The law clerks were all in a huddle when I went into the law library first thing, looking for Angela, the associate I was technically supposed to mentor, which in most law firms translates into “work to death.”
“We read about, er, your client getting killed,” one of the law clerks said.
I rarely bother learning their names. They are only at the law firm for a few months, then gone back to law school or into the great stream of legal commerce elsewhere. They are all either in the top quarter of their class or related to a client or somebody important. They are all eager, healthy, and fundamentally useless in their tender years, with only one or two years of law school under their caps. They are fungible goods. It was Angela, a second-year associate with the perfectionistic work habits of the chronically insecure, that I needed this morning.
But I nodded politely to the law clerk.
Encouraged, the nameless boy said, “They don’t even know if it was murder.”
“Yes, I read the story,” I said, peering over the heads and the law books, looking for orange hair. One thing about Angela, petite though she is, she can’t hide from me with that Orphan Annie/Bozo the Clown hair.
“Newspaper quotes an unnamed source, said it looked like poison.”
“Yes, I read the story. Anybody seen Angela?”
“Why didn’t they mention your name?” the unnamed clerk asked.
“You think that’d be good, free advertising?” I finally focused on him. Blond, square-jawed, tall. Was there a factory somewhere making these boys and importing them without a tariff? The Mattel factory for boy lawyers, located in some Third World country, stocks high on the Dow because cheap, native child labor and creative American accounting maximized profit? Why else would there be so damn many of them?
“Sure. So long as they spell your name right and put in the firm’s name and address,” the clerk said, too perkily for a boy.
“Sure,” I mimicked in his pert tone, waited, then added, with the serious voice of a lecturer, “A dead client is not a good result.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Angela went over to the courthouse library to look up something in the Federal Register,” another nameless boy said.
“Thank you.” I left, wondering if the firm would pay for a beeper for Angela.
I stomped toward my own desk through the cubbyhole of my secretary’s office and for my greeting said, “Send a runner after Angela, will you? She’s at the courthouse.”
Bonita, my long-suffering and unnaturally calm secretary, said, “She’ll be back by the time you’re done with the Evan’s file interrogatories on your desk and with Detective Sam Santuri. He’s due at eleven. Good morning.”
I started to growl, then said, “Good morning.” Figuring I might as well get this detective thing over with, I didn’t make Bonita change the appointment.
Sam appeared just as I finished churning around on the interrogatories, and Bonita ushered him into my office on her small, light feet.
“Sam Santuri,” he repeated as if I might have forgotten his name in the last few hours, and he offered his hand.
Standing in the military “head up, shoulders back” stance, I took Sam’s hand with the firm but brief grip Jackson had taught me so I wouldn’t “shake hands like a girl,” and I looked Sam Santuri straight in the eyes and didn’t blink. Now that I’d had my second round of coffee, plus the adrenaline from my irritating but mercifully brief exchange with the nameless law clerk, I was ready for him.
Sam was, I noticed, rather good-looking in that broken nose sort of way that men who have spent too much time outside and led rough lives can be. While unfashionably dressed, he had a Kirk Douglas jaw and a full head of graying black hair and acted all business. I had about five hundred other things I needed to be doing and didn’t even think about flirting.
“Dr. Trusdale’s appointment with you yesterday, what was that about?” the detective asked after we minimized the polite exchanges to the bare basics.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet. The autopsy will tell us more. Now, could you answer my question?”
“You’re saying it could have been an accident?” I thought it interesting that neither the detective nor the newspaper had mentioned the marijuana roach on the floor by the stricken man’s fingers.
While I was thinking about that marijuana, my heart gave a jolt as my mind focused on the impact that half-smoked joint would have on the jury in my bum-knee guy versus the dead orthopod lawsuit. How exactly would I rehabilitate a dead defendant doctor at trial if it became public knowledge he smoked marijuana? A stoned surgeon, now there was a defense attorney’s nightmare. I definitely had to settle this case before the investigation went further and produced more publicity.
“Excuse me,” I said, punching the phone’s intercom. To Bonita, “Get Henry Platt on the line and set up a face to face with him as soon as possible, but no later than this morning.”
Sam looked at his watch, then at me. Behind his head, my imitation heirloom clock, from which I had forcibly removed the chimes one day in a fit of pique, said it was 10:58 a.m. So spank me, I was rude and in a hurry. Detective Santuri didn’t need to know that Henry was the claims adjuster in the Trusdale case and the man I needed to authorize a quick settlement.
