Worked pretty darn well, I thought, noting privately that my herbal kava quota was getting up there into liver-damage-alert territory.
But somebody needed to e-mail or call or fax and tell me exactly what I was being warned off of because, as I repeatedly explained to Sam, I personally did not have a clue.
In the meantime, I had filed another motion for a continuance in the veggie baby case, even though a new trial date had not yet been set. Getting shot at along with the defendant ought to be worth at least another couple of months’ delay before the trial date was reset.
Continuances aside, and as if I didn’t have enough crap to cope with, Dr. Randolph was campaigning to have me fired as his attorney, despite the provision in his liability insurance contract that says the insurance company—that is, Henry, as the claims adjuster—picks the defense attorney. Dr. Randolph had it in his head that everything that sucked in his life was my fault, and he didn’t want a girl lawyer even if she didn’t get shot at. Naturally, he bitched to Henry and Jackson both about replacing me as his trial attorney. Jackson, fed up with the many mutual bitching phone sessions between Henry, himself, and the irritatingly snide doctor about kicking me off the case, scheduled a lunch meeting at his favorite eating place, the Ivy Club. “We’re going to settle this, once and for all,” he barked.
Naturally, the Ivy Club, which charged a monthly fee so its members wouldn’t have to eat with riffraff—as if the prices at most Sarasota lunch spots didn’t take care of that on their own—took a dim view of Jack the Bear, my guard dog.
Jackson and Henry took a dim view of Newly, my guard man.
So there I was, totally unprotected, the only woman, sitting at a table in a swank and over-air-conditioned private eating establishment, surrounded by Jackson, who I feared was still mad at me for raising my voice at him in front of Ashton; Dr. Randolph, who for inexplicable reasons thought I was responsible for his being shot at; and Henry, sweet, affable, malleable Henry.
Henry was my only ally, I thought. A man I could outtalk, outmaneuver, terrorize, and probably physically beat up even on a day when I was wearing a pink sweater and feeling demure.
In other words, I was strictly on my own.
While the waiter tried to coax us into committing to the daily special (allegedly fresh trout with new potatoes and a salad of mixed greens), Dr. Randolph made clear for the hundredth time that he personally couldn’t stand me, and that Henry, as the claims handler for his malpractice liability policy, must hire him another attorney and another law firm, as apparently his distaste for me now flowed over toward Jackson.
Henry bleated and peeped a bit in the early rounds, signifying nothing.
“By God, I trained that girl myself,” Jackson thundered.
At thirty-four, I thought I qualified as a woman, but I had better sense than to interrupt Jackson on a tear.
“And don’t give me that girls-can’t-try-cases crap.” Jackson pounded his water glass into the table. “Lilly’s as tough as either of you.”
Okay, damning by faint praise on the “tough” issue.
Unswayed, Dr. Randolph threatened Henry with a bad-faith suit if he didn’t authorize replacing me with a “real attorney.” I decided not to explain to Dr. Randolph that what he meant was a breach of contract case, that bad faith technically referred to a liability insurer’s failure to negotiate a settlement in good faith, but I was going to take him on over the “real attorney” phrase.
But then, before I could swallow my coffee and speak, Henry, my alleged ally, surprised me by saying that perhaps, maybe, possibly, since Dr. Randolph and I obviously had a personality conflict, I should withdraw and that the insurance company could hire Dr. Randolph another attorney and another law firm.
Jackson slapped Henry across the hand with his napkin, and the waiter, apparently at a loss for getting any of us to order anything, simply brought a round of bread to go with our coffee and left us to our bickering.
Henry, rather forcibly for him, again said to the table at large that the company should hire another attorney and, given my “obvious inability to work well with Dr. Randolph,” I should surrender the file. This, he said, would be cheaper than defending a bad-faith suit, a misnomer that Henry knew better than to repeat, but I was too indignant that Henry wanted to paint me as the one with the “obvious inability” to point this mistake out. Weren’t Henry and I friends? Buddies from way back. What in the world was troubling Henry that he wanted to pry the Randolph file out of my hands and give it to a perfect stranger?
