Amelia rolled her eyes. “Talking to Austin on the phone. Like, they see each other at school all the time, you’d think they wouldn’t have anything to talk about, right? But they gossip worse than any girl I know at school. It’s weird. I mean, I guess Nate’s more of a girl than a boy, so maybe that’s why he never runs out of things to talk about with Austin. Can I be excused?”
“Yeah, I said you could,” I said, maybe in a snappish tone that I didn’t really mean. “And listen, I don’t want you saying rude things about your brother behind his back.”
She rolled her eyes. “What did I say?”
“You said that he was more of a girl than a boy. I don’t want to hear those demeaning things out of your mouth. Not to his face and not behind his back.”
Amelia gave me a look. “Sorry,” she said in a bratty tone-of-voice, so that it came out drawn out like sorrryyy. Then she ran upstairs and slammed her door.
I sat at the dining room table, staring at the leftover chicken and sad mashed potatoes, wondering how it was that I was going to talk with Nate about his sexuality. When a kid at school, James Royal, teased Nate and bullied him about being gay, which ostensibly was the reason why Nate brought a gun into his school that one day, I didn’t think anything of it. I just figured that James didn’t know what he was talking about.
Now, if Amelia was right, Nate really was gay. There was just no way that I could bring it up to him, though. I figured that if he wanted to tell me, he would. He didn’t talk to me about it, so I had to think that he wasn’t ready to go into it.
I cleared the table, and made myself a glass of scotch on the rocks. I took it into my den and put the television on. Some program was on, but I wasn’t really tuned into it so much. All I could think about was that my son was possibly gay and I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.
I wanted to talk to somebody about it, but I thought that I would be betraying Nate if I called Harper to ask her about it. He hadn’t told me, so who was I to turn around and tell somebody else his secret?
I shook my head and drank some more. I was just going to have to forget about this Nate thing, until he was ready to talk, and just focus my energies on my two cases that were occupying my mind.
I did decide to go ahead and call Harper and tell her about the antibiotics thing. I wanted to pick her brain on what expert we could hire to come in and explain the concept of false positives on a drug test. If I could just show the jury that my mom maybe didn’t have opiates in her system at the time of Dr. Dunham’s death, then maybe, just maybe, I would be able to win the case.
Harper picked up on the third ring. “Hey, Damien,” she said. “How are things?”
“Fine,” I said, then the words just tumbled out of my mouth. “Nate’s gay and I don’t really know how to talk to him about it.” I shook my head and silently kicked myself. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to be calling Nate out like that. “And also, my mom was taking Cipro at the time of the drug test. Taking it badly, I might add. She took five pills the night that she was arrested, and five pills the night before. I think that I can challenge the drug test and I was wondering if you knew a good expert who might be able to testify about false positives.”
“Well, yeah, I have a good hired gun for something like that. That’s interesting that your mom was taking a drug that is known to cause false positives for opiates. I guess we’ll just have to get her medical records into evidence and get a hired gun and approach the trial that way. I think that we can show that Dr. Dunham’s overdose was an unfortunate accident.”
I felt embarrassed about blurting out about Nate, so I wanted to get off the phone before she could ask me any questions about my son. “Well, good talking to you, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow. We can brainstorm this a little bit more, huh?”
“Yeah.” She hesitated. “So, Nate. Are you sure?”
“No, I’m not sure. I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget I said a word. Please, Harper, forget I said anything.”
“I will,” she said. “But if you need to talk to me about it, don’t hesitate. I know something about it. My dad turned out to be gay, after all.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
At that, I hung up the phone, forgetting to even say goodbye.
After I got off the phone, I put my head in my hands.
Just one more thing I was going to have to deal with.
Another day in the life of Damien Harrington.
No big deal.
Chapter 20
Things were going along pretty well on the Michael Reynolds front. I got him scheduled in for a deposition, and I had bombarded him with discovery requests. True to what he was saying, he didn’t hire an attorney. I had a feeling that, before everything was said and done, I was going to get a default judgment against him. That was because the guy didn’t have an attorney, and I was intentionally burying him in discovery requests. If he didn’t have an attorney to guide him as to the proper procedures on how to make motions to the court about my discovery requests, because even I had to admit that they were unduly burdensome, then I really thought that he wasn’t going to be able to comply. I thought that he probably wouldn’t be able to come up with all the documents I’d asked for, and probably wouldn’t be able to answer all the interrogatory questions that I sent to him.
Not only that, but I anticipated that he was going to miss some filing deadlines. I was just going to make it as hard as possible for him, in hopes that I was going to wear him down, make him miss a filing deadline or not come to a deposition, and then I could go ahead and ask the court to enter judgment on my client’s behalf.
On the day of the deposition, Audrey Blackwood appeared. She was dressed in a new suit, her hair put up in a bun. She looked very anxious and nervous. As she sat in my office, she had a handkerchief in her hand that she was wringing, over and over and over.
I felt a great amount of compassion for her. This was a woman who was broken, grieving intensely. Her pain was palpable – I could feel it on my skin.
