Florida Is Murder (Due Justice and Surface Tension Mystery Double Feature) (Florida Mystery Double Feature)

by Diane Capri

  I then looked at the trial calendar. Because 95% of all civil cases settle, I schedule about twenty trials a week during my jury term and twenty-five trials a week during non-jury term. There were 10-15 breast implant trials scheduled every jury term for the next twelve months.

  The class action case was scheduled for trial six months hence. As many cases as were still on my docket, more than twice that many had been transferred to Federal Court in Georgia to the multi-district litigation being handled by my good friend, Judge Franklin. I had no idea what was happening with Judge Franklin’s cases, and I called him. Miraculously, he was available to speak to me.

  After the pleasantries were exchanged, I asked “Steve, what is the status of the breast implant litigation you’re handling these days?”

  “We’ve got a global settlement almost completely negotiated. It’s been approved by the plaintiffs and the defendants. I have a couple of motions by insurance companies and Medicare and Medicaid to decide and then I’ll make a decision on final approval.”

  “What will happen to the settlement if it is not approved?”

  “I haven’t let myself think about that,” he laughed. “But, if that should happen, then I guess we’ll start having trials on all four-hundred-forty-thousand claims. I figure I’ll get done about the time I am scheduled to depart the earth, or this will kill me prematurely!”

  I laughed politely in commiseration. Judges don’t get paid overtime. “And what will happen after the settlement is approved, if it is?”

  “After approval, the only step left is for the individual plaintiffs to submit the medical proof necessary to establish their entitlement to payments under the terms of the settlement grid.”

  “Settlement grid?” I felt like I was learning a foreign language.

  “We’ve worked out a system where women with different types of diseases will be paid different sums of money. The least amount a woman will be paid is five-thousand and the most is one million.”

  I whistled. “That’s a hell of a lot of money, especially to the lawyers. How will the legal fees be paid?”

  “Well on the plaintiff’s side, I want to limit transaction costs to twenty-five percent of the total settlement amount. Of course, the plaintiffs are squealing like stuck pigs over that because they’re used to forty percent fees, exclusive of costs, and the defendants are objecting that it’s too high because they’re the ones that get to pay it.”

  The figures he quoted were staggering. Following the money seemed to be the first rule for lawyers as well as murder investigators. “And what about defense attorney fees?”

  “Defense attorneys will be paid by the defendants through whatever arrangements the defendants have made for paying them. I haven’t gotten into that because the defendants haven’t asked me to. I don’t see how I could resolve that anyway.”

  “There seems to be some new urgency in my courtroom by the plaintiffs to get these cases on for trial. I noticed today that I’ve got ten trials set every jury term for the next twelve months. Do you have any idea why?”

  “I think that’s happening all over the country, partly because it pressures the defendants to settle and partly because in the last several months the scientific studies that have come out have all been supporting the defense side. The plaintiffs feel they’re playing beat the clock. If they don’t get their judgments soon, they’re worried the defendants will start trying the causation issues and winning. The defendants are pushing the cases to trial because they think they can win or at least they can make the plaintiffs work and then the plaintiffs’ will get more reasonable. If I don’t get this settlement put to bed pretty soon, I’m afraid the whole thing will fall apart.”

  I thanked Steve for his help, and went back to studying my list. I noticed that Grover had all of his cases set for trial, but none of Johnson’s were scheduled. Worthington’s cases were all set, but they ran into the next three years, pretty evenly spaced out. The remaining attorneys seemed to be either behind the curve in requesting trial dates or, perhaps, not prepared for trial.

  I did some quick multiplication in my head. If each of the plaintiffs Grover represented would settle, it looked to me like just the cases on my docket would net him attorneys’ fees of $270 million under Florida’s forty- percent fee rule. Of course, he could have made arrangements to accept lower fees based on the volume of business, and he probably owed referral fees to a number of lawyers who had sent him their cases to handle as well. Still, he stood to gain a tremendous sum of money if these cases were all tried and won. Not as much as the tobacco lawyers would get, but certainly enough to keep him and his four ex-wives off food stamps.