Jackson, slitting his eyes into that had-enough look, suddenly jumped up from his chair. “Lilly Cleary’s the best damn trial attorney in Sarasota. If I’d had a company of men in ’Nam who could think and move as fast as Lilly can, I’d’ve taken the whole damn country. She’s the only lawyer I know who can pull your sorry butt out of the fire. You want to set the record for the biggest judgment in Florida against a doctor, you go get somebody else. Otherwise, you’d better get on your knees and give thanks she’s agreed to take your case.”
Nobody said a word.
Everybody in the Ivy Club was looking at Jackson.
The waiter ran over, and Jackson sat down, looked at me, and roared, “Now, Lilly, order something normal.”
I ordered the daily special for all of us and felt a blush of pleasure glowing across my face.
Jackson thought I was a good trial attorney.
He believed in me.
Henry and Dr. Randolph became deeply intrigued by their butter and rolls and didn’t speak or make eye contact with Jackson, or me. Fine, I thought, you little worms. Eat your cow fat and white bread. But I wanted to get up and dance around the table. And here I’d thought Jackson was still mad at me.
While he surely understood that he’d won, as he usually did, by the force of his own conviction, Jackson iced his cake by explaining his own girl-factor theory to Dr. Randolph. As a woman of child-bearing age, with the ability to look and act sweet and sympathetic, I would be a gentle touch for cross-examining the plaintiff good-mother (which would have to be done with white kid gloves, Jackson explained, to avoid looking as if we were picking on her and pissing off the jury) and conducting the direct examination of Dr. Randolph on the stand, and my obviously sympathetic, sweet, feminine, demure, ladylike, maternal, trusting, even charming girl factor would, thus, convey to the jury that Dr. Randolph was a man a woman could absolutely trust; that is, he didn’t screw up in delivering the baby. Quite a burden to lay on my estrogen.
The nervous waiter was hovering again, placing plates of the main course more or less in front of us, and Jackson shooed him away as soon as the plates touched the table.
As I pretended to eat my food, I realized that Jackson had sucked me in deeper. Before his stand-up routine on my behalf, I hadn’t cared two whits whether Dr. Randolph got a new attorney or not. I didn’t particularly want to try the case, but it wouldn’t have been the first time a client and I hissed and spat at each other during a trial. But now I was on fire to try this case, to win it, to live up to Jackson’s faith in me.
“Stop messing with your food, Lilly,” Jackson said. “Just eat it.”
After our luncheon, I spun my wheels and churned my files and agitated the rest of the afternoon, while Bonita went quietly about the important tasks. That night, at my invitation, Olivia came over to teach Jack the Bear that Newly was allowed to get near me, even touch me.
Olivia greeted Newly by asserting, “I remember you.”
Her tone of voice revealed nothing about whether this was a good memory or a bad one.
“Sure,” Newly said, extending his hand and smiling, “the other night, at Lilly’s office.”
Jack the Bear growled at Newly as he reached his hand toward Olivia, and she tapped the dog on the noise lightly and took Newly’s hand.
“No, the petitions, in ’ninety-eight, to persuade the county planning department to deny the variance granting Wal-Mart the right to build on the property next t
o Oscar Scherer.”
“Oh, sure, you’re the scrub jay lady.”
Turned out Newly had been a big help to her, rounding up a whole crew of his clients to testify before the planning committee about the value of that acreage to them personally, as it was the nesting and breeding ground for the scrub jays and gopher turtles that pulled them into Oscar Scherer State Park on a regular basis.
“I love the way those little birds will come and sit right smack on top of you,” Newly said, and I wondered how all this had happened without my knowing it, but 1998 was the year I was off busy being in love with the dermatologist who eventually broke my heart. A great many things had slipped past me that year.
“Could use your help again,” Olivia said, and she and Newly went into the kitchen, Jack the Bear in tow and growling still, and they sat and discussed saving the scrub jays from the evil doctors’ plans of putting up the medical arts building.
