The best-girlfriend thing went a step further the next morning.
Jennifer and Ashton had invited me to spend the night at Ashton’s house, and I did out of fatigue and fear of staying alone in my own house in case the lurking would-be assassin still had me in mind, and because I figured it was too late to show up at Sam’s in a sweat-stained red halter. During the night, Bear-ess snuggled into the bed with me and I slept soundly, notwithstanding the Cuban coffee.
I woke up when Jennifer crawled into bed with me the next morning, balancing a tray with two cups of coffee laced generously with Bailey’s Irish Cream.
The caffeine and alcohol hit my empty stomach with a surge and a bang, and Bearess, to my amazement, lapped some out of Jennifer’s cup without Jennifer so much as slapping the dog’s nose.
“Oh, she always shares my coffee,” she said when I protested.
“What about germs?”
“Oh, I don’t have anything contagious. The doctors ran all kinds of tests. I’m clean.”
Not what I meant, of course, but this was a new piece of information that made me wonder what doctors, noting her use of the plural, and why they had run “all kinds of tests.”
“What I want to do is explain,” Jennifer said, and patted my now exposed thigh. I was drinking spiked coffee, propped on a pillow in the bed, half-naked in one of Ashton’s T-shirts, with a big dog nuzzling my arm and a weird Barbie-doll woman patting my leg. “Okay,” I said. “Give it a whirl.”
“Marcus and I are old friends, see, and Ashton and I felt bad about ...you know, Angela stealing your boyfriend.”
“Angela didn’t steal my boyfriend.”
“Oh, well, sure,” Jennifer said, and patted my leg again as Bearess lapped another snort of her spiked coffee.
“Anyway, we just thought you and he might hit it off.”
“What about the LSD?”
“Oh, I was really, really, really so glad you didn’t say a word about that. I was just doing a favor for a friend, and Marcus and Ashton wouldn’t understand one bit.”
A favor for a friend? A wasp in the car? This girl must have gotten her excuses straight off of television. I could see she needed a course in the inventive lie. Or, as Jackson called it, the theory of the Big Lie, in which the weirder, more imaginative, and bigger the lie, the more likely it is that people will actually believe you. This was often the dominant theory of many a lesser plaintiff’s case in the personal injury lottery world.
But before I could swallow the coffee and begin the tutorial on the theory of the Big Lie, Jennifer said, “The thing is, I applied for a job with Marcus, at his office. He’s in with a bunch of other radiologists. But I didn’t get the job. But I sorta tracked him for a few weeks, and once he met me, he, you know, kinda asked me out. We went out, and he was a really nice man, and then I decided to move to Sarasota, and so he helped me get my job. Then I met Ashton and, like, the rest is history.”
Okay, I thought, you stalked the man for a date and a job, but what does that have to do with that LSD?
“So, see, the thing is, and what I was getting at, is that Marcus is really a good guy. He’s not nearly as boring as you’d think. You are so cooool. I just thought you’d like him. That’s all.”
So cooool? Nobody except Jennifer had said that about me since before I’d gone to law school, where apparently being forced to study the penumbras of the Constitution had totally stripped me of any coolness.
Jennifer squeezed my thigh with her free hand, while the dog drank from her coffee cup in the other hand. Her fingers curled around my flesh as she held on to that rather sensitive part of my leg. As little twirls of heat spun off from her fingers on my thigh, I wondered who exactly this woman was and what she was up to.
“I’m so glad you can keep a secret,” she said, and let go of my leg. “I mean, you know, the acid. Keeping a secret is really important between girlfriends, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“So, anyway, what would you like for breakfast? I just eat fruit.”
“Fruit is good,” I said, and lifted my cup of coffee out of reach of Bearess as she aimed her long tongue at my cup, having apparently finished most of Jennifer’s.
It turned out that Sam had been worried, which made him mad, and he actually raised his voice at me for not telling him where I had spent the night.
This took place while I was sorting papers at my desk around noon on Sunday, having earlier had a predictably weird breakfast with Ashton and Jennifer and Bearess, who actually had a place mat just for her on Ashton’s breakfast table, where Jennifer fed the dog scrambled eggs. After that, I’d showered at Ashton’s, admired his collection of lotions and potions, wondered how much of those Caswell-Massey products the law firm had paid for, and borrowed a long linen sundress from Jennifer in furtherance of our new status as best girlfriends. Without a stitch of underwear on (best girlfriends or not, I wasn’t wearing somebody else’s panties unless I’d washed them myself), I headed to the office. I hadn’t been at my desk more than an hour before Sam was banging on my window, and I let him in.
