Blood Money

by James Grippando

  “Let me stop you there,” said Corso, “and remind viewers that I spoke exclusively with Celeste’s roommate on the air last night; she told me they had been at a Sydney Bennett look-alike contest on Miami Beach.”

  “Well, that story may be unraveling,” said the reporter.

  “What do you mean?”

  The gleam in the journalist’s eye gave Jack cause for concern. The reporter continued:

  “BNN has learned that the defense team for Sydney Bennett may have actually hired Celeste as a decoy to distract the crowd. The plan, sources tell us, was for Sydney Bennett to slip away unnoticed while the media and the crowd focused their attention on the look-alike.”

  On screen, Faith Corso’s mouth was agape. Jack nearly fell off his barstool.

  Corso continued in a tone dripping with contempt: “That is the most cowardly and despicable ploy I have ever heard. The very idea of putting a college student in a situation like that just so Shot Mom could slip away off-camera and hop on an airplane to Fiji or Cancun or wherever she’s hiding and sipping piña coladas while her lawyer hawks her book—well, that is just criminal in my mind.”

  “Yes, I would say that Sydney Bennett’s lawyers will be facing some very tough questions in the coming day or two.”

  Corso broke for a commercial. Jack lowered the volume and apologized again to the couple seated next to him for the news intrusion. Seconds later his phone vibrated with an incoming call. He checked the number. It was the FBI—in a manner of speaking. It was Andie. The BNN reporter had been absolutely right: Sydney’s lawyer would be facing some tough questions.

  Jack stepped away from the bar and took his fiancée’s call in the relative quiet of the back hallway that led to the restrooms.

  “Hey, love. What’s up?”

  “I just got off the phone with Ben Laramore. He called here at the house.”

  “Laramore? I presume that would be . . .”

  “Celeste Laramore’s father. His daughter is at Jackson in a coma.”

  Jack collected himself, feeling for the family. “What does he want?”

  “To talk to you. Man to man.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. He wants you to come to the hospital.”

  Jack sighed. “I guess I owe him that much.”

  “You’re not going. This case is out of control. For all you know, the poor man is so distraught that he wants to shoot you dead.”

  “If that’s what he wants, he’ll find me sooner or later. It’s important to meet with him and tell him face-to-face that this story about hiring his daughter to be a decoy is nonsense.”

  “How do you know it’s nonsense?”

  “Because I didn’t do it.”

  “How do you know someone else didn’t? Like her parents, her brother, some old boyfriend?”

  That guy who met Sydney at the airport.

  Jack let a woman pass on her way to the restroom, then continued. “I need to tell Ben Laramore that I didn’t do it. And I want to assure him that if somebody on my team was involved, I’ll get to the bottom of it. That’s the right thing to do.”

  “Fine. Then I’m coming with you.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me. He’ll respect you more if you show up with an FBI agent. Especially if she’s your fiancée. And armed.”

  Jack could have pointed out that he’d done just fine as a lawyer for fifteen years without FBI protection, but he didn’t argue.

  “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes,” she said, then ended the call.

  Chapter Eight

  You should never have gotten involved in this case,” said Andie.

  They had made it all the way to the parking lot before she said it. Jack figured it was all the media trucks outside the hospital entrance that had finally triggered the told-you-so comment. It wasn’t typical Andie.

  Andie Henning was unlike any woman Jack had ever known, and not just because she worked undercover for the FBI. Jack loved that she wasn’t afraid to cave dive in Florida’s aquifer, that in her training at the FBI Academy she’d nailed a perfect score on one of the toughest shooting ranges in the world, that as a teenager she’d been a Junior Olympic mogul skier—something Jack hadn’t even known about her until she’d rolled him out of bed one hot August morning and said, “Let’s go skiing in Argentina.” He loved the green eyes she got from her Anglo father and the raven-black hair from her Native American mother, a mix that made for such exotic beauty.

  He hated when she tried to manage his career.

  “You’re violating our agreement.”

  The “agreement” was for the sake of their relationship: Jack didn’t question her undercover assignments; Andie didn’t judge his clients.

  “Sue me,” she said.

  The crowd outside the University of Miami Jackson Memorial Hospital was a fraction of the turnout for Shot Mom’s release from jail, but it was still sizable. Hard-core Shot Mom haters had gathered in circles of support outside Jackson, keeping vigil and occasionally joining hands to pray for the full recovery of Celeste Laramore. It was just minutes before the eleven o’clock news broadcasts, and at least a dozen reporting teams were jockeying for position and preparing for live updates from the hospital.

  “Better find another way in,” said Jack.

  Andie steered past the crowd at the main entrance and drove to the ER on the other side of the building. A pair of squad cars were positioned in the driveway, beacons flashing. Jack presumed they were there to redirect the vigil keepers and the media toward the main entrance so that the ER could actually deal with tonight’s share of nearly a quarter-million visits annually. Andie found a parking spot, and they walked inside.

