The Jackpot Page 8

  He worked ninety-hour weeks as the race for partnership kicked into overdrive. Meanwhile, Ashley taught kindergarten at St. Michael's, Carter's own alma mater. Many of the students were children of Carter's co-workers. These were the attorneys who lived inside the city limits of Richmond and wouldn't dare send their kids to a city school. Although they were taxed heavily themselves, they didn't contribute nearly enough to the city's tax base to give rise to decent public schools.

  Ashley soured on the marriage within a year, but before she had a chance to nail down an appropriate divorce lawyer, she discovered she was pregnant. An ultrasound revealed twins, which pushed thoughts of ending the marriage to the back burner. Taking center stage were baby registries, endless cravings for Taco Bell, a four-thousand-dollar crib, and other games of upper-class pregnancy. Two of her friends in the Junior League were also pregnant, and suddenly, she was part of a super-exclusive club. Weekends were spent on baby-buying frenzies. Evenings, when she was alone waiting for Carter to come home, she read baby books.

  Despite her commitment to prenatal care and advance preparation, the reality of motherhood was much different than the pictures she had painted for herself. Carter took three days off after the twins' birth and then went right back to his hellish work schedule. Ashley's mother came to visit for a week, during which time she witnessed her only daughter display a shocking lack of any maternal instinct.

  Ashley never got the hang of breastfeeding, and so she turned to formula relatively quickly. Medically speaking, this would have been fine, except that preparing formula also seemed to be beyond her maternal capabilities. The twins' pediatrician, Terry Murphy, was deeply concerned by Ashley's apparent inability to grasp the fairly simple concept of mixing the powder in tap water. The twins lost an alarming amount of weight between the day they left the hospital and their two-week checkup. The doctor gently urged Ashley to use ready-made formula and had her bring the girls in for weight checks every day for the next week. If they weren't steadily putting on weight, the pediatrician warned her that he'd have to call Social Services. The idea of a child protective services worker in the Pierces' neighborhood galvanized the new parents into action, and Ashley began buying premade infant formula.

  The girls did begin putting on weight, and Ashley settled into her role as their distant, inattentive, and relatively disinterested mother. She quit her job as a teacher and began drinking during the girls' naps. Being a stay-at-home mom was more than she could handle, so when the girls were six months old, she enrolled them in a Montessori school. By the time they were three, they'd been expelled from that school and two other daycare centers for a marked refusal to comply with their teachers' instructions.

  Madison and Cameron grew into bright, beautiful and out-of-control young women. This stemmed largely from their parents' total unwillingness to impose either discipline or rules from the time they were old enough to have rules and discipline. By the age of twelve, Madison was nipping scotch. By the age of fourteen, Cameron had discovered the joys of marijuana. Both were smart enough to stay in the top ten percent of their high school class, which helped keep the 'rents off their back. It also kept the cell phones, the platinum digital cable package, and the high-speed Internet in service, along with gas in the Jeeps.

  The marriage was sacrificed at the twin altars of partnership and wealth. Carter was too busy with work to devote any time to the marriage beyond a fancy dinner and a one-night's stay at the Jefferson Hotel for their anniversary. He began cheating on Ashley about two years into the marriage. His first foray into infidelity involved a fellow associate attorney, a wide-eyed brunette named Amanda Patton. She was interested only in sex, and that was fine with Carter. In its own way, it set the table for his future affairs – sex only, no secret, loving relationship that operated in the dark behind his marriage to Ashley.

  There had been half a dozen or so over the years, each involving a woman remarkably similar to the one that had kicked off his adulterous adventures. This had helped avert any risk of feelings getting in the way of a good time. All had been fun, quick-moving, and all had burned out like firecrackers. He had assumed that was where he had been headed with Dawn, at least until she had told him that she had his proverbial bun in her oven.

  His phone rang, and he immediately recognized the number on the caller ID screen. He was afraid to take the call, but he was even more afraid not to.

  "Hello?"

  "Carter, it's Blinky."

  Blinky was Carter's bookie and the man to whom Carter currently owed the $140,000 in gambling losses.

  "Hey there you."

