Back in the green-marbled splendor of my Ritz-Carlton room, I gave wholly over to despair. The migraine clobbered my head and churned my stomach. I would lose millions on this case. My legal career was over. I had no sex life anymore and I missed Newly, and Sam didn’t talk to me about anything except his damn investigations. My stomach lurched.
I mean, my life was so in the toilet—why shouldn’t my head be too?
Eyeing the declining balance of the Percocet from the late Dr. Trusdale’s last prescription, I considered my pharmacological alternatives as my brain banged painfully against my skull. I could take a Percocet and go to bed and hope I slept and didn’t die of the mixture of that particular drug and alcohol or from pain. Or I could take an outrageously expensive oral triptan, a wonderful migraine pill that if it doesn’t constrict your blood vessels into a stroke will miraculously ease a migraine. At twenty bucks for each single pill and with the risk of cardiac disaster, described in the patient information literature as “serious adverse cardiac events,... including death,” I try to err on the side of caution in taking these little miracle pills.
Death as a possible side effect or not, I peeled back the bubble pack for the triptan, said a quick prayer my heart wouldn’t explode, and swallowed it. I was done in by the combination of wine and the stress of the airport and watching my perfect expert witness disappear into the smoke cloud of his own self-righteous and steadfast refusal to testify to what I was paying him to testify to.
Wondering about the quality and purity of Atlanta’s tap water, I filled and drank a glass of it.
Then, for good measure, I took a Percocet anyway, and I showered and I crawled into bed and waited for either drug-induced sleep, triptan relief of pain, or death. At that moment, I had no particular favorite among those options. Either, whatever.
Somewhere in the never-never land of dreaming while awake, a narcotic trick I’m particularly fond of, the phone rang. I rolled toward it in my big, lonely king-size bed.
My stomach did a free-fall dive, my brain shifted and collided with my skull and set off fireworks of pain, and I concluded that if I had in fact died, I had not made it to heaven.
I picked up the phone but forgot to talk. After a moment of silence, a male voice said, “May I speak to Lilly Cleary?”
“Sam? Lieutenant Santuri?”
“This is Detective Santuri. Sam. I’m not a lieutenant.”
Yeah, whatever. “I hope you’re calling from the lobby.”
Long pause. No endearing response.
Damn, down we go again, I thought through the daze of chemicals duking it out inside my body, including my own failing brain chemistry, which was refusing to produce whatever those little neurotransmitter things are that keep you from saying stupid things and getting depressed.
“No. I’m in Sarasota.” A heavy, tired, masculine voice.
Ah, Sam, I thought. Whether he sounded worn out or not, I wanted his big, strong arms around me. “How soon can you get here?”
Pause.
Uh-oh, I thought. Straighten up, Lilly girl.
“Have you been drinking?”
Oh, Sam, sweetheart, that’s the least of it, I thought, but said, “You woke me up. I was dreaming.” Not directly responsive, but close enough to skate over my inappropriate phone manners so far.
“I got your location from Bonita,” he said.
Big-time uh-oh, I thought.
“Who’s dead?” Why bother with the little niceties like “How are you?” when a homicide detective gets your number from your secretary, who knows better than to give it out indiscriminately, and calls you in the wee hours?
“Nobody.”
But I heard the sound of “yet” in the pause.
“But Dr. Randolph is in the ICU.”
I struggled to clear my head. “Shot?” I asked. “Poisoned.”
My stomach lurched, seriously this time, and I said, “Excuse me, please,” to Sam and put the phone down. One thing about hotels, even big swanky ones like the Ritz, is that you are never far from the toilet, where I went and threw up the very last of my expensive wine and awesome wholly vegetarian Middle Eastern dinner. I hoped the triptan pill had had enough time to fully digest into my system.
After washing my face and hands, I picked up an additional phone, which was oddly—at least to me and my class of people—located beside the toilet. Closing the lid on the toilet, I sat down and leaned sideways against the wall.
“Sam?”
“Still here. You okay?”
“Er, no. I mean, yeah. Tell me what happened.”
“How soon can you get back here?”
