Skinny-dipping (3 page)

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.

By the time he was back on his feet and married to his second wife, he took on the largest tomato-growing conglomerate in the state on behalf of the migrant workers being systematically poisoned by the illegal use of pesticides. Big class-action suit.

Technically, Newly won both a legal and a moral victory. The EPA shut down the tomato growers, who sold off the fields to a big-ass developer at a profit that shot up the growers' stock. Now modest tract houses lined the streets, acre after acre, where the migrants used to make a meager living picking poisoned tomatoes that were shipped north and sold high in winter to support rich white guys who lived nowhere near the illegal poison dust. Now our tomatoes come from Mexico, where they can legally use the pesticides that are illegal here. The circle of poison Newly didn't dent.

But Newly got some money out of the case and some satisfaction, and maybe some karma credit in heaven. But his second wife felt neglected because that class action took so much of his time, and she left, taking his reaccumulated money with her.

That's when I met him.

Between two and three. Number four was now calculating his net worth and ratting him out to the bar association's ethics division.

For a very smart man, Newly needed to learn a few things. Memo to file, I thought, sipping the good merlot: Tell Newly: 1) you don't have to marry everybody you have sex with (he'd proposed to me after making love the second time); 2) don't ever put anything in joint title unless you're protecting assets from creditors; and 3) get a way better divorce attorney.

While I was thinking who'd be the meanest, nastiest divorce attorney for Newly, I felt the first wave of the wine kick in, that woozy feeling that life is rather splendid after all. Giving in to the buzz, I finished my wine and curled comfortably against Newly on the couch.

“I remember the first thing you ever said to me,” he said, putting his hand on my arm and rubbing two fingers up and down on a small warm space of skin.

No way—it'd been eight years since I'd met him. “Yeah? What?”

“That's not your real name. That's the first thing you said to me,” Newly insisted.

Well, it
wasn't
his real name. I'd looked up his name-change petition in the courthouse later to be sure. Lester Bagley Ledbetter was the name his parents had stuck him with, and I didn't blame him a bit for upgrading it. But why would he remember my saying that years ago,
if
that's what I had said? Maybe he made it up. Lord knows Newly was the mother of invention. Even allowing for that, something in the tenor of his voice made me look closely at him. Granted, he is the master of artful facial expressions and tones of voice—all good trial attorneys are—but he sounded wistful, like a man carrying a torch.

Rather than pursue that concern, I hinted that Newly should leave now.

“Oh, hon. I hate hotels. Can't I just stay the night?”

“You haven't gotten your own place yet?”

“Aw, my money's all tied up. You know what a divorce is like.”

No, I didn't, not personally, though Jackson had made me work on a few rich doctor divorces on the theory that a girl lawyer representing a rich man dumping his wife for a younger model makes the man somehow more sympathetic and strongly suggests by example that a woman can earn her own living and doesn't need alimony. Apparently Newly didn't have a woman lawyer. I frowned by way of an answer.

“Hon, just tonight. For old times'. I'll get a place tomorrow.”

Addled by fatigue and wine, I nodded. “One night. On the futon.”

He slid his arm around my waist.

“In the guest room,” I said.

“Aw, hon.”

But I handed him clean sheets and gave cursory instructions on how to unfold the futon from couch to bed, and I headed into my own room and shut my door against him.

The next morning, when the phone rang and I rolled over toward it, I was momentarily stunned to find Newly curled up like a hairy, forty-four-year-old teddy bear on my organic cotton sheets that are dyed with beet juice and cost not much less than what I'd paid for my first car, a 1965 Chrysler Newport that I bought from my brother and never did learn to parallel park.

Sometime during the night, he must have sneaked into bed with me. He's not that light on his feet, and I am not that sound a sleeper. Okay, memo to file: Don't slurp down that much good wine when you want the man to sleep in the guest room. Still, I was certain we hadn't done anything but sleep. The phone rang again.

Some guy from the police department with a name I didn't quite absorb wanted to talk to me about the dead orthopedic doctor and asked if I could come right down to the police department. The half-life of last night's wine made me nasty, and I said something rude that loosely translated to “Hell, no.” Newly jerked beside me as I hung up.

I hadn't finished making the coffee before the police officer called back.

“Detective Sam Santuri,” he snapped, as if that excused his earlier call.

“So detectives come to work at dawn, like farmers?” I wondered if I could just chew the coffee grinds instead of waiting for the hot water to soak out the caffeine.

After a long pause, the detective said, “Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you. I thought most professionals were up by seven.”

“I usually am,” I said, suddenly not wanting this man with the sexy last name and the good bass voice thinking I was a dilettante. “But I had to work late, very late, last night. Trial work, you know.”

I cradled the phone between my chin and shoulder and reached to pour my coffee. While Sam breathed into my ear, I sipped the
real
nectar of the gods, and the caffeine seeped into my bloodstream and my brain cells popped into gear. I guessed it was my turn to apologize for yelling.

“Look, perhaps I was... snippy when you called earlier. But I'm too busy with my clients to just run over to the police station this morning. Call my office and make an appointment with my secretary. Her name is Bonita.” I gave him the number and was satisfied that I'd let him know I was an important person he couldn't be jerking around, calling at all hours of the morning.

While I put down the phone, Newly was sitting at my kitchen table, smiling and looking as if he was expecting breakfast. If the man wanted me to fix him breakfast, he was going to get a raw egg in a Yoo-hoo, but first he would have to go out and buy a Yoo-hoo and a raw egg.