Lucky Leonardo (5 page)

Thanksgiving Day dawned drizzly and gray, which matched the inside of Leonardo's head as he awoke after a night of medicating himself with shots of vodka. He ran, or rather shuffled, through his day's agenda in the shower. Pick up son. Have happy holiday meal at sister's house. Return son. Do not think about lawsuit.

“Hi Dad,” Harvey greeted him.

“Hi Harv. How're you doing?”

“Mom's screaming at me.”

“Why's that?”

“The usual.”

Harvey was thirteen years old, in eighth grade. His best friend Carl did nothing except play video games. His second best friend Mike did nothing except watch television. Harvey reported to his father that his mother screamed at him for not picking up his clothes, for not doing his homework, for giving her lip, for having slugs for friends, for not telling her where he was or when he would be back, and for everything else.

“Do the best you can,” Leonardo advised.

“I don't think she loves me any more,” Harvey answered.

Leonardo worried that his bond with Harvey, which was once so sweet and complete, was unraveling. “That,” Leonardo told his golf buddy Gerry, “is the pain of a broken family.”

“Don't be so hard on yourself,” Gerry answered. “A lot of it is just because he's growing up. Sons grow up. I haven't spoken to my son in months. It's just what happens.”

Leonardo's sister Gayle had the same luck with turkey as their mother, so Leonardo generally filled up on hors d'oeuvres and alcohol, and didn't really mind when the bird was served half-frozen, or burnt black, or soaked in grease, or with the plastic packet of gizzards and liver melted into its cavity. Gayle picked up the Thanksgiving ladle after their mother died eight years ago, not really by popular demand but without forceful opposition.

Barbara, in consultation with her mother, expressed a brief interest in the job which she withdrew before the first leaf of fall fell, to the surprise and regret of no one on Leonardo's side since they never liked her cooking or the way she sneered when she looked down her nose at them. There was also talk of a merger with the Thanksgiving held at the home of a cousin, the daughter of Leonardo and Gayle's mother's sister, known to be a big-deal Thanksgiving, but the talks broke off when a claim to ownership of Leonardo and Gayle's mother's mother's china, on which the cousin traditionally served her meal, was jokingly raised and not taken as a joke.

Gayle and her husband Hal owned a Fifties-style, split-level suburban ranch. Combo living room/dining room. Two and a half baths. Asbestos around the pipes. Two girls. Ellen, the older, cuter, popular one was a freshman at the University of Rochester, studying history and art. Joan, the younger, bulkier one, with blotchy skin and a pierced nose and eyebrow, was a junior in high school, and secretive in her ways. “I think she smokes marijuana,” Gayle confided to Leonardo in the kitchen, as she was trying to figure out whether it was her oven or her cooking thermometer that was giving her the trouble. “Tell me what you think.”

Gayle and Hal ran a traditional home. After the meal the men settled into the television room for serious holiday football while the women cleaned up, or in this case, the women except for younger daughter Joan who escaped under the guise of having to go to the bathroom. Leonardo was a golf guy with a passing interest in baseball, and tended to associate football with the Vietnam War. But Harvey and Hal sprawled themselves in big-bodied chairs with foot rests that came up when they leaned back, like pigs in shit.

“Hal,” Leonardo asked during a commercial, from his stilted perch in the corner, “have you had any interesting cases recently?”

“Not really. My usual assortment. Personal injury, collections, a little landlord-tenant…”

“Landlords or tenants?”

“Doesn't matter to me.” The game was back. The play was on. “Wow, Harvey, did you see that hit? Man oh man…”

“Amazing,” said Harvey.

“It's not a morality play,” said Hal. “Everyone's looking for what they can get, except the landlords can pay my fee, and are generally more decent as human beings…” Hal respectfully paused as the quarterback surveyed the field, and crouched under center for the snap. “Now, Harvey, watch for the pass. I think they have to pass…Yes…Oooh…Too bad. I thought he was going to catch it.”

“Good call, Uncle Hal,” Harvey said.