  "Yeah, Merry Christmas!"

  "Same to you."

  "So, I'm sitting here, thinking it's almost Christmas, and my kid wants an iPad all of a sudden, one with the 3G connection and all that, and I get to wondering, iPads are not cheap, and I was thinking, 'hey, my good friend Carter Pierce owes me a little bit of scratch,' and I'm wondering when are you gonna have my money?"

  "Soon, Blinky. Next week."

  "I'm sitting here, Carter, and I hear you say that, and I think, 'Carter said, 'soon, Blinky, next week,' last week, and I'm starting to get a little disappointed in my friend Carter."

  "Year-end bonus coming up next week, Blinky. I swear."

  "I hope it's been a good year, Carter, because I want it to be a good year too, and if it's not a good year by, say, the time the ball drops in Times Square, I'd bet it's not gonna be a very Happy New Year for one of us in this conversation."

  Carter's stomach flipped.

  "So enjoy the Christmas and all that and let's make sure things are square by the time baby New Year shows up. Or it won't be a happy new year at all."

  The line clicked dead.

  Carter recounted the events of what had proven to be a terrible day.

  1.His wife pushed him ever closer to the brink of bankruptcy.

  2.His mistress announced she was pregnant.

  3.His bookie had threatened to kill him.

  4.His janitor had won four hundred million bucks.

  It was this last nugget that he could not get out of his head. Just thinking about it made his head hurt. Julius or Jerome or whatever his name was – the crack dealer, the pimp, his goddamn janitor – had won the lottery! It seemed a particularly cruel blow for Fate to deliver, in his darkest hour, while he was suffering. As he sat here on one of the last days of the year, he thought it was as good a time as any to take stock of his life.

  Didn't he deserve better? He had worked hard. He had gone to a good college, a solid law school. He'd put in the long hours, the sweat, the toil, and what had he gotten in return? A job he had hated for years. A shell of a marriage. A mistress whose ovaries had laughed in the face of contraception. Twin nightmares for daughters. No son to carry on the family name.

  Maybe Dawn would have a boy. Maybe he'd take the Pierce name. Wasn't that what they did in the projects? Every goddamn kid, a different last name than the mother. And Dawn could do a lot worse than naming her kid Carter Livingston Pierce, Jr. Or even Carter Livingston Pierce, II. He'd always liked that, the II hung on the end of a name like marble pillars. Next to the commonplace III, it sounded goddamn regal.

  He thought about how it would play out in the firm. Naturally, no one would be told, at least officially, that Dawn was carrying Carter's baby. But it would, of course, get out. It would be like a grassroots campaign, starting with the support staff. Word would trickle up the chain until it was discussed in the executive dining room. No one would say anything to Carter's face. Some attorneys might even feel a twinge of envy. Dawn was considered one of the hottest paralegals at the firm. This was not a matter of opinion, as the male partners kept a Top 25 list in the sauna and updated it monthly to account for boob jobs, new hires and the like.

  The partners wouldn't give a shit about the pregnancy, given that half of them had sired children out of wedlock. It was like an NBA team. As long as Carter Pierce kept winning, kept bringing in the business and kept the
business in the house, he could take a dump on the floor of his office and no one would say boo.

  He wondered if he could keep the news away from Ashley, say forever. You never knew what she might pull when she found out about the pregnancy. The crazy pill-addled cougar might divorce him. Or she might use the child as the ultimate bargaining chip for the rest of his natural life. There was no way to know.

  Not telling her scared him even more, because who the hell was he kidding? She would find out. Once word spilled out into the open waters of the firm, it would only be a matter of time before one of his colleagues' backstabbing wives would blab it to Ashley at lunch. Not as a gesture of friendship, but to be the one who got to break the news, because at that moment, the bearer of bad news could rest comfortably in the knowledge that someone else's life was in a bigger shitter than hers.

