Bone Valley

by Claire Matturro

  “Even if it was a setup? Couldn’t you just explain that to a judge, that it was a trap?” Bonita asked.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, if Jackson and I hadn’t stopped her and she had told me what they call client secrets, I’d never get to defend the case. If I’d entered an appearance on behalf of the plastic surgeon, Mrs. Moody would have filed a motion to have me disqualified, and any judge in this circuit would have granted it.”

  If it hadn’t been my ox that had nearly been gored, I would have admired it—it could have been a perfectly executed setup if I hadn’t seen it coming. Then, in a rising fit of pique at Newly, my twice-ex boyfriend, I called him. He came on his private line with his usual big, eager voice.

  “Newly, you jerk,” I said.

  “Lilly? Is that you?”

  “Why in hell’s bells did you tell Sherilyn Moody I’d be defending that doctor who messed up her face?”

  “Oh, that. I got the name of the doctor’s liability insurer in a…er, a kind of, er…prediscovery. When I saw it was Henry’s company, I knew Henry’d turn the case over to you. He always gives you the best cases. I warned Sherilyn that you’d be tough. You always have a trick up your sleeve.”

  “When was this? That you told Mrs. Moody I’d probably be the defense attorney?”

  “Ah, let’s see, a month, maybe, three weeks ago?”

  “Well, she paid me a visit, tried to hire me as cocounsel and tell me all about your trial strategy.”

  “Whoo, hon. You know what that means?”

  “She didn’t tell me anything confidential. I stopped her in time. But I want to know this—when did you start, you know, actually preparing a case?”

  “Hon, I hadn’t done a thing on that case except get her to sign a contingency-fee contract.”

  “Well, get ready, ‘hon,’ because I’m going to be on the other side, and dressed for bear, when that sucker hits the circuit-court docket,” I shouted in his ear, and hung up.

  When I issued forth with another round of cursing the dead and the living Moodys, Olivia and Bonita tried to quiet me. “You don’t understand. M. David played the same trick on me to get Jackson out of a case,” I said. “Only he pulled it off.”

  “Uh-oh,” Olivia said, and I saw a glimmer of remembering. But it was before Bonita’s time, and she frowned in puzzlement at me, while patting my arm and making those soft cooing sounds I’d heard her use on Carmen.

  Maybe Bonita would stop making that noise if I just told her the story. Painfully, I explained that during my first year at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, Jackson Smith had been retained to defend a corporation in what was going to be a long, nasty lawsuit, the kind of lawsuit that defense firms love because, win or lose, it would not only bring the firm publicity, but net the law firm sizable legal fees. What we called the “money-tap” kind of lawsuit.

  In his usual style, Jackson had proved to be a formidable foe for the plaintiff. At that stage of my career, i.e., right out of law school, I was floundering, stuck doing workers compensation and everyone’s legal research. Overworked and underappreciated, I had not followed Jackson’s case closely.

  “That’s when you met M. David,” Olivia said. “I remember. I was there at one of those awful formal fund-raisers, and he zeroed right in on you. You were so pretty.”

  Letting the past tense in connection with pretty slide by for the moment, I nodded, remembering against my will how I’d been immediately smitten with M. David. I mean, okay, spank me for being that easily seduced, but M. David was a very handsome and rich man, he had sought me out, and he had courted me with a great deal of finesse that was wholly foreign to me at that point in my life—I mean, come on, my only prior lover had been Farmer Dave, a pot farmer and felon, the very same man now living with a Grand Canyon burro in my apple orchard in north Georgia. Farmer Dave had some sterling qualities, but finesse and elegance were not among them.

  So, yeah, I was an easy target for M. David.

  He’d romanced me with such grace I had managed to overlook the fact that he had a wife. Certainly, as I later learned, he had a history of overlooking that fact.

  “He promised he would love me forever,” I said, hearing a catch in my voice and stopping it, right then. I’d spent too many years hating him to let that lost-love thing make my voice quiver like a teenage girl’s.