“Now tell me again why I’m here?” she asked me. “I guess I don’t really understand what a deposition is. I mean, why can’t we just go to trial and make him testify on the stand?”
I explained to her my strategy for this case. Ordinarily, I scheduled depositions as a discovery device. They were usually useful to find out information and other avenues that I needed to pursue, and maybe the names of other people who might be useful to the case. Also, depositions were helpful to lock-in testimony. That way, if the person tries to get up on the stand and lie, I would have their answers in the deposition to show the jury that they were lying.
In this case, however, the deposition served those purposes, but it was also designed specifically to be another burdensome exercise that I hoped that Michael Reynolds wouldn’t participate in. If he didn’t show for the deposition, then I could hold him in contempt, and it would be one more building block in my eventual motion for a default judgment.
“The deposition is important as a pretrial discovery device,” I explained to Audrey. “It locks in testimony so that if he tries to lie on the stand, I can hit him with a prior inconsistent statement. Also, the questions I ask him will be designed to lead me to other avenues that I might explore. I’ll also ask him about witnesses, and questions of that nature. Also, taking a deposition will help me see what the weaknesses are of the case.”
“What if he doesn’t show?” Audrey asked, her hands still wringing the handkerchief tightly.
I smiled. “If he doesn’t show, then I can ask a judge to hold him in contempt. That would mean that he would have to pay attorney’s fees and the cost of having the court reporter here. If he doesn’t show repeatedly, or if he’s ordered to pay fees and then doesn’t do it, I can ask for him to be thrown in jail. He wouldn’t be able to get out of the jail until the fees are paid, or he is no longer in breach of the order, whatever that order may be.”
Audrey nodded
her head. She bit her lower lip. “I have to say, I’m a little bit nervous about all of this. I’ve never done anything like this before. I’ve never been in a lawsuit or anything like that before. And I’m scared. I’m scared about what he’s going to say about my daughter. I’m afraid he’s going to say things about her that maybe I don’t want to hear.”
I had to admit, that was concerning me. It seemed that maybe Audrey Blackwood might have known something about her daughter that she wasn’t telling me.
“Why are you nervous about that? Was Carrie a different kind of person than what you told me?”
Audrey was silent for a few minutes, but then she shook her head. “No. No. Carrie was a good girl. She would never willingly participate in something vile like a sex tape. I believed her when she said that she was raped by that man, and I believed her when she said that she had nothing to do with that video going online. I believed her. There’s no reason why I wouldn’t have believed her.”
Audrey was not exactly convincing me, but there was nothing I could really do about it. I was just going to have to get into the particulars of this case and hope that everything worked out in the end.
Harper poked her head into the office. “I was going to get some lunch, and I was wondering if you wanted anything? I was going to go down to that Mixx place and get a salad.”
The Mixx was a little salad and sandwich joint that was by the Plaza library. Harper loved that place, because she could get any kind of salad that she wanted, and the place just mixed it up. You could get any kind of vegetable, meat, seed, cheese and salad dressing, in any combination. It was a very popular joint, and Harper went there all the time. Especially since our office was right off the Country Club Plaza, that place was very convenient.
“Uh, Harper, this is Audrey Blackwood. She’s the plaintiff in the case against Michael Reynolds.” I had told Harper ahead of time that Michael was scheduled in for a deposition, and Harper told me that she wanted to meet Audrey. That was probably the reason why Harper chose this time to ask about whether or not I wanted lunch at The Mixx.
Harper came into the office and sat down next to Audrey. “I’m very glad to meet you.” Harper took Audrey’s hand and clasped it with her own. “I wanted you to know that I think it’s incredibly brave what you’re doing. It can’t be easy for you to have to relive your daughter’s situation.”
Audrey smiled. “It’s not easy. It’s never easy. You know the old cliché, you’re not supposed to bury your child. You’re not supposed to be the one who lives on. It’s not the natural order of things. I never dreamed, I never imagined, that I would die after my daughter. I think about her every day. Every minute of every day. I wonder what it was that I missed. How could I have missed the signs that she was so depressed? I don’t know how I couldn’t see how humiliated and degraded she felt when that video went viral. I don’t think that I can ever get over it.”
Harper nodded her head. I knew that she was feeling this woman. I knew that Harper was too professional to tell this woman what Michael had done to her, but I knew that it was on the forefront of her mind.
Harper looked at me. “When is Michael supposed to be here?”
I looked at the clock. “A half hour ago. The court reporter has been sitting in the conference room waiting for him to show. He doesn’t have an attorney. He told me he wasn’t going to hire counsel, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he missed this. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.”
Harper still sat in the office. It looked like she was just going to hang out with us, and not go and get lunch after all. Truth be told, I thought that Harper was just as anxious as Audrey, maybe moreso. Harper knew, as well as I did, that if Michael Reynolds didn’t appear for a deposition, and didn’t respond to discovery requests, and didn’t file an answer to my petition, I would be able to get a default judgment against him, which would be the best thing for everybody, except for Michael himself. I knew that Audrey wanted her day in court, and I didn’t want to deny her that, but I also thought that it would be mentally and emotionally better for her if she didn’t have to sit through a protracted trial.
