Skinny-dipping (20 page)

While I tried to regulate my heart and breath and imagine what in the world I would say to the state trooper, I looked at Jennifer. Her face was red, her eyes big, and she was panting. Her huge, Barbie-doll breasts were heaving.

“Unbutton the third button,” I said, thinking cleavage was our only weapon now. But she didn't budge, a catatonic look crossing her face.

I grabbed my wallet, pulled out my driver's license, and got out of the car. If I acted contrite and passably normal, maybe the state trooper wouldn't shoot me.

The trooper, who was young and red-faced, looked angry as he crawled out of his vehicle, outwardly cautious, his right hand free and near the holster on his belt. I'm sure I looked as crazy as Jennifer had. I didn't say a word. Delvon had told me once that there are only three things you ever, ever said to a police officer if you are stopped or questioned: “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” and “I'm sorry, sir.” I was silently practicing the “I'm sorry, sir” when I heard the other car door open and Jennifer popped out, the third button on her blouse opened and the bulges over her demibra radiant.

“Oh, officer,” she said, sounding remotely normal. “This is all my fault, I'm afraid. I am so sorry.”

You got that right, babe.

I glanced at the trooper and noticed that he had snapped open his holster and was looking down at us as if we were the Dixie Mafia personified.

At least one of us might be, I thought.

“There was a wasp in the car.” She took a step closer to him, walking with a lilting spring that made her hair and hips sway alluringly, full blonde armor ready. “I'm deathly allergic. I've got these little syringes of stuff I'm supposed to carry with me in case I get bit, but I forgot. And I panicked, and I scared my friend here. She was trying to drive and swat the wasp, and I was opening the windows so it would fly out, and I told her to go faster so the air would blow the wasp out, and, oh, it finally did, and I am so sorry.”

Nobody in their right mind would believe that, I thought. No bosom in the world could get us out of this.

The state trooper glanced back at me. “License and registration,” he said.

I handed him my license, and then I thought, Registration,
mierda.
It isn't even my car.

“I'll get it,” Jennifer said, grinning as if she were a cheerleader at the homecoming game and the trooper was the coach giving a last-minute pep talk.

“Easy, ma'am,” he said, easing over toward her, his right hand hovering toward his holster.

“Just in the glove compartment? Won't be but a sec,” she said.

I contemplated running like hell, but then another car whooshed in behind the trooper's car, and I turned toward the sound and saw Ashton and the doctor man get out and approach the trooper.

“Y'all stay back,” the trooper said to Ashton and Marcus, his hand now on his holster.

“Hey, girls, what's up?” Ashton was grinning like a man in control of his destiny, or one deluded by substance abuse of long duration.

The trooper eyed us all. “You.” He pointed at Jennifer, and she beamed as if he had announced her the winner of the Miss Blonde Something pageant. “Get over there with them.”

We all watched Jennifer make a show of walking around the Jag in the shimmering heat of the late afternoon and stand beside Ashton and Marcus. “Hi, honey,” she said to Ashton, and she reached out and took his hand in her own dainty little pink-tipped fingers.

“You,” the trooper said, pointing at me, “get the registration, now, and go slow.”

I held up my hands toward the trooper to show him I had no weapons. “Yes, sir.”

The trooper followed me around to the driver's side and kept a close eye as I opened the door to reach the glove compartment. Ashton, Jennifer, and Marcus stayed lined up on the other side of the car while I dug in the glove compartment. The state trooper watched me, right hand resting on his holster, eyes flicking back and forth between me and the trio by the side of the road. I handed the trooper a registration and proof of insurance.

“It's his car,” I said, pointing at Marcus. “I was just test-driving it. We're just awfully sorry, sir, but the wasp really had us both freaked out.”

And that bag of acid had us a little freaked out too.

And whatever else was hidden in the car.

“Get over there with them,” the trooper said, and I did.

He walked back to his car and radioed in the registration to see if the car had been listed as stolen. Then he collected identification from each of us, accepting from Jennifer an assortment of credit cards and her library card in lieu of the driver's license she didn't have. He called all of us in on the radio to see if we had any outstanding warrants. I was pretty sure Ashton and I were all right, but I sweated out Jennifer and Marcus. But we were cleared.

Then he asked me if he could look through the Jag.

“Help yourself,” I said, “but it's his car. You might ask him. I'm just test-driving it. Never met the man before late this afternoon.”

Really, why didn't I say I was just a hitchhiker and whatever he found in the Jag had nothing to do with me? Surely the state trooper had never heard that one before.

“Oh, please,” Marcus said. “Help yourself.”

I watched Jennifer's face but saw only the vapid expression of a woman with nothing more to worry about than sweat stains on her silk blouse.

The trooper made all four of us sit in his car while he rattled through the obvious hidey-holes in the Jag. He seemed to take a long time. The Baggie in my bra scratched, but I didn't dare take it out. None of us in the trooper's car spoke, probably for fear we were being taped or monitored.

