Wildcat Wine (8 page)

“Isn't it?” The judge on the right was not giving up easily.

“Your twenty minutes are up,” said the presiding judge.

I had been having so much fun, I hadn't noticed how the time had flown by.

“Your Honors, if I might just have a moment to finish addressing the questions raised about fraud?”

“No,” the presiding judge said. “We have your appellate brief.” Translation: Sit down and shut up.

“We'll take this under advisement, and we will let you know our decision.” Having so spoken, the presiding judge nodded to the bailiff as if to say, “Next.”

Mumbling, “Thank you,” to the court, I sat down and decided then and there that I would fire Gandhi as a client if I didn't kill him first.

Chapter 12

In law school,
they have this thing called moot court in which some of the students dress up like lawyers and pretend to make appellate arguments about lofty constitutional issues of the sort that 99 percent of us will not once encounter in our actual law practice. Law professors who have never in their lives made an actual court appearance pretend to teach these students how to properly present a persuasive legal argument in these dress-up mock arguments. The better students then do moot-court competitions all over the country to see who can do the best pretend arguments. Moot-court competition winners then get something impressive to put on their résumés, and get plush positions at the grand old law firms in the grand old cities, while the rest of us hump and grind and get the best jobs we can.

For law students who don't have the gumption to stand up and pretend to make mock arguments, but still want the ultimate plush jobs, law schools have something called law reviews, in which usually nerdy students rewrite law professors' multifaceted and obscenely footnoted articles. While working on law reviews, these students spend exorbitant amounts of time deciding such highly critical things as whether the period goes inside the parenthesis or outside the parenthesis.

The better law-review students from the better law schools are then hired to clerk for appellate judges, where they spend one to two years primarily summarizing huge vats of paper verbiage into smaller vats of paper verbiage so that the judges do not have to personally read the trial transcripts, briefs, and such things. The better of these lucky clerks are then offered jobs teaching at law schools. And people like me pay tuition to learn from them how to be lawyers, when in fact all these people primarily know how to do is punctuate, research, and summarize.

Thus, after three years of exhaustively dull and detailed theories taught by people who have no functional lawyering skills, and after having become impressively indebted due to the high cost of tuition and textbooks, the average law student graduates and doesn't know a single thing about how to actually practice law.

That leaves these students with two options: (1) the painful road of self-education, fraught with the embarrassment of learning almost exclusively from the process of screwing up; or (2) finding and learning from a mentor, an experienced attorney who rarely gives a rat's ass whether the period goes inside or outside the parenthesis, but knows exactly how to goad a witness on cross-examination into blowing up the opponent's whole case.

Given these options, I had been lucky my first year out of law school. After I spent a few months floundering in the cesspool of Kenneth's workers'-compensation defense work, Jackson Smith had adopted me. The fact that Jackson believed himself to be the physical reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson never bothered me in the least because I grew up in a family of crazy people. When Jackson, with his gray beard trimmed square to replicate his lemon-sucking, military-genius hero, stared at me eagle-eyed, like the portrait of his past-life persona that hung behind his desk, I didn't blanch at all. I listened. And while I listened, Jackson trained me to be a top-notch trial attorney.

Unfortunately, Jackson wasn't much of an appellate attorney himself, not having the patience for the nuances and intellectualism of that higher form of litigation. That is, he was a Rambo with Results in a jury trial, but a bull in a Palm Avenue antiques shoppe when it came to the appellate court. Thus, my training from him on conducting an appellate argument had been brief and embarrassing. When I was a first-year associate, one day without warning, Jackson picked me up by the scruff of my neck and hurled me into the deep end of the ocean, and when I clambered back to shore, he stroked his beard and nodded. I had done my first appellate argument with less than two hours of notice, but I had lived and I didn't quit and in Jackson's eyes, that was good enough.

All of which is to say that my woeful and embarrassing performance before the appellate court on Gandhi's behalf had some basis in my lack of appellate training, if not lack of preparation, but nonetheless I could hardly blame Jackson or my law school for failing to teach me how to strangle my own client in the middle of an oral argument without attracting undue attention from the panel of judges.

So naturally I blamed Gandhi.

