Skinny-dipping (9 page)

Why the cargo ship captain had driven into the piling was explained variously by the bad weather, his undisclosed multiple sclerosis, allegations of alcohol, and the demon bad luck. Of course, when the wrongful death lawsuits started, one of the key allegations was that the Florida Department of Transportation had designed the bridge wrong, allegations prompted largely because the State of Florida had way more money than the hapless captain or his employer.

Even in south Georgia, the news of the Skyway's collapse was played big-time on television and in the newspapers, and the photographs of the crumpled bridge were awesome.

My brother Delvon, though technically not old enough to have a driver's license, had his first car, bought from wages earned helping Farmer Dave cultivate marijuana on Dave's back forty acres. Delvon needed to get out of town for a while, and I wasn't fussy about skipping school. So we hit the road to see this collapsed bridge. I don't think either of my parents actually noticed that at fifteen Delvon owned and drove a car, without a license and without insurance, or if they noticed they let it slide. Like most things.

In Delvon's 1965 Chrysler Newport, it was a six-hour drive from our house to the wrecked bridge, which he measured by beer and joints, and I, by Moon Pies and Tootsie Rolls. We were loopy by the time we reached the causeway and drove out slowly on the remaining bridge. At the highest point of the surviving northbound span, where all traffic had been routed, we stopped the Newport, which was no big deal because everybody else was also parking and checking out the devastation below. Delvon and I, flatlanders all of our lives, were hit with vertigo as we crept out of the Newport and stood on the high, high metal grid and held on to the railings and looked at the crumpled pieces of bridge still dangling over the water across from us on the doomed second span of the Skyway and the garbage below it. Wreckage that still contained unrecovered corpses. Once it was certain that there were no more survivors, recovery operations had been abandoned until the storm abated, and the high, cold wind blew right through our T-shirts.

Delvon thought we should do something to commemorate the dead, and he ducked out of the wind into the front seat of the Newport and lit a joint. He passed it around a small crowd of gawkers. Delvon and I, our median age being thirteen, naturally had left the car radio playing as loud as it could play. Out of the mixed bag of Top 40 rock, as we stood there swaying on the surviving span of the Skyway and passing a joint with strangers, Simon and Garfunkel's “Bridge over Troubled Waters” played.

Something about the song totally freaked me, and I almost jumped or fell, tumbling willy-nilly against and partway over the railings as if called by a ghost in the murky waters below me. Delvon had grabbed me, and perfect strangers gathered to soothe and reassure me and offer benign banalities about the Greyhound bus and its dead, still trapped in the rough black waves below us.

As Delvon held me, I looked out over the railing and into the waters of Tampa Bay, and for a moment I saw eternity, right there, on that bridge, in the cold wind of the fading storm.

Years later, as a summer law clerk in Sarasota with one year of law school behind me, I had worked on one of the last Skyway lawsuits still churning in the court systems of Florida and the federal system. Well, “worked on” might be too generous a term. Mostly I had photocopied reams of paper in the discovery process, a proper use of my first-year law school skills, especially since I worked cheaper and knew far less than the secretaries. I learned the nuances and complexities of running a photocopy machine, which was far more useful than what I had learned in law school during the previous nine months and on an even par for boredom. Delvon, on the lam, had come south with me, and we rented a duplex on the northern tip of Anna Maria. Delvon worked construction and made three times what I earned, plus he got to take his shirt off, listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and smoke dope while he worked.

When nobody was watching that summer, I actually read the documents I was copying. No detail was too grisly, and most theories of blame hoisted against the various defendants struck me as just plain silly. The cargo ship captain, the only one to blame, it seemed to me, was not a defendant because he didn't have any money. The “deep pocket” theory of liability, in which a wounded plaintiff sues not the party actually responsible for the mishap but the next closest party with the most money, struck me as patently unfair. Thus, a defense attorney was born.

And although technically the new bridge with its yellow mast wasn't the same bridge on which I had stood as a kid and seen eternity in the whitecaps over a sea of the recently dead, the new bridge was still my talisman.

With the bridge fading into a purple night, I sat there in somebody else's lawn chair and contemplated my soul and struggled to find that glimpse of eternity again, until the sand fleas and no-see-ums got to be too much, and then I drove home down the Tamiami Trail.

Newly was nearly asleep, and I watched him with the same puzzlement I've felt studying indignant clients who don't understand why they should pay for their own stupidity, as if “But I didn't mean to hurt him” took away their culpability. “Why did you take that whiplash case?”

“Hmm,” he muttered, rolling over to face me and reaching out his hand toward my stomach.

“You know, the kayak whiplash?”

“You know why I took that case?” he asked, as if he'd introduced the topic.

“Yeah, because you advertise on buses and daytime TV and take every case that walks in your door.”

Newly looked a bit wounded when he looked up at me.