“Okay, so what exactly is going on here?” I demanded after he yelled at me.
“What do you mean?”
“Am I a suspect, or what? Why am I supposed to stay glued to your side?”
There was a long pause. An awkward pause. He didn’t say anything for a minute or two, and then came out with the entirely unoriginal and repetitive, “Where were you last night?”
Oh, I got it. He was jealous.
“Like I tried to tell you, I went to Tampa with Ashton and his girlfriend and a client. It was business, then it was late, so I spent the night with them. Want their number? Check up on me?”
This felt like a high school romance, and the man hadn’t even kissed me.
“Dr. Randolph has hired a bodyguard. We don’t know what is going on. You need to be careful,” Sam said, and stood up, apparently ready to leave.
“I am careful.”
He walked out without another word.
I finished the work that absolutely, totally, and without a doubt had to be done, left a series of notes for Bonita and also for Angela, who should have been in the office but wasn’t, and I went to my house, checked all the door locks and windows twice, and took a very long shower. I put on matching bra and panties in red under a red-flowered rayon sheath with cap sleeves and a hemline too high for the office, a pair of casual sandals so I wouldn’t look too dressed up, brushed and flossed twice, and drove to Sam’s house. He answered the door on the first knock.
Time for Sam to fish or cut bait, I thought, and sauntered into his house without saying a word. I had a package of condoms in my purse in case he wasn’t a Boy Scout about such things, and I waited patiently for him to get the picture and act on it.
He got the picture.
For a man who wasn’t eighteen anymore, Sam was pretty impressive, and I felt such sweet tenderness when I looked at his face afterward that I knew this wasn’t just about sex.
But the thing was, I explained, after basking in the postcoital closeness for about one and a half minutes, I had to go back to the office. “There are at least two things I really ought to finish tonight if I’m going to survive Monday,” I said.
“I’ll go with you. Take a look at that Trusdale file.”
Okay, so much for his version of whispered lovey, dopey, great-first-sex sweet nothings.
Sam had already gotten copies of the pleadings, which are public records, from both the Dr. Trusdale and Dr. Randolph files at the courthouse, and he was still pursuing a subpoena to get the rest of the materials in the files that were not public record. I’d turned responding to the subpoena over to Jackson as the firm’s managing partner. But now, all toasty and warm and completely satisfied in the arms of the man who might still harbor vague suspicions about me, I agreed that he could look at the Trusdale file. After all, the doctor was dead, so what kind of attorney-client privilege could there be? More important, who was left to enforce it?
Back at the law firm of Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, I warmed up the copy machine and my computer and started churning out a rough draft of a preliminary response to Stephen’s petition for mandamus, which sought in legally hysterical words to force Judge Goddard to set a trial date in the Jason Goodacre case. Angela had done a bang-up job of research and composing a rough draft opposing Stephen’s petition, from which I was freely pirating. Our response wasn’t due until Friday, but I knew I’d do five or six versions and, as with Tommy Glavine’s historical bad pitching in the first inning, I just needed to get this part over with as quickly as possible.
Sam sat on the couch with the Trusdale file.
There was something rather nice and homey about this, like we were a real couple. I kept this to myself, made myself forget Sam, and typed like a madwoman.
But by the time I had the first draft of the legal argument done, the room was too full of Sam for me to move on to the next part of the response. I could see him. I could smell him. I could catch the currents of wind he threw off as he moved. I wanted to taste him. I remembered the feel of him too well. Also, my back was stiff and I needed to move around.
I stood up, stretched, peeked out the window. Though it was Sunday night, three cars besides my own 1987 Honda were in the parking lot, so I suspected that at least a few lawyers still lurked in the building.
As I was stretching, Sam got up from the couch, where he’d been reading through Dr. Trusdale’s files, and locked my office door.
I guess this startled me, because he grinned and said, “Don’t look so worried.”
I grinned back and let him come toward me.
We didn’t bother to undress completely. That’s a nice thing about men’s pants and the way a woman’s dress can be lifted out of the way.
“My God, you are beautiful,” Sam said, while pushing my dress up around my hips and staring right at my face, my eyes.
I don’t believe this, that I’m beautiful, but I never deny it when anyone says it to me. “You are too,” I said, and meant it, but Sam was thinking with his body now and didn’t appear to hear me.
A half hour later, though we had smoothed out our clothes and I had giggled a few dozen times, my legs were still quivering when somebody knocked on my door.
“Lilly?”
