Authors: Claire Matturro
Skinny-dipping (2 page)
I had learned to
wiggle my ears during constitutional law in my second year at a second-tier law school at a football state university, one that
Newsweek
once labeled “
the
biggest party school.” While my con law professor was speaking about the penumbras hidden in the Bill of Rights, I kept myself from plopping asleep on my desk by tensing my jaw muscles in a certain way, causing my ears to wiggle.
In the overall scheme of things, this skill proved as useful to me as learning about constitutional penumbras.
So here I was, the morning after my courtroom victory and mugging, wiggling my ears to stay awake as my new client, a desperate orthopedic surgeon who, through a series of events probably not his fault, had nonetheless permanently screwed up his patient's left knee, explained in excruciating detail how he performs a knee replacement operation. Dr. Trusdale was saying, repeatedly, as if I'd never heard this before, that it wasn't his fault the guy on the table got a staph infection, which ate away bone and tissue and required subsequent surgeries until the poor patient had ended up worse off than when he'd begun his odyssey into the world of modern medicine.
Okay, okay, I get it. Not your fault. Not like you went to the bathroom before surgery and didn't wash your hands.
Staph happens.
I'm going to make a line of bumper stickers and T-shirts marketed to medical malpractice attorneys with that in bold orange: staph happens!
“Are you all right?” he asked, interrupting my fantasy of a new business producing witty T-shirts for lawyers, filled with in-house jokes. New client or not, I was already bored with him.
“Sure. Why?”
“You were, ah, twitching your face.”
Oh, yeah. Memorandum to file: Stop wiggling your ears when the client is looking at you.
“Fine, sorry. I got mugged last night. Right out back. Believe that? Neck's a bit sore.” I rubbed it. It did hurt.
Proving that doctors can be just as self-absorbed as lawyers, Dr. Trusdale said, “Oh, all right, so long as you're listening to me.” Then he went back to explaining technical stuff while I bit my tongue to keep from yawning. I willed my ears still, but my legs and fingers started tapping and wiggling. I had a smoldering headache that I could blame on my mugger if anybody cared, but which probably had as much to do with the vodka and Häagen-Dazs Swiss Almond that Ashton and I and his girlfriend, who had beamed in from someplace long after the actual mugging, had consoled ourselves with once the police left. I ate the whole carton. Ashton said the almonds get caught in his teeth, and Jennifer, the girlfriend who's as skinny as a snake but has Barbie-doll breasts, doesn't “do dairy,” but they definitely helped with the vodka, so I can't say how much I drank. Jennifer cooed and smothered and tried to act like my best friend, though our previous social exchanges had been to argue over whose turn it was on the Stairmaster at the Y and to trade exercise comments at firm functions (“I can do forty-five minutes on the Stairmaster,” she claimed. “How long can you go?”)
“Give her a chance,” Ashton had begged me. “She's really smart.”
Sure thing, and those breasts are real.
But all that was the night before, and now I wanted this doctor to shut up. He was probably a decent enough guy. But his “it's not my fault” mantra was getting old.
Drone. Drone. Drone.
“Un-huh,” I threw out now and then, while I was thinking, Yeah, I know, I'd have to learn this stuff if I'm actually going to try this case before a jury, but there'll be months, maybe years, of discovery and dilatory pretrial crap before the judge gets pissed off and makes us actually try the damn thing. If we don't settle. If we don't delay until the plaintiff, the guy with the bum knee, gives up, wears out, runs out of money, or dies (which happens a lot in Sarasota, where the average citizen is a blue-haired Michigander who is 106 years old, drives a big-ass Lincoln Continental, gets her driver's license automatically renewed by mail, and can't see a Honda at five feet). “Justice delayed is justice denied” being a favorite cliché among personal injury and malpractice defense attorneys like us, prospering here in a city grown rich catering to the only technically still alive.
But by catering to professionals and businesses that got sued, often only because they are the deep pocket, not the guilty, my law firm had grown wealthy and taken on an air of uptown. A tony facade. Our sign, a four-foot-high chunk of carved marble that bears an unpleasant resemblance to a gravestone, proclaimed the name of the law firm: Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, P.A. We obviously never abbreviate the name, though our receptionist is adept at saying the whole firm name as if it is one word. While we are mostly a defense firm, we indulge in a modest real estate practice since all real estate in Sarasota is for sale and has an appreciation rate that blows my mind. We don't handle criminal defense, unless an existing client gets into some kind of discreet trouble, like DWI, but concentrate on medical malpractice and personal injury defense, and we have a host of doctors, hospitals, auto insurance companies, and nursing homes as revolving clients.
