Skinny-dipping (8 page)

Chapter 10

Though I was earnestly
trying to finish the damn appellate brief, I kept remembering both Sam's body pressed against mine and what he had said (or not said) about Dr. Trusdale. Such a hideous way to die, and Sam wouldn't even commit to whether it was or wasn't murder.

Murder or not, I decided to call a pathologist I'd worked with before in a couple of med mal cases. She's a kind of paleo-hippie. She and Olivia would be a good match on that score, I thought. Once, when I sat with her at a Kiwanis luncheon, I noticed one of the pathologist's dangling earrings was a fancy roach clip and the other a silver and jade dragonfly. I get a kick out of her, Dr. Annie Watts, and if we were seven-year-old kids I would have asked her to ride bikes to the lake and share my Fudgesicle, but I wasn't sure how grown-up women initiated friendships.

Despite my habit of calling on her only when I needed information, Dr. Watts acted glad to see me and welcomed me into her overstuffed office. I shifted and fidgeted in my chair during our small talk as her jars and files and journals pressed in on me. After we caught up, I got out the basic story about Dr. Trusdale, whom I identified as a client. She knew him, slightly, and had read the story in the paper. Though the newspaper still had not mentioned the poisoned marijuana, she'd already heard about the pot from someone in the medical examiner's office.

“Oleander—that's what the detective told me,” I said.

“Extremely toxic plants, oleanders contain both the toxin oleandrin and nerioside.” Dr. Watts pulled a cigarette from a half-filled pack, tapped the cigarette on her desk, and then put it, unlit, in her mouth. She sucked air through it with a notable gurgle that distracted me momentarily from the towering stacks of books not two feet from my chair.

“These toxins are like those found in foxglove— they work on the heart. One leaf can kill a child and thirty leaves will kill a horse. All those people planting hedges of oleanders don't appreciate its danger. Water drunk from glasses where cut oleander flowers have been can make people sick. Even honey made by bees visiting the flowers has produced toxic results.”

I nodded, remembering that the real estate agent had warned me about the one clump on the corner of my lot when I bought my house, telling me never to burn the trimmings when the oleanders were pruned because even the smoke was dangerous. To this day, I tread a wide berth around my pink oleanders and hope the bush will die on its own. But they are tough plants, one of the reasons the highway department likes to plant them in the right-of-ways.

Still, they are pretty. I said so.

“Sure. But so are coral snakes. Beautiful creatures. But are you going to raise a few for pets?”

“Point taken.”

Annie tapped the unlit cigarette in an ashtray and then put it back in her mouth. “Clinical symptoms develop rapidly and can include death without warning. Other symptoms can include gastrointestinal distress, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and abdominal pain. The toxins in oleanders can also cause irregular heart rates and rhythms.”

“Not a pretty way to go, eh?”

“No. Not a good way to die.”

“So whoever did this, I mean, assuming somebody deliberately laced his pot with oleander trimmings, was pretty up on plants, and also mean.”

“It's mean, and it's imprecise, so if someone knew enough to lace the pot with oleanders, they were also taking a chance that the deceased would smoke enough. Not a good plan. Not a plan you could count on.” The pathologist tapped her cigarette again. “Not a plan somebody with good sense would use.” Tap, tap with the cigarette.

“You want a light?” I offered, eyeing a box of matches on her desk, easy reach from me.

“Hell, no, I don't want a light. I quit smoking. Two years ago. Nasty habit. You ever see the lungs of a smoker?”

“Nope. Missed that one.”

“I could show you.”

“Nope, that's all right.”

“Well, you change your mind, you let me know. In fact, we're doing an autopsy in just a little while on a man who died of lung cancer. You could stand in.”

Though I had some other questions for the doctor, I was seized with an acute desire to leave, so I headed out to Fred and Olivia's house to see the puppies.

After a curse-evoking drive down the Tamiami Trail, a highway that gives all highways a bad name for tacky and traffic, I arrived at Fred and Olivia's house and pounded their front door. Olivia answered, arched her brows, and waved a lit cigarette at me by way of greeting. Fred came around the corner, smiled, and held up his drink, and I nodded. Olivia led me to the nursery, where one of their female Rottweilers was nursing three little squeaky furballs.

