Skinny-dipping

by Claire Matturro

  “Newly.” I couldn’t resist. “Angela is an attorney. She knows that.”

  “Ah, hon, just thinking out loud.” Newly refused to be embarrassed as he plotted the class-action suit that would change the world and make him a rich man. The pheromones ground down as the attorney brain chemicals overtook them.

  And all I’d had in mind when I handed the letter denying Bonita’s claim to Angela was a simple, well-placed phone call. Usually insurance companies will capitulate on the small stuff once they realize that there’s a whole law firm ready to fight with them over nickels and dimes. Wasn’t that exactly why my auto insurance company finally forked over the cost of a new paint job and new window for my ancient Honda after the still-at-large bad-aim shooter took out the window? Too bad for this HMO that it had not followed the usual course of capitulation on a relatively minor claim by a mother backed by a whole law firm. Now the wrath of Angela and the ambitions of Newly were at play in the field of the class action, and no telling where this would go.

  Where the class action might end, I couldn’t say. But as I watched Angela’s eyes get greener and Newly’s hands snake toward her, I knew where they would end up.

  Chapter 22

  Sam had been looking particularly fetching to me as he sat across from my desk, sipping my organic coffee, until what he had told me sank in like a dozen eggs splattering against my face.

  “Say that again,” I requested, hoping I was only suffering stress hallucinations.

  “Dr. Randolph was the chair of the HMO’s appeals review board that denied the heart transplant for Mr. Jobloski after Dr. Trusdale’s surgery caused the staph infection that traveled to his heart. He voted against the transplant.”

  “So, like, there’s a connection between Dr. Trusdale and Dr. Randolph on the Jobloski case?” Even as I said that, I thought, Like, no duh, girl, get it together. I should probably start actually sleeping again, I cautioned myself.

  Then a couple more eggs went splat. “Mierda, it’s the same HMO. I mean,” I said, “Dr. Randolph was on the board of the same HMO that denied the heart transplant, and that’s the same HMO for Dr. Trusdale’s bum-knee guy and that paid Dr. Randolph financial incentives not to perform surgeries, like say, a cesarian on the veg... the brain-damaged baby’s mother.”

  Sam nodded. “We are definitely taking another look at the missing Mrs. Jobloski. For some reason Miami hasn’t come up with a photo yet, but we’re still trying. Maybe she blamed Dr. Trusdale for the infection and then blamed Dr. Randolph for upholding the HMO’s decision to deny the heart transplant that might have saved her husband.” Sam half smiled at me as if waiting for praise for finding a link between the dead orthopedic surgeon and the shot-at obstetrician that didn’t actually involve me.

  Okay, good for you, I thought. You’ve got a suspect and a motive. But I had a bigger pile of crap in the veggie baby case. Revenge, huh? Yeah, I understood that. I’d like to strangle Henry and Jackson for not knowing Dr. Randolph sat on the HMO review board of the same HMO involved in the veggie baby case. This wasn’t likely to bode well for my defense of Dr. Randolph.

  “Is Dr. Randolph still on the review board?” I asked, desperately hoping the answer was no.

  “Yes.”

  “Does he get paid for this?” I asked, desperately hoping the answer was no.

  “Yes. Big bucks.”

  I closed my eyes at the thought of Stephen LeBlanc’s smirk as he danced this out for the jury: Dr. Randolph was paid big bucks to sit on the review board of the same HMO that paid all its doctors, including Dr. Randolph, yearly bonuses for cost-containment measures such as, you know, not providing health care. The bonus thing was bad enough, but paying Dr. Randolph to sanctify similar financially based denials of care was icing on evil. To even a dim jury, that would smell nasty.

  Sam said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the roar in my head.

  How in the hell did Henry do a preliminary investigation of Dr. Randolph and not know this?

  How in the hell did Jackson spend a year doing discovery that filled a room with interrogations and deposition transcripts and not know this?

  More important, how was I going to keep these facts from a jury?

