Blood Money

by James Grippando

  “We talk. If I look uncomfortable, it’s because Stefan probably didn’t expect me to pass this bit of information along to the Laramore family.”

  “Like I said, if you’re breaking a patient confidence—”

  “No,” she said, interrupting. “Just the opposite. Trust me, there’s already a buzz about this at the hospital. This is something that Celeste’s family should know. Something their lawyer needs to know.”

  “I’m not their lawyer yet. I’m considering it.”

  “After you hear what I have to say, you’ll want to be their lawyer.”

  “If you put it that way, I’m all ears.”

  “Just, please don’t ever attribute this to me.”

  “Understood.”

  She shifted in her seat, as if building up her nerve. Then she let it fly: “Celeste Laramore should not be in a coma.”

  Jack allowed her words to hang for a moment, the impact growing. “Exactly what are you trying to tell me?”

  “Let me put a finer point on it,” she said. “If it weren’t for BNN, she wouldn’t be in a coma.”

  Jack measured his response, trying to be polite. “Rene, I appreciate your concern for the family. But I have no intention of filing yet another frivolous lawsuit against a media giant whose television program allegedly provoked some loser to commit a violent act. Those claims just don’t cut it.”

  “I hear you,” she said. “And clearly, Faith Corso was talking about a claim along those lines when she broke the news that the Laramore family was considering a lawsuit against BNN.”

  “I’m aware of that report,” he said, stating the obvious. “But I can’t talk to you about what the family is considering.”

  “I understand. I didn’t come here to find out what’s under consideration. I’m here to tell you what you should consider.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “I don’t think it was a coincidence that BNN was the first to report that the Laramore family is planning to sue them. They know what they did wrong. Faith Corso just got out in front of the story, trying to obscure the fact that the cause and effect is much tighter than anyone would ever suspect. Much clearer than BNN would like anyone to believe.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  Rene leaned closer, folding her hands atop the table, locking eyes with Jack. “Meaning that in both a medical and legal sense, BNN is directly responsible for what happened to Celeste Laramore.”

  “That’s easy to say. But proving in a courtroom that BNN was the legal cause of Celeste’s coma is the Achilles heel in the case.”

  “I didn’t say it would be a breeze. But I can help you prove it.”

  “How?”

  Her eyes narrowed, her stare tightening. “Do you think a television network could have a problem if its news-gathering tactics interfere with a hospital’s ability to treat an injured patient?”

  “Possibly,” said Jack. “It might depend on what those tactics are.”

  “Fair point,” she said. “But listen to what I’m saying, Jack. Because this time, BNN went way too far.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jack reached Cy’s Place in time to catch the 7:10 P.M. start of the Marlins’ game on TV. Theo wanted to hear all about his meeting with Rene. Jack gave him next to nothing, sharing instead nearly everything else he’d done since. An hour wasted at the courthouse on a calendar call. Another hour driving Abuela to a friend’s house for the night so she wouldn’t be alone. A useless follow-up with Detective Rivera, who was still without leads on Jack’s attacker. A phone call to Andie.

  “Andie who?” said Theo.

  “Very funny,” said Jack.

  The conversation seemed to stick on Andie, mostly Jack’s doing, which prompted Theo to render more pithy advice on “temporary” versus “permanent”—pop psychology on the order of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and “THE DOCTOR IS IN.” A lonely customer a couple of stools away overheard and joined in.

  “I know the feeling,” he said as he loosened his tie. He had out-of-towner written all over him, a businessman who had wandered over from one of the Grove hotels. “Just got divorced myself.”

  Jack nodded but said nothing, wanting no part of that conversation. Theo overrode him.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” said Theo. “What’s your story, pal?”

  He leaned closer, resting one elbow on the bar, as if he were about to divulge the secret formula for Coca-Cola. “My wife called me a wimp.”

  Jack blinked, not quite comprehending. “You divorced your wife for that?”

  “No. She divorced me. And you know why?”

  Jack had an inkling, but it was Theo who said what they were both thinking.

