Skinny-dipping

by Claire Matturro

  While I might work in chaos, neither my brain chemistry nor my physical constitution was designed to live in chaos at my own house.

  My head was so jumbled, I decided, because my house was so jumbled. Jumbled with Newly’s stuff. Jumbled with Jack’s toys and Jack’s mat and Jack’s drinking dish and Jack’s pillow. But mostly jumbled with Newly’s stuff. And Newly’s ferret.

  Newly needed to leave my house. The ferret too. I’d just have to get someone else to go to Atlanta with me, that is, if my potential expert witness ever lighted in the city long enough for me to actually interview him. If he didn’t soon, despite my various continuances, I’d have to track the expert to one of his many seminars and conferences and interview him between his presentations.

  So, Atlanta trip or not, Newly had to go. Jack probably had to go too. It didn’t seem like anybody was trying to kill me anymore, if anyone ever had been.

  Rubbing Jack’s ears again, I asked him: “Do you want to go home to Olivia’s?”

  At the word Olivia, Jack jumped up and pranced around and started running back to the car, past the No Trespassing signs. I guess that was Rottweiler for “Take me home to Mama.” So I did.

  Not being an attorney, Olivia wasn’t allowed at the picnic and she answered the door. Jack leaped at her with unabashed dog joy.

  “He misses his mama,” I said, “so I’ve brought him home.”

  Squeals came from the backyard.

  “I’ve got my grandkids here. Playing with the puppies. Come on back.”

  With Jack prancing at her side, we walked through the disarray of her house and into the backyard. Two girls, maybe six and eight or near to it, were doing crooked cartwheels in the cropped Bahia grass of the backyard while three puppies whirled after them.

  “Where’s Crosby?” I asked, looking around for the playpen.

  “Oh, he’s upstairs, away from the kids. He’s doing all right today, but those kids’ll wear out a puppy, let alone an old fella. Want to see him?”

  “No, I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Not that there’s any urgency—at least, I don’t think so—but that compassionate leave thing, have you talked to Jackson about it yet?” Olivia asked. “It’ll give Angela some peace of mind to know she can go without penalty when she needs to.”

  The littlest girl ran up to us. “Can you do cartwheels, Grandmom?” she shouted.

  Olivia shrugged, then we traded looks and grinned.

  What, after all, had all those yoga classes and gym workouts been about, if not for this? Well, okay, technically all that exercise had been about how we’d look in bathing suits, white jeans, or naked. Olivia might have been of the generation that danced half-naked at Woodstock, but she was still buff.

  When Fred came home a half hour later, Olivia and I and the Rotts and the grandkids were doing cartwheels, none of us too grand at it, and Jack the Bear was spinning with glee, while upstairs in a playpen the ancient little rat dog slept.

  Only later, when I was leaving and followed Olivia into her garage to rinse off some of the grass and dirt, did I smell something familiar. I couldn’t place it right off, but I knew it.

  “What’s that smell?” I asked.

  Olivia picked up a blue bottle and handed it to me. “This?”

  “Yes.” A perfumy, chemical smell. Familiar, but at the same time not familiar.

  “Flea spray. I get it at the Granary. They special order it for me. It’s got way too much perfume in it, trying to cover up the smell of the tea-tree oil and the pyrethrins. But it works, and it’s mostly natural.”

  Olivia said she didn’t completely trust those new systemic flea and tick preventatives, so she stuck with this spray, perfume and all.

  Smell has a long memory, as well as a way of triggering the mind to remember.

  I hadn’t gotten to my Honda before it came back to me: the night I was mugged, the night before Dr. Trusdale was killed, the smell of the mugger’s hands. A strong, perfumy, chemical smell. Like the flea spray.

  Now, why would Olivia have tried to mug me?

  Chapter 21

  At my insistence, the executive committee convened in Ashton’s office the Monday evening after the bar picnic.

  After the usual macho crap that passes for camaraderie among the big three had run its course, I launched in. “Angela needs a week’s compassionate leave. Sometime soon, but no exact date yet.”

  “Why?” Jackson thundered.

