They’re pulling for me. They want to buy us a nice dinner, but we have work to do. The last thing I need tonight is a heavy dinner with wine and drinks.
AND SO WE DINE at the office on deli sandwiches and soft drinks. I make Deck sit in a chair in my office, and I rehearse my closing argument to the jury. I’ve memorized so many versions of it that they’re all running together. I use a small chalkboard and write the crucial figures neatly on it. I appeal for fairness, yet ask for outrageous sums of money. Deck interrupts a lot, and we argue like schoolchildren.
Neither of us has ever made a closing argument to a jury, but he’s seen more than I so of course he’s the expert. There are moments when I feel invincible, downright arrogant because I’ve made it this far in such wonderful shape. Deck can spot these airs and is quick to chop at the knees. He reminds me repeatedly that the case can still be won or lost tomorrow morning.
Most of the time, however, I’m simply scared. The fear is controllable, but it never leaves. It motivates me and inspires me to keep forging ahead, but I’ll be very happy once it’s gone.
We turn off the office lights around ten and go home. I drink one beer as a sleeping aid, and it works. Sometime
after eleven, I drift away, visions of success dancing in my head.
LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, the phone rings. It’s an unfamiliar voice, a female, young and very anxious. “You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Kelly’s,” she says, almost in a whisper.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, waking quickly.
“Kelly’s in trouble. She needs your help.”
“What’s happened?”
“He beat her again. Came home drunk, the usual.”
“When?” I’m standing in the dark beside my bed, trying to find the lamp switch.
“Last night. She needs your help, Mr. Baylor.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s here with me. After the police left with Cliff, she went to an emergency clinic to see a doctor. Luckily, nothing’s broken. I picked her up, and she’s hiding here at my place.”
“How bad is she hurt?”
“It’s pretty ugly, but no broken bones. Cuts and bruises.”
I get her name and address, hang up the phone and dress hurriedly. It’s a large apartment complex in the suburbs, not too far from Kelly’s, and I drive around several one-way loops before I find the right building.
Robin, the friend, cracks the door with the chain in place, and I have to identify myself sufficiently before I’m admitted. She thanks me for coming. Robin is just a kid too, probably divorced and working for slightly more than minimum wage. I step into the den, a small room with rented furniture. Kelly is sitting on the sofa, an ice pack to her head.
I guess it’s the woman I know. Her left eye is completely swollen shut, the puffy skin already turning shades
of blue. There’s a bandage above the eye with a spot of blood on it. Both cheeks are swollen. Her bottom lip has been busted and protrudes grotesquely. She wears a long tee shirt, nothing else, and there are large bruises on both thighs and above the knees.
I bend over and kiss her on the forehead, then sit on a footstool across from her. There’s already a tear in the right eye. “Thanks for coming,” she mumbles, her words hindered by the wounded cheeks and the damaged lips. I pat her very gently on the knee. She rubs the back of my hand.
I could kill him.
Robin sits beside her, says, “She doesn’t need to talk, okay. Doctor said as little movement as possible. He used his fists this time, couldn’t find the baseball bat.”
“What happened?” I ask Robin, but keep looking at Kelly.
“It was a credit card fight. The Christmas bills were due. He’s been drinking a lot. You know the rest.” She’s quick with the narrative, and I suspect Robin’s been around. She has no wedding ring. “They fight. He wins as usual, neighbors call the cops. He goes to jail, she goes to see the doctor. Would you like a Coke or something?”
“No, thanks.”
“I brought her here last night, and this morning I took her to an abuse crisis center downtown. She met with a counselor who told her what to do, gave her a bunch of brochures. They’re over there if you need them. Bottom line is she needs to file for divorce and run like hell.”
“Did they photograph you?” I ask, still rubbing her knee. She nods. Tears have made their way out of the swollen eye and run down both cheeks.
“Yeah, they took a bunch of pictures. There’s a lot you can’t see. Show him, Kelly. He’s your lawyer. He needs to see.”
With Robin’s assistance, she carefully gets to her feet, turns her back to me, and lifts the tee shirt above her waist. There’s nothing underneath, nothing but solid bruises on her rear and the backs of her legs. The shirt goes higher and reveals more bruises on her back. The shirt comes down, and she carefully sits on the sofa.
