Perri O’Shaughnessy - Breach Of Promise

“Who put in the flowerbeds and bought the furniture and oversaw extensive remodeling-”

“That was me.”

“And who lived there for ten years, only to be thrown out of it like a dog because your name wasn’t anywhere to be found on the ownership papers?”

“Oh, stop, please!” Lindy said, tears flowing down her thin cheeks.

Winston had made her cry.

“Court’s adjourned until one-thirty. Mr. Reynolds. Get your-get up here.”

On cross examination after lunch, to no one’s surprise Riesner focused on Exhibit 1. Nina took on the job of making the objections from Lindy’s table. Lindy now sat at her right, Winston and Genevieve on her left. The jury filed in, Mrs. Lim, looking stern in her checkered suit, in the lead.

Riesner was in fine form, with a bright, new silk tie in gold and red, buffed from his nose to his toes. The bruise on his cheek gave him a slightly reckless look. His air of false sympathy for Lindy had the exact impact he must have hoped for, casting doubt upon her sincerity.

Then he got to play with visuals, dreamed up during some midnight meetings to engage those media junkie, Generation X jurors, Nina presumed. Tacking a large piece of blank paper over an easel standing at the front of the room, he took a marker pen. “Agreement,” he said, while he wrote at the top, “between Lindy and Mike. Lindy gets half of everything, including the business. And here’s a space at the bottom for you and Mike to sign. Did you ever give Mike a paper like that to sign?”

“No.”

“Did Mike ever give one to you?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you ever do that?”

“We had our agreement,” she said somewhat plaintively. “A promise between us to live as husband and wife, and share everything. Mike told me that was enough.”

“Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Markov, that the reason you didn’t get him to sign a paper stating that you owned half of anything was that this wasn’t your deal, but that the separate property agreement was?”

“No, it wasn’t because Mike never carried out his part of the agreement. He promised to marry me in exchange for my signing.”

“Ms. Markov, tell me this. The day you signed Exhibit One, if Mike Markov and you went to a justice of the peace that very day, would you have married him?”

“Of course I would have!”

Riesner sailed over to the clerk, flipping a piece of paper toward her and giving it an exhibit number.

“What’s this?” he asked Lindy.

She looked at the certificate, looked back at Riesner, and looked at Nina. “It’s a marriage certificate.”

“Between you and a man named Gilbert Schaefer? Indicating you were married before you met Mike?”

“Yes.” Why did her voice keep getting shakier and shakier? She hadn’t made a secret of the fact that she had been married before.

“And your divorce became final when?”

Lindy didn’t answer. She was looking at Mike again. Her face turned waxen.

“Objection, Your Honor. This is beyond the scope of cross-examination,” said Nina, suddenly scared. “Counsel can’t question the witness about a piece of paper I haven’t seen.”

“This is not beyond the scope, Judge,” Riesner piped up. “She opened this line of questioning when she brought up the issue of marriage. I did overlook showing this to Counsel. My mistake. I apologize.” He walked over and handed Nina the paper with a flourish.

“I’m overruling the objection,” Milne said.

“My divorce became final…” Lindy started, then stopped. She looked at Nina again for help, but Nina’s attention was riveted to the piece of paper she held between a rigid thumb and finger.

“Where did you obtain that divorce?” Riesner asked, seeming to let Lindy off the hook.

“In Mexico. Juarez.”

“Now, I’m going to ask you this question again, Ms. Markov, and please give it your careful attention. When did that marriage terminate?”

“Last year,” Lindy said. Some of the jurors did a double take. The audience shifted and murmured.

“What the hell?” Winston whispered, and Nina passed him the divorce decree, dated the previous year.

“Quiet,” Deputy Kimura said sternly to the audience.

“In spite of your frequently stated wish to marry Mr. Markov, you were not free to marry, isn’t that so?” Riesner asked.

“Let me explain! I thought I was divorced the year before I met Mike. I didn’t know there was a problem with my divorce until very recently. Originally, I had flown to Juarez and taken care of it quickly.”

“You flew to Juarez for a quickie divorce without caring whether it was legal and binding in the U.S.?”

“Of course I thought it was legal! Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“That’s just another lie, isn’t it? Where’s this famous Juarez divorce decree?” Riesner knew from Lindy’s deposition that she had lost it years ago. “Well, where is it?” he repeated impatiently, his voice loaded with condemnation.

“I lost it.”

“Lost it?” He strolled around, sighing, practically rolling his eyes. “You’re telling us you obtained an invalid divorce decree, lost the evidence of that, and didn’t know until last year that it was invalid? Come on, Lindy…”

“Objection!”

The lawyers wrangled for a few minutes with Milne out of the jury’s hearing, but Nina knew she could do nothing to attenuate the damage done to their case. The jury could not ignore the evidence. Lindy hadn’t been divorced, therefore there could be no marriage to Mike.

“When did you find out you were still married to Gilbert Schaefer?”

“My ex-husband called me a little over a year ago. He said he wanted to remarry, but he thought he ought to get a divorce here. He had checked and found out the first one might not be any good.”

“So any marriage to Mr. Markov would have been bigamous. And invalid.”

“Objection,” said Nina. “Calls for a legal conclusion. It’s argumentative and speculative and-”

“Sustained.”

“So during all those years with Mike Markov, you were still married to another man?” asked Riesner.

“I was married to Mike,” Lindy said firmly, “in every way except City Hall’s.”

The statement sounded moonstruck and flighty under the circumstances.

“Oh, by the way. Did you explain any of this to Mike last year?”

Lindy shook her head dumbly.

“You have to speak up,” Riesner said.

“No. I didn’t want him to know.”

“Why not?”

“Where are we going with this, Your Honor?” Nina said. She marched up to the judge with Riesner. Milne leaned over, careful to whisper, and said, “Jeff. Now, what’s this all about?”

“It’s about her secrets and lies, Judge. Her poor little wife act. Her total trust and reliance on Mr. Markov. Not only that. It’s her whole case. She signed that Separate Property Agreement based on a mutual promise to keep their assets separate. She knew her divorce was no good. A broken promise to marry-phew! Stinks to high heaven, and I just proved that.”

Milne said to Riesner, “Okay. But you’ve gone far enough with this line of questioning. I’m not going to let this last question in.”

“But-”

But nothing. They were dismissed.

As they both swiftly walked the short distance to the counsel tables, past the jury box, Nina suddenly felt a pressure on her shoe. Riesner had stepped on her heel.

Over she went, straight forward, in an ungainly leaping motion. She crashed into the trial table directly in front of an astounded Winston, and clutched at the table for support, but her hands slid off and she banged onto the table legs and hit the ground. A stabbing pain shot down her left ankle.

Deputy Kimura’s hands were there, lifting her up, and Genevieve rushed around the table to help her smooth her skirt.