Skinny-dipping (5 page)

He offered his plump little hand, which I shook and held tightly for a moment past the ordinary convention, as if we were old friends.

In a way we were. We'd been through a lot of cases together, the worst being the hysterectomy on the pregnant woman.

“Henry, please have a seat,” I said and pointed to his fruit plate and his iced coffee. He'd probably hit the Dairy Queen on the way back to his office, but at least that wouldn't be on my conscience.

“We have a problem,” I said, with no smile, “but you know that.”

“Yes. I read about Dr. Trusdale in the morning paper. Learn anything more about it?”

Oh, yes, thanks to Newly and the exponentially expanding rumor mill.

“That the good doctor was smoking a marijuana joint at the time he suffered a seizure and collapsed.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Henry said.

I let that sink in while I wiped off a grape with my napkin and ate it, then sipped my coffee.

Henry is a nice guy, generally neat and careful, and he'd been promoted by the insurance company from his early days largely because he was there and he was nice, but he was way too easy to manipulate for a claims adjuster. Because of that he had now gone as far as he would go with his company, and he knew it but had the serenity to accept the things he couldn't change. Or else he was on Prozac.

“We'll have to settle. Right away. Won't we?” Henry took a bite of his banana muffin, eyeing the fruit as if he wasn't sure what a kiwi was.

“I'll need your authority to go to the policy limits if I have to do so to settle. Now, before the marijuana is common knowledge,” I said, hearing the clock ticking. “Before the bum-knee guy's attorney hears about the pot. For all we know, it'll be in the paper tomorrow. Today is my window of opportunity.”

“I'll have to ask my boss on the policy limits.”

“Henry, I don't have time. We're racing the rumor mill here.”

I popped another grape in my mouth and waited for Henry to capitulate.

“All right,” he said.

“Here.” I shoved a sheet of paper at him. “I need your signature on this authorization to go to policy limits.” Bonita had already notarized it. All right, I know you're supposed to wait until the person signs before you notarize things, but time was of the essence.

Whether he noticed this breach or not, Henry signed the authorization and I shoved my Styrofoam container of fruit at him. “Thanks. Take this one too—I've got to get to the bum-knee guy's attorney before he hears about the pot.”

“Aw, Lilly, aw, could you, I mean, would you... that is, eh, can you... will you . . . ?”

Overadrenalinized and cranky with anxiety, I snapped, “Pick a verb, Henry.”

“Will you ask Bonita to join me for lunch? Please?”

From inside the doorway, I studied Henry and softened when I saw his naturally pink face had turned a deep red and his Paul Newman blue eyes were downcast with shyness. So, he was smitten. I smiled. “Sure, Henry. I'm sure she'd like that.”

I walked back to my office, sent Bonita off to join Henry, and punched in my own telephone numbers to call the bum-knee guy's attorney.

As Bonita nibbled fruit with Henry in the conference room, I hurried my opposing counsel into a hasty settlement conference. Fortunately for me, the bum-knee guy's attorney hadn't heard about the pot yet, and I said a prayer of thanks to God, Buddha, the cosmic forces, the blue god, and the angels of both light and darkness.

Two hours of bickering later, my stomach churning, with nothing in it to digest except two grapes and itself, I had a signed preliminary settlement agreement. It was higher than it would have been if I hadn't known about the marijuana, but lower than the policy limits. Henry should be happy.

Too bad I couldn't be there when the bum-knee guy and his attorney heard about the toxic marijuana and realized they had settled for half of what I would have offered.

When I got back to my office, I found Bonita back at her desk and Olivia, the wife of the second key partner, Fred O'Leary, waiting for me. “Won't take but a second,” Olivia said, holding up a form letter and some petitions. “Bastards trying to put up a medical arts building down in Laurel, next to Oscar Scherer Park. Knock out the last great Florida scrub, knock out the last of the scrub jays. You need to write a letter to the planning department and your county commissioner. Then get everybody you see to write one and sign the petition.” Fred O'Leary's wife handed me a stack of paper as we stood over Bonita's desk.

