Olivia understood the distinction between a compassionate leave and a vacation. Doubtless, by now Angela did too, as she’d come back from her week-long family reunion to find every partner in the place had dumped extra work on her desk.
“Compassionate leave, huh. That’d be good,” Olivia said. “Count on Fred’s vote.”
“I’ll set it up, then.” I paused awkwardly and wondered how I should ask a friend if she had, by chance, just maybe, possibly, killed one of my clients. “I can’t stay long.” As if that would work as a segue into “By the way, did you poison Dr. Trusdale?”
“Want to see the puppies?” Olivia asked.
Yes, puppies might be the antidote to the sadness I felt while looking at Crosby.
While Olivia and I sat outside in the afternoon heat and humidity, the three puppies tumbled about us and Emily peed on my foot.
“That’s it, then,” Olivia said. “She’s marked you. You’re her person.”
“Olivia, would you kill a person to save the scrub jays?”
Without looking at me, or answering, Olivia went into the kitchen and came back with paper towels for my wet shoe, fortunately just a pair of flats I didn’t care about, and she sat back down and appeared to be thinking.
“Do I get more facts?” she asked. “Like, if I just kill one person it saves all the scrub jays forever, or what?”
“Ah...I...er, I don’t know.”
“This is about that dead doctor, isn’t it?”
“Ah...er, yes.”
“Don’t hem and haw with me. Ask me what you mean.”
“Olivia, did you kill Dr. Trusdale and shoot at Dr. Randolph because they were trying to get that land and ruin the scrub jays’ habitat?”
“No. I didn’t. It wouldn’t do any good. Another doctor would just spring up, and if I killed all the doctors, then it would be lawyers, or a Wal-Mart, or an Eckerd’s, or another damn mall. I know I can’t win this. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try. So, no, I didn’t kill anybody.”
I leaned over and wiped the puppy piss off my shoe, asked to wash my hands, thanked her, and left.
Olivia wasn’t a liar. I believed her. And damned if I was going to be the one to point out to Sam Santuri that Dr. Trusdale and Dr. Randolph had something besides me in common—their leadership role in trying to kill off one of the last remaining flocks of scrub jays on the southwest coast of Florida. Such a tip would have led right back to Olivia, and she had enough to do as it was.
Driving away, I decided that since I was already so far behind in my work, what with my unscheduled side trips to Brock’s and Olivia’s, another procrastination wouldn’t matter. So I stopped at my house to change shoes and to check on Johnny Winter, the newest member of my household.
Johnny was chittering in his cage when I peeked into the guest room. I refilled his food dish, checked on his water, and fluffed some fresh cedar chips in the cage.
Johnny Winter kicked the fresh cedar out onto the floor and knocked over his food.
“Hon,” Newly had previously explained, “he’s not used to being locked up in his cage. I used to let him have the run of the house. Honest, he’s litter-box trained, like a cat.”
Despite that reassurance, the first thing Johnny had done the night we rescued him from Roy Mac’s garage, that is, after he bit me, was run through my house spraying like a tomcat.
“Hon,” Newly had explained, “he’s a boy. He’s just got to mark his territory. Honest, he’s litter-box trained.”
After that, Newly and I had reached a compromise, which I considered far more than fair. I wouldn’t kill Johnny Winter, and Newly would keep him in his cage. Even after Newly had cleaned up with vinegar and baking soda, a faint scent of tomcat piss still hovered throughout my house.
“Hon,” Newly had said, looking wistfully at the caged ferret, “that cage thing is just for the time being. Till you and Johnny get used to each other.”
I didn’t think Johnny Winter would be staying that long.
The ferret was an albino, with long white hair, pink, malevolent eyes, incessant chittering, and a long tail.
“Hon,” Newly had explained, “he’s named after Johnny Winter.”
“Who?”
“You know, Johnny Winter, the rock singer. The one with the long white hair. Great guitar. Awesome. You know him.”
“No, I don’t. That’s why I said ‘Who?’ ” Sometimes that decade gap between our ages did make a difference, as Newly and I had definitely not grown up listening to the same rock stars.
