Skinny-dipping Read online

  Thinking I’d rather have a black and plastic office than continue to pretend to listen to my dreary new client pontificate further on the difficulties of his profession and the unfairness of a legal system that actually allowed an injured patient to sue his doctor, I stared at my client and waited for a break. So, when my good orthopod paused to inhale, I gave him an earnest but pain-laden smile (I’ve learned something from watching Newly’s well-rehearsed clients over the years), and I said, “My head and neck really hurt. Really. Bad. I’m afraid we’ll need to reschedule this so I can give you the attention, the whole attention, you deserve.” I paused, studied his face, and saw the emerging sympathy.

  “Mugged, you said?”

  Got him.

  I grimaced, rubbed my neck. Exaggerated the mugging experience, with special emphasis on the choke hold and the neck twisting.

  “You’re a surgeon, so could you, please, maybe, write me a prescription for a pain medicine? That Advil just isn’t helping me.”

  Memo to file: Never ask for a narcotic by name— that tips them off.

  By the time he left, I had a prescription for Percocet, a personal narcotic favorite of Elvis Presley’s and Dean Martin’s.

  If I’d known somebody was going to kill Dr. Trusdale later that night by spiking his marijuana with toxic oleander, I’d have listened closer and been nicer.

  Chapter 3

  Jackson Winchester Smith, the founding and controlling partner at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, P.A., charged into my office while I was grinding the beans and heating the Zephyrhills bottled spring water for my second pot of coffee.

  “Good win on that kayak whiplash case,” he thundered. Jackson never talks, he thunders. He has a portrait of Stonewall Jackson in his office big enough to be a weight-bearing wall, and his favorite quote is “Don’t get in a pissing contest with a skunk.” It does not worry me in the least that the man who signs my paycheck believes that he is the physical reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson. Despite a certain love-hate cachet to our relationship, he is my hero, my mentor, and the man who single-handedly made me the firm’s only woman partner.

  Jackson glared at my French press. “What’s wrong with the coffee in the lunchroom?”

  Oh, please. Shall I start with the dioxin in the bleached paper coffee filters, or the pesticides in the coffee, or the white fake dairy creamer consisting almost entirely of fat, dye, and chemicals? Or limit myself to the apt observation that the stuff tasted like crap?

  Smiling, though I felt the muscle spasm kicking in at my jaws, I asked, “Join me?”

  I maximized the swing of my hair and my smile while I fixed us both coffee with just a dollop of organic two percent milk. We tipped our coffee cups together like friends toasting with their wine, and I sat down, leaned back in my chair, and waited.

  “Ah, sorry about the mugging. You don’t need to file a workers’ comp claim.”

  I noted this was a statement, not a question, but nodded and said, “I’m fine” as if he’d asked how I was.

  “I’ve ordered new security lights for the back. Also, I sent out a memo telling people to leave the building in groups of two or more after dark.”

  Nothing so silly as saying, “Don’t work nights anymore.”

  “A good idea,” I answered, sipping my coffee and waiting.

  “How’s your caseload?”

  Aha.

  “Heavy.” I gave the answer I always give to that question. Not to be overworked is the kiss of demise in a law firm.

  “Good,” Jackson said, the answer he always gives to assertions of overwork. “I want you to take over my CMV case, the brain-damaged baby case. One with cerebral palsy and mental retardation.”

  Oh, sure, I thought, now that you’ve milked thousands of dollars of legal fees out of the discovery stage of the litigation process, dump it on me. So year-end, your computer printout shows you made a ton of money for the firm, and my score sheet shows I lost a multimillion-dollar veggie baby case after a two-week trial.

  “I thought you were going to settle that one.” The rule of thumb being that a defense attorney always settles a brain-damaged baby case unless the mother is a total pig caught smoking crack on a police video while visibly pregnant and pounding her womb with sharp objects in front of forty bishops, all of whom will testify against her. Not that negligence on the part of the doctor or the hospital has a thing to do with the jury’s decision. A sweet young mother, a distraught and earnest father, and a drooling infant dangling his big-eyed, vacant head left and right. No way a jury doesn’t give that skewed Norman Rockwell painting some money. Big money.