“What did you ask me?” I looked at him and admired the poker face he maintained.
“Why were you representing him? What was that about?”
“Medical malpractice suit against him. Knee replacement. Plaintiff got a bad infection. Totally messed-up knee now. Would you like a copy of the complaint?”
Sam nodded and made a note.
I punched my phone and asked Bonita to make a copy of the complaint in Dr. Trusdale’s case but not until she’d set up the meeting with Henry.
Ten minutes later, after the good detective and I exchanged more questions than answers, Bonita brought in a copy of the complaint and said, “Henry will be here at eleven-thirty. I’ve ordered two fruit plates from the Granary.” Bonita took Sam in with a sideways but practiced study and winked her approval over his head as she passed back out the door. Being a devout widow didn’t stop her from admiring a fine-looking man, though the ghost of her late husband seemed to be as real to her as he had been in the flesh. Before he died in an accident at the local orange juice processing plant—an accident so ghastly neither she nor I could drink the stuff to this good day—he and Bonita had had five children, and she never raises her voice to them. There wasn’t a man in the law firm who wouldn’t jump her if he could, but the five kids and the prominent gold cross around her neck and that “Don’t even think it” look she can zap out at the first hint of a flirt kept them off of her. She remained as married to the dead husband as to the live one, as far as I could tell. None of that kept her from admiring Detective Santuri, and she tended to matchmaking for me, thinking I couldn’t reach Nirvana until I had a husband and five kids tearing up my house.
As I watched Bonita leave my office, Sam scanned the complaint and asked, “How far along are you?”
I inhaled so I could give him the layman’s-introduction-to-litigation speech I use on clients, but before I got past the first ten words, he cut me off.
“When’s the trial?”
In about ten years if I get my way, I thought, irritated at being interrupted, but I kept my face neutral and said, “I just filed an answer denying liability. In the normal course of litigation, we dick around a year or two with the plaintiff and his attorney, and then we either settle it or try it in circuit court. Fortunately I’m not hampered by any speedy-trial problems like you are in the criminal courts.”
“Dick around, eh? That a new legal term?” He almost grinned.
“Yes, a legal term of art meaning to jerk one’s opposing counsel’s chain as often as one can while keeping careful billing records of each sparring event. Or, what they call discovery in law school.”
“We call it depositions in criminal court, but every now and then in the criminal justice system it actually accomplishes something other than generating fees.”
Generating fees, eh? As if my getting paid for hard work is a crime? This guy was definitely irritating. But I nodded and kept my mouth shut.
“Sometimes on our side,” Sam said, “it lets our assistant state attorney know if he’s got any holes in his case to worry about, and once or twice I’ve seen it convince a defense attorney to throw in the towel and plea.”
Yeah, okay, so Sam knew something about the legal system. Good for him. “Yes. You’ve no doubt been through depos and trials as a homicide detective.”
“Seems like I can remember one or two.” He shifted forward in his chair and took a closer look at me.
Caution sensors went off in me.
“You were mugged the other night?”
“Yes. No big deal. How’d you know?”
“We share info at the police station. No profit motive in our business. Think there could be any connection?”
Sharing their info? About me? Why? Not wanting to draw a red circle around it, I didn’t ask the detective but made a mental memo to file to ask Newly to find out why somebody was looking into me because the good doc died.
I paused so long wondering why Detective Santuri had asked me that question that he repeated it. “Any possible connection?”
“No.”
The good detective Sam Santuri let my “no” sit there in the air long enough that I wondered if I’d been too emphatic, and I watched him watching me. Waiting for what? For me to jump up and confess something? I visualized a crystal blue waterfall and kept my face calm, my shoulders relaxed, and my eyes right on his. They were a kind of deep chocolate color, I noticed.
“Tell me about the mugging?”
I did, including the rescue-by-Ashton story that Ashton was perpetuating to his greater glory.
“Why try to strangle you? Why not just grab your purse or briefcase?”
“Beats me,” I said. “I’m a civil defense attorney, not a criminal defense attorney. Don’t have a clue how muggers think.”
“Any attempt to snatch your purse or briefcase?”
Maybe not. It happened fast. I shrugged, but I was thinking Sam raised a good point. If this was a common mugging gone awry, why had it felt like the mugger wanted to choke me? Why not just grab the purse and run?
“Any attempt to get into the building? Maybe choke you after you’d punched in the lock code, get in, and steal whatever he could grab quickly?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess I’m not a good witness.”