“Aw, hon,” Newly had said, “wait till Karen lets me get my CDs, and I’ll play you some of his stuff.”
Further discussion of listening to the real Johnny Winter playing awesome guitar ended when Johnny Winter the ferret hurled himself against the side of his cage and squealed like a banshee.
“Just let me let him out for a little bit,” Newly had said. “I’ll stay here with him and see he doesn’t tear anything up.”
From that first week with Johnny, things had not improved. I kicked the cedar chips back at him. “Little weasel, your days are numbered,” I said, and headed back to the law firm.
Shoving the thoughts of Newly and his damn weasel out of my head, I plowed through the back door into my own office. Bonita followed me in. “You need to be nicer to Henry,” she said, plunking a basket of red peppers and tomatoes on my desk.
“What are these?”
“Red peppers and tomatoes,” she replied, her face blank, though she fingered her gold cross necklace.
So, okay, she’d be a great witness, wry and never giving more information than asked for. “What I meant was, why are you giving these to me? Where’d they come from?”
“From Henry’s greenhouse. He grows them organically. He is an amateur botanist, a good gardener, and a very fine cook.”
“And he is sending them to me?”
“Yes. He brought them by while you were out.”
“Why?”
“Henry thinks you’re mad at him. Because he didn’t catch the Trusdale prior malpractice suits. Of course, you didn’t catch them either. And then, because he tried to get you out of the Randolph case that day at the Ivy Club. He thought you wanted off the case and was trying to help you.”
I sighed. I could tell that between making over Angela and visiting Olivia and checking on Johnny Winter and now soothing both Bonita and Henry, this wasn’t going to be the day I billed those twenty deficit hours I needed to beat the firm’s monthly billing average. “Shut the door, sit,” I said, and started my personal pot of filtered Zephyrhills spring water boiling for the French press. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
“So, spill,” I said.
“Henry is a nice man. You should be nicer to him.”
Too many nices in one conversation for my taste. “Look, he screwed up,” I said, overlooking the import of Bonita’s observation that I too had missed the prior malpractice suits against the good, though thoroughly dead, doctor. “If Dr. Trusdale hadn’t died, we’d have been hit big at the trial. I would have been sideswiped big-time with those other lawsuits, and I would have looked bad, really bad. Henry is supposed to investigate, all right?”
“Yes.” Bonita looked serene. “Still, you need to be nicer to him.”
Without talking further, I did my thing with the French press and my ten-dollars-a-pound organic coffee that I don’t share with just anyone, and then poured each of us a cup. Bonita drinks hers black, so I tried to do likewise.
“So, you and Henry are dating?” This was far more interesting to me than pursuing a theory that I should be nicer to the man who sold a malpractice policy to a staph-carrier surgeon with two prior hits and a possible substance-abuse problem, and who had blamed me for my “obvious inability” to get along with the doctor on the Randolph case.
“Not dating. But seeing each other. He likes the children.”
While I sipped caffeine and contemplated pursuing the difference between
dating and seeing each other, Angela burst into the room, teetering on high heels and looking like a petite, traffic-stopping starlet. Her hair was a perfect Veronica Lake pageboy, only in a delicious shade of auburn with absolutely gold golden highlights. For a moment, I wondered if I wanted to go red. Brock, bless his heart, was a genius.
“Belleza,” Bonita said, rising from her chair to greet Angela. “So beautiful. Your sweet little face. And your hair—magnifico.”
Sounding like a mother, I thought.
“I can’t walk in these shoes. And my lips feel all waxy. And the guys in the library, all the clerks, they’re...they’re teasing me.” Angela kicked off the shoes.
“They’re flirting,” I said, beaming. “But you’re right—ditch the shoes. Did Brock take you shopping too?” My idea about high heel shoes is that they are weapons, to be used as such, and therefore not worn every day. Besides, even in spikes, Angela was still short, so short was a look that was going to have to work for her, and she might as well be comfortable, which you cannot be in the type of shoes Brock had apparently persuaded her to try. Also, in those kind of heels she’d never be able to keep up with me and carry my extra briefcase.