  More realistically, setting the cases for trial would force settlements and Grover would get the money more quickly. He’d have to discount the value of the claims to settle them now, but he probably wouldn’t have to discount them much, considering the costs of defense. It was curious that Grover’s partner, Johnson, hadn’t done the same math.

  And I couldn’t see the advantage to the defendants in pushing the cases to trial. Agreeing to prompt trial dates would put a significant amount of pressure on most of the defense law firms. They just didn’t have the manpower to do the work required to defend multiple, four-week trials. And even if they did have enough lawyers to put on the trials, their other work would suffer. A defense firm that puts all its eggs in one client basket makes big money while it lasts, but can’t withstand the business loss when the cases are over. And why did only two of the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to take their cases to trial now? Why not the rest of them? Both Grover and Worthington were in a game of high stakes poker and I wasn’t at all sure which one was holding the better hand.

  I began looking at the individual plaintiffs’ names. I was shocked to find so many I recognized as my friends, neighbors and colleagues. I found myself smiling involuntarily every time I recognized the name of a woman whose cosmetic enhancement had not been obvious to me.

  From the defense side, Worthington’s two major clients surfaced repeatedly, but there were also quite a few cases against Carly’s company, MedPro, and other defendants, both local and national. I recognized some as George’s investments. Others were common corporate America household names.

  I continued looking at the list and trying to discern patterns within it. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I thought something might jump out at me if I just kept looking. It didn’t.

  When I looked at my watch, it was 8:00 p.m. and I needed to get home. I put the list out of sight, but not out of mind.

  The other thing I couldn’t put off any longer was an extended conversation with Kate. She deserved to know what was going on with Carly, and with me. I stopped by her house on the way home.

  I saw Kate standing at her kitchen window when I pulled up in the driveway of her South Tampa home. Kate lives two doors off the Bayshore on Oregon, in an old bungalow type house. It was charming, but it was on a corner lot and the kitchen looked out over a busy side street. Both George and I were worried about just anyone being able to drive up and see her standing in the kitchen, but she said we watch too much television. She wouldn’t even put blinds on the windows. She said she had moved to Florida for sunlight.

  I sat in the car and watched Kate work for a while before she noticed I was there. She was a beautiful woman still. She hadn’t changed that much from the first time I saw her, when I was three. I loved her sparkling blue eyes, and her wide, generous smile. She wore her hair in the same French twist she’d always worn, and if there was a little more grey in with the brown, it looked beautiful none the less.

  Kate should be married, I thought, for the hundredth time. She’s such a nurturing person. She raised three children of her own, and me since Mom died, without any help from anyone. She’d be a great wife, and a great mother if Carly would just let her be.

  Kate eventually looked up from her cooking and saw me sitting in the car in the driveway. She waved me inside. I walked up to the back
door and she came to let me in. At least we’d been able to talk her into locking the door when she was home alone.

  “Willa! What a nice surprise,” she said as she hugged me with one arm while the other held her paring knife. “Will you stay for dinner? Nothing as fancy as you could have at Minaret, but I still make a pretty good veal loaf.” I was following her into the kitchen, and she just kept talking without waiting for my reply. I don’t remember her doing that when we all used to be around. Maybe living alone was getting to her. I decided to speak my thoughts when I finally had a chance to get a word in.

  “Kate, what really happened to your husband?” I hid my face in the refrigerator, ostensibly looking for a bottle of beer, avoiding her gaze. We’d never talked about this, and I wasn’t sure she’d think it was any of my business. But she didn’t seem to mind.

  “He just left one day and never came back. He didn’t even have enough originality to come up with a good story. He said he was going out for cigarettes.” She had pulled out three potatoes to peel after she put the veal loaf in the oven.