  Jackson was Miami’s premier public hospital, which meant that in addition to its stellar reputation for groundbreaking research in everything from cancer to spinal injury, it was also a workhorse for the world of Medicaid and no health insurance. The ER waiting room was a virtual cross-section of lower-income Miami. An old Haitian woman hung her head into a big plastic bucket that reeked of vomit. A homeless man with no legs slept in the wheelchair beside her. A single mother comforted a crying baby as her four other children played leapfrog on the floor, shouting at one another in Spanish. A drug addict in withdrawal paced back and forth across the waiting room, talking to himself. Anything less than a bullet to the head meant hour upon hour of waiting. Free treatment from some of the best doctors in the world was their consolation.

  Jack started toward the admission desk to ask how to get to the intensive care unit, but Andie stopped him.

  “I seriously doubt that Mr. Laramore wants you up there,” she said. “Let me call and see if he wants to come down to meet us.”

  Andie moved to the other side of the waiting room, near the window, for better reception on her cell phone. Jack found an open chair facing the television, right beside a man with an ice pack on his knee who was cursing at the Marlins for blowing a three-run lead in the bottom of the ninth. The guy seemed eager to engage anyone who would listen to him, but Jack didn’t bite. Jack was thinking about what, if anything, he could say to comfort the father of a young woman in a coma. Nothing came to him, but it wasn’t for lack of effort. He was so deep in thought that he didn’t hear Andie approach.

  “I was wrong,” said Andie.

  Jack looked up. “Wrong?”

  “Mr. Laramore does want you come up. In fact, he insists.”

  Jack considered that word—insists. That sounded like someone who wanted Jack to see the damage he’d inflicted. A strange feeling came over him, no doubt akin to what his death row clients had felt when the guard swung by to say, “It’s time.”

  “Okay. Then I’ll go up.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Andie.

  “Yeah, I do,” said Jack.

  They got visitor badges from the registration desk, and after a painfully slow elevator ride, the doors finally parted at the fifth floor. Polished tile floors glistened beneath bright
fluorescent lighting, and the after-hours quiet seemed only to enhance an assault on the eyes that rivaled snow blindness. The hallway led to a set of locked doors marked INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. Jack identified himself over the intercom, and a nurse’s response crackled over the speaker.

  “Room six,” she said, “but only one more visitor can come in now. Maximum of three at a time.”

  Jack took that to mean that both parents were at their daughter’s bedside, which heightened his anxiety. He’d been preparing to meet only Mr. Laramore. An angry father was one thing; a devastated mother took it to an entirely different level.

  Andie appeared to be on the verge of invoking her law enforcement status to clear an exception to the three-visitor limit, but Jack cut her off. “One at a time is fine,” he said into the intercom, but Andie shot him a look that said it was not fine.

  “The mother’s in there,” said Andie, her clear implication being that an FBI agent who also happened to be a woman could only help the situation. But this wasn’t Andie’s problem.

  “Rules are rules,” said Jack. “I got it from here.”

  He gave her a kiss and entered alone.

  The door closed behind him, and the click of the lock gave him a little rush of adrenaline. The lighting inside the unit was much softer than in the hallway, and only the steady beep of patient monitors pierced the silence. In the center of the ICU was the nurses’ station, an open island of charts and records surrounded on all sides by a wide corridor. Lining the outer perimeter were the glass-walled rooms for patients. Most patients were in open view, and the unit appeared to be full, but in some rooms the privacy curtains were drawn, so it was hard to know. Jack spotted several busy nurses making the medication rounds. As he rounded the corner to room six, there was no doubt in his mind that the man walking toward him was Celeste Laramore’s father.

  “Thank you for coming,” the man said.

  The warm and appreciative handshake surprised Jack, and he even wanted Jack to call him by his first name—Ben. Jack had braced himself for everything from bitter coldness to outright confrontation.

  “It was the least I could do,” said Jack.

  Laramore was younger than Jack had expected, probably late forties. The stress was all over his face, however, and if this coma persisted, it required no crystal ball to see how quickly it would age him. Laramore glanced over his shoulder toward room six. The privacy curtain was drawn, so Jack was unable to see inside. It made his chest tighten to think of Mrs. Laramore in there with a comatose daughter.

  Laramore said, “Let’s go down to the lounge a minute, if you don’t mind.”

  Jack followed him around to the other side of the unit, where there was a small room for visitors to catch a moment alone when needed. Laramore got them each a bottle of water from the vending machine, and they sat across from each other at a small table.

  Laramore checked his watch. “Tomorrow already.”

  Jack noted the time on the microwave oven. It was three minutes past midnight.

  “Exactly two weeks from today is Celeste’s twenty-first birthday.”

  It was a painful place to start, but there was no easy route. Jack wasn’t sure what to say, so he let him keep talking.

  “They tell me someone in the crowd grabbed Celeste by the throat,” he said. “She had no pulse by the time paramedics got to her. They were able to restart the heart with a defibrillator. But . . . uhm . . .”

  “I heard,” said Jack. “She’s in a coma. You don’t have to go into details.”

