An Invisible Client (5 page)

I stepped away from him and poked my head into the conference room. “Let’s go, Olivia. We’re done here.”

8

We pulled out of the lot and got onto I-15 heading back to Salt Lake. Neither of us spoke until we were getting off the freeway downtown.

“That was weird,” she said. “They were totally scared.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean we can prove anything. They might just be scared about the bad press a lawsuit would bring. It was weird how quickly the wagons circled, though.” I exhaled loudly. “How is it you’ve never had a job?”

She glanced at me. “My mother is really ill. Schizophrenia. She’s been sick for as long as I can remember. I needed to stay home and take care of her when I wasn’t at school, so jobs and friends and stuff were never really an option.”

“How’d you guys survive?”

“I got her on disability, and I would knit stuff at home, caps and scarves, and sell them on Etsy. That would make ends meet, usually.”

“How’d you pay for law school?”

“Knitted a lotta fucking scarves.”

I laughed. She laughed, too, a soft, pleasant sound.

“We got one more stop before heading back to the office.”

The hospital wasn’t far from my house. It sat up on the side of the easternmost mountains in the valley, surrounded by shrubbery and trees. We parked near emergency parking. I guessed that Joel Whiting would probably be in the ICU, so we headed there.

The receptionist directed us to a room at the far end of the corridor. I saw Rebecca in the corridor, heading into the room, and when she saw me, her face lit up.

“Mr. Byron. You came.”

“Noah is fine, Rebecca. Hope we’re not here at a bad time.”

“Not at all. One second.” She tapped on the glass window of the door, then whistled, two loud whistles. She waited a second, and two whistles responded from inside the room. I gave her a quizzical look. She smiled. “When Joel would get lost at a park or something, that’s how we’d find each other. So we use it now to let each other know where we are. It’s silly.”

We sat down on the chairs against the wall.

“Tell me what happened that day,” I said.

She stared off into space. “I was in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, and Joel came in from playing baseball. That’s his favorite sport. He came in and threw his glove onto the table, and I told him to move it. He started coughing. He’d had a cough for a couple of days, but I knew he didn’t like doctors, so I didn’t take him in. It was just a cough.” She bit her lower lip. “So I got the cough medicine down from the kitchen cupboard that I’d bought earlier. It was in a little purple bottle. He argued, like all boys do, but he did as I asked. I gave him two capfuls, the recommended dose, and he seemed fine. He got a juice out of the fridge, went into the living room to watch television . . .” She was silent for a long time.

I said, “What happened next, Rebecca?”

She bit her lip again. “He, um . . . I didn’t hear anything. So I went into the living room to see what was going on . . . and I found him on the floor. He was just flat on his stomach, like he couldn’t move. I ran over to him, and I was shaking him and screaming his name, but the only time he moved was when he vomited.” She wiped the tears away from her cheeks. “I called 911, and then I just held him. I didn’t know what else to do. I just held him.”

I waited until she was ready to speak again.

“Anyway,” she said, “the ambulance came, and they took him to the hospital. They thought he’d had a stroke. And then they told us they thought he’d had a heart attack. They didn’t know what to look for. And then a nurse said she’d heard of another little boy across the valley who had gotten sick after taking this cough medicine that had cyanide in it. So the hospital tested the medicine, which they were nice enough to go to my house and get so I could stay with Joel, and it came back as having cyanide in it. But not a lot. Just enough to hurt a child.”

Tears started flowing again, and she took a few crumpled tissues out of her pocket and dried her eyes.

“We’ve been here ever since. His kidneys are failing. The cyanide wasn’t enough to kill him. But it did a lot of damage. They won’t give him a transplant. I’ve tried everything to convince them, even called the governor’s office, but they won’t do it.”

“Is there a chance he’ll recover?”

“I pray for that every day. But according to the doctors, no. He’s getting worse every second.”

I couldn’t believe they wouldn’t get him a transplant. Several of my clients had received transplants, even alcoholics and drug addicts who would get clean just long enough to test and qualify for the organ. It didn’t make sense that they wouldn’t give a kidney to a little boy who’d done nothing wrong.