“I did have a case last week that aggravated me,” Hal said, as play stopped because the intended receiver was lying still on the turf, and doctors and trainers were running in from the sideline. “I was about to evict an old man who hadn't paid his rent for months. Literally months. At the last minute he gets a girl attorney I've never seen before. She shows up in court with her guns blasting, about how her guy's got cancer, and his heat doesn't work, and the security sucks, on and on. She knows where my guy buried all his skeletons. She kills him on cross examination. Kills him. At the end of the hearing the judge who I've known for years is eating out of her hand…”

“His arm's moving Uncle Hal…”

“Naw, that's just some sort of twitch. But he may be talking. See how the doctor's down there really close…”

“What's her name?” Leonardo asked.

“Her name is…yes, Harvey, he's talking…uh, maybe not…Abigail Stern. Stay away from her, boys. She is one fucking ball buster.”

Harvey laughed.

“Oops,” Hal said. “Sorry about the grammar.”

Leonardo waited a few minutes, until after they wheeled the player off on a stretcher with his fate still unknown, to ask his follow-up. “Is Abigail Stern local?”

“Ummm, yes. Newton.”

The fact she kicked Hal's butt might reflect the fatness of her target and nothing more, Leonardo realized, but he called her anyway, at 8:00 am on the day after Thanksgiving. He got her recording. He left a message.

Then he thumbed through the
Globe
to see if the lawsuit was news. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow? The next day? Inevitably the spotlight would shine upon him, and the more he thought about it, which was more than frequently and approaching obsessive by the time he left his message for Abigail Stern, the more it ate at him, like the pack of papers he folded neatly into his pants' pocket two days ago was growing sharp teeth.

I feel exposed,
he told himself on his way to the office part of his house for his first appointment.
Like a young boy left alone. Like I'm in the locker room after a swim, and I see a man watching me as I take off my trunks, and he starts walking toward me, and I can see the devil's smile in his eyes…

A shiver circulated Leonardo's spine. He picked up his prescription pad and his calendar book.
They know where I live. They're going to attach my house. I don't even know what that means. And pardon me for asking, but who in hell is the man with the devil's smile?

He reached the door to his office, and paused on the brink with his hand on the knob. He grimaced. He twisted the knob.
Good-bye privacy, reputation, stability, net worth. Unless lightning strikes the lawyers on their way to the courthouse, or Eugene limps, assuming he's recovered enough to limp, to the balcony overlooking his rehab center parking lot to proclaim how unfair this is, I'll be taking this up the butt.

He crossed the threshold, reaching down as he did to the bottom of his tool box for a veneer of professional demeanor with which to greet his first appointment of the day, a married couple waiting in the waiting room, fully engaged in the continuation of their life's argument.

She: “As usual, you didn't answer my question.”

He: “As usual, you didn't hear my answer to your question because you didn't like my answer.”

Leonardo: “Good morning. Please come in.”

They entered his office and sat down in their customary chairs.

She: “We were walking through the rose garden in the Arboretum, which was bare, and prepared for winter. I said, ‘Too bad we're not here when the roses are in bloom.'”

He: “And I said, ‘We're here today. The park is beautiful today, even though there are no roses in bloom. It's beautiful for the season that this is. It's austere beauty. Why can't you just enjoy it for what it is? Why can't you just enjoy being here today? Especially when this is the closest thing to a fucking date we've had in three months.'”

She: “And I said, ‘Sweetheart, why can't you respond to what I just said, like, “Yes, dear, I bet it's beautiful when the roses are in bloom,” instead of giving me a lecture on how stupid I am.'”

He: “Because I disagreed with you. I was happy enough to walk in the park then and there. I thought you should be too.”

She: “You're so nuts.”

He: “You're so nuts.”

Leonardo: “Would you like my opinion on who's most nuts?”

She and He: “Yes.”

Leonardo: “This particular time or in general?”

She: “This particular time.”

He: “In general.”

Leonardo: “You think one of you might be most nuts in general and the other most nuts this particular time?”

She and He: “…Umm.”

