by Martin Clark
Lettie sat and signed the will, her seventh revision in 2010. After witnessing the signature and adding their own names to the document, the secretaries quietly exited Joe’s office, their steps quick, relieved.
“Don’t think I didn’t see you makin’ your pissy expression,” Lettie said, still seated.
“What expression?” Lisa asked in a mocking tone.
“I wanted to leave Lawyer Joe somethin’, but he wouldn’t hear of it,” Lettie said. “Make up for the torment his wife is to him.”
“Maybe you could bequeath him your cauldron and list of spells,” Lisa cooed.
Lettie laughed. “That’s right funny. Gotta hand it to you. Pretty damn clever for the hired help.”
“So why the cat?” Lisa asked, returning to the subject. “You know good and well Brownie’s here nearly every day.”
“I just wanted me some company on the ride in, okay? And this is a good pet who’s had it rough. Wanted it to see the world. Special treatment.” She cocked her head toward Brownie. “Me and Brownie get along fine. He knows I ain’t tryin’ to raise no sand with him. I could let this here cat go and neither one of ’em would so much as bat an eye. Me, I got a sense about animals.”
“Leave the cat in the cage, please.”
“Bet you the fifty, Della. Double or nothin’. Lion and lamb will lie down. Won’t be no problem.”
“We’ll take the cash, thank you,” Lisa told her.
“What say you, Mr. Stone?” Lettie asked, squinting across the desk at him.
He shrugged. “I’m with Lisa. I’m happy to have the easy money.”
Lettie smiled. “Don’t blame you. People realize I got a supernatural skill. With animals and humans.”
“Right,” Lisa cackled. “Hey, I’ll tell you what: We’ll wager the fifty, plus if I win you agree to address me as Attorney Lisa Stone for the rest of your life. And greet me with a little bow whenever we meet.” She demonstrated, bending at the waist. “Make it interesting.”
“Done,” Lettie said instantly.
“Okay, well, count me in,” Joe said. “But I’m rooting for my wife, Lettie. And against you.” He checked the dog. “Don’t be fooled by my man Brownie. He’s pretty damn frisky for a nine-year-old. You’re going to wind up owing us a hundred plus the regular bill.”
“No I ain’t,” Lettie replied.
“Suit yourself,” he warned her.
She walked to Brownie and knelt beside him, and the dog, affable and spoiled, rolled onto his back, smiling, legs akimbo, his tail drumming. There was a damp spot on the fabric where his jowl had rested. Lettie rubbed his chest and squeezed his paws and pushed in close to his face, bumped his muzzle with her nose. She tugged his collar until he sat upright on his rump, front legs extended, locked. Still on her knees and her eyes level with his, she said nothing but stared at him for so long that Lisa checked her watch, the office quiet, the phone ringing in the adjacent room, bits and pieces of Betty’s voice filtering through the wall. “You understand?” Lettie finally said. Brownie lifted his ears. Tilted his head. Reached for her with a front paw that didn’t touch her, a friendly jab.
She returned to her chair and removed a plump, brindled tabby from the carrier and cradled it in both arms. Immediately, the cat seemed terrified, a fur ridge raising across its spine, its eyes abuzz. Lettie carried it in Brownie’s direction, where he remained just as she’d left him, mesmerized on his haunches, ears alert, his black head tipped slightly toward the high plaster ceiling. The cat was squirming. It spit and growled, the sound wet and feral, buried in its gullet. Lettie touched her open hand to the dog’s nose, blocking him, then eased the cat to the floor, the animals separated by a matter of inches, their twitchy distrust inbred.
The tabby hunkered down, hugging the ground, hissed, and began retreating in deliberate backward slides, stopped. The moment Lettie lifted her hand, Brownie barked and lurched hell-bent after the cat, and it didn’t quite get purchase on the polished wood at first, its legs whirligigging every which direction, its claws frantically scratching against the oak. Brownie rushed past Lettie and snapped at the cat, but it was able to dash away, crossed the room at full speed and somehow climbed straight up the far wall, nearly to the high crown molding, before it lost momentum and twisted and fell, landing on a table covered with files and law books. It made a beeline for the office door, swept around the corner and disappeared. As Brownie tried to shoot past her, Lisa grabbed his collar to end the chase, yanking him up onto two legs, momentarily choking him, his barks strangled in his throat, the last of them hoarse and breathless.