  “Then, one night he told me he wanted to hire me, since he thought he might be caught in some of the fallout from the lawsuit. I was thrilled. Stupid me, I thought Jackson and the firm would think I was this big rainmaker to bring in M. David as a client. So, yeah, I agreed on the spot to represent him.”

  I paused, collected myself, and said, “So, after he hired me, M. David told me a collection of ‘insider information’ about the corporation that was suing Jackson’s client. All relative to Jackson’s case, but I was too”—what? Brain-dead with young love was about the best description—“distracted to know how important the information was. I didn’t even have a clue that M. David was a silent partner in the corporation suing Jackson’s client. I thought he was an innocent bystander, at worst, a third party.”

  I looked up at Bonita in time to see the lightbulb of understanding flash across her face. To her credit, she quickly regained her neutral, calm expression, and didn’t chastise me for having been stupid, or involved with a married man, which I guessed were redundancies, and she let me finish my story.

  “See, like with what Sherilyn just tried to do, once M. David revealed the insider secrets to me, this disqualified Jackson from the case under the same conflict-of-interest ethics rules. Because what one lawyer in a firm knows is imputed to all members. So it was the same as if M. David had told client secrets straight to Jackson himself,” I said. “Plus, M. David promised to spin it so that it looked like I had seduced him with the very intent of prying secrets out of him, and that Jackson had put me up to it.”

  Bonita gasped. “No one would believe that of Jackson. That he would…prostitute you like that.”

  It stung for a moment that she hadn’t said, “No one would believe that of you.”

  Then I said, “But it wouldn’t matter. Jackson and I would have had to testify, and, wholly aside from the damage to our reputations and the fact that the press would have had a field day, once we were called to testify, we would have had to withdraw as counsel because a lawyer cannot testify in a case where he or she is an attorney of record. You know that.”

  Bonita sighed, and nodded. I caught a small flicker of sympathy on her face.

  There I had been, just a kid straight out of law school, and I thought this handsome, sophisticated man loved me. Not only had I thought M. David loved me, but I thought I loved him too. What a perfect mark I’d been. What a perfect, horrified fool I’d been when I found out that instead of a sudden infatuation with my charms, M. David had simply calculatedly and deliberately set me up for the sole reason of disqualifying Jackson.

  “I remember the…fallout,” Olivia said. I watched as Olivia shaped her words carefully, whether for my benefit, or Bonita’s, I wasn’t sure. “Jackson, once confronted by M. David, was forced to withdraw from representing his client, with a great financial burden for both the client and Jackson,” she said, finally settling on a condensed version of the bare facts, and leaving out the fracas that had naturally followed the revelation that I’d been so easily duped at such a great cost to the law firm.

  Still ashamed after all these years, I hung my head. “A lesser man would have ruined me, but Jackson took me under his wing,” I murmured, my face still pointed at the floor, still grateful to Jackson after all these years.

  Olivia stood up and walked toward me. “I never loved Fred so much in my life as I did then, or Jackson either. They stood down the rest of the partners who wanted to fire you.” She put her hand under my chin and pulled my face up.

  That sordid escapade would have destroyed my career if Jackson and Fred had not supported me. I would have ended up back in B
ugfest, Georgia, eking out a meager and disgraced living in my father’s old law office.

  But Jackson had forgiven me, had told me not to make the same mistake again, and then had trained me in his own image to become a great trial attorney.

  I lifted my head, and I smiled. After all, I hadn’t made the same mistake twice. Jackson’s faith was well placed. “Bonita, why don’t you give Henry a call. After you’re done chatting with him, put him on with me. I’ve already got some ideas on how to work that case against Sherilyn.”

  And I made a mental note to ask Jackson to be my coach at the punching bag at the Y. You wouldn’t think a woman trial attorney would need to know how to land a solid blow to the head, but increasingly I was seeing the advantages of just that.

  Little did I know.

  Chapter 25

  Rain, in a kind of pre-hurricane fierceness, stung my face when I left the office that evening, and water was pooling on Shade Avenue deep enough that I worried about my little Honda Civic sloshing through the high waters. But as my car did a car version of the dog paddle, I realized I had to make one stop on the way home, and I spun around and headed toward Bayshore Drive.