  While I fretted over the ramifications of Sam’s tidbits, he quieted. Assuming Sam’s silence meant he’d said what he had to say, and in a huff of generalized anxiety, I pushed him out the door. Only later I hoped I hadn’t been rude.

  I was still reeling from Sam’s new information when Newly brought me a framed canvas of a girl with a scrub jay on her shoulder, another painting by the local artist Ted Morris.

  Standing in the doorway to my office, he said, “Hon, this is for you.”

  I knew it was over and that Newly would be leaving me now for Angela.

  After he left, Bonita came into my office and studied the painting.

  “It’s very beautiful,” she said, and sighed. “And here I thought you were going to break his heart.”

  She closed the door behind her on the way out. I stared at the painting and plotted my next move. The ferret was gone, and that meant a new wiz-free couch was in order. Thinking I could hang the scrub jay painting in my office, I called up Brock the Hairdresser-Therapist and asked if he could go to the Women’s Exchange and other quality used-furniture shops with me on Saturday. The man had impeccable taste. Sarasota, having such an abundance of the truly rich, who apparently replace their couches like most of us change the oil in our cars, has an incredible array of really fine used furniture to choose from.

  “Why furniture shopping again so soon?” Brock asked.

  “Because a weasel pissed on my couch and I can’t get the smell out.”

  “Oh, sugar, haven’t I been telling you to date from the deeper end of the gene pool?”

  Now that Newly had officially moved out of my house and into Angela’s apartment, Angela naturally tried to avoid me, which was difficult given that I was her supervising attorney and needed her to keep me from getting even further behind on my exponentially expanding workload. That Angela would take to hiding from me was a side effect of my engineering her and Newly as a couple that I hadn’t anticipated—like the way people in the hallways looked at me with a kind of pity now that the story of Angela snaking Newly away was out. I remembered the same curious signs of pity—overly solicitous behavior or avoidance being the dominant ones—from when my dermatologist lover, the one who officially broke my heart, had left me. Everything had been grand between us, I had thought, until one day, as we were walking on the beach, he reached over and touched my face.

  Tenderly, I had thought.

  Then he stretched the skin under his fingers just a bit. “I could make you look twenty-one again,” he said.

  “Why would I want to look twenty-one again?” I had asked, and meant it, then at the relatively young age (so I thought) of twenty-nine.

  Sure enough, he left me for a twenty-one-year-old office nurse. Blonde. Big knockers. The night of the big breakup, Olivia and Bonita and I shared a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to steady my resolve to keep living. Though Bonita had later survived the death of her husband on the strength of prayer and by overworking, to help me through my heartbreak that night she had broken with her strict hold on morality to get perfectly drunk with Olivia and me, and we had officially formed the “Death to Blondes” sisterhood. Though technically Olivia was about as blond as one could be, the Black Jack helped us overlook that in her case. Now, well after the fact, I wondered if the youth-hungry doctor had left his blond nurse for still another twenty-one-year-old now that the nurse would be four years shy of the dreaded thirty, or if she had submitted to his knife and laser.

  Water under the bridge, I told myself, but I found myself looking again at my crow’s-feet and laugh lines. The Retin-A definitely wasn’t winding back the clock.

  And now, in the eyes of the lawyers and staff of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, as well as the legal community of Sarasota, I had been dumped not once but twice f
or a younger woman.

  Given that public interpretation, whenever my path and Angela’s crossed, everyone stopped to watch, waiting to see if I would do the hissy-fit thing. No way. It was my idea to bring Newly and Angela together. I was cool with Angela. Totally.

  To show how cool I was with the situation, I invited Angela to go with me to Atlanta on my trip at long last to scout out Dr. Jamieson in living color as our expert witness in defending Dr. Randolph in the Jason Goodacre (née the veggie baby) case, officially relieving Newly of that travel task, though he repeatedly assured me he would still go with me. No, I said to Newly, that would not be fair to Angela.

  However, when I invited Angela to go with me instead of Newly, she seemed to view this as some kind of trap. Judging from the expression on her face, she must have thought I planned to get her far away from the protective eyes of her fellow associates and murder her.

