“What do you suggest?” he asked.
“Let’s meet somewhere neutral, and very public.”
“How about the Pleasant Hill Park on Gregory Lane?”
I consented and we agreed to meet at our scheduled time. “Don’t tell John,” I added.
Two hours later I sat on a picnic bench with my two golden retrievers at my feet. It was a late-spring morning, warm and fresh. My cell phone rested on the table, next to my briefcase. The table was next to the parking lot where I’d left my car in full sight.
About five minutes later a sports car zipped through the parking lot and pulled in next to my car. A man in shorts and a golf shirt, carrying a briefcase, got out and walked my way.
“I didn’t recognize you.” I laughed. “You look different when you’re not wearing a suit, almost human.” He laughed, and it set the tone for an amicable working meeting. We both opened our briefcases and extracted papers.
“John agrees to everything except for three issues.”
Here we go again
, I thought. “First, he wants to file separately on Concord’s capital gains.”
“Really?” I laughed. “That’s what I’ve said for the last two years. Second?”
“John doesn’t think the airline mileage voucher will work to transfer your share of the joint mileage.”
“It will. He just has to sign it. You know what Judge Lawrence thinks about this item. What’s the third wish for the genie?”
Bradley handed me a list. John wanted six of the twelve Waterford hocks, the Anthony Quinn vellum, the blue goose cookie jar, the modernistic statue acquired in Spain, and the bathroom scale. Would John’s greed never end? I looked at the dogs at my feet and embraced the sun on my face. Peace settled over me.
“You’ve got a deal,” I said, “provided I get three of the last six annuity checks that have remained uncashed, and that John pays to have Martinez Moving pick up these last few items and the Mercedes 450SL at my house.”
Bradley looked relieved. “I didn’t think you’d give them up.” I shrugged my shoulders. “They’re only things. My peace of mind is more important. I want John Perry out of my life.”
As Bradley drove away, I remained at the table feeling smug. I was no longer John’s potential victim; there was nothing he would gain financially from my death. I grabbed the morning paper and turned to my horoscope. It read,
You know all the right things to say and do today. Others welcome your leadership. A recent success could make you feel heady; do not act foolishly.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Stakes
The melodrama of my meeting with Alan Bradley in Pleasant Hill Park strengthened my resolve to change the unfair no-fault divorce law of California. Although I was at peace with the agreement, the journey to get to a place where I could feel safe and let go had been long and arduous. It wasn’t right. No attempted-murder victim should have to undergo this additional trauma.
I returned home after the meeting with Bradley and reread the rejection letter from Assemblyman Campbell. It irritated me. Why should it take a year to get my assemblyman to take a stand, one way or the other, on a request from his constituent? Campbell indicated that a change in the law would be a major departure from the state’s longstanding history of no-fault divorce, and it wasn’t his specialty. He was afraid to buck the system, but he provided me with a list of family law legislators.
I had forgotten about the list of names and now read it with the curiosity of a prospector looking for a lost gold mine on a torn map. I didn’t recognize any names in the family law section and moved on to public safety. Bates...Gotch...Isenberg...Lee...Rainey. I stopped. Dick Rainey was the former sheriff of Contra Costa County. I had met him when he came to Excelsior to give a campaign speech. I immediately wrote him a letter. Three weeks later, in June 1994, I sat in front of him in his Walnut Creek district office, crying as I told him what had happened and why I wanted to change the law.
“Your story is a tragic case. The law is ludicrous and must be changed. I’ll carry your legislation.”
I inhaled deeply and moved a wadded tissue to my eyes to dab at the happy tears. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“The next step,” Dick said, “is to get the bill written. You’ll need to help my legislative aide to do that.”
From my first utterance in Belli’s office, it had taken me nineteen months to get someone to agree to help me change the law. What I didn’t realize as I walked out of Dick’s office was that a new set of struggles was just beginning.