“So,” she said, “did you talk to them?”

“I did.”

“And?”

I chose my words carefully. “It was . . . odd. If the COO had just met me, apologized, and said he was doing everything he could to make the situation better, that probably would’ve been the end of it. But they had a team of lawyers there. It was like they were trying to scare me away.”

“I knew it! I knew they were hiding something.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re hiding anything. They could just be frightened of the bad press from a lawsuit.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Mothers know these things, Noah. They did this to my boy, and they’re trying to get away with it.”

“Where did you buy the medication?”

“At a grocery store, Greens. It’s by our house. A little store just in the neighborhood.”

“Did you check the tamper-resistant seal?”

“Of course. It was sealed. No one had tampered with that bottle. I’m sure of it.”

I rubbed my forehead. “Do they still have the bottle, in case we want to retest it ourselves?”

“I guess the police would. They came and took it.” She stole a quick glance through the glass on the door. “So, are you going to help us?”

I looked at Olivia. She wore the same pleading expression that Rebecca did.

I couldn’t take the case yet; liability wasn’t clear and I didn’t want to jump in until I knew for certain something was there. But it wouldn’t hurt to look. “I’m not officially taking the case, but I’m going to look into it a little more. Maybe send out our investigator and see what he can turn up.”

She smiled and put her arms around me in a hug. Surprised, I didn’t move. Though Rebecca didn’t look much like Tia, something about them was similar. Just a scent, maybe, or the way their touch felt. It sent a jolt through me. When she pulled away, I stood and said, “I’ll be in touch for some more information tomorrow.”

“Don’t you want to meet him?”

I glanced toward the door. “Sure.”

9

Rebecca whistled at the hospital room door. Two whistles responded. She opened the door, and I followed her into a private room filled with balloons and flowers. Olivia came in behind me and leaned against the wall. In front of me, a particularly large balloon proudly displayed the San Francisco Giants logo, and a Giants jersey, white with red trim, hung on one wall. I cast my eyes over these things before I turned to the bed.

Joel Whiting was abnormally thin for a twelve-year-old kid. His arms and legs were like sticks. His pale face had lips so cracked he looked like he’d been lost in a desert. The dark circles under his eyes stood out like makeup, and even though he looked dehydrated, his face was puffed up, as if he were retaining too much fluid. He wore a San Francisco Giants baseball cap.

“Joel,” his mother said, “this is Mr. Byron. He’s a lawyer. He’s going to be helping us.”

“Hi, Mr. Byron,” he said, voice as soft as the squeak of a mouse.

“Hello, Joel.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had no experience with children. One of my ex-girlfriends had had a son, but he’d been just a baby. I could place a baby somewhere and not have to interact. This boy was full-on staring at me, expecting something. It made me uncomfortable, and I had to look away and clear my throat.

“Giants fan, huh?” I said.

“Yeah. My daddy used to take me to their games. I saw them play the A’s, and we got popcorn and sodas.” He seemed equally as excited about the popcorn and sodas as the game.

“Must’ve been fun.”

“Do you like baseball?”

“Not really. Boxing was always more my sport.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “My mama won’t let me watch boxing. She says it’s for people who are violent.”

Rebecca blushed, though I didn’t feel insulted in the least.

“That’s true. Your mother is a smart lady.”

“Look at this,” Joel said.

He reached over to the small table by the hospital bed. The effort it took seemed gargantuan, but he slowly wrapped his fingers around a card and held it up for me to see. I took a step closer.

“It’s a Barry Bonds card. It’s not a first edition—those are really expensive—but my daddy got me this at Giants Stadium.” He turned the card around and stared at it, seeming suddenly sad. “He hit a home run when I was there, and my dad wanted to catch it, but it was too far away.”

I nodded. “That’s a cool card. I would hang on to that. It’s gonna be worth something one day.”

“Who’s that?” he said, looking at Olivia.