After I had vented my spleen on him for at least a half hour under a shade tree in the parking lot of the appellate court, I informally resigned as his counsel, fired him as a client, threatened him with bodily harm if he ever came near me again, and yanked the keys from his hands and jumped in behind his Acura's driver's seat.

If he hadn't been quicker than me, I would have left him standing under the shade tree in the parking lot of the court. But even as I was backing up, he ran fast enough to hop into the passenger side of his car, which in my anger I had forgotten to lock against him.

He finally had sense enough to keep his mouth shut.

In no mood for the scenic back roads through the grimly harvested plains of bone-valley Florida, I picked up I-4 at the first chance and hurled our car west, toward Tampa. Unlike my own ancient Honda, Gandhi's car had a CD player, and after perusing his CD selections while driving ninety miles an hour in the perpetually heavy traffic, I picked out a Sheryl Crow CD, and tapped my fingers to “Run, Baby, Run” while negotiating the multicircled interchange onto I-75 south with the plan of being back in Sarasota in a jiffy so I could file a motion to withdraw as Gandhi's lawyer and kick him in his privates.

As I approached the Fruitville Road exit to Sarasota, I thought of Earl and Farmer Dave and, on a pure whim, decided to go down to the next exit, drive to the vineyard, and see personally if Earl had decided yet to drop the charges against Dave. If he hadn't, I was in just the right mood to sweet-talk him into changing his mind and freeing my man Dave.

That is, if Dave was still in jail, which he most assuredly was when I had called Philip Cohen Monday night to inquire. Philip reported that Earl had not yet dropped the charges and Dave's first court appearance had stalled out on the open question of extraditing him to Georgia. Wondering if there had been any changes this morning while Gandhi humiliated me in court, I grappled for my cell, punched in Philip's private number, and got a recording and an invitation to leave a message. “You better be getting Dave out of jail right now,” I snapped, as if it were Philip's fault that Dave had trashed a motocross, stolen a truck of wine, and failed to outrun a deputy sheriff.

Earl's it was, I thought, tossing the cell in the general vicinity of Gandhi's lap. Gandhi didn't ask where I was going when I passed our interstate exit for the next one, and then whipped his red Acura around a sharp bend and headed east with a vengeance. He had not said one word on the entire trip back.

The subdued Gandhi finally spoke as I took the turn into the vineyard too fast and spun off the pavement for a moment, sending up showers of gravel. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

“Shut up,” I said, neither sure nor particularly caring if he meant the side trip, my driving, or some cosmic concept beyond my immediate comprehension.

I slammed on the brakes in front of the Gift and Wine Shoppe, and stomped toward it. The door was locked and it took me a few seconds of raging before I realized there was a sign on the door that read: “In the vineyard, second road on left.”

In the heat of the noon hour, I pulled off my jacket and even in my pissed-off mood, I smoothed it and folded it carefully over the seat as I got back into the car and drove down the second road on the left.

“This is definitely not a good idea,” Gandhi repeated.

“Shut up,” I repeated.

At the end of the dirt road, rows and rows of muscadine grapes grew on trellises of wood and wire. I got out of the car and walked toward the first row of muscadines. This early in the spring, their leaves were still a bright green, and no grapes yet bunched among the small leaves. The ground beneath the vines was clean, and at the base of each plant there was a circle of well-mulched dirt. I bent close enough to the mulch to inhale the pungent smell of mushroom compost. Short, well-tended grass grew where the grapes didn't.

Picturesque. I nodded approvingly, and stood back to study the grounds cared for by someone who obviously took pride in his vineyard.

The neat green rows began to calm me down.

Okay, I thought, looking out at the stakes with the grape tendrils crawling their way out into the bright sun on the arbor wires, so what if I lost the appeal, which certainly appeared likely. That just meant I would have to try the case. I'd get more money for trying the case, and I was entirely confident of my ability to win before a jury. Henry, being the generally docile claims adjuster that he was, wouldn't blame me for losing the appeal, not if I handled him just so.

“All right,” I said, looking at Gandhi. “You can get out of the car.”

He crawled out, tentatively, and together we began walking down a path toward a shed half hidden behind the vineyard.

