Skin Tight

21

The clerical staff of Kipper Garth’s law office was abuzz: Clients-real live clients-were coming in for a meeting. Most of the secretaries had never seen any of Kipper Garth’s clients because he generally did not allow them to visit. Normally all contact took place over the telephone, since Kipper Garth’s practice was built exclusively on referrals to other lawyers. The rumor this day (and an incredible one, at that) was that Kipper Garth was going to handle a malpractice case all by himself; one of the senior paralegals had been vaguely instructed to prepare a complaint for civil court. The women who worked Kipper Garth’s phone bank figured that it must be a spectacularly egregious case if their boss would tackle it solo, for his fear of going to court was well known. Kipper Garth’s staff couldn’t wait to get a look at the new clients.

They arrived at eleven sharp, a man and a woman. The clerks, secretaries, and paralegals were startled: It was an unremarkable couple in their mid-thirties. The man was medium-build and ordinary looking, the woman had long ash-blond hair and a nice figure. Neither displayed any obvious scars, mutilations, or crippling deformities. Kipper Garth’s staff was baffled-the hushed wagering shifted back and forth between psychiatric aberration and sexual dysfunction.

Both guesses were wrong. The problem of John and Marie Nordstrom was far more peculiar.

Kipper Garth greeted them crisply at the door and led them to two high-backed easy chairs positioned in front of his desk. The lawyer was extremely nervous and hoped it didn’t show. He hoped he would ask the right questions.

“Mr. Nordstrom,” he began, “I’d like to review some of the material in the state files.”

Nordstrom looked around the elegant office and said: “Are we the only ones?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are we the only ones to sue? Over the phone you said a whole bunch of his patients were suing.”

Kipper Garth tugged restlessly at the sleeves of his coat. “Well, we’ve been talking to several others with strong cases. I’m sure they’ll come around. Meanwhile you and your wife expressed an interest-”

“But not alone,” John Nordstrom said. “We don’t want to be the only ones.”

His wife reached across and touched his arm. “Let’s listen to him,” she said. “It can’t hurt.”

Kipper Garth waited for the moment of tension to pass. It didn’t. He motioned toward the walnut credenza behind his desk. “See all those files, Mr. Nordstrom? Patients of Dr. Rudy Graveline. Most of them have suffered more than you and your wife. Much more.”

Nordstrom said, “So what’s your point?”

“The point is, Mr. Nordstrom, a monster is loose. Graveline is still in business. On a good day his clinic takes in a hundred grand in surgical fees. One hundred grand! And every patient walks in there thinking that Dr. Graveline is one brilliant surgeon, and some of them find out the hard way that he’s not. He’s a putz.”

Mrs. Nordstrom said: “You don’t have to tell us.”

Kipper Garth leaned forward and, ministerially, folded his hands. “For me, this case isn’t about money.” He sounded so damn earnest that he almost believed himself. “It isn’t about money, it’s about morality. And conscience. And concern for one’s fellow man. I don’t know about you folks, but my stomach chums when I think how a beast like Rudolph Graveline is allowed to continue to destroy the lives of innocent, trusting people.” Kipper Garth swiveled his chair slowly and gestured again at the stacks of files. “Look at all these victims-men and women just like yourselves. And to think that the state of Florida has done nothing to stop this beast. It makes me nauseous.”

“Me, too,” said Mrs. Nordstrom.

“My mission,” continued Kipper Garth, “is to find someone with the courage to go after this man. Shut him down. Bring to light his incompetence so that no one else will have to suffer. The place to do that is the courtroom.”

John Nordstrom sniffed. “Don’t tell me the sonofabitch’s never been sued before.”

Kipper Garth smiled. “Oh yes. Yes, indeed, Dr. Graveline has been sued before. But he’s always escaped the glare of publicity and the scrutiny of his peers. How? By settling the cases out of court. He buys his way out, never goes to trial. This time he won’t get off so lightly, Mr. Nordstrom. This time, with your permission, I want to take him to the wall. I want to go all the way. I’m talking about a trial.”

It was a damn mellifluous speech for a man accustomed to bellowing at a speaker box. If not moved, the Nordstroms were at least impressed. A self-satisfied Kipper Garth wondered if he could ever be so smooth in front of a jury.

Marie Nordstrom said: “In person you look much younger than on your billboards.”

The lawyer acknowledged the remark with a slight bow.

Mrs. Nordstrom nudged her husband. “Go ahead, tell him what happened.”