“That went well,” she said, now holding the collar with both hands. “You pick the wrong mojo, Lettie? Forget to turn in a circle after your incantation?” Lisa sounded agitated, but a sly smile was taking root.
Joe clapped sharply. He called the dog’s name. He clapped again, and this seemed to tamp down much of Brownie’s excitement. “Come here,” he said, his voice stern. Lisa let go of the collar. The dog checked in the direction of the cat’s quick departure, looked at Joe, relaxed, studied the empty doorway some more, bounced his ears and wagged his tail, barked once, then finally ambled toward his master.
Lettie remained beside the pad, crestfallen, every feature, every crinkle and crow’s-foot, suddenly weighted. A permanent black tear was tattooed at the corner of her eye, and the dark drop seemed elongated. “I can’t believe it,” she mumbled. “My…” Her mouth was sprung open, the gold tooth more apparent than ever. She raised both hands and pressed her temples, the bottoms of her skinny biceps hanging toneless and feeble, slack below the divide of the bone.
She was so pitiful, so deflated, so shocked that even Lisa was sympathetic. “Hey, Lettie, nobody’s perfect. I’m guessing Gunther Gebel-Williams probably had a dancing bear miss a beat or a lion forget a routine from time to time.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Joe added.
“Not to me,” she replied, the answer freighted with disbelief, the flat-earther who’d sailed to the edge of her map and found an endless horizon, not dragons and sea beasts. “Lawyer Joe, you know I got a gift with animals. It’s my callin’.” The last word was soft, wispy. She was staring down as she spoke, focusing on Brownie’s bed.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lisa said. “Tell you what: You can keep the money. You don’t have to pay us the hundred.”
“Oh no,” Lettie answered. “Hell no. Lettie Pauline VanSandt pays what she owes. I ain’t a welsher. You won and I lost.”
“How about you donate the hundred to the SPCA?” Joe suggested.
“Uh-uh. I’ll pay it when I leave.” She collected her pet carrier and shuffled to the door, where she turned and slightly dipped her head and said, “Congratulations, Attorney Lisa Stone.” She paused. “You lucky-ass bitch.” She switched the carrier from one hand to the other. “Adiós.”
Lettie paid her bill in cash, the extra hundred included, then took her receipt and voodooed the cat lickety-split from beneath the lobby sofa and into the cage as if there were nothing to it. “Tell Lawyer Joe,” she instructed Betty, “this crazy damn creature used to belong to the Cassidy girl, the teenager what was killed with her parents in the car crash last month. Those kinda circumstances queered it for me. I figured it out now. Otherwise I woulda won. You tell him, you hear?”
Two weeks and a day later, the Stones received the news about their screwball client, and when she heard the report, Lisa glanced up and noticed, for the first time, that Lettie’s scared cat had clawed a tiny chunk out of the wall, this faint gouge nicked into the plaster, light playing through the window and setting the damage apart.
—
Not long after Lettie left, Lisa stuffed a file into her briefcase and began the drive to Roanoke for a doctor’s deposition in a personal injury suit. Her client was a pleasant fellow who’d been broadsided by a bank president’s kid at an intersection on King’s Mountain Road. There was money to be made suing for car-wreck checks—large money, in fact�
��and there were any number of deserving folks who found themselves being scammed and cheated by slippery insurance companies and their unscrupulous adjusters, but after years and years of it she’d had a bellyful, enough, and, say what you might, no matter how much skill you brought to the courtroom and how ethical you were and how hefty the verdicts and how magnificently you could bewitch a jury, there was still something seamy about personal injury work, and though few in the legal trade actually gave voice to it, the blowhards on TV and the screaming billboards with mammoth head shots and audacious dollar signs pretty much spoke volumes, same as the local automobile hustlers or the state lottery, more Barnum than barrister, more Charles Ponzi than Antonin Scalia. She occasionally inquired of Joe if this was why the heck they’d gone to law school, why they’d memorized federal civil procedure and studied the Constitution, just so they could earn a buck off whiplashes, pain meds, soft collars and trips to physical therapy. She was sick and tired of putting chiropractors on the stand and leading them through the same dog-and-pony show, these half-doctors with degrees from suspect schools, always tutoring the jury with their chunk of prop spine, pointing to rubber vertebrae and declaiming mumbo jumbo about “treatment modalities” and, her favorite, so encased in irony, “manipulations.”
