Lawyered to Death

by Michael Biehl

  “Zounds,” he said, “a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death.”

  He finally tried to avoid thinking entirely and passed his waking hours by reciting poems he had memorized in school. When he repeatedly muttered the prologue to the Canterbury Tales—“whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote, the droghte of March had perced to the roote”—he found it not only occupied and soothed his mind but also kept the other prisoners at bay. Arthur’s soliloquies in Middle English were apparently interpreted as a sign that he was dangerously deranged, which earned him privacy and a certain measure of respect.

  Elizabethan English had the same effect. Arthur had played Mercutio in a prep school production of Romeo and Juliet and was surprised to find that he still remembered many of his lines, and that he was given a wide berth by his cohorts both during and after a recitation.

  “They have made worm’s meat of me: I have it, and soundly too. Your houses!”

  Arthur hardly dared contemplate another night in this hellhole. The thought was unbearable. He was not proud of his softness. He knew that people had adjusted to far worse privations. But they hadn’t first lived for nearly six decades in the lap of luxury.

  The guard called out, “Lockdown,” and the men shuffled back to their cells.

  Walking past the guard, Arthur said, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave, man.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  The first thing Gene Decker said when he saw Karen was, “What happened to your face?” Karen, on the other hand, did not comment on her father’s appearance, dismaying as it was. He seemed to have aged years in the ten days since she last saw him. His gray business suit hung loosely on his tall frame, suggesting rapid weight loss.

  In the past eighteen months, Gene had suffered through a prostatectomy, hormone therapy and radiation for his prostate cancer. He sought Karen’s advice every step of the way, not always following it, always later wishing that he had. When his oncologist, Dr. Ulam, recommended chemotherapy, Karen expressed skepticism.

  “He says he’s confident he can give me five years,” Gene had told her.

  When Karen said, “Of what?” Gene asked her to accompany him on his next visit to the oncologist.

  They arrived at Dr. Ulam’s office precisely on time for Gene’s noon appointment. A receptionist instructed them to have a seat in the waiting room, which was clean, modern and full of other patients. They talked about the ugly side effects of chemotherapy for a half hour and then had a spirited fifteen-minute debate on whether marijuana ought to be legalized for the treatment of those side effects. Karen eventually gave up trying to persuade her conservative dad and changed the subject.

  “Jake and I are ready to have McKinley baptized,” she said. “As soon as Mom can set it up.”

  Gene looked dubious. “You sure? No more procrastination?”

  “No. I promise.” She almost found it endearing, this newfound interest her father was taking in her baby’s immortal soul.

  Gene’s face relaxed and he smiled. “Wonderful. I was worried Jake wouldn’t go along with it, because of his Hare Krishna thing.”

  “Buddhism, Dad. And he’s not really a Buddhist, it’s just an interest of his.”

  Gene gave Karen a sardonic look. “He has a lot of kooky interests, doesn’t he?”

  Karen felt her neck muscles tightening. “I wouldn’t say kooky. Unconventional.”

  “Was he really on the Frisbee team in college, or was he pulling my leg?”

  “He was very good at it,” said Karen.

  “Well, I hope you can get him to teach McKinley to play sports the other boys will respect. Like baseball.”

  Never mind, thought Karen. Just let it go. Don’t tell your ailing father that he’s a narrow-minded ass. She’d been listening to this sort of thing for seventeen years, and she still had not figured out what her father’s problem with Jake was. For years she believed her father was skeptical about a musician’s ability to make a reliable living, but Jake had dispelled any such doubts. Now her dad was putting Jake down as “kooky” because of the sport he played in college. Didn’t her father realize how hurtful it was to have a parent criticize your spouse? Maybe not. Maybe he needed someone to tell him.

  But Karen found she had no appetite for confrontation with her father. So little time left. So many things about him she would never understand. Jus. let it go.

  “How’s the new job?” said Gene.