Leonardo: “So it's possible there's more than one nut in this marriage?”

She and He: “…Umm.”

Leonardo: “Well, let's start there…”

Attorney Stern did call back. Leonardo saw the light blinking on his private line, and figured it was her, and wished to take the call, but at the time his people were huffing and puffing to reach a point of harmony—which they never quite reached, but who knew?—so he let the call go. The blinking stopped. He was sadder than he thought he should be when the blinking stopped.

Leonardo, you must stop the intrusive thinking. You must stop the intrusive thinking…

But she did leave a message. She would be in. Please call back.

Which he did.

“Attorney Stern.”

“Is she in?”

“This is Attorney Stern.”

“I am…I want…I uhhh…” He spoke like a dope, but succeeded in scheduling a meeting for three o'clock that afternoon at her office, which turned out to be in the suburban professional building next to the Starbucks where Chrissie worked, not far from where he lived.

Chrissie wasn't working that afternoon, because of her yoga class, which meant he wouldn't have to explain or fake explain what he was doing if she happened to see his car parked out front. Chrissie was asking for explanations recently. Starting with the night of the DeltaTek trauma, when he stood her up.

———

Chrissie had plans for that night. First, she made reservations at the Capital Grille. “What the fuck, it's his money,” she told Helen, her Starbucks girlfriend and relationship consultant who liked to bad-mouth Leonardo. Second, she invited her mother down from New Hampshire as a surprise dinner guest. Leonardo didn't know she had a mother.

By introducing her mother into the mix Chrissie wasn't, she told Helen, dreaming about vows, commitments, community property, meeting his folks, or anything of the sort. It was just that she'd been seeing this older man for close to six months, once a week or twice a week, going to concerts, movies, out to dinner, having sex, sleeping over his house a few nights when his son wasn't around, never seeing any of his friends, assuming he had any friends, never seeing any of her friends, never talking about anything, never opening up, and it became sort of vacant and airless, and she thought it was time to get a second opinion.

Or a third opinion if Helen's counted, but the problem with Helen's was that she was good at criticizing Leonardo behind his back but flirted with him when he showed up for coffee. “I want to wash your car with my tongue,” Helen liked to say to Leonardo, waggling her tongue to demonstrate her technique.

Helen was dark in her looks and demeanor, always fighting with her bouffant of steel wool hair, and trying to patch the acne pocks on her cheeks which caught one's eye and kept her from being pretty. The other thing was that sometimes her eyes glowed too brightly, which made some customers uncomfortable. And she liked to ask Chrissie nosy little questions about Leonardo, especially about sex with Leonardo.

“Mom,” Chrissie told Helen between frappuccinos on the afternoon of, “might be pissed if she thinks he's just using me for a rocks-off machine. But she usually looks for the good and lets the bad slide. She excuses a lot in men. She's known some real shits. She knows I've known some real shits.”

Aside from the “Mom, what do you think?” part of it, Chrissie also thought it would be good for Mom to have a night on the town. Because Mom had let her life get very quiet. The thought even crossed Chrissie's mind, skittered across like a squirrel chased by a dog, that when Chrissie had enough of Leonardo maybe Mom, who was two years younger than Leonardo, and not unattractive for her age group, might be interested in filling in. Chrissie liked to make the people around her happy.

So Chrissie and Mom sat in the restaurant bar for three hours, without word from Leonardo, and got stiff on cosmopolitans. “Unless he's dead, Chrissie, he should have called,” Mom said. “You can do better.”

———

Leonardo felt the chill from that night. He sent Chrissie's mom, whom he didn't meet because it was after midnight before the blood was mopped up at DeltaTek, a nice bag from Bloomingdale's, and he bought Chrissie a half-day of beauty at a downtown spa, to try to warm things over. But in his heart, and speaking as a professional, he knew.

Abigail Stern was no spring chicken. Because brother-in-law Hal called her a “girl attorney” Leonardo expected doe eyes and a slim figure, something along the lines of Chrissie, but apparently Hal used the phrase in the traditional way to include all persons with a skirt in their closet.

