by David Staats
“He was an old friend, or maybe I should say long-time colleague of Rich’s. After the divorce, when Rich had the new will done, he didn’t think it would be a good idea to have either Vanessa or me be the executor, so he asked Mort.”
“Right now, I don’t see that there is either anything that you need to do nor can do. It’s up to Mr. Golden to see that the terms of the will are carried out. Was there anything specific that you wanted me to do for you?”
“I just want to make sure I get what’s coming to me.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it. It may require some patience, however.” Mr. Dure refolded the will and put it back in its envelope. “How’s business?” he asked.
“Business has been good,” she said. “I hope the unfortunate way Rich died won’t hurt the business any.”
Mr. Dure put his palm on the envelope and slid it across the desk, not lifting his hand from the envelope until it was in front of Ms. MacCreedy. “I hope so, too,” he said. He stood, and she stood, and I stood this time, too. We all said good-bye, and the legal consultation was ended. Mr. Dure walked Ms. MacCreedy back to the reception area.
* * *
I have been disappointed that more of my old friends are not around. I guess it has been five years since we graduated from high school. How quickly time passes when you think about it. Jessica is in New York … Amanda in Houston …. But Ashley and Sarah are here and we got together one night. We went out to the Great Catch Sports Bar, which as coincidence would have it, is right next to the University Health Club. I had just participated in a legal consultation with the owner last week! Of course I couldn’t say anything about it to my friends because everything a lawyer does is confidential. But I felt in a small way that, hey, I’ve got information and insight into what goes on behind the scenes of all these places that we all took for granted.
We sat in a booth. Ashley and I had just regular Margaritas, but Sarah, always the daring one, had something new: a smoky Margarita which apparently is made by putting liquid nitrogen into the drink. So it came to the table with smoke coming out of the glass and the bartender said it’s really cold, don’t drink it until the smoke has gone away. Sarah said – I think she just wanted to keep the bartender there – So, what could happen? And he said, you could freeze your lovely mouth and have to go to the hospital; and Sarah said, oh no I won’t, she’s a nurse – meaning Ashley. (Ashley’s done one year in her nursing program and has a year to go.) The bartender looked at Ashley, then glanced at me, and then went away. Sarah said, appraisingly, “Not bad.”
Then we found out that Ashley had just gotten engaged – that’s exciting. She looks great, better than ever. And they were teasing me, saying if Sarah froze her mouth, after Ashley got done treating her, she’d hire me to sue the bar. I think Sarah was just a tiny bit tipsy because she said she’d accept the bartender as damages.
So we had a fun night, and when we came outside, the night was warm and quiet – Canterbury is not a rowdy town. The bell in the town hall clock struck ten. Ashley drove Sarah home, which I was glad of because Sarah had had three drinks. But I had had only one. I drove my mother’s car home and I felt good because my friends were happy and I was learning the law and liking my job and almost immediately after I got into bed I opened my eyes and it was morning.
* * *
Sometimes the same thing just keeps popping up in your life. Two days after I had been at the bar which was next to the University Health Club, Mr. Dure called me into his office. The owner had come to see him again. This time when she came in, she looked mad, like she was ready to take someone’s head off. Mr. Dure greeted her and introduced me again. I smiled for her but she barely cast a glance in my direction. She had a thick, folded sheaf of papers in her hand.
She sat down heavily, frowning and just about threw the papers on Mr. Dure’s desk. She was holding her purse tightly in her lap. I noticed that I was twiddling my pen so that the top was tap-tap-tapping against my legal pad. I stopped.
“What do I do about that?” she demanded.
Mr. Dure reached forward to draw the papers to himself. He unfolded them and read them quickly. “When did you get this?” he asked.
“A creepy little man came into the health club this morning, asked if I was the manager, and gave me that envelope.”
“You’re being sued,” he said. “By Vanessa Hargrave, against you and your corporation, for allegedly negligently causing the death of her husband, Richard Hargrave … who, I take it, was your former husband.”
“She didn’t waste any time, did she? His ashes were buried just a week ago. What should I do?”
“You should send this to your insurance agent. Who is your carrier and your agent?”
“Nicole Vaderdot is my agent. I think the company is Diamond Casualty.”
“Send this to Nicole. The insurance company will defend this action. They have lawyers they use on a regular basis.”
I was kind of disappointed. I had been expecting that I would get to see the workings of a lawsuit from the very beginning.
“I don’t get to pick the lawyer?” asked Ms. MacCreedy.
“Probably not. It depends on your policy, but it’s unusual that the insured can designate counsel.”
“That stinks.” She pouted. I suppose I would have felt the same way.
Mr. Dure explained to her how it works. “The insurance company lawyers will handle the case, but I can help you a little bit now – it’ll take at least a couple of days for the insurance company to open a file and send the case to counsel … but you should begin now to gather and preserve evidence ….” For the first time in the interview, a glimmer of hope shone on her face. But when Mr. Dure went on to say, “Why don’t you tell me briefly what happened,” she frowned. It didn’t seem to me that she wanted to talk about it.
Mr. Dure waited while I watched closely. Even though the air was getting emotional, I felt eager and excited because I was seeing what a real lawyer’s work is like.
