“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?” she asked in disbelief. It wasn’t that she thought I was lying, which of course I was; she just couldn’t believe I hadn’t bothered to ask. “You weren’t the least bit curious?” she asked.
I’m not a great liar. More often than not, I get caught, especially when I compound one lie with another one. I shrugged my shoulders, letting her interpret the gesture however she wanted then I changed the subject.
“Should I call Mrs. Howard?” I asked.
“No. I think she was going to lie down. Which is exactly what you should be doing,” she said. “Come on.” She physically turned me around and directed me to the couch. “Lie down while I heat up your dinner.”
I don’t usually like to take orders from people, but it was different with Landra. In fact, I didn’t mind a blow to the head if I got her as a nurse in return. I was envisioning a night of romance with my Florence Nightingale and I pulled her down on the couch with me when I lay down.
“I told Sara I’d spend the night with her, so I can’t stay long.”
“No way! I need you more than she does,” I said. “I had a blow to the head. What if I fall asleep and don’t wake up?”
She seemed to be mulling it over and for a second I thought she was going to relent. “If you don’t wake up can I have your Suburban?”
“That’s very sensitive of you, Landra. It’s nice to know where your loyalties lie,” I said acting insulted.
“Hey, don’t do that to me, Sam. You know I’d rather be here with you. But come on . . . Sara’s 80 years old. How do you think she felt being carted off to the hospital in an ambulance?”
“The one time I get hurt, and Mrs. Howard has to one-up me.”
Landra laughed.
“It’s not funny,” I said.
“I know its not,” she said. “Will you forgive me?” She leaned down and kissed me lightly on the lips, and her hair fell onto my face.
“Only because you smell so good.”
“I really am sorry, Sam.”
“I know you are. I’m just giving you a hard time.”
“I’ll make it up to you. I promise,” she said.
Landra stayed while I ate but I could tell she was antsy to get back to check on Mrs. Howard. I didn’t have much appetite and I was beginning to feel more and more nauseated as I ate, but I didn’t want to hurt Landra’s feelings by not eating the meal that she’d prepared. I let her off the hook after I’d eaten about half of what was on my plate and sent her on her way, then I fed the remainder of my dinner to the Siamese. He showed his appreciation by lying on top of me and purring loudly while he breathed in my face.
I made an exception that night, knowing that I’d probably live to regret it, but I let the bastard sleep inside. He went out and did his business right before I went to bed, and I let him back in and left him sleeping on the hearth. When I woke up he was lying on my chest and breathing in my face. Maybe the bastard thought I needed extra attention because of the bump on my head, or maybe he was just appreciative of me sharing my dinner with him, but our relationship had definitely gone into a new phase.
Chapter 12
Things moved at a fast and furious pace during the next few weeks and I found myself totally immersed in my work. We couldn’t come to an amicable settlement through the auspices of the EEOC, so I filed a lawsuit on Maddie’s behalf. She and Penny and I worked late every night for a week and the final product reflected all the hard work that had gone into our Original Petition. We named Larry and the CEO, both individually and as officers of the company, and both the local and national divisions of Datacare. Along with Title VII sexual harassment, retaliation and constructive discharge claims, we asserted causes of action based on tort claims of intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, invasion of privacy, and negligent retention.
I served the parties with discovery requests at the same time I filed the Complaint, and prepared deposition notices for the CEO and Larry. I couldn’t wait to get the CEO in the hot seat. A part of me really wanted to take the case to trial. In fact, I was almost sorry that Maddie was my neighbor and that I had taken a personal interest in her welfare. I preferred to stay detached from my clients. That way, it didn’t matter to me if they were put through hell on the witness stand. The way I saw it, if my client stood to make a cool dollar on the case, he should buck-up and take the abuse like a man – or woman as the case may be. But with Maddie it was different. I’d grown to think of her as my friend, not to mention that she had turned out to be a damn good legal secretary. In the short time she’d worked with us, she’d surpassed Penny’s skills almost immediately. She’d grasped the concepts involved in dealing with divorce proceedings, preparation of wills, and other matters that we dealt with on a regular basis; she had developed a dialogue between literally all of our clients, and in many cases, with our opposing counsel; and she’d managed to charm even the most ill-tempered clerks and court coordinators who we had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. As much as I hated to admit it, I’d come to rely heavily on Maddie in fielding calls and handling mundane and time consuming details that go hand in hand with practicing law.
Penny saw it too, but she didn’t seem to mind. She actually preferred to let someone else take over the secretarial functions so that she was free to handle the administrative details of running the office. In fact, Penny liked to take credit for Maddie’s progress, not unlike a mother bird that nurses her young then tosses it out of the nest. She would look at Maddie – or rather Madeline – proudly, and say something sickeningly motherly that would make me want to gag.
On the night after Datacare was served with our lawsuit, someone chunked a rock through the plate glass window of our office. There was glass all over the sidewalk outside and all over the reception area inside. Penny had a dustpan in her hand and a grave look on her face when I arrived.