An hour later, Michael still hadn’t shown, so I sent the court reporter away. I then sat down at my desk and immediately prepared a motion for sanctions, and a motion to hold Michael in contempt of court. As far as I was concerned, I was one step closer to getting a default judgment against the guy. One step closer to ruining his life, without him even being aware of it.
I felt a certain sense of satisfaction with my strategy. If it worked out, it was going to be maximum punishment for him, with a minimal amount of work for me.
This was going to be the easiest judgment that I was going to ever get.
Chapter 21
When Harper got into the office the next day, I went to see her and ask her if she could meet me in the conference room. I wanted to brainstorm my mom’s case with her, and I knew that she had court in the afternoon, as did I. Mine was just a DUI plea, but I nevertheless had to show up for my client.
“Sure,” Harper said, a cup of coffee in one hand and a donut in the other. “I’ll be in in just a second.”
I went down the hall into the conference room and spread out the information I had on the conference table. Harper came down and joined me in a matter of minutes.
“Okay,” I said to Harper when she came into the conference room. “I wanted to brainstorm this whole thing with you. I got to thinking last night that I maybe knew where this was going, but I had a weird dream last night about Sally Wallace. In my dream, she kept saying that somebody wanted Dr. Dunham dead. You said last night that if we could convince the jury that Mom’s drug test was a false positive that we might conclude that Dr. Dunham’s death was an unfortunate accidental overdose and call it a day. We might be able to show the jury that, too. But I have a feeling that there’s something more. We need to dig deeper on this.”
Harper sat down, took a bite of her donut and a sip of her coffee and nodded her head. “I agree, actually. I was just thinking that it would be easiest to convince the jury that it was an accidental overdose that your mother had nothing to do with. That would be easiest, but you’re right. I think that there’s something more and I keep circling back to Sharita Vance and her weird reaction when you asked her what drugs she pitched to Dr. Dunham. I think that we need to figure out what was going on.”
She pointed to the bottle of Oxycontin that was on the conference table, the bottle that I got from Sally Wallace. “I think that we need to send that pill in for testing. Find out what was in it. I mean, I know that it says Oxycontin on the bottle, but I still think that we should go ahead and have it tested. I just have my own gut feeling about this case, and I think that the key to the case is showing that Dr. Dunham might have ingested a drug that he wasn’t prepared to ingest.”
I had to admit, I didn’t think about that angle. “Tell me your thinking,” I said.
“Well, here’s what I started to put together last night after I put the kids to bed. I was up until 4 in the morning, trying to put the puzzle pieces together. And you and I kept talking about why would a pain management doctor take a street drug like heroin? I started to really think about it, rolling that question around in my mind, over and over.”
“Go on…”
“Well, Sally genuinely thought that Dr. Dunham didn’t prescribe pain meds, right? Yet he did prescribe them - once a week, every week, to Sharita Vance. She was the only person that he prescribed drugs to.”
“Right….” I had no idea where she was going with this, but she did.
“Well, okay. He’s prescribing drugs to Sharita Vance once a week, and she sees him once a week. Now, don’t you think that’s just a little bit odd? I mean, yeah, when you’re on opioids, you have to come in for follow-up visits, but every week? And why wasn’t she on his patient list?”
“That’s right, she was on his social calendar, not his patient calendar.” I had to really think about this.
“Right.”
Harper was nodding her head excitedly. “So, we have four weird things about this. One, Sharita was seeing him every single week for something, it wasn’t follow-up visits, because you don’t have to see your doctor every time you get a prescription refilled, not even with opioids.”
“And two…”
“Two, Sharita wasn’t on his patient calendar. Three, she was the only person who he was prescribing drugs to. And four, the bottle of Oxycontin with Sharita’s name was found in Dr. Dunham’s office. Why would he have a prescription with her name on it in his office?”
“So, what’s your theory?”
“Here’s what I came up with. What if Dr. Dunham was prescribing drugs to Sharita, and she was selling them back to him?”
I thought about what Harper was saying. “Huh…let me think about this.”
“It makes sense,” Harper said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. I mean, it would work beautifully, if you think about it. If Dr. Dunham was a drug addict, how would he get his hands on drugs? Pharmaceutical reps can’t send him samples. Opioids are Schedule II, which means that they’re controlled. He can’t write scrips to himself. So, he gets a confederate, he gives her a bogus diagnosis of some kind of chronic pain, he writes her a scrip, she sells it back to him.”
“I’ve never heard of that kind of thing.”
“Neither have I, but can you poke a hole in that theory?”
I shook my head. “No, actually. I think that it would work. But Dr. Dunham died of a heroin overdose, not an Oxycontin overdose.”
“Right,” Harper said. “That’s why I want to send that pill in for testing. I’m thinking that if we do that, we’ll find that the pill isn’t Oxycontin at all, but pure heroin.”
“Come again?” I asked her. I still wasn’t quite on her level of thinking. I knew that she had a flash of insight, and had worked it all out in her head, so she was way ahead of me.
Until Proven Guilty Page 14