Before we got to the shed, I saw a large and profoundly odd-looking machine. A square tractorlike thing, with metal tentacles, so tall as to appear top-heavy, big and ugly, with a white iris incongruously painted on its side. I was so intent on studying the top arch of the machine with its mechanical spider arms that I wasn't looking or listening to Gandhi until I heard him gasp and then hiccup.

The strangling noise he kept making between hiccups made me suddenly wish I had gotten around to taking that CPR course.

“Are you all right?” I asked, patting him on the back.

He shook his head emphatically. Taking a great gulp of air, he said, “I knew this wasn't a good idea.”

I turned back to the machine and tried to follow Gandhi's eyes.

There, on the other side of the machine, extending at a most unnatural angle, was a leg with a foot on the end. And a large pool of dark maroon.

Leaving Gandhi to his hiccups, I ran around the machine.

There, crushed or mauled beneath it, was Earl Stallings. I did not want to look close enough to figure out the exact mechanics of the matter, but spun away from the body and thought for a moment I might faint. Dizzy gray fuzz enveloped me, like the phosphate fog from the netherworld. I teetered.

Gandhi, still hiccupping, came up behind me, and with both hands he covered my eyes and pulled my head into his chest, and he held me as if I were a sweet child, and he patted my back, and when his breathing began to normalize and I was past my near faint, I said, “We've got to call 911.”

That the CPR course I never took wouldn't have done any good, we both knew.

Chapter 13

Though I had
had a physician client murdered with a marijuana joint spiked with deadly oleander, I had never seen his body. In fact, I had never even seen a photograph of his dead body.

That was definitely the better approach, not seeing, I thought as I sat sideways in the opened door of Gandi's car with my head bent over my legs while waiting for my stomach to settle. Gandhi clucked and patted and tried to do calming things, but all I wanted to do was go home and shower and drink a belt of Absolut and go to bed and wake up in my next lifetime.

But in the distance, I heard the sound of sirens gaining on us.

Then sirens, noise, and official people exploded all around us, and I glanced up to see paramedics hovering over poor Earl, and then I shut my eyes and had a sudden insight into just how horrific Benny's experience of finding the dead man in the swamp really must have been for him.

Two uniformed deputy sheriffs descended upon Gandhi and me, and started asking basic questions, like who we were, and issuing standard orders, like show some ID, and don't go anywhere. One of them pulled Gandhi away from me, and on the car stereo Sheryl Crow's CD, going round the third or fourth time, hit “No one said it would be easy.”

While a uniformed deputy watched me, I searched my purse for a stray Valium, found only Tums and Advil, and took both. With rising levels of agitation, I was digging in Gandhi's glove compartment looking for a stray Valium when I found a stray joint and shoved it back under his car manual. I hoped we weren't suspects and that my guard deputy either hadn't noticed or didn't care about the joint. Then new cars drove up. I pulled myself out of Gandhi's Acura, stood up, looked at the sun, blinked, and told myself to go forth and be useful.

Damned if Tired Johnson wasn't crawling out of an unmarked car, holding a baby. Looked about nine months or so. Alert, round red face. Tired looked haggard.

Calling out Tired's name, I started toward him, but the deputy who was guarding me put a hand out in front of me. “Give him a chance to look over the scene,” the deputy said. “And whatever you do, don't ask him about that baby's momma.”

“What the hell is he doing with a baby out here?”

The deputy shrugged. “Baby-sitting problems, probably. Hard being a single dad and raising a son. Just don't ask him—”

“Yeah, about the mom,” I finished. Got it.

“Sets him right off,” Mr. Deputy Chatty added.

Nodding, I looked around for Gandhi and spied him cornered between two uniformed deputies yammering away. I sent shut-up waves toward him, but for a psychic, he didn't get my message at all.

“Maybe you want to turn off the radio? You know, save the battery,” Mr. Deputy Helpful said. “You're probably gonna be here a while.”

Oh, great, an afternoon with Mr. Chatty Deputy, SO Investigator Tired and Son, Dead Earl, Mr. Motor-mouth Client, and no lunch.