The windows were no doubt the original ones that were installed back when the building was constructed, and it gave me a whole new respect for tempered glass. The damn window had exploded into a million little pieces and there were razor sharp shards of glass everywhere. I could feel them embedded in my shoe soles, scratching the floor when I walked.
“What the hell happened?” I asked, looking around at the mess in disbelief.
Penny reached down and held up a nice size rock, then placed it carefully on the coffee table. “I found it right over there,” she said. She pointed to the spot on the floor like it had cooties.
“Did you call the police?” I asked her.
She nodded her head. “They’ve already been here.” She looked overly troubled, and I knew what it was about. Mother Hen was worried about her precious Madeline. “The officer left his card. He’d like for you to call him when you get the chance.” She furrowed her brow and handed me the card, and I stuffed it in my pocket. I caught myself thinking of Oliver and I considered saying “your face looks like this” but I decided against it.
“Call a cleaning crew and a glass company and tell them to get over here yesterday.”
“I’ll do it right away.” She set the dustpan, full of glass, down on the coffee table beside the rock and went straight to her desk. She took an authoritative and efficient tone when speaking to people at both the cleaning and glass company, and when she hung up, she looked relieved and much more at ease. She must have thought I was going to make her clean up the mess.
Penny looked at her watch. “I’d sure like to have this cleaned up by the time Madeline gets here,” she said.
I knew it. I played dumb. “Why would it matter?”
“Oh . . . you know . . . she’s going to feel like it’s all her fault.”
“That’s ridiculous Penny. Anyone could have thrown that rock. Datacare is not the only one I’ve pissed off recently. Hell, it could have been a street punk or a gang banger – someone we don’t even know.”
“That may be true . . .”
“It i
s true,” I interrupted.
“But I don’t think Madeline will see it that way.” She gave me a nasty look that made me think twice about interrupting her again, then she continued. “All I’m saying is that it would be nice to be able to keep this from her . . . if it were possible.”
“Well first of all, I seriously doubt that it’s possible, but even if it was, she’s as much a part of this office as we are. Don’t you think she has a right to know what’s going on? That way, she can make an informed decision on anything that may need to be addressed.”
I wanted Penny to come around to my way of thinking because I didn’t like to be at odds with her. And I figured since it was my office and I was her boss, it should be she that conceded, not I. Apparently, she wasn’t thinking along those lines and she persisted in her scheme to protect Maddie, even to the point of plotting a way to keep her from coming in for the day.
“You could call her and tell her that since she’s been working so hard that you want to give her the day off. With pay of course,” she added.
“She hasn’t worked any harder than either of us,” I pointed out. “She’d know something was up. Besides, she’s entitled to know what’s going on,” I repeated.
“But . . .”
I cut her off. “Call me when everything’s cleaned up,” I said, and I marched into my office and shut the door hard. I’d been using a chair from the conference room ever since my office chair had broken and just the sight of the chair pissed me off. I called Penny on the intercom. “Why don’t I have new chair yet?”
“The one you wanted was on four weeks’ back order,” she explained calmly. “It should be in next week. Would you rather me cancel the order and get you one that’s in stock?”
“This chair sucks,” I told her.
“Would you like to try mine?” she said agreeably. “Or we could rent one until your new one arrives?”
She was being way too nice. How can you be a prick when the person you’re trying to antagonize is so damn helpful and agreeable? “Never mind,” I said grumpily. I hung up and sat my butt down in the chair. In truth, it was no worse that my old chair – probably even a little better.
I tackled a stack of papers on my desk and was in the process of compiling answers to discovery requests, when someone simultaneously knocked and opened the door.
“Oh my God!” Maddie exclaimed. It sounded like, Oh mah gawd! “Do you think Larry did that?”
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “I guess he could have. But then so could a lot of people.”
She chewed her cuticle. “That’s true . . . I guess. It’s just the timing,” she said skeptically.
“If we’re going on timing, it could just as easily be Josie DuMans’ ex-husband. He was livid about the restraining order,” I reminded her.
“Whale, that’s true too.”
She wanted to believe it, but I could tell she wasn’t convinced. Truth was, if I had to guess who’d thrown the rock, I’d put money on Larry, but Maddie didn’t need to know that.
“What did you tell the police?” she asked.
“I haven’t talked to them yet, but when I do, I’ll mention Larry and DuMans as people who might have a grudge.”
The cleaning crew and the glass people arrived at the same time and by noon, all visible traces of the broken window were gone, but the incident left lingering doubt in my mind as to Maddie’s safety. I even contemplated calling Niki and getting him to put one of his guys on Maddie, without her knowledge of course, but I realized I was over-reacting badly. It wasn’t the first time that something like that had happened to me – I’d had my tires slashed; I’d been run off the road; my car had been keyed. I had to admit to myself the truth of what I’d told Maddie and Penny: Anyone could have thrown that rock through the window. In the end, I chalked it up to a bad experience and left it at that.
