Bone Valley (21 page)

A diamondback will
rattle before it bites you.

A dog will growl before it bites you.

A cat will hiss before it bites you.

But Mrs. Sherilyn Moody, new widow and prospective murder suspect, determinedly thin and expensively dressed, followed Olivia right in through the back door and into the space outside my own office with a great pretense of graciousness, not a hint of a rattle, growl, or hiss about her. Despite the rain, she was neither damp nor fuzzy haired.

“Olivia,” Sherilyn said, “thank you for escorting me inside.”

“No, you can’t—” I tried to say.

“Oh, it’s all right, Lilly,” Olivia said. “I ran into Sherilyn just a while ago and she wants to explain in person why she and that other guy decided to drop the orange-defamation cases.”

Nope, sorry, but I didn’t think that was the reason at all, and I sputtered, “I can’t talk to you now.”

I had the feeling I was standing naked in a snowstorm and fate had just dumped a bucket of ice cubes on me.

“Oh, Miss Cleary, I am sorry I invited myself here today. But this will only take a second. I want to discuss hiring you. As cocounsel in my—”

Part of my brain said to turn around and run from Sherilyn. But the part of my brain that controls my feet told me to stand pat and hold my ground. And the part of my brain that was heavily influenced by lawyer training told me I could talk my way out of this.

“No,” I said, with great force and conviction in my voice. “I will not discuss anything with you.”

Bonita and Olivia moved toward me, little worried looks on their faces at my apparent rudeness.

Sherilyn said something I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own heartbeat hammering behind my eyeballs.

“Shut up and get out,” I shouted.

The cute blond girl who worked in the mail room across the hallway from my office came out of her cubbyhole and peered around the wall at me.

“As I was saying, Miss Cleary, why I came here today is to discuss my malpractice case, and your role in it, that is, hiring you as cocounsel. My preliminary medical expert is quite certain that the plastic surgeon went too deep with his laser,” Sherilyn said, with just as much force and conviction as I had shouted at her.

“Don’t tell me anything—”

“Of course, Newly Moneta, my current attorney, I believe he is one of your ex-boyfriends, says—”

“Stop, no, NO.”

“Oh, my dear, I didn’t realize you still cared so about the man. Why, just wait until I tell him. If it’s any comfort, he speaks well of you too. Anyway, Newly’s theory is that I can—”

At that, I had flat out had enough of the Moody family, and I launched myself at the surviving Moody, my right fist formed and my arm raised. Only the combination of Bonita literally jumping in front of me and a quick back step on Sherilyn’s part kept her from getting her face smashed in.

But Sherilyn didn’t quit. “Newly’s got an expert all lined up, a Dr. Standfield Morgan, don’t you just love how that name sounds, and here’s a summary of Newly’s trial strategy and his opening statement—”

I took another swing at Sherilyn, but my blow had only glanced off her helmet of hair when Bonita, who is quick on her feet, shoved me back a step even as I swung at Sherilyn. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the cute blond mail-room girl make a run for it, presumably down the hall. Bonita grabbed my arm and held on, tugging on me to make me back up.

Sherilyn turned to Bonita and Olivia, and said, “I’m explaining to Lilly all the sordid details of what that horrid doctor did to me in ruining my face, and what my attorney has planned for trial, as you will surely note.”

Bonita made shushing noises toward Sherilyn, but continued to hold my arms with her own strong hands. I struggled to get out of Bonita’s grip, though I was reluctant to fight with my own secretary, and settled for shouting back at Sherilyn, the devil’s own mistress, “I am not your attorney. I will never be your attorney. Shut up.”

Sherilyn daintily dusted off her linen sheath as if I had thrown mud at her and said, “As I was telling you pursuant to hiring you as cocounsel in my case, what I did after the surgery was—”

I spun toward Sherilyn again, so fiercely that Bonita lost her hold on me, and my fist was ready and aimed when Jackson stepped between Sherilyn and me, and my punch bounced off his stomach, hurting my hand, but apparently not much bothering him.

As I struck the founding and controlling partner of the law firm in his iron gut, a chorus of gasps rose from the hallway.

But I didn’t look at the rubberneckers. I looked at Jackson, standing as tall and strong and fierce as his namesake at First Bull Run, when General Bee’s next-to-last words were, “There stands General Jackson, like a stone wall.”