“You can't pick them up yet. Matilla is still protective,” Fred said, joining us and handing me a vodka, which I immediately sipped. Absolut. Bless his heart, he remembered my brand.

Matilla growled at me as I leaned over her, admiring her children.

Olivia reached over and picked up one, and Matilla didn't so much as prick up her ears. “Knows the boss,” Olivia said.

She handed me the puppy. “It's the girl. She's yours, say the word.”

I went through the usual protestations—I was rarely home, working long days and weekends, and traveling for hearings, trials, depositions. It wouldn't be fair to the dog, I said.

But when I retire, I thought but didn't say, I was taking at least two, maybe three of Olivia's prize Rottweilers to my new home. Nobody knew my five-year plan. Which, of course, had been a seven-year plan when I'd first bought the 180 acres of apple orchards and woods in north Georgia two years ago. Farmer Dave, the man who had taught my brother Delvon and me about loyalty and farming, was my current caretaker, hiding out as he was on a few dozen felony warrants. I pay down the mortgage and visit when I can, and Farmer Dave keeps the orchard green, happy, and mowed.

Thinking how a Rottweiler would be just the dog for Farmer Dave and the 180 acres, I said, “When I'm ready.”

“When you're ready,” Olivia repeated, and I pressed the puppy to my chest, where it tried to nurse on a button on my blouse. I hugged the puppy ever so gently, mentally named her Emily, and rocked her against me.

“You know who's doing well in her obedience training with a Rottweiler?” Fred asked, lighting his cigarette off Olivia's.

“Yeah, and it's not even one of our Rotts,” Olivia said.

“Who?”

“Jennifer, that nitwit girlfriend of Ashton's,” Fred said. “Olivia's been working with her and her dog.”

“Yeah, a female, named Bearess. At first, I wouldn't have bet two plugged nickels that girl would ever even housebreak the dog, but she's doing pretty darn good with it.”

“Dog must be pretty smart,” I added, and thought,
Bearess
?

“Well, yes.” Olivia nodded. “But I'll tell you what, Jennifer is not nearly as dumb as we all think she is.”

“Nor,” Fred added, sipping his vodka, “as smart as Ashton wants us to think she is.”

“She's pixilated for sure, but she's not totally stupid. You should see her work with that dog,” Olivia said.

“You teaching them obedience training?” I asked.

“They've been taking a class at the vo-tech, but Ashton asked me to work some with them on the weekends. It's not bad. They're kind of fun to work with.”

Trust Olivia to find a word like
pixilated
when the rest of us were using words like
dumb
and
dingbat
and
nitwit
. But I was quickly tired of talking about Jennifer, who might or might not be as stupid as most of us in the Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley family were apt to think she was.

“How goes the Save the Scrub Jay campaign?” I asked, thinking to change the subject and learn how it was progressing.

“Those letters and petitions you and Bonita worked on will help. Thank you. Told you, I think, your Dr. Trusdale was the ringleader of the physicians who want to develop that land for a south-county medical arts building.”

I nodded, and Emily the still-blind puppy mewed and then tried to nurse from my little finger.

“But Dr. Trusdale's getting killed off didn't help any. Another physician—this one's an obstetrician—has taken over the reins of the physicians' group. Putting a lot of pressure on the county planning board for approval.”

“They wouldn't even know a scrub jay if one landed on them,” Fred said.

I was focusing on what Olivia had said, that Dr. Trusdale's getting killed “didn't help any.”

Olivia had sounded so wholly without sympathy.

Had she thought Dr. Trusdale's death would help save the scrub jays from the physicians' plans for developing the jay habitats into a medical arts building?

On the way out the door, I glanced around in their yard and spotted the oleanders growing in a pink and white clump at the front corner, far out of reach of the large fenced backyard full of big dogs.

It didn't mean a thing, I told myself. Almost everybody with a yard in Sarasota has a clump of oleanders somewhere on his or her property. Florida oleanders were as ubiquitous as the poison ivy of my native childhood, though more toxic.