Abigail was at least fifty, and wearing pants. Not fat, but filling space. Size twelve, maybe fourteen. Blond-toned hair, cut short, some lipstick, a brush of mascara, but pretty much what you see is what you get. Candace Bergen, if she bulked up, and added crow's feet and wear and tear, would still be prettier than Abigail, but that's the general idea. The differences between the young Candace Bergen and the young Abigail Stern were much more profound and systemic, so you could say that Abigail was weathering well.

Her office was low budget, two rooms off a corridor of dentists and accountants, with the first room an unmanned reception area, and the second a plain Jane office replete with work table, client chairs, lonely potted plant, and enough files and papers strewn around to make her look busy, with a view out the window of Starbucks and of the traffic intersection beyond the parking lot. She was the only lawyer. A solo practitioner. In the suburbs.

Whatever that meant.

“Would you mind telling me about yourself?” Leonardo asked as he sat down in one of the client chairs, like he was shopping around, not just a desperate man with no choice.

“I would be happy to. How did you find my name?”

“I…my understanding is that everything I say is confidential?”

“Yes, of course, unless you tell me you're about to kidnap somebody…”

“Well, I think you met my brother-in-law last week, Hal Eisenberg?”

“Yes. I did. Attorney Eisenberg. At the housing court.”

“How did that go?”

“My guy did OK.”

“How did Hal do?”

“Dr. Cook, you're not bound by the same confidentiality as I am. If I said he was unprepared and a blowhard you could go right back and tell him I said so, and that would be embarrassing.”

“He recommended you, inadvertently, by telling me you were busting him.”

“I appreciate the compliment. I try to do a professional job on all my cases, big and small. That's how I market myself. Have you dealt with many lawyers?”

And so it went for close to an hour, with Leonardo asking for her story, but basically telling his own, starting with his divorce, his ex-wife, his son, his custody rights, his payment obligations, his lawyer, her lawyer, the judge, the second judge, what he tried to do as a psychiatrist, what he thought about pills and insurance companies, blah, blah, blah, getting around to when Brockleman called him with a crisis on a pleasant fall afternoon when he already had a tee time which he wished with all his heart he hadn't canceled.

A tear came to his eye at this juncture.
A tear? How come a tear? A long time between tears. I am definitely engaged in a new and worrisome internal dialog, manifested by an array of symptoms…and I can't seem to get them to shut up.
He looked around for a tissue. In his office there were always tissues. In Abigail's office there was a slightly soiled Starbucks napkin under a plastic cup containing the remains of a mocha frappuccino. Like she wasn't prepared for tears. Like she had other priorities. She handed him the napkin.

“Did you bring the papers?” she asked as he dabbed.

Leonardo pulled them out and handed them over.

“Martin Drunkmiller represents the plaintiffs,” she said at first glance.

“Is that good or bad?” Leonardo asked.

“I know him,” she answered as she hunkered down with the papers, taking her time, running her finger over each page, flipping to the next, occasionally nodding, occasionally furrowing her brow, occasionally biting her lower lip, all of which Leonardo experienced as a physical exam where he rolled on his side and let the doctor stick a lubricated finger up his asshole.
Tumors? Pain? Humiliation? What do you think, doc?

“Dr. Cook,” she said at last, “I think the plaintiffs—the Binhs—will have preemption problems with some of their tort claims, because of worker compensation exclusivity, and they'll probably have causation and credibility problems, but my preliminary assessment is that unless the company is motivated to settle quickly, and puts real money on the table, this thing will be around for a while.”

“It's all lies.”

“Dr. Cook, it can take a lot of time and effort to disprove lies. Besides, is it a lie that there's a seriously-injured guy?”

“No.”

“A seriously-injured guy gets a chance to make his case. That's how it works. I don't think a judge will throw it out before discovery is completed, if then. I wouldn't be surprised if the discrimination claims and the fraud claims get to the jury.”

“How long?”