  “Her, er, her dog is pretty old, and when he gets near the end, she needs to take him home to Mississippi. Name’s Crosby, he weighs about four pounds, and he is family.”

  “She needs a week to take a dead dog to Mississippi?” Jackson thundered again.

  “No, he’s not dead. But he’s practically ancient, and fragile. She wants to take him home while he is still alive, let him see the rest of her family, let everybody say good-bye, and then bury him.” Realizing how nuts this already sounded, I left off the part about “under the pecan trees with the others,” still uncertain if the “others” were more dead dogs, dead members of the human family, or something straight out of a southern gothic that defied polite discussion.

  Nobody said anything. I had the distinct impression Jackson and Ashton were waiting for the punch line.

  “She was going to take him at Christmas, leave him with her brothers, but it doesn’t look like he is going to last that long.” From the looks on their faces, my explanation didn’t help.

  “Not but four pounds? Why can’t she just put the dog in the freezer, wrap it up in tinfoil until Christmas, take it home then?” Ashton said.

  “Damn, Ashton,” Fred said, exhaling his cigarette smoke in a kind of cough toward Ashton, who prissily waved his hand in the air as if to ward off plague germs. This from a man who snorted things purchased from strangers on street corners in the bad parts of town.

  Jackson slitted his eyes at me, looked me up and down. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

  Leave it to Jackson to view common human decency as a peculiar state of female hormones.

  “Look,” I said, not even bothering to deny the pregnancy thing, “Angela works her butt off for all of us. She’s a mule who works hard all day and doesn’t eat much hay. Give her the week to take when she needs it, and don’t dump on her when she gets back.”

  “I absolutely agree,” Fred said, and lit up a second cigarette from the butt of the last one.

  To my surprise, Ashton agreed too. Perhaps he was latently ashamed of having suggested Angela freeze-dry Crosby in tinfoil.

  Jackson asked, “Does she need to go right now?”

  “No. Crosby probably can hang on awhile longer. I just figured we’d leave it up to Angela to know when to go.”

  “All right, then. But Angela’s working on an appellate brief for me, and she can’t go until she’s done, you hear?”

  “I’ll finish the brief if she needs to go before it’s completed,” I said, overlooking for the moment that since Angela was my associate, I was the only partner who was supposed to be assigning work to her.

  “It’s an antitrust thing,” Jackson said. “Nobody but Angela understands it. Horizontal market shares. Do you know what a horizontal market share is?”

  Of course I didn’t. Antitrust was an eight a.m. elective in law school, so I’d skipped it. But damned if I’d admit that to Jackson. “It’s okay. Angela can go over the case with me.”

  “Doll, it’s got complex math and charts. By the time she explains it to you, she could have written the brief. She finishes that brief, she can take her dog home anytime she needs to. But you do her other work while she’s gone and don’t complain, you hear me?”

  “Deal,” I said, and I headed back to my own office.

  Light came from under Angela’s closed office door as I walked by. But I was tired. It was late. Tomorrow would be soon enough to tell her that when she decided it was time, she could have a week to take Crosby home to die, so long as she had finished Jackson’s wor
k by then.

  Back in my own office, I gathered up my newest file—a man who made a living counseling rich women on Longboat Key who’d been kidnapped by space aliens had been sued for malpractice, and I was to defend him. I wondered how in the hell I’d find an expert witness for that narrow subspecialty.

  At home, Newly was spread all over the couch in the living room with Johnny Winter, the albino ferret, draped around his neck like a scarf. The CD player was blasting out some kind of rock music that sounded like the stuff Delvon liked to listen to before he found the Holy Spirit and switched to Amy Grant. Apparently neither Newly nor Johnny Winter heard me come in. Newly jumped up, and the look of a teenage boy caught by his mother with his hands on his dick flashed across his face.

  “Ah, hon,” he started, but Johnny Winter squealed and launched himself off Newly’s shoulders, and like a flying squirrel, or a spirit from the nether-world, he spun out through the air and then leaped from couch to chair to table to floor and then down the hallway, stopping once to spray my bedroom door, and then he disappeared.