  “If you want to be a trial attorney, you’re going to have to develop a better poker face,” I said, and reissued the invitation with a logical, legal explanation that loosely translated into “We need to gang up on Dr. Jamieson to see if he can take the pressure of a cross-examination.” Angela and I would go a few rounds in a pretend deposition, playing good lawyer/bad lawyer, to see how the doc handled himself under the pressure of intense questioning.

  Conveniently, I left out that the real reason she needed to go with me was because I needed her to guide me through the tube, the concourse, the hordes of people, the luggage claim, and the cab ride in the Valium-and-vodka haze I knew from experience I would be in by the time we landed in Atlanta.

  Still looking anxious, Angela made the usual lawyer excuses, plus she threw in Jackson’s antitrust appellate brief and the care of little Crosby.

  “Not even two days. Thirty hours. That’s all I’m asking.”

  “But Jackson’s brief—I need to edit it and—”

  “Bring the damn brief. Edit on the plane,” I said, thinking that any lawyer who couldn’t simultaneously bill travel time to one client and preparation of a brief to another—a practice known technically as double billing and as common as gray suits in the profession—wouldn’t make partner. “Olivia will babysit Crosby.”

  Of course Angela eventually, though warily, agreed. Olivia had assured Angela that she would keep Crosby, leaving Newly and Johnny Winter, the evil ferret, the run of Angela’s apartment for a couple of nights.

  Chapter 23

  If there is a cab driver in Atlanta who speaks English, I’ve yet to encounter him.

  The one who Angela had flagged down spoke a language I did not recognize, and he smelled of tuna and marijuana, but he grinned at me and winked at Angela as he lifted our luggage into the cab. I slumped in the back, woozy with the stress of walking through hundreds of strangers, many of whom no doubt were carrying spores of a new and particularly virulent strain of Ebola or some similar deadly virus, my heart pounding and my hands sweating. Angela, using a combination of talking loudly and pointing at Emory on the napkin-size map of Atlanta she’d snaked from a car rental booth, persuaded the cabby to deliver us to Emory Medical Center. Dr. Jamieson was expecting us there in about an hour.

  Naturally, I would have preferred a shower, a nap, and a stiff belt of espresso before meeting the doctor, though, as Angela repeatedly and rather annoyingly kept pointing out, the flight from Sarasota to Atlanta was only two hours long and it wasn’t as if we were flying to Africa. We settled for a good hand-washing in an Emory café bathroom, plus copious espresso.

  More or less, I was functional when we tapped on Dr. Jamieson’s faculty office door at the appointed time.

  Please don’t let him be ugly or fat, or stutter, I prayed to the cosmic forces. Juries tend to best believe tall, thin, good-looking men who speak like Dan Rather, this according to jury studies by the Institute of Something Ostentatious that had charged us over a hundred dollars for software that told the lawyers in the firm of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley such things. Any attorney at the firm could have told anyone that for free.

  The man who opened the door made me hold my breath in fear he was a stress-overload hallucination.

  He looked like Robert Redford.

  Angela fluffed her hair and smiled.

  When Dr. Redford shook my hand and his hand was real, and firm, and warm, I exhaled. For the first time since Jackson had dumped the veggie baby case on my desk, I thought I had a chance at winning the sucker.

  Angela had insisted we stay with her brother Ronny, the computer genius who had filched computer data for his baby sister. But Ronny lived in one of those hell’s little ten acres somewhere in the next county over from Atlanta, and his general standards of household cleanliness were unknown to me, so staying with him was wholly out of the question. Instead of our staying with him, I convinced Angela that he should stay with us at the Ritz-Carlton in Atlanta. That was not a tough sell. The real tough sell would be explaining the third hotel room on the bill to Henry, guardian of the liability insurance company’s expenses, but if Henry denied reimbursement I was sure the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley executive committee would pick up the tab. I certainly wasn’t going to.

