Chemo rubbed the palm of one hand along his cheeks, making sandpaper sounds. Rudy Graveline wished he would knock itoff.
“What about the TV?” Chemo asked. “Does that count, if it makes the TV?”
“Of course.”
“Radio, too?”
“Certainly,” Rudy said. “I told you before, no big deal. I don’t need to see the actual corpse, okay, but we do need to be sure. It’s very important, because this is a dangerous man.”
“Was,” Chemo said pointedly.
“Right. This was a dangerous man.” Rudy didn’t mention Stranahan’s ominous phone call on Maggie Gonzalez’s answering machine. Better to limit the cast of characters, for Chemo’s sake. Keep him focused.
“Maybe it’s already on the radio,” Chemo said hopefully.
Rudy didn’t want to put the guy in a mood. “Tell you what,” he said in a generous tone. “We’ll go ahead and do the first treatment this afternoon.”
Chemo straightened up excitedly. “No shit?”
“Why not?” the doctor said, standing. “We’ll try a little patch on your chin.”
“How about the nose?” Chemo said, touching himself there.
Rudy slipped on his glasses and came around the desk to where Chemo was sitting. Because of Chemo’s height, even in the chair, the surgeon didn’t have to lean over far to get a close-up look at the corrugated, cheesy mass that passed for Chemo’s nose.
“Pretty rough terrain,” Rudy Graveline said, peering intently. “Better to start slow and easy.”
“Fast and rough is fine with me.”
Rudy took off his glasses and struck an avuncular pose, a regular Marcus Welby. “I want to be very careful,” he told Chemo. “Yours is an extreme case.”
“You noticed.”
“The machine we use is a Stryker dermabrader-”
“I don’t care if it’s a fucking Black and Decker, let’s just do it.”
“Scar tissue is tricky,” Rudy persisted. “Some skin reacts better to sanding than others.” He couldn’t help remembering what had happened to the last doctor who had screwed up Chemo’s face. Getting murdered was even worse than getting sued for malpractice.
“One little step at a time,” Rudy cautioned. “Trust me.”
“Fine, then start on the chin, whatever,” Chemo said with a wave of a pale hand. “You’re the doctor.”
Those magic words.
How Rudy Graveline loved to hear them.
Compared to other law firms, Kipper Garth’s had the overhead problem licked. He had one central office, no partners, no associates, no “of counsels.” His major expenses were billboard advertising, cable, telephones (he had twenty lines), and, of course, secretaries (he called them legal aides, and employed fifteen). Kipper Garth’s law practice was, in essence, a high-class boiler room.
The phones never stopped ringing. This was because Kipper Garth had shrewdly put up his billboards at the most dangerous traffic intersections in South Florida, so that the second thing every noncomatose accident victim saw (after the Jaws of Life) was Kipper Garth’s phone number in nine-foot red letters:
555-TORT
Winnowing the incoming cases took most of the time, so Kipper Garth delegated this task to his secretaries, who were undoubtedly more qualified anyway. Kipper Garth saved his own energy for selecting the referrals; some P.I. lawyers specialized in spinal cord injuries, others in orthopedics, still others in death-and-dismemberment. Though Kipper Garth was not one to judge a colleague’s skill in the courtroom (not having been in a courtroom in at least a decade), he knew a fifty-fifty fee split when he saw it, and made his referrals accordingly.
The phone bank at Kipper Garth’s firm looked and sounded like the catalog-order department at Montgomery Ward. By contrast, the ulterior of Kipper Garth’s private office was rich and staid, lit like an old library and just as quiet. This is where Mick Stranahan found his brother-in-law, practicing his putting.
“You don’t knock anymore?” said Kipper Garth, eyeing a ten-footer into a Michelob stein.
“I came to make a little deal,” Stranahan said.
“This I gotta hear.” Kipper Garth wore gray European-cut slacks, a silk paisley necktie and a bone-colored shirt, the French cuffs rolled up to his elbows. His salt-and-pepper hair had been dyed silver to make him look more trustworthy on the billboards.
“Let’s forget this disbarment thing,” Stranahan said.
Kipper Garth chuckled. “It’s a little late, Mick. You already testified, remember?”
“How about if I agree not to testify next time?”
Kipper Garth backed away from the next putt and looked up. “Next time?”
“There’s other cases kicking around the grievance committee, amI right?”
“But how do you-”
“Lawyers talk, Jocko.” Stranahan emptied the golf balls out of the beer stein and rolled them back across the carpet toward his brother-in-law. “I’ve still got a few friends in town,” he said. “I’m still plugged in.”
Kipper Garth leaned his putter in the corner behind his desk. “I’m suing you remember? Defamation, it’s called.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed. “Mick, I know why you’re here. Chloe’s been killed and you’re afraid you’ll take the fall. You need a lawyer, so here you are, looking for a goddamn freebie.”
“I said don’t make me laugh.”
“Then whatis it?”
“Who’s getting your malpractice stuff these days?”
Kipper Garth started flicking through his Rolodex; it was the biggest Rolodex that Stranahan had even seen, the size of a pot roast. Kipper Garth said, “I’ve gota couple main guys, why?”
“These guys you’ve got, can they get state records?”
“What kind of records?”
Christ, the man was lame. “Discipline records,” Stranahan explained, “from the medical board.”
“Gee, I don’t know.”
“There’s a shocker.”
“What’s going on, Mick?”
“This: You help me out, I’ll lay off of you. Permanently.”
Kipper Garth snorted. “I’m supposed to be grateful? Pardon me if I don’t give a shit.”
Naturally, thought Stranahan, it would come to this. The pertinent papers were wadded in his back pocket. He got them out, smoothed them with the heel of one hand and laid them out carefully, like solitaire cards, on Kipper Garth’s desk.
The lawyer muttered, “What the hell?”
“Pay attention,” Stranahan said. “This one here is the bill of sale for your spiffy new Maserati. That’s a Xerox of the check-fifty-seven thousand, eight something, what a joke. Anyway, the account that check was written on is your clients’ trust account, Jocko. We’re talking deep shit. Forget disbarment, we’re talking felony.”
Kipper Garth’s upper lip developed an odd tic.
“I’m paying it back,” he said hoarsely.
“Doesn’t matter,” Mick Stranahan said. “Now, someofthis other crap-that’s a hotel bill from the Grand Bay in Coconut Grove. Same weekend you told Katie you were in Boston with the ABA. Anyway, it’s none of my business but you don’t look like a man that could drink three bottles of Dom all by your lonesome. See, it’s right there on the bill.” Stranahan pointed, but Kipper Garth’s eyes were focused someplace else, some place far away. By now his lip was twitching like a porch lizard.
“You,” he said to Stranahan. “You jerk.”
“Now what’s this dinner for two, Jocko? My sister was at Grandma’s with the kids that night, if memory serves. Dinner for two at Max’s Place, what exactly was that? Probably just a client, no?”
Kipper Garth collected himself and said, “All right, Mick.”
“You understand the situation.”
“Yes.”
“It was easier than you think,” Stranahan said. “See, once you’re plugged in, it’s hard to get unplugged. I mean, once you know this stuff is out there, it’s real easy to find.” A half-dozen phone calls was all it took.
Kipper Garth began folding the papers, creasing each one with a great deal of force.
Stranahan said, “What scares you more, Jocko, the Florida Bar, the county jail, or an expensive divorce?”
Wearily, Kipper Garth said, “Did you mean what you said before, about the disbarment and all that?”