  “Because you are a wimp?”

  “No,” he said, smiling awkwardly, not sure it was a joke. “I had knee surgery. Torn ACL. Hurt like you wouldn’t believe. Did I get even one minute of sympathy from my wife? Hell, no. All I ever heard from her was that I don’t know what pain is because I’ve never had a baby.”

  “She has a point,” said Jack.

  “No, you’re both wrong. Just because I’ve never felt that kind of pain doesn’t mean I’m not in pain. That’s like saying I’ve never had the pleasure of sex because I’ve never had sex with a porn star.”

  “You told her that?”

  “Damn right.”

  “So, lemme get this straight: You made a point about pain that disrespects women by drawing an analogy to sex that totally disrespects women. Is that basically the picture?”

  The man fell silent, searching for a response. Finding none, he slapped a ten-dollar bill on the bar and walked away, muttering something to the effect of, “Everybody takes that bitch’s side.”

  Theo cleared away the empty beer glass. “I was wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “What I said at your house this morning. About you being single. You’re sounding more married all the time.”

  “You agree with that guy?”

  “I’m just saying.”

  Theo brought him a fresh bowl of mixed nuts. Jack cherry-picked the cashews and the almonds while watching the Marlins load the bases but fail to score in the bottom of the first inning. His cell rang during the commercial break, and he practically fell off his stool as he reached for it, hoping it was Andie. It wasn’t.

  “Guess who.”

  He recognized Sydney’s voice in an instant. Jack closed out the bar noise with a finger to his ear. “Where are you?”

  “None of your business.”

  The threat from his attacker was still fresh in Jack’s brain: Tell me where Sydney is or . . .

  “Actually, it is my business.”

  “Jack, I need help, and I can’t talk long, so please just listen to me.”

  The reception was poor, and the bar noise didn’t help. Jack hurried to the exit and found a quiet spot on the sidewalk beside a five-foot-tall fiberglass peacock. The extra few seconds was time enough for him to think better of responding to her jab in kind. “All right, I’m listening,” he said.

  “I need to know if you really are the lawyer for the Laramore family.”

  “They asked me to represent them. I haven’t made a decision yet.”

  “Faith Corso said you’re planning to sue BNN. Is that true?”

  “If I agree to be their lawyer, that decision will be between the Laramore family and me.”

  “You are going to sue BNN, aren’t you?”

  “Sydney, even if I end up not taking their case, my conversations with the Laramores are still privileged. I can’t talk about this.”

  There was a brief silence, but Jack suspected that Mount Sydney was on the verge of eruption. Her response was at least an octave above shrill: “How could you do this to me?”

  “It’s not about you, Sydney.”

  “Yes, it is! It’s me who people turn on their TVs to watch, not you. I’m the one people talk about. I even had an agent pick me up in his airplane.”

  “Right. And how did t
hat work out for you?”

  “It’s been hell, okay? Complete hell. I’m done with him.”

  “What a shock.”

  “Stop treating me like I’m some kind of joke. The fact is, we were this close to a seven-figure deal with Cornerstone Publishers.”

  “Sydney, every agent in America is on the verge of a million-dollar deal.”

  “This is real, damn it. But you are making it almost impossible for me to hold this thing together.”

  “Me?” he said, scoffing.

  “Connect the dots, Jack. Cornerstone is owned by BNN. Without an agent, what do you think my chances are of salvaging this deal if my lawyer hauls off and sues BNN? It will blow up everything. You are going to kill my deal!”

  “That’s really not my concern.”

  “I deserve this, Jack. Don’t take this away from me!”

  Jack’s personal experience with spoiled brats in general was limited, and the fact that some attacker had nearly choked him to death demanding to know Sydney’s whereabouts didn’t make it any easier to handle this one. “Is this really why you called, Sydney? To whine about your million-dollar book deal?”

  “This is important!”

  “It’s more important for me to know where you are.”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Then we have nothing more to talk about.”

  “No, please!”

