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.