“Got a five-thirty out tomorrow—ah, today, this afternoon.” But then, it wasn’t likely that I could convince Dr. Jamieson to abandon his moral fiber in one day, not after my most seductive pleadings over wine had already failed. “I can try and catch an earlier flight.”
“Might be a good idea.”
“Should I stick with bottled water and packaged foods with the seals still intact?”
“I don’t know if you’re a target or not. You and Angela be careful and get back here. We need to talk.”
“I’ll call the airport right now.”
We ended on the obvious and I hung up. I drank two glasses of tap water on the theory that the would-be murderer probably hadn’t had time to poison the whole Atlanta water system, and I picked up the phone by the toilet to call the airport. Instead, I called Angela’s apartment. Having, as I mentioned, that ability to remember numbers and having called her more than once in the past, I dialed from memory and hoped Newly would answer.
He did.
“Oh, Newly,” I said, surprised that I was crying. “My life sucks.”
Okay, so here I was worried about me when Dr. Randolph was fighting for his life in the ICU after being poisoned. Tacky, sure. But I didn’t like Dr. Randolph, and I am intimately involved with myself.
I let it all spill out for Newly’s freshly awakened ears. In the background, I heard the chittering of Johnny Winter, the evil ferret, who no doubt had the run of the place in Angela’s absence.
“Hon, I can get there in seven hours. I’ve driven it that fast before. Say the word.”
“No, I’m booking the first flight out.”
“Call me back and tell me when and I’ll meet you at the airport.”
Only later did I realize he hadn’t said a thing about meeting Angela at the airport too.
The next task, I painfully reminded myself, was to actually get the quickest flight home. I couldn’t stand the thought of booting up my laptop and doing Delta online, so I weaseled a Delta 800 number from the hotel switchboard and punched it in. After some annoying exchanges with an officious airline employee, I changed Angela and myself to a noon flight—the first available, so said this employee.
Then I called Angela to tell her what was going on. She was all for waking up Ronny and the two of them joining me in my hotel room to protect me on what now seemed like a bit of an off chance that I was a target of the would-be assassin too. But I assured Angela that the Ritz had impeccable locks on the doors, but in the event that someone did break in and kill me, she and Newly should be sure to sue the hotel on my behalf and donate the judgment to the Salvation Army.
Thinking of the postdeath donation, I wondered, Could you buy your way into heaven after the fact? I called my brother Delvon to ask him and woke him up. Delvon sounded stoned, even in his just-awakened state, but happy, and we had a long, wholly incoherent conversation about getting into heaven, a phone conversation that Dr. Randolph’s liability insurance company would have to pay for under the guise of travel expenses pursuant to interviewing Dr. Jamieson.
Then I crashed out on the bed, eyeing the alarm clock suspiciously and hoping, more or less, to live to see the light of morning.
Naturally, I didn’t sleep. What I did as my over-priced triptan pill began to constrict my swollen brain blood vessels and ease my pain was to begin the counteroffensive. Okay, so first I had to prove that Mrs. Goodacre had active CMV while she was pregnant. Then I had to find another expert, one who would testify that CMV was the sole cause of Jason’s brain damage. One who would refuse to entertain even the remote possibility that anything my client had done or failed to do during the delivery of young Jason had in any way caused anything more than a large medical bill. Legal journals are full of advertisements from physicians who offer their expert opinions for a fee. Abandoning my dream of a virgin witness with impeccable credentials, I realized I’d be dialing up these professionals and taking bids.
Then in the last aura of the retreating migraine, I thought, So who says Mrs. Goodacre never had an ultrasound that would show the damages that CMV could cause to a developing fetus? So who says she never had prenatal care of any serious kind? So who says she didn’t have amniocentesis?
Mrs. Goodacre alone had said she hadn’t had these things.
We didn’t know for sure because most of her pregnancy had taken place in Idaho, and, of course, Henry in the guise of cost containment had refused to authorize payment for any trips to Idaho for discovery purposes.
I wondered just how good Ronny really was at computer snooping, and I watched the illuminated dials on the alarm clock until it was late enough in the early morning to call his room.