  “When he didn’t come back from the store, you must have been frantic.” I took up the green beans, washing them at the sink and cutting off the ends so they could be steamed.

  “Oh, sure. Crime in our neighborhood was as bad as anywhere for 1975. I called all the hospitals, the police department. No one had seen him.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t injured or killed or something?” I asked her, putting the beans in the sauce pan with a little water, salt and the steamer.

  “Here, let me season those. I put rosemary in them. Gives them a nice flavor.” She took the pot out of my hand and emptied the water in the sink. She refilled the pot, added rosemary instead of salt, and put the beans back in the steamer. She turned the burner on under it, and moved back to the potatoes.

  “He wrote to me, about ten years after he left. He’d found another woman he wanted to marry, and he asked for a divorce, which I gave him, of course. He never asked about the boys.” She was putting the potatoes on to boil, adding whole garlic cloves to the water, and then moved to the refrigerator to get out salad greens.

  “That must have been enough to sour you on men for a while,” I said, sitting down at the table. It was apparent she didn’t want any help, so I moved out of the way.

  She nodded. “For a long time, I didn’t understand it. I thought there was something wrong with me. Since I never told the boys I’d divorced their father, I couldn’t very well tell them I planned to date. And for a long time, I just wasn’t interested.”

  “Well, at some point, that must have changed.”

  “Because of Carly, you mean? Yes, but that was years later, and quite unexpected, really. Would you open that red wine, Dear, I think I’ll have a glass with you while you have your beer.” I opened the bottle as she got a wine glass out of the cupboard for each of us and began to set the table for two, even though I never said I’d stay. She lit tall green candles in pewter candlesticks that I knew, from long familiarity, she’d inherited from her mother. I went to call George and tell him I wouldn’t be home for dinner.

  When I came back into the kitchen, the potatoes were done and Kate was mashing them, drinking her wine and adding large dollops of butter. Tomorrow, headache or no, back to my running or I’d soon weigh as much as Pricilla Worthington. When the veal loaf was done, and Kate had made the burgundy gravy to go with the garlic potatoes, green beans and salad, we sat down to eat with another full glass of wine each. The intimacy, and the wine, gave me the courage to take up our conversation again.

  “How did you meet Carly’s father, anyway?” I tried to make it sound casual, as if I knew, but had just forgotten. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kate had never told any of us anything about him. In fact, this was the first time I’d ever had the nerve to suggest we all knew Carly’s father was not the same man who had fathered the boys. With Kate, somehow, we’d known the topic was taboo.

  I’m not sure if Kate was more surprised that I’d asked, or that she answered, but eventually she said, “Your mother was responsible for that, actually. She had a party and she invited him. We met. We danced. I let myself go. I woke up in his hotel room. We had a lovely breakfast, and I never saw him again. Except for every time I look in Carly’s eyes.”

  She was trying to keep it light, but her voice became very soft and I could tell that, whatever she thought now, she had loved him then. I sensed she wanted to talk about it, finally, this thing that had made her so happy, but had caused her daughter so much pain.

  “Carly looks just like him, you know. His hair was curly and red like hers. And her flashing, deep blue eyes. People think she got those from me, but she didn’t.” She paused, remembering.

  “When I found out I was pregnant with Carly, my first reaction was pure fright. Single mothers were not anything like accepted the way they are today. And it may have taken Carly ten years to do the math, but my family and my neighbors figured it out right away.” She was recalling bitter words, now, I was sure.

  “But what could I do? I had two sons at home and I was divorced and pregnant. That was the reality of it. There was no choice. I could be pregnant and unhappy or pregnant and make the best of it. Your mom was great. She’d wanted another child after she married your dad, but she just couldn’t get pregnant. She was so happy she’d be Carly’s godmother. Your mom really helped me through those days.” She emptied the Merlot bottle into our glasses and we sat quietly while she remembered that far away time and tried to decide how much to share with me.

