Household Gods

Almost as good as the food in her estimation was that he seemed to have decided to lay his guilt aside. He was just as she remembered, good company, occasionally witty, willing to talk shop or gossip or whatever she happened to be in the mood for. Whoever said women were the worst gossips must have been a man; because when it came to dishing the very best and choicest dirt, the male of the species gave the female a solid run for the prize.

Nicole hadn’t enjoyed a meal so much since she couldn’t remember when. She went back to the office in a glow of good humor, all ready and set to tackle the papers Sheldon Rosenthal had slapped down on her desk. By mid-afternoon, after the interruptions had tapered off to one per hour, she was beginning to have a feel for the way the analysis should look. If there weren’t any surprises in the rest of the documents or in the case law that pertained to them, she’d be on solid ground in her assessment.

That was a good feeling. A very good feeling indeed. She’d missed this: the exercise of her mind in the intricacies of a legal system she knew and understood. And no man was patronizing her for being able to understand it. She really was a lawyer here, a woman lawyer, and that was maybe not common enough yet, but it was getting there.

23

So, she thought, no surprises. Or should she assume that? If she did, she could make a call or two of her own now without feeling guilty for wasting the time.

Before she reached for the phone book, she called up a file from the computer and printed it out. She wanted to be sure she had all the facts handy. As she read over the two pages from the laser printer’s tray, she smiled grimly.

County Government Offices, the heading in the white pages said. The office she wanted was on Ventura Boulevard, only two or three miles away. She dialed the number. “Good afternoon, District Attorney’s office,” said the voice on the other end. “Family Support Unit – spousal- and child-support cases. How may I help you?”

Nicole steadied herself. Here it was. Moment of truth. She said it baldly, in her best and crispest professional voice. “My ex-husband has been late on a good many child-support payments, and he’s missed a good many others altogether,” she said. “I badly need the money, and I want help collecting it.”

“Please hold,” the voice said without expression. “I’ll put you through to the Child Support Enforcement Section.”

For her listening pleasure, or lack thereof, the FSU offered 101 Strings – soothing enough if you weren’t the sort who preferred acid rock. Nicole, whose taste ran to Top Forty when it ran to anything at all, lived through it until a new voice came on the line: “Child Support Enforcement. This is Herschel Falk. I understand you have a collection problem. May I have the details, please, Ms. -?”

“Nicole Gunther-Perrin,” Nicole said. His silence had an interesting quality: like an open door, or an open mind. She gave him the details he’d requested. All of them, with scrupulous exactness, from the date and number of the child-support order to the dates of Frank’s checks that had come late to those of the checks that should have come but never had.

“Well, well,” Herschel Falk said when she finished, and then again, a moment later: “Well, well. You certainly have all that at your fingertips, don’t you, Ms. Gunther-Perrin? I wish everyone who called here were so well prepared.”

“I’m an attorney,” Nicole said with a hint of tightness. Her teeth had clenched while she ran through the list of Frank’s delinquencies. She couldn’t seem to pry them loose.

“I see.” Falk sounded like a man who’d heard everything at least once, and most things a lot more often than that. “Now you’ve had it up to here with your ex, and you’re going to hit him up for everything you have coming to you.”

“Mr. Falk,” Nicole said, “that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Let me give you Frank’s – Frank Perrin’s – work and home telephone numbers, too, while I’m at it.”

She heard the scratch of pen on paper as she read them off. Then he said, “If I don’t get him, I will leave a message at both those numbers this afternoon. Let me put the figures into the computer, so I can tell him how much he owes to the penny. There’s ten percent interest on delinquent payments, you know.”

“Now that I had forgotten,” Nicole said with a grin Frank would not have been happy to see. “I’m in corporate law, and I really thought he would keep up after we divorced. I didn’t pay as much attention to the regulations as I should have.”

“That happens,” Herschel Falk said with every evidence of sympathy, and a degree of relish that she took note of. This was a man who enjoyed his job. Not a nice man, oh no, but a very good man to have on her side. “We’ll take care of it from here,” he said. “Some people find a call from the District Attorney’s office amazingly – mm, maybe therapeutic is the word I’m looking for. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it does for a good many.”