Newly brought home steaks and asked me to cook them and didn't get it at all when I reacted with anger. “I'm a vegetarian,” I blurted out. Not to mention I don't take domestic orders from my lovers.

“Since when are you a vegetarian?”

Well, all right. I'd converted, I admitted, since we had last been together. But hadn't he noticed I never touched the plastic chicken or the rubber-gravied alleged steak at the weekly Kiwanis meetings, where we'd been sitting together for years so we could make fun of the speakers?

“Converted, like a religion? So, can I cook a steak for me to eat,” he asked, “or would that defile the temple?”

Snip, snap, snarl. After we crackled at each other some more, I excused myself to wash up and change before supper, which he promised would include a salad and a baked potato for me.

The salad he made was ordinary iceberg lettuce, not the organic romaine I use, and imported Mexican tomatoes wholly without taste but laden I suspected with pesticides, and he hadn't washed any of it. Eyeing the toxic tomatoes, already sliced and beyond washing now, I told him I had a headache and wasn't hungry, though I picked at the baked potato, and asked him to sleep in the guest room.

Having Newly living with me was wearing thin already.

The next night I came home and he had hung two paintings on my white, real plaster walls bearing the delicate swirls of a true plasterer in his prime. Not the kind of walls you can find in the half-mil and up condos, with their mass-market Sheetrock.

“Look, hon. Original art, by local guys. This one is by Ted Morris and this one is by A. J. Metzgar.”

I looked at my formerly blank, clean, white walls, where Newly had hung a painting of a bobcat in a lush Florida hammock, the sharp blades of a palmetto thicket shading the cat, and a second painting, a surreal, ethereal painting of what might have been a waterfall in what might have been a dream.

Yes, I agreed, they were nice paintings. They were. I liked them.

He'd had to pay Karen the Vindictive, his soon-to-be ex-wife, for them before she'd let him take them out of the house that she had a temporary court order banning him from entering, but he'd presented the sales receipts and paid her full value plus interest. And now they were mine, he said. For me.

But Newly didn't understand that my walls, like my floors, and my bookcases, and my dresser tops, were all clean, clear, and white for a reason. To cope.

I didn't know how to explain it to him.

“I just can't stand stuff around me, clutter,” I said, remembering the piles of magazines, paperbacks, dirty clothes, and garbage in the house of my childhood.

“This is like when you have to wash each piece of lettuce about fifty times, isn't it?”

“Yes, perhaps. Sort of.”

“Don't they have medicine for that?” Newly asked, looking concerned.

“Yes. Paxil. It made me tired. I couldn't take it and be a lawyer.” That Newly understood, because stamina is perhaps the universal attribute of every successful trial lawyer.

Therapy had helped, I told him. In fact, I assured him, I was perfectly functional and under the general impression that an obsessive-compulsive disorder benefited a trial attorney, so long as it was controlled.

Newly didn't understand just how much better I was. I didn't have to rush home at noon every day and take a shower anymore. I could eat out in restaurants—good ones that would let me inspect their kitchens, that is. Though I had yet to meet a salad bar I could force myself to eat from, I could eat the packaged salads from the Granary after a tour of their kitchen, and I had learned self-hypnosis and visualization techniques, and I knew how to go to a cool, safe place in my mind. My waterfall, as I explained to Newly.

“A waterfall like this one?” Newly looked at the Metzgar painting he had hung on my wall.

“Yes,” I said. Just like that one—cool, green, blue, and aqua, and soft, and safe, as much dreamscape as waterfall.

“My baby,” he said, and held me gently until I felt him press against my stomach and we ended up in the shower together, where we discovered that the warm and tingling sensations of pure peppermint soap when rubbed expertly into sensitive spots had a rather electrifying result.

Long after we'd tumbled into the bed, I realized Newly never did take the paintings down.

Chapter 11

When I stumbled into
my office through the back door, still tingly from Newly's inventive morning devotional involving copious amounts of Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, Detective Santuri was already sitting in my office, waiting. Bonita shrugged when I glared first at Sam and then at her.

