Skinny-dipping (24 page)

Epilogue

I have a nearly
endless capacity for driving those around me crazy.

That's why Ashton and Angela were both sitting at the counsel's table, twirling their respective poufs of hair and chewing their lips and telling me how to pick a jury. Only the oddly pleasant Dr. Randolph, acting as if his unintentional Jimsonweed hallucinogenic trip to the ER had been a lobotomy of sorts, sat sedately while I let Stephen LaBlanc alienate the jury pool with his kind of Miami big-shot penetrating and insulting questions. Of the thirty people now sitting in front of Stephen as he talked down, through his nose, to them, prying into their personal beliefs about just about everything but oral sex, some six of them would eventually become the jury in
Goodacre versus Randolph
.

Me, I was cool. So cool that Angela had been poking at me with her finger and whispering in my ear, and jotting me little notes about things I should ask the prospective jury members. So cool that Ashton was Mr. Antsy-Pants and kept leaning over Angela to hiss little suggestions at me.

Me, I was so cool that even the migraine crashing against my skull didn't rattle me. I just pulled out my bottle of Dr. Trusdale's last prescription for Percocet and took one.

Angela sucked in her breath. A bit self-righteous, if you ask me, for somebody living in sin with a man still technically married, and somebody who had induced her brother to commit a computer crime and steal valuable secrets from his own employer.

“For heaven's sake, Angela,” I said, ever the Zen master of mentors, “it's just voir dire.”

Angela tsked-tsked another minute. But Ashton stuck out his hand. “Got one for me?”

I popped out a pill for him.

Then Dr. Randolph eyed me suggestively.

“You want one too?” What I started to say was “Write your own prescription,” but, then, sharing is the minimum standard for civilized behavior, so I rolled out a pill for the now transformed and weirdly affable doctor.

Angela tsked again.

Me, I was totally cool with voir dire, which is a fancy lawyer phrase for a session to ask the pool of perspective jurors (known in fancy lawyer talk as voirdiremen) questions designed to help a lawyer see into their souls and pick the ones who would naturally resolve any conflicts in that attorney's favor.

See, my thought was simple: I didn't care who was on my jury, because I was going to win.

After all, I had Mrs. Goodacre's irate sister cooling her heels in the Holiday Inn on Lido, just champing to get before the jury and impeach her sister by spilling the whole thing about Baby Sister stealing her insurance card, going to Boise, and finding out through amniocentesis and ultrasounds that the baby she was carrying had CMV birth defects.

This same sister, when Angela and I had appeared at her door in Idaho, had been more than willing to spill it all once she found out that her own baby sister had turned down a $2 million settlement offer and had not even mentioned to her, the big sister, that she even had this lawsuit going. Big Sister's view was obviously that a fair split should have been envisioned by Little Sister, whose fraudulent ways apparently included keeping her own sister's hand out of the cookie jar. Then, of course, there was the small matter of the big sister's potential role in defrauding her insurance company, which, of course, Angela and I were more than willing to straighten out for her once we were assured of her testimony— testimony that would not only doom the formerly saintlike Mrs. Goodacre but subject her and her dapper little attorney to some interesting sanctions for defrauding the court.

Big Sister, née Nell Bazinskyson, was most indignant at being presumptively cut out of the Jason Goodacre litigation lottery pie. Calling Baby Sister a bitch and a cheat, among other things, Big Sister agreed to be our surprise witness, used to impeach Mrs. Goodacre's testimony, who we could sneak in without listing her on the pretrial witness list because Angela had found an exception to the rules against “trial by ambush” that allowed us to do just that. Dr. Jamieson, my expert witness, had seen the light indeed once he was confronted with the amnio and ultrasound reports, which Big Sister had been kind enough to get for us from the Boise clinic, because, after all, at least in the eyes of the Boise clinic, these were
her
patient records and there were no patient-client privilege issues that required involving Mrs. Goodacre or her able though jackassy attorney, Mr. LaBlanc. Dr. Jamieson, confronted with the irrevocable evidence that the fetus already showed damage in the ultrasound and that the amnio established a primary CMV infection during Mrs. Goodacre's pregnancy, had backed off his concurrent-cause theory in a hurry.