“Hi, Joel,” she said, approaching the bed. “I’m Olivia. I work for Mr. Byron. And guess what? I love the Giants. I lived in San Francisco for a summer.”

“No way.”

“I did. I even went to a few of their games, and I saw them beat the Oakland A’s, too.”

“I hate the A’s.”

“Me, too,” she said softly, as though they were sharing a secret.

In her interview, she had seemed shy and socially awkward, but around Joel she softened. As though the edges of her personality had been taken off and only the core remained. It was easy to tell she was someone who loved children.

He looked at the card. “I’d like to go back again.”

I heard a knock behind us, and two nurses brought in a machine I hadn’t seen before.

“Hey, Joel,” one of them said. “It’s that time again, buddy.”

“Already? I was talking about the Giants with Mr. Byron and Olivia.”

“Mr. Byron and Olivia can come back when we’re done.”

Rebecca gently touched my arm. “It’s time for his dialysis. We should go.”

“It was nice meeting you, Joel.”

“You, too, Mr. Byron. Bye, Olivia.”

I saw the nurses get the needles ready, and I couldn’t watch. We went out into the corridor again, and his mother looked back through the small glass window above the door handle.

“He’s on hemodialysis,” she said. “Four times a week. The needles are painful, but the worst part is the muscle cramps. He gets really bad muscle cramps, and I’ll just stay and massage him for hours.”

I put my hands in my pockets and glanced at Olivia. “He’s a good kid.”

“The best a mother could ask for. It just doesn’t seem fair that we don’t get enough time together. But I thank the Lord every day that we get this time together, right now. Just me and him.”

“Where’s his father?”

“His father died in Iraq. He was a JAG officer. They hit his jeep with a rocket, and he died last year.”

“I’m sorry.”

She glanced at me. “The Lord sent you here, Mr. Byron. He sent you here to help us and make sure that no one else’s child has to go through this.”

A dying boy, who’s as American as apple pie. What jury could resist him? Even if liability wasn’t clear, if I could get Joel into that courtroom and put him in front of that jury to talk about the pain he’d gone through . . . to tell the jury about the needles they had to stick into him four times a week and how he probably can’t sleep and has nightmares . . . The jury might give me whatever I asked for. Bob would understand that, too, and probably pay us to make it go away.

“I don’t know anything about what the Lord wants,” I said, “but I’ll help you if there’s a case there.”

“How are we going to get Joel to the court to testify?” Olivia asked while I drove us back to the firm. “I once read a case in law school where the judge and jury came to someone’s hospital room. Are we gonna do that?”

I shook my head. “Nine out of ten cases don’t go anywhere near a jury. Pharma-K will probably settle to keep it away from one.”

She was silent for a second, then said, “That’s why you might take this case, isn’t it? It’s not to help them.”

“First rule of being a lawyer is that it’s always about the money, Olivia.”

I stopped the car in front of our building to let her out.

“I guess it will help them. Any money they win, I mean.” She opened the door and slid out. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad I came.”

“Hey,” I said. She leaned back in through the open door. “You shouldn’t blurt things out at meetings. You tip your hand that way, rather than being able to use it later. But thanks, the tip about the pharmacy was good.”

She smiled shyly. “You’re welcome. So I’ll see ya around the firm, I guess.”

“Actually, I was thinking. Raimi doesn’t need another bankruptcy associate right away. But I need someone in PI if you want. You passed the Bar yet?”

She grimaced, her nose scrunching and glasses rising above her brows. “Couple months. July. I’ve been studying eight hours a day. If you’re worried I won’t pass . . .”

“Not worried. Think you can handle studying and the work I’ll throw at you?”

“Yes. I mean, I would love to.”

“Okay, nine a.m. tomorrow. I’m going to have a meeting with our investigator about this case. I want you there.” I grinned. “I know you can start right away.”

10

I had set a meeting with our investigator for nine, but I was in the office at eight—the earliest I’d been there in years. Olivia arrived early, too. She was wearing a light blue suit, and she stood at my office door until I said, “You can come in.”

