Before I could even get to Atlanta to check out my potential expert witness, Stephen LaBlanc had hyper-ventilated himself and me back into an emergency hearing before Judge Goddard, demanding that I commit to an expert witness immediately and that we set a trial date promptly, and, of course, that the judge deny my second motion for a continuance, because Stephen’s clients, the ever gentle good-parents, were simply unable to cope with the emotional blackmail of our stalling, plus they were under enormous financial strain, having to, you know, like, actually care for their own baby.
My associate, Angela, twisted a strand of orange hair around a finger into a tighter and tighter knot as she sat beside me. I had a migraine that had been gritting itself against my skull and my personal fortitude since morning. Dr. Randolph, despite his busy, busy schedule, had decided to come and listen in.
Worse than having the prick doctor, my own client, physically present, Stephen had brought the good-parents and the little veggie baby with him. That was a particularly gut-punch play, I thought, so maybe he was getting desperate, hoping the sight of the veggie baby would influence the judge.
I stared at the kid. This was my first up-front and in living color exposure to the plaintiffs and their own little darling. I tried to pretend the veggie kid didn’t look so bad. By now, he was three, and at the rate I was going he’d be ready for kindergarten before we sat before a jury, unless today was the day Judge Goddard got pissed at me and set a date and made me try the case. Jason was the baby’s name. Though, at three, I guess he wasn’t really a baby anymore. He was blond and hazel-eyed, and his movements were difficult, stiff, and jerky. As I stared, trying to assess his impact on a jury, Jason’s head circled in a random, uncontrolled way and his mother took both her hands and held his head until the child stilled. He cooed when she touched him.
Oh, frigging great, I thought, listening to the pathetic, and oddly moving, noises. Not unlike a mourning dove. Cooing and pathetic, but responsive to his mother. How did I beat that?
The parents, Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Goodacre (née Nancy Bazinskyson) were the perfect candidates for sainthood, with their visual displays of attention to the child. They were attractive in a sort of unkempt, wardrobe-by-Wal-Mart sort of way. I remembered from my review of their depositions that she stayed home full-time with Jason and he had a perfectly normal job as a manager of a McDonald’s. They had moved to Sarasota from Idaho to pursue a better life and because they were tired of the cold, and Nancy had been seven months pregnant at the time. She had not had any insurance when she became pregnant, and Jonathan didn’t marry her until her fourth month. But his Idaho insurance, of course, wouldn’t take her on, as she was already pregnant. Fortunately, the McDonald’s where he started working offered an HMO that did not have any preexisting-condition exclusions, so after a modest employee probationary period, Nancy Goodacre became insured—at eight months and in the nick of time, though for all the good her husband’s HMO ended up doing her.
Nancy had claimed, and her meager records supported this, that due to her lack of money (her boss had fired her the first time she threw up at work, in violation of all kinds of federal statutes, but then Nancy wasn’t wise in the ways of employee rights) she’d had no prenatal care in Idaho except some very basic, cursory public health clinic workups. Henry, in a rare show of backbone, had refused to allow Jackson to travel back to Idaho to subject friends, coworkers, Nancy’s public health obstetrician, and neighbors to depositions, and Jackson let it slide because he had already been to Idaho years before on a hunting trip and didn’t want to go back. But the private eye Henry finally did authorize hadn’t found out anything except that these were ordinary, young, somewhat boring people who had dated for a long time but waited until Nancy was well into her pregnancy before they married. No hidden records of child molestation or drug use. Too bad for Dr. Randolph. And, of course, we did have her medical records from her Idaho public health obstetrician, the result of the early work of subpoenas and aggressive discovery on Jackson’s part, which showed that she had normal blood pressure and blood workups and no ultrasounds or amniocentesis.
So here we all were, face to face, the good-parents, the veggie baby, the prick doctor, the impatient judge, the never-to-be-underestimated Stephen, me, and the increasingly high-strung Angela.
Oh, frigging great.
With earnest tones, Stephen began to detail the costs and trauma facing the young good-parents in caring for a physically and mentally disadvantaged child. The good-parents needed to get the show on the road so they could collect some money from their lawsuit and hire somebody to take care of their kid because they were oh so tired. Naturally, I’m paraphrasing Stephen’s argument. Mrs. Goodacre, née Nancy, I swear, actually began to cry, no doubt, I thought, as a warm-up for the jury trial; that is, if, in contrast to my current strategy, we ever actually got around to having a jury trial.
When it was my turn, I expressed my heartfelt sympathy for the parents and for Jason but pointed out that Stephen’s argument on their behalf assumed the truth of the matter in dispute; that is, that my doctor was negligent and therefore the jury would award the parents a substantial amount of money. The essence, I argued, of Stephen’s argument was that the doctor was a recalcitrant creditor who wouldn’t pay his bills on time and the plaintiffs wanted the judge to force him to pay up now. Of course, I went through the usual lawyer double-talk, your honor, your discretion, it’s his own fault for stealing our expert in the first place, et cetera, and I threw in enough big legal words to, I hoped, placate my client, the lurking doctor.
Ever alert to the rule that you end with a bang, not a whimper, I pointed out that Dr. Randolph and I had been shot at, a matter documented by the police report I had attached to my second motion for a continuance. Entirely aside from the normal disarray that this caused in our ability to prepare a defense, I argued, our new security measures had completely prevented me from traveling and meeting with my proposed new expert witness (this was only a small fib, as it was my potential expert’s own summer travel schedule that was delaying my meeting him in Atlanta), and I certainly couldn’t be expected to try a case like this without an expert witness. A little more of the your honors and your discretions, and I shut up.