I switched the CD off, picked up my cell, walked to the back of Gandhi's car, and hit Bonita's number. Mr. Deputy followed me, and made no particular effort to hide the fact that he was listening.

“Bonita,” I said, “Gandhi is with me, and we're going to be late.”

Before she was halfway through her questions, I cut her off and folded up the cell and tossed it into the car, and I studiously kept my back to Earl's mangled body.

Tired groused his way toward me. I could hear him coming with a running monologue of things he was most certainly unhappy about, his son's baby-sitter topping the list.

I looked at him. He was red faced and sweating. I looked at his son, and was struck immediately by the resemblance. “He looks just like you,” I blurted out, taking in the child's round, red, sweaty face, and alert hazel eyes, and daffy whirls of dark-blond hair.

“Thank you,” Tired said, though I had not necessarily meant it as a compliment. He thrust the baby toward me. “Want to hold him?”

No, I did not. Babies are sticky, and they can do the most disgusting things without the least prompting, and they invariably burst into tears if I so much as look twice at them.

“His name is Redfish,” Tired said, still holding the baby out toward me when I didn't answer.

“Why on earth do you have that baby out here? There's a dead man over there, for heaven's sake, Tired.”

I saw Mr. Deputy wave his hands behind Tired, and run his hand under his throat and then do a frantic time-out gesture with his hands. Okay, yeah, all right, I know, I'm not supposed to ask about the kid's mom, I thought, and looked over Tired's head toward the frantic hand motions of the deputy whose name I had never bothered to learn. I gave that deputy my best Hard Look.

Then I turned back to Tired, who was blowing the gnats off Redfish's face. “His real name is Joshua Rodney, but my daddy started calling him Redfish when he wasn't but a week old, and it kinda stuck.”

“Look, Tired, I'm not, like, a child psychologist or anything, but by the time he's in, say, preschool, maybe you ought to call him Josh, and stop bringing him to see dead people.”

“Ma'am, look, okay, I didn't have a choice. The baby-sitter called an hour ago and had to go home. I didn't have time to get another one, so I took the day off, but then this came up.”

The baby giggled and turned even redder.

“He's cute, ain't he?” Deputy Helpful piped in.

“Then you take him,” I said.

“On duty,” he said, and took two steps backward.

Yeah, on duty spying on me, I thought, and, wholly against my better judgment, I reached out and took the proffered baby.

“I got to talk to you about all this, ma'am, but first I got to, well, you know, look around and stuff. Looks like that grape harvester must've malfunctioned and knocked him off.”

A grape harvester—so that's what that big, ugly tractorlike thing was. But I didn't have time to study on this new piece of information because as Tired walked off, young Redfish turned toward me, took inventory of the situation, inhaled, and let out a scream that even poor dead Earl must have shuddered at. Tired looked back at me and said, “He likes it if you sing to him.”

Sing to him? Who exactly did Tired think I was?

Redfish continued to share his negative view of the state of affairs, as Gandhi began to trot toward us with his guard deputy closely behind, trying to intercept.

I sat down in the car, turned on Sheryl Crow again, and the kid screeched a whole other octave. Okay, the na-na song wasn't a lullaby. I cut off the CD and turned the radio on and flipped the dial until I heard music. Toby Keith was asking his high school crush what she thought of him now, and, damn, little Redfish shut right up and reached for the radio dial.

Gandhi was by the opened car door now and looked in. “You doing all right?”

Under the circumstances. I nodded. And I was doing way better than poor Earl.

Poor Earl. The man who was pursuing a criminal complaint against Farmer Dave. Not for a fraction of a portion of a second did I think Dave would kill a man over a felony-theft charge, but Tired and the local state attorney wouldn't know that about Dave. I felt a prickle of panic sweat start down my face. Picking up my cell, I punched in Philip's private line, and, when he answered, I asked, “Dave still in jail?”

“Yes. And I have a client with me now and can't talk.”

“Fine. Don't bill for this call then.” I hit the end call button as Redfish reached for the cell phone.

As Redfish began to trace sticky all over me, and throughout Gandhi's car, I sighed with no small measure of relief that at least Dave had the perfect alibi.