It was Angela, and I could tell from the tone of her voice that something was wrong. I crossed in front of Sam in a hurry and unlocked and opened the door. Angela was holding Crosby in her arms and crying. For a moment I couldn’t tell if the dog was alive or not, and I was suddenly afraid that Jackson and I had kept Angela here too long doing our work. Then Crosby opened his eyes for a moment, looked at me with some kind of doggy recognition passing through them, and then closed them.
“Oh, Angie,” I said, and I opened my arms and took her in them, hugging her carefully, conscious of the weak, tiny dog in her arms.
“He’s not going to make it much longer,” she said.
“I know, Angie. Oh, I am so sorry.” And I was. The obvious platitudes danced into and out of my brain, but there was nothing to say. Her pain was real, and it hit me harder than it should have, for reasons I didn’t understand. I let her out of my hug but kept my hands on her forearms as she held on to Crosby.
“We’re leaving now for Mississippi,” a voice behind her said, and I looked up and saw Newly.
“He’s been sedated. We’ve got some meds for him,” Angela said, a catch in her voice. “My mother is expecting us. Crosby was her dog as a puppy. They need to say good-bye.”
I understood this perfectly, again for reasons I couldn’t have articulated.
“I’ve got to go. I put Jackson’s antitrust brief under his door last night. Will you tell everybody tomorrow?”
“Of course. Don’t worry. You’ve got your week, you know that, the compassionate leave the executive committee agreed on. Don’t hurry back too soon.”
“Thank you.” Angela pulled out of my hands, and I saw Newly look at me, then over my shoulder at Sam.
“Drive carefully,” I said.
Angela had already started walking off, but Newly stood there, continuing to stare at me, and I felt a flush creep up my face, as if I’d been caught in some infidelity.
Then Newly too opened his arms to me, and I went into them, and we hugged. He whispered, “I’ll always love you,” and then he dropped his arms and went out after Angela, to drive her and her dying dog back home to Mississippi, through a long, dark night, taking his new sweetheart to the arms of her mother, alerted and waiting to comfort her strange, orange-haired child.
Newly would be a good father, I thought, and turned back to Sam.
Ten minutes later, my office phone rang, and Newly’s voice came through, loud and clear as if he were shouting over traffic.
“Hey, hon,” he said. “I forgot to tell you something. I don’t know, but this might have something to do with all that mess you’re in. But Friday, this guy, the bum-knee guy who was suing Dr. Trusdale, he comes into my office. Saw my ad in the Sunday paper. Wants to hire me to sue Trusdale’s estate, or his own HMO. Not sure which. Seems like his health insurance is all messed up. Looked like Dr. Trusdale was trying to defraud this guy’s HMO by filing a bunch of claims for physical therapy this guy swears he never got. Not for the bum leg, but for a hip. Swears he wouldn’t go back to Trusdale in a hundred years, even to use his physical therapist. Came to me to see if I could get his insurance straightened out. It’s all a big mess, and his company is claiming he’s way over some limit for physical therapy or something. Might just be a mistake—I don’t know. But I thought you ought to know. Call my secretary for the file, and I’ll let her know you’ll call.”
So much for attorney-client privilege, I thought, but Newly always was a bit loose on the rules. Questions bubbled in my brain, but then I heard Angela say something in the background, and then there was a long pause, and then Newly came back on the phone and said, “Gotta go, hon.” His voice was sad.
I felt like crying. I looked up at Sam to see if he looked sad, and he did.
He’d had a dog once, so I guessed he remembered this part.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
But whose home? I wondered, for a moment facing up to the fact that despite those flashes where he seemed like a soul mate, the truth was I really didn’t know a thing about this man. Except he was older than me, he was an expert lover with obvious experience, and he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. Also, he didn’t seem to be much of a detective, judging from the Trusdale and Randolph investigations, but then, maybe I was being too harsh.
My phone rang again.
“Oh, gosh, hon,” Newly said. “I forgot to tell you. I dropped off Johnny Winter at your house. You never changed your lock or anything. I put him in the bedroom. Olivia can’t keep him with all those dogs at her house, and I can’t take him with me to Mississippi. Angela’s just too upset to deal with Johnny. I knew you’d take care of him. Let him out of the cage now and then, okay?”
I didn’t say anything. But I remembered now why I’d wanted Newly to move out.
“You don’t mind, do you, hon?” he asked, the sound of traffic coming through the phone.