  Ben was face-to-face with Jack but looking past him, numbness and disbelief guiding his line of sight to the middle distance. “I spoke with three different neurologists this morning. Cardiologist came in after that. A pulmonologist is keeping an eye on her to see if she needs any assistance in breathing. Just before you got here, we met a gastro specialist about inserting a feeding tube, if it comes to that. Physical therapist is scheduled to come by twice a day to move her limbs.” He paused, then took a deep breath.

  Jack said, “They do have excellent doctors here.”

  “Yes, they do. But not a single one of them can tell us if Celeste will ever regain consciousness. If she does . . . well, it’s just not clear if she’ll be the same.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Jack.

  Laramore drank from his water bottle, then shifted gears. “Do you know how much it costs per day for Celeste to stay here?”

  “I can only imagine.”

  “No, you probably can’t. No one can, until you land in the ICU with no health insurance.”

  “Celeste is uninsured?”

  “She had student coverage through the university.”

  “Why wouldn’t that pay for hospitalization?”

  “It would, normally. But see, I got laid off last November. I worked for a plumbing subcontractor, mostly new construction. When the housing market tanked, Celeste took a part-time job to cover her tuition. What I didn’t realize is that she cut her course load when she started working. She became a part-time student.”

  Jack could see where this was headed. “A part-time student isn’t eligible for student health insurance.”

  “Nope. Like most twenty-year-old kids, I guess my daughter didn’t really see a need. So she never told us she’d had to drop her student coverage. I found out this morning when I spoke with the insurance company.”

  Jack didn’t know how to respond. “Are you sure there’s no way around it?”

  “The policy was canceled seven months ago. How do you get around that?”

  Jack had no answer.

  Laramore said, “But that’s not what this is about.”

  Jack waited for him to explain what it was about, but silence hung between them. Jack suddenly was aware of the hum of fluorescent lights above them. It was getting awkward, so he spoke.

  “When my fiancée told me that you called, I wasn’t sure why you were reaching out to me. But I’m glad you did. One of the reasons I came here is to assure you that I didn’t use your daughter as a decoy to get my client out of jail. Anything you may have heard in the news to the contrary is completely untrue.”

  “Jack, let me tell you something about myself: I don’t believe anything I hear on BNN.”

  “That’s helpful to know. But . . . I’m guessing that you didn’t ask me here just to tell me that.”

  “No. I wanted you to know how much I love Celeste. And to tell you that her mother and I want to do everything possible for her.”

  “I understand.”

  “And we want your help.”

  “What can I do?”

  He leaned into the table, leveling his gaze. “My wife and I want to sue the jail. Failure to provide adequate security and crowd control.”

  “That’s what this is about? You want a lawyer?”

  “Not that I went out looking for one. But today at lunch, a couple of attorneys tracked me down in the hospital cafeteria and said I should sue the Miami-Dade Department of Corrections.”

  Nothing like a twenty-year-old woman in a coma to bring out the ambulance chasers. “Real class acts,” said Jack.

  “Tell me about it. They want forty percent of whatever I recover. Plus fifty grand or more in costs.”

  “I hate the way they tracked you down, but that fee arrangement isn’t just for sleazebags. It’s fairly typical.”

  “That’s what I understand. Which is why I called you. My wife and I were hoping that . . .”

  “I would do it for less?”

  “For free, actually.”

  “Free?”

  “Look, we’re hoping and praying for the best, but the doctors aren’t exactly bursting with optimism. The hospital bill aside, what are we going to do if Celeste has long-term issues? We need every penny for Celeste’s recovery.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I mean, it’s not like I’m trying to get rich off of this.”

  The allusion to blood money wasn’t lost on Jack. “I don’t questio
n your motives. But a lawsuit is not a quick answer to anything.”

  “You got a better idea for a guy who’s been out of work for eight months?”

  “I know you’re not a fan of BNN, but Faith Corso could actually be a force for good here.”

  “Did I just hear you correctly?”

  “I know she abused me pretty badly, but I honestly think that a lot of her mean side on television is for effect. My bet is that she would be genuinely moved by the fact that you have no way to pay your daughter’s medical bills. Her fans are in the millions—literally. I could see her making a plea for contributions.”

  Laramore shook his head, scoffing. “Funny. My brother-in-law had the same idea. He actually got through to one of the producers on the phone. A nice young woman who seemed willing to help. Pete ended up hanging up on her.”

  “Why?”

  “Quid pro quo. BNN wanted the first photograph of Celeste in a coma.”

  Jack could barely fathom it, even for BNN.

  Laramore said, “Truth is, even if Faith Corso stepped up to help, how long would that last? A week? We need a long-term solution. And we need a lawyer who isn’t going to grab forty percent of it.”

  Jack read between the lines. Maybe the Laramores didn’t believe the BNN reports about Jack having hired their daughter as a decoy, but implicit in the request that Jack work for free was the notion that Jack bore some responsibility for Celeste’s injuries. Jack couldn’t help but feel accused. Even Andie had made him at least consider the possibility that someone close to the defense team had put Celeste in danger.

  How do you know someone else didn’t do it? Her parents, her brother, some old boyfriend?

  A nurse entered. “Mr. Laramore, your wife asked me to check on you.”

  He rose, alarmed. “Is something wrong with Celeste?”