We all grumped something that might have passed for good morning, and I left my door cracked so Bonita could overhear from her office without straining.

“So what do you know about those other malpractice lawsuits against Trusdale?” I jumped in and asked before Sam could get started.

Sam protested that he still didn't have the particulars on the other lawsuits, only that one was in Miami, one in Dallas, both had settled, and the records were sealed, he said. “Mrs. Trusdale can't find any of the settlement papers. She thinks he destroyed them.”

“See if Mrs. Trusdale remembers the names of the attorneys,” I said, thinking, Sealed, my ass. “I'll take it from there.”

If Henry couldn't dig out the facts from his insurance networks of rats, spies, and databases, one of those attorneys would brag the details if I approached him or her lawyer to lawyer. And if Mrs. Trusdale didn't remember the attorneys' names, now that I knew the cities I could eventually get copies of the complaints out of Miami and Dallas, as those are public records. But I was a lot more interested, now that my role in defending Dr. Trusdale was over, in making either Henry or Sam do the work.

While I glowered, Sam admitted, more or less, that he had no leads about where the marijuana laced with oleanders might have come from. If Dr. Trusdale was a pothead, he hadn't left a track.

“Could someone have forced him to smoke it?” I asked, envisioning someone with a gun pointed at him, not telling him the joint was laced with poison.

Sam shrugged.

He asked me about the mugging again. He asked me about Dr. Trusdale's file, his liability policy, the settlement, the opposing counsel, and what I knew about the doctor, which I admitted was fundamentally nothing. After all, it was Sam who had told me about the prior two malpractice hits on Dr. Trusdale. This version of twenty questions was just a warm-up though, I soon learned.

“Why'd he write you a prescription for Percocet?” Sam asked, blowing me away.

Act calm, I told myself. It isn't a crime and he isn't after me. Is he?

“Remember, I'd been mugged,” I said. “My neck was a mess. I hurt. He saw I was in pain and offered me that prescription.” Yeah, after I belabored my pain and bluntly asked, but who could dispute my version now?

“Shouldn't you have gone to your own doctor?”

“Sure, if I'd had time, which I didn't.”

“Hmm,” he said, and wrote something down in his notebook.

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“I don't know. You want to tell me?”

This time I shrugged.

“You smoke marijuana?”

Oh, yeah, as if I'd admit it to a cop if I did. “No. Not since a little experimentation in high school.” Leaving out my brother's patch and my liberal college use of Delvon's pure and clean homegrown. “I don't do street drugs.”

Too late, I caught the implication of this last statement in the overall context—no street drugs, just pharmaceuticals, like the ones the good, but dead, Dr. Trusdale had prescribed for me. True, I'd given up marijuana more than a decade ago for the FDA-assured purity, and the legality, of the occasional prescription with a bang, and I kept a careful rein over even that, but none of this was information I wanted a Sarasota police detective to know.

To try to edit what I had said would be to highlight the mistake. I kept silent, and then I noticed the dark hair on Sam's arms, and his hands, noticed the big, long fingers, the strong-looking hands, big hands. I raised my eyes up to study his face, his shoulders, and I was acutely and physically aware of this man in my office just a few feet away from me. He was, as Bonita had first pointed out to me, a real hunk.

“Why do you think his death has some connection to me?” I asked, distracted by Sam's physical presence into forgetting that the first rule about holes is to stop digging.

“I don't. Do you?”

I heard Bonita's phone ringing and then, through my slightly opened door, her voice, and then she knocked on my door.

“I need to go to the hospital. Carmen jumped off the roof and Benicio thinks she might have cracked a bone in her arm. He's driving her to the hospital, but I need to meet them there.”

Bonita's house, like my own, was a squat, concrete-block style known as a Florida ranch for some reason having nothing to do with cows. It was a low-to-the-ground house, but I still wouldn't want to jump off of it.

“Why was she jumping off the roof?” I asked.

“She's a five-year-old,” Bonita said, with that oddly peaceful look of resignation. “They don't need reasons.”

