Personal injuries (12 page)

Malatesta fit in the latter category. He appeared pleasantly avuncular, with thinning grayish hair and heavy blackframed glasses, his small quick eyes swimming within the distortions. Even in the robe he looked slightly too thin for his clothing, his shirt gapping at the neck. He licked his lips before speaking in his mildly officious tone, a bit like a clergyman's.

"Well," he said and smiled at the lawyers. "This is a very interesting matter. Very interesting. The papers here are very well drawn on each side. Both parties have had the advantage of top-rate advocacy. Now, counsel for Standard Railing-McMann?"

Jim repeated his name.

"Mr. McManis makes the appealing argument that a person ought not be allowed to drink himself to the point of senselessness and then blame someone else for the mishaps that follow. Mr. Feaver counters that Standard's position is a bit of a red herring: balcony railings, he says, must be built of a sufficient height and durability to prevent a fall, whether the plaintiff stumbles because he's deliberately tripped by an usher, or gets caught up in his own feet, or keels over drunk. In Mr. Feaver's view, a railing is like a lawn mower or a pharmaceutical drug, where the manufacturer is strictly liable for any injuries that result from use of the product. The cases in other jurisdictions admittedly go in both directions."

With a sudden manifestation of his usual irritable look, Walter rose up from his desk and interrupted the judge. The bench was at eye height for him and he was on his toes, reaching over it like a window ledge to point out a paper he'd handed the judge before. Malatesta was evidently confused, and he covered the microphone for the courtroom's public address system with his palm as Walter spoke to him. He was smiling faintly when he resumed.

"Well," he said. "I had intended to hear argument, but the calendar is crowded and Mr. Wunsch reminds me that, in light of that, I signed and filed an order last night denying Mr. McManis's motion to dismiss. So no need to do again what's already done. That will be the ruling of the court, with due apology to counsel. The case will proceed." Malatesta emitted another somewhat tentative smile and directed Walter to set a date for a status. In the brief hush, the only sounds were the heat from a register below the podium and Walter's pen scratching out an order to confirm what the judge had said.

"But, Your Honor," said McManis suddenly. Robbie's head shot around. McManis was sagged over the podium with a forlorn expression. Before he could say more, Feaver thanked the judge and, as he wheeled, kicked Jim in the ankle, while he steered Evon out by the elbow. Glancing back, she saw McManis slowly gathering his papers.

Klecker had stopped the FoxBIte and removed it from Feaver by the time Jim returned to the conference room from the courthouse.

"`But, Your Honor'?"
screamed Robbie as soon as he saw Jim. McManis was too low-key and measured to be vulnerable to ribbing very often and Robbie made the most of the opportunity.

"
What
were you going to do?" Robbie shouted. "Try to talk the judge into changing his mind?" Caught somewhere between sheepishness and amusement, McManis sat in one of the conference room barrel chairs. His tie was lowered and he appeared drained by the entire experience. It had been such a confusing moment, he finally said. After all the preparation, his instinct was to react like any other loser. McManis's brief protest in the courtroom actually amounted to good cover, which made it that much easier for Robbie to give him the business. Evon and Klecker hailed several other agents in from the hallway to listen.

"You're the
patsy
," Feaver screamed. "You're
supposed
to lose." Both Sennett and I had arrived while Robbie was carrying on. Klecker had downloaded the recording magazine to the computer equipment in the cabinet and replayed for us the brief exchange in the courtroom. Listening, McManis shook his head and said he remained utterly lost about what Malatesta had been up to. He couldn't understand then or now why the judge would schedule a hearing only to announce he'd reached a decision last night. But Sennett, running at warp speed, saw what had happened.

"That's a snow job for the record," he answered Jim. "It's wallpaper for the derriere. This guy is really clever," he said. "Mere's going to be a perfect excuse for everything. The motion's a close call. So Malatesta staged the hearing to show he had so little interest in who won or who lost that he even forgot he'd already ruled. If anybody ever questions him on the case, today's transcript will be Exhibit A for the defense. We can't drop a stitch or Malatesta'll go
right
through the opening." A second of hushed admiration for Stan's deft intelligence penetrated the still air of the conference room. For the agents, perhaps, it had never been quite as clear why Sennett was in charge. He held the floor an instant longer, the smallest man there, looking about, impressing his warnings and his discipline on each of them.

