Visiting hours at Denver Health Medical Center started at 7:00 P.M. Liz reached Phil Jackson’s private room at 7:01.
She was eager to see him and make sure he was okay. She walked briskly, then slowed steadily. A journey down the busy hospital corridors triggered memories of Ryan’s medical school residency, back when DHMC was called Denver General Hospital. She remembered the night he’d decided to be a surgeon. She remembered the following nights, too, the years of sacrifice. Ryan worked twenty-hour shifts for wages that didn’t even come close to paying his student loans. They lived week to week on Liz’s paycheck. They saw each other once a day for dinner right at the hospital, usually a ten-minute burger break between her night job and her day job. Ryan had invested so much. She had invested just as much. All for the glorious payoff of life without parole in Piedmont Springs.
For Liz, it was a return to failure. She had grown up dirt poor, one of seven children in a dilapidated four-bedroom farmhouse. She was the only one in her family who had ended up staying in Piedmont Springs. It was a bitter irony. Her heart had been broken when Ryan had gone away to college without her. She was seventeen and left to play mom to six younger siblings, an experience that had taught her never to want children of her own. Four years later, her friends had been so jealous when Ryan invited her up to Denver and asked her to marry him. A medical student. A future surgeon. He could have been her way out. No one had told her it was a round-trip ticket. In hindsight, she should have smelled trouble when it took five years of living together to move the engagement to the wedding.
“Knock, knock,” said Liz as she appeared in the doorway.
Jackson was sitting up in bed and conscious. He looked battered but better than expected. The right side of his face was swollen with purple and black bruises. A bandage covered eleven stitches above his right eyebrow. Painkillers and a glucose solution fed intravenously into his needle-pricked forearm. His dinner rested on a tray over his lap. It had hardly been touched. At his side was a yellow legal pad and a case file his secretary had brought from the office.
“Phil?” she said softly.
He waved her in and tried to smile, but the movement of any facial muscles seemed to cause him pain.
“You poor man.”
“Nothing a good dose of work can’t cure.”
“Don’t you ever stop?”
“Don’t complain. It’s your case I’m working on.”
She nearly shivered with gratitude. “You have no idea how relieved I am to hear you say that. I was so afraid you would drop my case.”
“Why would I do that?”
She shrugged impishly. “I spoke to your paralegal this afternoon about the phone conversation I had with Sarah Langford. Didn’t she tell you?”
“She told me everything. Honestly, I figured it was Brent long before you even called.”
“And you’re still sticking with me?”
He laid his legal pad aside and took her hand lightly, looking her straight in the eye. “Let me tell you something. I have deposed everybody from Teamsters to gangsters — and ripped them to shreds. I have had my tires slashed, my house vandalized, my life threatened. If I were easily intimidated I’d be sitting in an office at some big law firm doing bond work. I’m more committed to your case than ever. Nobody threatens Phil Jackson. Least of all a punk like Brent Langford.”
She squeezed his hand, then pulled away shyly.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “You can’t help yourself. All women find men with purple faces absolutely irresistible.”
“It is a very nice shade of purple.”
He smiled, then turned more serious. “You know, I’m not the only one who has to gear up for a fight. You need to brace yourself as well.”
She nodded tentatively. “I’ll do what I have to do.”
“Good. Because this is going to get nasty. And I don’t just mean Brent’s deposition. The whole Duffy family is going to feel the pressure. In fact, the FBI should be taking a pretty close look at them already.”
“The FBI?”
“One of my most satisfied former clients is now a special agent in the Denver field office. I called her this morning from the hospital and asked her to poke around a little. Brent’s attack is a federal offense — obstruction of justice. The FBI has much bigger fish to fry, but with a little friendly encouragement and factual embellishment, I think I piqued her interest. Ryan’s phony invoices at his clinic. Frank’s talk of all the money he was going to leave you. Brent’s statement that it was ‘family business.’ It probably won’t amount to anything, but it doesn’t hurt to have your husband squirming under the microscope of a possible federal racketeering investigation.”
She blinked nervously. “That’s pretty harsh, don’t you think?”
“Do you want to win or don’t you?”
“Yeah, I want to win. But-”
“No buts. Now do me a favor. Take this,” he said as he handed her a slip of paper. It had two phone numbers written on it.
“What’s this?”
“My secretary got a call today from the law office of Norman Klusmire. He’s your husband’s new divorce attorney. The top number is his beeper number. On your way home tonight, stop at a pay phone and dial his beeper. Be sure to use a pay phone so there’s absolutely no way of tracing the call back to you. Just enter the other number and hang up.”
“Whose number is it?”
“It’s the home phone number for the judge in your case. He’s a crusty old fart who goes ballistic whenever lawyers call him at home. He won’t even give Klusmire a chance to explain he was answering a bogus page. This is the kind of stupid little thing that’ll have Judge Novak riding his ass all the way to trial. It should teach a hotshot criminal lawyer like Klusmire to think twice before taking on another divorce case.”
“That’s too clever,” she said as she tucked the piece of paper into her purse.
“I can’t take full credit. I sort of stole the idea from one of my clients. Whenever she suspected her husband was off with his mistress, she used to beep him with their rabbi’s home phone number.”
“Do you always steal from your clients?”
“Sometimes.”
“What are you going to steal from me?” she asked coyly.
He raised an eyebrow till it hurt. “We’ll see.”