  That his mistress' pregnancy was not even his biggest problem at the moment was really saying something. He thought about Blinky, who, as Carter recalled, had a bit of a temper and claimed he owned a blowtorch. This scared Carter a little – actually it scared him a lot – because despite what he had told the man, Carter would not have the money by New Year's Eve. He thought again about the small, gimpy man's warning that the people he did business with had made people owing far less money disappear. He knew that Blinky had only let Carter ride such a high line of credit because he seemed like a successful man. What Blinky did not know was that Carter was heavily leveraged and cash poor. Carter wondered if he could sign over the title to one of the vacation homes to the guy but dismissed the idea just as quickly. He didn't have six figures in equity in the three homes combined, let alone one of them. And he was pretty sure that the adjustable rate mortgage was about to adjust upward again.

  Again, he thought about the lottery ticket, drifting along the track of his mind like a solitary train car. He envisioned himself with the money. He wished he could divorce Ashley and give her ten million bucks on the condition that she never talk to him again. Then again, the money would ease the strain on their marriage. What the hell – maybe they would stick it out. They could move to an island and live on a big plantation. He could set the girls up for life. He could set up Dawn and her baby for life. He could set up future generations for life. He would invest wisely, make the money work for him. Make the Pierce name synonymous with wealth and stature. Like the Kennedys!

  The lottery ticket train car kept rolling along the track until it coupled with the other train car in his mind, a boxcar loaded with fear and worry. And then suddenly, it became clear, like a picture in his mind, a snapshot of an event that had yet to pass but most certainly would.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Friday, December 21

  9:11 p.m.

  The more Carter thought about it, the more he liked the idea of stealing Julius' ticket and cashing it for himself. The morality of the caper, quite frankly, never entered his cost-benefit analysis. He always believed that a good lawyer never let morality invade the province of law. No, his main problem would be separating man from ticket.

  Julius would do anything to protect that ticket. The key would be convincing Julius that he was in a safe place. Earn his trust. Get physical custody of the ticket, ride it out until Wednesday morning, when lottery headquarters would re-open after Christmas. Cash it in, smile big for the camera and disappear from the face of the Earth.

  He began sketching out a plan. Julius was counting on Carter to protect him, look out for his interests. That misplaced trust would serve as the foundation for the scheme. He was Julius' lawyer, and Julius would do what Carter told him to do.

  Before he could get to all that, though, he had to deal with Samantha, the poster child for bleeding heart lawyers everywhere. That she had been passed over for partner might actually work in his favor. Now that her career with the firm was kaput, she might have a financial incentive to help him. He could throw a few million at her in exchange for her silence, an offer that he thought she might be receptive to. He had seen her harden over the years like concrete, the light in her idealistic eyes slowly flickering out as she learned the realities of the practice of law. And now, all she had left to look at was the wreckage of her career. Yeah, she wouldn't be a problem, but he'd better make it five million. Five million dollars. All the money she would ever need. And for what? Looking the other way? Such a small thing. And if her moral compass quivered, he could always play on her guilt. He knew that she helped her parents' struggling business, that she had relatives in the Middle East she sent money to.

  The second issue would, of course, be facilitating the parting of ways between Julius and the ticket. The best and easiest option would be to advise him to store the ticket at the firm to ensure its safety. The problem was that Carter thought it unlikely that Julius would agree to such an arrangement. Julius might have been an uneducated thug from the projects, but he did not appear to have calamari stuffed in between his ears. He wasn't going to let that ticket out of his sight until he handed it over to lottery officials the following Wednesday.

  Carter needed to overpower him somehow. The idea scared him more than a bit, because, after all, Julius was a beefy thug from the projects. Carter, a slender but flabby 180 pounds, rode a stationary bicycle three mornings a week while checking his Blackberry. Slowly, a plan began to form in his head. It was going to cost him at least a few million, probably a lot more, but it would be worth it.

  He picked up the phone and placed a call. The line picked up after two rings.

  "Go," a voice said upon picking up.

  "Todd, it's Carter."

  "What up?"

  * * *

  Todd Matheson was Ashley Pierce's younger brother, a self-described entrepreneur who had never held any legal job for longer than six months. The working world had never really appealed to Todd, nor did it find him particularly appealing. He discovered at a relatively young age, however, that he had an aptitude for deceit and worked industriously to hone his skills. It was widely known but never discussed at holiday dinners that Todd was a con man.

