Directed Verdict

by Randy Singer

  “Old Melvin—frequently wrong but never in doubt,” Win said.

  But Mack just sat there, staring after his quirky partner, his mind a thousand miles away. Abruptly, Mack turned to the two remaining members of the group. “Maybe so, but he may be onto something this time. I’ve got an idea.”

  For the next half hour, they discussed and refined the details of Mack’s plan. The entire meeting lasted two hours and cost the nation of Saudi Arabia $3,225. It would prove to be worth every penny.

  * * *

  Brad pretty much neglected the Reed case during the two months that Leslie spent in England. To be sure, the case proceeded, but Brad himself was too busy with other matters to devote his time to the file. His primary concern during the summer months was a tricky product liability case that went to trial during the last week of July. The case settled while the jury was deliberating, but preparing the case decimated Brad’s summer.

  While Brad deposed engineers and scrutinized product-testing reports on this other case, the trickle of paper from Kilgore & Strobel became a flood. Every day, the mail would be littered with pleadings, motions, or discovery requests from Strobel’s minions. Brad didn’t pay much attention to the growing mountain of paperwork. He knew nothing major would occur until after the court conducted a hearing on the motion to dismiss in late August. Fortunately, Leslie would be back in the country a few weeks early to help him prepare.

  * * *

  All summer long, Leslie and Bella wore out the FedEx planes between Virginia Beach and Exeter. Leslie attended class in the morning, worked on legal pleadings all afternoon, then reviewed her FedEx packages for more presents from Kilgore & Strobel. She was thankful her coursework was light but resentful that she had no time to tour the country. She could not take time off while there was work to be done on the Reed file, and there was always work to be done on the Reed file.

  * * *

  For Bella, it was just another lonely day in the office. Brad was in court, and Nikki and Sarah were huddled in the conference room working on answers to interrogatories. As usual, Bella held down the fort, answering the phone and doing the firm’s filing. The clock on her desk barely moved, the morning stretched on forever, and she found herself counting the minutes until lunch.

  At a few minutes before twelve, Bella put her phone on forward, rushed down to the firm’s small kitchen, closed the door behind her, and lit up her fifth or sixth cigarette of the morning—she had lost count. She turned on the small fan strategically placed in the corner of the countertop and pulled a plastic chair up to the small table. She grabbed her bag lunch out of the refrigerator and picked up her sappy romance novel. The plot was all too predictable, but she had bought it for the picture of the strapping young gladiator on the cover with the long dark hair and the come-hither look. She settled in for another solitary lunch hour. It was, she supposed, the price you paid when you exercised your freedom to smoke.

  There were no windows in the kitchen, just white walls stained yellow, a tile floor, a counter area, sink, refrigerator, microwave, and coffeepot. To Bella, it was as cramped as a jail cell. But thanks to some tense negotiations with Brad a few years ago, it was also the one place inside the office where she could still officially smoke. Until Nikki came, she could also sneak a smoke in the women’s rest room or light up when Brad was out of the office, but now even those minor luxuries had disappeared.

  Bella indulged herself in a little self-pity. Discrimination against smokers seemed to be not just legal, but downright fashionable. It was not like she could control it. Someone ought to do something about this. Smokers have rights too.

  As she worked her way through a salad and another unimaginative chapter of the book, the door burst open, and Nikki darted through. As usual, Nikki held her breath and went straight for the refrigerator to retrieve her lunch. She waved snidely at Bella and gave her a tight-lipped smile. Then she waved the smoke away from her face, neither talking nor breathing the entire time she was in the room.

  “Hope you choke,” Bella said as the door closed behind Nikki.

  A few minutes later, three pages and two long, passionate kisses later, to be exact, the door opened again, but this time more slowly. Sarah Reed stuck her head in the kitchen and walked in with her own bag lunch.

  “Hi,” she said. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Um . . . no.” Bella put the book down and gathered her Tupperware a little closer to her own place, making room for Sarah. “That’d be great.”

