Wildcat Wine (21 page)

Chapter 31

Wholly without any idea
of what else to do, I went home and flopped down on my bed. Against incredible odds, I dozed and then woke, hot and late for work. After stumbling through my morning routine, I headed out to my humble Honda.

Bleary to my soul despite the copious amounts of morning coffee, I staggered into my ancient Honda, waiting like a noble beast of burden in my carport. My purse fell off my shoulder and thunked down beside me in the bucket seat and I grabbed it to throw it in the other seat, and when I did, I saw a rattlesnake on the floor of the passenger side of the car.

Well, damn if I'm falling for that twice, I thought, and leaned over to pick up what I blithely assumed, given my prior experience, was a dead rattler.

The snake flicked its forked tongue, hissed, and raised its head.

Uh-oh.

I froze, I held my breath, and my hand was stuck there in the air as I watched the snake.

Remembering my grandmom's admonitions to never back a snake into a corner, or scare it, or piss it off, I contemplated my options as sweat began to pool on my upper lip.

It was unlikely that gallant young Tired would lope across my driveway with that peculiar cowboy gait of his and throw his knife and rescue me.

No, this time it was up to me.

Despite the fact that I had voluntarily chosen to be a trial attorney, I am not normally predisposed to encouraging physical danger. I don't rock climb, I don't ski, and I applaud bungee jumping only as a means of reducing the population and generating litigation. But, being a trial attorney, I don't fall apart under pressure.

So I thought: I have to do something. I can't remain frozen in space indefinitely, no matter how appealing that seemed to be at the moment, and I was quickly reaching the limits of my ability to hold my breath. The snake had not coiled, but as Grandmom had taught me early on, a rattler does not need to coil to strike.

The trick then was to be still until the snake calmed down and no longer perceived movement, which a snake will translate into a threat when the movement doesn't come from the soon-to-be frog dinner in front of it.

After the snake calmed down, the trick would be to hurl myself out of the car before it was riled up again and bit me.

And if I failed, I had my cell phone in my jacket pocket and could hit 911 in plenty of time not to die. I was young, relatively speaking, and healthy, and one snakebite when I was six blocks from the hospital would not kill me.

But it would be a new experience in the extremely unpleasant. And despite having chosen to be a trial attorney for a career, I do not normally invite physically unpleasant events.

So naturally I was hesitant to hurl myself toward the door lest the snake proved the faster of the two of us.

Next door, to my horror, I saw my new grandmom come ambling out of her house, wave at me, start across her unnaturally green grass, and pause to frown at my own not-chemically-treated grass, as I'm one to let nature take its course where lawns are concerned. Then she trotted straight toward the passenger side of my car, her right hand slightly extended as if she was planning to open my passenger-side door and chat with me.

Well, okay, I wasn't going to let her pop my car door open and get bit. She might not survive it, and if she did, she was sure to sue the hell out of me. Highly motivated, I catapulted myself against my door at roughly the same time I opened it and I fell out on the driveway, screaming, “Get away,” and slammed the car door. Nothing bit me.

I wondered if moves-faster-than-a-rattlesnake was something I could use in my Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley firm brochure bio.

“Get back,” I shouted at Grandmom.

“Well, my goodness, you don't have to be that rude. I just wanted to invite you over tonight for dinner.”

“Watch out,” I said, wheezing slightly and pulling myself up. I peered into the car. The snake was coiled. “Don't open the door. There's a rattler inside.”

“Oh, my dear, I'm sure you are mistaken. You stay up too late at night, no wonder you see things.”

“All right, then, don't open the door, but look inside. Just don't open the door.”

Grandmom looked inside and gasped. “Now haven't I been telling you to enclose that carport? Get a garage and wild things won't crawl into your car, and you'll improve the value of your house and this whole street will look that much better.”