Apparently Jennifer had told the truth and the only illegal contraband was now LSD dust in the wind.

In the end, the state trooper wrote me a ticket for speeding and left it at that. I don't know whether it was the heaving bosom, our fundamentally clean-cut, middle-class, middle-aged appearance (well, at least with Ashton and Marcus, that is), the story of the wasp, or just the state trooper's own desire to be done with all of us once he failed to find contraband or outstanding warrants. But a speeding ticket was all that happened.

That, and I made Ashton let me drive his car while Jennifer and Marcus cruised into Tampa in the Jag well ahead of us. For once I went the speed limit. Well, okay, I went ten miles over, but nobody stops you for that.

“She's totally crazy,” I said to Ashton.

“No, babe, she's just high strung.”

I thought, Yeah, well, I'd ask for a second opinion.

“I'll pay the ticket,” he said.

“Damn right.”

We drove the rest of the way in a strained silence.

Once in Tampa, despite my attempts to get Jennifer alone and ask what in the hell that LSD thing was about, I was never able to get her outside the range of strangers who could listen in. I prefer not to discuss illegal drug contraband in the hearing of people I don't know, so I figured I would catch her later, back in Sarasota.

Oddly enough, we had a perfectly fine dinner at the Colombia, drank several bottles of fine Spanish wine, finished up with the famous Cuban coffee, and flirted our way around Ybor City, a historical area that years ago had deteriorated into a slum but, in the Florida pave-it-for-cash spirit, had been re-created into an upscale mall of bars and touristy places. After closing down the bars, we left Marcus and his Jag to whatever in Tampa. Neither Jennifer nor I had said a peep about the LSD in front of Marcus or Ashton.

Damn, Jennifer and I had a secret, and we'd had an adventure together. In girlfriend terms, I think that meant we were now officially best friends.

Best girlfriend or not, I wasn't ever riding with her behind the wheel again. “I'll drive,” I said, taking the key from Ashton.

On the long ride back, Ashton and Jennifer teased and giggled and had a bit of indiscreet oral sex in the backseat while I tried not to listen.

I never did think to ask her why she didn't have a driver's license.

Chapter 29

The best-girlfriend thing went
a step further the next morning.

Jennifer and Ashton had invited me to spend the night at Ashton's house, and I did out of fatigue and fear of staying alone in my own house in case the lurking would-be assassin still had me in mind, and because I figured it was too late to show up at Sam's in a sweat-stained red halter. During the night, Bear-ess snuggled into the bed with me and I slept soundly, notwithstanding the Cuban coffee.

I woke up when Jennifer crawled into bed with me the next morning, balancing a tray with two cups of coffee laced generously with Bailey's Irish Cream.

The caffeine and alcohol hit my empty stomach with a surge and a bang, and Bearess, to my amazement, lapped some out of Jennifer's cup without Jennifer so much as slapping the dog's nose.

“Oh, she always shares my coffee,” she said when I protested.

“What about germs?”

“Oh, I don't have anything contagious. The doctors ran all kinds of tests. I'm clean.”

Not what I meant, of course, but this was a new piece of information that made me wonder what doctors, noting her use of the plural, and why they had run “all kinds of tests.”

“What I want to do is explain,” Jennifer said, and patted my now exposed thigh. I was drinking spiked coffee, propped on a pillow in the bed, half-naked in one of Ashton's T-shirts, with a big dog nuzzling my arm and a weird Barbie-doll woman patting my leg. “Okay,” I said. “Give it a whirl.”

“Marcus and I are old friends, see, and Ashton and I felt bad about ...you know, Angela stealing your boyfriend.”

“Angela didn't steal my boyfriend.”

“Oh, well, sure,” Jennifer said, and patted my leg again as Bearess lapped another snort of her spiked coffee.

“Anyway, we just thought you and he might hit it off.”

“What about the LSD?”

“Oh, I was really, really, really so glad you didn't say a word about that. I was just doing a favor for a friend, and Marcus and Ashton wouldn't understand one bit.”

A favor for a friend? A wasp in the car? This girl must have gotten her excuses straight off of television. I could see she needed a course in the inventive lie. Or, as Jackson called it, the theory of the Big Lie, in which the weirder, more imaginative, and bigger the lie, the more likely it is that people will actually believe you. This was often the dominant theory of many a lesser plaintiff's case in the personal injury lottery world.

But before I could swallow the coffee and begin the tutorial on the theory of the Big Lie, Jennifer said, “The thing is, I applied for a job with Marcus, at his office. He's in with a bunch of other radiologists. But I didn't get the job. But I sorta tracked him for a few weeks, and once he met me, he, you know, kinda asked me out. We went out, and he was a really nice man, and then I decided to move to Sarasota, and so he helped me get my job. Then I met Ashton and, like, the rest is history.”