I made green tea for all of us and pretended to listen, but I was caught up in replaying the mysterious tape in my head of who killed Dr. Trusdale, and why, and what could that possibly have to do with Dr. Randolph, and (or?) me.
An hour after Olivia left, having vented her spleen about the evil doctors who would put a profitable location of a building ahead of little bluebirds, Newly and I discovered that Jack the Bear still wouldn’t let him near me.
Later that night I dreamed of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. I was standing on its girders, and then suddenly they were falling, crashing into the murky black waters of Tampa Bay, with me, a small, clinging person on the crumpling metal and concrete, hurtling toward sure death.
Before I crashed into the water, I came awake with a start and a small cry.
Jack the Bear leaped into the bed, nuzzled my face, licked my cheek, and put a protective paw on my shoulder. I petted the big dog’s broad head and contemplated popping a kava capsule, but the health food stores don’t sell these herbs cheap and I didn’t want to waste it if I was going back to sleep anyway.
From the guest room, Newly’s snores continued unabated. So much for his sentry duty. Jack snuggled against me, and I put an arm around his wide black shoulders, closed my eyes, and hoped for sleep.
Chapter 15
Watching my back was getting old.
Even Newly’s protective presence had been tempered, as he had been forced to go back to work to earn money for all the ex-wives and for Karen the Vindictive, who got temporary support pending the divorce.
Leaving me even more vulnerable, Jack the Bear’s attention and enthusiasm for protecting me had clearly fallen off in the last few days, so much so that I had Bonita take him to the vet on her lunch hour. I paid a royal ransom to learn he was probably just depressed over the change in his environment and I should see he got more exercise. As I plowed unprotected through the minutia in the discovery files in Dr. Randolph’s case and made lists of information we still needed, Jack moped on the carpet near me, a melancholy sigh occasionally slipping out of his otherwise inert black and tan dog body.
There was still no trial date in the Dr. Randolph case, my deadline to amend the witness list was clicking closer and closer, and I’d yet to actually nail down a new expert witness.
Our expert witness—that is, our hired physician—would be critical in this case because there were compelling and obvious facts against us. The mother seemed like a nice, normal woman, and she was actually married, and her husband seemed like a nice, normal person. During labor, the mother had developed problems delivering, and the prevailing evidence in the depositions I’d reviewed indicated that Dr. Randolph should have performed a cesarean. The monitors showed fetal distress consistent with a lack of oxygen, and a lack of oxygen during labor is a known cause of brain damage in an infant.
So our expert witness would be vital in establishing, beyond a reasonable medical degree of probability, that the infant’s brain damage had not occurred as a result of oxygen deprivation during a prolonged and traumatic delivery, but rather was a result of a failure of the infant’s brain to properly develop in the womb, probably because the mother had contracted CMV, a virus known to cause precisely the type of brain damage this infant had, especially the small-head thing.
Our expert had to be good enough to overcome sympathetic plaintiffs and facts that tended to condemn the defendant. Such as all that deposition testimony about HMO incentives paid to the doctor to avoid surgeries like cesareans.
Our expert had to be a compelling enough witness to explain technical, boring, medical, and scientific information to a jury whose collective minds were probably made up against Dr. Randolph the moment they saw the spastic movements and vacant stare of the child, dressed as cute as a Gerber baby and sitting right there in his mother’s loving arms.
Divorce work suddenly looked good.
Deep in my losing veggie baby files, I was nearly as morose as Jack the Bear when Detective Santuri dropped by. Bonita led him into my office while they discussed how her five-year-old, astonishingly, had not been in the least hurt by her jump off the roof. Jack the Bear disdained to growl at Sam but did at least open his eyes and stare at him. Naturally, I was sitting unglamorously on the floor, shoes off, reading depositions and aligning interrogatories in categories, to be memorized later.
“Nice photo,” he said, coming around my desk and looking at a snapshot of my apple orchard that Delvon had mailed me the previous week after his visit with Farmer Dave at my request to make sure Dave wasn’t doing anything illegal on the property that would allow the government to confiscate the orchard. “Looks peaceful.”
“It is.”