“No, I took that case because I felt sorry for that woman.”

“Because she was fat and stupid?”

“No, because in her whole life nothing had happened to her that was interesting. I mean, at parties, this woman didn't have anything to talk about except television shows.”

“You took her case because she was boring?” I couldn't believe that.

“No. Because she didn't have any stories to tell. Now she's got one. She's got a great story about her lawsuit, and her lawyer, and being on the witness stand, and how she was screwed out of a just verdict by a cruel legal system and a foxy defense attorney. Her own three days of
L.A. Law
. And it's her story.”

I looked at Newly a little differently for a moment, remembering the migrant workers he'd taken on against the tomato conglomerate. He'd lost a wife in the process, but he had helped those people. A rush of tenderness flooded over me, and I looked down at Newly's sweet, rough face, dark against my pillow, and for a moment I thought we might just make this work out.

“Then again, it was a cheap case to try, and you never know—right jury, feeling sorry for her, I might have hit a jackpot.”

Chapter 12

Someone had been rifling
through my veggie baby case files. I could tell at once.

Most of the files were still in the storage room upstairs, where, box by box, I was reading through them. But the most important ones—the medical depositions and the patient's medical records—were in my office, where I had been studying them between working on other cases.

“Bonita,” I said, making her get up from her computer and come into my office, a quizzical look on her pretty face.

“You been going through these files?”

“No.”

“Anybody else been in here?”

“Not while I was here.”

“The medical records on the plaintiff, the mother, I started through them last evening. Somebody's gone through the file with her records—the file clasps holding the pages together are not aligned evenly.”

Bonita sighed. “I'll straighten them out, but first I have to finish those notices of deposition and get the interrogatories in the Windjammer case ready, and—can't you just let the clasps be crooked for a little while?”

“That wasn't my point.” I hadn't finished reviewing the plaintiff's medical records last night because I had reached a point at which I could no longer focus, and now I realized somebody could have taken something out of the file and I wouldn't know. “Somebody's been messing with my files.”

“Now why,
chica,
would anybody want to do that? Not a person in this law firm wants a thing to do with that case.”

The phone rang before I could retort, and Bonita picked it up, spoke a word or two of greeting in her professional voice, then smiled at the phone as if it were a person and whispered something, and laughed sweetly at the response. Hmm, I thought, reading the whisper and laughter as a hint of romance and wondering if someone was finally giving the ghost husband a shove. Then she handed the phone to me. “Henry,” she said as I took it.

“What'd you pull up on Dr. Trusdale's other suits?” I didn't bother with hello because Bonita had already given him a good enough greeting for both of us.

“I got the reports from his prior insurers. He didn't list either of them on his application with us. Guy had a talent for covering his tracks. You wouldn't believe what I've had to do to find this out. Why, it took me over three days just to—”

“Yeah, yeah, Henry, life's hard. Now what'd you find?”

“Suit in Texas was nothing, really, a bit of an infection, apparently cured right up with superantibiotics. No permanent damage, so it settled for nuisance value. But the one in Miami was different. Kind of a sad story.”

Yeah, as if I'd never heard a sad story before. “Define nuisance value in Texas first,” I said.

“Twenty thousand.”

Nothing, I thought. “Okay, what about Miami?”

“Guy getting a hip replacement picked up a nasty staph infection.”

Well, that was sounding familiar. What was Dr. Trusdale, the Typhoid Mary of staph? Maybe he
did
go to the bathroom and not wash his hands. I wondered if anybody had ever scraped his nails or tongue to see if he was a carrier.

“Infection got into the patient's heart,” Henry continued. “He needed a heart transplant after the staph ate up his heart muscle, but his HMO wouldn't authorize it.”

“Oh, and that'd be new,” I said.

“Guy was just a regular joe, not rich enough for a heart transplant, so bottom line was he died. His widow sued Dr. Trusdale, the HMO, the hospital, and just about everybody else.”

“What was her name?”

“Elaine Sanford Jobloski.”

“How'd it play out?”

“Court dismissed the suit against the HMO. Trusdale's insurer settled for a quarter of a million and the hospital fought back until the widow cracked and went into a mental institution. Her attorney let the hospital suit drop.”

“Henry, write me up a file memo of everybody's names and addresses and get it to me soon as you can. Bring it over—don't mail or fax it.”

“But our case is over. No harm done. I mean, I didn't catch those prior lawsuits before, but it didn't hurt you. Or the company.” His voice almost squeaked. “I mean, yes, if I'd caught those prior suits before, we'd never have issued the policy to him in the first place, but, look, nobody was hurt by that... that oversight.”

“Henry, I'm not after you. I just thought Detective Santuri should know this.”

“Oh,” Henry bleated.

“Look,” I said, “we're buds, okay? We watch each other's back. Don't worry.”

