Lucky Leonardo

by Jonathan D. Canter

  “The damn brake is on for Christ sake, you…,” Eugene replied with audible enunciation over the grate of his wires, improvising.

  Mulverne and Janet Casey stood with their son-of-a-bitch New York-style lawyer Paul E. Greene in a little conversational triangle at arm’s length from the pastries, which only Janet was eating. Mulverne didn’t look well. “Just a cold,” he told Janet when she picked him up at his house. “One day it’s mild and sunny, and the next day it’s frozen rain and I get caught without an overcoat.”

  “Do you have fever?”

  “Nah,” said Mulverne who was old school when it came to sucking it up, but whose face looked pale and puffy like a bird whose sucking up included bad worms for breakfast, and on the ride over he flapped his hands up and down to get Janet to lower the volume on her aggressive driving, which was a worrisome first as far as she was concerned and started her thinking about her resume.

  “Remember,” Paul E. said, “the mediator may tell you that mediation is a time for the lawyers to give their mouths a rest, and for the opposing parties to talk directly to each other because it gives them a chance to open up and get things off their chest, and lets them find a human meeting point without all the legalities and technicalities. But that’s crap. You keep it zipped and let me do the talking because if you admit something in here I promise you they’ll shove it up your ass in open court the next chance they get no matter how many times they solemnly swear that nothing leaves this room.”

  “You’re very cynical, Paul,” Mulverne responded in a weak voice, like he was familiar with cynicism and knew it wasn’t the only path. “That’s why I hired you.”

  Janet nodded.

  Abigail hovered over the food, fighting the mean restrictions propounded by her new diet, thinking one little cheese Danish wouldn’t hurt anybody, while explaining to Leonardo why she was optimistic that his medical malpractice insurance carrier would come around. The carrier denied coverage on the basis of its interpretation of policy exclusions applicable to Treatment (as defined) of Non-Patients (as defined) exclusive of Included Emergencies (as defined). If the facts were different, they said with the institutional equivalent of compassion, you might have coverage, but they aren’t so you don’t. Sorry.

  “The language is labyrinthic,” Abigail explained to Leonardo, with an inflection of professional admiration in her voice for an insurance company at the top of its game. “I got lost and scared in the dark passages. But,” she added, “it’s one thing for them to write a nifty denial letter, and quite another for them to justify their denial to a jury. I’ve had productive calls with their adjuster…”

  “Great,” Leonardo responded.

  “He recognizes the exposure. In the remote event we make progress today, I’ll give him a call.”

  “Great,” Leonardo responded.

  Leonardo’s mind was drifting toward the Marge Blitz 2:00 pm funeral, which he wanted to work. Helen was working it, and he loved to work a funeral with Helen, loved her austere funeral persona, loved how they performed smoothly and gracefully as a duo, walking down the aisle in grave synchronization, exchanging glances of deep regret which brought tears to the eyes of the observant. It was killing him—mildly irritating him, to be more reflective of his emerging equilibrium—to be stuck inside of mediation, at the insistence of hard-hearted strangers.

  Janet Casey and Mulverne also had an interest in Marge’s funeral. “Chances are,” Mulverne said, “her damn investigation gets buried with her.”

  “May it rest in peace,” said Janet.

  ———

  Enter the mediator, a breezy, handsome sort whose name was left on the list after the other names were eliminated, so it wasn’t like they were in love with him. He called the room to order, gently and without seeking to impose his views on the subject, like order was a matter of personal choice and he could live with disorder if that’s what the parties preferred because he was just here to help them recognize and achieve whatever it was they wanted to recognize and achieve, because he wasn’t the judge, and he wasn’t judging them.

  He had them sign an agreement promising that they wouldn’t sue him no matter what, and then he sent each group down the hall to its own separate conference room, to confer and stew. They were encouraged to take their coffee and pastry with them.