“He beat her with a belt,” Robin explains. “Forced her across his knee and just beat the shit out of her.”
“Do you have a tissue?” I ask Robin as I gently wipe tears from Kelly’s cheeks.
“Sure.” She hands me a large box and I dab Kelly’s cheeks with great care.
“What are you gonna do, Kelly?” I ask.
“Are you kidding?” Robin says. “She has to file for divorce. If not, he’ll kill her.”
“Is this true? Are we going to file?”
Kelly nods, and says, “Yes. As soon as possible.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow.”
She squeezes my hand and closes her right eye.
“Which brings up the second problem,” Robin says. “She can’t stay here. Cliff got out of jail this morning, and he started calling her friends. I skipped work today, something I can’t do again, and he called me around noon. I told him I knew nothing. He called back an hour later and threatened me. Kelly, bless her heart, doesn’t have a lot of friends, and it won’t be long before he finds her. Plus, I have a roommate, and it just won’t work.”
“I can’t stay here,” Kelly says softly and awkwardly.
“So where do you go?” I ask.
Robin has been thinking about this. “Well, the counselor we talked to this morning told us about a shelter for abused women, sort of a secret place that’s not officially registered with the county and state. It’s some type of home here in the city, sort of a word-of-mouth place. The women are safe because their beloved men can’t find
them. Problem is, it costs a hundred bucks a day, and she can stay only for a week. I don’t earn a hundred dollars a day.”
“Is that where you want to go?” I ask Kelly. She nods painfully.
“Fine. I’ll take you tomorrow.”
Robin breathes a heavy sigh of relief. She disappears into the kitchen, where she finds a card with the shelter’s address.
“Let me see your teeth,” I say to Kelly.
She opens her mouth as wide as possible, just wide enough for me to see her front teeth. “Nothing’s broken?” I ask.
She shakes her head. I touch the bandage above her closed eye. “How many stitches?”
“Six.”
I lean even closer and squeeze her hands. “This is never going to happen again, understand?”
She nods and whispers, “Promise?”
“I promise.”
Robin returns to her place next to Kelly and hands me the card. She has some more advice. “Look, Mr. Baylor, you don’t know Cliff, but I do. He’s crazy and he’s mean and he’s wild when he’s drunk. Please be careful.”
“Don’t worry.”
“He might be outside right now watching this place.”
“I’m not worried.” I stand and kiss Kelly on the forehead again. “I’ll file the divorce in the morning, then I’ll come get you, okay. I’m in the middle of a big trial, but I’ll get it done.”
Robin walks me to the door, and we thank each other. It closes behind me, and I listen to the sounds of chains and locks and dead bolts.
It’s almost 1 A.M. The air is clear and very cold. No one’s lurking in the shadows.
Sleep would be a joke at this point, so I drive to the office. I park at the curb directly under my window, and race to the front door of the building. This is not a safe part of town after dark.
I lock the doors behind me, and go to my office. For all the terrible things it might be, a divorce is a fairly simple action to initiate, at least legally. I begin typing, a chore I struggle with, but the effort is made easier by the purpose at hand. In this case, I truly believe I’m helping to save a life.
DECK ARRIVES at seven and wakes me. Sometime after four I fell asleep in my chair. He tells me I look haggard and tired, and what happened to the good night’s rest?
I tell the story, and he reacts badly. “You spent the night working on a stinking divorce? Your closing argument is less than two hours away!”
“Relax, Deck, I’ll be fine.”
“What’s with the smirk?”
“We’re gonna kick ass, Deck. Great Benefit’s going down.”
“No, that’s not it. You’re finally gonna get the girl, that’s why you’re smiling.”
“Nonsense. Where’s my coffee?”
Deck twitches and jerks. He’s a nervous wreck. “I’ll get it,” he says, and leaves the office.
The divorce is on my desk, ready to be filed. I’ll get a process server to pin it on my buddy Cliff while he’s at work, otherwise he might be hard to find. The divorce also asks for immediate injunctive relief to keep him away from her.