  Karen hesitated. She should have been prepared for such an obvious question. The answer was also obvious: it’s a disaster. But she was not eager to tell her father about it. How she had managed to botch her relationship with the head of the firm in three days. How her schedule was poaching on her time with McKinley. How the guy who had recruited her into the firm had also tried to recruit her into an extramarital affair. Unpleasant matters to discuss with one’s father. Especially if one’s father had warned one not to make a hasty decision about changing jobs.

  Gene interpreted her hesitation. “Not so good, I take it. Having some problems, Tootsie Roll?”

  Karen had hated her father’s pet name since she was thirteen, but now she realized she was going to miss hearing it. “It’s complicated.”

  “Anything your old dad can help with?”

  She searched for a way to discuss work problems while steering clear of troublesome topics. A good diversion was what she needed. “I’m working on a murder case. The story’s been on TV and in the newspaper.”

  “Elizabeth said you’d probably be in on the Winslow case. I didn’t see your name in the paper.”

  Karen was glad to have had no media contact, but she detected a note of disappointment in her father’s voice. Her invisibility had deprived her parents of bragging rights with their friends. “I’m sort of in the background. Matthew Stoker is lead counsel.”

  “His name I saw. How’s the case going?”

  Karen looked around to make sure no other patients were eavesdropping. “I’ve been investigating who might have been responsible for Lorraine Winslow’s death, and I turned up some interesting leads.”

  A brief summary of the path that led to Karen’s deduction that the victim had been poisoned and her subsequent medical treatment sabotaged seemed to impress her father immensely. As a result, she went on to fill in all the details, right up to the point where she intended to drive to De Kalb to interview the clerk at Mercury Messenger Service but was impeded by the injured toe.

  “My afternoon is open,” said Gene. “I’ll drive you out there.”

  At 1:15 P.M. a nurse summoned Gene to an examining room, where he and Karen waited another fifteen minutes for Dr. Ulam. The examining room was the size of a modest walk-in closet. There was a calendar on the wall turned to the previous month, with the logo of a prescription medication on it. Karen also noticed drug logos on the paper towel dispenser, the mirror over the sink and a pencil holder on the countertop. The room had more advertising in it than the Sunday Tribune.

  Dr. Ulam was a tall, lean man with a dark mustache. When introduced to Karen, he spent ten minutes asking her about Shoreview Memorial’s plans to build a medical office building next to the hospital, dwelling on whether he could get a discount on rent there if he moved his inpatient admissions over from St. Peter’s Hospital. He then spent one minute laying out the course of chemotherapy he recommended for Gene. Karen had him walk through the risks and side effects of chemotherapy.

  “And what benefits should he expect from the treatment?” she asked. “The book I got from the library didn’t discuss chemotherapy as a treatment option for prostate cancer.”

  “Doing sahm reading, eh?” the doctor said with a condescending lift of his bushy eyebrows. “We are not treating the prostate cancer with chemotherapy per se. The tumor has metastasized to the bone. If untreated, it may metastasize to lung. It is the metastases we are treating.”

  “And how would the treatment affect his life expectancy at this point?”

/>   “It is difficult to say,” said the doctor. “Each case is different.”

  “But,” said Karen, “didn’t you say you were confident you could give him five years?”

  Dr. Ulam raised his eyebrows higher. He nervously clicked the push button of a ballpoint pen with his thumb several times. The pen had a drug logo on it. “I gave no such assurance. Often patients with advanced stage tumors hear what they want to hear.”

  “How about five months?” said Karen.

  The doctor shook his head. “There are no guarantees.”

  Karen looked at her father. The bitterness on his face told her all she needed to know. She thanked Dr. Ulam for his time.

  GENE DECKER’S CHRYSLER seemed as big as a limousine to Karen. Her father had the only car she knew of with a bench seat. As they drove through soggy cornfields to the increasingly irritating sound of windshield wipers, Karen consoled herself that farmers needed the rain.

  “That SOB,” said Gene. “Saying I heard what I wanted to hear, like I’m senile. He told me five years.”