Of course I minded. What if the ferret wizzed on my new couch and matching chair? Even used, they weren’t cheap. But then, the ferret was already inside my house, and Newly and Angela and Crosby surely were in the next county by now. What could I say? At a loss, I didn’t say anything at all.
“Thanks, hon. I knew we’d always be friends,” Newly said to my silence.
The line went dead.
“Damn that Newly. He didn’t forget to ask or tell me. He knew perfectly well that once the damn ferret was in my house and he was in the next county I wasn’t going to make him come back and get it. Another Newly trick—why he—” I stopped, inhaled, looked at Sam, who had surely heard what Newly had said.
Okay, memo to file: Don’t complain about the old boyfriend to the new boyfriend.
“What’d he say about the Trusdale bills?” Sam asked.
What had Newly said? “Something about Trusdale billing the guy’s insurance for procedures he didn’t do. On his hip.”
“I didn’t see anything in your file about hip procedures or charges. Are your medical records complete?”
“Yeah, they should be.” I went over to the couch, where Sam had been studying the file, and I looked at the records myself, as if somehow he would have forgotten something he’d looked at no more than an hour before. “Could just be an insurance company screwup.”
I had the records that Dr. Trusdale had provided me, and nothing about a hip showed up in them. Of course, if the dead doctor had been defrauding his patient’s insurance company, he’d hardly have supplied me with documented evidence of it, so it was no big deal that his records didn’t show anything.
I flipped over to the computer printouts of the bum-knee guy’s health insurance claims for the last few years. One of my first steps in any malpractice case is to get copies of the plaintiff’s health insurance claims for at least the last ten years. A good defense attorney can usually find something in such records to use either as a defense at trial or to coerce a better settlement before trial. Sometimes it is a bitch to get this information and takes a hearing and a court order, but I remembered that in this case it had been surprisingly easy. Standard interrogatories on my part and the bum-knee guy’s attorney supplied the records from the insurance company. I took my time looking at them again. The first time, I’d looked at them just for something really embarrassing to the bum-knee guy, something he naturally wouldn’t want revealed to a jury of his peers, or for something that suggested a predisposition toward infections. Of course, I’d concentrated on the surgery and presurgery records.
In other words, I hadn’t paid much attention to anything after the fateful knee surgery once I saw that there was nothing outrageous in the guy’s health records that I could use to my advantage.
But now I looked.
Nothing about any hip.
But something was amiss. The next to last sheet of the insurance claims summaries ended on March of one year. The next sheet started in January of the next year. True, it was possible to go that long without filing a single insurance claim. But not when you’ve been hit with the kind of catastrophic infection that this man had suffered. Quickly, I double-checked the claims printouts with Dr. Trusdale’s records and saw a couple of things in the records after that March date that were not on the claims printouts.
At least one sheet of the insurance company’s claims records was gone from my file.
I would have noticed this gap in the dates if these insurance claims forms had come to me that way. That’s the curse and the blessing of the obsessive compulsive.
“Somebody took something out of this file,” I said. And I remembered the Sunday I’d realized somebody had rifled through this file at my house and I’d gone to accuse Newly, but then we ended up fooling around, and I settled for bringing the files back to the office, where I’d kept them locked up.
“Who had access?” Sam asked.
“Newly, Bonita, me.”
“Newly?”
“Look, Newly wouldn’t steal something out of my file and then tip me off about it in a phone call, okay?”
I noticed I hadn’t said that Newly wouldn’t steal something out of my file, period. I wondered if Sam had caught the distinction.
“This is my copy of the file. A duplicate. I keep duplicates at home and in off-site storage. CYA,” I said, hoping to talk past the implied taint on Newly’s character. “The original file is probably still upstairs in the master storage closet. We tend to keep closed files there for a couple of months, in case something comes up, then they’re moved to our warehouse.”
“Your firm has its own warehouse?”
Nobody except other lawyers understand how much paper a lawsuit produces. You can’t throw it out until at the very least all the remotely possible statutes of limitations have run out, but I didn’t bother to explain that to Sam, who, after all, should have appreciated this given that cops keep evidence for about forever. “Come on.”
We went upstairs, where it took me longer than it should have to find the cabinet with the fairly modest Dr. Trusdale file in it. The cabinet was locked. I didn’t have a clue who had the key, and it took me less time than it should have to break into the filing cabinet with an impressively strong letter opener and my own bad attitude. Sam showed insight in not getting in my way.
In the original file, the complete set of insurance claims summaries showed a couple of office visits, an ultrasound, an X-ray, and a series of in-office physical therapy sessions related to the bum-knee guy’s hip. All these claims, missing from my set of records, were charged by Dr. Trusdale to his then very former knee surgery patient, all allegedly filed by Dr. Trusdale’s office against the man’s insurance.