“It’s all in the file,” John Nordstrom said.

“I’d like to hear it again,” Kipper Garth said, “in your own words.” He pressed a button on the telephone console, and a stenographer with a portable machine entered the office. She was followed by a somber-looking paralegal wielding a long yellow pad. Mutely they took positions on either side of Kipper Garth. Nordstrom scanned the trio warily.

His wife said: “It’s a little embarrassing for us, that’s all.”

“I understand,” Kipper Garth said. “We’ll take our time.”

Nordstrom shot a narrow look at his wife. “You start,” he said.

Calmly she straightened in the chair and cleared her throat. “Two years ago, I went to Dr. Graveline for a routine breast augmentation. He came highly recommended.”

“Your manicurist,” John Nordstrom interjected, “a real expert.”

Kipper Garth raised a tanned hand. “Please.”

Marie Nordstrom continued: “I insisted that Dr. Graveline himself do the surgery. Looking back on it, I would’ve been better off with one of the other fellows at the clinic-anyway, the surgery was performed on a Thursday. Within a week it was obvious that something was very wrong.”

Kipper Garth said, “How did you know?”

“Well, the new breasts were quite… hard.”

“Try concrete,” John Nordstrom said.

His wife went on: “They were extremely round and tight. Too tight. I mean, they didn’t even bounce.”

A true professional, Kipper Garth never let his eyes wander below Mrs. Nordstrom’s neckline.

She said: “When I saw Dr. Graveline again, he assured me that this was normal for cases like mine. He had a name for it and everything.”

“ Capsular contracture,” said the paralegal, without looking up from her notes.

“That’s it,” Mrs. Nordstrom said. “Dr. Graveline told me everything would be fine in a month or two. He said they’d be soft as little pillows.”

“And?”

“And we waited, just like he told us. In the meantime, of course, John kept wanting to try them out.”

“Hey,” Nordstrom said, “I paid for the damn things.”

“I understand,” said Kipper Garth. “So you made love to your wife?”

Nordstrom’s cheeks reddened. “You know the rest.”

With his chin Kipper Garth pointed toward the stenographer and the paralegal, both absorbed in transcribing the incident.

Nordstrom sighed and said, “Yeah, I made love to my wife. Or tried to.”

“That’s when the accident happened between John and my breasts,” continued Mrs. Nordstrom. “I’m not sure if it was the left one or the right one that got him.”

Nordstrom muttered, “I’m not sure, either. It was a big hard boob, that’s all I know.”

Kipper Garth said, “And it actually put your eye out?”

John Nordstrom nodded darkly.

His wife said: “Technically they called it a detached retina. We didn’t know it was so serious right away. John’s eye got swollen and then there was some bleeding. When his vision didn’t come back after a few days, we went to a specialist… but it was already too late.”

Gently Kipper Garth said, “I noticed that you told the ophthalmic surgeon a slightly different story. You told him you were poked by a Christmas tree branch.”

Nordstrom glared, with his good eye, at the lawyer. “What the hell would you have told him-that you were blinded by a tit?”

“It must have been difficult,” Kipper Garth said, his voice rich with sympathy. “And this was your right eye, according to the file.”

“Yeah,” said Nordstrom, pointing.

“They gave him a glass one,” his wife added. “You can hardly tell.”

“I c an sure as hell tell,” Nordstrom said.

Kipper Garth asked: “Did it affect your work?”

“Are you kidding? I lost my job.”

“Really?” The lawyer suppressed a grin of delight, but mentally tacked a couple more zeros to the pain-and-suffering demand.

Mrs. Nordstrom said: “John was an air-traffic controller. You can well imagine the problems.”

“Yeah, and the jokes,” Nordstrom said bitterly.

Kipper Garth leaned back and locked his hands across his vest. “Folks, how does ten million sound?”

Nordstrom snorted. “Come off it.”

“We get the right jury, we can probably do twelve.”

“Twelve million dollars-no shit?”

“No shit,” said Kipper Garth. “Mrs. Nordstrom, I need to ask you something. Did this, uh, condition with your breasts ever improve?”

She glanced down at her chest. “Not much.”

“Not much is right,” said her husband. “Take my word, they’re like goddamn bocci balls.”

The guy would be poison as a witness, Kipper Garth decided; the jury would hate his guts. No wonder other lawyers had balked at taking the case. Kipper Garth thanked the Nordstroms for their time and showed them to the door. He promised to get back to them in a few days with some important papers to review.