  “Tried to settle it,” Jackson said. “Parents’ damned attorney has visions of grandeur. Some snotty hot-shot out of Miami.”

  Yeah, I knew the parents’ attorney, an arrogant son of a bitch who liked to make sure everybody knew he went to Harvard and who was forever correcting my pronunciation of his name—Steph-fin, not Steve-in. We’d met at some early rounds when Jackson sent me to argue some legal minutia in the case. As I recalled, our theory was that the infant’s birth defects were caused by a common virus, CMV, and not mistakes during the delivery. But it was going to be hard to get around the argument that the obstetrician screwed up by not doing an emergency cesarean when problems developed during labor.

  “Up the settlement offer,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was begging.

  “Can’t. Already at policy limits.”

  That was a lot of money thrown at the plaintiffs. Their refusal showed either confidence or stupidity, and where personal injury litigation lottery stakes are at play, the former is often a reflection of the latter. Me, I’m a “bird in the hand beats two in the bush” sort of girl. I would have taken the offer. Never let a jury of strangers decide your fate if you can help it, that would be my advice.

  But, of course, the good-parents had not asked me. And now Jackson wanted to hand this mess off to me.

  “Sure,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had a choice, since I was barely even a partner and crap runs downhill, so I might as well pretend to take it with good graces. “Got a trial date yet?”

  “End of the month. But I filed a motion for continuance. It’s before Judge Goddard. You argue the motion.”

  “What’re the grounds?” I asked, thinking, Other than the usual justice-delayed maxim and the natural human tendency to put off as long as possible anything that was difficult to do.

  “The parents’ attorney hired off our leading expert witness, and we need to find another one. You’d better hit MEDLINE this afternoon and read up on the literature, find the leading CMV experts. Look for somebody we don’t have to fly in from California, all right?”

  “You mean our doctor who was so emphatic that this sort of brain damage could only develop in the womb? He bailed on us?” My heart made the kind of conspicuous thump-thump that happens after a loud noise late at night.

  “Yeah. For twice our hourly rate. After he changed his mind, I set him up for another deposition. Under oath, son of a bitch says the money Stephen LaBlanc offered him didn’t have a thing to do with it. Our doctor’s damn insurance company’s so cheap we can’t even keep a decent expert. Then this overpaid expert says he erred in his initial opinion because we distorted the facts about the microcephaly.”

  “The what?”

  “Microcephaly. You know, kid was born with a small head. You don’t remember that?”

  Yeah, I remembered the small-head thing, only I called it a small-head thing, not microcephaly.

  So we were screwed with that physician whore. Nice trick on Stephen’s part, I thought.

  “Better get busy.” Jackson put down his coffee cup, keeping his eyes even with mine, probably checking for panic. I hoped he couldn’t hear the thump-thump-thump of my heart, my now fully activated fight-or-flight response in place. Even my mouth had dried up. I smiled, reassuringly I hoped, to the man who had just ruined my life.

  Oh, just frigging great, I thought, as I watched h
im leave. If I didn’t get that continuance, I had less than three weeks to find an expert, hire him, coach him, amend the witness list to include the new expert, set up his deposition so Stephen LeBlanc couldn’t bitch “unfair surprise” and keep my expert off the stand, get ready for the trial, and maintain my regular caseload.

  My left eye pounded and my shoulders twitched in spasms.

  Two minutes after Jackson left my office, I poured another cup of coffee and heaped it with turbinado sugar, the soul food of any personal crisis. I turned on my computer and went online, accepting my karma that I was soon going to know more than anyone could possibly want to about cytomegalovirus, wisely called CMV, and I had better find a good medical expert, quick.

  Just what I wanted to be, the law firm’s leading expert on an unpronounceable virus. Already my “anything wrong with your mouth” fifteen minutes of pop-star status at my law firm had faded. My law firm, where if you rested on your laurels, somebody would steal your billings and your leather desk chair.