  He moved from room to room on pace with the minute hand of a clock, too slowly for the human eye to see progress, but after an hour had visited all the stops including the pit stop and was starting a new tour around the dial, listening to each group’s protestation of innocence with the sincerity of a shrink except for his recurrent raised eyebrow which sent the message that he could not control his facial reaction to bull shit.

  “I’m trying to understand what happened in the last few minutes before the, uh, glass impact,” he said to them on his first go-around. “I’m wondering what you might do differently if you could re-play it,” he asked when he returned.

  “Not have Ben out there to break the fall,” Mulverne groused despite his attorney’s warning to keep it zipped.

  Leonardo felt the need for a stretch and soda. In between mediator visits, while Abigail was calling for her messages, he left his team’s assigned room and ambled back to the main conference room and at first thought he was alone in the room. No people sounds. No motion. But as he closed on the food spread he realized he had company. Eugene Binh was wheeled up to the big picture window, facing the rippling water and glowering sky like Zeus parked atop Mt. Olympus. Leonardo wondered how Eugene felt about the big span of plate glass.

  “Hello, Eugene,” Leonardo offered.

  “Dr. Cook?” Eugene asked, despite his wired jaw.

  “Yes.” Leonardo answered. He walked to a spot at the window where he could be seen by Eugene’s immobilized head. “Eugene,” he said, “I’ve worried about you. I’m sorry you were hurt. I’m sorry things turned out as they did. I know we’re opponents in the litigation, but from the bottom of my heart I can tell you that I tried to help. I can tell you that I feel your pain. I hope you fully recover, emotionally and physically…”

  “No hard feelings,” Eugene replied, clear enough.

  Mulverne entered the room doing his cranky old bird imitation. He beaked and feathered his way to the food, not acknowledging Leonardo or Eugene. He lifted a can of Coke, popped it, took a deep gulp and gave back a deep belch.

  “Hello, Mr. Mulverne,” said Leonardo from across the room.

  “Dr. Cook,” Mulverne replied, “how nice to see you again. I hear you have a new job.”

  “Yes.”

  “Funeral director?”

  “Assistant funeral director.”

  “Temporary?”

  “For now.”

  “Good for you, Dr. Cook. And how’s the family?”

  Leonardo was working on a shield of taciturnity, offering generosity to the world in exchange for sun in the morning, but hadn’t reinforced all the soft spots just yet. “Are you referring to my broken-up traditional family or my intact alternative one?” he asked back.

  “To tell you the truth, Dr. Cook, I was just making light conversation.”

  “Oh. In that case thank you for asking.”

  Chapter 48

  If the volcano painted on the wall in the DeltaTek lobby started to erupt, spewing molten lava onto the ceiling and across the marble floor, that would approximate the general surprise when Eugene Binh rose from his wheelchair in a purple rage and lunged for his wife’s neck.

  She was back on script and making like she was feeding him lunch, but making a hash of it, poking the fork into his chin and dropping mayonnaise on his lap and not under any circumstances touching any part of him with any part of her. Eugene felt like the pet monkey, and it was more than he could sit through. “I don’t give a shit about the money,” he muttered to her in between pokes of the fork.

 
“Be quiet,” she hissed like the dragon lady, and gave him another poke. “You still owe me big time.”

  “Like hell I do,” he answered, and went for her neck.

  It wasn’t like they were hiding his ability to do jumping jacks and hand stands. They didn’t forge medical records, or lie about the pain. Rather, Drunkmiller rationalized, they were just gravying over Eugene’s recovery prospects for the time being, like maybe until the check cleared, in another recitation of the old jurisprudential saw that if you keep the door closed until you have to open it, you may never have to open it.

  Eugene lurched, but indicative of the long way he still had to go in his recovery, and in a ghastly reminiscence of his leap through the glass at DeltaTek, but suggestive too of Marge Blitz’s encounter with the bridge abutment and, if you don’t mind taking a leap yourself, the collision of Mary Ellen’s die with the stack of chips which ended her lucky roll, he wobbled short of his wife’s neck and crashed instead head first into the big picture window with the bird’s eye view of Boston Harbor.