Now I had another ball to juggle in the many that made up my life—work, the law, my book, victims’ rights, and fighting John in divorce court. I looked for opportunities to advance each one. During the International Women’s Writing Guild’s annual summer writers’ conference, I connected with Nancy Weber, a nurse and psychic, who helped the police solve crimes. I asked Nancy to do a psychic reading on John. She said she had to hold something that person had touched, so I told her I would mail what I could find at home.
“Fine,” she said. “We’ll set up two half-hour phone conferences, one for his past and one for his future.” I left at the end of the week looking forward to the readings.
A month later, my mother and I made our first trip to Sacramento to meet with Rainey’s legislative aide, Eric Burlington. It wasn’t that I
needed the emotional support; I just liked taking my mother along to give her a change of scenery. I knew the trip would be successful. That morning my inspirational calendar told me,
Today, maintain your purpose in life, act on it, don’t just wish for it to happen. Persevere in your attempts to achieve your goal.
“What do you want to do with the bill?” Eric asked.
“I want to give financial protection to victims of spousal attempted murder in divorce court. I don’t want the perpetrator to be able to get half the victim’s retirement fund, to be able to collect alimony from the victim, or to have the victim pay the perpetrator’s medical and car insurance until the divorce is final.”
“Have you had any luck writing a draft?”
“No. My divorce attorney keeps putting me off. I can’t get him to commit.”
“That’s okay. I’ll have the legislative counsels work on a draft. Then I’ll ask for your comments and revisions. In the meantime, you need to start looking for a sponsor for your bill.”
Eric explained that the sponsor is the group that spearheads getting support for a bill and rounds up witnesses to testify before the committees. I scribbled notes as fast as I could while he talked. This was important stuff, and I didn’t want to forget a word.
My mother and I gathered our things and got up to leave. As we walked toward the door, I turned around and looked Eric directly in the eye. “I am going to change the law,” I said.
Two weeks later, on October 6, 1994, I stood in the American Airlines terminal at JFK International Airport in New York, waiting for the commuter flight to take me to Hartford, Connecticut. I was on my way to a writers’ retreat and workshop. I strolled around concourse D, killing time. At gate 49, the door opened and a plane-load of passengers spilled into the area.
With nothing better to do, I watched as they deplaned. A middle-aged woman in a black business suit emerged, then a bald man with a wrinkled coat, followed by a couple of thirtysomething men carrying briefcases. Next, an older man in a Burberry raincoat and Stetson...
oh my God! No, it couldn’t be. What’s he doing here? He’s no longer on parole. Is he following me?
My heart pounded. My breathing escalated. The man wearing the raincoat and Stetson hat was John. He moved to one side, checked his itinerary, and looked at the direction sign above. Then he winced as he limped to the next gate and sat down.
Fearfully, I melted into the wall and crept along it until I got to my departure gate. I sidled up to the podium, as close to the gate agent as I could get, checking the concourse all the while. “The man who tried to murder me just got off the plane at gate 49,” I panted. “He may be following me. He may try again to kill me.”
The agent escorted me behind the partition, out of sight, and listened intently as I spilled my story between sobs. “Stay here. Let me check out the flights,” he soothed. After five minutes that seemed more like five hours, the agent slipped around the corner with a passenger manifest in his hand and a security guard behind him. “I confirmed that a John Perry was on the flight from Geneva, Switzerland,” the agent said. “He’s booked on a connecting flight to Seattle that leaves in two hours.”
A coincidence. It was a coincidence, albeit a highly emotional one! I stayed behind the podium with the security guard until time to board my flight. Even after all this time, seeing John made me panic and stirred up demons I thought I had laid to rest. My emotions spilled into my writing over the next ten days. When I shared the encounter that night with the writing group, I was told it was the strangest event to have happened on the way to one of the retreats. “Great! Now I get to add you to my ‘this is the strangest case I’ve known’ fan club.” I laughed.
In late October, a week before her retirement, my friend Pam popped into my office and invited me to join her for lunch, with the added caveat that I could reconnect with our former workmate, Rex Johnston, who was meeting her at the Potato Barge. I accepted.