“Didn't we do this before?” I remembered Olivia's intense one-woman campaign to save the scrub jays that nested next to Oscar Scherer State Park. Scrub jays are odd bluebirds that for some reason have no fear of man, much, unfortunately, to their detriment, and will land on you in a curiously touching way. They are beautiful, they are friendly, they are industrious, and they are endangered, and, of course, hardly anyone cared. Except Olivia.

“Yeah, we stopped them in 'eighty-six, way before your time, and then again in 'ninety-eight, but now they're at it again. County bought the land in 'eighty-six to protect it but never did anything to tie it up, no conservation restrictions. So every new county commission can sell it or lease it long-term if they want. Value of the property has skyrocketed like you wouldn't believe. These doctors want a thirty-year lease from the county to develop it. Planning board has to okay it first. Lots of pressure on the members of the planning board, you can imagine. In fact, that doctor of yours is one of the main movers and shakers.”

Doctor of mine? Did she mean the dermatologist I had dated to much fanfare a few years ago, the one who officially broke my heart when he dumped me for his office nurse, a twenty-one-year-old blonde with nary a blemish or wrinkle, or was she talking about any one of my current or former physician clients?

“Which doc of mine?”

“Dr. Trusdale,” Olivia said, as Bonita pointed to the clock on the wall and then to her calendar, her face calm, her eyes almost sleepy.

Oh, the dead doc of mine, I thought, momentarily ignoring Bonita's desultory warning. Did Olivia know Trusdale was dead? She hadn't used the past tense.

“I'll get on it, but first I think Bonita has something for me to do.”

“I'm out the door,” Olivia said. “You guys come on by, see the dogs anytime.” Olivia, aside from trying to save birds, raised and trained Rottweilers.

“I'll put my kids on it. They'll get signatures at the mall and get their teachers to write,” Bonita said.

Olivia thanked us and left. Bonita put the “Save the Scrub Jays” materials in a neat pile by her purse so she wouldn't forget to take them home.

“You haven't forgotten Dr. Padar's hearing on the plaintiff's motion for a new trial, have you?” Bonita said. “It's in St. Pete.”

“No, I haven't forgotten. Get Angela for me, please. She can drive while I review the file.” As if I didn't already know every word in it.

Because the hearing was in St. Petersburg, Angela would have to navigate two interstates plus drive across the Sunshine Skyway, the wicked and beautiful 192-foot-high bridge that spans Tampa Bay and connects St. Pete with Sarasota county and points south. A trip from Sarasota across the Skyway could take anywhere from a half hour to all day depending on wind currents, traffic flow, and whether anyone had rear-ended someone or any suicides had backed up the steady stream of cars. Just last week the bridge was closed all morning while someone in a Spiderman suit scaled down the high bridge only to be arrested by the waiting coast guard and hauled off to jail or the loony bin.

I glanced at the clock and considered that I might be pressing my luck, but I thought a Skyway crossing under a tight time frame would be a good test of Angela's aggressiveness and nerve.

With the wind behind us, and no suicide jumpers or slow tourist gawkers in front of us, Angela whipped us across the Skyway while I flipped through the file. We got to the courthouse in the nick of time, hustled across the genteel old streets of St. Petersburg, smiled through two sets of metal detectors, and ran up the stairs to the courtroom.

At the hearing I said about two hundred dollars' worth of words and won despite my conciseness. So flushed with that easy victory and the Dr. Trusdale settlement, I felt exuberant.

Angela surrendered the keys at my demand, and I blasted back across the Skyway while Angela studied Tampa Bay for dolphins or sharks.

“You reckon it's true, what they say about this bridge?”

“Don't say ‘reckon.' It's not sophisticated,” I said, echoing the same correction Jackson had drilled into me as a two-month associate after I'd said “reckon” and “fixing to” at a hearing while he bird-dogged me. Jackson had paid for speech and diction lessons for me so I wouldn't sound like a south Georgia hick, but I didn't think I needed to go that far with Angela. “Don't say ‘fixing to,' either,” I added.