  “When you’re willing to tell me where you are, we can talk.”

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  “Good luck with your book.”

  “Good luck?” she said. “I don’t even have an agent. What am I supposed to do now, huh? What am I supposed to do, Jack?”

  “Grow up,” he said, ending the call.

  There was a pit in Jack’s stomach. Part of it was the possibility, however remote, that some publisher actually would pay a million dollars to keep the Shot Mom express rolling along. More troubling, however, was the realization that he probably needed Sydney’s cooperation if the police were going to find the sick puppy whose idea of a proper introduction was to grab people by the throat and send them to the ER.

  Jack started back into Cy’s Place, then stopped. The meeting with Rene was just a few hours old, and Jack hadn’t made a decision one way or the other about the Laramores; in fact, he had promised himself that he would sleep on it. But if what Rene had told him was true, if the meddling of an overzealous BNN reporter had kept Celeste from getting the immediate medical treatment she’d needed, the case might actually be winnable.

  Every Goliath had its David.

  The feeling inside him continued to grow. “Winnable” might be pushing it. But the case could have serious settlement value. And the overly altruistic notion that he was the world’s pro bono clinic needed to stop. He was a sole practitioner, not Mother Teresa, and he was engaged to marry a woman who was even more underpaid than Jack Swyteck, P.A. He would just have to work out a modified fee arrangement that was fair to him and the Laramores. It might actually make up for the financial hit he took defending Sydney Bennett.

  To say that Sydney’s call had pushed him off the fence might have been overstatement. But there was definitely something to be said for helping people who wanted to be helped, who didn’t go out of their way to prove that they were beyond help. It was one of those moments when he wished his old friend Neil were still alive, when he would have liked to pick up the phone say, “Neil, we got a job to do.” His daughter Hannah wasn’t a bad second choice. Jack still had her number on speed dial from Sydney’s trial. She answered with a cheery “hello” on the second ring.

  “Hannah, hey. Can you meet me at the institute in an hour?”

  “Sure. What’s cookin’, good lookin’?”

  That was one of the corny expressions she’d inherited from her father, which brought a little smile to Jack’s face.

  “Partner, you and I got a complaint to draft.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jack and Hannah spent most of the night drafting the complaint against BNN. A phone call to Ben Laramore had triggered the green light. Jack had been more than reasonable in his proposed contingency fee. The suit against the Department of Corrections would have to proceed on a separate track, since suing a state agency in Florida had special prefiling procedures and notice requirements. Jack also needed time to investigate and determine if the detention center had done anything wrong. The plan was to file and serve BNN on Thursday. A quick settlement was a long shot, but BNN’s lawyers agreed to a prefiling conference at the company headquarters on Wednesday at four o’clock.

  “Hotter in New York than Miami,” said Jack.

  He wasn’t kidding. Jack could see the heat rising from the sidewalk as they stepped out of the cab on Sixth Avenue. Miami had its humidity, but temperatures never even got close to the afternoon highs of a mid-July heat wave in Midtown Manhattan. Three gold letters on a black marble facade—BNN—told them they were outside the right building. An air-conditioned lobby beckoned, and Hannah nearly had to trot to keep up with Jack as they crossed the busy sidewalk and approached the revolving door.

  “What are the odds we walk out of here with a check?” she asked.

  “Somewhere between Sydney Bennett getting nominated to the Supreme Court and Faith Corso giving up on calling me Sly-teck.” It had been Corso’s name for him ever since learning that his surname rhymed with “Sky-tech.”

  The lobby wasn’t as cool as Jack had expected, and he dabbed away the sweat on his forehead as they signed the visitors’ register. A security guard led them past the bank of common elevators that served floors two through forty-nine. The ride to the penthouse was an express. The chrome doors parted, and a receptionist who could have made the cover of Vogue greeted them by name.

  “This way, please,” she said.

