Sweetheart Deal Read online

  Sweetheart Deal

  Claire Matturro

  To Della Johnson Hamner,

  and in memory of Ada Bell Taylor Johnson

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Your cheating mind will tell on you.

  Chapter 2

  Ah, the sweet, green grass of home, I thought, and…

  Chapter 3

  I’ve never yet been in a hospital that didn’t make…

  Chapter 4

  No sense beating around any bush just because I was…

  Chapter 5

  All for the lack of a refrigerator.

  Chapter 6

  I stood in the front doorway and gulped a breath…

  Chapter 7

  In south Georgia, the earth is lush and never idle,…

  Chapter 8

  A peacock is the male bird of the species called…

  Chapter 9

  Though my experiences in the last few years had taught…

  Chapter 10

  Well, damn.

  Chapter 11

  Trash. Piles of trash.

  Chapter 12

  Crazy. I’d have to be plumb out of my mind…

  Chapter 13

  Well, it’s all right. It’ noon, and I’ve got two…

  Chapter 14

  My spine jolted a bit as my little Honda Civic…

  Chapter 15

  As the cosmic forces had surely decreed that I would…

  Chapter 16

  If a swanky Miami trial attorney had come at me…

  Chapter 17

  Deep in the heart of Dixie lay a deep freeze…

  Chapter 18

  There is something about not being in my own bed…

  Chapter 19

  Life has this nasty way of following moments of pure…

  Chapter 20

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I didn’t care that nobody could…

  Chapter 21

  As the sun rose higher in the sky, I got…

  Chapter 22

  Act normal.

  Chapter 23

  All the airborne toxic dust particles floated around me in…

  Chapter 24

  Paper.

  Chapter 25

  It turned out that the nurses in the Bugfest hospital…

  Chapter 26

  Smugglers.

  Chapter 27

  Blue.

  Chapter 28

  I confess that when I was in college and taking…

  Chapter 29

  Simon’s mother had a cold, cold heart, okay, I got…

  Chapter 30

  While it’s true, as Hank Williams sang, that none of…

  Chapter 31

  As the small towns of the South watched more of…

  Chapter 32

  A circle of nice, professional men surrounded the bed of…

  Chapter 33

  One benefit of my making lists of things to do…

  Chapter 34

  My own mother, crazy as she seemed to be, with…

  Chapter 35

  It is the nature of love to survive death. My…

  Chapter 36

  Patti Lea would not hear for one second any version…

  Chapter 37

  Here it was, a bright, chilly morning, the day of…

  Chapter 38

  Bonita’s voice over the phone reverberated with an anxiety that…

  Chapter 39

  One thing about the law is this: it often refuses…

  Chapter 40

  Shalonda was still sleeping when I checked on her, and…

  Chapter 41

  Of course, Demetrious, being the chief of police in a…

  Chapter 42

  Henry had many sterling qualities. I was glad Bonita had…

  Chapter 43

  Obviously it had never seriously occurred to either Colleen or…

  Chapter 44

  The mournful sound of Patsy Cline lamenting about walking after…

  Chapter 45

  Folks who go where they are not supposed to be…

  Chapter 46

  Hiding in the tree house from the snare of the…

  Chapter 47

  Becky was a show-off.

  Chapter 48

  A few years back, my junior associate had stolen Newly,…

  Chapter 49

  My next goal was to drive by Rebecca’s office and…

  Chapter 50

  Children run away.

  Chapter 51

  Ten minutes before my cell phone made that irritating and…

  Chapter 52

  On the spot, I would have made a deal with…

  Chapter 53

  It was simple, really: Who had killed or tried to…

  Chapter 54

  Well, damn, I thought as I smashed in Simon’s window,…

  Chapter 55

  There’s nothing like a brisk jog through the dense brown,…

  Chapter 56

  My brother Delvon likes to tell me that I need…

  Chapter 57

  When you break and enter a building in daylight in…

  Chapter 58

  There are cultures that believe a person has an animal…

  Chapter 59

  Never let your guard down, not even when poking in…

  Chapter 60

  Someone was butting me in the stomach.

  Chapter 61

  Poor old Rodney had done just about all the reassuring…

  Chapter 62

  Those not as fast as Shalonda, Shalonda, Demetrious, and me…

  Chapter 63

  The $65,000, what with all the general excitement, had slipped…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Claire Matturro

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  chapter 1

  Your cheating mind will tell on you.

  I, Lilly Belle Rose Cleary, attorney-at-law, so thought as I glared at my own client. Not only was this man attempting to defraud the legal system, he was not listening to me, his defense attorney. Thus, I was engaged in a wrangle of wits with an idiot.

  And I was not winning.

  This is, of course, not that unusual in the larger scheme of things; one has only to look back at some of our recent presidential debates to see other shining examples of battles of the wits won by the witless.