Forty-nine
O
NE GREAT ADVANTAGE IN BEING A rookie is that I’m expected to be scared and jittery. The jury knows I’m just a kid with no experience. So expectations are low. I’ve developed neither the skill nor the talent to deliver great summations.
It would be a mistake to attempt to be something I’m not. Maybe in my later years when my hair is grayer and my voice is oily and I have hundreds of courtroom brawls under my belt, maybe then I can stand before a jury and give a splendid performance. But not today. Today I’m just Rudy Baylor, a nervous kid asking his friends in the jury box to help.
I stand before them, quite tense and frightened, and try to relax. I know what I’ll say because I’ve said it a hundred times. But it’s important not to sound rehearsed. I begin by explaining that this is a very important day for my clients because it’s their only chance to receive justice from Great Benefit. There’s no tomorrow, no second chance in court, no other jury waiting to help them. I ask them to consider Dot and what she’s been through. I talk
a little about Donny Ray without being overly dramatic. I ask the jurors to imagine what it would be like to be slowly and painfully dying when you know you should be getting the treatment to which you’re entitled. My words are slow and measured, very sincere, and they find their mark. I’m talking in a relaxed tone, and looking directly into the faces of twelve people who are ready to roll.
I cover the basics of the policy without much detail, and briefly discuss bone marrow transplants. I point out that the defense offered no proof contrary to Dr. Kord’s testimony. This medical procedure is far from experimental, and quite probably would’ve saved Donny Ray’s life.
My voice picks up a bit as I move to the fun stuff. I cover the hidden documents and the lies that were told by Great Benefit. This played out so dramatically in trial that it would be a mistake to belabor it. The beauty of a four-day trial is that the important testimony is still fresh. I use the testimony from Jackie Lemancyzk and the statistical data from Great Benefit, and put some figures on a chalkboard: the number of policies in 1991, the number of claims and, most important, the number of denials. I keep it quick and neat so a fifth-grader could grasp it and not forget it. The message is plain and irrefutable. The unknown powers in control of Great Benefit decided to implement a scheme to deny legitimate claims for a twelvemonth period. In Jackie’s words, it was an experiment to see how much cash could be generated in one year. It was a cold-blooded decision made out of nothing but greed, with absolutely no thought given to people like Donny Ray Black.
Speaking of cash, I take the financial statements and explain to the jury that I’ve been studying them for four months and still don’t understand them. The industry has its own funny accounting practices. But, using the company’s
own figures, there’s plenty of cash around. On the chalkboard, I add the available cash, reserves and undistributed surpluses, and tally up the figure of four hundred and seventy-five million. The admitted net worth is four hundred and fifty million.
How do you punish a company this wealthy? I ask this question, and I see gleaming eyes staring back at me. They can’t wait!
I use an example that’s been around for many years. It’s a favorite of trial lawyers, and I’ve read a dozen versions of it. It works because it’s so simple. I tell the jury that I’m just a struggling young lawyer, scratching to pay my bills, not too far removed from law school. What if I work hard and am very frugal, save my money, and two years from now I have ten thousand dollars in the bank? I worked very hard for this money and I want to protect it. And what if I do something wrong, say, lose my temper and pop somebody in the nose, breaking it? I, of course, will be required to pay the actual damages incurred by my victim, but I will also need to be punished so I won’t do it again. I have only ten thousand dollars. How much will it take to get my attention? One percent will be a hundred dollars, and that may or may not hurt me. I wouldn’t want to fork over a hundred bucks, but it wouldn’t bother me too much. What about five percent? Would a fine of five hundred dollars be enough to punish me for breaking a man’s nose? Would I suffer enough when I wrote the check? Maybe, maybe not. What about ten percent? I’ll bet that if I was forced to pay a thousand dollars, then two things would happen. Number one, I’d truly be sorry. Number two, I’d change my ways.
How do you punish Great Benefit? The same way you’d punish me or the guy next door. You look at the bank statement, decide how much money is available, and you
levy a fine that will hurt, but not break. Same for a rich corporation. They’re no better than the rest of us.
I tell the jury the decision is best left to them. We’ve sued for ten million, but they’re not bound by that number. They can bring back whatever they want, and it’s not my place to suggest an amount.