I poured the newly minted Angela a cup of coffee, loaded it with milk from my minifridge and sugar, topped mine off with milk, and grinned. I had a trophy protégée of my own creation.
Only later that night did it occur to me that Angela now looked better than I did.
Chapter 20
And lawyers wonder why nobody likes them?
Once a year, in a spirit of exclusivity, the members of the Sarasota County Bar Association have a picnic. It’s an all-day affair, with any kind of liquor a lawyer could want. With no exceptions, no one but members of the Sarasota County Bar are allowed. It’s a whole treed and green grass spread on one of the few undeveloped plots of land in the county, packed full of lawyers and judges, drinking heavily on the county bar’s tab.
I’ve often wondered who they got to do the work before women joined the bar.
The events are dreadful. But most of the lawyers in town go. Not to go is to invite suspicion and gossip.
The main food is dead cow. The main topic is some version of “I’m smarter than you; mine is bigger; I have more money” or “I’m a trial attorney and you’re a wussy, gutless estate planner.” Testosterone and beer are the drugs of choice, though whiskey runs a close third. Estrogen isn’t even in the running.
I had Jack the Bear with me on a leash, and Newly was there too, though I told him in no uncertain terms he was not to hover about me. The man was absolutely driving me crazy. He was smothering me. He had my house a mess. And he had dared to raise the specter of children and all that implied.
If Newly’s bugging the crap out of me wasn’t enough, Jack the Bear, during his ultra-watchdog phase, had ended my sexual inebriation with Newly by making sure we didn’t get close enough to touch. Sleeping in my big bed with a depressed Rottweiler, I saw Newly and me for what we were: painfully mismatched and doomed. And then there was the not-so-small matter of Johnny Winter, the albino ferret that now lived in the den and chittered constantly for Newly’s attentions.
But there he was, a shadow under the tree. Newly the ever watchful, as if someone would willingly enter into a crowd of drinking lawyers in full brag and attempt to do me harm.
Turning my back to Newly, I smiled in pretend attention as Angela, who had drawn quite a few “aahs” that morning in her newly madeover glamour, and an attorney named Jill discussed the proper diet for old dogs such as Crosby.
While I waited for an opportunity to jump ship to a better chat, one of the imminently exchangeable young lawyers from our firm, a first-year associate whose name I might have remembered if my life depended on it, came up and put his arm around Angela and greeted her with a drunken attempt at wit.
I saw Angela flinch, as if to dislodge his arm from her shoulder. At my feet, Jack the Bear rose, the hair on the back of his huge neck a bristle of warning in a rare showing of something other than his doggy depression. The clueless associate offered some inane banter.
As a partner with at least technically some authority over this associate, I opened my mouth to tell him to leave, but before I spoke he grabbed Angela’s right breast.
Acting on what must have been sheer instinct, Angela hooked his jaw with enough clout that he spun off, collided with the beer keg, and knocked it down against a concrete picnic table, sending beer spurting everywhere. As the associate crumpled on the ground, moaning and bleeding at the corner of his mouth, Jack the Bear lunged, dragging me with him at the other end of his leash. Dog and I collapsed on top of the associate, and beer rained down on us.
Only the quick command of Fred, fortunately nearby, saved the now bloody associate from a trip to the emergency room.
Once we had pulled the dog off of the drunk associate, I was quick to stand beside Angela, ready to defend her if the men took the old-school “boys will be boys, why overreact?” response.
Fred, holding Jack’s leash, said to a very red-faced Angela, “Good for you.”
To the associate on the ground, he said, “You’re fired. Get up and get out. Now.”
Jackson and Ashton had materialized from a congregation of judges and agreed. “We don’t tolerate that kind of boorish behavior,” Jackson said, though he might well have been referring to the young man’s inability to hold his liquor rather than his pawing of a fellow associate.
Missing entirely the opportunity to leave bad enough alone, the now ex-associate stood up—nobody helped him—and began to threaten Angela and me with a lawsuit for assault, negligent infliction of emotional harm, wrongful termination, and dog-bite damages.