  Much as I didn’t really want to, I had to go to Sherilyn’s McMansion on the bay and apologize to her. After all, I had tried not twice but three times to punch her, and I had most definitely yelled at her. Though she deserved both the hitting and the yelling at for trying to set me up, still, good professional manners, generally speaking, do not involve attorneys screaming or striking people in their office. We’re supposed to file motions in court instead.

  Oh, yeah, and then I still wanted to find out why she and Rayford had dropped the orange-defamation lawsuit, that is, if the post-apology moment should present itself to me to ask.

  Given the rain, I whirled my little Honda right up in Sherilyn’s big circle driveway as close as I could get to her gilded front door, and ran toward the house. After I banged on the door, it opened, and a woman in a black uniform answered with a suspicious and unfriendly look on her face.

  “May I please speak with Mrs. Moody?” I asked.

  “Name?”

  “I’m Lilly Cleary.”

  She shut the door in my face. I heard a click, probably a lock. Given the events of the afternoon, I wasn’t overly hopeful Sherilyn would send her maid back to admit me.

  But moments later, Sherilyn herself appeared, snakelike and seductive, wearing clinging knit in a sea-wash soft blue-green that complimented her hazel eyes and chestnut hair, as well as her ardently trimmed body. There seemed to be an awful lot of cleavage showing for a stormy evening and a new widow.

  “Hello,” I said, hoping momentarily for at least an invite out of the rain.

  Sherilyn nodded at me, and stood blocking the entrance to her house.

  “I’ve come to apologize. For my behavior at the office today. I’m not usually so…aggressive.”

  Sherilyn glared at me.

  Since her expression didn’t suggest we’d be laughing over cocktails in the next half hour, I said, “Well, then, I’ll be going.”

  “It was unexpectedly gracious of you to come by,” Sherilyn said, surprising me. “I accept the apology.”

  We stared at each other for a strange moment.

  “I told M.D. it wouldn’t work, you know, that you could not possibly fall for the same trick twice.”

  This time I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak.

  “Really, it’s better this way, don’t you think?”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Oh, now we’ll be adversaries in court. You’ll represent the doctor who did this to my face, and my attorney will have a splendid time, really, trouncing you and that fraud, that odious quack. I so look forward to it.”

  Yeah, me too. Actually, I realized, I really did look forward to it. Trounced, my ass, I thought. You just wait. But what I said, with a slight smile, was, “Until then, perhaps you would tell me why you and Rayford dropped the lawsuits against Angus and Miguel.”

  “You are just totally unbelievable,” she said.

  “So are you.”

  Sherilyn made a rude noise and shrugged. “If I tell you, will you go away?”

  “Most assuredly.”

  “Rayford wanted to drop the suit, and I didn’t care. There wasn’t any money in it, it was just…Well, there wasn’t any money in the suit for Rayford or me, and I didn’t care what Rayford did. I was just as happy to be done with those groves.”

  “Rayford told me he owned a cattle ranch in Montana or something.”

  “That’d be Rayford,” Sherilyn said, and snorted a short burst of gruff, most unladylike laughter. “He was a cowboy or something, but he didn’t own any ranch. Rayford was M.D.’s bodyguard. You know, one of those guys who shows up from out west with a dollar inside his shoe and big dreams.”

  “So how’d he get enough money to buy half of that orange grove? Bodyguarding pay that well?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. On either question.”

  Thinking once again of how fortuitous M. David’s death was for his good widow, I couldn’t resist one last volley. “I see y’all didn’t waste any time putting Delilah Groves up for sale.”

  “Don’t be snide, dear.”

  “Snide,” I half-shouted. “You tried to cheat me out of a big case.”

  “And you slept with my husband.”

  Oh, that, I thought. “But he didn’t mean it. It was a setup.”

