Though I was earnestly trying to finish the damn appellate brief, I kept remembering both Sam’s body pressed against mine and what he had said (or not said) about Dr. Trusdale. Such a hideous way to die, and Sam wouldn’t even commit to whether it was or wasn’t murder.
Murder or not, I decided to call a pathologist I’d worked with before in a couple of med mal cases. She’s a kind of paleo-hippie. She and Olivia would be a good match on that score, I thought. Once, when I sat with her at a Kiwanis luncheon, I noticed one of the pathologist’s dangling earrings was a fancy roach clip and the other a silver and jade dragonfly. I get a kick out of her, Dr. Annie Watts, and if we were seven-year-old kids I would have asked her to ride bikes to the lake and share my Fudgesicle, but I wasn’t sure how grown-up women initiated friendships.
Despite my habit of calling on her only when I needed information, Dr. Watts acted glad to see me and welcomed me into her overstuffed office. I shifted and fidgeted in my chair during our small talk as her jars and files and journals pressed in on me. After we caught up, I got out the basic story about Dr. Trusdale, whom I identified as a client. She knew him, slightly, and had read the story in the paper. Though the newspaper still had not mentioned the poisoned marijuana, she’d already heard about the pot from someone in the medical examiner’s office.
“Oleander—that’s what the detective told me,” I said.
“Extremely toxic plants, oleanders contain both the toxin oleandrin and nerioside.” Dr. Watts pulled a cigarette from a half-filled pack, tapped the cigarette on her desk, and then put it, unlit, in her mouth. She sucked air through it with a notable gurgle that distracted me momentarily from the towering stacks of books not two feet from my chair.
“These toxins are like those found in foxglove— they work on the heart. One leaf can kill a child and thirty leaves will kill a horse. All those people planting hedges of oleanders don’t appreciate its danger. Water drunk from glasses where cut oleander flowers have been can make people sick. Even honey made by bees visiting the flowers has produced toxic results.”
I nodded, remembering that the real estate agent had warned me about the one clump on the corner of my lot when I bought my house, telling me never to burn the trimmings when the oleanders were pruned because even the smoke was dangerous. To this day, I tread a wide berth around my pink oleanders and hope the bush will die on its own. But they are tough plants, one of the reasons the highway department likes to plant them in the right-of-ways.
Still, they are pretty. I said so.
“Sure. But so are coral snakes. Beautiful creatures. But are you going to raise a few for pets?”
“Point taken.”
Annie tapped the unlit cigarette in an ashtray and then put it back in her mouth. “Clinical symptoms develop rapidly and can include death without warning. Other symptoms can include gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and abdominal pain. The toxins in oleanders can also cause irregular heart rates and rhythms.”
“Not a pretty way to go, eh?”
“No. Not a good way to die.”
“So whoever did this, I mean, assuming somebody deliberately laced his pot with oleander trimmings, was pretty up on plants, and also mean.”
“It’s mean, and it’s imprecise, so if someone knew enough to lace the pot with oleanders, they were also taking a chance that the deceased would smoke enough. Not a good plan. Not a plan you could count on.” The pathologist tapped her cigarette again. “Not a plan somebody with good sense would use.” Tap, tap with the cigarette.
“You want a light?” I offered, eyeing a box of matches on her desk, easy reach from me.
“Hell, no, I don’t want a light. I quit smoking. Two years ago. Nasty habit. You ever see the lungs of a smoker?”
“Nope. Missed that one.”
“I could show you.”
“Nope, that’s all right.”
“Well, you change your mind, you let me know. In fact, we’re doing an autopsy in just a little while on a man who died of lung cancer. You could stand in.”
Though I had some other questions for the doctor, I was seized with an acute desire to leave, so I headed out to Fred and Olivia’s house to see the puppies.
After a curse-evoking drive down the Tamiami Trail, a highway that gives all highways a bad name for tacky and traffic, I arrived at Fred and Olivia’s house and pounded their front door. Olivia answered, arched her brows, and waved a lit cigarette at me by way of greeting. Fred came around the corner, smiled, and held up his drink, and I nodded. Olivia led me to the nursery, where one of their female Rottweilers was nursing three little squeaky furballs.