CHAPTER 11

FOR ALL HIS OVERENTHUSIASTIC OPENness about everything else, Robbie was guarded concerning Lorraine. At the start, he said next to nothing to Evon concerning his wife, as if to emphasize that, notwithstanding his deal with the government, in this arena they could not intrude. But after six weeks around him, Evon had absorbed a lot about Rainey and her illness. She'd learned bits from Mort or the staff. And coming and going from Robbie's office, she'd overheard dozens of his cheerful phone calls with his wife, as well as more sober conversations with the legion of caretakers in Rainey's life-doctors, physical therapists, occupational therapists, masseuses, nurses, and the home health care aide whom he employed twenty-four hours a day. By now he'd even ventured isolated observations to Evon about Rainey, but only a sentence or two, rather than his usual extended digressions. Recently, he'd glumly reported on the need to puree everything Lorraine ate. "Puree of steak, can you imagine? Pureed muffin? She can still taste, at least." His lean face took on the longing, distant look of a man at sea.

It was something of a surprise one day in mid-February when he invited Evon in to meet Lorraine. They had been in the neighborhood, down the block, in fact, meeting a prospective client. Sarah Perlan, a short and portly woman, wanted to sue the local tennis center for the Achilles tendon she'd torn when she'd stumbled on a wayward ball. When they were done at Sarah's, Robbie had suggested a visit with Lorraine. Evon was reluctant to intrude, but he insisted Rainey wanted to meet his new paralegal.

"I guess I've talked a lot about you." His furry brows crawled up his forehead as if this phenomenon struck him as unaccountable.

From the entry, you could imagine the interior as it had once been. Something of a neat freak, Rainey Feaver had tended to the austere, and had furnished almost exclusively in white. The living room, as Robbie had once observed, was the sort of place where a three-year-old with a chocolate bar could do as much damage as a tornado.

But sickness had a design sense of its own. Outside the house, Robbie referred to it as the Disease Museum, a proving ground and display space for every device, simple or complex, that might somehow improve the life Lorraine had left. Along the handcrafted walnut railing that ran up the turret staircase dominating the foyer, an electric hoist now whirred along a grease-blackened track. Metal hospital rails had been applied to all the walls, and there were a number of electronic doorbells visible that Rainey had once used to summon help.

On the first step of the staircase, he turned to Evon. "Sure you can handle this?" He might have thought of that before, but it was too late to turn around. The truth was that she was not good with illness. Maw-Maw, her grandmother, paralyzed after disk surgery went bad, had moved in with her parents when Evon was fifteen. Her entire existence by then was founded on physical well-being, and she was often frightened in the presence of the old woman, even sickened when a sheet or hem slipped away and she caught sight of her grandmother's legs wasted to the width of a hockey stick. She kept what distance she could. `You know, it isn't catching,' her mother finally told her one afternoon in her customarily brutal fashion.

This encounter would be worse. Maw-Maw's decline had been long but natural. Rainey Feaver was thirty-eight years old and dying. There was really no hope. Some-a distinct minority of ALS

patients-lived twenty years with the disease as it smoldered through their bodies. Stephen Hawking was by far the most famous of these slow-progressing cases. But Lorraine was `normal'-walking one day, falling down the next, and in a wheelchair within eighteen months. Her hands had weakened to the point that she could no longer hold a pencil or lift her arms above her head. And now, two and a half years after diagnosis, she could not feed herself or swallow well. She needed assistance even to remain upright on the toilet. She could not control her salivary glands, and shortly before Evon had arrived on the scene, they had been irradiated to keep Rainey from drowning in her own spit.