After the couple had gone, Kipper Garth ordered the stenographer to transcribe the interview and make a half-dozen copies. Then he told the paralegal to type up a malpractice complaint against Dr. Rudy Graveline and the Whispering Palms Spa and Surgery Center.

“Can you handle that?” Kipper Garth asked.

“I think so,” the paralegal said, coolly.

“And afterwards go down to the courthouse and do… whatever it is needs to be done.”

“We’ll go together,” the paralegal said. “You might as well learn your way around.”

Kipper Garth agreed pensively. If only his ski bunny knew what their dalliance had cost him. That his blackmailer was his own frigging brother-in-law compounded the humiliation. “One more question,” Kipper Garth said to his paralegal. “After we file the lawsuit, then what?”

“We wait,” she replied.

The lawyer giggled with relief. “That’s all?”

“Sure, we wait and see what happens,” the paralegal said. “It’s just like dropping a bomb.”

“I see,” said Kipper Garth. Just what he needed in his life. A bomb.

Freddie was napping in his office at the Gay Bidet when one of the ticket girls stuck her head in the doorway and said there was a man wanted to see him. Right away Freddie didn’t like the looks of the guy, and would have taken him for a cop except that cops don’t dress so good. The other thing Freddie didn’t like about the guy was the way he kept looking around the place with his nose twitching up in the air like a swamp rabbit, like there was something about the place that really stunk. Freddie didn’t appreciate that.

“This isn’t what I expected,” the man said.

“The fuck you expect, Regine’s?” Boldly Freddie took the offensive.

“This isn’t a gay bar?” the man asked, “I assumed from the name… “

Freddie said, “I didn’t name the place, pal. All I know is, it rhymes. That doesn’t automatically make it no fruit bar. Now state your business or beat it.”

“I need to see one of your bouncers.”

“What for?”

The man said, “I’m his doctor.”

“He sick?”

“I don’t know until I see him,” said Rudy Graveline.

Freddie was skeptical. Maybe the guy was a doctor, maybe not; these days everybody was wearing white silk suits.

“Which of my security personnel you want to see?” asked Freddie.

“He’s quite a big man.”

“They’re all big, mister. I don’t hire no munchkins.”

“This one is extremely tall and thin. His face is heavily scarred, and he’s missing his left hand.”

“Don’t know him,” Freddie said, playing it safe. In case the guy was a clever bail bondsman or an undercover cop with a wardrobe budget.

Rudy said: “But he told me he works here.”

Freddie shook his head and made sucking sounds through his front teeth. “I have a large staff, mister, and turnover to match. Not everybody can take the noise.” He jerked a brown thumb toward the fiberboard wall, which was vibrating from the music on the other side.

“Sounds like an excellent band,” Rudy said lamely.

“ Cathy and the Catheters,” Freddie reported with a shrug. “Queen of slut rock, all the way from London.” He pushed himself to his feet and stretched. “Sorry I can’t help you, mister-”

At that instant the ticket girl flung open the door and told Freddie that a terrible fight had broken out and he better come quick. Rudy Graveline was huffing at Freddie’s heels by the time a path had been cleared to the front of the stage. There a gang of anorexic Nazi skinheads had taken on a gang of flabby redneck bikers in a dispute over tattoos-specifically, whose was the baddest. The battle had been joined by a cadre of heavyset bouncers, each sporting a pink Gay Bidet T-shirt with the word SECURITY stenciled on the back. The vicious fighting seemed only to inspire more volume from the band and more random slam-dancing from the other punkers.

Towering above the melee was Chemo himself, his T-shirt ragged and bloody, and a look of baleful concentration on his face. Even through the blinding strobes, Rudy Graveline could see that the Weed Whacker attached to Chemo’s stub was unsheathed and fully operative; the monofilament cutter was spinning so rapidly that it appeared transparent and harmless, like a hologram. In horror Rudy watched Chemo lower the buzzing device into the tangle of humanity-the ensuing screams rose plangently over the music. As if by prearrangement, the other bouncers backed off and let Chemo work, while Freddie supervised from atop an overturned amplifier.

The fighting subsided quickly. Splints and bandages were handed out to fallen bikers and skinheads alike, while the band took a break. An expression of fatherly admiration in his shoe-button eyes. Freddie patted Chemo on the shoulder, then disappeared backstage. Rudy Graveline worked his way through the sweaty crowd, stepping over the wounded and semiconscious until he reached Chemo’s side.

“Well, that was amazing,” Rudy said.

