LAWYERED
TO DEATH
LAWYERED
TO DEATH
A KAREN HAYES MYSTREY
MICHAEL BIEHL
Many thanks to June Cussen, David Cussen, Shé Hicks, and Kris Rowland for their help with this edition.
Copyright © 2013 by Michael Biehl
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Inquiries should be addressed to:
Pineapple Press, Inc.
P.O. Box 3889
Sarasota, Florida 34230
www.pineapplepress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biehl, Michael M., 1951–
Lawyered to death / Michael Biehl.
pages cm. — (A Karen Hayes mystery)
A mystery novel in the Karen Hayes series, previously published in hardcover (2003) by Bridgeworks, now in paperback.
Summary: “Arthur Winslow, the successful CEO of a Midwest hospital, begins an affair with a beautiful hospital receptionist, unaware that she and her husband are setting him up for an embarrassing and costly sexual harassment claim. Hospital attorney Karen Hayes, introduced in the previous Doctored Evidence, is called on to defend Winslow against the claim, but she soon finds herself defending him against a murder charge as well after his ailing wife dies from the administration of a drug to which she was known to be allergic. Karen enlists the aid of Matthew Stoker, a smooth, aggressive young trial lawyer. At his law firm she discovers an abundance of unethical practices. A trail of clues leads her to a long-forgotten file at the firm — and a fight for her own life and that of her infant son” — Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-56164-630-2 (pbk.)
1. Women lawyers—Fiction. 2. Hospitals—Employees—Fiction. 3. Malicious accusation— Fiction. 4. Law firms—Corrupt practices—Fiction. 5. Middle West—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.I34L39 2013
813’.6—dc23
2013027037
978-1-56164-696-8 e-book ISBN.
First Edition
10 9 7 8 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Part I:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part II:
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part III:
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
About the Author
Again, to Cathleen
LAWYERED
TO DEATH
PART I
“Some people never see their lies as lies.
They just see the truth—the truth in disguise.”
–B. B. KING
CHAPTER
1
The calluses on the thumb and index finger of Duane Billick’s right hand were as thick as tire treads, developed from twisting off the caps of thousands of long-necked beer bottles. In twenty years a single night had not passed without Duane opening at least a dozen. He usually managed to work his way through an entire case before passing out on the brown velour sofa in his basement rec room.
Duane was only halfway through his first six-pack of the evening when a story on the Channel 4 news riveted his attention, actually got him to sit upright and put his feet on the floor, which was covered with orange indoor/outdoor carpeting.
“Shari, get your can down here! You gotta see this!”
Duane’s wife, Shari, was upstairs scouring dried gravy off the Melmac and calculating how long it would be before she could afford a new dishwasher. She stopped to wipe her forehead with her apron. Her floral-patterned housedress, damp with perspiration, clung to her slender figure. It was unseasonably warm for late May, and tropically humid in the small kitchen. Maybe a window-unit air conditioner first, then a new dishwasher around Christmas.
“Shari! Are you deaf?”
“Be right there, honey,” she shouted, wiping her hands on a dishtowel draped over her shoulder. She slipped her diamond ring back on and then flicked off the kitchen lights to save electricity.
“Hurry the fuck up!”
“Okay!”
The descent into the basement felt like a plunge into cool water. By the time Shari got to the rec room, the TV was off and Duane was pacing in front of the sofa, his eyes darting about, a tight, intense smile on his lips. Duane was potbellied yet sinewy and bony, with shoulder-length blond hair, a sparse mustache, and a four-day stubble of beard. He wore blue jeans and a worn-out T-shirt with a faded Marlboro logo on the breast pocket. He limped when he paced, as a result of a broken hip sustained in a slip-and-fall “accident” six years before.
“What is it, honey?” asked Shari.
Duane stopped pacing and looked straight at her. His tongue played with the tips of his mustache hairs. “It’s a goddamn gold mine, is what it is,” he said. He took a long swig of beer, his Adam’s apple bobbling in his throat like a cork, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “This broad from Chicago just took a law firm down for seven million bucks. For friggin’ sexual harassment. Can you believe it? Dough like that for a little in-and-out? Man, all the hookers in Jefferson put together wouldn’t make that in a century.” He started pacing again, his tongue darting at his mustache.
Shari felt a twinge of apprehension in the pit of her stomach. When Duane behaved like this, it usually meant he was hatching some scheme. His schemes were almost always dangerous and bluntly dishonest. She balled her apron up in her fists.
“That’s . . . really something, honey. Would you like me to get you another beer before I finish the dishes?”
Duane stopped pacing and looked at Shari out of the corner of his eye. That look meant Duane wasn’t buying her pretense that she didn’t know what he was getting at.
“We got to take a shot at this, sweets,” he said, pointing at the blank TV screen with his forefinger, “and we got to get to it pronto.”
