When I stumbled into my office through the back door, still tingly from Newly’s inventive morning devotional involving copious amounts of Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap, Detective Santuri was already sitting in my office, waiting. Bonita shrugged when I glared first at Sam and then at her.
We all grumped something that might have passed for good morning, and I left my door cracked so Bonita could overhear from her office without straining.
“So what do you know about those other malpractice lawsuits against Trusdale?” I jumped in and asked before Sam could get started.
Sam protested that he still didn’t have the particulars on the other lawsuits, only that one was in Miami, one in Dallas, both had settled, and the records were sealed, he said. “Mrs. Trusdale can’t find any of the settlement papers. She thinks he destroyed them.”
“See if Mrs. Trusdale remembers the names of the attorneys,” I said, thinking, Sealed, my ass. “I’ll take it from there.”
If Henry couldn’t dig out the facts from his insurance networks of rats, spies, and databases, one of those attorneys would brag the details if I approached him or her lawyer to lawyer. And if Mrs. Trusdale didn’t remember the attorneys’ names, now that I knew the cities I could eventually get copies of the complaints out of Miami and Dallas, as those are public records. But I was a lot more interested, now that my role in defending Dr. Trusdale was over, in making either Henry or Sam do the work.
While I glowered, Sam admitted, more or less, that he had no leads about where the marijuana laced with oleanders might have come from. If Dr. Trusdale was a pothead, he hadn’t left a track.
“Could someone have forced him to smoke it?” I asked, envisioning someone with a gun pointed at him, not telling him the joint was laced with poison.
Sam shrugged.
He asked me about the mugging again. He asked me about Dr. Trusdale’s file, his liability policy, the settlement, the opposing counsel, and what I knew about the doctor, which I admitted was fundamentally nothing. After all, it was Sam who had told me about the prior two malpractice hits on Dr. Trusdale. This version of twenty questions was just a warm-up though, I soon learned.
“Why’d he write you a prescription for Percocet?” Sam asked, blowing me away.
Act calm, I told myself. It isn’t a crime and he isn’t after me. Is he?
“Remember, I’d been mugged,” I said. “My neck was a mess. I hurt. He saw I was in pain and offered me that prescription.” Yeah, after I belabored my pain and bluntly asked, but who could dispute my version now?
“Shouldn’t you have gone to your own doctor?”
“Sure, if I’d had time, which I didn’t.”
“Hmm,” he said, and wrote something down in his notebook.
“What has that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. You want to tell me?”
This time I shrugged.
“You smoke marijuana?”
Oh, yeah, as if I’d admit it to a cop if I did. “No. Not since a little experimentation in high school.” Leaving out my brother’s patch and my liberal college use of Delvon’s pure and clean homegrown. “I don’t do street drugs.”
Too late, I caught the implication of this last statement in the overall context—no street drugs, just pharmaceuticals, like the ones the good, but dead, Dr. Trusdale had prescribed for me. True, I’d given up marijuana more than a decade ago for the FDA-assured purity, and the legality, of the occasional prescription with a bang, and I kept a careful rein over even that, but none of this was information I wanted a Sarasota police detective to know.
To try to edit what I had said would be to highlight the mistake. I kept silent, and then I noticed the dark hair on Sam’s arms, and his hands, noticed the big, long fingers, the strong-looking hands, big hands. I raised my eyes up to study his face, his shoulders, and I was acutely and physically aware of this man in my office just a few feet away from me. He was, as Bonita had first pointed out to me, a real hunk.
“Why do you think his death has some connection to me?” I asked, distracted by Sam’s physical presence into forgetting that the first rule about holes is to stop digging.
“I don’t. Do you?”
I heard Bonita’s phone ringing and then, through my slightly opened door, her voice, and then she knocked on my door.
“I need to go to the hospital. Carmen jumped off the roof and Benicio thinks she might have cracked a bone in her arm. He’s driving her to the hospital, but I need to meet them there.”
Bonita’s house, like my own, was a squat, concrete-block style known as a Florida ranch for some reason having nothing to do with cows. It was a low-to-the-ground house, but I still wouldn’t want to jump off of it.
