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Skinny-dipping
Chapter One
I, Lilly Rose Cleary, have a nearly endless capacity for driving myself crazy.
That's why I ended up in law school, that and a serious lack of any readily discernible talents, despite my being smart and tall for a girl.
That's why I was sitting behind a long wooden table in a courtroom, defending this guy, this person, my client, in a civil lawsuit accusing him of causing this woman, this plaintiff now testifying, to suffer the terrible pain and disability of whiplash.
Kayak whiplash.
From being rear-ended in a kayak. In a mangrove channel off the Intracoastal. On a church outing.
Kayak whiplash invited ridicule. Naturally, I obliged. But after an early deposition round of humiliating the plaintiff, economics brayed and I had offered her twenty thousand dollars, the nuisance value of such a case, to stop being stupid and shut up and settle. But no, she had insisted on her constitutional right to a jury trial, meaning I, the defense attorney, would get the twenty thousand and more for convincing the jury to give her nothing.
In my efforts to persuade the jury to give her precisely that nothing, I was trapped behind this courtroom table while this woman's attorney, Newton "Newly" Moneta, questioned her on direct, trying to nail down her husband's loss of consortium claim. This plaintiff, this woman who couldn't even kayak right, was expounding on why she couldn't have sex with her husband because her neck and shoulders and back and entire torso were a constant spasm of pain because my guy, the defendant, had come around a bend in the mangroves and rear-ended her as she sat, stopped dead, in her kayak.
Listening to this plaintiff pontificate on her lack of a sex life, I thought my head would explode. My legs jiggled under the table, I shifted and sighed, slumped and straightened, and my fingers tapped on the desk until my client frowned at me. So, okay, spank me, I'm not good at sitting still.
Newly took a step back and nodded at me, and it was my turn.
But the plaintiff, thinking, I guess, that the jury might have missed her point, hung her head and said in a little-girl voice, "I mean, I can't even, you know, do him with my hands, because my arm and shoulders hurt so."
Newly whipped around toward her and said, "Thank you," and told "your honor" he was done.
I stood up. Didn't even bother to walk around from behind the table.
"You can't" -- I stopped and glanced down to show my own reluctance to pursue this inquiry -- "manually stimulate him with your hand?"
She looked wary but nodded.
"Anything wrong with your mouth?" I asked.
Newly objected before he even got back to his table.
The plaintiff jerked her head up, glared at me as if this were all my fault, and said, "I don't have to answer that."
In case the judge had missed it the first time, Newly repeated, "I object, your honor."
Not waiting for the judge to respond, which is bad lawyer etiquette, I said, "Your honor, he opened the door on direct." Lawyer talk for "You started it."
Newly said, "Outside the scope of direct." Lawyer talk for "Did not."
The judge said, "Overruled" and turned to the plaintiff and said, "Yes, you do have to answer that." Judge talk for "I'm the boss."
The plaintiff gave it her best shot at being offended and offered such a nonanswer answer that I said, "I withdraw the question, your honor. No further questions." Lawyer talk for "Never mind, the jury gets my point."
Newly closed the plaintiff's case with a medical whore, who swore a person could actually suffer such a thing as whiplash from a rear-ended kayak. After Newly officially rested his case, I made the standard motion and asked the judge to rule immediately in favor of my guy and deprive the jury of both hearing my defense and reaching its own verdict. To my detailed argument, Judge Goddard responded, "Go to lunch but don't take long." Taking that for a denial of my motion, I gathered up my client as the judge added, "I want this case over with today." We'd been at it for two days before this morning's testimony, and Judge Goddard had apparently had a bellyful.
With Judge Goddard's infamous impatience in mind, I scarfed a banana and a bowl of organic mixed greens with a maple syrup vinaigrette dressing from the Granary, the local health food store, while my client, a guy named Elvis who drove a tow truck and who had the rare good luck of having a personal liability insurance policy that was covering my fees and his lunch, picked at a tofu sandwich and asked, "What is this stuff?"
"It's like tuna," I said, figuring soybean curd was beyond the tolerance of his Florida cracker upbringing.
After lunch, I put Elvis on the stand to show the jury that he was a nice, basic guy and then put on our main medical guy. This medical witness was costing my client, or, to be technically correct, the client's liability insurance company, a small fortune, but the doc was great. Soft voice, big medical words explained to a grade-school level without condescension, gray hair, and taupe-colored wire-frame glasses that brought out his blue eyes. Came across like Marcus Welby, M.D. Privately, he'd told me the plaintiff was as healthy as an ox, big as one, and about as dumb, and, by the way, he "really knew how to grill a great steak" if I would like to have dinner with him at his beachfront house. Yeah, sure, dead cow burnt over charcoal to maximize the carcinogenic impact. I said I'd keep his offer in mind for the calm after the trial and suggested that he convey to the jury that the plaintiff was a big, stupid girl making this up. Bless his heart, the doc did just that ...
Skinny-dipping. Copyright © by Claire Matturro. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