Ms. MacCreedy hugged her purse to her more tightly. She sniffed and finally began to speak. She spoke hesitatingly. “I got a call Monday morning from Blake. He told me that Rich had been found dead, which I – so I went in to the Club. When I got there, the ambulance people were just standing around, they had called a doctor – pretty useless, it seemed to me – but apparently you’re not dead unless a doctor says so – ”
“Who was the doctor?” said Mr. Dure, interrupting.
“I don’t know.”
“Alright. Go on.”
“So after the doctor certified the obvious, the question was, where should the body be taken and then I realized somebody had to call Vanessa.” She paused and cleared her throat.
“Did the doctor say what was the cause of death?”
“He said he’d never seen a body in that condition before, but given the circumstances, he said it was likely a heart attack.”
“This was what? nine days ago, the Monday after the Fourth?” said Dure.
“Right.”
“Do you know what cause of death was listed on the death certificate?”
“Heart attack, I think.”
“Assuming that’s correct,” said Mr. Dure, “the question will be, did the Health Club do anything, or fail to do something that it should have done, that caused or contributed to this heart attack. And specifically,” he said, flipping a page in the document and glancing at the next page, “by failure to warn of the risks of using the sauna … or failure to properly monitor the use of the sauna. You have a membership application with a release?” asked Dure.
“I’ll have to check and see if we have one for Rich or not. You know, right? it was his club. I got it from him in the divorce settlement. So, he’s been a member forever.”
“Alright, you’ll check on that. Was there a warning or caution sign on or in the sauna?”
“Something is there.”
“Get pictures. Was the sauna in good repair?”
She hesitated and
seemed to consider carefully before answering. “I think it was,” she said, not sounding at all certain.
“Gather up your maintenance records – and check to see if the sauna had a warranty.”
“Oh! Good idea,” she said. She took a small notebook from her purse and made a note.
“Now,” said Dure, “a critical question is going to be, how did he wind up dead in the sauna on Monday morning?”
“He came in, late Friday afternoon, to take a sauna bath, and, um,” she put her hand to her mouth for an instant, “as best as we can tell, he must have had the heart attack and been in there all weekend.”
“But how did that happen?” asked Mr. Dure, an expression of bafflement on his face.
“It just happened. I mean, heart attacks happen.”
Here Mr. Dure smiled at her, but it wasn’t really a smile. He had really close-set, straight, white teeth and the way he pulled back his lips and showed them would have creeped me out if I hadn’t known that he was actually nice. “What I mean is, how did it happen that no one noticed?” he said. “That you closed up the club – what? without checking the sauna or even turning it off?”
“It was Blake’s fault. It was his job to close up that night, but he was in a hurry to go to his next job and forgot to turn off the sauna. He’s done that once before.”
“Blake is the one who called you on Monday morning?”
“Right.”
“So, is it the case that Blake was the last one out of the Club on Friday, and the first one in on Monday?”
“I think so.”
“You’d better get a detailed statement from him. Probably it’s not something you should do yourself. I could have my investigator, Kurt Kniffe interview him.”
I had met Mr. Kniffe once briefly. I thought it was funny that both the K and the final e in his last name are pronounced, but I suppose that if his name were pronounced ‘nif,’ it would be just as weird.
“It’ll cost a few dollars,” said Mr. Dure. “On the other hand, if you wait till your insurance company assigns lawyers, they will take care of it at likely no cost to you.”
“I think I”ll wait for them to do it.”
“That’s fine. Until insurance counsel take on the case, gather your relevant documents, and take photos of the warning signs and the sauna itself.”
“Alright, thank you very much,” said Ms. MacCreedy. She got up and as she left the office her eyes fell on me briefly, but she didn’t say anything to me.
I was learning so many things. After she left, Mr. Dure had me put my notes in a special file he kept of potential matters. “This interview did not result in an engagement,” he said, “but it is wise to keep the notes until we know for sure that it is a dead matter.”
Chapter 5. Ms. MacCreedy Finds Out That She Has Gone Bare
While Christine Bonneville, esquire-to-be, was learning so much in Mr. Dure’s office, the wheels of bureaucracy were turning at the Diamond Casualty Co. A week after Elizabeth MacCreedy’s consultation with Mr. Dure, the mailman delivered to her a slender envelope which bore the return address of her illustrious insurer. With a strange mixture of curiosity and trepidation she opened the envelope and took out the single sheet of paper which it contained. As she read it, her forehead furrowed and she stopped at the end of the second paragraph and started over at the beginning. What’s this? She read it again, this time to the end. It must be some mistake. Her stomach fell and she shivered so that her head shook. She read it again. Decline coverage? What was that supposed to mean? This will have to be straightened out.
She thought it best not to call for an appointment, but taking the letter immediately marched over to the office of her insurance agent, four blocks away. As she walked, her mood rose and fell. As she thought about the letter, she got angrier and angrier until just before the boiling point she would realize that it was some mistake and that it would all be cleared up by her visit. She would then relax and feel a shiver of cold and momentary slackness in her legs as the adrenaline drained out of her system until half a block later she would remember the words of the letter and her anger would build again, and the cycle would repeat itself.