  It wasn't as if Todd Matheson hadn't been granted every opportunity that an upper-middle class upbringing afforded. Like Carter, he had attended St. Michael's, where he first began his criminal enterprise. He didn't join the Key Club or the swim team, focusing his efforts instead on commerce, a true Future Businessman of America. He peddled a range of items, from ecstasy to bootleg Grateful Dead concert tapes to illegally obtained old exams to prescription medication.

  His life as a dealer began without much fanfare, just one weekend when he realized he had more weed in his pocket than he could smoke. He sold it to a group of girls home from college for Thanksgiving. When he was dry, he went back to his dealer, a sophomore at James Madison University, and offered to fill the retail need in Richmond's private school market. And there was a need. The dealer agreed, and Todd was off and running, buying wholesale and kicking up twenty percent of his profits.

  And by no means was Todd Matheson a one-trick pony. Using a network of spies he enlisted, he blackmailed teachers that were sleeping with students, students who cheated on tests, and administrators who cheated on their spouses. His rackets generated a relatively steady monthly income, one that he used to bankroll a luxurious lifestyle throughout his high school years.

  He continued his ways during his four years at Hampden-Sydney College, a small all-male college in south-central Virginia catering to any good man seeking a good education, as long as that man was Southern, wealthy and could trace his lineage back to the Mayflower. As soon as freshman orientation was over, Todd started dealing marijuana and cocaine to these rich, spoiled sons of the Confederacy. Although his venture was relatively profitable, Todd enjoyed living beyond his means. The summer before his sophomore year, he bought a large house on the outskirts of Farmville.

  He hosted lavish parties that attracted the horny boozehounds of Hampden-Sydney and husband-hunting co-eds from every small women's college within a fifty-mile radius. He installed a bar in
every room, stocking each one with top-shelf liquor. Bowls of cocaine had been scattered through the house like party bowls of peanuts. To his friends, he provided vials of GHB, the date rape drug. He bought three big-screen televisions and drove a Porsche 911.

  Todd's proclivity toward excess was surpassed only by his tendency to run his mouth. He was an enthusiastic public relations man. He talked about his dealers, his income, his clients, and his plan to become the biggest dealer in the Southeast. He directed most of this chatter to the young ladies whose pants he was constantly trying to remove. Eventually, he caught the ears of the Farmville Sheriff's Office, and two of its enterprising young sheriff's deputies began surveillance of Todd's activities at the house.

  Within a week, they observed patterns consistent with drug trafficking and quickly obtained a search warrant. The strike team found four garbage bags full of marijuana, sixty-eight bricks of cocaine, and twelve binders crammed with sheets of LSD. It was one of the biggest drug busts in the history of southwest Virginia. This attracted the attention of the Drug Enforcement Agency, who wanted to use Todd to blow out the supply pipeline.

  Facing fifteen years in a federal prison, Todd quickly became a DEA informant. In exchange for testifying against his suppliers, he was allowed to plead guilty to a state possession charge, and he spent eighteen months in a regional jail. When he got out, his drug supply, not surprisingly, had dried up. He had heard that there was a contract put out on his head. Now saddled with a felony conviction that would follow every job application he'd ever fill out, Todd was less interested than ever in joining the real world.

  He turned to conning, which proved to be far easier than the accounting headache of drug dealing. His first scam involved scaring senior citizens into thinking their homes needed expensive repairs. He'd knock on the door of old widows at the beginning of the month, just after they'd received their social security checks. His voice dripping with honey and charm, he'd warn of runaway termite infestations, cracked foundations, or failing roofs, depending on his mood. There was no time to waste! He used fancy words like joists and gables and scared the seniors with statistics as to how much wood termites could eat in twenty-four hours. A small deposit would get Matheson Construction on the job just as soon as an opening cleared on the schedule. Of course, that would be the last time the victims would ever see Todd Matheson. He changed banks frequently, opened numerous accounts, created dozens of shell companies. He ran gambling scams, investment scams, pyramid schemes. He conned bored and lonely housewives. He conned folks who longed to get rich quick.