If there is a cab driver in Atlanta who speaks English, I’ve yet to encounter him.
The one who Angela had flagged down spoke a language I did not recognize, and he smelled of tuna and marijuana, but he grinned at me and winked at Angela as he lifted our luggage into the cab. I slumped in the back, woozy with the stress of walking through hundreds of strangers, many of whom no doubt were carrying spores of a new and particularly virulent strain of Ebola or some similar deadly virus, my heart pounding and my hands sweating. Angela, using a combination of talking loudly and pointing at Emory on the napkin-size map of Atlanta she’d snaked from a car rental booth, persuaded the cabby to deliver us to Emory Medical Center. Dr. Jamieson was expecting us there in about an hour.
Naturally, I would have preferred a shower, a nap, and a stiff belt of espresso before meeting the doctor, though, as Angela repeatedly and rather annoyingly kept pointing out, the flight from Sarasota to Atlanta was only two hours long and it wasn’t as if we were flying to Africa. We settled for a good hand-washing in an Emory café bathroom, plus copious espresso.
More or less, I was functional when we tapped on Dr. Jamieson’s faculty office door at the appointed time.
Please don’t let him be ugly or fat, or stutter, I prayed to the cosmic forces. Juries tend to best believe tall, thin, good-looking men who speak like Dan Rather, this according to jury studies by the Institute of Something Ostentatious that had charged us over a hundred dollars for software that told the lawyers in the firm of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley such things. Any attorney at the firm could have told anyone that for free.
The man who opened the door made me hold my breath in fear he was a stress-overload hallucination.
He looked like Robert Redford.
Angela fluffed her hair and smiled.
When Dr. Redford shook my hand and his hand was real, and firm, and warm, I exhaled. For the first time since Jackson had dumped the veggie baby case on my desk, I thought I had a chance at winning the sucker.
Angela had insisted we stay with her brother Ronny, the computer genius who had filched computer data for his baby sister. But Ronny lived in one of those hell’s little ten acres somewhere in the next county over from Atlanta, and his general standards of household cleanliness were unknown to me, so staying with him was wholly out of the question. Instead of our staying with him, I convinced Angela that he should stay with us at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. That was not a tough sell. The real tough sell would be explaining the third hotel room on the bill to Henry, guardian of the liability insurance company’s expenses, but if Henry denied reimbursement I was sure the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley executive committee would pick up the tab. I certainly wasn’t going to.
And, of course, if one stayed at the Ritz, then one should eat there too. On the insurance company’s tab, of course. So, there we were: Dr. Jamieson, the Robert Redford look-alike, who was drawing stares; Ronny, who had orange hair and thick glasses and wore high-heeled cowboy boots that made him substantially taller than me, drawing a few stares of his own; and Angela and me, slinky in our little black dresses and drawing a few stares too. Quite the foursome, dining out at the Ritz. Dr. Jamieson was not married, as it turned out, though I doubted he spent many Saturday nights alone, and Angela and I had already done the first round of quiz, quiz, flirt, flirt, on him, his qualifications, his research, his articles, his medical practice. We knew he could wow a jury. Tomorrow we would do the hard-core questions and answers on the actual case. Tonight was purely for the pleasure of eating expensive food in a fine restaurant with a good-looking man and having somebody else pay for it all.
Angela and Ronny had their heads together, playing catch-up and remember-when and talking about people with names straight out of Tennessee Williams. Dr. Redford, a.k.a. Dr. Jamieson, and I were somewhat ignoring them, intent as we were on flirting with each other.
About the time Dr. Jamieson was tilted just right to look down my little black dress, Ronny finished his monologue on the Lumberton High School graduating class of whatever and leaned into me, eyeing the pale skin at the top of my black silk. “You and Angie need to come out tomorrow and see my new house. It’s a beaut. Brick, two stories, got a porch all the way around it.”
Angela explained to Ronny that we had tickets for the late-afternoon commuter special back to Sarasota tomorrow and would need to spend the day with Dr. Jamieson, but maybe she and I could come visit another time. I nodded, studying the man’s orange hair, which he wore in a kind of retro Afro frizz, and I thought he would be good-looking with normal hair and a better pair of eyeglass frames. What gene pool did they come from where orange frizzy hair was their lot? And why had neither of them thought to do anything about it?
Angela steered the conversation back to one of Ronny’s old girlfriends, whom apparently Angela had not liked much, and I lost interest and returned my full attention to Dr. Jamieson, or William, as he had invited us to call him.
Flipping my hair and tilting my chin, I continued flirting with William while sharing a second bottle of truly awesome wine, eating an elegant, wholly vegetarian Middle Eastern meal and pretending to discuss CMV and Jason Goodacre.