  They followed her across the two-story lobby, the receptionist’s five-inch heels clicking on the parquet floor of maple and mahogany. The view of Central Park was one of the most impressive Jack had ever seen, and he imagined that Hannah was doing her level best not to act like a bumpkin and snap a photo with her iPhone. The view quickly got worse, as they were led down a hallway lined with photographs of BNN’s top news personalities. Faith Corso was the most prominent, staring straight at them from the focal point of the “T” in the intersection of hallways.

  “Here we are,” the receptionist said, but she tripped as she reached for the door handle, nearly falling off her five-inch heels.

  Subtly, so only Jack could see, Hannah rolled her eyes. Hannah was four feet eleven, always wore flats, and loved the look on people’s faces when they discovered that the shortest person in the room was also the most tenacious.

  “My bad,” said the receptionist. She gathered herself and opened the heavy door to the main conference room.

  A team of lawyers—three men and three women—was already seated at a long, polished table made of burled walnut. As if on cue, all six checked their watches as Jack and Hannah entered the room. Jack was familiar with the big-firm power play of making the plaintiff’s lawyer wait around for half an hour or more before defense counsel deigned to show up. This was the flip side: making the opposition feel as though they’ve kept everyone waiting, forcing them to start the meeting with an apology for being late—a position of weakness—even though they were right on time.

  “Sorry y’all were early,” said Jack, refusing to play into their strategy.

  The lawyer with the most gray in his hair rose and shook Jack’s hand. Stanley Mills was BNN’s general counsel and vice president of legal affairs. A round of introductions revealed that the most junior lawyer at the table was one of nineteen attorneys who worked in-house under Mills. The remaining lawyers on BNN’s side of the table were outside counsel from the Wall Street law firm of Marston & Qualls. Jack recognized one of them: Ted Gaines, routinely rated as one of the top trial lawyers in the country by American Lawyer magazine, famous for closing arguments that resonated with the rhythm
of a Baptist revival. Mills thanked Jack and Hannah for coming and showed his guests a seat on the opposite side of the long, rectangular table. But it quickly became clear that Gaines was running the show.

  “Got your love letter,” said Gaines as he tossed a copy of the ten-page complaint on the table. It didn’t land flat, and it lay there exactly the way Gaines had intended: like a dirty napkin.

  Jack looked at it, then at Gaines. “It’s not a love letter,” he said dryly.

  “Right, right. Even love letters are more grounded in reality than this piece of work.” Gaines glanced at the junior lawyer at the end of the table. “Shannon, lights, please.”

  The room darkened. A projection screen lowered from a slot in the ceiling, and a beam of light from a projector shot from the opposite wall. Gaines pulled a remote control from his pocket and brought up the first slide of his presentation: Laramore v. Breaking News Network.

  Gaines paused. “Pardon me if this comes across as condescending, Mr. Swyteck. But I think it’s important that we put this in terms you can understand.”

  The lawyers in his peanut gallery smirked. Gaines continued.

  “Let’s start with the allegations of your complaint that we can agree on,” he said as slide number two flashed on the screen. It summarized several paragraphs from the complaint.

  “‘On July eleven at approximately two A.M., a nine-one-one operator dispatched an ambulance to Miami-Dade County Women’s Detention Center in response to a report that a young woman had been injured in the parking lot. At approximately two thirteen A.M., paramedics from Jackson Memorial Hospital arrived on the scene and immediately began treatment of the young woman, later identified as Celeste Laramore. At approximately two twenty A.M., the patient was placed in an ambulance and taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital.’” Gaines paused and said, “So far, so good. Unfortunately, that’s about all we agree on.”

  Gaines moved to the next slide. “In the interest of brevity I’m going to move quickly through my main points of contention, so try to follow along.

  “Paragraph twelve: ‘At approximately two twenty-two A.M.—just two minutes after Celeste Laramore was placed in the ambulance—BNN reported that the patient was unconscious and in V-fib.’ Slight disagreement there,” said Gaines. “It was actually two twenty-one A.M. One minute after loading her in the ambulance. Nobody denies that BNN gets it fast.”