  Still, it didn’t happen that often to me, and I was irritated, and wondering if I was losing my stomach for my line of work, which was defending doctors, lawyers, and other professionals against the costly and insulting burden of malpractice lawsuits brought by their former patients and clients.

  I balanced myself for my next verbal thrust, reducing it to the direct order and not the rationale. “You cannot respond to a motion to produce the relevant medical records by providing the plaintiff’s attorney with altered medical records. Absolutely not.”

  “Why not?” my idiotic and wholly charmless client asked, in his personal quest to ruin what was otherwise, so far, a seemingly pleasant morning in Sarasota, Florida.

  “Because it is unethical, it is illegal, and it is a fraud upon the court, which will subject both you and me to sanctions.” Then, getting to the real crux of the matter, I said, “You can’t get away with it. It’s obvious. You changed the information in a blue pen; the original text is in black ink.”

  “But it won’t matter when it is photocopied,” my idiot client replied.

  I sighed. Could anyone be that stupid and allowed to live outside an institution? “It will still be obvious. You’ve scribbled over half the notes. Besides, did it ever occur to you that the plaintiff’s attorney might demand a look at the original records?”

  H
enry Platt, my sweet, pink-cheeked claims adjuster, the very man who had referred this case to me and who was now present to protect his company’s interest and offer me moral support, took up the challenge. “Besides, if you use…that is, doctor the, er, I mean, alter the…I mean, falsify, er…engage in a fraud, then we, your malpractice insurance company, can deny coverage.”

  Excellent point for Henry. I liked this man more and more over the years that we had worked together. “And if Henry’s company denies coverage due to your, er, fraud, since they’ve hired me to represent you pursuant to the terms of your policy, I would no longer be your attorney. The insurer will not pay any of your legal expenses. You will be totally on your own.”

  “About those original records?” Idiot Client asked.

  “Yes,” Henry and I said in concert.

  “You mean the plaintiff’s attorney could look at them? The real ones? I mean, the original ones?”

  “A request to review the original records would not be out of line in a medical malpractice case,” I said, using my most lawyerlike tone of voice. The one that said I’m in charge, you’re not. “Especially in light of the fact you’ve scribbled over a number of words and written in different ones. In fact, I would consider it legal malpractice on the part of the plaintiff’s attorney if she did not inspect the original medical records.”

  “But…these are the original records.”

  Henry and I rose out of our chairs and glared down at Idiot Client, a chiropractor who had been treating a man he had diagnosed with spinal subluxation. Unfortunately, what the man actually had was a cancerous tumor of the spine, which had not much improved under Idiot Client’s spinal manipulation. Only the intervention of the patient’s daughter had gotten the patient appropriate medical attention, and led to a malpractice suit against this man, this client, this idiot, this would-be fraud, this chiropractor to whom Henry’s liability-insurance company had the grave misfortune of having sold a malpractice policy.

  “These are the originals?” I asked. Sometimes stress blocks my ears.

  “Yes,” Idiot Client said.

  “You took a blue pen and changed things on the original records, which were in black ink? And you didn’t—what? Think this would be noticed by anyone?” I struggled to keep from yelling. I noticed Henry’s cheeks were splotching red.

  “I didn’t think anybody would look at the originals. Everything photocopies black and white,” he said. “I…I panicked.”

  Henry and I looked at each other across the top of this man’s head as we continued standing and the idiot between us remained seated.

  “Settle?” Henry said, a little squeak in his voice. “Lilly, can we settle it? Quick?”

  “Henry, a word. Outside,” I said.

  We stepped out into the hallway, out of the earshot of our hopefully soon-to-be Not Client. I paused, waiting for Henry to read my mind as I could not suggest that he take a course of action detrimental to my client, the chiropractor, even if I couldn’t as of this minute personally stand that client. “Henry?”

  “He clearly, er…that is, he committed a fraud, and there’s an unambiguous provision in our policy for”—Henry paled and gulped air—“denying coverage in that event. My company owes him nothing,” Henry said. “Not even a defense.”

  I nodded, careful not to encourage Henry in the path I would have demanded in a heartbeat if I was not ethically charged, at least for the time being, with protecting my client’s interests. “You tell him. You know I’m still his attorney until the court grants my motion to withdraw.”

  “Could we get Bonita in here to, er, er…”

  “Witness it?”

  “Yes.”

  Technically, Bonita, my long-suffering and unnaturally calm legal secretary supreme, widow, mother of five headstrong children, and the object of Henry’s great affection and three-year quest to marry, was not needed as a witness and would have been suspect in any event, seeing where her loyalties lay. But I nodded. Henry was always more forceful around Bonita. If he needed his sweetie by his side before he could act boldly, this was fine with me. “Go get her,” I said.

  A few moments later, the three of us slipped back into the room. Idiot Client looked at the ever-lovely Bonita, stood up and puffed out his chest, sucked in his belly, and offered his hand. Henry marched between them quicker than a bull moose on the make. Over his shoulder, I could see a small smile flit about Bonita’s face.