Just like Newly had said.
“I need coffee,” I said. Smashing the file into Sam’s hands, I went into the upstairs kitchen. Of course there was a pot on one of the many eyes of our industrial-size coffeemaker. Grimacing at the thought of how long it might have been sitting there turning to sludge, I poured two cups, added a big teaspoon of sugar and white fake dairy chemicals to mine, and handed the other to Sam.
We drank.
Halfway through my cup, which was outstandingly evil in taste and texture but potent, the rest of my brain started working.
“Mierda,” I said. Fraudulent billing to the HMO? Was that what had escaped both my attention and Sam’s? Of course, Sam had been at a disadvantage: He hadn’t had the Randolph files lying around on his floor for weeks, and he wasn’t in the room when Newly reviewed the HMO claims and raised questions about the bills.
What had Newly asked about the records in Mrs. Goodacre’s MIB file? Records that showed claims for additional visits to Randolph after Jason was born. Why would she go back to a doctor she plainly distrusted, probably hated, for ultrasounds after she had delivered her child?
Throwing the rest of the coffee in the sink, I grabbed Sam’s hand and pulled him back down the stairs into my ground-floor office, where I pulled out the purloined MIB printouts Ronny had kindly provided and the medical records from Dr. Randolph’s office.
Of course, there was no corresponding account of any such ultrasounds in Dr. Randolph’s own records, just as there had been no corresponding account of any hip visits in Dr. Trusdale’s own records.
“So somebody is ripping off the HMO?” Sam asked when I pointed this out.
“Yes, but how in the world do you do that? I mean, the claims come from the doctor’s office, and the check goes to the doctor, and the company usually sends an EOB to the patient.”
“EOB?”
“Explanation of benefits.”
Sam nodded and furrowed his brow in the perfect cliché of a man thinking hard as I added up the numbers in my head and rounded off. Between the two sets of what now appeared to be fraudulent bills, the HMO had paid out roughly an extra grand in each file. Of course, the company would send its hounds from hell after whoever had done this for less than a grand, but the point was, as I asked Sam, “Would somebody kill to cover up a fraud of only two grand?”
“You’re thinking in too small a box,” Sam said.
“You mean, like the jail time is the same whether you embezzle two thousand or two million, so go for the two million?”
“That, and what if whoever was doing this defrauded a couple hundred dollars on a couple hundred patients over a period of months? That’d add up.”
“Yeah. Like that case a few years back where the hotel chain—I forget which one—added a made-up surcharge of one dollar on everybody’s bill. For a buck, nobody complained, and a buck on every room in every hotel in the chain turned out to be big money. While it lasted.”
“Missed that one,” Sam said.
“Ah, a plaintiff’s lawyer figured it out. Brought a big class action. Made a ton in legal fees. Guess that wasn’t played so big outside of the legal newspapers.”
And then I thought, It’s the same game a lot of insurance defense attorneys play. Feeling a tad like I was ratting out my fellow lawyers, I explained to Sam, in possibly more detail than he needed, the theory of the little fifteen-minute cheat, the simple trick of adding fifteen minutes to most of the entries on your daily time sheet. Myself, I had (really) never done this, because I was as busy as hell and billed accordingly without the need to cheat. But I knew it was done. An attorney attends a hearing, and it takes one hour. Instead of billing that one hour, he (or she—billing fraud not being solely a male practice) instead bills one hour and fifteen minutes. The theory is that nobody is going to notice, or check, or bitch about fifteen minutes. But then you repeat it, over and over, and the ten-hour day an attorney legitimately puts in working on a variety of cases for a variety of clients suddenly becomes at least a twelve-hour day. Multiplied by an average work year, that’s roughly, rounded off, an unearned bonus closing in on an additional hundred grand. All raised in little increments of fifteen minutes.
“So, lawyers cheat, huh?” Sam said.
“Oh, yeah, and there aren’t any crooked cops,” I snapped.
“But, yeah, couple hundred here, a couple hundred there from the HMO, and it adds up. Small enough claims on a variety of patients and the company doesn’t see anything amiss. No heart transplants or anything like that, just a few ultrasounds and some physical therapy. But how would it work? I mean, if all these bills were being done by the same doctor, I could see how it might work, with the checks coming into his office. But two different doctors?”
“I don’t know. I don’t get it.”