“You can’t pick them up yet. Matilla is still protective,” Fred said, joining us and handing me a vodka, which I immediately sipped. Absolut. Bless his heart, he remembered my brand.
Matilla growled at me as I leaned over her, admiring her children.
Olivia reached over and picked up one, and Matilla didn’t so much as prick up her ears. “Knows the boss,” Olivia said.
She handed me the puppy. “It’s the girl. She’s yours, say the word.”
I went through the usual protestations—I was rarely home, working long days and weekends, and traveling for hearings, trials, depositions. It wouldn’t be fair to the dog, I said.
But when I retire, I thought but didn’t say, I was taking at least two, maybe three of Olivia’s prize Rottweilers to my new home. Nobody knew my five-year plan. Which, of course, had been a seven-year plan when I’d first bought the 180 acres of apple orchards and woods in north Georgia two years ago. Farmer Dave, the man who had taught my brother Delvon and me about loyalty and farming, was my current caretaker, hiding out as he was on a few dozen felony warrants. I pay down the mortgage and visit when I can, and Farmer Dave keeps the orchard green, happy, and mowed.
Thinking how a Rottweiler would be just the dog for Farmer Dave and the 180 acres, I said, “When I’m ready.”
“When you’re ready,” Olivia repeated, and I pressed the puppy to my chest, where it tried to nurse on a button on my blouse. I hugged the puppy ever so gently, mentally named her Emily, and rocked her against me.
“You know who’s doing well in her obedience training with a Rottweiler?” Fred asked, lighting his cigarette off Olivia’s.
“Yeah, and it’s not even one of our Rotts,” Olivia said.
“Who?”
“Jennifer, that nitwit girlfriend of Ashton’s,” Fred said. “Olivia’s been working with her and her dog.”
“Yeah, a female, named Bearess. At first, I wouldn’t have bet two plugged nickels that girl would ever even housebreak the dog, but she’s doing pretty darn good with it.”
“Dog must be pretty smart,” I added, and thought, Bearess?
“Well, yes.” Olivia nodded. “But I’ll tell you what, Jennifer is not nearly as dumb as we all think she is.”
“Nor,” Fred added, sipping his vodka, “as smart as Ashton wants us to think she is.”
“She’s pixilated for sure, but she’s not totally stupid. You should see her work with that dog,” Olivia said.
“You teaching them obedience training?” I asked.
“They’ve been taking a class at the vo-tech, but Ashton asked me to work some with them on the weekends. It’s not bad. They’re kind of fun to work with.”
Trust Olivia to find a word like pixilated when the rest of us were using words like dumb and dingbat and nitwit. But I was quickly tired of talking about Jennifer, who might or might not be as stupid as most of us in the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley family were apt to think she was.
“How goes the Save the Scrub Jay campaign?” I asked, thinking to change the subject and learn how it was progressing.
“Those letters and petitions you and Bonita worked on will help. Thank you. Told you, I think, your Dr. Trusdale was the ringleader of the physicians who want to develop that land for a south-county medical arts building.”
I nodded, and Emily the still-blind puppy mewed and then tried to nurse from my little finger.
“But Dr. Trusdale’s getting killed off didn’t help any. Another physician—this one’s an obstetrician—has taken over the reins of the physicians’ group. Putting a lot of pressure on the county planning board for approval.”
“They wouldn’t even know a scrub jay if one landed on them,” Fred said.
I was focusing on what Olivia had said, that Dr. Trusdale’s getting killed “didn’t help any.”
Olivia had sounded so wholly without sympathy.
Had she thought Dr. Trusdale’s death would help save the scrub jays from the physicians’ plans for developing the jay habitats into a medical arts building?
On the way out the door, I glanced around in their yard and spotted the oleanders growing in a pink and white clump at the front corner, far out of reach of the large fenced backyard full of big dogs.