Apparently Benicio, the oldest and the summer version of family day care for the other children, was a better driver at fourteen than he was a babysitter, I thought.

“Go. But call me and let me know how she is.”

Bonita waved, and I let that be the excuse to run Sam off.

With Sam gone, I pulled Dr. Trusdale's liability policy out of the file drawer to see who had approved coverage for him. Damn doctor, I thought, lying straight-faced to me, denying prior malpractice suits. And lying on his application for malpractice insurance, I noticed as I scanned it. Damn Henry, I thought, when I saw that Henry himself had approved the policy. I had to question Henry's promotion to claims adjuster after seeing this big a screwup. Henry's company would not have issued the liability policy if it had any notice that Dr. Trusdale's subspecialty was getting sued. And Henry, as the policy's point man, was not supposed to just take the doctor's word for it; he was supposed to dig out the truth from insurance company databases that rival those of the FBI. I punched in Henry's number on my phone and after the usual delays got his happy-sounding little bleat.

“Henry, you screwed up,” I said. Who needs hello when you're on a mission.

“What?”

“Trusdale—you approved his policy application. He had two prior malpractice suits, both settled. You didn't catch that? You're supposed to investigate, aren't you, to find that out?”

I listened to Henry breathe.

“What difference does that make now?” he finally retorted, a bit sharp for Henry.

“Don't get sloppy on me,” I snapped back.

“But you didn't know either,” he said.

“Henry, I just told you.”

Henry breathed some more, and then he asked what else I knew about the suits. I admitted that Detective Santuri had uncovered that uncomfortable little fact, and Henry bleated and agreed to dig around.

“Yeah, you do that.”

“Does Detective Santuri think these other suits have anything to do with the doctor's death?” Henry asked.

“I don't think he knows,” I said and made my good-byes.

Bonita returned just after six to declare that her five-year-old was fine, just a little bruised, thanks be to God, and that the little girl's aunt had come by to stay with the kids now so she could work late to catch up for the hours she'd missed that afternoon.

After expressing my own relief that her child was all right, I told Bonita that everything could wait for tomorrow, as I was just studying Jackson's discovery files in the veggie baby case.

“Would you please stop calling it that?” Bonita's usually calm voice had a sharp tone that I didn't often hear.

“Calling it what?”

“The veggie baby. That child has a name. It has a soul. It is a child of God, and you disrespect it by what you call it.”

Well, of course I disrespected it. I was trying to prevent a jury from giving the veggie baby's parents millions of dollars because of it. A jury in Mississippi gave a family $25 million for a brain-damaged baby last year. If I lost a $25 million case, I'd be back to waiting tables and weeding pot for a living. I could hardly allow myself to become attached to the child, could I? Besides, the black humor of attorneys on both sides of personal injury cases—like ER nurses, paramedics, cops, and firemen—was a system of emotional self-defense. We saw a lot of truly crapped-up, hurt, disabled, and painfully broken people, and humor, however callous, was the way we coped with it. Well, that and the good wine, the vodka, or the substance abuse of one's choice.

“I didn't mean to upset you,” I said, aware that of all the people at Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, Bonita was the one person whose respect I most wanted to have.

Bonita nodded. I resolved to be careful not to call it the veggie baby in her presence anymore.

But Bonita's anger at me dug in deeper than she might have intended.

I was ashamed.

Something that happens more often than I will admit to anyone and try not to admit to myself—this shame.

Poor Dr. Trusdale was dead, and it was not a good death at all.

In typically lawyer fashion, I had reacted to the news of Dr. Trusdale's death in terms of what this meant to my case: that is, how I could wrestle a good result from the paper in Dr. Trusdale's file, even though Dr. Trusdale was presumably past caring.

Well, actually, technically, my first thought had been to wonder about the prescription he had written me, and I had some shame over that too.