  All jaws dropped, except for his wife’s which was busy spewing bitter recriminations at him from a safe distance, but there was no shattered glass this time. It bent, but didn’t break. Attorneys Drunkmiller and Remington rushed to their crumpled client like football docs to a player lying still on the turf, like the player who worried Harvey and Hal last Thanksgiving Day, and hovered over him with worried faces and consoling words, and must have also sprinkled him with fairy dust because after taking a ten count he stood himself up, brushed himself off, and sat back down in his wheel chair looking like he wanted to finish his lunch.

  Which got the settlement negotiations moving down the slippery slope to yes. Attorney Greene took the first step by saying he planned to amend his counterclaim against the Binhs to allege fraud and conspiracy in connection with the nature and scope of Eugene’s alleged injury, and Attorney Drunkmiller met him halfway by saying that Attorney Greene was full of shit and how would he like a fist in his mouth, adding, however, that the Binhs would consider lowering their demand.

  After a few frenetic caucuses, and in Leonardo’s case Abigail’s impassioned and successful telephone call to her connection at his malpractice carrier who conditionally agreed to cover Leonardo’s proposed contribution of one hundred thousand dollars (18 percent of the total), plus his attorney’s fees, leaving Leonardo not out of pocket money-wise, the parties had a deal, generating enough cash and credits to the Binhs to finance their divorce and, when added to their workers compensation recovery, pay their legal and medical bills and keep Mrs. Binh in Chanel-like suits and cigarettes for the indefinite future, and her husband in long-term residence at a recuperative center, with a few bucks left over, subject to papering, board approval, court approval, insurance company final approval, and a few other conditions which could sink it if somebody decided it needed to be sunk, but it definitely looked, smelled, and tasted like a deal. Just like that.

  Just like the monster in your nightmare, who promised to never leave you, suddenly resigns and disappears. I am no longer your monster. Good luck with the rest of your life.

  “I feel good,” Leonardo sang like James Brown as he cruised north to Marge’s funeral in the common-sense used Toyota sedan which he acquired with the cash part of the sale of his Corvette.

  “Congratulations,” Dr. Z remarked when Leonardo phoned in the news from the road, thinking he was talking to Dr. Z’s tape and driving crazy like Marge for a few dotted lines when the tape started talking back. “Sounds like a happy ending.”

  “I guess sometimes, for no particular reason, and notwithstanding predictions to the contrary, there’s a happy ending,” Leonardo philosophized. “You get lucky, and end up happy. Like in craps, sometimes the shooter survives long enough to make his point.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Z said, “but don’t stop taking your meds…”

  ———

  Speaking of happy endings, Joan ended her hunger strike within a week of her arrival at Harriford Academy, although she wasn’t about to give up on her clandestine plans for escape, in the back of the UPS truck, or by hopping a freight train on its way to Canada, or disguised as a corpse à la the Count of Monte Cristo, which led her to find friends in the underground Escape Society which met in the woods on Saturday afternoons and sometimes at midnight under the full moon depending on who was in detention and who was on security patrol, and swore each other to secrecy by oaths chanted to the beat of sticks on stones which they passed down from year to year. The oaths, the sticks, and the stones.

  Joan invited Harvey to join. “Sounds like fun,” he said, “but I don’t want to get into trouble.”

  ———

  On the way out of Drunkmiller’s office, Leonardo thanked Abigail profusely. “Just business,” she said, but was smiling and happy about it too, and gave him a congratulatory hug. On the whole, Leonardo thought, she was a disappointment. Although maybe he expected too much. As Dr. Z was fond of saying, “…if you want hugs and kisses for your booboos, you should hire a mother.”

  Chapter 49

  Marge Blitz’s funeral drew a decent crowd for a weekday afternoon, including Janet Casey and Mulverne who arrived after the folk singing began, despite Janet’s best efforts, which were speedway quality and revived Mulverne. “I feel much better,” he whispered to her and to the back ten rows as they entered the chapel, like he had just taken a meaningful dump.