I dropped my fist. I inhaled. He had a stomach like a damn stone wall. I rubbed my sore hand against the soft cotton of my shirt, but that did nothing to take the sting out of it.

“You need to leave now, Mrs. Moody,” Jackson said, in a voice that invited neither rebuttal nor refusal. So saying, he put both hands on her shoulders, forcibly turned her around, and pointed her at the exit. “Here, I’ll let you out the back door. Much closer to the parking lot.”

Mrs. Sherilyn Moody, plaintiff-designate from hell, gathered her poise around her and left.

The cute blond mail clerk hovered within touching distance of Jackson, and I saw her as an angel for fetching him, and made a mental note to see that she got a big Christmas bonus. Even if her interference had meant I’d hit my own mentor.

“I think everybody can leave now,” Jackson said.

Only then did I peer out and see the faces in the small crowd of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley regulars clustering in the hallway. But at Jackson’s words, they quickly broke and scampered back to their offices.

Except for Olivia, who didn’t actually work here anymore, but might as well have.

She slipped past Jackson in his commanding-general persona and put her hand on my other arm.

“All in all, doll, you shouldn’t hit people in the office,” Jackson said. “And you shouldn’t ever try to punch a woman.” Then he gave me a quizzical kind of grin, and added, “Even her.” With that, he stomped off down the hallway.

Suddenly I could see the value of knowing voodoo and made a mental note to return to New Orleans soon and learn the basic curses, as much defensive as offensive, against the Moody virus. For the time being, I shook off both the protective hand of Bonita and the comforting hand of Olivia.

“That bitch was just about to do me out of defending a physician in what will probably be a very lucrative case,” I said.

Bonita renewed her grip and pulled me back into my office. Olivia followed us inside and shut the door.

“Do you need a kava?” Olivia asked me.

No, I needed voodoo or Valium, or both, and quickly. Or an ice bag for my hand. So just how many crunches did Jackson do at the Y to make hitting his stomach like hitting stone?

Instead, I breathed. I closed my eyes. I visualized my peaceful waterfall. Then I opened my eyes and said, “Two, please.”

Olivia riffled in her purse until she found the herbs, and Bonita poured me a glass of water from my triple-filtered water carafe, and I gulped the capsules.

And there, while I waited for Mother Nature’s own weedy little roots to soothe me, I told them what had happened to Mrs. Moody’s face. Then, I explained to Olivia that Henry had promised he would refer the defense of the plastic surgeon to me when Mrs. Moody filed her medical-malpractice suit.

If Sherilyn Moody had succeeded in telling me any of Newly’s trial strategy or her own admissions in the guise of hiring me as her attorney, however fake her attempt to hire me really was, such information would have created a conflict of interest. No matter if I had tried to shout it out, had Sherilyn managed to tell me any of the “secrets” about her case, the rules of ethics would have precluded me from defending the surgeon she would sue. Because I could have used the private and privileged information that she had told me against her in her lawsuit.

“Even if it was a setup? Couldn’t you just explain that to a judge, that it was a trap?” Bonita asked.

“It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, if Jackson and I hadn’t stopped her and she had told me what they call client secrets, I’d never get to defend the case. If I’d entered an appearance on behalf of the plastic surgeon, Mrs. Moody would have filed a motion to have me disqualified, and any judge in this circuit would have granted it.”

If it hadn’t been my ox that had nearly been gored, I would have admired it—it could have been a perfectly executed setup if I hadn’t seen it coming. Then, in a rising fit of pique at Newly, my twice-ex boyfriend, I called him. He came on his private line with his usual big, eager voice.

“Newly, you jerk,” I said.

“Lilly? Is that you?”

“Why in hell’s bells did you tell Sherilyn Moody I’d be defending that doctor who messed up her face?”

“Oh, that. I got the name of the doctor’s liability insurer in a…er, a kind of, er…prediscovery. When I saw it was Henry’s company, I knew Henry’d turn the case over to you. He always gives you the best cases. I warned Sherilyn that you’d be tough. You always have a trick up your sleeve.”

“When was this? That you told Mrs. Moody I’d probably be the defense attorney?”