These revolving clients crash through our dark oak double doors, angry at us because they've been sued, and we lock them out at night with a ridiculously decorated but quite serious deadbolt lock. The front door is a monster, with door handles designed to look like gargoyles foisted on us by an interior decorator that Ashton Stanley, in the years before he'd taken up with Jennifer the Stair-master wizard, had been wooing until he found out this interior decorator had begun life as a boy. Ashton's early crush on the decorator also explained why he had a clear plastic table for a desk and a purple rug and black walls. Good thing the decorator stopped playing hard to get before the whole inside of the law firm was mauve and black and plastic.
Thinking I'd rather have a black and plastic office than continue to pretend to listen to my dreary new client pontificate further on the difficulties of his profession and the unfairness of a legal system that actually allowed an injured patient to sue his doctor, I stared at my client and waited for a break. So, when my good orthopod paused to inhale, I gave him an earnest but pain-laden smile (I've learned something from watching Newly's well-rehearsed clients over the years), and I said, “My head and neck really hurt.
Really.
Bad. I'm afraid we'll need to reschedule this so I can give you the attention, the
whole
attention, you deserve.” I paused, studied his face, and saw the emerging sympathy.
“Mugged, you said?”
Got him.
I grimaced, rubbed my neck. Exaggerated the mugging experience, with special emphasis on the choke hold and the neck twisting.
“You're a surgeon, so could you, please, maybe, write me a prescription for a pain medicine? That Advil just isn't helping me.”
Memo to file: Never ask for a narcotic by nameâ that tips them off.
By the time he left, I had a prescription for Percocet, a personal narcotic favorite of Elvis Presley's and Dean Martin's.
If I'd known somebody was going to kill Dr. Trusdale later that night by spiking his marijuana with toxic oleander, I'd have listened closer and been nicer.
Jackson Winchester Smith, the
founding and controlling partner at Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, P.A., charged into my office while I was grinding the beans and heating the Zephyrhills bottled spring water for my second pot of coffee.
“Good win on that kayak whiplash case,” he thundered. Jackson never talks, he thunders. He has a portrait of Stonewall Jackson in his office big enough to be a weight-bearing wall, and his favorite quote is “Don't get in a pissing contest with a skunk.” It does not worry me in the least that the man who signs my paycheck believes that he is the physical reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson. Despite a certain love-hate cachet to our relationship, he is my hero, my mentor, and the man who single-handedly made me the firm's only woman partner.
Jackson glared at my French press. “What's wrong with the coffee in the lunchroom?”
Oh, please. Shall I start with the dioxin in the bleached paper coffee filters, or the pesticides in the coffee, or the white fake dairy creamer consisting almost entirely of fat, dye, and chemicals? Or limit myself to the apt observation that the stuff tasted like crap?
Smiling, though I felt the muscle spasm kicking in at my jaws, I asked, “Join me?”
I maximized the swing of my hair and my smile while I fixed us both coffee with just a dollop of organic two percent milk. We tipped our coffee cups together like friends toasting with their wine, and I sat down, leaned back in my chair, and waited.
“Ah, sorry about the mugging. You don't need to file a workers' comp claim.”
I noted this was a statement, not a question, but nodded and said, “I'm fine” as if he'd asked how I was.
“I've ordered new security lights for the back. Also, I sent out a memo telling people to leave the building in groups of two or more after dark.”
Nothing so silly as saying, “Don't work nights anymore.”
“A good idea,” I answered, sipping my coffee and waiting.
“How's your caseload?”
Aha.
“Heavy.” I gave the answer I always give to that question. Not to be overworked is the kiss of demise in a law firm.
“Good,” Jackson said, the answer he always gives to assertions of overwork. “I want you to take over my CMV case, the brain-damaged baby case. One with cerebral palsy and mental retardation.”
Oh, sure, I thought, now that you've milked thousands of dollars of legal fees out of the discovery stage of the litigation process, dump it on me. So year-end, your computer printout shows you made a ton of money for the firm, and my score sheet shows I lost a multimillion-dollar veggie baby case after a two-week trial.