In short, migraine or not, I had an ambush witness, the plaintiff's own big sister, who would establish that the good-mother was a lying, cheating fraud who knew by her fifth month that the child she carried had birth defects, defects caused not as she now claimed by any act of Dr. Randolph but because of an altogether common virus.

I had an expert witness who looked like Robert Redford, had impeccable credentials, and could not be impeached with prior, inconsistent testimony or a history of testifying for filthy lucre. He had been added to the witness list and had been deposed by Stephen, who didn't ask any questions about the amnio or the ultrasounds, no doubt because he was clueless about them, or he assumed I was clueless.

Angela had been awarded the second chair position at trial because she had the good luck of having a computer guru brother, who had hacked into the MIB records in the first place. In sulky contrast, Ashton was being punished by being assigned the second, second chair and working for free as his act of contrition because his crazy girlfriend had tried not once but twice to kill Dr. Randolph, our client. Despite my antsy cocounsel, I was so cool during voir dire because it simply didn't matter who in the jury pool actually ended up on my jury.

I could win this case with Mrs. Goodacre's own family tree on the jury.

So I didn't have any questions to ask of the prospective jurors, in contrast to Stephen, who was now prying into their beliefs on when the soul entered a fetus.

While Stephen prattled on with his meddlesome quest, I checked my watch. Nearly noon. I eyed Angela and pointed at my watch.

One of us had to sprint to my house at the lunch break and take Bearess for her noontime frolic about the neighborhood.

See, in the way of the miracles, Delvon's showing up and Johnny Winter's turning into a skunk in the nick of time were not the only claims to genuine miraculous events.

Bearess, who had jumped into the dark waters of Tampa Bay after Jennifer, survived. A fisherman out at dawn had spotted a dog paddling in a circle and had pulled her into his boat. Bless his heart, he had taken the dog, which had suffered a broken leg, some broken ribs, and assorted other injuries, straight to his own vet, who had tended her and then traced her rabies tag back to Jennifer. When the vet realized what she had—by then the story of Jennifer and her dog's diving off the Sunshine Skyway had been blasted off every Bay-area radio station and cable news channel and got a page-one mention in the
Sarasota Herald-Tribune
—she contacted me, as I was prominently mentioned in the story as an eyewitness who had tried to save the dog and had “ties” to Jennifer. Naturally, I claimed the dog. Though the story leaked out, and various and sundry goodhearted people came forth to offer to adopt Bearess, whose noble nature and physical strength could never be questioned, I paid the bills, tipped the fisherman and the vet both, and brought Bearess home.

She was a distraught and emotionally wounded beast.

Angela came home, a distraught and emotionally wounded woman, having buried Crosby under the pecan trees with the “others,” who as it turns out included a grandparent and a cousin and a host of other dogs and one billy goat named Earl Gray.

I took both of the wounded, heart-weary females into my home, and Newly too for a couple of nights, though he tiptoed into my bedroom not once, but twice, and acted hurt when I verbally chastised him and sent him back to Angela. I nursed Angela and Bearess the best I could, which is to say I listened a lot, made them do wind sprints with me until they were too tired to cry, and fed them both copious amounts of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, which, I might add, had the unpleasant side effect of making Bear-ess throw up in equally copious amounts. But Johnny Winter, the now hero ferret, ate a whole carton with no ill effects at all. Needless to say, he has the run of the house now. I mean—what the heck?— Brock and I can pick out new secondhand couches and chairs every few months, and with the windows open during the days, it's not so bad.