“Oh, thanks.” She sat down across from me.

“How’s your mom?” I asked.

“Good. I told her I was hired here. I think she was happy. Didn’t really say much about it.”

“Did she not want you to become a lawyer?” I thought of my own father; the only thing he ever said about lawyers was that he wished he could get a hunting license for them.

“My grandfather was a chemist, and I think she thought I would go into the sciences. The thought of just being in a lab all day made me crazy, though. I want to be out, making big arguments to judges to change the law.”

I chuckled. “The law is like a big rusty ship. You can’t change its course without nearly destroying the ship in the process.”

I noticed her looking at a spreadsheet attached to a file on my desk. I slid it toward her. “Take a look. Make sure my numbers are correct.”

She flipped through the demand letter—a brochure created for insurance companies, outlining the damages to my client and the amount we were seeking. Her eyes scanned the document so fast I wasn’t sure she was actually reading. Taking a pen off the desk, she clicked it and then marked up the document.

“The estimate for long-term care is wrong. It says for eleven years and five months but it’s only calculated for eleven and three months. That should be an extra four thousand.”

“Four grand in thirty seconds of work. I should have you come in here more often.”

She blushed a little and set the file back on my desk. “I feel bad for Joel. He lost his dad last year, and now he has to live in a hospital. Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Whether or not something’s fair isn’t the right question for us. The question is, how much is the case worth? You might not like that, but this family didn’t come to our firm so we could hold their hands. They came to get money for their suffering.”

“Mrs. Whiting doesn’t seem like she cares about the money.”

“Yeah, everyone says that until I hand them a check with a lot of zeros.”

My intercom beeped, and Jessica said, “Sir, KGB is here.”

“Send him back.”

“KGB?” Olivia asked with a raise of her eyebrows.

“His name’s Anto. He’s Serbian and was in the special forces. Marty’s an idiot and didn’t realize Serbia and Russia are two different countries. He called him KGB a few times, and it stuck.”

KGB walked in. He was a slim man with a paunch and fat cheeks. The weight didn’t suit him, and it was obviously only recently gained. He had fought in the Bosnian war and gone AWOL when he saw the atrocities the Serbs were committing against the Muslims. Once, while drunk at a bar after he’d helped find evidence in a case I settled for half a million, he told me he’d killed his commander with a knife to the back of the neck. The commander had raped a young Muslim girl and her mother in front of their entire family.

“Anto, thanks for coming.”

He sat down next to Olivia without acknowledging her. “What can I do for you?”

Sometimes, I wanted chitchat about the weather, what new cars looked cool, or whom he was dating, but he never provided it. He was to the point and didn’t feign any interest in what I was doing. Sometimes, sincere people threw me off guard.

“You know the Pharma Killer case? Someone allegedly poisoning the kids’ medicine?”

He nodded.

“A mother of one of the victims thinks this was company negligence and a cover-up, not some psycho lacing the medicine. I’ve agreed to look into it for them.”

He pulled out his phone, along with a stylus for taking notes. “Name?”

“Joel Whiting is the child, twelve years old. The mother bought the cough syrup, Herba-Cough Max, from a grocery store called Greens in their neighborhood. I wanna know how Greens monitors their medicine, whether there’re cameras, how sealed and protected the medicine is, stuff like that. I also want you to interview people at Pharma-K. None of the executives. No one from management. Catch some of the secretaries and janitors after work and see if they’ll talk to you. There’s a secretary named Debbie Ochoa that I really want to talk to. Also, I want the police reports for all three kids that got sick. All the cases were in Salt Lake County.”

He nodded. “Anything else?”

“See if you can turn up anything about this company from its past. Any settled lawsuits, claims of negligence, anything like that.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and this is Olivia. She’ll be working with us on this.”

He nodded. “I have to you in a week,” he said.

“Sounds good.”

As KGB rose, I said to Olivia, “We need to run up to the hospital and see Joel’s doctor.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanna talk to him before Pharma-K’s lawyers do.”