Shari sighed and dropped her arms to her sides. Here we go again, she thought. There was no resisting Duane when he was set on a project, and she could tell that he was set on something. There would be worry and hassle and shame and then a long wait for some amount of money. It was just a question of how much worry, how much hassle, how much shame, how long a wait.
And how much money.
“What do we got to get to, honey?” she asked. “And what’s the hurry?”
Duane flopped down on the sofa and rubbed his hip, his face twisted in an expression of pain. He looked like he needed another Vicodin, but it was too soon to take one. Shari hoped that Duane would not get back into the habit of taking narcotics whenever he felt like it. He had been down that road before and it ended in rehab. He finished the beer and held the empty up for Shari.
“Get me another, sweets,” he said. “Get one for yourself, and then sit your can down here. The dishes can wait. We got work to do. With this story out there, claims artists all over the country will be on this like flies on shi
t. There’s a short window of opportunity here.”
DUANE BILLICK WAS a professional plaintiff or, as he liked to call it, a “claims artist.” When he was twenty-three, an elderly lady in a Chevy Corsica rear-ended Duane’s pickup truck at an intersection. Lou Chambers, an attorney who advertised on television, turned Duane’s sore neck into $5,000, which seemed like magic to Duane, inasmuch as he had been driving drunk at the time and was stopped at a green light. The Ford Ranger he acquired with the proceeds only served to whet his appetite.
Five months later, Duane was driving his Ranger home after having it serviced at a gas station when he noticed that the temperature gauge was buried in the red. He opened the hood, removed the radiator cap and discovered that the jerk at the service station had drained the antifreeze from the radiator but had forgotten to refill it. A clear screwup on his part.
Duane had an inspiration. He rolled his shirtsleeve up to the elbow, gritted his teeth, and, with a four-second exercise of sheer willpower, inflicted a third-degree burn on his forearm that cost the gas station’s insurance company twelve grand and netted Duane $8,400 after attorney’s fees and expenses.
Duane spent the entire sum on a flurry of extravagant dates with a beautiful young woman named Shari McNee, and a flawed but nonetheless impressive two-carat diamond ring that nearly made Shari faint when Duane presented it to her at her nineteenth birthday party, right in front of her giggling friends. The gesture left him broke, but it accomplished its purpose. Duane Billick—moody, uneducated, average-looking at best—was not only penniless but also unemployed when he managed to marry the prettiest and sweetest girl he had ever met. No question about it, it was a good trade-off for a cigarsized white scar on his forearm.
The down payment on the Billicks’ country house came from the biggest score Duane ever made. He and Shari were living in an apartment in Jefferson, a midsize city about an hour’s drive from the outskirts of Chicago. The apartment was infested with cockroaches, and one Saturday afternoon Duane brought home a tall aerosol can of roach killer with comic book pictures on it of helmeted soldiers shooting giant bugs with machine guns. When Duane aimed the nozzle of the can at the baseboard under the kitchen sink, he noticed that the spray came out in two distinct streams, one straight ahead, the other out to the side at an almost ninety-degree angle.
A defective nozzle, no doubt about it.
Duane opened a beer, sat down at the kitchen table and thought. The room reeked from the bug spray, even though he had only sprayed it for a couple of seconds. Obviously, it was really strong, foul stuff. He read the label on the can, which contained some extremely stern warnings, including one that said:
“AVOID CONTACT WITH EYES. MAY CAUSE BLINDNESS. IN CASE OF ACCIDENTAL EYE CONTACT, FLUSH THOROUGHLY WITH WATER. SEE A PHYSICIAN IMMEDIATELY.”
Duane chuckled at the unintended irony in the warning. How could you “see” a physician if you were blinded by the bug spray? He finished his beer, opened another, sat down and thought some more. “May” cause blindness, the label said. Might not, too. Probably wouldn’t, or they wouldn’t let them sell it to regular folks. He covered one eye with his hand, to test out how bad it would be to have use of only one eye. Didn’t seem so bad. It also seemed like it would be pretty easy to fake a certain amount of vision impairment, since who could say what you could or couldn’t see on a vision chart?
One more beer, and Duane was ready to act. Covering his right eye with his left hand, he held the can in his right hand and delivered a solid stream of bug spray to his left eye for a full two seconds. It stung like grapefruit juice on a canker sore. He waited for a few minutes before throwing some water on his face, being careful not to wash all of the poison out of his eye. Then he phoned his lawyer, Lou Chambers.
Lou sent Duane to the Jefferson Clinic, where an ophthalmologist treated Duane’s severe eye irritation, prescribing anti-inflammatory drugs and antibiotic eyedrops. The ophthalmologist at the clinic was willing to give an expert medical opinion that Duane had permanently lost over 50 percent of the vision in his left eye, even though there was no observable damage to the lens, cornea, retina, vitreous humor or any other structure of the eye that could explain the blurred vision Duane reported.