Chemo glanced down at him and scowled. “Fucking battery died. I hope that’s it for the night.”

The surgeon said, “We really need to talk.”

“Yes,” Chemo agreed. “We sure do.”

As soon as Chemo and Rudy went backstage, they ran into Freddie, Cathy, and two of the Catheters sharing some hash in a glass pipe. Through a puff of blue smoke Freddie said to Chemo: “This jerkoff claimed he’s your doctor.”

“Was,” Chemo said. “Can we use the dressing room?”

“Anything you want,” Freddie said.

“Watch out for my python,” Cathy cautioned.

The dressing room was not what Rudy had expected. There was a folding card table, an old-fashioned coat rack, a blue velour sofa, a jagged triangle of broken mirror on the wall and, in one corner, an Igloo cooler full of Heinekens. On the naked floor was a low flat cage made from plywood and chicken wire in which resided a nine-foot Burmese python, the signature of Cathy’s big encore.

Rudy Graveline took a chair at the card table while Chemo stretched out on the whorehouse sofa.

Rudy said: “I was worried when you didn’t call from New York. What happened?”

Chemo ran a whitish tongue across his lip. “Aren’t you even going to ask about my face, how it’s healing?”

The doctor seemed impatient. “It looks fine from here. It looks like the dermabrasion is taking nicely.”

“A s if you’d know.”

Rudy’s mouth twitched. “Now what is that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a fucking menace to society. I’m getting myself another doctor-Maggie’s picking one out for me.”

Rudy Graveline felt the back of his neck go damp. It wasn’t as if he had not expected problems with Chemo-that was the reason for choosing Roberto Pepsical and his crooked cops as a contingency. But it was merely failure, not betrayal, that Rudy had anticipated from his homicidal stork.

“Maggie?” the doctor said. “Maggie Gonzalez?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. We had a long talk, she told me some things.”

“Talking to her wasn’t the plan,” Rudy said. “Yeah, well, the plan has been changed.” Chemo reached into the Igloo cooler and got a beer. He twisted off the cap, tilted the bottle to his lips, and glowered at the doctor the whole time he gulped it down. Then he belched once and said: “You tried to gyp me.”

Rudy said, “That’s simply not true.”

“You didn’t tell me the stakes. You didn’t tell me about the Barletta girl.”

The color washed from Rudy’s face. Stonily he stared into his own lap. Suddenly his silk Armani seemed as hot and heavy as an army blanket.

Chemo rolled the empty Heineken bottle across the bare terrazzo floor until it clanked to rest against the snake cage. The sleek green python flicked its tongue once, then went back to sleep.

Chemo said, “And all this time, I thought you knew what the fuck you were doing. I trusted you with my own face.” He laughed harshly and burped again. “Jesus H. Christ, I bet your own family won’t let you carve the bird on Thanksgiving, am I right?”

In a thin abraded voice, Rudy Graveline said: “So Maggie is still alive.”

“Yeah, and she’s going to stay that way as long as I say so.” Chemo swung his spidery legs off the sofa and sat up, straight as a lodgepole. “Because if anything should happen to her, you are going to be instantly famous. I’m talking TV, Dr. Frankenstein.”

By now Rudy was having difficulty catching his breath.

Chemo went on. “Your nurse is a smart girl. She made three videotapes for insurance. Two of them are locked up safe and sound in New York. The other… well, you’d better pray that I find it before it finds you.”

“Go do it.” Rudy’s voice was toneless and weak.

“Naturally this will be very expensive.”

“Whatever you need,” the doctor croaked. This was a scenario he had never foreseen, something beyond his worst screaming nightmares.

“I didn’t realize plastic surgeons made so much dough,” Chemo remarked. “Maggie was telling me.”

“The overhead,” Rudy said, fumbling, “is sky-high.”

“Well, yours just got higher by seven feet.” Chemo produced a small aerosol can of WD-40 and began lubricating the rotor mechanism of the Weed Whacker. Without glancing up from his chore, he said, “By the way, Frankenstein, you’re getting off easy. Last time a doctor screwed me over, I broke his frigging neck.”

In his mental catacomb Rudy clearly heard the snap of the old dermatologist’s spine, watched as the electrolysis needle fell from the old man’s lifeless hand and clattered on the office floor.

As soon as he regained his composure, Rudy asked, “Who’s got the missing tape?”

“Oh, take a wild guess.” There was amusement in Chemo’s dry tone.”

“Shit,” said Rudy Graveline.

“My sentiments exactly.”