But when I hung up the phone, I thought, Man, Henry had screwed up big-time in not finding out about those suits during the insurance application process. If Henry and I had learned about those prior staph cases for the first time at trial, it would not have been pretty.

Only the fortuitous event of Dr. Trusdale's death and my quick settlement had saved us both from being cut off at the knees in front of a jury.

I looked up from that thought and said, “So?” to Bonita.

She smiled and shut my door on the way out.

That night, I was telling Newly that somebody was screwing around with one of my files, that Henry was getting sloppy and defensive on me, and the other highlights of my day.

Newly was painting my toenails while he listened, and he said, “You think there is some connection?”

I stopped doodling my fingers in his chest hair to wipe up the drop of Radical Red he had spilled on my leg, and said, “Between what?”

“Well, you got mugged. Your client had a history of staph suits that he was covering up, and he got killed. Now somebody is snooping in your files.”

“They don't even know if Dr. Trusdale was actually murdered,” I said, missing the point as Newly finished my toes, put the nail polish away, and started brushing my hair.

He was wearing my pink satin tap pants again.

“Haven't you done your laundry yet?” I asked, leaning my head back as he pulled the brush through my long black hair in smooth, even strokes. This laundry question was a test—if he even hinted that I should do his laundry, he was out. Right then. On the curb.

But Newly didn't get trapped that easily. “Sure, hon, I've done a couple of loads. Great washing machine. Folded my stuff, put it up in the guest room. In that empty chest, just like you told me.”

What I had told him was not even to think about putting any of his stuff in my room.

“So, why . . .?” I pulled up the laced hem of the satin panties.

“Because they feel so much better than mine. Much softer. You don't mind, do you?”

Making himself right at home, I thought, but then forgot about it when he slapped the brush lightly across his hand and asked, “Want me to tie you and spank you? We've never tried that. Or you could do me if you want.”

Chapter 13

If I had known
that I would end up getting shot at and ruining one of my favorite suits, the blue seersucker from Nello's that cost a ton of money but fit like a tailor-made, all in all, I would have skipped what was primarily just a courtesy meeting in the veggie baby case with the good doctor, my new client, the obstetrician Dr. Winston Calvin Randolph the Second. His name alone told me I was going to have problems. Juries tend to hate physicians with snooty names as this reinforces the image of the aloof, arrogant money-grubber. But it was probably too late to have him legally change his name, and so, wholly unprepared for the
mierda
storm that would follow, I'd begun my business day by trying to actually get through on the telephone to Dr. Randolph to set up a face to face.

In my innocence, I'd tried calling his office, only to speak to four different women, each snottier in turn as I repeated my simple request to have the doctor call me. No, I wasn't a patient, I wasn't in labor, I wasn't selling anything, and, no, I didn't have free drug samples. Obviously they were not going to take a message without my identifying myself as his lawyer, so I did, fully aware this often pisses off doctor clients who suffer from the notions that 1) the support staff doesn't already know they've been sued and 2) anybody cares unless his or her own ass was on the line.

Yeah, he was pissed when he got back to me. He was busy, and he was pissed, and he was arrogant, and he didn't know why Jackson had assigned the case to me. But he finally agreed to come by my office and meet with me at six-thirty p.m. “First chance I've got, only chance all week. Busy, busy,” he insisted. What did I care? I routinely work past seven anyway.

Before I had my hand out and my smile fixed in place, Dr. Randolph's first words to me were “Where's Jackson?”

“Hello. I'm Lilly Cleary. I'm taking over your case from Jackson.”

He started bitching. Why was his case reassigned to a younger attorney, a woman attorney, an attorney in midstream, with the lawsuit pending for over a year and getting near a trial date? Where was Jackson? Was a woman tough enough to try a case like this? He didn't want some affirmative-action hire handling his case. Et cetera.

Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Get over it. Girls get to practice law now. It's in one of the penumbras of the Constitution.

Instead of pointing that out, I decided to match arrogance for arrogance.

“What you need to know, Dr. Randolph, is that I'm a board-certified trial attorney (this is true) and I graduated second in my law class (this is not true, but it sounds good) and I've represented countless physicians in countless malpractice suits with favorable results (this is more or less true). You haven't been abandoned.”

“So, you're a good attorney?”

“No, Dr. Randolph. I'm not a
good
attorney. I'm an excellent attorney. Now, please, make yourself comfortable.”

“Second in your law school?”

“Yes,” I said, carving the lie into stone. I mean, who checks? Technically I was ranked seventh in a class of 187 students, which is pretty darn good, but I've learned over the years that this doesn't seem to impress people. Telling clients that I graduated number one sounds like a lie. But second, hey, that sounds true and it triggers the “tries harder” image of the second-place winner. Now, just don't ask what law school, I thought.