There was a God—Delvon was right—and I was in high form, happy. With the airport-return trauma many hours away, I was troubled only by the vague question of whether, now that I was a single, unattached girl again, it would be too slutty to go to bed with my expert witness should William press his advantage, which I was certain he would.
Then Dr. Redford pushed the down-you-go button on the roller coaster and said, “You know what the two big problems with your case really are, don’t you?”
Yeah, I thought, I have an arrogant prick for a client and at trial I’ll have Mr. and Mrs. Good-Parents sitting at the plaintiffs’ table with a cooing child whose head won’t stay still unless his mother holds it.
“No,” I cooed myself. “Please tell me.”
“From the medical records you’ve shown me, you can’t prove Mrs. Goodacre had CMV during her pregnancy. After the child was born, she was tested and came up with a positive on the CMV. But she could have had the infection when she was a child and would have tested positive. To hurt the fetus, the infection must be active during the pregnancy.”
“Really,” I murmured. Too buzzed on the expensive wine and the square jaw and perfect blue eyes of this man next to me to care, or absorb, his sentence of doom to my existing defense.
“Too bad she didn’t have amniocentesis. Take a clear sample, four to six weeks after the symptoms, and CMV can be identified by a polymerase chain reaction in the amniotic fluid.”
Oooh, I thought, talk dirty to me.
“The other problem you have is that even if you could prove that the mother had a primary CMV infection during the pregnancy, the fetal monitor strips showed fetal distress and oxygen deprivation. That could have added to the child’s condition. It probably didn’t cause the initial cerebral palsy or mental retardation if she really did have a primary CMV infection in the first or second trimester, but it most certainly could have made it worse. In fact, the birth trauma could have caused the Horner’s syndrome.”
The falsely dormant muscle spasm at the back of my neck pulsed alive.
“I believe you lawyers like to call it concurrent cause, and if I remember my malpractice seminars, that will support a jury verdict too.” William finished destroying my life and then leaned back and sipped his good wine.
Yes, unfortunately, concurrent cause would indeed support a jury’s verdict awarding Mr. and Mrs. Good-Parents a sizable chunk of money. Concurrent cause was just another legal buzzword that appellate lawyers liked to argue about, but the root concept was simple enough: For any one injury, there could be more than one cause.
So, let’s see: a CMV infection as cause one (assuming I could prove the active case during the pregnancy), Dr. Randolph’s alleged negligence as cause two, and a child whose lifetime therapy and care could cost millions, not to mention the emotional distress, pain and suffering, mental anguish, and all that stuff of the good-parents. And the jury could, and probably would, calculate CMV at one percent causation (at the most), the doctor the rest. Ninety-nine percent of, say, twenty million was still a loss, a big loss. I saw my career sliding away from me down the slippery slope of concurrent cause.
“Mierda,” I said, louder than I should have. Angela’s head jerked up, and she stared at the doctor and me.
My whole right shoulder was in a muscle spasm now, and I looked into those blue eyes, and I said to the doctor, “You wouldn’t have to testify to that, would you? I mean, with a little wordsmithing”— this being a lawyer term for lying—“couldn’t you still testify that the CMV caused the birth defects to a reasonable degree of medical certainty? Ignore the possibility of a concurrent cause as too remote.”
Angela gasped. “You can’t lie under oath,” she said.
Oh, Angie, sweetheart, people do it all the time. Some professional expert witnesses do it for a living, I thought.
“It wouldn’t be lying,” I started to explain, but Dr. Jamieson cut me off.
“Of course, if I’m asked, I would have to answer honestly. Regardless of whether the infant suffered brain damage as a result of his mother’s primary CMV infection during gestation, a primary infection that you haven’t yet proved, the obstetrician’s negligence in failing to alleviate the fetal distress and the oxygen deprivation could well have worsened the infant’s overall condition. If there had been an ultrasound showing, say, the typical ascites, then this would be different.”
“Ascites?” Ronny asked.
“Fluid buildup,” Angela and I answered together like a cued Greek chorus.
“If an ultrasound showed that, or other signs of CMV damage, then you could establish that CMV was more than likely the sole, proximate cause. But without something like that, the best I can testify to is the possibility of concurrent cause.”
So, okay, now I knew why he had never been a paid expert witness before, as a strict adherence to the absolute black and white truth usually precluded a paid witness’s popularity among trial lawyers. And I also knew that I was back to square one in the search for an expert witness.
By the time dessert came, I had a migraine and couldn’t imagine why I had even vaguely entertained the notion of romance with this man.