  She watched Sarah spread out a sandwich, some carrot sticks, and an apple. Bella suddenly felt self-conscious about the cigarette smoking away on the ashtray in front of her. She liked Sarah—after all, no one else had dared join her for lunch in this smoking dungeon. But Bella decided not to put out her cigarette yet, as a matter of principle.

  “What’re you reading?” Sarah asked.

  Would a missionary approve of a romance novel? “Just something I found lying around,” Bella said. She gave the book a suspicious and unfamiliar look, as if somebody had just switched her book of choice when she wasn’t looking. She turned the book over so it was lying with its cover facing down.

  “It’s probably a nice break after all those legal pleadings,” Sarah said. “I don’t know how you do it, day after day.”

  “Yeah, it is.” Bella took a short puff on her cigarette and blew the smoke over her shoulder. “The other stuff does get pretty dry.”

  Sarah nodded. “Can I get your advice on something?”

  “Sure.”

  “How do you keep everything around here straight? I mean, I’m finding as a single mom that I just can’t keep up with everything. Seems like I’m always showing up late or missing something or not getting something done. Yet here you are, single yourself, and basically keeping this whole firm running on schedule.” Sarah leaned forward and tilted her head a little. “How do you do it?”

  It was, Bella thought, a good question. She pushed the novel aside. She was just thinking this morning about how she could see the strain showing on Sarah’s face. Maybe this would help.

  After a few minutes of time-management coaching, the conversation turned to other matters. Bella finished her salad, but still she kept talking. She seemed to mesmerize Sarah, who kept her eyes glued on Bella, asked the most insightful questions, and seemed enthralled with the answers. Before long, Bella found herself snuffing out her half-finished cigarette and laughing with Sarah, in spite of herself. She couldn’t remember when talking to someone about nonlegal matters had seemed so natural.

  “Tell me about your family,” Sarah said.

  Bella hesitated. The first noticeable pause in the conversation. What was there to tell? I’m not married. Never been married. An only child whose parents are divorced. The only person who ever loved me—my mom—can hardly recognize me. Tell me about your family.

  What family?

  “There’s not much to tell,” Bella said, looking down at her Tupperware. She began packing up. “Dad and Mom divorced when I was in college. No sisters or brothers. And Mom, well . . .” She could feel the tears forming in her eyes, the words catching in her throat. “Mom’s not well.” She sniffled. “Sorry.”

  Bella stood to leave and threw her trash away. She felt stupid, tearing up about her mom, but she couldn’t help it. She knew it would be better to change the subject and get back to work.

  But there was something about Sarah. “She’s in a nursing home,” Bella heard herself say, “with Parkinson’s.”

  Sarah stood now as well and reached out gently to touch Bella’s arm. “Do you see her much?”

  Bella nodded.

  “Maybe I could go with you sometime,” Sarah said softly.

  “You’d do that?”

  “Sure. And there’s something else I’d like to do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would it be all right if I prayed for her?”

  “Right now?” Bella couldn’t imagine praying right here, right now, in the middle of the
smoking room. Was it legal? It seemed so . . . well, so unclean. So . . . unnatural.

  “Sure. What’s her name?”

  “Gertrude.”

  And before Bella knew what was happening, Sarah was praying for her and Gertrude right there in the middle of the smoking room, her hand gently rubbing Bella’s arm. Sarah was so sincere about the whole thing, this sweet missionary who had lost her own husband, passionately praying for Bella and her mom, that Bella felt guilty when she realized she had not once directed the conversation Sarah’s way.

  Bella never closed her eyes, for fear that Nikki would blow through the door. Still, she somehow felt God couldn’t help but hear Sarah’s prayer on her behalf.

  “Thanks,” Bella said when Sarah was done. “That’s one of the nicest things anybody’s ever done for me.”

  Then she hustled out of the small kitchen area before the tears could start in earnest.