Angela gave me a hurt little look.

“After all, you're not in the South anymore, not in Sarasota.” Where the imported carpetbagger culture overruled the geography.

“Do you think it's true, what they say about the Skyway?”

Much better, I thought, and said, “What, you mean about VWs and vans blowing off in the windstorms?”

“No, I meant about the men buried in the concrete supports.”

Everything and nothing about the Skyway myths are true, so I just said I didn't know and kept driving as Angela studied the blue waters of Tampa Bay, and then the bridge was behind us and four thousand cars were in front of us.

I hate interstates and swung off at the first chance onto U.S. 301, where there is still some hint of what old Florida must have been. But as I was negotiating the traffic on the way back to Sarasota, Angela piped up and asked, “Can we stop at my apartment a minute? I need to check on Crosby. He's very old.”

“Oh, you live with your father?” I realized that though Angela had been working with me for nearly two years I knew very little about her.

“No, Crosby's my dog. He's fifteen.”

“That's practically ancient, isn't it? For a dog?”

“Yes.”

So, we spun off east to the cheaper apartment complexes and stopped to check on a little rat dog with a fluff of gray hair around his face. Despite his frail look, Crosby engaged us both in a rather lively lick-and-wag session.

Angela's apartment was decorated in Early College Poverty, with a three-legged couch propped up on a brick. But the place was as clean and clear of debris as my own house.

“Don't they pay you?” I asked, looking at the wounded couch, though as a partner I knew perfectly well what she earned. I had argued for her first raise myself.

“I've got a lot of debt. College loans and stuff. And I'm saving up for a down payment on a house.”

Good for you, I thought. Get out of debt, don't put on the golden handcuffs, hold out for a real life in a decade or so—exactly my plan, so I approved of the implication that it was also Angela's.

We walked the ancient little rat dog outside in the shade around the Dumpster, where he seemed to be unusually fussy about selecting a place to go, and Angela explained that she hoped Crosby would live until Christmas so she could take him home during the annual law firm holiday shutdown and leave him with her brother so that “when Crosby crosses over, Jimmy can bury him down in the pecan orchard with all the others, exactly like I promised.”

Home, from her accent, was obviously somewhere in greater Dixie. I decided not to ask about the rest.

Chapter 7

To counterbalance the otherwise
good afternoon, after returning from the Crosby detour I hunched over my desk, reenergized by the panic at the thought of Jackson's veggie baby case, and I began reading MEDLINE literature about CMV. Bonita had gone, but she had left me tomorrow's schedule and an apple with a note that said it was unwaxed, organic, and washed.

Trusting Bonita not to trick me with a waxy pesticide/germ-laden apple, I munched and read. Reading medical literature is a torturous process. Physicians, especially research physicians, tend to use words that normal people naturally will not have a clue about. The article in front of me stated that congenital CMV infections occur in .2 to 2.2 percent of births. Okay, got it. That's English. Approximately 5 to 10 percent of those infants will have classic signs of illness or defects at birth. Okay, got it. Also English. Cerebral palsy and mental retardation are but two of the possible results if a woman develops a primary CMV infection during pregnancy. Okay, got it.

Then the article said, among other incomprehensible phrases, that suggestive findings included hydrops, splenomegaly, chorioretinitis, occlusion of the foramen ovale, cerebral ventriculomegaly, intracranial calcifications, microcephaly, ascites, hyperechoic bowel, brain atrophy, and oligohydramnios. I stifled my urge to scream out loud and reached for my dog-eared medical dictionary, in which the definitions of terms such as
oligohydramnios
usually were made up of still other words I would need to look up. Sometimes the process of understanding one word could suck up half an hour or so of time I didn't have.

After spending an hour on one page, I simply couldn't comprehend any more, and I figured that if I drank another drop of coffee I might as well scrape out the lining of my stomach with a rusty knife. That, and not the darkness outside the window in my corner office, told me it was time to go home.