  And, of course, if one stayed at the Ritz, then one should eat there too. On the insurance company’s tab, of course. So, there we were: Dr. Jamieson, the Robert Redford look-alike, who was drawing stares; Ronny, who had orange hair and thick glasses and wore high-heeled cowboy boots that made him substantially taller than me, drawing a few stares of his own; and Angela and me, slinky in our little black dresses and drawing a few stares too. Quite the foursome, dining out at the Ritz. Dr. Jamieson was not married, as it turned out, though I doubted he spent many Saturday nights alone, and Angela and I had already done the first round of quiz, quiz, flirt, flirt, on him, his qualifications, his research, his articles, his medical practice. We knew he could wow a jury. Tomorrow we would do the hard-core questions and answers on the actual case. Tonight was purely for the pleasure of eating expensive food in a fine restaurant with a good-looking man and having somebody else pay for it all.

  Angela and Ronny had their heads together, playing catch-up and remember-when and talking about people with names straight out of Tennessee Williams. Dr. Redford, a.k.a. Dr. Jamieson, and I were somewhat ignoring them, intent as we were on flirting with each other.

  About the time Dr. Jamieson was tilted just right to look down my little black dress, Ronny finished his monologue on the Lumberton High School graduating class of whatever and leaned into me, eyeing the pale skin at the top of my black silk. “You and Angie need to come out tomorrow and see my new house. It’s a beaut. Brick, two stories, got a porch all the way around it.”

  Angela explained to Ronny that we had tickets for the late-afternoon commuter special back to Sarasota tomorrow and would need to spend the day with Dr. Jamieson, but maybe she and I could come visit another time. I nodded, studying the man’s orange hair, which he wore in a kind of retro Afro frizz, and I thought he would be good-looking with normal hair and a better pair of eyeglass frames. What gene pool did they come from where orange frizzy hair was their lot? And why had neither of them thought to do anything about it?

  Angela steered the conversation back to one of Ronny’s old girlfriends, whom apparently Angela had not liked much, and I lost interest and returned my full attention to Dr. Jamieson, or William, as he had invited us to call him.

  Flipping my hair and tilting my chin, I continued flirting with William while sharing a second bottle of truly awesome wine, eating an elegant, wholly vegetarian Middle Eastern meal and pretending to discuss CMV and Jason Goodacre.

  There was a God—Delvon was right—and I was in high form, happy. With the airport-return trauma many hours away, I was troubled only by the vague question of whether, now that I was a single, unattached girl again, it would be too slutty to go to bed with my expert witness should William press his advantage, which I was certain he would.

  Then Dr. Redford pushed the down-you-go button on the rolle
r coaster and said, “You know what the two big problems with your case really are, don’t you?”

  Yeah, I thought, I have an arrogant prick for a client and at trial I’ll have Mr. and Mrs. Good-Parents sitting at the plaintiffs’ table with a cooing child whose head won’t stay still unless his mother holds it.

  “No,” I cooed myself. “Please tell me.”

  “From the medical records you’ve shown me, you can’t prove Mrs. Goodacre had CMV during her pregnancy. After the child was born, she was tested and came up with a positive on the CMV. But she could have had the infection when she was a child and would have tested positive. To hurt the fetus, the infection must be active during the pregnancy.”

  “Really,” I murmured. Too buzzed on the expensive wine and the square jaw and perfect blue eyes of this man next to me to care, or absorb, his sentence of doom to my existing defense.

  “Too bad she didn’t have amniocentesis. Take a clear sample, four to six weeks after the symptoms, and CMV can be identified by a polymerase chain reaction in the amniotic fluid.”

  Oooh, I thought, talk dirty to me.

  “The other problem you have is that even if you could prove that the mother had a primary CMV infection during the pregnancy, the fetal monitor strips showed fetal distress and oxygen deprivation. That could have added to the child’s condition. It probably didn’t cause the initial cerebral palsy or mental retardation if she really did have a primary CMV infection in the first or second trimester, but it most certainly could have made it worse. In fact, the birth trauma could have caused the Horner’s syndrome.”