  “Yes, that’s what he explained to me, years ago. And that’s why he put me up to my little attempted coup d’état. M.D. thought it would be great fun, tricking you again. He thought it would take my mind off—well, you know, my face. Now, dear, the wind is blowing rain into my house, and I think you should say good-bye.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Just a couple more questions, please.” I put a chipper, girlish sound in my voice that I didn’t mean any more than I meant I was sorry the rain was blowing into her house. I hoped the wood peeled off her floors and the roof blew away.

  Sherilyn laughed. “You are totally unreal.”

  But she didn’t shut the door in my face.

  “One more question—”

  “Oh, probably not, but I’m bored with all this rain, and you are amusing in a certain backwoods sort of way. That’s what M. David said about you—an exact quote, if you want to know.”

  No, thank you, I didn’t want to know what M. David had said about me, whether exactly quoted or paraphrased, and I had to do that whole inhale, exhale, calm-down thing before jumping to my real point.

  “So who do you think killed M. David?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you the same thing I told that cop lady. I don’t know. But if I ever find out, I’ll kill them myself before I turn them over to the law.”

  Wow. That was great, I thought. She sounded like she meant it.

  Then I thought, so, yeah, she did mean it.

  “Good night,” Sherilyn said, with a tone of finality.

  With that, I figured we were done. But a large, dark man appeared behind Sherilyn in the shadows of her McMansion’s vestibule. “Everything all right, Sherry?” he asked.

  “Just fine, dear,” she said, turning away from me long enough to give him a look.

  Well, this warranted a moment’s further study, I thought, and leaned in to see the man better. Quickly, my eyes focused on his body, I mean, you couldn’t miss it. It was well developed, this body, and dressed in a tight black T-shirt with some designer squiggle over the chest pocket and tight black jeans.

  Having digested the body, I looked at the face. Standard and aging. Gray hair. Dark eyes. Lines and wrinkles and thinning lips and hair.

  Running from time, lifting weights at the gym.

  This was Theibuet, I was sure of it, remembering back to the night of the antiphosphate rally, the last night of poor Angus John’s life.

  Great, this was like giving somebody rope and watching while they tied the noose themselves. Theibuet and Sherilyn
, together, in her house, on a dark and stormy evening, with the endowed widow showing off nearly her entire bosom and the man dressed in tight black.

  Yeah, these two had something going on.

  “You need something?” Theibuet asked me, in a voice with a hint of menace in it.

  Before I could answer, Sherilyn said, “Oh, her. She’s just one of M. David’s crazy ex-girlfriends. I think she’s harmless enough. And, besides, she was just leaving.”

  “I was not M. David’s girlfriend,” I said, highly insulted by being categorized as “harmless.” Her insults renewed my enthusiasm for taking boxing lessons from Jackson, and for taking her and her lawyer on in court. Wait till I subpoenaed all, as in all, of her medical records and read the juiciest parts—and there are always juicy parts—into evidence at trial, and hence, forevermore, into the public record. Instead of enlightening her on the various court-sanctioned, tried-and-true ways I could ruin her life during her lawsuit, I smiled like I meant it. “See you at the depositions,” I said, turned and sprinted to my car, and slogged away home.

  Home, where I found Jimmie, naturally enough, in my kitchen, drinking my grocery-store wine.

  “It’s not near as tasty as that other stuff you done hid from me, but it’ll sure dog-knock your lights out.”

  “Pour me a glass, please, while I dry off.”

  “You better let me get you the good stuff. I done been feeding crickets to that durn bird of yours,” Jimmie said. “He chases ’em around his cage till they jump out. I reckon you got a bunch of crickets jumping around on your porch, so don’t leave the door ’ween the porch and the den open, you hear?”

  “Why are you feeding Rasputin crickets?” I asked, and then wondered where he got the crickets, completely missing for the moment the real point of his confession, which was that my porch was teeming with little black hopping things.

  “Lenora told me to get him on bugs when I told her you was feeding him candy bars.”

  “They’re not candy bars, they are trail mix bars. They are organic, they are seeds and oats and perfectly healthy for a—”