During all this, Delvon, who was still technically on the lam, stayed at Angela's and out of the watchful and still suspicious eyes of Sam, the detective, who had indeed yelled at me for going home and almost getting killed, but he more than made up for it in the usual way. While Sam was a bit cop-like about Delvon, the John the Baptist look-alike, at least Sam didn't ask too many questions, and eventually Delvon, who can't physically stand to be outside the state of Georgia for too long a period of time, headed up to my apple orchard in north Georgia to chill for a while.

Not long after Delvon settled into the apple orchard, Bearess and Angela fell in love with each other, just as Bearess and I had fallen in love with each other, and the only fair thing was a joint-custody arrangement. We take turns caring for the dog, though, having a yard, I get dibs on keeping her most of the time.

Newly is whipping up a king-size class-action suit against nine different HMOs for violation of the prompt-pay provisions, and if the HMOs don't have him killed, he'll probably end up famous and the subject of a movie. Did I mention he stole the pink tap pants when he moved out of my house? I assume he will marry Angela if he doesn't woo me back from Sam.

Sam remains the steadfast, noncommunicative but ardent lover he was the first week. Frankly, I still don't know if he is a good detective or not, but he takes his turn walking Bearess when Angela and I are too tied up to do so. Eventually, Sam, I figure, will have to break down and talk to me, really talk to me, or I will just go back to Newly after he and Angela get divorced.

The mystery of who Sam really is remains, but it is not the only remaining mystery. Jennifer's body was never found. The HMO she had been defrauding in hundred-dollar bites sent its hounds from hell and tracked some of the waylaid checks to a bank in the Caymans. But by the time the HMO had all its little legal ducks in a row to claim the proceeds in the account, someone beat them to it. The money was gone—poof. Withdrawn well after the date of Jennifer's skinny-dip dive off the Skyway.

The accepted theory espoused in the newspapers and by the official spokespersons for the various law enforcement agencies involved was that Jennifer had an accomplice. In fact, Ashton was a key suspect, but after a sustained period of police harassment he skated clear.

My theory is different. Me, I remembered Jennifer's dive from the bridge. The way Jennifer's toes bounced and pointed, her hands in a serene triangle in front of her face, the lovely arch of her body in the jackknife formation of a high dive as she went out and over and down out of my sight. See, I think she lived, and some fisherman somewhere picked her up, dressed only in her midnight blue panties, and she and the fisherman are living somewhere in the Caribbean, no doubt happy enough until the stolen HMO money runs out.

Or else Ashton really did snake the money out of the Cayman bank.

I'll have to figure this out later, just as Angela and I will eventually have to decide who gets custody of Bearess and Newly.

Who knows?

What I know right now is this: I'm going to stomp all over Stephen LaBlanc in
Goodacre versus Randolph
.

Let the show begin.

Here's a Sneak Preview of
Wildcat Wine
by Claire Matturro

Available in hardcover from
William Morrow
An Imprint
of HarperCollins
Publishers

Chapter 1

It's hard being Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary.

And if I didn't know that already, Bonita, my legal secretary supreme and secondary therapist, kept reminding me.

“Carita,”
she said, shaking her head and handing me the pink highlighter at my hyperventilated request so that I could mark another obscure legal point I needed to memorize for my upcoming appellate argument. “You make this so much more difficult than it needs to be.”

So spank me, I'm a lawyer, and complicating things at a high hourly rate is my specialty.

I ignored Bonita's implied protest and recited a choice quote I had just underlined in pink, and Bonita typed it into my laptop for future reference. We were both sitting on my shiny terrazzo floor on pure-cotton yoga mats. I was only on the seventh legal opinion of questionable value for my argument, busily color-coding impressive language from jurists I hoped to twist to the benefit of my client, a charlatan to be sure, but not without his charm and definitely with the liability policy that would pay me.

Thinking of how much work I still had to do made me gulp air and jump up to wash my hands and face.

“I wouldn't be you,” Bonita said, sighing as I plopped down again beside her. This from a widow with five accident-prone children.