We were back at the hospital by nine thirty. The hospital sat on the University of Utah campus. I knew Joel’s doctor would be in because I had looked him up online. He was a professor of nephrology at the university medical school. His office hours were from ten to noon.

We waited outside his office in the school. The vibe of students running around with their books and the idealistic, hopeful expressions on their faces took me right back. Law school had been like that. Only a few students had approached it in a cutthroat manner. Professors assigned cases out of books in the library, and by the time I’d get there, the pages had been ripped out. But for the most part, there was excitement, and a sense of brotherhood hung in the air. We’d been promised six-figure salaries and a ticket to change the world upon graduation.

The reality was that six-figure salaries existed only for a few. And in exchange, those few worked eighty hours a week for the most miserable lawyers in the country: civil litigators at massive firms.

I always knew I’d make it. I had a vision: the law wasn’t a noble profession; it was just a business, no different from any other. No advertisement was too tacky when Marty, Raimi, and I were starting out; no method of getting clients was too lowbrow. One of our most successful ads was a television commercial that featured a beautiful model stripping off her top to reveal the lingerie underneath. Then she said, “I’m waiting for you, but I won’t wait forever.” And we hit them with the divorce pitch. We ran another ad that showed a good-looking man in a Porsche saying essentially the same thing. The response from horny men and unhappy housewives who had been married too long was overwhelming.

The Bar opened an investigation into complaints that we were actually causing divorces, but the Bar was nothing. It had no real teeth. As long as we didn’t steal from our clients and we showed up to all the hearings, a slap on the wrist was all the Bar could hand out. Don’t steal, don’t lie too much, show up to court—those were the only ethics a lawyer needed.

A man with gray hair and a soft expression approached the office. “Can I help you?”

“Dr. Corwin?” I rose and shook his hand. “Noah Byron. I was wondering if we could talk about Joel Whiting for a minute, Doc.”

He looked from me to Olivia and back. “Are you relatives?”

“No,” I said with a shy grin, “his lawyer.”

As I expected it to, his expression changed. Doctors possessed a built-in animosity toward attorneys. Their insurance companies had convinced them that they were paying fifty thousand dollars a year in medical malpractice insurance because of us, though that wasn’t true at all. In Utah, anyone bringing a medical malpractice suit had to first clear a medical panel made up of doctors. If those doctors didn’t approve, the potential plaintiff couldn’t sue. Doctors looked out for their own, and only truly egregious cases made it through: drunk doctors slipping up during a surgery; a blatantly wrong diagnosis that left the patient dead or disabled. That freed droves of quacks to recommend unnecessary procedures on people, knowing they would never be sued. Still, the insurance companies had pulled a magic trick and convinced doctors it was somehow our fault they were getting milked by their providers.

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss his case. You’ll have to talk with the office of legal counsel.” He turned to leave.

“Doc, I’m just trying to help his mother understand what’s going on. She thinks he’s going to pass away, and no one’s doing anything to help him. I’m just here for her. No malpractice suit, I promise.”

He tapped his fingers against his thigh a few times. “Fine. Come in.”

His office was neat and sparse. I sat across from him, and Olivia sat next to me. When we were seated, Dr. Corwin said, “What does she have questions about?”

“Are you certain it was cyanide that did this?”

“Is that her asking or you?”

“Both.”

“The tests are conclusive. Yes, he had acute cyanide poisoning.”

“Can you tell where the cyanide came from? Like, if it was man-made or natural?”

“Natural cyanides are rare. The type found in his blood was inorganic, something commonly used in silver mining, actually.”

“Huh. It seems like people would die pretty quick from cyanide. Was this a weaker form?”

“Not really. The amount just wasn’t enough to kill, but it did extensive damage. I’m afraid Joel’s prognosis isn’t good.”

I hesitated. “Why isn’t he on the transplant list?”