  “Sometimes they’re less inclined to make representations with a lawyer in the room. We’ll have Ulam’s office send your records to Dr. Hooperman at the U. of C. He’ll give us the straight scoop.” Thinking her decisiveness might have been insensitive, she added, “If that’s what you want.”

  “I want the straight scoop,” he said. For the second time that day, a male hand appeared on Karen’s knee. “Try not to worry about me too much, Tootsie Roll. I’m not afraid. I’m just sorry I won’t be around to see McKinley grow up.”

  THE DE KALB office of Mercury Messenger Service was a small storefront next to a pizzeria in a strip mall. The clerk was a tall, attractive woman in her early twenties who wore too much makeup. “Tiffany” was embroidered on the breast pocket of her blue uniform.

  “No, I don’t remember what the person who placed the order looked like,” she said, but she remembered talking to Anne Delaney about the delivery to the hospital. “I don’t remember taking the order. I only know I took it ’cause my initials are on it.”

  “Do you get that many people who bring parcels here in person and pay in cash?” Karen asked.

  “Enough so’s I can’t remember them all,” said Tiffany.

  Karen drummed her fingertips on the countertop. “Well, would you remember if the person was, say, African American.”

  Tiffany tilted her head. “I don’t remember any blacks coming in that whole day.”

  Karen turned her palm up and moved it forward, as if offering the clerk something on a tray. “So you see, you remember the person wasn’t black. That’s a start.”

  Tiffany lowered her eyelids and lifted her chin toward Karen. “Yeah, I guess I remember he wasn’t eight feet tall, too.”

  Karen raised a finger. “You said he. A man placed the order?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Gene stood next to Karen, studying a blank order form. “There’s a space for the customer’s signature.” He pointed to the bottom of the form.

  “We don’t require that,” said Tiffany.

  “Yes, but he may have signed it anyway,” said Gene.

  Karen and Gene waited silently while Tiffany shuffled through a drawer packed with thin sheets of the sort that made copies without carbon paper. “Here it is,” said the clerk. She handed it to Karen.

  The form revealed that the order for a delivery to Shore-view Memorial Hospital in Jefferson was placed at 11:40 A.M. on June 16. “Arthur Winslow” had signed in the space for the customer’s signature. Karen had seen Arthur’s signature dozens of times. This wasn’t it.

  “Would you have noticed if a woman signed a man’s name?” Karen asked the clerk.

  She shook her head. “No, I never check the signatures on the order form, just on the credit card slip. This guy paid cash.”

  “Why do you say ‘guy’?” said Karen.

  “I’m just now remembering. Not many people pay cash. Women almost never do. I’m pretty sure there were no women in that morning who paid cash.”

  “By any chance, do you remember a guy in a gray wind-breaker, with sunglasses and a baseball cap?”

  “No,” said Tiffany. She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe. Yeah, I sort of do.”

  Karen questioned her for several more minutes until a customer came into the store. Back in the car, Karen remembered something the desk clerk at the Sleepy Time Motel had said. “Hardly anybody checks in midmorning.”

  She asked Gene if he had any cash and he opened his wallet. He was loaded. Karen lifted a fifty from the wallet and dashed back into the store. She came out a few minutes later with the store copy of the order form.

  There was a pay phone at the gas station across the street. Gene pulled the Chrysler close to it so that Karen did not have to stand in the rain.

  “Matt, I’ve got something. The person who placed the order to have the chocolate delivered to Lorraine’s patient room signed Arthur’s name on the form, and I’m sure it’s not his signature. More importantly, he placed the order in person at 11:40 A.M. I think I can prove Arthur was in Jefferson, at the Sleepy Time Motel, at 11:40 A.M.”

  “That’s great,” he replied. “Karen, you’re amazing. Of course, the prosecutor is going to say Arthur might have used an accomplice to ship the chocolate.”

  “Why would Arthur have an accomplice sign Arthur’s name?”

  “Good point. You’ve got a copy of the form?”