During lunch the three of us laughed as we recounted stories from our lab days. We brought each other up to date on what we had been up to for the last couple of years, including some about my encounter with a psychopath. On that one, we didn’t laugh. Before we parted, Rex invited us to a dinner party at his house on the third Friday of November.
The following week Rex was gone on a Mexico vacation and I dealt with the devastating loss of my beloved golden retriever Gobi only four days after our re-acquaintance lunch. At fourteen-and-a-half, Gobi had lived a good life, but it was hard to let him go. I couldn’t stop crying. I took two days off from work to grieve then concentrated on my job, getting rid of John, and changing the law. When Rex returned the first week of November, I invited him to the Justice for Murder Victims dinner dance in San Francisco, which was a week before his own dinner party. We enjoyed each other’s company on both occasions. With success at hand, I extended an invitation to him to join my mom and me for Thanksgiving dinner at my house, and he gladly accepted with an offer to bring a smoked turkey. I insisted he also bring his small dog, Taffy. The dinner was delicious, Rex’s laugh was infectious, and our pets integrated with ease. Rex told my mom the story of how his ex-wife had adopted Taffy at the Oakland SPCA a day before the dog was to be snuffed. It seemed that no one wanted a one-year-old scraggily blond mixed terrier with a horrendous overbite complicated by too many teeth. I picked Taffy up and gave her an extra long hug. Mom eagerly engaged in the conversation and, after Rex left, she commented that he looked and acted somewhat like my dad. Her observation shocked me. She was right. Rex, from Illinois, had some of the same Midwestern traits of my dad, who was born and raised in Kansas, and they were of similar build and coloring.
Rex and I started to date, slowly. With each date I noticed that our common interests and values meshed into a comfortable relationship. I had trusted my Higher Power. My trust was not misplaced, in either my Higher Power or in Rex.
Many mystical happenings have no obvious explanation but produce amazing results. My first psychic reading with Nancy Weber had been one such. She told me things about John’s past that chilled me, including that he had murdered three women in the Miami area around 1960. Nancy also “saw” events that coincided with what John’s stepmother had told me, things that Nancy would have no way of knowing. Eerie. Now I sat perched on the edge of my chair at work at the end of November, ready for the second reading. It was noon and Nancy was due to call any minute. We were going to deal with John’s future.
I jumped when the phone rang. Nancy said she was holding John’s photograph and his money clip once more, and that visions were popping into her head. “This time I see money being exchanged for shipments of something... crates with straw sticking out... and the something is being imported illegally.”
I hadn’t told her John was importing plants. What she said chilled me. “I see him with connections in Zurich... something about arms dealers and money laundering.”
“Oh, Nancy, I ran into John in the airport when he was on his way home from Geneva, not too far away from Zurich.”
“You’re always in danger from him, Barbara. Especially if he thinks you are following him.” I took heed of her ominous warning. I would watch my step, even more than I was already doing. When I didn’t think it could get any worse, it did.
“John’s connected with a woman,” Nancy continued. “When he gets this way, he gets violent and possessive. But it’s not jealousy; it has to do with possession of wealth, and it’s starting to happen.”
Her prognostications turned darker. “It’s dangerous for her to be with him,” Nancy said. “He’s going to try to murder her. He’s a sociopath with psychopathic serial tendencies. You’ve got to warn her and let her know her life is in danger, but you must do it anonymously.”
When the consultation ended I sat like a zombie, mulling over all the details I had scribbled on my white lined paper. I had to share this amazing event with someone. I went to Elizabeth’s office and told her what Nancy said. “What are you going to do?” she gulped.
“I don’t know, but I trust in my Higher Power. He will give me the way.”
For three months I worked diligently on the bill. Finding a sponsor was paramount to my success, so I wrote letters, made phone calls, and visited offices, to no avail. No one was interested in taking on my cause, including my divorce attorney. Oh, they all agreed the law needed to be changed, and they would support me. They just didn’t have the staff to commit. More likely, they lacked my passion.