While I reached for the yellow highligher, Benicio, Bonita's teenage son who insisted that we call him Benny, pounded his size-twelve boots into the kitchen, where in one gulp he consumed about three dollars' worth of my GMO-free, hormone-free, fat-free organic milk—slogan: “Our Cows Aren't on Drugs.” He was cutting my grass, apparently at about a square foot per quart of milk, and relentlessly bitching that I didn't have any real peanut butter.

“This soy peanut butter sucks,” he said, eating a spoonful straight from the jar. “Positively sucks,” Benny reiterated, as if somehow I had managed to miss his point.

“Please don't talk like that to Lilly,” Bonita said, her voice low and sweet.

“But this soy stuff is so gross.”

Before we finessed the soy peanut butter debate further, Bearess, my one-hundred-pound rottweiler that I inherited from a dingbat mass-murderer wannabe, lifted her head and growled at the front door.

“Doorbell,” I said, stifling the urge to jump up and scream that everybody had to get out and leave me alone with my hearing transcripts, my depositions, my photocopied legal opinions, and my multi-colored highlighters.

“I didn't hear a doorbell,” Benny said.

Bearess growled again and rose from her organic cedar-chip dog bed, which she drags around the house to follow the rotating patches of sunlight through the windows and which cost me not much less than tuition at my first community college on my seven-year quest for a law degree. The dog advanced on the front door, even as the bell rang.

“Told you,” I said, pulling myself away from the thousands of sheets of paper that I would boil down into a convincing appellate argument to save my client, a pet psychic/alien-abductee counselor.

Edgy with visions of having a judge in a black robe smite me from behind the appellate bench, I opened the door without peeking, as it was the middle of a bright afternoon and having a large celebrity rottweiler vastly reduced the fear of home invasions. Besides, this was Southgate, a Sarasota neighborhood with safe, middle-class streets. I lived on Tulip Street and one didn't have home invasions on Tulip Street.

“Lilly Belle, my old sweetheart,” bellowed a long-haired man in cutoffs, standing barefoot in my doorway. He was built like a middleweight boxer with big, big hands and a face that looked like he had spent about a hundred years in the bright sub-tropical sunshine. His T-shirt was a crudely painted white dove flitting among red opium poppies—my brother Delvon's handiwork.

“Farmer Dave,” I said, and Bearess stopped growling and stuck her big black-and-tan mug in between us until Dave petted her. Then I let him hug me, biting back my twenty questions and sniffing him, primeval and patchouli.

“Why aren't you at my apple orchard?” I gave in to the primary question. Dave was the caretaker of my 180-acre heavily mortgaged apple orchard in north Georgia, as well as my mad-hatter brother Delvon's best friend.

“ ‘On the road again,' ” he sang out in a decent mimic of Willie Nelson's theme song. Willie is Farmer Dave's secondary god, next to illegalities of the nonviolent persuasion. Willie worship marginally explained the two pigtails Farmer Dave's head sprouted and the long, wayward gray beard.

“You left my orchard for a road trip?” I snapped, imagining rats burrowing through my house and barn and the trees withering from neglect, never to bear fruit again, while Dave went on a frolic.

“Ah, Delvon's up there, now that he's done saving your life and the GBI put him out of business. He's taking care of things. Gave me a chance to get out of Georgia for a while.”

Dave grabbed me again, kissed me on the cheek, and was heading for my mouth when the phone rang. As I moved toward it, I pointed to Bonita and said, “Bonita, meet Dave Baggwell. Dave, meet Bonita Hernández de Vasquez. And this is Benicio, her son, my alleged yardman.”

“Benny,” Benicio corrected, glowering at me as I grabbed up the phone.

“You can't leave that mile-long truck out there,” screeched my neighbor, the hall monitor of the universe. “I'll call the police. It's a violation of clause two of the neighborhood covenants.”

“Move to a condo, you blue-haired Nazi,” I screeched back. I hung up the phone with a clunk.