  Newly’s expression went from caught to panic, and he launched himself down the hallway after the albino ferret, who obviously returned my sentiments.

  Leaving Newly to the ferret, I cleaned up and headed for the kitchen. By the time I had finished stir-frying some tofu and making a salad of mixed greens, heavy with arugula and parsley, Johnny Winter had been corralled and returned to his cage. Newly had washed down my bedroom door with vinegar and vacuumed off the couch. I told myself to get used to this because a Rottweiler puppy would make messes too. But I was solid in my resolve to ask Newly to leave, even if he couldn’t afford to rent a decent place.

  While I wondered where Newly would go after he left here, we ate our salads without speaking. I served the tofu over brown rice and watched Newly eye it suspiciously. He took a bite and chewed slowly.

  “Needs tamari,” I said, chewing mine, and I passed him the bottle after sprinkling a few drops of the salty soy sauce on mine. It also needed some toasted sesame oil, but that was still in the refrigerator and I was too tired to get up. I was falling behind at the gym and in my wind sprints, and my rising fatigue was the first sign I needed to get back to my exercise. But who had time, between cleaning up after Jackson at the office and cleaning up after Newly and his beast from hell at home.

  Newly took another bite. “Hon, what exactly is this?”

  “Tofu.”

  “Huh? Heard of it.” He sprinkled a great deal more tamari on it than was either necessary or healthy and ate another bite.

  “Exactly what is tofu?” he asked.

  “It’s soybean curd.”

  Newly put his fork down and gave me a pained look. “You want me to move out, just say so.”

  My lips were forming themselves around the phrase “As a matter of fact” when the phone rang.

  On the phone, Angela was all atwitter about Bonita’s health insurance company and the things she had found out while looking into its denial of Bonita’s ER claim for her five-year-old. She was talking in a nonstop, word-tumbling way that was more typical of me than her, but I gathered she now shared my view that health insurance companies were the right hand of the Antichrist.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Those scumbags.”

  A mild rebuke for the Antichrist, I thought. Tired as I was, I started to tell her to hold it until morning. Then I looked over at Newly and saw him trying to spit the tofu into my cloth napkin. He winced sheepishly when he realized I’d caught him.

  I remembered how smitten he had been over Angela when she punched out the drunk associate at the bar picnic.

  I remembered how smitten Angela had been over Newly as he tenderly wiped off the beer that had sprayed all over her. Me, he didn’t even hand a napkin to.

  An idea crossed my mind.

  “Angela”—I made my voice sound sweet—“why don’t you bring over what you have and we’ll talk. I have some Fuji apples and some decent Riesling wine we can have for dessert after we’ve talked it over.”

  I hoped Crosby would not mind sharing his last days with Johnny Winter, the evil albino ferret, because already I was moving Newly out and into Angela’s crummy apartment.

  In hardly any time at all Angela and Newly were sending off pheromones I couldn’t help but pick up, trapped as I was between the two of them on my couch, where the faint scent of something reminiscent of tomcat wee-wee had defied the all-natural orange-peel pet odor cleanup spray the man at the Granary had assured me would neutralize ferret wiz. I intended to ask for my money back. He could come sniff the couch if he didn’t believe me.

  Angela had a ream of computer printouts from Bonita’s HMO, printouts showing that for the preceding six months all of the emergency-room claims filed in Florida had been denied as not constituting emergencies.

  “And look at this,” she said, her normally pale face flushed. “Fully one half of all the claims for the last month were denied for insufficiency of information on the claims’ forms.”

  “Apparently the company has a couple of new cost-containment techniques in place,” I said, not at all surprised. But I took the computer printouts and started scanning them. Newly took the sheets as I finished.

  Some of the denied ER claims didn’t really sound like true emergencies, I agreed. But some of the claims listed on the printouts certainly sounded like classic emergencies. Out loud, I mused that the HMO probably counted on most people giving up right away, while others would write letters and take appeals before they gave up. But only a minority— such as Bonita and the few who’d been in head-on collisions at high rates of speed and managed to survive so they could fight with their HMO as part of an increasingly common postaccident therapy— would consult a lawyer. No doubt, those people would eventually be paid, at least in part. But even on the claims finally paid, the delay allowed the HMO to hold its money in interest-bearing accounts that much longer.