The doctor took a seat at the head of the rosewood conference-room table and grunted as he eased into the chair. “I've been to some malpractice seminars, you know. And what you need to do is file a motion for summary judgment on proximate cause.”

Oh, frigging great.

It took me a good half hour to get him off of that one, pointing out repeatedly that we had already done that and lost, and then he was right back to bitching about Jackson abandoning him to me, a mere female, and I'd had it up to here. I said, “Look, first thing we're going to have to do is coach you on your attitude.”

“My attitude?”

“Yes. Juries hate arrogant pricks.”

Yes. We were learning to work together well, weren't we?

The upshot of this exchange was that Dr. Randolph insisted on seeing Jackson, right then, and so I snapped something passably rude at him and said I would take him to Jackson “right then” and led him out the back door into the parking lot, which was by then largely deserted. My plan was to drive him to Jackson's house, where Jackson and his wife were no doubt enjoying a good wine over a low-fat dessert, probably some exotic, expensive fruit. Dr. Randolph instinctively headed toward Ashton's Lexus, and I said, “Nope, the Honda.”

“This runs?” he asked, snidely.

I had opened my mouth to say, “Like a little baby jet,” when a whisking, popping noise went off nearby. The good doc and I looked at each other, and then looked around us. Another noise, like a backfire, went off, but this time something tore through the sleeve of my blue seersucker suit.
“Chingalo,”
I yelled, a word Bonita's son Benicio had taught me so I wouldn't sound crude and cheap by saying it in English, and I was thinking that I'd paid three hundred dollars for the jacket alone when I noticed Dr. Randolph had disappeared from sight.

Dr. Randolph recognized gunshots for what they were. I reflected later, loudly and repetitively for his and everyone else's benefit, that he didn't think to warn me, or to knock me down and cover my body with his, or any of those chivalrous things a man is supposed to do when being shot at in the company of a woman.

What he did was drop like a rock and crawl under my aged Honda.

When the next bullet took out the window of my poor car and shattered shards of glass over me in a spray, I got it. I dropped, pulled out my cell phone, hit 911, and screeched into the ear of the poor woman answering the call that I was being shot at in the parking lot behind the law firm of Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, but before I gave the actual address, my cell phone exploded into tiny pieces of plastic, clueing me in that ducking was insufficient protection. I rolled under the car, collided in a thunk with the shaking Dr. Randolph and ruined the lovely matching seersucker skirt.

Almost immediately, I heard the sound of sirens and I finally exhaled. The police department was only three blocks away.

Half an hour later, we were stomping around with the uniformed police officers, trading versions— mine the truth, the good doctor's a version in which he miraculously saved me by throwing himself over me and pushing me under the car—when I began to feel the need to do a girl-like thing.

But I held the urge to cry in check because Ashton was standing around, and one never cries in front of any of the big three partners.

However, when Sam Santuri arrived on the scene, I didn't think, then, to question why he was there, as technically nobody was dead and he was a homicide detective. Instead, I rushed into his arms and burst into tears.

He held me and patted me, putting his arms protectively about me, and when my need to cry evaporated, as it did in seconds, I thought, Hmm, this is nice. He had good, strong arms and a good, strong chest, and he smelled clean, like sunshine on the beach. Though I felt safe and comfortable in his arms, I slowly became confused about what was going on and wondered why exactly we were holding on to each other. As I started to pull out of his grip, his arms seemed to tighten around me, and maybe he pressed his chest against mine. It was hard to say, given the yelling that had broken out between Ashton and Dr. Randolph, who was, excuse me, now officially on my
mierda
list.

When the yelling stopped—Randolph had threatened to sue the law firm because he'd been shot at in our lot, and Ashton had not reacted well—Sam took me inside, into the cool of my own, safe office, where I sat and breathed for a few minutes while he waited.

“Now, tell me what happened.”

I did. Then I excused myself, went to the ladies' room, washed my face and hands in my special tea-tree soap, and took a double hit of kava, a south-seas herb touted as a safe, natural alternative to Valium.

When I got back to my office, Newly was there, his face stricken, and he said, “Oh, hon,” and he took me in his arms and held me so tight I didn't think I could breathe, and then kissed me, a bit too passionately, I thought, given my near-death experience. When I saw Jackson and Bonita hovering in the growing crowd, I guessed Newly and I were out of the closet as a couple. I also saw the way Sam was taking in this tender display between Newly and me.

Of course, Sam had an hour's worth of more questions, and he wore me out before finally the overprotective Newly drove me home in his gold Lexus, the only thing of financial worth that Karen the Vindictive, the couldn't-be-ex-quick-enough-wife, hadn't persuaded the divorce judge to enjoin Newly from touching. Already my little Honda had been yellow-taped with official crime-scene streamers and would be impounded, Sam had explained, while the crime-scene technicians looked for bullets and such things that might shed some light on who was trying to murder either me or Dr. Randolph, or both of us.