When I have these episodes of morose, introspective hand-wringing, I am apt to drive down the full length of Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island and trespass through the yards of the rich folk in the pink stucco monster houses on the tip of Anna Maria and sit on the beach, which is still technically open to the public along the shoreline, though there is no public access within miles. My habit, or perhaps solace, is to sit and watch the reflected sunset over the yellow arch of the Sunshine Skyway bridge. The bridge is like an incredibly large piece of avant-garde jewelry in the water, a geometric display of modern engineering, a high-rise double-span bridge, with a bright yellow mast that crosses Tampa Bay. It is beautiful. It is a particular favorite for suicides. I have seen both dolphins and sharks swimming under its pilings, and once, when I was a kid, I saw eternity off the edge, beyond the girders, in the vast, deep expanse of water.

That moment, be it hallucination or divine gift, draws me periodically back to stare at the bridge, as if the flash of immortality I felt that time more than two decades ago might return and impart some wisdom, or peace.

The most scenic, but not the quickest, route to the best point of land to view the Skyway from my side of Tampa Bay is down the islands. This long drive meanders down Longboat and Anna Maria, two shifting sands of barrier islands washed on the western shore by the Gulf of Mexico and on the eastern shore by brackish bay waters filtered through a few remaining mangroves. As I drove, I listened to the folk music on WMNS and contemplated the evils in my soul.

Such contemplation while driving was possible because the winter hordes of seasonal visitors, snowbirds in the local jargon, had gone back to their cool native habitats, finally died, or else were summering in Highlands, North Carolina. Snowbirds are typically ancient people who originated up north and have bad reflexes and bad vision. These tribes of ancients attempt to make up for these shortcomings by driving very big automobiles at very slow rates of speed and keeping their left blinkers on at all times. They are particularly fond of engaging in long, slow winter parades on the two-lane road that runs down Longboat and Anna Maria. But in the summer, the ancient ones are replaced by younger and poorer tourists from the neighboring Deep South states with battered pickups and minivans full of rambunctious and sunburned children. They have to stay in Manatee County because Sarasota has zoned out anyone who is other than a millionaire, unless that person provides a service that the rich retirees need, like cardiologist, lawyer, CPA, New Age healer, upscale jeweler, plastic surgeon, and undertaker. Say what you will about these summer tourists with their raucous kids; they at least know how to drive and can still see.

Keeping pace with a van with an Alabama tag and a red-faced kid leaning out the window and yelling at the sky, I watched the Gulf of Mexico in the breaks between the condos as I drove and introspected. Then I parked by a No Parking sign at the northern tip of Anna Maria Island and walked past the No Public Access and No Trespassing signs.

Technically criminal, yeah, but I'm basically of the opinion that since I'm an articulate, well-dressed person with a job in an air-conditioned office, no one will actually
arrest
me for trespassing.

Once I was safely on the public beach without encountering any irate private landowners, I walked. The sun was going down over the Gulf, and the reflected colors were a baroque delight as they tripped through the clouds over the Sunshine Skyway.

After dragging somebody else's lawn chair down to the point, I sat and stared at the Skyway, and I said to myself: “I am not always a nice person.” I resolved to be better. I resolved to care the next time a client got killed. I resolved to become a Big Sister, to adopt an ugly mutt from the brink of the Humane Society's gas chamber, to go to Mass with Bonita the next time she asked, and to quit bitching about my United Way contribution, which is a mandatory component of life at Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley because Jackson's wife is perennially either a chair, co-chair, vice chair, chief nag, or face person of the annual fund drive.

Kicking off my shoes, I rubbed my bare toes in the warm, wet sand and studied the Skyway. This was the new bridge. The spring of 1980, a cargo ship captain rammed his empty ship into one of the pilings under the 150-foot southbound span that was designed to let tugs and ships pass unheeded into the port in Tampa. When the boat hit, the whole damn section of the highest span of the bridge shuddered, then crashed into the stormy waters below. Fortunately, the separate, northbound span survived. Unfortunately, at the time the southbound bridge collapsed, a Greyhound bus full of tired travelers and a few cars were crossing its span. Thirty-five people followed the wreckage of the bridge into the dark, deep waters of Tampa Bay to their deaths. One old coot in a pickup survived the fall into Davy Jones's locker.