But under the influence of adrenaline and stale caffeine, something was ticking inside my head. My own little neurotransmitters were connecting the dots even as I said I didn’t get it.
Explaining the theory of the little fifteen-minute cheat made me think of Ashton. Ashton espoused that theory, had explained it to me when I was still a pup wet behind the ears. He had acted offended when I politely declined the chance to join the club.
No doubt Ashton had explained it to Jennifer.
Jennifer, who worked at a “service” that did medical transcriptions and billings and filed insurance claims, and did who knew what else for doctors too cheap to hire their own employees. How closely would the doctors monitor that service?
Grabbing my cell phone from my purse, I punched in Ashton’s number. Then I hung up.
“What are you doing?” Sam sounded like a cop.
“I don’t know,” I said, telling the truth and not liking his tone one bit.
If Ashton was involved in some way, I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Beyond that personal loyalty thing, a code I’m pretty big on, a code Delvon and I had lived by in the rough years, there was the immediate problem that if a partner in Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley went down the tubes as a major crook, then the firm was done. The publicity would kill us. I still had a huge mortgage on my apple orchard. I needed at least five more years of the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley gravy train.
But then another little dot got connected. The Trusdale file had been in my den the Saturday Jennifer and Ashton had come home with me. Jennifer had disappeared into the powder room and could have detoured into the den and taken the now missing evidence of insurance fraud. Or she could have unlocked the back door and then let herself in later that night while Newly and I were playing in the pool at Ashton’s.
Anger bubbled up in me until I thought of Jennifer curling beside me in bed that Sunday morning after the I-75 car trip from hell, squeezing my leg and saying how glad she was that we were best girlfriends, especially now that she knew I could keep a secret. Somehow, she’d wiggled into being my friend, and friends kept each other’s secrets.
Okay, get a grip, Lil, I thought. Not ratting out somebody for transporting a bag of LSD was one thing. But not ratting out somebody who had killed someone, had tried to kill someone else, and had possibly tried to kill me was too much.
No, I couldn’t keep this secret.
I wondered where Jennifer was on this Sunday night. With Monday morning’s workday looming, she probably wouldn’t be at Ashton’s now, as least I hoped not. I saw no way out of making the phone call, so I picked up the phone on my desk and punched in Ashton’s number. At least I’d keep it off the cell phone airwaves.
Sam walked out to Bonita’s desk and picked up her phone to listen.
Ashton answered on the fifth ring. “Yo.”
“Ashton, you alone?”
“Hey, babe, want to come over?”
“What exactly does Jennifer do?”
“Anything I want her to do.”
“I mean, at the medical services place where she works.”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“It’s a long story, Ashton. Now, what’s she do?”
“She does all that paperwork for the insurance claims. Files the claims for the patients, processes the checks when they come in, you know, stuff like that. She’s a great bookkeeper. I told you she wasn’t as dumb as you make her out to be.”
Apparently not, I thought.
“Ashton, ah, you need to protect yourself, I, er . . .” I saw Sam wave his hand for me to stop, but this was Ashton. For better or worse, he was my law partner. For better or worse, he was my friend. I spit it out quickly. “Jennifer has been filing fake bills with an HMO. It shows up in Dr. Trusdale’s and Dr. Randolph’s files. You’ve got to—” Sam crossed back into my office and slammed down my phone.
We glared at each other but didn’t have the time to explore our sudden mutual anger.
“I’ve got some work to do now,” he said. “Stay here or get a ride to my house. Stay off the phone and don’t go to your house.”
Assuming, apparently, that I would explicitly obey, Sam then turned and slammed himself out the back door.
Immediately I called Ashton back, and he answered equally immediately and without preliminary greetings.
“Lilly? You didn’t call the cops, did you?”
Okay, technically I hadn’t called the cops, and I didn’t want my law partner thinking I was ratting him and his girlfriend out to the police, so I word-smithed my answer with careful legal precision. “Ashton, I haven’t called nine-one-one, but you need to protect yourself. Are you—”
“Gotta go, babe.” Slam.
Visualizing Ashton rushing toward his personal shredder, I wasn’t particularly offended he hadn’t stayed on the line long enough to chat about whether he was involved in Jennifer’s scheme or not. Still bristling at Sam’s order, I decided to go home and call Ashton later to pursue his potential culpability.
Sam’s car wasn’t long out of the parking lot before I found the first associate I could, a first-year still toiling away in the Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley library, and I demanded he take me home, which, in true toadlike associate fashion, he did posthaste.
As it turned out, this was not a particularly bright move on my part.