Dr. Corwin’s brows drooped and he sighed. “Organs, particularly child organs, are extremely rare. We have to prioritize based on likelihood of survival of the recipient. Joel’s kidneys are damaged beyond repair, but his liver is damaged, as well. Within six months, he would need a transplant for that. We also have damage to the heart and lungs that may not even manifest right away. I simply don’t know how long he has left. To transplant him now would . . .”

I knew what he was thinking and that he didn’t want to say it aloud in front of a lawyer. “Would be a waste of an organ.”

“I didn’t say that,” he quickly added. “It just might take away from someone with a higher chance of survival. It’s not an easy decision, but it’s one our board had to make.”

“But it’s not impossible,” Olivia said. “I’ve read there’ve been cases of people with HIV or other terminal illnesses getting organs. If you really wanted to make it happen, couldn’t you?”

“Young lady, there is nothing I’d like more than to give that boy an organ. But to give him one means there’s another little boy who won’t have one. A little boy who can probably survive and grow old and have children of his own. I’m sorry, but that’s just life.”

I inhaled deeply. “How long does he have?”

“I don’t know. Not long.”

I nodded. “Thanks for your time.”

I rose to leave, and Olivia followed me out. When we reached the corridor, she shook her head. “He’s passing the buck. If one person in this whole process really took a stand and fought for Joel, they’d get him an organ.”

“Do you know if a woman is being attacked or beaten, it’s actually better to have one person see it than thirty? That’s because if there’s thirty people that see it, everyone will think someone else will help. If it’s only one person, they can’t think that way and will likely help. That happened in a rape case in New York. People are set up to pass the buck. I don’t blame the doctor.”

“Well, that’s not depressing or anything.” She sighed. “So, what now?”

“I wanna do something really quick. I’ll meet you at the car.”

I stood outside Joel’s room for a second and wondered whether I really should go in there. The case wasn’t good, and Walcott was probably the top defense litigation firm in the state. Bob could bury us with money and paperwork and have us tied up in court for the next decade. I touched the doorknob but didn’t turn it. Then I looked down both directions of the corridor, turned the knob, and went inside.

Joel was watching television. His mother wasn’t there. He smiled when he saw me.

“Hi, Noah.”

I stood at the foot of his hospital bed. “Hey.” I glanced up at the television. A cartoon was playing. “What you watching?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see the name. What’re you doin’ here?”

“Just came to check up on you. Where’s your mom?”

“She went home to get some more clothes.” He tried to sit up and grimaced with pain.

“Let me help.”

I took him gently under the arms and lifted him higher onto his pillows. He was as light as a blanket. I could feel his bones through his flesh, and the feeling lingered on my hands after I let him go. I pulled up a chair and sat down next to him, staring up at the television.

“I like your name. Noah Byron. It’s cool.”

I grinned. “Byron’s not my given name. I changed it as soon as I turned eighteen.”

“Why?”

I considered how to phrase my answer. “My dad wasn’t as nice as your dad. So I didn’t want to carry his name. The second I turned eighteen, I went to court and changed it.”

“Why did you choose Byron?”

“After a poet, Lord Byron. One of my favorites.” I smiled at the memory. “I don’t think I’ve read poetry for twenty years.”

He thought for a while. “I like it even more since you chose it. It’s like you picked your own name. Like you picked who you are.”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

He swallowed and reached for a cup of water on the table next to him. I handed it to him.

“Thanks.” He drank, then held the cup in his fingers. “My mama said there’s a lotta money that we might get if you win your case. I don’t care about the money. I just want enough so my mama doesn’t have to work anymore. She works at a factory in West Valley for a bad man. She quit so she could be with me, but she’ll have to go back. He makes her cry sometimes, but she says she didn’t go to college and can’t get another job. That’s why she says I have to go to college, so I don’t have to work for bad men.” He took another sip, as though the effort of speaking had dehydrated him. “Can you do that? Can you make it so my mama doesn’t have to go back to him?”

I stared at him. “Yeah. Maybe.”

He smiled widely. “I knew you were a good man. That’s what my mama said about you. That you were a good man God sent here to help us.”