  Chapter 4

  My full name is Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary, named after both grandmothers and a maiden aunt, and I haven’t answered to Lilly Belle Rose since I was six and got expelled for hitting a boy who kept calling me that. In even the most modest shoe heel, I’m six feet tall. When I need to project power or instill fear, a black suit and a pair of three-inch heels pretty much do the job. I’m gaining on thirty-five at a rate that has exorbitantly sped up since I turned thirty, and I’m not really that pretty, though often people think I am.

  It’s my hair, my half a yard of thick, black shiny hair that I can use as a veil in the dance of the seven veils and that stays just the right shade of black, with painfully maintained highlights of burnt sienna to belie the hair dye, courtesy of Brock, my hair-dresser and therapist. Except in bouts of high humidity, which in Sarasota is more often than not, my hair keeps just the right pageboy wave. That’s why people think I’m pretty. That, and being thin, tall, and having blue eyes. What they call Black Irish, that dark hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. My two brothers are what I guess you’d call Red Irish, big red faces and big heads of red hair, and big, big hearts.

  Though my brothers stayed home in south Georgia, I moved to Sarasota straight out of law school because once when we were children we’d vacationed here with our father. My brothers and I had discovered that if you dug any kind of hole, it would fill up with water from the ground, and there were medieval statues of women and bulls and goddesses in the median of the Tamiami Trail near the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the beaches went on forever with white sand washed by the turquoise Gulf of Mexico, and elegantly thin royal palms lined the city streets, and, in the bay-front curve of the Tamiami Trail, majestic homes built in the 1920s boom stood in rows of grandeur not contemplated in my native south Georgia town.

  All that Sarasota grandeur was gone now. Overdevelopment and progress and retirees seeking highrise condos and not giving a rat’s ass about history or architectural integrity, plus the passage of time itself, had conspired to render it all asunder. Even the high water table was gone, sucked out of the ground by greedy use and years of prolonged drought. But when I was six, I saw the city in the waning days of its glory, and I loved it. I kept that image in my mind, and I wanted out of all that Georgia red dirt anyway, and so I came here to make my way in the world.

  And now, eight years later, I stared at my face in the lighted mirror of my own bathroom, and I wondered if the Retin-A was really making any difference. I mean, I still saw those lines around my eyes. And the ones around my mouth.

  Sun. The number one cause of wrinkles. Should have stayed out of the sun, the dermatologist had told me. Oh, thanks, that’s worth that ninety-five-dollar bill. As if I’d had a choice, growing up in the Deep South. The only people who didn’t have sun-damaged skin in my Georgia town were either invalids, rich white ladies, or night-shift workers at the pickle factory who slept days.

  Sun. Yeah. To avoid it in Georgia, you have to stay indoors.

  And my mother’s principal child-raising technique when my brothers and I were children was to open the kitchen door while clutching her first Coca-Cola of the morning and say, “Shoo.” In the summer, that meant we played outside in the hot, bright sun until we saw my dad’s car come up the driveway at dusk and we went in for supper. My brothers and I stayed sunburned. We’d eat lunch from our weekly allowance, Fudgesicles, Dr Pepper, cheese crackers, and banana Popsicles being the staples of our summer diet. During the school year, we ate the school lunches, the house specialty being lime Jell-O with green peas in it. My mother’s idea of cooking dinner was to open cans—canned hash, canned chili, canned pears, canned beans. My father ate his noon meal at the Woolworth lunch counter, and my mother drank Coca-Cola and took pills from a bottle she hid under her mattress. I took one of those pills once when I was nine, and when it hit me I couldn’t get up off the floor for over an hour. My brother Delvon took one and smashed his bike into a slash pine. Our middle brother had no imagination and never stole from our mother’s stash.

  When we got older and the school nurse sent home a note saying our mother should fix us breakfast, she’d put a raw egg in a bottle of Yoo-hoo for us. By the time we were teenagers, she didn’t even bother with the cans or the egg in the Yoo-hoo. It’s a wonder we didn’t all get scurvy.