Well, okay, she had spunk and she didn't scare easily and I had to appreciate those qualities. As I pulled out my cell phone and punched 911 for the third time this month, I wondered if there was some limit to the number of times I could call that emergency number before the county sent me a bill.

As the dispatcher sputtered to life on the other end of my line, I wondered. I had figured Kenneth for the dead fish and the dead snake. That was pretty obvious. But now that he was traveling to his next incarnation, who would want to scare me? Or hurt me?

Chapter 32

Sarasota is a rich city,
built on a bay front that follows the curve of the land against blue water. Beyond the bay, barrier islands outlined the region with their tufts of green resort communities and sand lapped by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Sarasota has some of the finest restaurants in the entire country. It has a private service industry bar none. It has grand, high-rise condominiums full of old people who once lived up North and now reside in million-dollar rooms with panoramas of the many waterways they are too old and too urban to explore beyond the view from their balconies. It has shopping to rival any large megalopolis. It has the Ringling Art Museum, with real Rembrandts, and live theater and opera and its own ballet troupe, all of which paint the city with a veneer of sophistication. The city has pink water fountains with dolphins at downtown intersections and tile-and-brick mosaics on the streets of its restored funky old 1920s artsy neighborhoods. It has a whole subculture of people who make their fine livings servicing the retired people who move here to die.

But would you believe in all that shimmering, big-city facade, in all that teeming service industry, in all its government and its bureaucracies, Sarasota did not have a single service designed to remove live rattlesnakes from one's car.

Go figure.

The Sarasota police detective who came to my door wrote down everything I said, asked not a penny's worth of questions, wished me luck with the snake, and left.

I called the Fish and Game people, who asked a few questions, and then said that because the rattler wasn't on an endangered species list, I was on my own.

I called every one of the bird rescue groups, only to have a multitude of basically nice people explain to me in patient detail that, fundamentally, a snake was not a bird and I was on my own.

I called Jackson, who said he could come over and “shoot the damn thing,” and I considered this, but didn't want to kill it now that it was no immediate threat to me—I mean, it was just a snake doing its snake thing, not the Antichrist or anything. Also, I didn't want snake guts all over the inside of my Honda, so I concluded that I was on my own.

With my grandmom neighbor, I discussed my theory that if I opened the door and waited, the snake would leave of its own accord and in its own time. Grandmom, perhaps understandably, didn't want that big rattler living in her neighborhood, and she offered a variety of wholly useless tips—like call 911—and continued to blame me for my wild lifestyle and for not enclosing my carport, and I concluded that I was on my own.

As I was standing in my own driveway, studying the yellow pages under any conceivable topic, the snake crawled up the inside of the car and flicked its forked tongue in the window.

Okay, yeah, the snake was probably as eager to leave as I was for it to go.

With sweat trickling down my neck, Bearess howling from behind my front door, my new grandmom ranting at me, and a small contingency of my stay-at-home neighbors gathering to offer utterly inane suggestions—call 911 being the lead tip despite the number of times I told everyone I
had
called 911, I thought of Tired. After all, he'd rescued me before. When I didn't catch him at his office, I called him at home. In a too-much-adrenaline-rush sort of garble, I got the basic problem across.

“Yes, ma'am. Getting that snake out could be tricky. I know an old fella from back home, operates out of east county now, out by the winery and Myakka River State Park, who I bet can help. Give me a sec to call him, then I'll come on over.”

East county, that tiny corner of Sarasota County that is still wild, old Florida, with the cracker boys and the long-horned cows and the scrub and the snakes and the wild hogs and bugs and cypress swamps and back water from the Peace and the Myakka Rivers and the myriad little creeks. The real Florida. Okay, somebody from out there was far more likely to know how to get rid of a snake in a car than somebody with a master's degree in criminal justice from an urban university.

So, we'd wait. Not wanting my new grandmom to stroke on me, I hinted that now would be a good time for her to go home, but this was apparently better entertainment than her television offered her, and she hung on. Finally I took her inside, fixed her a cup of hot tea, pacified Bearess with an extra dish of dog food, and washed my hands and face and changed my blouse.