There were no prizewinners for the worst disease, Bobbie had told Evon. He knew this from his practice. The body could fall apart in gruesome ways not even envisioned in nightmares. But this one, `this rotten motherfucker of a disease,' as he repeatedly called it, was perhaps the most insidious. Your body deserted you. The voluntary muscles weakened, spasmed painfully, and then stopped working at all. Even the minutest volitional reflexes eventually disappeared, blinking usually being the last to go, rendering a patient entirely inert. In the meantime, intellectual functions remained unimpaired. Rainey thought. She saw. And worst of all, Robbie said, she felt. Inside and out. Movement ended with ALS. But not pain. She suffered intensely and could not writhe or lift her hand far enough to massage the muscles knotted in misery. The Feavers had tried every potential remedy-herbalists and homeopaths and acupuncture. They'd volunteered for experimental drugs and had been accepted for one trial, a medicine that after ninety days left Rainey on the same steady downward slide. They had even gone to see a woman with a ridiculous machine made up of old vacuum tubes and a long flashing neon wand that she waved over Rainey's torso while making a 'woo-woo' noise with her mouth. The scene, Robbie said, would have been worth a laugh, had they not been so humiliated faced with the unreasoning depths of their desperation.

The Feavers' bedroom, where Robbie still slept, was full of contraptions. Evon crept to the threshold, but went no farther inasmuch as Rainey was in the bathroom. In her absence, Robbie toured the room, pointing out various machines he'd previously described. There was something called a Hoyer lift that brought Lorraine, when she had the energy, from the large hospital bed to her wheelchair, An adjustable tray table held a speakerphone, the Easy Writeran appliance to hold a pencil-a mechanical page turner for reading, and two remote controls for the huge theater-style TV

A glowing computer monitor sat beside the bed, along with an alphabet board on which Rainey pointed out letters when she became frustrated by her efforts to speak.

All of this, of course, had cost-monumentally. Including the caregivers' fees, the figure she'd heard Robbie repeat was more than $2 million. He would soon blow through the lifetime cap on his insurance and already had a suit pending against the company for several hundred thousand dollars in covered expenses they'd refused to pay. But in a situation with few blessings, money was one. He had money, buckets of money, a hundred times the resources of most families, whom this disease routinely brought to the verge of bankruptcy. In their case, Mort had told Evon once, Rainey simply would not live long enough for Robbie to spend everything. The process of retrieving Lorraine from the bathroom was under way. Evon retreated while Robbie assisted the aide, a tiny Filipina named Elba. Down the hall, Evon heard them encouraging Rainey as she was restored to the chair and wheeled back.

The night before, a Sunday, Robbie had gone to a wedding. Rainey had been too fatigued to go, but having promised to take his mother, Robbie attended, ferrying the old woman back and forth from the nursing home where she lived. Rainey slept in snatches between bouts of muscle cramps and had apparently missed his return last night as well as his departure this morning. Robbie described the evening's doings now.

"Mother of all Jewish weddings. Right down to the sculpted chopped liver. Great food, bad wine. And even so, my Uncle Harry was drunk like always and got so sick he didn't notice that he'd flushed his false teeth down the john."

Much more softly, Rainey answered. Her faint mumbling speech, a wobbly ghoulish drone with a glottal hiccup at the end of every word, was growing worse every day. For this, too, Robbie envisioned mechanical aid, a computer controlled voice simulator that could be operated so long as Rainey had any voluntary movement remaining, even flexing her brow. Evon had heard Robbie's discussions with his wife's former colleagues in the computer industry who were helping. The hardware had been purchased and stored somewhere in the house, but the Feavers held out against each of these changes as long as possible, since no matter how convenient they were, there was no way to avoid the emotional impact of the lengthening shadow of decline.

"To the nines," he answered now. "Everybody. Inez bought a three-thousand-dollar dress-where she gets three thousand for a dress is beyond me-and as soon as she walks in, there's Susan Schultz in the same thing. Then my Aunt Myrna shows up in this tight white number, a lady of what?

Sixty? And through the fabric and her panty hose you can see the outline of the tattoo on her fanny. You don't pick your family, right? I took my ma out on the dance floor in her wheelchair and whirled her around a few times. She got a real bang out of it."

Evon heard Rainey's voice again.

"I wish you'd been there, too," he said more somberly.

He refused to linger on the downbeat. Whatever his private moods, with Lorraine, Robbie was determined to be the spirit of brave optimism. On the phone, Evon had often heard him counterpoint his wife's reports of deterioration by reminding her of some other physical element that seemed to be withstanding the physicians' dire predictions. Frequently, he'd turned to the computer in his office to tap out a message to her, especially when he'd heard a good joke. "Email," he explained to Evon, an innovation to which Lorraine had introduced him. Now his tone ascended cheerily as he announced Evon. She girded herself.