  Helen gave Mulverne a discreet “shhhh” sign, and ushered him and Janet to available seats. Leonardo arrived a few minutes later, after making what he considered good time in his fuel-efficient Toyota, and was surprised to see Janet and Mulverne, whom he had shaken hands with over the table at Drunkmiller’s within the hour, and coolly wished well like they were business colleagues closing a business deal, but far more surprised to see Barbara, two rows ahead on the aisle.

  Barbara, Barbara, Barbara. What in the world are you doing here? He blinked to see if she would disappear. But she didn’t, suggesting she was either the kind of hallucination which would require an adjustment to his pill regimen, or was actually sitting on the bench in the flesh. In the reality. This afternoon. Accompanied by her lovely neck.

  When he sniffed for her scent, on the assumption that hallucinations did not emit odor, he caught a whiff of the messenger dog, the dog affiliated with higher powers who arranges coincidences, as he recalled Tom describing the dog in his Foxwoods after-dinner story about the coincidence of meeting a girl and a dog on the beach at dawn, good old Tom, although it could just be that big old golden retriever snoozing near the door. More dogs were turning up at funerals these days, come to pay their last respects, often without invitations.

  By then Kurt, bandaged about his ribs and head, was explaining his view of Marge’s life to the assembled. He spoke slowly because of how painful it was for him to talk, and remember. “Marge tried to dress around her bigness,” he said, “but let’s face it, if you wrap a tent around a cow it’s still a tent and she’s still a cow…”

  Helen spotted Leonardo, and asked him by use of an expressive eyebrow whether he planned to work or watch. He answered with an eyebrow of his own: “Helen,” it said, “at this point in my roller coaster day, week, month, and year, I’m here to watch you perform.”

  She blew him a thank-you kiss with the slightest twist of her lip, like in the early days behind the Starbucks counter when she cupped her breast for his eyes only. He meant to ask her what the story was on the dog by the door, but she had already turned back to doing her business, with great and decorous sadness.

  Kurt got less bitchy and more sentimental after he broadcast Marge’s last tape, climaxing in the fireworks of her crack-up, followed by a moment of stunned silence on the tape and in the audience. Kurt wiped away a tear. “She was an imperfect person. She drank, and went crazy, and kicked me around, and smashed into a bridge abutment,” he said. “But in our good times, and
most of our times were good times, she was a mother to me…”

  That sentiment put some handkerchiefs in motion.

  “I resent, I really resent,” Kurt went on, “the people who didn’t know her, who didn’t know anything about her, who attacked her character, and attacked her decency, attacked her like dogs going after a defenseless mother deer, and locked their jaws on her throat and brought her down. I hope they’re happy now. I hope they’re happy they got their pound of flesh, their two hundred and twenty pounds of flesh, splattered like a pizza all over the road. I hope they’re happy now…”

  Which is when Brockleman’s widow rose from a middle bench looking haggard and thin and a short step from the grave herself and pointed a bony finger toward Kurt’s eye: “Your stupid, crazy mother person killed my husband,” she said, “and you stand there telling jokes and lies? Who are you?”

  The room inhaled and held its collective breath, unnerved by the confrontation and uncertain as to whom to support.

  “Trouble,” Leonardo thought to himself from his place at the back. “No exit in sight.”

  But Helen was completely can-do, and responded in real-time, like a seasoned professional at the top of her game who knew the rules and knew what to do when the rules didn’t reach. She was at the distraught widow’s side, with an arm wrapped around for support, and a handkerchief for the tears. She offered just the right touch and just the right commiseration. She led the widow from the room without a further finger being pointed. Like a bomb diffused.

  When it was done, Leonardo beamed like a proud father.

  A shaken Kurt picked up his nearby guitar, and in a thin but evocative voice and with minimum strumming began to sing, “Imagine,” the John Lennon classic with the easy words that everyone could join in on, and they did, over and over until there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Except for Mulverne, who joked he had tear-duct reduction surgery to keep him from ever crying in public, although the fact was he wasn’t motivated to cry.