Skinny-dipping (13 page)

Chapter 19

I had pulled my
duplicate set of Dr. Trusdale's files out of private storage, taken them to my office, and had been studying the papers again, trying to figure out what there might be in that file that could connect him, me, and Dr. Randolph.

Nobody tried to harm me as I read the fine print on a lot of paper, but my head rocked with the fact that someone had gone through two of my files, and not incidentally that the client attached to one of those files was dead and the other had been shot at by someone hiding in a bougainvillea jungle.

Was there something in those files worth killing over?

When I'd read tiny print until I couldn't focus anymore, I buzzed Angela, explained the situation to her, as if she hadn't stayed fully informed via the associate rumor mill, and set her to the task of finding some connection in the files.

An hour later she came back in and said, “You and Henry are the only connections that appear in those files.”

Damn impressive. It had taken me days to come up with that. But an hour didn't give her time to study the huge vat of Dr. Randolph's files.

“Look deeper,” I said.

“There is one other connection. Outside the files, I mean.”

“Yes?”

“Both Dr. Trusdale and Dr. Randolph were part of a doctor group that's trying to buy this land down south and put up a medical arts building. They've been advocating before the county planning board.”

I narrowed my eyes, frowned. “How do you know that?”

“Olivia told me.”

“Olivia?”

“Sure. She's got that scrub jay thing, you know. And she's babysitting Crosby now, during the day, while I'm at work. Poor little fella is too frail to stay by himself now, and we, Olivia and I, talk.”

Like Olivia and I used to talk. In the old days. When I had the time and the temperament. When Olivia had been like a mother. Like she was now with Angela.

I looked at Angela with a sudden understanding of her—lonely, overworked, anxious, out of her league, far from home, looking for an anchor.

Just as I had been eight years ago.

Except I'd had gorgeous hair, not an orange mop. I studied Angela carefully, perhaps for the first time, and registered her face. I mean, who noticed she had a nice nose, two perfectly fine green eyes, and a rosebud mouth that just needed more color. True, her eyelashes and eyebrows were pale to near invisibility, but that's why God made Maybelline.

“Got a couple of minutes?” I meant a couple of hours, but no young associate will admit to a partner that he or she has a spare hour, let alone two.

Angela nodded, but I could tell she was wary.

One frantic phone call later, Angela and I spun into a baroque hair salon with coveys of smartly dressed young men and women with individual customer rooms that was about as close to a French bordello as I was likely to get. We were there, over Angela's multifaceted excuses and protestations, for a color job with Brock the expert and a quickie with the salon's makeup man. Angela was going to be transformed into an auburn-haired beauty. My treat. After all, I maintained a tab with Brock, tithing over to him each month the cost of my own gorgeous hair and sanity brought about by his therapeutic listening skills and sage advice (summed up: “Screw 'em all but six”), not to mention the divine way he dressed. I had learned to dress from this man, and that, I noted, glancing at Angela's definitely not natural-fiber dress, one that fairly screamed sale rack, was something else Brock could do for my little orange-haired mouse.

“But my hair's always been this color,” she protested.

“All the more reason to change it, sugar,” Brock purred, as he rolled his eyes at me behind Angela's head and began pulling out bottles and tubes and things.

While Brock worked his magic and his charm, I wondered if Olivia would kill a human to save the scrub jays.

Once Angela's hair was too doused with wet, perfumy gels to allow her to leap from Brock's chair, I excused myself. I drove to Olivia's house and was glad when she invited me in. She had a playpen in the middle of the living room, filled with blankets and pillows and dog toys, and in one corner of it curled Crosby, the ancient and going-downhill little dog.

“Is he going to make it?” I asked.

“No. None of us are ‘going to make it,' are we?” she said, smiling sadly to deflect the words.

“I mean, will he make it until Christmas? So Angela can take him home and bury him under the pecan trees. With the others.” Christmas was the only time the law firm of Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley shut down for four days, four
paid
holiday days off, with an uncharacteristic generosity in granting leave time before or after those four days. Nobody did any work that close to Christmas anyway. All this Olivia knew, of course. I repeated, “Will Crosby make it until then?”

“Doubt it. He's pretty frail.”

We leaned over the playpen, and the little dog opened his eyes and took about half an hour to stand up on wobbly legs and come over to us, where we petted and oohed and aahed, and he licked us both once, wagged his tail, and wobbled back to his corner and folded up into a knot of gray fur and put his head down.

“Maybe I can ask the executive committee to give Angela a compassionate leave. Kind of an open-ended one that she can take when she needs to.” The executive committee was the big three—Jackson, Fred, and Ashton. Compassionate leave meant Angela would get paid and nobody would hold it against her or think she didn't have enough work to do. In contrast, a vacation would be without pay, as she'd taken her week in May to participate in a multigenerational gaggle of kinfolk at some Mississippi river town. The partners also perceived any vacation longer than a three-day weekend to mean that the associate did not have enough work and was not serious about a career with Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley.

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.