  “Nice trick,” I murmured, flipping through the printouts as Angela and Newly covertly sniffed each other.

  Denying or delaying the ER claims was probably worse, but the denial of half of all claims for the last month for insufficient information hit a chord with me. My own last claim for a routine office visit had been denied because of insufficient information. The denial letter explained that the insurance company did not have my current address in its computer. Yet that letter had been mailed to my current address, and I didn’t even have an HMO but a real policy. It took me three months and an increasingly shrill approach to straighten that out. In the process, I had learned one of the health insurers’ dirty little tricks.

  “I know what’s going on,” I said.

  “Me too,” Newly said.

  “What?” Angela the Naive said.

  “Florida, like most states, has a prompt-pay act on the books that requires a health insurance company to promptly pay the claims submitted to it,” I said.

  “But, there’s a hole in the statute,” Newly continued, running his fingers through his hair and leaning around me toward Angela.

  “What?” Angela said, leaning around me toward Newly. “What’s the hole?”

  “If the insurer doesn’t have the right information, that is, the right code, address, whatever, it can deny the claim until it gets the right information,” Newly said.

  I leaned back, out of their way.

  “Why delay payment?” Angela asked Newly.

  Oh, Angie, I thought, wake up. No way I was that naive at her age.

  “Same reason they deny the ER claims. Save money. Sure, they will eventually have to pay some, maybe most, of those denied claims, but if they delay payment for a few months, that’s a few more months that their money sits around earning interest. On a small scale, it doesn’t seem like it would matter. But consider that we are talking about thousands and thousands of dollars delayed each day, collecting interest, and it adds up.”

  “Then they are violating the spirit of the statute, if not the ac
tual statute,” Angela said.

  “Precisely. It sounds like a perfect class-action suit to me,” Newly said, and he practically stood up and danced, he was so pleased.

  Ever the wicked stepmother for details, I said, “Where’d you get these computer printouts?”

  A very good question, and one Newly or I should have asked immediately. The insurance company certainly wasn’t going to hand these out.

  “Ah, I...”Angela paused, and her face turned red again.

  “Spit it out,” I said.

  “You can trust us,” Newly said, in his most perfect “trust me, I’m your lawyer” tone of voice. No wonder he had such a high seduction success rate, as he made “trust me” sound so darn good.

  “My brother works for the company.” She ducked her head a moment. “But you can’t tell anyone. He’d get fired.”

  Angie, sweetheart, he’d get killed, I thought, but kept that to myself.

  “Is he a claims adjuster, or what?” Newly asked.

  “No, he’s one of their big computer gurus. He works in Atlanta, home office for the southern region. He’s not supposed to have access to this kind of data, but you know those computer geniuses— you can’t really keep anything from them if they put their minds to accessing a file.”

  “And you asked him to, ah, access the files?” I was surprised, this from a girl who wouldn’t even push a yellow light on the Tamiami Trail.

  “Yes, I asked Ronny to help me.” Angela’s look was innocent, as if she had not perceived her potential breach of law, ethics, and privity. “The HMO people I spoke with about Bonita’s claim were so damn irritating. Smug. Way too smug. The manager told me he ate lawyers like me for lunch.”

  “So,” I said, beginning to understand something of this woman’s psychological makeup, “you figured you’d show them.”

  “Exactly.” Angela smiled, the smile of the benevolent to the outward eye, but the smile of sweet revenge in actuality. This woman had the makings of a trial attorney after all, I thought.

  “The problem is how to get this information on the up and up and then start collecting the class members,” Newly said. “It’s one thing to know something, it’s another to prove it in a court of law. And these printouts would be inadmissible, given that your brother more or less stole them. We can’t subpoena these records unless we have a lawsuit, and we don’t have a lawsuit until we have some evidence to support the suit.”