Mistress of Justice (18 page)

She noticed something else: Though she hadn’t seen him change his appearance, Reece’s jacket, at some point, had become unbuttoned and in lifting his hand to straighten his hair he’d mussed it. He looked boyish. She
thought of him suddenly as a young Southern lawyer—a hero in a John Grisham book.

The witness too had relaxed. He was less stiff, less cautious.

Taylor, though, thought that Reece had gone too far with the good-old-boy approach. The witness was looking good in the eyes of the jury; the credibility of his testimony was improving. By now, she reflected, her father would’ve cut the balls off this doctor and had him cowering on the stand.

Reece said, “Now, let me quote from the record as best I can.” He squinted and recited, “ ‘In March of last year a doctor from St. Agnes treated a patient—Mr. Marlow there in the wheelchair, the plaintiff—who has arthritis and adrenal insufficiency with seventy milligrams of cortisone acetate in conjunction with one hundred milligrams of indomethacin.’ ”

“That’s right.”

“And you testified that you wouldn’t have done that.”

“Correct.”

“Because of his preexisting ulcerous condition.”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve looked through his charts. There’s no record of his having an ulcer.”

The witness said, “I don’t know what happened with the charts. But he told the doctors he had an ulcer. I was there. I heard the exchange.”

“He was in the emergency room,” Reece said. “Generally a busy place, a lot of doctors trying to cope with all kinds of problems. I’ve been in them myself—cut my thumb bad last year.…” Reece winced and smiled at the jury. “I’m a real klutz,” he told them. Then back to the doctor: “So will you agree that it’s
possible
that the person Mr. Marlow told about his ulcer wasn’t the person who administered the drugs?”

“That doesn’t—”

Reece smiled. “Please, sir.”

“It’s possible. But—”

“Please. Just the question.”

Taylor saw that Reece was preventing the witness from reminding the jury that it didn’t matter who knew before the injection because Dr. Morse had brought it to the staff’s attention just
after
the injection, when there was still time to correct it, but the staff had ignored him.

“It’s possible.”

Reece let this sit for a moment. “Now, Dr. Morse, there’s been a lot of talk in this trial about what is and is not an accepted level of medical treatment, right?”

Morse paused before answering, as if trying to figure out where Reece was going. He looked at his own lawyer then answered, “Some, I suppose.”

“I’m thinking that if, as you say, you wouldn’t’ve treated the patient with these medications then I assume you feel that St. Agnes’s treatment was below the standards of proper medical care?”

“Certainly.”

Reece walked to a whiteboard in the corner of the courtroom, near the jury, and drew a thick line horizontally across it. “Doctor, let’s say this is the standard-of-care line, all right?”

“Sure.”

Reece drew a thin dotted line an inch below it. “Would you say that the level of care St. Agnes provided in administering those drugs was this far below the standard level of care? Just a little bit below?”

Morse looked at his lawyer and was greeted with a shrug.

“No. It wasn’t just a little bit below. They almost killed the man.”

“Well.” Reece drew another line, farther down. “This far?”

“I don’t know.”

Another line. “This far below?”

Dr. Morse said in a solemn voice, “It was very far below.”

Reece drew another two lines then stopped writing. He asked, “Once you get below a certain level of the standard of care … well, how’d you describe that?”

Another uncertain look at his lawyer then the witness answered, “I’d say … I’d guess I’d say it was malpractice.”

“You’d characterize St. Agnes’s treatment of Mr. Marlow,” Reece said in a sympathetic voice, “as malpractice.”

“Well, yes, I would.”

A murmur of surprise from several people in the courtroom. Not only was Reece befriending the witness but his cross-examination was having the effect of making the witness repeat over and over again that the hospital had made a mistake. He had even gotten the witness to characterize the staff’s behavior as malpractice—a legal conclusion that no defense lawyer in the world would have accepted from a plaintiff’s witness. Yet it had been Reece himself who elicited this opinion.

What was going on here? Taylor glanced at Burdick and saw him sitting forward, clearly troubled.

A dozen rows behind him Clayton’s representative, Randy Simms, sat immobile though with a slight smile on his face.

The judge looked at Reece, opposing counsel looked at Reece.

“I appreciate your candor, Doctor. Malpractice, malpractice.” Reece walked back to the table slowly, letting the word sink into the jury’s consciousness. He stopped and then added brightly, “Oh, Doctor, if you don’t mind, I just have a few matters of clarification.”

“Not at all.”

Reece said, “Doctor, where are you licensed to practice?”

“As I said before, California, New Jersey and New York.”

“No other state?”

“No.”

Reece turned to look into Morse’s eyes. “How about any other
country?”

“Country?”

“Yessir,” Reece said. “I’m just curious if you’ve ever been licensed to practice in any other country.”

A hesitation. Then a smile. “No.”

“Have you ever
practiced
medicine in another country?”

“I just said I wasn’t licensed.”

“I caught that, sir. But what I just asked was ‘practiced,’ Doctor, not licensed. Have you ever
practiced
medicine anywhere outside of the United States?”

The man swallowed, a look of horror in his eyes. “I’ve done some volunteer work.…”

“Outside of the country.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And would you be so kind as to tell us which country, if that isn’t too much trouble, Doctor?”

“Mexico.”

“Mexico,” Reece repeated. “What were you doing in Mexico?”

“I was getting a divorce. I liked the country and I decided to stay for a while—”

“This was when?”