Tired arrived with Redfish in his arms, and when I stepped outside to meet him, he said right off, “This isn't an official visit, you understand. I'm just here as a . . . friend. Sheriff told me if I bring Redfish to one more official crime scene, I'm off the force.”

“Where's his baby-sitter?”

“Don't know. A no-show.”

“Why don't you find a good day care?”

“You know what can happen to kids at a day care, even a good one? Germs. Them kids don't ever wash their hands, and they spit on each other, and I just know Redfish would stay sick. I'm not taking any chances.”

Okay, that made perfect sense to me, and a full-time nanny probably wasn't in the budget for a sheriff's department investigator.

“All right. I'll show you the snake.” As I led Tired over to the rattler in the car, with my neighbors milling around waiting for the next act, my front door burst open and Grandmom came stomping toward me, then stopped.

“What a beautiful baby,” she said.

As I looked at sweaty, red-faced, on-the-verge-of-a-howl Redfish, he looked past me to Grandmom and reached out his arms to her.

Grandmom opened her arms to him.

Redfish cooed as Grandmom took him in her arms, and she cooed right back. Tired and I stood back a moment, and in mutual bewilderment, we watched his son and my neighbor fall in love with each other.

After a stunned break, I made the introductions. “Dolly Gormand, my neighbor, please meet Tired Johnson and his son, Redfish.”

“You, I remember you from that AA meeting,” Dolly snapped at Tired.

“No, ma'am, I don't think that was any AA meeting. We were—”

But Dolly didn't care, she started taking Redfish toward her house. “I need to get him out of this sun and wash off his poor, hot little face.”

We watched her go.

“She all right?” Tired asked.

“She raised three kids, and her grandchildren come and visit four or fives times a year and nobody ever had to call 911.”

“I better go check her out,” Tired the worrier said and took off after his son.

Tired was still inside with Dolly when just about the most beat-up pickup I'd ever seen pulled into my driveway. Oh, like, now what?

On the sides of the truck, red lettering spelled out “Experienced Hog Hunters,” with white letters below it explaining, “Catch or Kill Domestic or Wild Hogs.”

A man chomping on an unlit cigar crawled out. Dressed in jeans, boots, and a plaid shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his face, the man walked up to me and stuck out his hand. “Percy Ponder, ma'am.”

I shook his hand, which I noted was long fingered and scarred. “Lilly Cleary.”

Glancing back at the truck, I waited for the other man inside to crawl out too. He didn't.

“Hear you got a problem with a snake in your car?”

“Yes. Let me show you.”

Percy studied on the snake in the Honda some, and hummed, and frowned, and chewed on his cigar.

As Percy studied on the situation and I sweated, Bearess gave voice to a splendid series of howlings, almost operatic in tone, range, and quality. At the doggy chorus of dismay, the pickup-truck door opened and the other fellow got out and shouted: “Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehoods.”

I gave the young man my famous Hard Look, and then softened it before turning to Percy.

“Oh, don't mind him, he's just touched by the Spirit. Ate some of those cow poop mushrooms, you know the ones make you hallucinate, then he read him the Book of Revelations. Turned out not to be such a good idea, but we figure he'll come out of it sooner or later.”

“How long's he been like this?”

“Year or so,” Percy said in an unconcerned tone of voice.

I made a mental note to remind my brother Delvon not to eat psychedelic mushrooms and read Revelations.

Tired came out of Dolly's house next door, minus Redfish, and with a relaxed smile on his face, and I assumed some bargain of child care had been reached, and he shook hands with Percy as the Bible quoter ducked back behind Percy's pickup.

“Well, let's get her done,” Percy said.