By the time she arrived at the seventy-year old, four-story building of faded yellow brick where her agent had its offices, one of the taller buildings in downtown Canterbury, she was perspiring on account of her exertion and the day’s summer heat, and her face was flushed. She felt some relief waiting in the coolness of the small lobby for the elevator. But once inside the elevator, her stomach began to churn again. She pressed the button for the third floor.
* * *
Commercial lines specialist Nicole Vaderdot was slender and bony, her body an agglomeration of protrusions, seemingly held together by the red sheath dress of the kind that she favored, tight and unfashionably short for a woman in her forties. Her office was modest in size, its beige carpet and blond desktop appearing garish under the bright, livid fluorescent light.
After replacing the telephone receiver in its cradle, she put on a mechanical smile and snugged her chair up to her desk in preparation for meeting a client who would be irritated, hopefully not irate, on account of the declination letter, a copy of which Ms. Vaderdot had received by e-mail two days earlier. The wail of a siren from the street below penetrated the office, loud enough through the old-fashioned single pane windows to have interrupted conversation. A moment later, Elizabeth MacCreedy marched into her office.
The sight of Ms. MacCreedy brought a rush of recollections to Ms. Vaderdot: the account had been much better when Mr. Hargrave owned the business. MacCreedy questioned every charge and premium increase; she gave one the feeling that she was insecure where money was concerned, that money was her parachute, her life-saver, her gas mask.
“Good morning, Ms. MacCreedy,” she said, cranking her smile a little wider, “what can --”
“Please explain this to me,” demanded MacCreedy, flinging the letter out in her right hand across the desk and remaining standing.
Ms. Vaderdot extended her arm; her caliper-fingers closed on the letter. “Please. Have a seat, Ms. MacCreedy,” she said, as her arm swung back inwards bringing the letter with it.
“I’ll stand, thank you, until you tell me what this is about.”
“If you sit down I will explain it.” Commercial lines specialist Vaderdot instinctively knew, as if it were programmed in her DNA, that a victory on the minor issue of making the client sit, would determine the outcome of the interview.
“Just tell me,” said Elizabeth, and remained standing.
Ms. Vaderdot cranked her smile yet a notch wider. “You will be much more comfortable,” she said, “if you sit and so will I.” She snapped her mouth closed.
“I am going to stand here until you tell me what this is about!”
Ms. Vaderdot had a lot of other work to accomplish that day. If this account was not salvageable, best to get the interview over with as quickly as possible and move on to more rewarding tasks. The main thing would be to not provoke a lawsuit. “If you’re more comfortable standing,” she said, “please.” The smile subroutine was terminated and the earnest-concern subroutine started. “The lawsuit which you forwarded to the Diamond Casualty Co. arose out of the use of a sauna,” she said. “A sauna is a special risk, coverage for which requires a rider. This letter is telling you that you did not purchase coverage for this claim. So they --”
“What do you mean? I’ve been paying premiums every year. On time. Thousands of dollars! What do you mean, I didn’t purchase coverage?”
“Ms. MacCreedy, I know this is disappointing to you. Coverage for saunas requires a special rider. Your policy doesn’t have that rider.”
“What are you talking about? We used to have that rider. I know. And every year we told you we wanted the same coverage as the year before. So we should have it.”
“I’m sorry, you never told me to put on that rider. And I’ve checked the past three years’ policies – since I’ve been ha
ndling your account – and there’s never been any such rider on your policy.”
“But you should have known we needed that!”
“Why should I assume that you wanted that coverage? Some people go bare on what they think are remote risks to save the cost of insurance.”
“Go bare?” said MacCreedy.
“Go without coverage. If you have no coverage, you’re bare.”
“We used to have it,” said MacCreedy. She made a sidestep in front of the client’s chair and boom! sat down heavily. “What happened to it?”
Commercial lines specialist Vaderdot flexed sideways and opened the lower drawer on the right side of her desk. She withdrew an olive-green manila folder from the drawer and opened it out before her on her desktop. The file folder had metal clips at the top of both sides which secured sheaves of papers. Paging through the right-hand sheaf, she found the page she was looking for. “Our standard cover letter that always accompanies our policies will be familiar to you.” With precise enunciation she read, “‘Enclosed is your new policy. PLEASE READ IT CAREFULLY. It sets forth the coverages you have purchased, and spells out your rights and responsibilities under the policy. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR COVERAGES, PLEASE CALL OUR OFFICE.’ So it is your responsibility to inspect your policy and make sure it is what you need. We can’t recommend any coverage to you unless we know what your needs are.”
“So what does it mean?” asked MacCreedy in a defeated tone.
“Unfortunately,” said Ms. Vaderdot, adjusting the arch in her lumbar spine to sit a little taller, and re-engaging to a limited extent the smile subroutine, “it means that you’ll have to defend the lawsuit on your own. There’s no coverage.”
“I have to hire a lawyer myself?”
“That’s right.” After a pause, Ms. Vaderdot added, “Would you like me to bind coverage for you with that rider going forward?”
