Read Online Date With the Devil by Don Lasseter - Free Book Online

typing duties. But they also found time for entertainment. “We had so many wonderful times. We went to Atlantic City, the Hamptons, to New York City, just all kinds of fun stuff. One of my favorite times was when we went over to the city and we caught a hansom cab for a ride around Central Park. It was absolutely beautiful. He explained he was trying to get me to marry him. I wouldn’t say yes, so he said, ‘Let’s just do the whole ride again.’ It was so much fun. I think he knew that even if I agreed, he could deny the whole thing—as an attorney—and say he was just drunk.”
    Mahler, Stacy said, had been quite generous with her. “We used to go get our hair styled together. I would get a five-hundred-dollar styling and we’d have our nails done. It was so nice having a guy you could run around with and do things like that.”
    His generosity went a little too far with one gift David presented to Stacy. She laughed with embarrassment when speaking of it. “He decided he wanted to get me this certain toy. It was before Rudy Giuliani put a crackdown on all this stuff, and David bought this ‘machinery.’ I didn’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t want it, so he decided to take it back to the store. Picture him, getting on the subway with it. He didn’t wrap it. Everybody could see, and he didn’t care. The store was closed at first, and he had to carry it all over town. He finally goes there, handed it over, and said, ‘She wore it out.’ Talk about making me blush.”
    A more pleasant recollection Stacy chose to talk about regarded another remarkable coincidence. “One time we went to the top of the Empire State Building when he was showing me all of the sights. You go up elevators to a certain point and then get in line for another ride to the top. We were in line and struck up a conversation with another couple. They were tourists and we asked where they were visiting from. One of them said, ‘Oh, a little place in California you’ve never heard of, I’m sure.’ I said, ‘Well, try me.’ They said, ‘Visalia.’ I couldn’t believe it. He worked for someone I went to high school with. So that was kind of fun.”
    When the first Christmas drew near, David took Stacy to spend the holiday with her parents. “That was the first time he met them. He and my dad got along handsomely. The next year, we spent Thanksgiving with them. We would alternate being with his parents for one holiday and with mine the next holiday, and then reverse them the following year. His mother was a wonderful woman, and his dad is extremely strong-willed. I really liked his stepmother too, who is a very nice woman.”
    One particular aspect of Stacy’s relationship with David’s father, an expert in commodity trading, delighted her. “He would do all this analyzing of stocks, and then I would pick one at random, and mine almost always outperformed his.”
    Relationships between Stacy and David’s family also extended to his sisters. “Beth was wonderful. Alice, I didn’t know that well.” Asked if Mahler had conflicts with them, Stacy could only grimace and say, “Isn’t there always issues between siblings?”
    Even if David at first seemed “charismatic” to Stacy, she could see a few conflicting characteristics. “He had a good sense of humor, but sometimes it didn’t show. You would say something off the cuff that you thought was funny and he wouldn’t crack a smile. He really wasn’t much of a joke teller.” In trying to identify what Mahler did laugh at, Stacy couldn’t think of anything. She rationalized, “Sometimes his idea of comedy would go over other people’s heads.” She cited an incident in which they were playing Monopoly with some relatives. “The game requires some intelligence and they were playing like