Wildcat Wine

by Claire Matturro

  The baby giggled and turned even redder.

  “He’s cute, ain’t he?” Deputy Helpful piped in.

  “Then you take him,” I said.

  “On duty,” he said, and took two steps backward.

  Yeah, on duty spying on me, I thought, and, wholly against my better judgment, I reached out and took the proffered baby.

  “I got to talk to you about all this, ma’am, but first I got to, well, you know, look around and stuff. Looks like that grape harvester must’ve malfunctioned and knocked him off.”

  A grape harvester—so that’s what that big, ugly tractorlike thing was. But I didn’t have time to study on this new piece of information because as Tired walked off, young Redfish turned toward me, took inventory of the situation, inhaled, and let out a scream that even poor dead Earl must have shuddered at. Tired looked back at me and said, “He likes it if you sing to him.”

  Sing to him? Who exactly did Tired think I was?

  Redfish continued to share his negative view of the state of affairs, as Gandhi began to trot toward us with his guard deputy closely behind, trying to intercept.

  I sat down in the car, turned on Sheryl Crow again, and the kid screeched a whole other octave. Okay, the na-na song wasn’t a lullaby. I cut off the CD and turned the radio on and flipped the dial until I heard music. Toby Keith was asking his high school crush what she thought of him now, and, damn, little Redfish shut right up and reached for the radio dial.

  Gandhi was by the opened car door now and looked in. “You doing all right?”

  Under the circumstances. I nodded. And I was doing way better than poor Earl.

  Poor Earl. The man who was pursuing a criminal complaint against Farmer Dave. Not for a fraction of a portion of a second did I think Dave would kill a man over a felony-theft charge, but Tired and the local state attorney wouldn’t know that about Dave. I felt a prickle of panic sweat start down my face. Picking up my cell, I punched in Philip’s private line, and, when he answered, I asked, “Dave still in jail?”

  “Yes. And I have a client with me now and can’t talk.”

  “Fine. Don’t bill for this call then.” I hit the end call button as Redfish reached for the cell phone.

  As Redfish began to trace sticky all over me, and throughout Gandhi’s car, I sighed with no small measure of relief that at least Dave had the perfect alibi.

  Chapter 14

  By the time I finally arrived home and shucked off my clothes and stood under the hot, steady stream of my shower, I had to admit that Tired and I had come a long way together since the okra incident.

  Which didn’t mean I was taking his son to raise or anything. But I had to grudgingly admit that the man did seem to know what he was doing.

  Something about the physics and the biology of the body had convinced Tired that poor Earl was dead because he had been climbing on the side of the grape harvester, possibly to fix something, when he had fallen, and somehow the grape harvester turned itself on, and had taken a run at picking poor Earl. These matters of physics and biology Tired had explained in far more detail than Gandhi or I wanted to know, or than I thought mentally helpful for the tender ears of Redfish.

  But Tired had left entirely open the question of how or why the grape picker had turned itself on. Unless Earl had been stupid enough to have climbed the side of the machine while it was running and then to have fallen off in front of the wide, spidery arms of the harvester.

  Didn’t work for me, and I had tried to impress upon Tired that my limited acquaintance with Earl had convinced me that Earl was anything but stupid.

  “Even a smart man can be careless,” Tired had said, but he seemed open to my idea that Earl wouldn’t be that careless.

  While I had been pondering the question of who and why someone would want to push Earl off his grape picker and turn it on so it would maul him to death, Tired had suddenly become fascinated with the fact that I had a prior acquaintance with Earl. What was that all about and why was I here, and grill, grill, grill until I ended up with both a headache and heartburn despite the Advil and the Tums.

  The upshot of our exchange was that Tired leaned toward the notion that Earl might have been assisted in his fatal fall and I renewed my thanks to heavenly forces that Dave possessed the ultimate alibi, what with being in jail and all.

  Having replayed this while showering, I hoped to put it out of my mind. After my shower, I threw away the slip I had once considered lucky and on bare feet padded into my kitchen where Bearess was guarding the refrigerator and waiting patiently to consume her five dollars’ worth of dye-free, organic dog food.

  While she steadily crunched her little doggy nuggets, I poured a bowl of multigrain organic cereal and doused it with rice milk, and ate half before I shoved it away with a faint wave of nausea. Dead Earl’s mangled corpse was still playing across the screen of my mind, and I thought again of Benny, and went to the phone to check on him. Discovering a dead body at his young age had to be worse than my experience.

  Nobody answered.

  I called Philip’s unlisted number, and when he answered, I asked, “Is Dave still in jail?”

  “Not for long. Waylon is out.”

  I had more or less forgotten about Waylon, Dave’s truck-driving buddy.

  “Why isn’t Dave out?”

  “Mrs. Stallings, Earl’s widow, dropped the charges against both of them. Waylon’s going back to Lakeland. Dave’s still in custody until the Georgia officials resolve that matter of the motocross warrant. But I’ve talked at length with the county attorney in Grady County, and he’s not inclined to pursue it, so I believe Dave will be a liberated man by tomorrow.”

  The use of the term widow suggested Philip knew Earl was dead, but I wondered if he knew the details. “You know about Earl? I mean, what happened to him?”