Lou Chambers had a special fee arrangement with certain physicians at the Jefferson Clinic for potentially large but speculative cases like Duane’s eye injury. The doctor, like Attorney Chambers, agreed to accept a contingency fee of one-third of any settlement, so that the $100,000 that the manufacturer of the bug spray eventually agreed to pay was split three ways. The arrangement with the physicians was unethical, but unlikely to be discovered. Duane was happy with his third, which he used as the down payment on a house out in a rural area, fulfilling a promise he had once made to Shari.
At that point Duane was the named plaintiff in three personal injury lawsuits, all filed within a brief time span at the Weyawega County Courthouse. Lou Chambers became worried that a thorough defense attorney would turn up this suspicious fact, smell a scam and put up a tough defense. Then Lou might actually have to try a case in court, something he had not done in years.
His instincts were sound.
WINDOW OF “OPPORTUNITY,” thought Shari as she bent down to fetch two bottles of beer from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Duane was obviously not using the word to refer to a legitimate business or employment opportunity. He was all lit up about some sexual harassment case. Shari was frightened as never before by the prospect of one of Duane’s scams. Because this one, unlike the others, sounded like it might directly involve her.
Duane’s chicanery was appalling, but previously there had always been something sort of gallant about it, too. Shari hated the dishonesty, but she liked the way it made her feel to have a man show cunning and courage to get things for her. For all the times she had regretted marrying Duane, she had never for a moment doubted that he adored her, and that, she believed, was reason enough to stay. He had never placed her in jeopardy with his schemes, only himself.
“Hurry up with that brewski, sweets!” shouted Duane.
Shari looked down at the brown bottles in her hands, wondering how much they had to do with the fact that, as the years passed, she found herself regretting her marriage to Duane more frequently.
TWO YEARS AFTER the bug spray settlement, Duane had his eye on a Dodge Durango. This time, he did not wait for fate to offer him an opportunity. Like any good entrepreneur, he set out to create his own opportunity, and he put a lot of time and effort into selecting his next “target.” He did some research at the Weyawega County library on damages in tort claims. He then read up on food poisoning and figured out how to contaminate a frozen pizza in a way that could credibly have been caused by the maker’s negligence.
Duane was hospitalized for eight days. He expected his biggest payday ever, but it was not to be. A bright, energetic lawyer fresh out of law school who wanted to impress the partners at his law firm, the second biggest firm in the city of Jefferson, worked the case hard and turned up Duane’s history of creative claims. The young attorney suspected that Duane Billick was not merely spectacularly unlucky. The defense refused to offer anything to settle, and the case went to trial.
Lou Chambers was caught off guard at trial by the introduction into evidence of library records showing that Duane had done a lot of suspiciously relevant research immediately before he consumed the tainted pizza. Worse yet, Lou had not advised Duane that it was pointless to lie when he was asked on the witness stand: “How many times have you been a plaintiff in a lawsuit in the last five years?”
Duane lied.
The jury deliberations were brief. The foreman of the jury made an argument to his fellow jurors that proved to be persuasive: “Why should we give this scumbag a dime?”
Duane was disappointed by the verdict for the defense but not defeated. To get his SUV, he drove 180 miles to his next “target”—an enormous new supermarket just across the state line. Checking first for the location of sec
urity cameras and convex mirrors, Duane surreptitiously cracked open a plastic bottle of vegetable oil, slipped in the resulting puddle, and sat down somewhat harder than he had intended. The hip still bothered him after six years, especially when it was humid.
Since the broken hip, Duane had pulled off only nickel-and-dime recoveries: a few cuts and bruises, one dog bite for which he had to bait the dog mercilessly. Now well into his thirties, he was losing his physical courage; Lou Chambers’s ability to manufacture whatever medical opinion was needed to pump up damages was lost when the Jefferson Clinic got nailed for Medicare fraud, went bankrupt and was liquidated. For the most part, Duane and Shari got by on Shari’s modest income as a receptionist at Shoreview Memorial Hospital in Jefferson.
SHARI HANDED DUANE a fresh Bud and sat down on the sofa. She wrung her own dewy bottle in her hands like a wet rag. Duane bothered his mustache hairs with his tongue and narrowed his eyes. Shari suddenly felt uncomfortably cold.
“Look,” said Duane, “the way I see it, it’s just a matter of picking out the right guy. He’s gotta be a big shot at the hospital. A doctor, maybe, or an executive. He’s gotta have dough and a reputation he wants to protect. He’s gotta be a fair amount older than you, so he looks, you know, out of line for going after you. But he’s gotta be young enough that he’s still being led around by his dick.”
“Who are you talking about?” asked Shari.
“The guy who’s gonna harass you,” answered Duane.
Shari bit her lower lip and twisted her beer bottle so hard the label crumpled. She was pretty sure she knew what Duane was driving at, but she clung to a thin hope that she was wrong. She tried playing dumb a little longer.
“How do you know a guy is going to harass me, honey?”
“Because you’re gonna get him to harass you.”
Shari sighed. “How am I going to do that?”
Duane chuckled derisively. “You putting me on? Go look in a mirror, sweets. You’re still a ten and you know it.”
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