Sam Santuri sighed. “Most people aren’t.”
Imagine that, not taking careful notes while being choked and then knocked up the side of the head by a perfect stranger. Shame on me.
Finally Detective Santuri leaned back in his chair and asked, “Who pays your bills, the doctor or the insurance company?”
“Doc’s malpractice liability insurance company pays my bills. Plus it pays the settlement or the judgment so long as the amount is within the policy limits.”
“Any benefit to the insurance company, Dr. Trusdale getting murdered?”
“You mean, like if he’s dead they don’t have to pay up?”
“Something like that.”
“No. Coverage doesn’t go away just because the insured is killed. So long as the premiums are paid.” But I made a mental note to check the policy’s terms in case there was a new cost-containment rider that precluded coverage in the event the insured died during a lawsuit.
“So the lawsuit continues? Murdering the defendant doesn’t end the case?”
“No. I just file a notice of death with the trial court and follow that with a substitution of party, naming the doctor’s estate or the executor of the estate as the new defendant.”
“How about the plaintiff? Any benefit to him?”
“Just that I can’t put Dr. Trusdale on the stand, make him come over to the jury as a nice, competent physician. Nothing direct.” Well, that and the fact that it would be virtually impossible to rehabilitate a dead pot-smoking surgeon.
The good detective took another look at the complaint and then pulled out his card. I pulled out my card and we exchanged, and I smiled what I hoped was my nice-girl smile and he nodded and that was that. Or, so I thought.
Sam Santuri hadn’t driven off yet before Ashton popped his head into my office.
“Sorry your guy got zapped,” he said, fluffing his hair up another inch with his fingers. Somebody should tell him the bouffant on men went out with Elvis Presley’s waistline. Ashton’s shirttail was half out of his pants and there were little white specks of something in both corners of his mouth, but his maroon silk tie looked tight enough to choke him. “Heard he was smoking a bong of hash when he keeled over.”
“I heard it was a marijuana joint,” I said. “How’d you hear?”
“Aw, courthouse rumor. You know the girls in Records.”
Damn. That meant a very good chance that the bum-knee guy’s attorney already knew, or would soon, that the defendant surgeon was a pot smoker. In a conservative community with an average age of 106 and zero tolerance for recreational drugs, the best jury I could draw would still reflect the moral superiority of a generation that survived the Great Depression and World War II and would have great sympathy for a man who had a knee replacement operation and none for a younger, pot-smoking surgeon.
“I have to go,” I said to Ashton.
“You’d better settle that sucker, today, right now. Don’t even bother looking at the file.”
As if Ashton Stanley needed to tell me that.
Henry Platt, the medical malpractice insurance claims adjuster in charge of Dr. Trusdale’s case, came pattering into the conference room where I was already inspecting a slice of kiwi from my fruit plate and wondering if the kitchen help had used a clean knife.
He offered his plump little hand, which I shook and held tightly for a moment past the ordinary convention, as if we were old friends.
In a way we were. We’d been through a lot of cases together, the worst being the hysterectomy on the pregnant woman.
“Henry, please have a seat,” I said and pointed to his fruit plate and his iced coffee. He’d probably hit the Dairy Queen on the way back to his office, but at least that wouldn’t be on my conscience.
“We have a problem,” I said, with no smile, “but you know that.”
“Yes. I read about Dr. Trusdale in the morning paper. Learn anything more about it?”
Oh, yes, thanks to Newly and the exponentially expanding rumor mill.
“That the good doctor was smoking a marijuana joint at the time he suffered a seizure and collapsed.”
“Oh, my Lord,” Henry said.
I let that sink in while I wiped off a grape with my napkin and ate it, then sipped my coffee.
Henry is a nice guy, generally neat and careful, and he’d been promoted by the insurance company from his early days largely because he was there and he was nice, but he was way too easy to manipulate for a claims adjuster. Because of that he had now gone as far as he would go with his company, and he knew it but had the serenity to accept the things he couldn’t change. Or else he was on Prozac.
“We’ll have to settle. Right away. Won’t we?” Henry took a bite of his banana muffin, eyeing the fruit as if he wasn’t sure what a kiwi was.
“I’ll need your authority to go to the policy limits if I have to do so to settle. Now, before the marijuana is common knowledge,” I said, hearing the clock ticking. “Before the bum-knee guy’s attorney hears about the pot. For all we know, it’ll be in the paper tomorrow. Today is my window of opportunity.”