  “Of course.”

  “I found the body.”

  “Yes. Tired informed me. That must have been distressing.”

  Well, Tired and Philip were certainly chummy considering they were on opposite sides.

  Philip and I paused, waiting for somebody to take the next step.

  “Are you all right? Would you like to talk about it? I can come over, or we can meet someplace,” Philip offered.

  “Thank you, but I’m very tired and still have some things to do.”

  Yeah, like drink a bottle of poor dead Earl’s good organic wine in his memory.

  “I’ll check in on you tomorrow then. Call me anytime.”

  Never, ever tell me to call anytime. I take things very literally.

  The next morning I rose early to run wind sprints down at the middle school with the notion that exercise would blot out the image of poor dead Earl and my disastrous appellate argument, and would work off the calories from that extra wine.

  Once home from running, I made coffee and called Benny. He was busy getting ready for school and assured me he was doing fine.

  Though I pretended to take him at his word, I made a note to ask Bonita about him, and to take him out for ice cream soon.

  Thus, modestly fortified for the day by coffee, wind sprints, and good deeds, I showered, dressed, made up, fluffed my hair, and snuck into Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley through the back door, where Angela and Bonita perched like carrion birds in Bonita’s cubbyhole outside my office.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped, and slammed into my office.

  Angela followed me right in. She thrust another handful of paper at me. I took it.

  It was a draft of a relief-from-judgment pleading, which sought to recoup the judgment Newly had won for Bonita in her lawsuit against the company that had manufactured the machine that had sucked Bonita’s husband in and spit him out in fragments.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  Angela didn’t say a word.

  “Bonita,” I more or less shouted through the doorway between my office and her cubbyhole. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Around.”
r />   Okay, so the Sisterhood of the Secretaries was probably at work here. Bonita was very popular among the legal secretaries, and Angela seemed to be an honorary member of the Sisterhood, and one of them had probably chanced upon the draft and taken it to Bonita.

  Regardless of the source, something had to be done to stop this.

  To relive any of that would be painful for Bonita, and devastating for her children.

  “Read it,” Angela commanded.

  I glanced through it, skipping the boilerplate, and came, finally, to the gist of the complaint—that some of the children alleged to be the natural children of the deceased were not, and that Bonita knew this and had willfully defrauded the court to increase the value of the judgment, and on the basis of that fraud, all the sums paid should be recovered. The concept was simple enough—in a wrongful-death case involving a widow and surviving minor children, the widow brought suit in her own right, but also as the “best friend” of the minor children. Each minor child was due compensation for the loss of his or her father, including for emotional damages and the loss of support. In other words, five children meant five times the amount of money the company had to pay for manufacturing a defective product that had resulted in Felipe’s death.

  Or, from the bottling company’s point of view, fewer children meant less money. And lying about the number of children meant fraud, and fraud meant the court could throw out the whole judgment.

  “Have you read this?” I shouted through my office toward the space Bonita usually occupied.

  Something that sounded like a muffled, unhappy yes came from Bonita, so low in tone I had to strain to hear.

  “If you’re going to talk to me about this, then get in my office,” I said.

  Within seconds, Bonita appeared, shut my door, and stood before me.

  Knowing Bonita like I did, it never once occurred to me to question the accuracy of these claims that some of her children were not the children of her husband, Felipe. But I knew how court proceedings alleging that her husband was not the father of her children would hurt her. How the story would spread, transformed through repetition from allegation to accepted fact among the community. Although she was in this country legally, Bonita had never become a naturalized citizen, and that might hurt her credibility among a populace who would perceive her first and foremost as a Mexican.

  You say Mexican immigrant and the immediate images of the wetback, the drug smuggler, the migrant, the shacks and the poor, the great unwashed spring to many minds, and the American prejudices being what they were, many assumed that poor meant criminal. No matter that Bonita and her husband, Felipe, with Benicio a toddler and Armando and Javy babes in arms, had come into this country legally some eleven years before. In fact, they had both been recruited. The orange-juice plant wanted Felipe, with his industrial-engineering degree from California Polytech. And the plant had made Bonita a good offer for a human-resources position, what with her bilingual skills and her communications degree from California Polytech. Though Felipe stayed with the orange-juice plant until it killed him, Bonita had left it almost immediately and ended up with me, where we had learned the practice of law together.

  Despite all that, Bonita would still be a wetback to some people. Someone’s illegal maid, at best.

  But the damage to her reputation wrought by Kenneth’s fraud lawsuit would be nothing compared to the damage to her children. A protracted trial of the matter would force them all to relive the horror of the death of their father. Only their ex-nun aunt, Gracie, and Bonita’s own steel spine had pulled her children through the first lawsuit.

  Damn it.

  Then I thought, Whoa, it’s the age of DNA testing.

  But even as relief tried to raise its hopeful little puppy head, I realized with renewed horror that there was no body to exhume; Felipe had been more or less pulverized. What remains had been scraped together had been cremated.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Okay, there was a way out; there is always a way out.

