As Robert shuttled from place to place, Jane and Patsy developed novel ways of keeping tabs on his movements. The two women acknowledge that they took some pleasure in this. At first, they would cold-call car-rental companies to see if he had reservations. If the answer was yes, they would innocently ask the clerk where he was intending to drop off the car. If the answer to that was, say, a particular airport, they would call all the airlines there and ask whether Robert Maharam had a trip scheduled, and if so, what was his destination. Little by little, they got a sense of his regular business trips and vacations. He seemed to have severed all contact with other family members, and also seemed to be constantly on the move, taking cruises and staying in luxury hotels as far away as China.

They were tracking him because they hoped to get a judge in another state, one that he was planning to pass through, to issue an arrest warrant. This wasn’t easy: They’d have to know where he was and then hire a lawyer there to plead with a judge to issue a warrant, so they could get local cops to grab him at an airport.

Through all this, they began to understand just how flawed divorce law really was. Even though Robert had been held in contempt in New York, and Jane had obtained a warrant for his arrest, officials in other states didn’t much care. Jane and Patsy tracked Robert to Florida, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, and traveled to those states brandishing their New York warrant, but in each case, local law-enforcement agencies refused to enforce it.

At this point, Jane and Patsy might have been expected to give up and get on with their lives—who wouldn’t? Was Jane willing to spend the rest of her life doing this? Was Patsy prepared to sacrifice time that might have gone toward her career and perhaps starting her own family?

The unwavering answer, in both cases, was yes—leaving their friends, at times, in disbelief. “I remember once that they went to some state, where they thought they were gonna get him for the umpteenth time,” says Nancy Preiser, a friend of Jane and Patsy’s since the eighties. “When they came back, we all went to breakfast, and they were really, really depressed. It was very clear that this was really taking a toll on them.”

Patsy, for her part, remains intensely angry at her father—or her “ex-father,” as she now calls him. She can’t erase her vivid memories of what he had done to her mother. Patsy remembers his confessions and his phony contrition and her mother weeping as she wandered through an empty house, trying to understand why the only man she’d ever known and loved had callously taken everything.

“I saw, firsthand, what he did to her,” Patsy says, jabbing the air with her finger, the emotions still fresh. “I heard the lies. I heard him make promises. And I saw him break them.”

And Jane? Her work on Patsy’s music career had taken her into new and interesting circles. She might have started another relationship. But Robert had been the only man she’d ever been intimate with, and to be lied to and then so casually dismissed from his life, to be left alone at the age of 52—not to mention the incurable disease he’d left her with—well, it left her feeling damaged and unprepared for a relationship with anyone else.

There was another thing, too. As the years passed, Jane realized that if she allowed Robert to walk away, she’d forever think of herself as pathetic—a sheltered woman whose worldly husband had made a mockery of her. But if she refused to give up, if she devoted herself to fixing the law that had victimized her and many others, she might turn the entire sordid experience into an achievement. As she told her story to more and more people, they congratulated her for not giving up, and even called her a crusader, and it made her feel good in a way she hadn’t in years.

“I am very proud of myself for not rolling over,” she says. “It became very important to my sense of self. This was a way to deal with the whole thing—it kept me going. I didn’t want to become a victim. I don’t like the word victim.”

Frustrated by the courts, Jane and Patsy turned to the media in an effort to humiliate him into paying. In 1998, Jane spoke of her plight on Sally Jesse Raphael, and the show sent a crew to California in hopes of recording Patsy confronting her father in an airport he was scheduled to pass through. But Robert never showed up. On the show, Sally said to Jane, “He gave you the slip!”

Last year, Jane and Patsy came closer than ever to nailing Robert. In August, they learned from a car-rental company that he would be flying out of Dulles airport in Virginia. A lawyer who had been working with them, David Rosenblum, had come up with a novel way of persuading a judge to order his capture. He exhumed a nineteenth-century provision from English common law called “the writ of no exit”—which still holds sway in some states but is almost never used today—that allows a court to temporarily detain someone when his victim has shown that he has no adequate legal means of recourse against him. The terms of the detention under this writ are ill-defined, but in essence, it means that a judge can hold someone until he proves he is making a good-faith effort to pay his debt. Miraculously, a Virginia judge ruled that Robert could be picked up.