Hard as it was not to keep staring at Jason, I kept eye contact with the judge, trying to read his face, and, of course, to avoid eye contact with the good-parents, who no doubt perceived me as in league with the Antichrist.
Judge Goddard’s expression suggested that he didn’t care to hear any more about any of it. But he gave Stephen enough rope on a rebuttal to my argument to see if he’d hang himself, and Stephen launched into a pedantic argument that I had not cited a single case, statute, law review article, provision in The Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, or any other legal support in which being shot at had been legally recognized as a valid basis for a second continuance in a case of this magnitude.
Judge Goddard blinked at me, a signal that I could respond, even though the usual hearing protocol didn’t allow me to rebut a rebuttal.
I stood up. My head pounded.
“So what?” I said.
And I sat down. Judge Goddard was going to do whatever it was he was going to do, and nothing I said would make any difference.
Dr. Randolph made an audible hissing noise. Angela clicked her jaws, Nancy gasped, and Jason cooed. I wondered if Judy, the court reporter, noted all that in the record.
But Judge Goddard, known for his fondness of a concise argument, denied Stephen’s motions to compel a witness list and set a trial date.
Dr. Randolph lambasted me all the way back to the law firm of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley. Angela plucked at her hair. It was as hot as blue Hades. I was sorry the shooter had missed Dr. Randolph. But I was glad the speedy-trial provisions all pertained to criminal cases.
Back in the office, once assured it was unlikely that we would be trying the Goodacres’ lawsuit against the prick doctor any time this month, or next, Bonita explained to me that her health insurance company had refused to pay for her daughter’s trip to the emergency room when she jumped off the roof and hurt her arm because this did not constitute an emergency and she should have scheduled an appointment with the HMO doctor at his earliest convenience, which, of course, would have been at least two weeks.
I held out my hand and took the letter denying the claim, and I promised to do something about it.
Inside my office, I handed the letter to Angela and said, “Do something about this.”
I had learned a lot from Jackson after all.
At home that night, the phone rang while Newly was puttering about in the shower, solo, as I was icing my migraine and contemplating whether it made sense to take any drugs for it if I was just going to bed soon anyway.
The ringing startled me, and I dropped my ice pack. I had an unlisted number, as do most lawyers, doctors, and law enforcement officers. It much improved the quality of life to keep as many barriers as possible in place for members of such usually scorned but always necessary professions, and only Jackson, Bonita, Angela, Ashton, Fred, and my brothers and Newly had the number.
And Newly wasn’t calling from the shower, so this wasn’t going to be good news. I picked up the phone. In my anxiety, I forgot to speak.
“Hello?” The voice, after my pause, was vaguely familiar.
“Hello,” I said back, my phone manners replacing my fears that Delvon had been busted or one of Dan’s children had emerged from their cocoon of normality and had done something requiring an attorney’s assistance.
“Ah, is, ah, is Newton there?”
Newton? Nobody calls Newly “Newton,” though technically that was the name he adopted when he legally changed his name from Lester Ledbetter.
“Who is this?” I snapped.
“Who is this?” the voice snapped back.
“Look, it’s my phone and I asked first.” Peevish, definitely.
“This is Roy Mac. Newton gave me this number.”
“Roy, damn. This is Lilly.” Roy was a process server and a genuinely nice, funny guy who loved to play cards and who threw great Christmas parties.
“Lilly? Man, you all right? I haven’t seen you since, I don’t know, last Christmas party. Man, you were dancing up a storm.”
“Yeah, till somebody stepped on my hand.”
“Man, you and Newton?”
I wasn’t sure if I liked the incredulous tone of his voice when he paired me up with Newly. That ought to start some rumors, I thought.
When I didn’t respond, Roy asked if he could speak with Newton.
“Newly’s here, but he can’t come to the phone now.”
“Well, you gotta tell him to call me. About his ferret. My wife says it’s got to go. Tonight. She’s gonna make me lock him in the garage as soon as I get off the phone.”
A ferret?
Like, a long weasel?
“Yeah, Roy, will do.”
I wasn’t sure which to throw at Newly first, that he was giving out my number and I didn’t like it, or that Roy’s wife had locked his ferret in the garage and wanted Newly to come get it.
That meant the ferret, which I understood to be a long, thin, weasel-like varmint, would soon be locked in my garage.
“Mierda,” I said to the room. “Chingalo.”
Newly had to go. First all his piles of junk and his smothering, next raising the C question, and now threatening to bring rodents into my house.
But what I had figured out over the last few weeks was that Newly had no place to go. Karen the Vindictive had his assets locked up and had an injunction against his even thinking about coming back into the house his hard-earned contingency fees had paid for. She hadn’t managed to garnish his salary, but a heaping chunk of it went to cover her temporary alimony and the rest was carved up between the other ex-wives and the daily expenses of food, wine, dry-cleaning bills, gasoline, client entertainment, and the usual regular stuff like fancy coffee for everyone at the courthouse and flowers for the women in the police department who slipped him photocopies of things they were not supposed to slip him.
If I kicked him out, he might end up sleeping on his office couch or living in a cheap rent-by-the-day, -week, or -month efficiency. I wasn’t ready to do that. Or was I?
Not knowing how close to the edge of the limb he was, Newly started shouting from the bathroom. “Hey, hon, want to come see what I’ve got for you?”