Skinny-dipping Read Free

years old, drives a big-ass Lincoln Continental, gets her driver’s license automatically renewed by mail, and can’t see a Honda at five feet). “Justice delayed is justice denied” being a favorite cliché among personal injury and malpractice defense attorneys like us, prospering here in a city grown rich catering to the only technically still alive.
    But by catering to professionals and businesses that got sued, often only because they are the deep pocket, not the guilty, my law firm had grown wealthy and taken on an air of uptown. A tony facade. Our sign, a four-foot-high chunk of carved marble that bears an unpleasant resemblance to a gravestone, proclaimed the name of the law firm: Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, P.A. We obviously never abbreviate the name, though our receptionist is adept at saying the whole firm name as if it is one word. While we are mostly a defense firm, we indulge in a modest real estate practice since all real estate in Sarasota is for sale and has an appreciation rate that blows my mind. We don’t handle criminal defense, unless an existing client gets into some kind of discreet trouble, like DWI, but concentrate on medical malpractice and personal injury defense, and we have a host of doctors, hospitals, auto insurance companies, and nursing homes as revolving clients.
    These revolving clients crash through our dark oak double doors, angry at us because they’ve been sued, and we lock them out at night with a ridiculously decorated but quite serious deadbolt lock. The front door is a monster, with door handles designed to look like gargoyles foisted on us by an interior decorator that Ashton Stanley, in the years before he’d taken up with Jennifer the Stair-master wizard, had been wooing until he found out this interior decorator had begun life as a boy. Ashton’s early crush on the decorator also explained why he had a clear plastic table for a desk and a purple rug and black walls. Good thing the decorator stopped playing hard to get before the whole inside of the law firm was mauve and black and plastic.
    Thinking I’d rather have a black and plastic office than continue to pretend to listen to my dreary new client pontificate further on the difficulties of his profession and the unfairness of a legal system that actually allowed an injured patient to sue his doctor, I stared at my client and waited for a break. So, when my good orthopod paused to inhale, I gave him an earnest but pain-laden smile (I’ve learned something from watching Newly’s well-rehearsed clients over the years), and I said, “My head and neck really hurt. Really. Bad. I’m afraid we’ll need to reschedule this so I can give you the attention, the whole attention, you deserve.” I paused, studied his face, and saw the emerging sympathy.
    â€œMugged, you said?”
    Got him.
    I grimaced, rubbed my neck. Exaggerated the mugging experience, with special emphasis on the choke hold and the neck twisting.
    â€œYou’re a surgeon, so could you, please, maybe, write me a prescription for a pain medicine? That Advil just isn’t helping me.”
    Memo to file: Never ask for a narcotic by name— that tips them off.
    By the time he left, I had a prescription for Percocet, a personal narcotic favorite of Elvis Presley’s and Dean Martin’s.
    If I’d known somebody was going to kill Dr. Trusdale later that night by spiking his marijuana with toxic oleander, I’d have listened closer and been nicer.

Chapter 3
    Jackson Winchester Smith, the founding and controlling partner at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, P.A., charged into my office while I was grinding the beans and heating the Zephyrhills bottled spring water for my second pot of coffee.
    â€œGood win on that kayak whiplash case,” he thundered. Jackson never talks, he thunders. He has a portrait of Stonewall Jackson in his office big enough to be a weight-bearing wall, and