Okay, I thought, you stalked the man for a date and a job, but what does that have to do with that LSD?

“So, see, the thing is, and what I was getting at, is that Marcus is really a good guy. He's not nearly as boring as you'd think. You are so
cooool
. I just thought you'd like him. That's all.”

So
cooool?
Nobody except Jennifer had said that about me since before I'd gone to law school, where apparently being forced to study the penumbras of the Constitution had totally stripped me of any coolness.

Jennifer squeezed my thigh with her free hand, while the dog drank from her coffee cup in the other hand. Her fingers curled around my flesh as she held on to that rather sensitive part of my leg. As little twirls of heat spun off from her fingers on my thigh, I wondered who exactly this woman was and what she was up to.

“I'm so glad you can keep a secret,” she said, and let go of my leg. “I mean, you know, the acid. Keeping a secret is really important between girlfriends, isn't it?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“So, anyway, what would you like for breakfast? I just eat fruit.”

“Fruit is good,” I said, and lifted my cup of coffee out of reach of Bearess as she aimed her long tongue at my cup, having apparently finished most of Jennifer's.

It turned out that Sam had been worried, which made him mad, and he actually raised his voice at me for not telling him where I had spent the night.

This took place while I was sorting papers at my desk around noon on Sunday, having earlier had a predictably weird breakfast with Ashton and Jennifer and Bearess, who actually had a place mat just for her on Ashton's breakfast table, where Jennifer fed the dog scrambled eggs. After that, I'd showered at Ashton's, admired his collection of lotions and potions, wondered how much of those Caswell-Massey products the law firm had paid for, and borrowed a long linen sundress from Jennifer in furtherance of our new status as best girlfriends. Without a stitch of underwear on (best girlfriends or not, I wasn't wearing somebody else's panties unless I'd washed them myself), I headed to the office. I hadn't been at my desk more than an hour before Sam was banging on my window, and I let him in.

“Okay, so what exactly is going on here?” I demanded after he yelled at me.

“What do you mean?”

“Am I a suspect, or what? Why am I supposed to stay glued to your side?”

There was a long pause. An awkward pause. He didn't say anything for a minute or two, and then came out with the entirely unoriginal and repetitive, “Where were you last night?”

Oh, I got it. He was jealous.

“Like I tried to tell you, I went to Tampa with Ashton and his girlfriend and a client. It was business, then it was late, so I spent the night with them. Want their number? Check up on me?”

This felt like a high school romance, and the man hadn't even kissed me.

“Dr. Randolph has hired a bodyguard. We don't know what is going on. You need to be careful,” Sam said, and stood up, apparently ready to leave.

“I am careful.”

He walked out without another word.

I finished the work that absolutely, totally, and without a doubt
had
to be done, left a series of notes for Bonita and also for Angela, who should have been in the office but wasn't, and I went to my house, checked all the door locks and windows twice, and took a very long shower. I put on matching bra and panties in red under a red-flowered rayon sheath with cap sleeves and a hemline too high for the office, a pair of casual sandals so I wouldn't look too dressed up, brushed and flossed twice, and drove to Sam's house. He answered the door on the first knock.

Time for Sam to fish or cut bait, I thought, and sauntered into his house without saying a word. I had a package of condoms in my purse in case he wasn't a Boy Scout about such things, and I waited patiently for him to get the picture and act on it.

He got the picture.

For a man who wasn't eighteen anymore, Sam was pretty impressive, and I felt such sweet tenderness when I looked at his face afterward that I knew this wasn't just about sex.

But the thing was, I explained, after basking in the postcoital closeness for about one and a half minutes, I had to go back to the office. “There are at least two things I really ought to finish tonight if I'm going to survive Monday,” I said.

“I'll go with you. Take a look at that Trusdale file.”

Okay, so much for his version of whispered lovey, dopey, great-first-sex sweet nothings.

Sam had already gotten copies of the pleadings, which are public records, from both the Dr. Trusdale and Dr. Randolph files at the courthouse, and he was still pursuing a subpoena to get the rest of the materials in the files that were not public record. I'd turned responding to the subpoena over to Jackson as the firm's managing partner. But now, all toasty and warm and completely satisfied in the arms of the man who might still harbor vague suspicions about me, I agreed that he could look at the Trusdale file. After all, the doctor was dead, so what kind of attorney-client privilege could there be? More important, who was left to enforce it?

Back at the law firm of Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley, I warmed up the copy machine and my computer and started churning out a rough draft of a preliminary response to Stephen's petition for mandamus, which sought in legally hysterical words to force Judge Goddard to set a trial date in the Jason Goodacre case. Angela had done a bang-up job of research and composing a rough draft opposing Stephen's petition, from which I was freely pirating. Our response wasn't due until Friday, but I knew I'd do five or six versions and, as with Tommy Glavine's historical bad pitching in the first inning, I just needed to get this part over with as quickly as possible.