  “And then something curious happened. I started to be really happy. I was smiling all the time, looking forward to the baby coming. I don’t think I’d ever been quite as happy before that time, and I’m not sure I’ve ever been that happy since.” Her face lit up now with the memory.

  “Just the pregnancy hormones, you think?” I was staring at the flickering candle flame, almost hypnotized.

  “It was partly that, but something else, too. You see, Wilhelmina, I believe in the affluence of the universe. I believe you make your own life. You decide what it is that you want, and then the universe gives it to you. It’s not that you don’t have to work for it, but the law of least effort applies more often than not. If it’s too much trouble, it’s usually not worth it. Happiness is first, seeking happiness is the most important quest, and achieving it is life’s best goal.” Philosophy often comes in a bottle of wine, I’ve found, and it was no different with Kate.

  “I don’t mean happiness from a pill or a syringe. I mean real happiness that comes from obtaining your life’s desires. It’s hard to achieve happiness because real happiness is so often confused with things. You look for a new house or a new job or a new relationship, because you think those things will make you happy. Really, the opposite is true. If you’re happy, you’ll enjoy your job or your house or your relationship, and all good things will flow to you.” She took a deep breath. I waited, afraid to break the spell.

  “And when I was pregnant with Carly, I finally accepted that I had wanted another baby, and I had gone to that party looking for just such an available man as I met, and I got what I wanted. For all Carly’s angst over her paternity, she was the most wanted baby ever conceived and certainly one of the most loved.”

  I went over and gave Kate a big hug. I blinked my tears away, but Kate wasn’t crying. To her, this was an old story and she remembered it with obvious, almost ethereal joy.

  We were having such a wonderful evening that I didn’t want to spoil it by telling her what I’d come to say. But I couldn’t let her hear about it from one of the town wags, either. Fortunately, Kate never read the newspapers or watched television news. She said they only reported bad news, and she wasn’t interested. So, after we put the dishes in the dishwasher and sat down with our coffee, I gave her a very abbreviated version of Carly’s situation. I omitted my own troubles. I felt I had gone into this deal with my eyes open. No point in blaming it on Carly or put
ting the burden of my decision on Kate.

  She didn’t seem at all dismayed, and I couldn’t quite understand why. After everything she’d told me tonight, I knew she loved Carly as her chosen child, maybe even more than the rest of us (although before tonight, I’d always thought that particular honor belonged to Jason, her first born).

  “Kate, you don’t seem very worried. Carly is in serious trouble. You understand that, don’t you?” I was beginning to think she’d had more wine than she could handle, but I’d underestimated her again.

  “Willa, there’s no chance that Carly killed Michael Morgan, or anyone else for that matter. As to where she is at the moment, I’m sure she’ll turn up with some reasonable explanation. There’s nothing I can do for her until she comes to me with the same questions you’ve asked tonight. Carly has to get over being angry with me for keeping her father from her, and start being grateful she’s had such a wonderful family. Until then, there’s nothing I can do for her except love her, and trust that she’ll be all right. The same thing I do for all of you.”

  So, in the end, I gave her a hug, told her I loved her and left, uneasy in the knowledge that I’d underestimated her again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tampa, Florida

  Thursday 10:00 p.m.

  January 21, 1999

  My conversation with Kate left me with a lot to think about. Finding Carly before she got hurt and solving the relationship problems she had with Kate shouldn’t have been my mission.

  But somehow it was.

  The connection between Carly, Dr. Morgan’s murder, Grover and Johnson had to be related to the breast implant cases; nothing else made sense.

  Hathaway had said to follow the money, so I tried piecing the puzzle together with the money in mind.

  Carly said Dr. Morgan had been conducting research and believed he’d found the scientific explanation for the occurrence of symptoms in some women with breast implants. Something like that would have to be worth a lot of money on the legitimate market, not just to the interested parties to the litigation.