While Bonita and Dave eyed each other cautiously, I looked out the front window. It was a pretty big truck for a U-Haul. The phone started ringing again, no doubt Mrs. Covenant Nazi next door. “What's in the truck?”

“Wine,” Dave answered. “Cases of pure, organic, muscadine Florida wine. Sells for about twenty bucks a bottle.”

“Muscadine wine? From Florida?” I'd grown up eating muscadine grapes off the wild vines back home in the red hills of southwest Georgia, where we called them scuppernongs. But I wasn't aware of any commercial Florida muscadine wineries.

“Man, there's vineyards popping up all over Florida. Got one in east Sarasota, near Myakka River State Park. It's like a new thing, this Florida wine industry, with muscadine grapes. Can't grow them pinot noir and such grapes here, they can't take all this heat and humidity. Ain't tough like us,” Dave puffed, all but pounding on his chest. “This organic stuff beats the cake. Want to try a bottle?”

Well, certainly, I thought, wine ranking up there with coffee on my list of essential liquids. But not when I needed to be preparing for my appellate argument. “Sure, but I can't drink it now. I've got to work.”

“Sweetheart, it's Saturday.”

Yeah, I should have stayed at the office, I thought, listening to the unanswered phone ringing and wondering how much trouble Dave was going to be. “I still have to work,” I said.

“Tonight then, we'll drink a bottle,” he said, and winked. “My old lady's husband's back, so I need to crash here.”

Bonita tsked-tsked, but we ignored her.

“Hey, I can stay the night, can't I?”

“Where'd you get the wine?” Being a lawyer, I'm trained to never actually answer a direct question unless, possibly, it is asked by a judge in a particularly belligerent mood.

“Long story, Lilly Belle.”

Oh, frigging great, I thought, knowing what that meant. At least the phone stopped ringing.

“Benny,” he said, and turned to Benicio. “Hey, man. I know something about you.”

“Yeah?” Benny studied Dave with far less suspicious eyes than I noted his mother was using.

“Yeah. Lilly Belle here,” he said, pointing at me as if Benny might have forgotten who I was, “she sent me that paper you wrote on the jaguarundi cats in Myakka. I've been driving rock-hoppers out of Lakeland, then I got this, ah, special deal on that wine, but before I truck off to sell it, I'd sure like to see if I can't track me a jaguarundi.”

Benny looked at me. “You sent him my paper?” He couldn't hide his pleasure, though in a too-late attempt to show indignation he squinted his eyes after they had popped open in what looked like pride.

“It was a great paper,” Bonita said. “He got an A.” Farmer Dave turned to Bonita, tall, perfectly groomed Bonita, with her chocolate-colored hair smoothed back into a silver barrette. As I watched, Dave took her in more fully, and he smiled, big and full mouthed, making me wonder if he hadn't gotten his teeth capped. “Bonita, yeah, we've talked on the phone, at Lilly's office.” Grin, grin from Dave, his pelvis jutting out in a Mick Jaggar imitation. “Your son's a great writer. Fruit don't fall far from the tree.”

Sure, okay, Bonita's a looker, but flattering her son wasn't going to make her flirt back with a man who had two pigtails and a married girlfriend, no matter how pearly his teeth.

“What's all this got to do with Benny's jaguarundi paper?” I asked. Benny had written a paper for school about the elusive South American wildcats long rumored to be living, in scarce numbers, in Florida, and he had collected enough of the old Florida-cracker accounts to make a convincing case that the long-tailed cats prowled around at Myakka, the cypress-swamp state park in the eastern part of the county. Rich travelers from the 1920s had brought the cats back from South America, planning to domesticate them. When that didn't work, the cats were either turned loose or escaped into the wild lands in the area and reproduced.