“Two years, three years, or longer depending on how much of a pissing contest it becomes, and this, Dr. Cook, looks like it could become a major league pissing contest. I bet these boys will line up and piss at each other until their pissers run dry.”

“What about me?”

“You, Dr. Cook, should bring an umbrella.”

Leonardo winced.

“If the plaintiffs win against DeltaTek,” Abigail went on, “maybe they win against you too. Maybe DeltaTek indemnifies you. Maybe your insurance covers you. Maybe this and maybe that. It's too early for me to predict an outcome. There are too many unknowns. It's like a patient walks into your office for the first time and he's an emotional mess. Do you know the outcome of his treatment?”

“No, but…”

“And, Dr. Cook, these papers are just the beginning. In litigation there are always unexpected twists and turns, like in a suspense thriller. You play it chapter by chapter.”

Leonardo mulled this assessment. He shook his head. He shook his head some more. “This is very unfair to me.”

“Sorry.”

“It disrupts my whole life. I'll be smeared in the newspapers, in full view of my patients and my colleagues, and my ex-wife, and my son…”

“Possibly.”

“And I didn't do anything wrong. I'm innocent. I'm completely innocent. All I did was try to help the guy. I honestly and professionally tried to help the guy.”

“Yes.” There was a business clip to Abigail's voice, like the human turmoil part was beside the point. Like painting her nails. “It's a difficult situation.”

“I feel I'm being attacked,” Leonardo proceeded, letting it hang out, watching it hang out, unraveled by what he was seeing, “and I can't defend myself. Like I'm a little boy…” He caught a glimpse of the devil's smile again. He shuddered. He gagged. Big tears splurted out. He used his hands for wipers and his sleeve for drying.
Next thing will be 'Nam flashbacks. Descent to hell. Now boarding, descent to hell…

Abigail waited.

“I'm sorry,” he said when he quieted down. “I don't cry. I never cry. I don't know why I'm crying now. I'm used to sitting where you are, on the other side of the tears, but…” and he almost blurted again, but he stifled.

Abigail waited.

“What do you think I should do?” he asked after a while.

“I think you should be patient.”

“What?” he squealed. “I should be a patient? You think I'm…”

“No, no, Dr. Cook. You misheard me. I think you should be patient, and defend yourself.”

“Oh. How am I supposed to be patient with this attachment thing? They want to attach my house next week. I don't even know what that means…”

“Dr. Cook, the motion to attach your house looks like a piece of bluster to me. I think we can back them off…”

“We?”

“I'll work with you.”

“Oh.” Abigail's words of cooperation washed over Leonardo like a foamy wave, and left him with a goofy smile and a martini-like afterglow. Like she was a rescuer. Like all of a sudden the world wasn't so cold, or rapacious. “Feels good to me,” he said, although in the midst of his warm and fuzzy feeling he heard a small inside voice wonder, sort of like the sound of a mouse scratching in the attic, what to do about the tears, and the mood swings, and the small inside voices wondering.

On a downward path, like the last time.

Abigail talked on about timing and strategy, and the unpleasant and expensive realities of the adversarial system, returning more than once to her pissing contest metaphor with its implication of posturing penises and a wild thing out of control to support her request for a hefty retainer paid in advance, which tended to drop an anchor on the remains of Leonardo's martini-like afterglow. They scheduled a follow-up meeting.

On his way out he pit-stopped at the next-door Starbucks for a shot of espresso. Helen, Chrissie's work friend, spotted him as he sipped from his little cup in a quiet place along the counter. She sidled over. “Dr. Lenny, how're you doing?”

“Hi Helen.”

“Chrissie's not here.”

“I know.”

“I thought I saw your car in the lot. Stands out from the SUVs, you know?”

“Yes it does.”

“Did you come by to take me for a ride?”

“You're working…”

“I'm available.”

“Helen, you're a bad girl. You just want to get me into trouble.”

“Dr. Lenny, I'd love to go for a ride, and I won't tell Chrissie. Cross my heart.” She crossed her heart, ending with a quick little cupping of her left breast, as though serving it to him on a platter. No one else could see.