Sam sat on the couch with the Trusdale file.

There was something rather nice and homey about this, like we were a real couple. I kept this to myself, made myself forget Sam, and typed like a madwoman.

But by the time I had the first draft of the legal argument done, the room was too full of Sam for me to move on to the next part of the response. I could see him. I could smell him. I could catch the currents of wind he threw off as he moved. I wanted to taste him. I remembered the feel of him too well. Also, my back was stiff and I needed to move around.

I stood up, stretched, peeked out the window. Though it was Sunday night, three cars besides my own 1987 Honda were in the parking lot, so I suspected that at least a few lawyers still lurked in the building.

As I was stretching, Sam got up from the couch, where he'd been reading through Dr. Trusdale's files, and locked my office door.

I guess this startled me, because he grinned and said, “Don't look so worried.”

I grinned back and let him come toward me.

We didn't bother to undress completely. That's a nice thing about men's pants and the way a woman's dress can be lifted out of the way.

“My God, you are beautiful,” Sam said, while pushing my dress up around my hips and staring right at my face, my eyes.

I don't believe this, that I'm beautiful, but I never deny it when anyone says it to me. “You are too,” I said, and meant it, but Sam was thinking with his body now and didn't appear to hear me.

A half hour later, though we had smoothed out our clothes and I had giggled a few dozen times, my legs were still quivering when somebody knocked on my door.

“Lilly?”

It was Angela, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that something was wrong. I crossed in front of Sam in a hurry and unlocked and opened the door. Angela was holding Crosby in her arms and crying. For a moment I couldn't tell if the dog was alive or not, and I was suddenly afraid that Jackson and I had kept Angela here too long doing our work. Then Crosby opened his eyes for a moment, looked at me with some kind of doggy recognition passing through them, and then closed them.

“Oh, Angie,” I said, and I opened my arms and took her in them, hugging her carefully, conscious of the weak, tiny dog in her arms.

“He's not going to make it much longer,” she said.

“I know, Angie. Oh, I am so sorry.” And I was. The obvious platitudes danced into and out of my brain, but there was nothing to say. Her pain was real, and it hit me harder than it should have, for reasons I didn't understand. I let her out of my hug but kept my hands on her forearms as she held on to Crosby.

“We're leaving now for Mississippi,” a voice behind her said, and I looked up and saw Newly.

“He's been sedated. We've got some meds for him,” Angela said, a catch in her voice. “My mother is expecting us. Crosby was her dog as a puppy. They need to say good-bye.”

I understood this perfectly, again for reasons I couldn't have articulated.

“I've got to go. I put Jackson's antitrust brief under his door last night. Will you tell everybody tomorrow?”

“Of course. Don't worry. You've got your week, you know that, the compassionate leave the executive committee agreed on. Don't hurry back too soon.”

“Thank you.” Angela pulled out of my hands, and I saw Newly look at me, then over my shoulder at Sam.

“Drive carefully,” I said.

Angela had already started walking off, but Newly stood there, continuing to stare at me, and I felt a flush creep up my face, as if I'd been caught in some infidelity.

Then Newly too opened his arms to me, and I went into them, and we hugged. He whispered, “I'll always love you,” and then he dropped his arms and went out after Angela, to drive her and her dying dog back home to Mississippi, through a long, dark night, taking his new sweetheart to the arms of her mother, alerted and waiting to comfort her strange, orange-haired child.

Newly would be a good father, I thought, and turned back to Sam.

Ten minutes later, my office phone rang, and Newly's voice came through, loud and clear as if he were shouting over traffic.

“Hey, hon,” he said. “I forgot to tell you something. I don't know, but this might have something to do with all that mess you're in. But Friday, this guy, the bum-knee guy who was suing Dr. Trusdale, he comes into my office. Saw my ad in the Sunday paper. Wants to hire me to sue Trusdale's estate, or his own HMO. Not sure which. Seems like his health insurance is all messed up. Looked like Dr. Trusdale was trying to defraud this guy's HMO by filing a bunch of claims for physical therapy this guy swears he never got. Not for the bum leg, but for a hip. Swears he wouldn't go back to Trusdale in a hundred years, even to use his physical therapist. Came to me to see if I could get his insurance straightened out. It's all a big mess, and his company is claiming he's way over some limit for physical therapy or something. Might just be a mistake—I don't know. But I thought you ought to know. Call my secretary for the file, and I'll let her know you'll call.”

So much for attorney-client privilege, I thought, but Newly always was a bit loose on the rules. Questions bubbled in my brain, but then I heard Angela say something in the background, and then there was a long pause, and then Newly came back on the phone and said, “Gotta go, hon.” His voice was sad.