Having had only two grapes, Bonita's apple, and coffee for nourishment, I was hungry, so I stopped at the Granary and got a wide assortment of fresh, organic vegetables, including some luscious-looking snow peas and a gingerroot so fresh that the scent of it warmed my nose when I sniffed it. I envisioned a big stir-fry over brown rice, spicy with ginger and hot with just a dash of Chinese mustard, and some penoir blanc in a long-stemmed glass.

I forgot about Newly.

He was sitting in my living room, flipping through a file, his briefcase and a stack of transcripts on the floor. Newly, still in his office clothes, kissed me casually on the cheek, like somebody all moved in. He smelled like a courtroom.

“Did I give you a key?”

“Sure, hon.”

I knew he was lying, but he smiled sweetly at me. He can look rather winsome for a big alpha-male type. My best guess was that he had taken the spare key out of the kitchen drawer sometime this morning.

“We broke up, you know. About three wives back. Remember?”

“Aw, Lilly. I
never
broke up with you.”

I let it pass, for now, as I was too tired and too hungry to get into a discussion of any kind of personal relationship with anyone, especially Newly.

Newly wanted to take me out to dinner, and I debated, but I heard the call of the snow peas and the good wine and the fresh ginger waiting to be sliced. I said I'd cook, knowing even as I said it that this was a mistake.

I can cook, having learned through necessity, not at my mother's knee. But as a general rule I don't let men know I can cook. As soon as you cook a meal for them, before you know it they want you to do laundry, pick up after them, fetch them stuff, and then next thing you know you're cleaning up the bathroom after some large male animal with poor aim.

But I made the offer and edged around Newly's stuff on my floor and headed into the bedroom, where I chewed my lip after seeing suitcases scattered on my clean, bare terrazzo floors. I hung up my jacket and skirt, smashed my other clothes in the hamper, and took a quick shower, heavy with Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, which, I am convinced, could revive the dead.

Back in the kitchen, Newly hovered, trying to be helpful, so I sent him to move his stuff from my bedroom to the guest room and to shower while I re-washed the vegetables he'd held under the faucet in a clump for a fraction of a second. The rice was on, the garlic browning in a blend of olive oil and tamari, and I had finished slicing the ginger. One of the tiny, expensive jars of hot Chinese mustard, the pale green kind that will sear the roof of your mouth if you aren't careful, was opened on the counter. I like a few drops in the stir-fry to add a kick to the vegetables. Newly came back in the kitchen, wearing a pair of my tap pants in pale pink satin.

“My stuff's all dirty,” he explained. “These fit a bit snug,” he said, grinning, “but look good.”

Well, he did. Look good. He was a fine-looking man, though the pudge around his middle was gaining on his workouts, and the pink complimented his swarthy skin. Tall, dark, and handsome—in my pair of ladies' fancy panties.

Well, okay, I thought, grinning back and giving him a playful tug on the pink satin, then washed my hands and turned back to sauté the shiitake mushrooms.

Newly circled me from behind as I slipped the sliced carrots in the broth in the iron skillet.

“Smells good,” he said, his nose deep in my hair.

I took a long slice of fresh ginger in my fingers and turned around. “Here, eat this.”

“Hot,” he said, sucking air into his mouth.

“Hot,” I mimicked, with a seductive tone and come-hither smile to underline the double meaning.

Having obviously gotten Newly excited, though I wasn't at all sure why I had done so, I deliberately turned back to my vegetables, sizzling now in the skillet, and flipped the carrots and mushrooms, the rising steam smelling of spice and earth and food. The snow peas would go in last, just seconds after I turned the heat off, to turn them a bright green from the last of the heat but leave them crisp. Newly hovered, and pressed, and touched. His hands reached under my cotton shirt and touched my bare skin. They were warm. I remembered Newly's hands. Our history and my long dry spell conspired against my better judgment. I let his hands drift upward, his fingers gentle but sure as they tracked my skin and set off little sparks not wholly unlike those from the Chinese mustard.

Long before I got the snow peas in, we hit the cold terrazzo floor in a hot, hard thunk that bruised us both, though we didn't notice until the next morning.

As always with Newly, I was never quite sure how it had happened.