She lit a cigarette and cracked the window. Hit the presets and, finding zilch, turned down the radio. She passed the old DuPont plant, forlorn and empty beside a deep bend in the Smith River, the asphalt parking lot starting to split and crumble, crabgrass, spindly weeds and declining paint insolent behind chain-link fence, the insides of the place eviscerated and hauled away, machine after machine carted off and sold as scrap for pennies on the dollar. Forty-five hundred people had once worked three shifts there, and in place of steady traffic lines every eight hours, the lunch pails, horseplay, paychecks, womanless-beauty-pageant fund-raisers, softball teams, break room gossip and casserole-and-congealed-salad company picnic was a dilapidated eyesore that would, inevitably, be razed and buried under red-clay dirt, rogue, random chemicals left to seep into the water table and haunt the community. Lisa stubbed out her Marlboro Ultra Light in the ashtray, even though there was plenty left. Then she flamed another. What the hell. The trees beside Route 220 had shed their leaves, stood skeletal and bored. The winter sky was listless.
Amidst snow showers and a swirling wind, she and Joe had cut the ribbon for their Martinsville, Virginia, office near the close of 1991, and in those go-go days textile wages rocket-fueled the community. Two decades ago, the area had supported multiple country clubs and a robust Main Street with a shoe store and haberdashery. Cabinets were full of Princess House collectibles, garages sheltered metal-flake speedboats, parents wrote checks for college tuition, credit union accounts were fat. These days, the plants and mills were closed except for a few furniture factories that hired minimum-wage illegals with patently forged papers, the country clubs had shut their dining rooms and abandoned their galas and formal dances, and Main Street was a sad run of deserted storefronts, nail parlors and doodad emporiums without proper signage, just stick-on block letters applied to the glass in a window or double door. The minor league baseball team was threatening a move to Tennessee. The Walk/Don’t Walk signs hung broken on their uptown poles, no juice. Rumley’s Restaurant and its homemade pies and cobblers were gone.
In Roanoke, she parked at the physician’s building and took the stairs to the third floor, thinking the exercise might help cancel the smokes she’d had during the ride. A nicely mannered receptionist showed her to a conference room and asked if she’d care for bottled water or coffee, both of which she declined. She’d arrived a few minutes early, and she was surprised to see Brett Brooks seated at the table beside the young attorney who was representing the insurance company. A court reporter was stationed in the corner. Lisa had met Brooks only at cocktail parties and legal seminars, and he was regarded—rightfully so, by most measures—as one of the best in the state, a high-flyer with a degree from Yale and a flawless sense for the courtroom, perhaps an inheritance from his father, a flamboyant Montana con man who’d spent a portion of Brett’s childhood in a federal pen—or so the scuttlebutt had it. He stood to greet her, and the other lawyer scrambled to his feet as well, banging his knee on the underside of the table as he rose.
“Lisa,” Brooks said, “great to see you.” He walked around to where she was and shook hands. “You know Chip Maxey, from Woods, Rogers?” He stood beside her and nodded in the direction of Maxey, who was stranded on the other side of the room.
“Hello, Mrs. Stone,” Maxey said.
She’d checked, and Maxey had been with the firm almost three years. He was an eager young kid from a top-tier law school, just starting his career, sent over to do a routine deposition in a relatively minor case. “Hi, Mr. Maxey. Nice to finally meet you.” They’d spoken on the phone several times.
“Same here,” Maxey said.
“Looks like I’m about to be double-teamed,” Lisa joshed. Addressing Brooks, she asked, “What in the world brings you to a run-of-the-mill personal injury dep?”
“Just here to watch the master do her magic,” he replied, the modesty and compliment both sounding genuine. “I’ve already told my friend Chip he can expect a firefight.” Everything about Brooks was impeccable—his pricey suit, his speech, the tidy tie knot that filled in around his collar. He was wearing a fancy belt, loaded with silver and turquoise.
“Ah,” Lisa said, “I’m guessing you’re here to watch over our young defendant.”
“Bingo.” Brooks smiled.
