On the up side, while my contemporaries were being paid handsomely to toil away in the catacombs of the big firm law libraries and document depositories, I was doing the things a litigator is supposed to do, like taking depositions, arguing motions, and trying cases in front of real judges and juries.

I worked hard because I thoroughly enjoy a good fight and rose through the ranks quickly to become one of the agency’s front-line trial lawyers. As such, I was in charge of the high profile cases that were routinely brought—as Ridge was fond of saying—to harass corporate America. To my infinite delight, I often found myself opposite those prominent firms and their top-dollar lawyers.

We who generally represented the poor and the victimized received excellent press in those days from the likes of Carmen Ruiz. After a particularly bloody and well-publicized federal court battle, I got an invitation to lunch from Seymour Ridge. Martha and I had had one of our periodic blowout spats, and, since I was on her no-call list, I considered myself free of anyone’s expectations.

When he asked me where I wished to go to discuss my future, I gave him the name of a downtown club I had heard did not admit women at lunchtime. A half-dozen returning officers from the Civil War had founded it.

Sy Ridge was conservative with a capital C, but the old fart never flinched. By the end of a lunch of poached salmon, tossed salad, and crème brûlée under the reproachful eyes of a hundred card-carrying Republicans, I was convinced his firm might be a place where I could stand to work and accepted the job. There was no question that the money was right.

Modesty does not forbid me from saying I tore the place up and made Ridge look very good. It’s not that I am a genius. Rather, many lawyers at big firms are scared to death to take cases into a courtroom for trial and I was not. I pushed my matters to conclusion like a muleskinner with a whip and, as a result, the firm’s clients were very happy. Within a couple of years, I’d had several successes that had earned me my own secretary months ahead of schedule and an office maybe ten square feet larger than my fellow senior associates. A partnership offer was pretty much a foregone conclusion next January.

Still, I was not sure what Ridge’s reaction would be to my taking on this matter. When I went into his office to explain, it was mildly annoying that he found the whole thing amusing; very amusing.

He removed from his mouth the unlit cigar he had been chomping on all morning. A matrimonial. How nice, he said, a wide grin creasing the leathery skin of his massive face. I was involved in a couple of very lucrative matrimonial cases when I was younger.

Really? I said. My gullibility astounds me sometimes.

Yeah, he said, his grin growing even bigger. As a defendant.

His laugh seemed to shake the room. One hand patted his belly in appreciation. The other hand ran over the smooth dome of his bald head.

I told Francine I would only be involved until this woman can find a new attorney.

So I heard. Good luck with that. There was that grin again!

I made it very clear to her, and she’s going to make it clear to her friend.

Jane. Think about this. Who’s going to take on a case where they have no chance of getting any money? You said the guy hasn’t been paying the woman child support or maintenance. What does he do for a living?

He’s a lawyer by the name of Larry Hawkins.

Okay, that’s good.

Only, he was suspended a while ago. He supposedly just got his license back, but no income yet.

So, he’s not only a deadbeat dad, but the worst kind of deadbeat—a lawyer who knows how to keep his money hidden. Why was he suspended?

He borrowed some client money without permission, I said.

Ridge laughed again, only this time he laughed so hard he started hacking away and tears ran down his face. Taking client funds was among the worst offenses for a lawyer to commit. To Ridge, it obviously suggested someone who would not be afraid to lie to protect his assets in the future.

Ridge was still trying to catch his breath when I turned on my heel and started to leave.

Hold on, hold on, he called. Take it easy, Jane. Just having a little fun.

I remained half in and half out of his office, a scowl on my face.

It’s okay to take on the case. You have some free time now anyway, and if things start heating up on something else, we’ll have one of the first year associates take it over.

Thank you, Sir, I said, keeping it formal.

I’m assigning Francine as your legal assistant.

I retained my scowl. Sir? He knew this was breaking my rule.

See if you can improve her work habits, Jane. He took the cigar out of his mouth again and stared at it as if trying to will himself into a time when he could smoke in the confines of his office. I’m not kidding about this, Jane. I’ve had complaints. She’s a nice girl—everyone says so, with an occasional exception—but she’s been calling in sick and leaving early a lot lately. It can’t continue.

I’ll talk to her, Sir, I said.

He stuck the cigar back in his mouth. My use of the word Sir was beginning to annoy him. I call him Mr. R when I’m in a friendly mood, but I wasn’t all that happy at the moment.

Get out, he said.

I wouldn’t have said so to Ridge and certainly not to Francine, but I was actually pining for some work that didn’t include a ton of e-mails to read and contracts thick enough to choke a horse. It would also be refreshing for me to have a client who was a living breathing person.

If necessary, I could deal with seeing Carmen. She wasn’t a bad person, just occasionally pompous. She also had a way of finding conspiracies in the most banal circumstances. If she was sufficiently desperate, there was no telling how far she would stretch a story to get airtime.

In fairness, I should add that during those weeks I wanted to be busy—busier than I already was along the high road to partnership and riches beyond comprehension. Only a week before, I had heard for the first time through my friend Lee that David was ‘this close’ to getting engaged. Of course, such an announcement would seal the casket on a relationship that had lasted for three or so years, since he and I had looked across the table at a Bar Association committee meeting and liked what we saw.

Lee’s