“Why was she jumping off the roof?” I asked.
“She’s a five-year-old,” Bonita said, with that oddly peaceful look of resignation. “They don’t need reasons.”
Apparently Benicio, the oldest and the summer version of family day care for the other children, was a better driver at fourteen than he was a babysitter, I thought.
“Go. But call me and let me know how she is.”
Bonita waved, and I let that be the excuse to run Sam off.
With Sam gone, I pulled Dr. Trusdale’s liability policy out of the file drawer to see who had approved coverage for him. Damn doctor, I thought, lying straight-faced to me, denying prior malpractice suits. And lying on his application for malpractice insurance, I noticed as I scanned it. Damn Henry, I thought, when I saw that Henry himself had approved the policy. I had to question Henry’s promotion to claims adjuster after seeing this big a screwup. Henry’s company would not have issued the liability policy if it had any notice that Dr. Trusdale’s subspecialty was getting sued. And Henry, as the policy’s point man, was not supposed to just take the doctor’s word for it; he was supposed to dig out the truth from insurance company databases that rival those of the FBI. I punched in Henry’s number on my phone and after the usual delays got his happy-sounding little bleat.
“Henry, you screwed up,” I said. Who needs hello when you’re on a mission.
“What?”
“Trusdale—you approved his policy application. He had two prior malpractice suits, both settled. You didn’t catch that? You’re supposed to investigate, aren’t you, to find that out?”
I listened to Henry breathe.
“What difference does that make now?” he finally retorted, a bit sharp for Henry.
“Don’t get sloppy on me,” I snapped back.
“But you didn’t know either,” he said.
“Henry, I just told you.”
Henry breathed some more, and then he asked what else I knew about the suits. I admitted that Detective Santuri had uncovered that uncomfortable little fact, and Henry bleated and agreed to dig around.
“Yeah, you do that.”
“Does Detective Santuri think these other suits have anything to do with the doctor’s death?” Henry asked.
“I don’t think he knows,” I said and made my good-byes.
Bonita returned just after six to declare that her five-year-old was fine, just a little bruised, thanks be to God, and that the little girl’s aunt had come by to stay with the kids now so she could work late to catch up for the hours she’d missed that afternoon.
After expressing my own relief that her child was all right, I told Bonita that everything could wait for tomorrow, as I was just studying Jackson’s discovery files in the veggie baby case.
“Would you please stop calling it that?” Bonita’s usually calm voice had a sharp tone that I didn’t often hear.
“Calling it what?”
“The veggie baby. That child has a name. It has a soul. It is a child of God, and you disrespect it by what you call it.”
Well, of course I disrespected it. I was trying to prevent a jury from giving the veggie baby’s parents millions of dollars because of it. A jury in Mississippi gave a family $25 million for a brain-damaged baby last year. If I lost a $25 million case, I’d be back to waiting tables and weeding pot for a living. I could hardly allow myself to become attached to the child, could I? Besides, the black humor of attorneys on both sides of personal injury cases—like ER nurses, paramedics, cops, and firemen—was a system of emotional self-defense. We saw a lot of truly crapped-up, hurt, disabled, and painfully broken people, and humor, however callous, was the way we coped with it. Well, that and the good wine, the vodka, or the substance abuse of one’s choice.
“I didn’t mean to upset you,” I said, aware that of all the people at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, Bonita was the one person whose respect I most wanted to have.
Bonita nodded. I resolved to be careful not to call it the veggie baby in her presence anymore.
But Bonita’s anger at me dug in deeper than she might have intended.
I was ashamed.
Something that happens more often than I will admit to anyone and try not to admit to myself—this shame.
Poor Dr. Trusdale was dead, and it was not a good death at all.
In typically lawyer fashion, I had reacted to the news of Dr. Trusdale’s death in terms of what this meant to my case: that is, how I could wrestle a good result from the paper in Dr. Trusdale’s file, even though Dr. Trusdale was presumably past caring.
Well, actually, technically, my first thought had been to wonder about the prescription he had written me, and I had some shame over that too.