“We didn’t even sue for the policy limits,” Lisa remarked. “He doesn’t have any exposure. This is totally Allstate’s problem. Their check.”
“I told him the same thing,” Maxey said, still standing. “And I tried to convince my client’s father there was no need to hire other counsel.”
Brooks shrugged. “Do you know Miles Covington? Miles is very much his own man. He’s also the president of one of the largest banks in the South; if he wants me to monitor the case, who am I to refuse?” He—very quickly, deftly—smoothed his lapel. “Though, believe me, I told him in no uncertain terms that Mr. Maxey could expertly handle this, and that he and his son were not at risk. They have a million in coverage. Your plaintiff sued for, what, seventy-five thousand?”
“Yeah,” Lisa said. “Seventy-five.”
“So”—Brooks grinned—“I’m simply here to watch and learn. Truth be told, I informed Mr. Covington he was wasting his money on me.”
“A damn good gig if you can get it,” Lisa replied.
“Yeah,” Brooks said. “I’m not complaining.”
Dr. Anthony Corbett came into the sparse conference room wearing his unbuttoned white physician’s coat and carrying a thin file with numbers handwritten across the tab. A stethoscope was bunched in a commodious pocket at the bottom of the coat, and coils of black rubber spilled willy-nilly. His name was embroidered on the jacket, followed by the letters “M.D.” Corbett was around fifty, with long limbs and kinetic eyes. His hair was thinning, he wore glasses, and like most physicians, he was not the least bit happy to be in the company of lawyers, about to be quizzed while under oath, especially since he had already sent a letter explaining the plaintiff’s fairly routine injuries and prognosis to Lisa Stone.
Corbett was also grumpy because these self-important yakkers would no doubt exceed their scheduled time, and this nonsense would clog his waiting room and put him behind for the rest of the day. The attorneys would parse his every word, repeat questions ad nauseam and pepper him with legal jibber-jabber, all on account of a simple low back sprain and a broken arm that had fully healed without complication. And make no mistake, these sharks and their venal, bloodthirsty ilk were the very bastards who would sue him if they thought they could turn a profit, trial lawyers who kept his malpractice premiums through the roof, six figures every year thanks to their frivolous lawsuits and state-sanctioned extortion.
He said a curt “hello”
and “good afternoon,” took a seat, opened his file. Before being prompted, he raised his right hand and glanced at the court reporter. “I’m ready to start if everyone else is,” he said, his tone leaking impatience. “I don’t mean to rush, but I have a packed office today.” For the first time, he paid attention to the other people in the room, and when he focused on Lisa Stone, he hesitated, couldn’t help himself, blinked and ducked and wet his lips and aimlessly moved around his file, and his expression practically shouted “Wow!,” and then he ineptly tried to play it off and made his gaffe even worse, more obvious.
Without uttering a syllable, Lisa had disarmed him. Brought the doctor over. Enlisted a convert. “Delicioused” him was Joe’s colorful expression for her gift, a term he’d invented upon witnessing the effect for the very first time at a law school keg party. Watching Lisa sip a beer and immobilize a semicircle of men, he’d been reminded of his granddad Wilbur using a Barlow pocketknife to cut Golden Delicious apples into quarters and drop the pieces inside a rabbit gum. He’d take young Joe along with him on fall mornings to empty his traps, traps that were usually full of doomed, nose-twitching, grayish brown wild rabbits who’d chased the bait to a dead end, even though the creatures had to realize no meal could be worth pushing into a narrow plank box with a door curiously suspended above its entrance. Wilbur would kill and skin the rabbits on the spot, then carry them home for stew or to coat in flour and fry in a black skillet.
Not only was Lisa Stone smart as hell, but even in her forties she was also gorgeous, the beneficiary of a rarefied, finely fashioned perfection, her birthright a ceaseless allure, the va-va-voom craft of a very accomplished—and perhaps puckish—divine hand, as if she were Aphrodite’s off-the-books project. Embedded in this loveliness was a profound streak of decency and an unmistakable kindness, and her hospitable heart was always present, too, just as apparent as her striking features and starlet’s figure, so much so that very few people—men or women—ever resented her extraordinary looks, and she could convey it all, the whole delicious, rabbit-gum kit and caboodle, with as little as a smile or the set of her head.