Using a long stick with a circle of wire and really thick gloves and a plastic crate with a tight lid and more nerve than most people, Percy and that young man had that snake hissing inside the plastic crate within a half hour. My neighbors began to disperse. After a shower and a change of clothes, I figured I could be at my office in time to bill at least a few hours.

But first I asked Percy what I owed him, and, surprised it wasn't more, paid him and then asked, “Where would somebody get a live snake?”

“Lotta places, maybe,” Percy said. “Boyce, here”—Percy pointed at the Bible quoter—“used to belong to a church of snake handlers. They could probably tell you where to get one. And there's some fellows I know out of Wauchula that catch and sell snakes to labs and zoos and things. Plus there's just a whole mess of people in the Everglades who'd catch you a rattler for not much money at all.”

Tired patted my arm. “Lilly, that's my job. You let me take care of this. I'll find out who got the snake, all right? This one and the dead one before it.”

That struck me as a perfectly reasonable delegation of duties. I thanked everybody, inquired briefly after Redfish, was assured he was in good hands, and went inside and reprepared for work, then left for the office in my Honda, with all the windows down and the air-conditioning on, trying to blow out the combined scent of snake, fear, and cigar.

Once at my office, I was not the least surprised to find Bonita worried about my lateness. Before I could explain, I announced that the first order of business was for her to reschedule every single one of my hearings and client conferences for the rest of the week. I didn't care what chaos that created in my files, or what sanctions other attorneys threatened, because I was in no mood to argue out loud with people and didn't have the time to properly prepare for live performances.

As Bonita began the mass cancellation project and my snake-induced adrenaline faded, I began trying both to make up time on my unbilled, unworked cases and to distract myself from worrying. Hearings and depositions I couldn't handle this week, but paperwork I had to handle or I had to resign or die. My unread mail alone was as scary as the snake in the Honda. Thus motivated, I worked frantically on piles of paper until Jackson stormed-troopered into my office.

“Everything all right?”

“Dandy,” I lied.

Jackson studied me a moment and then decided to let it pass.

“Here. Got something for you to do, since you don't seem to be litigating much anymore. Might want to try your hand at probating an estate.”

What I wanted to try my hand at was being somebody else for a while, like, say, I don't know, maybe a nun in a convent somewhere in the middle of France.

But Jackson dropped a copy of a will on my desk. “Kenneth drew this up himself. There's Fred O'Leary, a board-certified estate planner not two offices down the hall from him, but no, Kenneth has to draft his own will.”

I picked up the will as if it were encrusted with a virulent new strain of the SARS virus.

“He had it witnessed a couple weeks before he died. Think he had a premonition?” Jackson asked.

Or a threat, I thought, but made a hmming noise in case Jackson's question wasn't rhetorical.

“Cristal just found it this morning,” Jackson said. “And get this. The personal representative named in the will is Ashton. Since he's taking the cure, I'll have the probate judge appoint you the PR, as a member of the same firm and all.”

“Ashton?” I blurted out, thinking,
Ashton?
Ashton, who couldn't probate Kenneth's will since he was detoxing in L.A. in a hot tub with a still-unnamed actress.

Why on earth would anybody who actually knew Ashton name him as a personal representative? Since Jennifer, his nutty beloved, had jumped off the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the poor man could hardly zip up his own zipper, let alone handle somebody's entire estate. And, I mean, Ashton and Kenneth were not close, Ashton was not a probate attorney, and Ashton, under the best of circumstances, i.e., before Jennifer jumped and he became a drug-addled zombie, painted with a broad brush and had litigated largely from a deep reservoir of energy and seat-of-the-pants inspiration. In short, Ashton was not generally noted for being detail-oriented. And even Kenneth would know that being a PR required someone who was extraordinarily detail-oriented, as the personal representative reviews the claims against the estate and pays the legitimate bills; finds, collects, and preserves the assets prior to distribution; does an accounting for the heirs and the probate court; deals with the IRS and its irrational record-keeping requirements and indecipherable estate tax code; and ultimately pays the heirs.