Judge Goddard, who had sized up the situation in a hurry, put his grizzled Florida cracker face an inch from the young man’s and said, “Boy, every judge in the circuit saw you grab that girl. Now you tell her you’re sorry and you get out of here. And don’t let me see your face in my court.”
Suddenly understanding and outwardly repentant, the man apologized to Angela.
As he limped off, I asked her, “Where’d you learn to hit like that?”
“I was the only redheaded girl in school and I have six brothers and I grew up in Lumberton, Mississippi.”
Ah, that explained a lot. Though whatever had possessed her to think of herself as a redhead when her hair had clearly been orange before Brock converted it to auburn was a matter I didn’t pursue.
Newly, who had been hovering close in case of assassination attempts, inched in closer to Angela, and I saw his eyes twinkling, and he said, “Good right hook.”
Angela blushed and ran her fingers through her newly normal-looking hair. She thanked him and twinkled back at him with her green eyes.
Hmm, I thought, Newly and Angela. Now, that might be a way to get rid of Newly without hurting him.
Leaving Angela and Newly to their flirt, I decided to bug out on the picnic. Especially since I was sticky with sprayed beer and humidity. Newly was so busy doing his Sir Galahad thing with Angela that he didn’t seem to notice me as I left.
Clammy and ignored, I crawled into my Honda, fresh from the police impound with a black garbage bag taped over the window that had been shot out in the parking lot of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley. The morose Jack the Bear drooped down in the bucket seat beside me.
Ashton and Jackson had both chastised me for driving the Honda with the garbage bag over the busted window, as this didn’t set the right tone for our law firm’s parking lot, but my auto insurance claims manager had taken the unenlightened attitude that having my window shot out was not covered by my insurance. The policy would pay for necessary repairs for incidents “arising from the use and enjoyment of the covered automobile,” but getting shot at was not “arising from the use and enjoyment” of my Honda according to my claims manager.
Well, technically, he was right. Unless, of course, you lived in Miami, where getting shot at most certainly arose frequently f
rom the use and enjoyment of one’s car.
And a window doesn’t cost that much to replace.
But what the hell good was a law degree and a junior partnership at Sarasota’s biggest and best defense law firm if I couldn’t bully a mere mortal claims manager into forking over coverage for the damaged window?
Until the matter was resolved, I was just going to drive around with the black bag in place. It doesn’t rain in Sarasota anymore anyway, the result, Olivia said, of overdevelopment and something about the air currents being disrupted by concrete and that global warming thing she’s always talking about.
Under my musings about Angela, my auto claim, and Newly, a series of relentless thoughts were plaguing me—like when you turn on an oldies radio station and it’s playing “Sugar Sugar,” and you don’t hit the button quick enough to go to the next station, and for the next hours or days, the annoying chorus of “Sugar Sugar” plays in your brain. Just like “Sugar Sugar” would drive you nuts, this was driving me nuts: “Who had killed Dr. Trusdale? Did that person also try to mug me? Had that person, or persons unknown, tried to warn or kill me, or Dr. Randolph, or both of us? And what did my rifled med mal files have to do with any of this?
Was Sam next in line to replace Newly, or did Sam think I had something to do with all this? Did he know I was withholding information? Was that stare he gave me one of professional interest, romantic, sexual interest, or just suspicion?
There was only one thing to do—go sit on the beach at the end of Anna Maria Island and stare at the yellow arch of the Sunshine Skyway, watching the sun go down and thinking on my sins. Maybe, I thought, romping on the sand and playing in the Gulf of Mexico would perk up poor down-atthe-snout Jack the Bear some.
As was my habit, I drove down Longboat Key and Anna Maria to the northern tip of Anna Maria Island, parked by the No Parking sign and walked past the No Public Access and No Trespassing signs to the public right-of-way along the shore. Jack the Bear moped along beside me until we sat down directly in the sand.
I rubbed Jack’s ears, and he put his big head in my lap and sighed. I sighed.
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