  “On the basis of the fraud you have committed, my company will be denying coverage. And since we have hired Ms. Cleary to represent you pursuant to your contract, which is now nullified by your fraud, she will, pursuant to my instructions, file a motion to withdraw as your counsel. I’ll get the paperwork started,” Henry said, clear, straight, and without his usual faltering. Bonita beamed.

  “You can’t do that,” the man said. “I’ll sue you. I’ll sue you both.”

  “Well, as your attorney at least for the next couple of minutes, I would advise you to please consider what an interesting witness Mr. Platt would make. And these”—I held up the altered records—“interesting evidence, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Idiot Client jumped up, snatched his records out of my hands, growled at us, and dashed out the door. Bonita hugged Henry as if he had cured cancer. Hugging complete, Henry turned to me and offered his hand, and we shook as if he and I had won a huge defense verdict.

  Just as Henry and I finished shaking hands, the phone in the conference room rang. I let it ring. I had left clear instructions not to be disturbed.

  While I was grinding my teeth, the phone stopped ringing. But soon enough, my law firm’s receptionist’s voice chirped over the phone intercom, telling me, and not incidentally Henry and Bonita, that my brother needed to speak with me and, honest, she wouldn’t have interrupted but he insisted it was a family emergency, and Bonita didn’t answer my office phone.

  “Which brother?” I asked, knowing my two brothers—mad hatter, Pentecostal, pot-smoking Delvon and steady-as-a-rock-in-a-still-lake Dan—have vastly differing concepts of an emergency.

  “Dan.”

  Uh-oh. Dan’s the normal one. Dan’s the one who could properly define emergency, the one who doesn’t have emergencies like other people have supper.

  I snatched up the phone and waited for a series of clicks, and then Dan’s voice came over the line, and he said, “Lilly Belle?”

  “Dan, it’s me. What’s wrong?”

  “Well, we got us a problem here.”

  He paused and I inhaled, imagining the dead or maimed bodies of people I loved. “What, Dan?”

  “My momma, I mean, our momma, has been…she’s…they’ve arrested her.”

  “For what?” I said, eyeing Henry and Bonita, and wondering in one part of my brain how to get them out of the room without seeming rude and with the other part of my brain wondering what in the hell my mother could have done to get arrested. I mean, the woman never left the house. Hell, the woman never got out of her pajamas.

  “The police chief saw her shoot a man.”

  “She shot somebody,” I said, too loudly and in a complete abandonment of proper office decorum. Henry and Bonita were most definitely paying attention. I also noticed they were holding hands. “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine, but they got her in the hospital instead of the jail. The doctor, you remember Dr. Weinstein? He’s treated her before. Moved here from up North about, oh, almost a couple years ago?”

  “No, I don’t know him. I haven’t been there in twenty years, remember? And how did he treat her? He does house calls?”

  “Oh, no, nobody does house calls. Mom coughed over the phone for him, and he wrote out a scrip for some antibiotics. Cleared her right up.”

  “She coughed over the phone for him?” Yeah, that was the standard of care, all right.

  “Sure did. Fixed her right up. Well, he’s a good doctor, and he has her pretty well sedated in the hospital now.”

  Oh, and that’d be different,
I thought, but caught my tongue in time to avoid saying so in the presence of Henry and Bonita.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night. But we decided to wait a bit on calling you, see if anything…you know, changed.”

  Changed? As in she un-shot the man? Or as in she was un-arrested? Or maybe changed as in the man was treated and released? Or died.

  “Is he”—dead was the word I wanted, but the rapt stares of Henry and Bonita made me wordsmith a tad—“in a state where his prognosis is clear?”

  “Lilly Belle, she shot that man to death.”

  My mother had killed a man?

  As I tried to process the notion that my reclusive mother, who was inclined toward serious inactivity, had finally actually done something, however bizarre and troublesome, Henry tilted forward in his chair as if to hear Dan’s end of the phone call.

  “Lilly, we need you. We need you to come up here. Can you come help?”

  Damn, Dan didn’t ask much of me. He was my brother, and he was strong, and if he needed me enough to ask for help, then I had to go. It was that simple.

  “Let me call you back in a few minutes,” I said, and gently put down the phone.

  “Do you want me to, er…get…er, call someone, Lilly?” Henry the Sweet asked. His face was bunched up in what I knew was genuine concern for me. Bonita rose and stood beside me, her hand lightly on my shoulder.

  “No, I…I guess I better go. I mean, go to Bugfest, to help Dan.” So saying, I trotted out of the conference room with Henry and Bonita in tow. Around the corner we went, and down the hall to my office, where Bonita pulled out my calendar. “I can cancel or reschedule everything for the rest of this week,” she said, after a quick glance.