  “Yes. I’m on my way to the Sleepy Time Motel. How much of a disbursement am I authorized to make to get my hands on that guest register?”

  “A couple of grand, easy,” said Matt. “Karen, you have no idea how fantastic this is. I’ve been doing a little research over at the county courthouse. I’ve turned up some very interesting stuff. We could have Arthur out before sundown. Be sure you’re back to the office by 3:30 P.M.”

  Gene stopped at a suburban office of Karen’s bank, where she withdrew $2,000, nearly the entire balance in her account. When she explained to her father that she needed the cash to bribe a motel desk clerk into letting her take the guest register, Gene said he had no idea this was what corporate law practice was like. He also expressed surprise at the appearance of the place Arthur had chosen for his rendezvous with Shari.

  “The Sleepy Time Motel,” he said, shaking his head, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Where the elite meet to cheat.”

  The desk clerk gave Gene a half smile and a nod, compelling Karen to explain that he was her father and they weren’t there to take a room. “I need to borrow your register. It’s like a matter of life or death.”

  The desk clerk refused. He continued to refuse as Karen placed first one, then two, then three hundred-dollar bills on the turquoise Formica counter. At five hundred he rubbed the back of his neck.

  “Say, Andy,” said Gene.

  “Yeah?” said the desk clerk.

  Gene pointed at an electrical junction box mounted on the wall next to the pay phone. “You know, the building code requires these to be flush-mounted in commercial establishments. Your light fixtures aren’t up to code, either.”

  The desk clerk looked at Gene, at the light fixtures and at the cash on the counter. He picked up the cash and handed the register to Karen. She promised to return it as soon as possible.

  In front of the Van Dyke ~ Eddington offices, Gene helped Karen with her crutches and escorted her to the revolving doors. He explained that he got the name “Andy” from the innkeeper’s license hanging by the office door.

  “When he hesitated to take the money, I thought he might be the proprietor, so I tried the name. If it’s his business, he doesn’t want to spend a lot of money fixing code violations.”

  “Thanks for helping with this,” said Karen. “I know you don’t feel good. I’m sorry it took so much of your day.”

  Gene bent down and kissed his daughter on the cheek. “Are you kidding? Tootsie Roll, that was the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

  CHAPTERr />
  24

  Apink message slip was waiting for Karen on the seat of her desk chair. It summoned her to Matt’s office “the moment you get back” and instructed her to “bring the goodies.” Her hair was damp and her makeup streaked and faded. The toe of her white sock was pink where the dressing was leaking. She ran a brush through her hair, patted her face down with a tissue, applied two quick swipes of lipstick and reported for duty.

  Emerson Knowles was in Matt’s office going over a document. Matt rose as soon as Karen walked through the door.

  “Wickwire and the Billicks are in the reception area,” said Matt. “Karen, I want you and Emerson to go get them. Emerson’s going to bring the Billicks back to my office for a while. Karen, you bring Wickwire to the corner conference room. Emerson, no talking about the case with the Billicks without their attorney present.”

  “Natch,” said Emerson.

  “What’s going on?” asked Karen.

  “A minor change in plans,” said Matt. He signaled for Emerson to hand Karen a copy of the settlement agreement.

  “This is a mistake,” said Karen. “We agreed on seventy-five thousand. This says ninety thousand.”

  “I’ll explain it when you and Wickwire get to the conference room. One thing. If it sounds like I’m being critical of you to Wickwire, don’t take it personally. Just go along.”

  “DEPOSITIONS?” SAID GARY Wickwire. “The case is settled. You don’t need depositions at this point.”

  Gary was dressed in the same clothes he had worn the day before. He seemed more at ease in the formal conference room than he had on his first visit—until Matt cast doubt on whether the case was settled by announcing that he intended to go ahead with the scheduled depositions.

  “I’m afraid we do need those depositions,” he said. “We would be failing to exercise due diligence if we settled a claim like this without any discovery. Mrs. Hayes is new here and may have failed to make that clear.”