“Ah, let’s see, a month, maybe, three weeks ago?”

“Well, she paid me a visit, tried to hire me as cocounsel and tell me all about your trial strategy.”

“Whoo, hon. You know what that means?”

“She didn’t tell me anything confidential. I stopped her in time. But I want to know this—when did you start, you know, actually preparing a case?”

“Hon, I hadn’t done a thing on that case except get her to sign a contingency-fee contract.”

“Well, get ready,
‘hon,’
because I’m going to be on the other side, and dressed for bear, when that sucker hits the circuit-court docket,” I shouted in his ear, and hung up.

When I issued forth with another round of cursing the dead and the living Moodys, Olivia and Bonita tried to quiet me. “You don’t understand. M. David played the same trick on me to get Jackson out of a case,” I said. “Only he pulled it off.”

“Uh-oh,” Olivia said, and I saw a glimmer of remembering. But it was before Bonita’s time, and she frowned in puzzlement at me, while patting my arm and making those soft cooing sounds I’d heard her use on Carmen.

Maybe Bonita would stop making that noise if I just told her the story. Painfully, I explained that during my first year at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, Jackson Smith had been retained to defend a corporation in what was going to be a long, nasty lawsuit, the kind of lawsuit that defense firms love because, win or lose, it would not only bring the firm publicity, but net the law firm sizable legal fees. What we called the “money-tap” kind of lawsuit.

In his usual style, Jackson had proved to be a formidable foe for the plaintiff. At that stage of my career, i.e., right out of law school, I was floundering, stuck doing workers compensation and everyone’s legal research. Overworked and underappreciated, I had not followed Jackson’s case closely.

“That’s when you met M. David,” Olivia said. “I remember. I was there at one of those awful formal fund-raisers, and he zeroed right in on you. You were so pretty.”

Letting the past tense in connection with
pretty
slide by for the moment, I nodded, remembering against my will how I’d been immediately smitten with M. David. I mean, okay, spank me for being that easily seduced, but M. David was a very handsome and rich man, he had sought me out, and he had courted me with a great deal of finesse that was wholly foreign to me at that point in my life—I mean, come on, my only prior lover had been Farmer Dave, a pot farmer and felon, the very same man now living with a Grand Canyon burro in my apple orchard in north Georgia. Farmer Dave had some sterling qualities, but finesse and elegance were not among them.

So, yeah, I was an easy target for M. David.

He’d romanced me with such grace I had managed to overlook the fact that he had a wife. Certainly, as I later learned, he had a history of overlooking that fact.

“He promised he would love me forever,” I said, hearing a catch in my voice and stopping it, right then. I’d spent too many years hating him to let that lost-love thing make my voice quiver like a teenage girl’s.

“Then, one night he told me he wanted to hire me, since he thought he might be caught in some of the fallout from the lawsuit. I was thrilled. Stupid me, I thought Jackson and the firm would think I was this big rainmaker to bring in M. David as a client. So, yeah, I agreed on the spot to represent him.”

I paused, collected myself, and said, “So, after he hired me, M. David told me a collection of ‘insider information’ about the corporation that was suing Jackson’s client. All relative to Jackson’s case, but I was too”—what? Brain-dead with young love was about the best description—“distracted to know how important the information was. I didn’t even have a clue that M. David was a silent partner in the corporation suing Jackson’s client. I thought he was an innocent bystander, at worst, a third party.”

I looked up at Bonita in time to see the lightbulb of understanding flash across her face. To her credit, she quickly regained her neutral, calm expression, and didn’t chastise me for having been stupid, or involved with a married man, which I guessed were redundancies, and she let me finish my story.

“See, like with what Sherilyn just tried to do, once M. David revealed the insider secrets to me, this disqualified Jackson from the case under the same conflict-of-interest ethics rules. Because what one lawyer in a firm knows is imputed to all members. So it was the same as if M. David had told client secrets straight to Jackson himself,” I said. “Plus, M. David promised to spin it so that it looked like I had seduced him with the very intent of prying secrets out of him, and that Jackson had put me up to it.”

Bonita gasped. “No one would believe that of Jackson. That he would…prostitute you like that.”

It stung for a moment that she hadn’t said, “No one would believe that of you.”