“I thought you were going to settle that one.” The rule of thumb being that a defense attorney always settles a brain-damaged baby case unless the mother is a total pig caught smoking crack on a police video while visibly pregnant and pounding her womb with sharp objects in front of forty bishops, all of whom will testify against her. Not that negligence on the part of the doctor or the hospital has a thing to do with the jury's decision. A sweet young mother, a distraught and earnest father, and a drooling infant dangling his big-eyed, vacant head left and right. No way a jury doesn't give that skewed Norman Rockwell painting some money. Big money.
“Tried to settle it,” Jackson said. “Parents' damned attorney has visions of grandeur. Some snotty hot-shot out of Miami.”
Yeah, I knew the parents' attorney, an arrogant son of a bitch who liked to make sure everybody knew he went to Harvard and who was forever correcting my pronunciation of his nameâSteph-fin, not Steve-in. We'd met at some early rounds when Jackson sent me to argue some legal minutia in the case. As I recalled, our theory was that the infant's birth defects were caused by a common virus, CMV, and not mistakes during the delivery. But it was going to be hard to get around the argument that the obstetrician screwed up by not doing an emergency cesarean when problems developed during labor.
“Up the settlement offer,” I said, hoping I didn't sound like I was begging.
“Can't. Already at policy limits.”
That was a lot of money thrown at the plaintiffs. Their refusal showed either confidence or stupidity, and where personal injury litigation lottery stakes are at play, the former is often a reflection of the latter. Me, I'm a “bird in the hand beats two in the bush” sort of girl. I would have taken the offer. Never let a jury of strangers decide your fate if you can help it, that would be my advice.
But, of course, the good-parents had not asked me. And now Jackson wanted to hand this mess off to me.
“Sure,” I said. It wasn't as if I had a choice, since I was barely even a partner and crap runs downhill, so I might as well pretend to take it with good graces. “Got a trial date yet?”
“End of the month. But I filed a motion for continuance. It's before Judge Goddard. You argue the motion.”
“What're the grounds?” I asked, thinking, Other than the usual justice-delayed maxim and the natural human tendency to put off as long as possible anything that was difficult to do.
“The parents' attorney hired off our leading expert witness, and we need to find another one. You'd better hit MEDLINE this afternoon and read up on the literature, find the leading CMV experts. Look for somebody we don't have to fly in from California, all right?”
“You mean our doctor who was so emphatic that this sort of brain damage could only develop in the womb? He bailed on us?” My heart made the kind of conspicuous thump-thump that happens after a loud noise late at night.
“Yeah. For twice our hourly rate. After he changed his mind, I set him up for another deposition. Under oath, son of a bitch says the money Stephen LaBlanc offered him didn't have a thing to do with it. Our doctor's damn insurance company's so cheap we can't even keep a decent expert. Then this overpaid expert says he erred in his initial opinion because we distorted the facts about the microcephaly.”
“The what?”
“Microcephaly. You know, kid was born with a small head. You don't remember that?”
Yeah, I remembered the small-head thing, only I called it a small-head thing, not microcephaly.
So we were screwed with that physician whore. Nice trick on Stephen's part, I thought.
“Better get busy.” Jackson put down his coffee cup, keeping his eyes even with mine, probably checking for panic. I hoped he couldn't hear the thump-thump-thump of my heart, my now fully activated fight-or-flight response in place. Even my mouth had dried up. I smiled, reassuringly I hoped, to the man who had just ruined my life.
Oh, just frigging great, I thought, as I watched him leave. If I didn't get that continuance, I had less than three weeks to find an expert, hire him, coach him, amend the witness list to include the new expert, set up his deposition so Stephen LeBlanc couldn't bitch “unfair surprise” and keep my expert off the stand, get ready for the trial, and maintain my regular caseload.
My left eye pounded and my shoulders twitched in spasms.
Two minutes after Jackson left my office, I poured another cup of coffee and heaped it with turbinado sugar, the soul food of any personal crisis. I turned on my computer and went online, accepting my karma that I was soon going to know more than anyone could possibly want to about cytomegalovirus, wisely called CMV, and I had better find a good medical expert, quick.
Just what I wanted to be, the law firm's leading expert on an unpronounceable virus. Already my “anything wrong with your mouth” fifteen minutes of pop-star status at my law firm had faded. My law firm, where if you rested on your laurels, somebody would steal your billings and your leather desk chair.