“I’ll have to ask my boss on the policy limits.”
“Henry, I don’t have time. We’re racing the rumor mill here.”
I popped another grape in my mouth and waited for Henry to capitulate.
“All right,” he said.
“Here.” I shoved a sheet of paper at him. “I need your signature on this authorization to go to policy limits.” Bonita had already notarized it. All right, I know you’re supposed to wait until the person signs before you notarize things, but time was of the essence.
Whether he noticed this breach or not, Henry signed the authorization and I shoved my Styrofoam container of fruit at him. “Thanks. Take this one too—I’ve got to get to the bum-knee guy’s attorney before he hears about the pot.”
“Aw, Lilly, aw, could you, I mean, would you... that is, eh, can you... will you . . . ?”
Overadrenalinized and cranky with anxiety, I snapped, “Pick a verb, Henry.”
“Will you ask Bonita to join me for lunch? Please?”
From inside the doorway, I studied Henry and softened when I saw his naturally pink face had turned a deep red and his Paul Newman blue eyes were downcast with shyness. So, he was smitten. I smiled. “Sure, Henry. I’m sure she’d like that.”
I walked back to my office, sent Bonita off to join Henry, and punched in my own telephone numbers to call the bum-knee guy’s attorney.
As Bonita nibbled fruit with Henry in the conference room, I hurried my opposing counsel into a hasty settlement conference. Fortunately for me, the bum-knee guy’s attorney hadn’t heard about the pot yet, and I said a prayer of thanks to God, Buddha, the cosmic forces, the blue god, and the angels of both light and darkness.
Two hours of bickering later, my stomach churning, with nothing in it to digest except two grapes and itself, I had a signed preliminary settlement agreement. It was higher than it would have been if I hadn’t known about the marijuana, but lower than the policy limits. Henry should be happy.
Too bad I couldn’t be there when the bum-knee guy and his attorney heard about the toxic marijuana and realized they had settled for half of what I would have offered.
When I got back to my office, I found Bonita back at her desk and Olivia, the wife of the second key partner, Fred O’Leary, waiting for me. “Won’t take but a second,” Olivia said, holding up a form letter and some petitions. “Bastards trying to put up a medical arts building down in Laurel, next to Oscar Scherer Park. Knock out the last great Florida scrub, knock out the last of the scrub jays. You need to write a letter to the planning department and your county commissioner. Then get everybody you see to write one and sign the petition.” Fred O’Leary’s wife handed me a stack of paper as we stood over Bonita’s desk.
“Didn’t we do this before?” I remembered Olivia’s intense one-woman campaign to save the scrub jays that nested next to Oscar Scherer State Park. Scrub jays are odd bluebirds that for some reason have no fear of man, much, unfortunately, to their detriment, and will land on you in a curiously touching way. They are beautiful, they are friendly, they are industrious, and they are endangered, and, of course, hardly anyone cared. Except Olivia.
“Yeah, we stopped them in ’eighty-six, way before your time, and then again in ’ninety-eight, but now they’re at it again. County bought the land in ’eighty-six to protect it but never did anything to tie it up, no conservation restrictions. So every new county commission can sell it or lease it long-term if they want. Value of the property has skyrocketed like you wouldn’t believe. These doctors want a thirty-year lease from the county to develop it. Planning board has to okay it first. Lots of pressure on the members of the planning board, you can imagine. In fact, that doctor of yours is one of the main movers and shakers.”
Doctor of mine? Did she mean the dermatologist I had dated to much fanfare a few years ago, the one who officially broke my heart when he dumped me for his office nurse, a twenty-one-year-old blonde with nary a blemish or wrinkle, or was she talking about any one of my current or former physician clients?
“Which doc of mine?”
“Dr. Trusdale,” Olivia said, as Bonita pointed to the clock on the wall and then to her calendar, her face calm, her eyes almost sleepy.
Oh, the dead doc of mine, I thought, momentarily ignoring Bonita’s desultory warning. Did Olivia know Trusdale was dead? She hadn’t used the past tense.
“I’ll get on it, but first I think Bonita has something for me to do.”
“I’m out the door,” Olivia said. “You guys come on by, see the dogs anytime.” Olivia, aside from trying to save birds, raised and trained Rottweilers.
“I’ll put my kids on it. They’ll get signatures at the mall and get their teachers to write,” Bonita said.