“Eight years ago.”

“And you practiced medicine in Mexico?”

Morse was looking at his fingertips. “Yes, for a while. Before I moved back to California. I set up a practice in Los Angeles. I found Los Angeles to be—”

Reece waved his hand. “I’m much more interested in Mexico than Los Angeles, Doctor. Now, why did you leave Mexico?”

Dr. Morse took a sip of water, his hands trembling. The plaintiff’s lawyers looked at each other. Even the poor plaintiff seemed to have sat up higher in his wheelchair and was frowning.

“The divorce was final.… I wanted to move back to the States.”

“Is that the only reason?”

The witness lost his composure for a moment as a time-lapse bloom of anger spread on his face. Finally he controlled it. “Yes.”

Reece said, “Did you run into some kind of trouble down in Mexico?”

“Trouble, like the food?” He tried to laugh. It didn’t work and he cleared his throat again and swallowed.

“Doctor, what is Ketaject?”

Pause. Morse rubbed his eyes. He muttered something.

“Louder, please,” Reece asked, his own voice calm and utterly in control of himself, the witness, the universe.

The doctor repeated: “It’s the brand name of a drug whose generic name I don’t recall.”

“Could it be the brand name for ketamine hydrochloride?”

The witness whispered, “Yes.”

“And what does that do?”

Morse breathed deeply several times. “It is a general anesthetic.” His eyes were joined to Reece’s by a current full of fear and hate.

“And what is a general anesthetic, Doctor?”

“You know. Everybody knows.”

“Tell us anyway, please.”

“It’s a solution or gas that renders a patient unconscious.”

“Doctor, when you were in Mexico, did you have a patient, a Miss Adelita Corrones, a seventeen-year-old resident of Nogales?”

Hands gripped together. Silence. He wanted water but was afraid to reach for the glass.

“Doctor, shall I repeat the question?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Well, I’m sure she recalls you. Why don’t you think back to the St. Teresa Clinic in Nogales. Think back seven years ago. And try to recall if you had such a patient. Did you?”

“It was all a setup! They set me up! The locals—the police and the judge—blackmailed me! I was innocent!”

“Doctor,” Reece continued, “please just respond to my questions.” His tie was loose, his face was ruddy with excitement, and even from the back of the courtroom Taylor could see his eyes shining with lust.

“On September seventeenth of that year, pursuant to a procedure for the removal of a nevus—that is, a birthmark—from Miss Corrones’s leg, did you administer
Ketaject to her and then, when you perceived her to be unconscious, partially undress her, fondle her breasts and genitals and masturbate until you reached a climax?”

“Objection!” Marlow’s lead lawyer was on his feet.

The judge said, “Overruled.”

“No! It’s a lie,” the witness cried.

Reece returned to the counsel table and picked up a document. “Your honor, I move to introduce Defense Exhibit Double G: a certified copy of a complaint from the federal prosecutor’s office in Nogales, Mexico.”

He handed it to the judge and a copy to the plaintiff’s counsel, who read it, grimaced and said in disgust, “Let it in.”

“So admitted,” the judge intoned and looked back to the witness.

Dr. Morse’s head was in his hands. “They set the whole thing up. They blackmailed me. I paid the fine and they said they’d seal the record.”

“Well, I guess it’s been unsealed,” Reece responded. “Now, the report goes on to say that the reason Miss Corrones was aware you were molesting her was that you not only administered the wrong dosage of Ketaject but that you injected it improperly so that most of the drug didn’t even reach her bloodstream. Is this what the prosecutor’s report says?”

“I—”

“True or not true? Answer the question.”

“They set me—”

“Is this what the report says?”

Sobbing, the man said, “Yes, but—”

“Wouldn’t you say, sir, that you can hardly state my client is guilty of malpractice because of the improper administration of drugs when you can’t even knock out a teenager enough to rape her?”

“Objection.”

“Withdrawn.”

“They set me up,” the witness said. “Just to blackmail me. They—”

Reece turned on him. “Well, then, Doctor, did you at
any time contact the law enforcement authorities in Mexico City or in the United States to report that you were being blackmailed?”

“No,” he raged. “I paid them the extortion money and they said I could leave the country and they’d seal the record. I—”

“You mean,” Reece said, “you paid the
fine
for your
punishment
. Like any other criminal. No further questions.”

Taylor found herself sitting forward on the edge of the pew. She now saw Reece’s brilliant tactic. First, he’d gotten the jury’s attention. Expecting petty bickering, they’d seen Reece befriend the witness, surprising them and getting them to sit up and listen. Then he got the man to say the magic word that, by rights, Reece or LaDue or anyone on the St. Agnes legal team would try never even to allow into testimony, let alone elicit themselves: “malpractice.”

And then, in a masterful stroke, he’d linked that characterization—that one magic word—to the witness’s terrible behavior and completely destroyed his credibility.

Taylor saw a gleam in Reece’s face, a flushing of the cheeks, fists balled up in excitement.

Reece turned. He noticed Donald Burdick in the back of the courtroom. The two men looked at each other. Neither smiled, but Burdick touched his forehead in a salute of respect.

Taylor turned and looked at Burdick then behind him. Finally Randy Simms showed some emotion. His lips were tight and his eyes bored into the back of Donald Burdick’s head. He rose and stepped out of the courtroom, which was utterly silent.

Except for the sobbing of the witness.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

She stopped him in the hallway of the court.