  * * *

  Nikki spent most of her summer on the road, touring the continental United States, talking to potential expert witnesses, hunting down doctors who had treated the Reeds at the military hospital in Riyadh, and spending money on clothes. She hit real pay dirt with a young intern stationed at Fort Bragg, an Army doctor named Jeffrey Rydell, who had been one of Charles Reed’s treating physicians in Riyadh. Nikki sat in a chair right next to Rydell, rather than across the small conference room table. She was wearing one of her stock-in-trade tight black miniskirts, and she crossed her legs provocatively, hoping the handsome young doctor would notice.

  “How’s Mrs. Reed doing?” he asked Nikki with genuine concern.

  “If you mean physically, she’s doin’ great. On the other stuff, give her time. She’ll be okay.”

  “She seemed like a fighter. I really hope she can get through this. I’ll help any way I can.”

  “You can start by telling me your opinion of the cause of Dr. Reed’s death.”

  Nikki placed her mini digital recorder on the table. She leaned forward and struck a pose, placing her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, letting the doctor know she was interested. She tried hard to ignore the wedding band on his left hand.

  “Cause of death was cocaine injection by the Muttawa that in turn led to an acute myocardial infarction. Even before this happened, Dr. Reed had advanced coronary artery disease, and as a result, the flow of blood to his heart was severely restricted. The cocaine, in my opinion, probably stimulated the formation of a blood clot in a man who was already in extreme distress from being tortured. The blood clot might not have been fatal in the arteries of a normal man, but in Dr. Reed’s case, it led to total restriction of the flow of blood to the heart, causing massive damage and ultimately death.”

  “You seem so sure that the cocaine was injected into his bloodstream, Doctor.”

  “I am.”

  “Based on?”

  “Well, first, the word of Sarah Reed that she and her husband never even experimented with the stuff. Second, neither Dr. Reed nor his wife had any of the telltale signs of drug abusers, and I’ve been involved in the management of hundreds of critical care patients with abuse problems. Third, the toxicological testing confirms that the concentration of cocaine in Dr. Reed’s blood actually showed higher levels at the second hospital he was in, the base hospital, than it did from the first hospital, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital.”

  There was a pause, and a mesmerized Nikki realized it was her turn to speak. “What’s the significance of that, Doctor?”

  “Well, it actually means that the cocaine must have been injected fairly close in time to when Dr. Reed was admitted to the King Faisal hospital, and that the cocaine was still being absorbed into his bloodstream while he was hospitalized. I was also shocked by the levels of cocaine found in the toxicological reports. They are not levels typically associated with snorting cocaine. When cocaine is snorted, it narrows the blood vessels in the nose, which in turn reduces the flow of blood, which results in a slower absorption rate. The types of elevated readings we saw in Dr. Reed’s case typically come from either injecting cocaine directly into a vein or from smoking crack.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “And finally, and perhaps most important, a very peculiar aspect of the toxicological report that I didn’t notice at first makes me certain the drug was injected.” Rydell paused for a second. “But if I tell you, then you have to reveal it in discovery or make sure that I mention it in my deposition, is that right?”

  The question hung in the air for a while, as Nikki realized she didn’t have the foggiest idea what he had just asked. She had been too busy looking deep into his eyes, fishing for a sign of mutual interest.

  “Huh? Oh, well, sure you would . . . What’s your question again?”

  “If I tell you this hunch I have about the lab report, do you have to tell the other side about my opinion prior to trial?”

  “Yeah, we have to tell them about any of the opinions you intend to testify about at trial, and then they will ask you questions about those opinions in a deposition prior to trial.”

  “And then they will go out and hire sixteen other doctors to come and testify as to why I’m wrong. Isn’t that the way it works?”

  “Something like that. I can tell you’ve done this before.”

  Rydell looked pensive for a moment, perhaps conflicted on whether he should share his hunch with Nikki. “One more question,” he said after a pause.

  Nikki raised her eyebrows.

  “If it really isn’t my opinion yet, if it’s just a hunch and I don’t research this ‘hunch’ until just before trial, and if I can’t really form an opinion until I’ve had a chance to research the ‘hunch’ further, then would you have to reveal it?”