  “Let’s see what he’s got first, I mean, by evidence, or theory, or support,” I said. “I’ll go through his office tonight. If Kenneth did get hold of something, and then induced the company to go along with this, there must be a trace. I mean, like a PI report, or something. A memo in the file about a conference with the bottle manufacturer. Something. You don’t start a suit like this without leaving a pretty broad trail.”

  Even Kenneth the slime drool wouldn’t go into court without some kind of evidence.

  I had to get into Kenneth’s office, which, of course, he would lock at night.

  My mind began to run over with thoughts of excuses, tricks, lies, subterfuges of a hundred myriad kinds, and plain old-fashioned breaking and entering. Some way to get into Kenneth’s office when he was not there.

  Bonita was either a mind reader or I was getting too easy to read.

  “You don’t need to steal keys or break in,” she said, looking at me with a great sadness in her eyes.

  “I do if I want to get into Kenneth’s office.”

  “Henry can get you in.”

  “Henry?” I blurted it out in a tone I realized too late was probably rude. Henry, Bonita’s more or less boyfriend, Henry the meek claims adjuster, Henry the man whose company had sold Gandhi the very liability-insurance policy that was paying my bill for defending him.

  Henry, a master of breaking and entering? When had he learned that skill?

  “His father was a locksmith. Henry worked for him during the summers in high school and college,” Bonita said, answering the question I hadn’t yet asked.

  Well, that might come in handy, I thought, filing away that fact, along with the information on Henry I’d collected over the years—that he had a college degree in education with a minor in botany, but couldn’t keep discipline among the teenagers in middle school, and had became an insurance salesman after only a few years of teaching. He had been promoted up the ranks of his company mostly because he had seniority and because he was a pretty nice guy.

  And because he was head over heels in love with Bonita, my secretary, I could pretty much make Henry do anything I wanted him to do.

  Bonita knew all this. Thus, the fact that she told me Henry knew how to pick locks let me know how far she’d go to find out just what Kenneth might have on her by way of evidence.

  I looked at Bonita and worried. But I said, “Please tell Henry to meet me here tonight at ten. Everybody should be gone by then. And, Bonita and Angela, I don’t want either of you here in case Henry and I get caught. We can talk ourselves out of this, but not you two.” Translation: Partners were accorded a certain latitude that secretaries and young associates were not. And nobody at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley would prosecute claims adjusters like Henry because they were the very people inside insurance companies who ladled out the cases upon which we as defense lawyers feasted.

  But I wasn’t planning on getting caught.

  Chapter 15

  Henry wore a suit and tie to meet me surreptitiously at night to break into my own law partner’s office.

  Such a gentleman, I thought as Henry began to tinker with a thin metal pick and the door to Kenneth’s office. Standing behind him, I snuck in a quick report on Gandhi’s oral argument, including the fact that the judges seemed to favor sending the case back for a jury trial, and possibly allowing the plaintiff to amend her complaint to allege fraud. I’d have to put this in writing, but wanted to soften Henry up first with a cursory verbal version.

  “Yes, Gandhi told me the judges didn’t, ah, like, ah, understand, ah, believe him. He explained that he gave, er, presented . . . made a bit of a presentation. He says that he is so glad I assigned the case to you. That you two are simpatico. And he’s sorry he screwed up, er, I mean messed up . . . disrupted your oral argument. He said you were brilliant.”

  Overlooking for the moment the fact that Gandhi was communicating directly with Henry, a situation I did not at all care for, I thought, Brilli
ant? In what universe? In that universe where Gandhi lived with his alien abductees and crystal girlfriend and psychic cats?

  Too ashamed of my performance at the oral argument to emphasize Gandhi’s compliment, but too savvy to deny it, I modified the subject. “So, Henry, why on earth did your company issue a liability policy to Gandhi in the first place? I mean, the man runs an ad in the Sunday paper that says, ‘Have you been abducted by space aliens? Call this eight hundred number.’ Didn’t you see the potential risk?”

  “That policy was issued, er, sold long after my promotion out of sales, so I don’t really know. The man had a degree and a license from the state of Florida and no prior malpractice suits. Guess it looked okay.”

  Yeah, a suspect degree from an Internet school, and a license from what must surely be one of the laxest agencies in the state. But before I could pursue that, the tumblers clicked in the lock and Henry opened the door and bleated out, “Do you think that Bonita will ever get over her husband?”

  No.

  But I didn’t want to discourage Henry, Henry with his chubby, ruddy face and Paul Newman eyes, his damp hands, and Henry with his newfound skills that I could use to my great advantage.

  “Henry, Bonita is very fond of you. Give her time.”

  Oh, great, the Dear Abby of the claims-adjuster set.

  “Here we go,” Henry said, his face two shades redder as we walked into Kenneth’s office.

  After switching on the light, I booted up Kenneth’s computer first thing, and while it was humming awake, I started to sneak about.

  Being a literate sort, I honored the “Purloined Letter” concept and went to the most obvious place first, Kenneth’s personal filing cabinet. I flipped through the tabs on the files looking for Bonita’s name or that of the bottling manufacturer. Nada, nothing, not in any of the four drawers.

  “Want me to look, er, search, I mean, access his files, and do a . . . on his computer, conduct a—”