* * * *
During this same period, I received notice that Landra’s case was set to go before the grand jury the following month. She hadn’t budged on hiring a criminal attorney and I’d finally hunkered down and started preparing for the case like I was going to represent her. The most problematic detail for us in defending the charge was the fact that Landra was the beneficiary of Drake Reeds’ life insurance policy – she had motive.
“When you were engaged, did you know that you were listed as the beneficiary of the policy?” I asked.
“Yes. But I never thought he would have left it that way after we broke up. You would think that would have been the first thing he’d change after we called off the engagement. It’s the first thing I would have done, anyway.”
She was convincing and I knew she would make an excellent witness. In a grand jury proceeding, the accused is not customarily allowed to testify. The prosecutor merely hands over what’s been compiled in the case and the grand jury doesn’t get to hear from the accused. Even with my limited knowledge of criminal law, I knew that an attorney would generally not want his client to testify before a grand jury. But I was convinced that if Landra could testify, the grand jury would no-bill the charge. How to get the DA to let Landra testify was the question.
Other than motive, the rest of the “evidence” was circumstantial and I didn’t see it as a problem. For example, they had lifted Landra’s fingerprint from the lock of the bedroom door. I went back to the mansion several times to look around the bedroom and the area on the patio where Drake had landed after he went through the window. The lock the prosecutor was talking about was one of those that is self contained in the door knob – a little button that pushes in and then pops out on its own when you turn the knob. It was only logical that Landra’s fingerprints would be all over the doorknob, including on the lock, given that she was frantically trying to escape from the room when Drake was assaulting her.
The District Attorney also contended that the location of Drake’s body on the patio was “inconsistent” with that of a mere fall. I’d hired an expert who would testify that taking into account Drake’s height and weight, and coupled with the fact that he had tripped over the chair before taking the plunge, the point where his body came to rest on the pavement below was absolutely consistent with Landra’s story.
I wasn’t too worried about the prosecutor’s contention that Landra had inflicted bodily damage to herself. In fact, the claim was so absurd that I felt it helped our case and I was glad he was asserting it. I truly believed that anyone who looked at the photos that the police had taken that night would think twice before accepting the theory that the bruises were self-inflicted. There’s something innate in us as human beings that precludes us from inflicting injury to ourselves, and the extent of the bruising would leave no doubt that Landra had in fact been assaulted.
The question of the investigation of Landra’s ex-husband was another matter, but I didn’t think the prosecution would be allowed to enter it into evidence, since it had no bearing on Drake Reeds’ death and nothing had ever come from it. But I knew that was a factor bearing on the D.A.’s tenacious intent to move forward with the case.
Chapter 13
The defendants’ responses to my request for production in Maddie’s suit arrived early one Monday morning. I assumed the Defendants would either swarm me with documents in an attempt to overwhelm me, knowing that I was a sole practitioner, or they would object to every request and turn over nothing. It turned out to be the former. The UPS man pulled up and delivered a half-dozen boxes of documents that I’d have to sort through, most of which were probably irrelevant.
One law firm was representing all defendants, which told me that the national boys probably didn’t know what the local boys were up to. If they had, they would have tried to distance themselves by getting separate counsel to represent Larry and the CEO.
I thumbed through the different sets of responses, first Datacare’s, then Larry’s, then the CEO’s, and flipped to the pages where I’d asked for “any and all photographs, films, tape recordings, video and/or audio tape recor
dings involving plaintiff.” This is pretty much a standard question but of course in Maddie’s case, it was extremely significant, as was their response. In the space underneath the request, each defendant had responded: “None in existence.” Cha ching.
“What’s all this?” Maddie asked when she arrived that morning.
“Datacare’s production responses. They’ve been busy.”
“I’ll say. You want me to take a box and start going through it?”
“Yeah. You might as well.” She leaned down to pick up a box and I realized that her humongous chest was gone. The change was such a shocker that I blurted out, “What happened to your . . .” I stopped myself before I said it, realizing the obvious.
Maddie’s face flushed. “Yes. I quit breastfeeding.”
“Sorry. You just look so . . .” I searched for the right adjective.
“Proportional?”
“Proportional,” I nodded. I couldn’t help smile. Between her status as my client, my secretary, and my neighbor, Maddie and I had spent a lot of time together, and I’d been developing a brotherly affection for her over the last month. I thought back to the first time I’d met her – with that hair and her huge bosom – and I felt like a shithead for being so judgmental. She was a much better person than I would ever be.
“What?” she asked defensively.
“What what?” I asked.
“What are you looking at me like that for?”
“I don’t know. You just look so different – so much smaller. I mean, all of you, not just your . . .” I motioned to her chest.
Maddie looked down at her body then back at me and shrugged her shoulders. “I guess.”
She was making me feel self-conscious for noticing in the first place – like I shouldn’t have been looking there. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I think you should shut up now,” she suggested, then she picked up the box and left my office.
“Good idea,” I said under my breath.
Advice of Counsel (The Samuel Collins Series Book 1) Page 17