“That dog okay?” he asked, stepping over the prone body of Jack the Bear, my guard dog.
“Yes. The vet says he is in great shape, just depressed.” Me too, but I didn’t say that.
“I had a Rottweiler once. Great dog.”
“What’d you call him?”
“Bear.”
“Oh, well, what else?”
“I’d like to have another Rottweiler someday.”
“I know where you can get a wonderful puppy, great lines,” I offered, thinking of Emily and her brothers playing at Fred and Olivia’s house.
“Not home enough.”
“Any wife? Kids? You know, to take care of a dog?” Oh, subtle, I thought, and wanted to kick myself.
“No.” But Sam, I saw, watched the way that information landed on my face.
“You run down anything on that widow, Elaine Jobloski?” I asked, feeling a blush creep over my cheeks as Sam stared at me.
“Yes. Thanks again for that report you sent me. It helped. We got a history on Mrs. Jobloski now. She had a classic nervous breakdown, what with the stress of losing her husband and the lawsuits. Some of her settlement money went toward an expensive residential counseling program. She got out of that program after six months, but then there was an involuntary commitment into a second institution. When she got out of that, she apparently fled the state. We’re trying to find her. There’s a trail to California.”
“California. That’d be a long drive to spike the good orthopod’s marijuana, wouldn’t it?”
Sam nodded.
“And nothing to connect her to Dr. Randolph’s shooting, right?”
Sam nodded.
“And there’d be no reason for her to mug me, right?”
And no reason for Widow Jobloski to rifle through my files, I thought, as Sam nodded.
Okay, so I wasn’t being original. But I wasn’t the homicide detective.
“We’re trying to get a photo. You can take a look. See if she looks familiar.”
This time I nodded.
There didn’t seem to be any reason at all for Sam to have dropped by. A point I made to Bonita after he left.
“Man’s got his eye on you,” she said, without pausing in her typing.
I wasn’t sure if she meant he wanted a date or considered me a suspect.
Chapter 16
Jennifer the Stairmaster wizard was my
new best friend, and, as with Newly’s moving in, I didn’t remember giving her an invitation either.
Standing in my kitchen, she was playing twenty questions about my work, telling me that Ashton says I am “so, so” smart. I was slicing carrots for a tray to take out to Newly and Ashton, who were eyeing each other like two fully racked bucks, circling for the charge to see which alpha male would win the doe herd.
When I brought the tray out, with dip made from soy sour cream we had to stop specially for at the Granary because Jennifer didn’t “do dairy,” Newly’s look seemed to ask why these people were in my house.
Frankly, I didn’t know. It was late Saturday afternoon. Ashton and I should be at the law firm, working, and we had been, but he’d dropped into my office and Jennifer had beamed in from the ladies’ room and chat, chat, chat, and now here they were.
Before they’d descended on my office, I had been working my way through the veggie baby file, my medical dictionary strapped to my hip, reading through the scientific literature on CMV. I was so frigging tired of this case.
But at least I had a potential expert now, a Dr. William Jamieson. Such a great, American-sounding name. Not only had he published the most definitive of the medical articles on CMV and brain-damaged babies, he maintained both an active practice and a place on the medical faculty at Emory. Dr. Jamieson had sounded great over the phone, and he was willing to meet with me and review the file. And, “Get this,” I had told Ashton as he and Jennifer pretended they cared, “this man has never been an expert witness before in his life.”
“A virgin,” Ashton had stated, a touch of envy in his voice.
Jennifer had giggled at that.
So it looked as if I had a pure, untainted doctor, one that the veggie babe’s good-parents’ attorney could not paint as some doctor whore who regularly supplemented his already outrageous income by testifying to anything he was paid to testify about.
All I had to do now was fly to Atlanta and meet him, check him out for visible defects, and grill him for composure. Of course, I would have done this already but for his own busy, busy schedule. Seems this potential expert was off summering at important conferences in Hawaii, and though I was chewing at the bit to meet him, it would be awhile before his schedule allowed a meeting in Atlanta. Thank goodness for my cumulative motions for continuances.
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