  In that ill-nourished family, I was the baby, and when I graduated from law school, my father, who was himself a lawyer, retired and moved to a fishing camp on a TVA lake, where he sits most of the daylight hours at the end of a dock, wearing a broad-brimmed Tilly hat I gave him and watching the life on the lake play itself out against the sun and the day. He sits so still that once a butterfly landed on his arm. My mother stayed in the house in town, where she never gets out of her pajamas except to go to the occasional funeral.

  That’s who I am, and that’s what I was thinking about when Newly called me up to say that he’d just heard on the police monitor that Dr. Trusdale had some kind of seizure and died, and the police were called to the house to investigate because it could be poison, and wasn’t I defending him? And could he come over?

  Chapter 5

  My first thought, may God forgive me, was to wonder if I could still get Dr. Trusdale’s prescription for Percocet filled now that he was dead.

  Then, to my modest credit, I felt really bad and asked Newly all the proper questions, interspersed with the proper cries of dismay. Frothing at the mouth, writhing on the floor when his wife came in from her AA meeting. Marijuana smoke in the air, a half-smoked joint on the floor by his hand. Already dying. Paramedics never had a chance.

  It never once occurred to me that this had anything at all to do with me. Never once occurred to me to question the source of Newly’s details. I mean, he is a prominent plaintiffs’ attorney in Sarasota, a big frog in a small pond, with contacts where he needs them to be. I accepted the truth of what he told me, and I let the horror sink in and then dissipate.

  The phone call with Newly done, I rushed out to the nearest all-night pharmacy and didn’t have a bit of a problem with Dr. Trusdale’s prescription, and when I got home, in my driveway Newly was sitting on the hood of his big gold Lexus, a twin of my colleague Ashton’s sedan. Must be an amendment I had missed to the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar that now required attorneys to drive imported automobiles costing at a minimum twice the average annual income for the state. I drive a 1987 Honda Accord with 187,000 miles on it. Salesman told me it would go 200,000 miles, and I’m holding the man to his word. Ashton makes fun of my ancient car and my little concrete-block “great starter home,” but I have a five-year plan and it doesn’t include locking on the golden handcuffs.

  Sliding off his imported gold sedan with the “Save the Rain Forest” bumper sticker, Newly held up a single red rose and a bottle of wine.

  “I don’t need consoling,” I told him.

  “I do,” he said. “After all, you beat me in court. And I’m getting divorced. Again.” />
  “Yeah, I’ve heard that divorce line before.”

  Newly pulled out some papers from his jacket pocket. “Here’s the notice of my property settlement hearing.”

  Always the Boy Scout, I thought, looking over the legal papers he had brought to show me.

  “That’s not all,” he said. “Damn Florida Bar’s investigating me again on Karen’s allegations that I lied about my personal assets to the judge in this divorce.”

  Karen, his soon-to-be ex-wife, no doubt had an ax to grind, but given Newly’s history, I asked, “Any truth to her claims?”

  “No. None whatsoever. Totally spurious.”

  I nodded but didn’t wholly believe him.

  “If I could just hold you,” he said, “I know we’d feel better.”

  “I feel fine,” I said, “and you remember, I’ve got a strict rule about not messing with married men.”

  But Newly looked forlorn, and he sweet-talked some more, and I let him inside my pink-tiled, terrazzo-floored house with the big Live Oak in the back and the modest mortgage payment. After all, Newly had brought some good wine and my invitation inside seemed the minimum standard for civilized behavior. We drank the wine while contemplating the specter of Newly’s losing his license again. Before I’d come to Sarasota, the Florida Supreme Court had suspended his license to practice law for three years, something to do with suborning perjury. That in and of itself hadn’t made much difference in Newly’s overall career; he just hired another attorney to sign pleadings and be the face man in court while Newly told everyone but his clients that he was working as a paralegal. Newly’s wife was embarrassed by the scandal and left him. And she took his money.