Page 31 of Sunset Beach
“If I’m lying, I’m dying,” he pledged. “Got to love an octogenarian horndog, right?”
Drue went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of water, uncapped it and took a swig.
“That’s a good case, right?” she asked.
“It’s a no-brainer. The maintenance worker has a criminal record, which the nursing home should have known about, the masseuse works for an escort service, and, get this, now Granddaddy has an STD. Brice is absolutely gonna love it.”
“All I’ve got is a woman who wants us to sue the nursing home because they won’t cut off her mom’s access to Home Shopping Network,” Drue said glumly.
“Weak sauce,” he said, sounding sympathetic.
Drue was trying hard to cling to her childish and unreasonable loathing for Jonah, but the fact that he was so annoyingly funny made it hard for her to maintain her grudge.
Over coffee earlier in the week, Ben had confided that Jonah had interned summers during law school at Campbell, Coxe and Kramner and was still at the firm because he’d failed his first try at the Florida bar exam. Jonah, she realized, had institutional memory.
“Hey,” she said, trying to sound casual. “You know anything about the Jazmin Mayes case?”
He ripped open two sugar packets and dumped the contents into his mug. “That’s the girl whose body was found stuffed into a dryer at the hotel on Sunset Beach? Like, two years ago?”
“It was actually a laundry cart, but yeah.”
“I know Brice thought it was a slam dunk for criminal negligence and/or wrongful death. Why do you ask?”
“Her mom, Yvonne Howington, came into the office this week. She wasraising hell, because we settled it as a worker’s comp case. She as much as accused my dad of taking a payoff from the hotel’s insurance company.”
Jonah snorted. “That’s how it is with some of these clients. They don’t want to hear the bad news, so they blame it on the messenger. Assume the worst, accuse the firm of bribery, bad faith, the works.”
“But this girl was murdered. Strangled to death. It’s so horrible. I can’t believe the best we could do was get a worker’s comp settlement,” Drue said.
“Why do you care?” He sipped his coffee.
“Because,” she said, sputtering. “It’s not right. Jazmin Mayes left behind a six-year-old daughter with serious medical issues. So now the grandmother’s a single mom, dealing with that stuff. And we settle it for chump change?”
“You’re right, it sucks, but it’s the law.”
“I don’t care what you say. Something’s seriously wrong if that’s the best Brice could do. The grandmother swears her daughter was being harassed at work, and that she was not on the clock that night. She never worked past eleven.”
“Don’t know what to tell you,” Jonah said. “I’m sure Jimmy Zee looked at it from every angle. The guy’s slick.”
“And a little girl lost her mom,” Drue said. “I just lost my mom too. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive about this stuff right now.”
Jonah nodded. “I gotta get back to my cube. Gotta make my granny quota. One down, two to go.”
“One down, two to go,” Drue mimicked. She needed to get back to her own cube, but her heart wasn’t in it. She kept thinking about that Aliyah with her shy smile and her Band-Aid-rigged eyeglasses. Who was working the Justice Line for her?
12
Drue’s phone lit up and she eagerly stabbed at the button on her console. It was Friday and she still hadn’t booked a single nursing home case referral. In fact, she hadn’t had anything close to a solid case lead in the two weeks since she’d started work.
“You’ve reached the Justice Line at Campbell, Cox and Kramner. This is Drue speaking.”
The caller was a youngish-sounding woman. “Hi. I wanna talk to somebody about how I fell in the 7-Eleven and broke my tailbone, and I got doctor bills and so I went over there to tell them they needed to give me some financial help, and the store manager called the cops on me.”
“Okay,” Drue said slowly, wishing she’d let the call roll over to the off-site phone center.
“First, what’s your name?”
The woman on the other end of the line paused. “Why do you need my name?”