Olivia thanked us and left. Bonita put the “Save the Scrub Jays” materials in a neat pile by her purse so she wouldn’t forget to take them home.
“You haven’t forgotten Dr. Padar’s hearing on the plaintiff’s motion for a new trial, have you?” Bonita said. “It’s in St. Pete.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. Get Angela for me, please. She can drive while I review the file.” As if I didn’t already know every word in it.
Because the hearing was in St. Petersburg, Angela would have to navigate two interstates plus drive across the Sunshine Skyway, the wicked and beautiful 192-foot-high bridge that spans Tampa Bay and connects St. Pete with Sarasota county and points south. A trip from Sarasota across the Skyway could take anywhere from a half hour to all day depending on wind currents, traffic flow, and whether anyone had rear-ended someone or any suicides had backed up the steady stream of cars. Just last week the bridge was closed all morning while someone in a Spiderman suit scaled down the high bridge only to be arrested by the waiting coast guard and hauled off to jail or the loony bin.
I glanced at the clock and considered that I might be pressing my luck, but I thought a Skyway crossing under a tight time frame would be a good test of Angela’s aggressiveness and nerve.
With the wind behind us, and no suicide jumpers or slow tourist gawkers in front of us, Angela whipped us across the Skyway while I flipped through the file. We got to the courthouse in the nick of time, hustled across the genteel old streets of St. Petersburg, smiled through two sets of metal detectors, and ran up the stairs to the courtroom.
At the hearing I said about two hundred dollars’ worth of words and won despite my conciseness. So flushed with that easy victory and the Dr. Trusdale settlement, I felt exuberant.
Angela surrendered the keys at my demand, and I blasted back across the Skyway while Angela studied Tampa Bay for dolphins or sharks.
“You reckon it’s true, what they say about this bridge?”
“Don’t say ‘reckon.’ It’s not sophisticated,” I said, echoing the same correction Jackson had drilled into me as a two-month associate after I’d said “reckon” and “fixing to” at a hearing while he bird-dogged me. Jackson had paid for speech and diction lessons for me so I wouldn’t sound like a south Georgia hick, but I didn’t think I needed to go that far with Angela. “Don’t say ‘fixing to,’ either,” I added.
Angela gave me a hurt little look.
“After all, you’re not in the South anymore, not in Sarasota.” Where the imported carpetbagger culture overruled the geography.
“Do you think it’s true, what they say about the Skyway?”
Much better, I thought, and said, “What, you mean about VWs and vans blowing off in the windstorms?”
“No, I meant about the men buried in the concrete supports.”
Everything and nothing about the Skyway myths are true, so I just said I didn’t know and kept driving as Angela studied the blue waters of Tampa Bay, and then the bridge was behind us and four thousand cars were in front of us.
I hate interstates and swung off at the first chance onto U.S. 301, where there is still some hint of what old Florida must have been. But as I was negotiating the traffic on the way back to Sarasota, Angela piped up and asked, “Can we stop at my apartment a minute? I need to check on Crosby. He’s very old.”
“Oh, you live with your father?” I realized that though Angela had been working with me for nearly two years I knew very little about her.
“No, Crosby’s my dog. He’s fifteen.”
“That’s practically ancient, isn’t it? For a dog?”
“Yes.”
So, we spun off east to the cheaper apartment complexes and stopped to check on a little rat dog with a fluff of gray hair around his face. Despite his frail look, Crosby engaged us both in a rather lively lick-and-wag session.
Angela’s apartment was decorated in Early College Poverty, with a three-legged couch propped up on a brick. But the place was as clean and clear of debris as my own house.
“Don’t they pay you?” I asked, looking at the wounded couch, though as a partner I knew perfectly well what she earned. I had argued for her first raise myself.
“I’ve got a lot of debt. College loans and stuff. And I’m saving up for a down payment on a house.”
Good for you, I thought. Get out of debt, don’t put on the golden handcuffs, hold out for a real life in a decade or so—exactly my plan, so I approved of the implication that it was also Angela’s.
We walked the ancient little rat dog outside in the shade around the Dumpster, where he seemed to be unusually fussy about selecting a place to go, and Angela explained that she hoped Crosby would live until Christmas so she could take him home during the annual law firm holiday shutdown and leave him with her brother so that “when Crosby crosses over, Jimmy can bury him down in the pecan orchard with all the others, exactly like I promised.”
Home, from her accent, was obviously somewhere in greater Dixie. I decided not to ask about the rest.