It didn’t mean a thing, I told myself. Almost everybody with a yard in Sarasota has a clump of oleanders somewhere on his or her property. Florida oleanders were as ubiquitous as the poison ivy of my native childhood, though more toxic.
Newly brought home steaks and asked me to cook them and didn’t get it at all when I reacted with anger. “I’m a vegetarian,” I blurted out. Not to mention I don’t take domestic orders from my lovers.
“Since when are you a vegetarian?”
Well, all right. I’d converted, I admitted, since we had last been together. But hadn’t he noticed I never touched the plastic chicken or the rubber-gravied alleged steak at the weekly Kiwanis meetings, where we’d been sitting together for years so we could make fun of the speakers?
“Converted, like a religion? So, can I cook a steak for me to eat,” he asked, “or would that defile the temple?”
Snip, snap, snarl. After we crackled at each other some more, I excused myself to wash up and change before supper, which he promised would include a salad and a baked potato for me.
The salad he made was ordinary iceberg lettuce, not the organic romaine I use, and imported Mexican tomatoes wholly without taste but laden I suspected with pesticides, and he hadn’t washed any of it. Eyeing the toxic tomatoes, already sliced and beyond washing now, I told him I had a headache and wasn’t hungry, though I picked at the baked potato, and asked him to sleep in the guest room.
Having Newly living with me was wearing thin already.
The next night I came home and he had hung two paintings on my white, real plaster walls bearing the delicate swirls of a true plasterer in his prime. Not the kind of walls you can find in the half-mil and up condos, with their mass-market Sheetrock.
“Look, hon. Original art, by local guys. This one is by Ted Morris and this one is by A. J. Metzgar.”
I looked at my formerly blank, clean, white walls, where Newly had hung a painting of a bobcat in a lush Florida hammock, the sharp blades of a palmetto thicket shading the cat, and a second painting, a surreal, ethereal painting of what might have been a waterfall in what might have been a dream.
Yes, I agreed, they were nice paintings. They were. I liked them.
He’d had to pay Karen the Vindictive, his soon-to-be ex-wife, for them before she’d let him take them out of the house that she had a temporary court order banning him from entering, but he’d presented the sales receipts and paid her full value plus interest. And now they were mine, he said. For me.
But Newly didn’t understand that my walls, like my floors, and my bookcases, and my dresser tops, were all clean, clear, and white for a reason. To cope.
I didn’t know how to explain it to him.
“I just can’t stand stuff around me, clutter,” I said, remembering the piles of magazines, paperbacks, dirty clothes, and garbage in the house of my childhood.
“This is like when you have to wash each piece of lettuce about fifty times, isn’t it?”
“Yes, perhaps. Sort of.”
“Don’t they have medicine for that?” Newly asked, looking concerned.
“Yes. Paxil. It made me tired. I couldn’t take it and be a lawyer.” That Newly understood, because stamina is perhaps the universal attribute of every successful trial lawyer.
Therapy had helped, I told him. In fact, I assured him, I was perfectly functional and under the general impression that an obsessive-compulsive disorder benefited a trial attorney, so long as it was controlled.
Newly didn’t understand just how much better I was. I didn’t have to rush home at noon every day and take a shower anymore. I could eat out in restaurants—good ones that would let me inspect their kitchens, that is. Though I had yet to meet a salad bar I could force myself to eat from, I could eat the packaged salads from the Granary after a tour of their kitchen, and I had learned self-hypnosis and visualization techniques, and I knew how to go to a cool, safe place in my mind. My waterfall, as I explained to Newly.
“A waterfall like this one?” Newly looked at the Metzgar painting he had hung on my wall.
“Yes,” I said. Just like that one—cool, green, blue, and aqua, and soft, and safe, as much dreamscape as waterfall.
“My baby,” he said, and held me gently until I felt him press against my stomach and we ended up in the shower together, where we discovered that the warm and tingling sensations of pure peppermint soap when rubbed expertly into sensitive spots had a rather electrifying result.
Long after we’d tumbled into the bed, I realized Newly never did take the paintings down.