  “There’s no rule that says we have to reveal a hunch,” Nikki answered confidently.

  “Good. Then let’s just say I’ve got a strong hunch—” Nikki heard a vibration, and then Rydell looked down and checked his beeper. He looked worried. “I’m sorry, Ms. Moreno, but I’ve got to go. Like I said, I’ll help however I can. . . .” He was already up and out of his chair, heading for the door.

  “Maybe I could come back for a follow-up interview. . . . There’s lots of stuff to cover,” Nikki offered.

  “I’d be happy to talk further anytime you need me, but don’t feel like you’ve got to come out here. Just give me a call, set up a time we can get together by phone.” And with that, Dr. Rydell was out the door, off to save another life.

  Nikki looked wistfully at the conference room door. She turned off her recorder and stuffed it in her briefcase. She worried that she was losing her touch. As she stood to leave, she caught sight of her own reflection in the conference room window. She straightened her posture, sucked in her stomach, and smiled.

  That boy must be blind, she said to herself.

  15

  BY THE FIRST WEEK OF JULY, Nikki was preparing to take her investigation international. It had not been an easy trip to arrange. For starters, a visa to Saudi Arabia was impossible to obtain without a sponsor from within the country. And obtaining a sponsor was not easy when the purpose for entering the country was to investigate a high-profile case against its government.

  Nikki started with the large multinational law firms that advertised a stable of English-speaking lawyers. Her goal was to hire a lawyer who would later help with depositions in the country and on this initial visit could serve as a translator and consultant. No respectable firm, however, was anxious to bite the hand that fed them.

  After three days of phone calls and three days of rejections, Nikki gave up her insistence on a respectable law firm with specialists in international law. She would settle for any semiliterate Saudi lawyer who could speak passable English. And she finally found her man in Sa’id el Khamin, a sole practitioner obviously hurting for clients and ready to make a quick buck. She agreed to pay him the exorbitant sum of twelve hundred Saudi riyals per hour, the equivalent of more than three hundred U.S. dollars. Somehow the amount
felt like a bribe rather than a legal fee.

  With el Khamin’s sponsorship, Nikki finally obtained her visa and prepared to prove her worth in Saudi Arabia. With el Khamin at her side, Nikki would interview former neighbors of the Reeds and the members of the Friday night church group.

  Nikki arrived at the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh late in the evening on July 8. She was bone weary after the brutal flight from Reagan National Airport, during which she sat sandwiched between two large Europeans who both slept soundly while encroaching mightily upon her shrinking space. When she arrived in the Kingdom, customs took forever, the process slowed by a shortage of agents and the fact that she was a single unaccompanied female.

  She was finally rescued by her sponsor, a rumpled and bearded Sa’id el Khamin, who convinced the authorities that she was harmless and would behave. They allowed her to pass into his custody.

  “Here, I bring gift for you. . . . Wear this abayya please.” Sa’id presented Nikki with the ugliest garment she had ever laid eyes on, an enormous all-covering black cloak. To Nikki, who had seen similar garments in news coverage of Afghanistan, it was the very symbol of chauvinistic oppression. She held the thing at arm’s length, as if it contained the germs for some incurable disease.

  “Change . . . here,” Sa’id suggested, pointing to a ladies’ bathroom. “No need to cover—” and he made a sweeping motion over his face. “But, please, Mees Neekie, put on over other garments.”

  Nikki smiled and graciously headed into the bathroom, wondering why she was doing this. Mumbling to herself, she wrapped the cloak around her until she felt like a mummy, then looked at herself disapprovingly in the mirror. She immediately began to sweat. This would be a long week in the Kingdom.

  When she came out of the rest room, her peculiar little host bowed deeply and thanked her enthusiastically. Sa’id himself was dressed in a white floor-length shirt that looked like a dress. He called it a “thobe.” As they walked through the airport, he pointed out items to Nikki and named them in Arabic, as if she were going to learn the language in the week or so she would spend in this place. Nikki had only two immediate goals: get to a nice American hotel room and get out of the oppressive abayya as soon as possible.