“Man, that paper convinced me those cats are out there. Hey, man, I'm a real good tracker. Why don't I leave the truck here and borrow Lilly Belle's car and go check it out? Then tomorrow, at the crack of day, I gotta go, get to Gainesville and sell me some cases of wine there. Them college kids suck up that organic wine. After that, up to Atlanta. Got a bunch of health food stores and fancy-ass wine stores in that town.” He grinned again at Bonita, then turned to me.

“Hey, Lilly Belle, why don't you come with me, like old times, you and me in the woods.” He winked, implying exactly the kind of thing I'd rather Bonita never suspected.

“I can't. Not today. I'm getting ready for an oral argument.”

“What's that?”

“It's an appellate argument.”

“Yeah, oh, sure, like all those high-priced boys did before the Supreme Court so we'd know who our president was gonna be.”

“Precisely. I have twenty minutes to convince a three-judge panel in the appellate court in Lakeland to affirm the summary judgment I won at the trial level for my client, who is a counselor, and one of his patients claimed that his, er, his...therapy fell below the applicable standard of care.” Yeah, the woman who was suing my guy thought she'd been abducted by space aliens, oh, and get this, had the nerve to accuse my client of malpractice, just because he thought for an hourly fee rivaling my own that he could reduce her lingering emotional trauma. This would, no doubt, play good in the rarified air of the appellate court.

“You always were one to plan everything down to a gnat's eyebrows, but what's so hard about a twenty-minute speech you gotta spend all day working on it?”

“Because, while I'm trying to argue my client's position, the judges can, and do, interrupt with questions. They can ask me anything about the case and I absolutely have to know the answers, no matter how obscure the question, and then I have to twist my answers to support the summary judgment I won at the trial level. See, a summary judgment is when the trial judge rules on a case before it goes to the jury, because the facts are not really in dispute and the law is clear, and in my case—”

“Whoa, Lilly Belle. Stop. TMI, babe.”

“ ‘TMI'?” Bonita asked.

“Too much info. Way too much,” Dave said.

“Hey, bud, you made me listen to your entire monologue on how the combustion engine works in an average car, which took hours, days even, and—”

“Belle, I didn't want you helpless, broke down on the side of the road, or taken advantage of by some mechanic thinking girls don't know spit about cars. But, sweetheart, when do you think I might need to know what a summary judgment is?”

“Okay, but you asked. And no, I can't go with you to Myakka. I'm busy. I already told you I'm working. I work for a living. I have clients. I can't run off with you at the drop of a hat just because you show up from out of nowhere.”

“Whoa. Got it, Belle. Got it, okay.” Dave turned to Benicio. “Hey, Benny, you want to come with me to Myakka, see if we can track us a jaguarundi?”

“Cool,” Benny said before Bonita could object. “We can take my Ford Ranger. It's a 1992, but it's only got 170,000 miles on it.”

“You got a Ford with 170,000 miles, and it still runs? You a mechanic or a mojo?” Then Dave eyed Benny closer. “You can't be no sixteen.”

“Almost, and I got a learner's permit, but I've been driving since I was twelve. Lilly taught me. She got me that truck too.”

Yep, and Bonita was still working on forgiving me for both facts.

“Let's go then, son.”

Bonita put a hand on Benny's shoulder. “
No conoces tu aquel hombre
.”

“Yeah, but
I
know him, known him all my life,” I said, overlooking for the moment how much trouble I'd gotten in with Dave when I was fifteen. “He's cool.” That Dave was cool was true, but largely irrelevant from a mother's point of view.

Bonita gave me the same look she'd given me when I bought Benny the truck.

“I'll take care of him, have him back by night,” Dave said.

As Benny reached for his jacket and his keys, Bonita reached for him. “Do not drink or smoke anything.”

“While your momma finishes the don't dos, I'll get my gear and bring it in,” Dave said. “No sense letting it bake in that truck.” A minute later, Dave dropped a worn-out backpack on the floor and handed me a ring of keys. “Hang on to these, will you? I'm always losing 'em. And here's the truck key. Don't lose that, you hear?” And he handed me a single key on a U-Haul plastic key ring.