When I have these episodes of morose, introspective hand-wringing, I am apt to drive down the full length of Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island and trespass through the yards of the rich folk in the pink stucco monster houses on the tip of Anna Maria and sit on the beach, which is still technically open to the public along the shoreline, though there is no public access within miles. My habit, or perhaps solace, is to sit and watch the reflected sunset over the yellow arch of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. The bridge is like an incredibly large piece of avant-garde jewelry in the water, a geometric display of modern engineering, a high-rise double-span bridge, with a bright yellow mast that crosses Tampa Bay. It is beautiful. It is a particular favorite for suicides. I have seen both dolphins and sharks swimming under its pilings, and once, when I was a kid, I saw eternity off the edge, beyond the girders, in the vast, deep expanse of water.
That moment, be it hallucination or divine gift, draws me periodically back to stare at the bridge, as if the flash of immortality I felt that time more than two decades ago might return and impart some wisdom, or peace.
The most scenic, but not the quickest, route to the best point of land to view the Skyway from my side of Tampa Bay is down the islands. This long drive meanders down Longboat and Anna Maria, two shifting sands of barrier islands washed on the western shore by the Gulf of Mexico and on the eastern shore by brackish bay waters filtered through a few remaining mangroves. As I drove, I listened to the folk music on WMNS and contemplated the evils in my soul.
Such contemplation while driving was possible because the winter hordes of seasonal visitors, snowbirds in the local jargon, had gone back to their cool native habitats, finally died, or else were summering in Highlands, North Carolina. Snowbirds are typically ancient people who originated up north and have bad reflexes and bad vision. These tribes of ancients attempt to make up for these shortcomings by driving very big automobiles at very slow rates of speed and keeping their left blinkers on at all times. They are particularly fond of engaging in long, slow winter parades on the two-lane road that runs down Longboat and Anna Maria. But in the summer, the ancient ones are replaced by younger and poorer tourists from the neighboring Deep South states with battered pickups and minivans full of rambunctious and sunburned children. They have to stay in Manatee County because Sarasota has zoned out anyone who is other than a millionaire, unless that person provides a service that the rich retirees need, like cardiologist, lawyer, CPA, New Age healer, upscale jeweler, plastic surgeon, and undertaker. Say what you will about these summer tourists with their raucous kids; they at least know how to drive and can still see.
Keeping pace with a van with an Alabama tag and a red-faced kid leaning out the window and yelling at the sky, I watched the Gulf of Mexico in the breaks between the condos as I drove and introspected. Then I parked by a No Parking sign at the northern tip of Anna Maria Island and walked past the No Public Access and No Trespassing signs.
Technically criminal, yeah, but I’m basically of the opinion that since I’m an articulate, well-dressed person with a job in an air-conditioned office, no one will actually arrest me for trespassing.
Once I was safely on the public beach without encountering any irate private landowners, I walked. The sun was going down over the Gulf, and the reflected colors were a baroque delight as they tripped through the clouds over the Sunshine Skyway.
After dragging somebody else’s lawn chair down to the point, I sat and stared at the Skyway, and I said to myself: “I am not always a nice person.” I resolved to be better. I resolved to care the next time a client got killed. I resolved to become a Big Sister, to adopt an ugly mutt from the brink of the Humane Society’s gas chamber, to go to Mass with Bonita the next time she asked, and to quit bitching about my United Way contribution, which is a mandatory component of life at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley because Jackson’s wife is perennially either a chair, co-chair, vice chair, chief nag, or face person of the annual fund drive.
Kicking off my shoes, I rubbed my bare toes in the warm, wet sand and studied the Skyway. This was the new bridge. The spring of 1980, a cargo ship captain rammed his empty ship into one of the pilings under the 150-foot southbound span that was designed to let tugs and ships pass unheeded into the port in Tampa. When the boat hit, the whole damn section of the highest span of the bridge shuddered, then crashed into the stormy waters below. Fortunately, the separate, northbound span survived. Unfortunately, at the time the southbound bridge collapsed, a Greyhound bus full of tired travelers and a few cars were crossing its span. Thirty-five people followed the wreckage of the bridge into the dark, deep waters of Tampa Bay to their deaths. One old coot in a pickup survived the fall into Davy Jones’s locker.
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.”