“Seriously. You have to be under fifty. I’ve missed my chance by a year or three.”
“Well, that’s just speed dating’s loss,” she said. “Anyhow, I think Match.com or Facebook would be better for you. Those sites have zillions of women in their forties and fifties, and I’m sure they’d be fighting over you tooth and nail.” She frowned. “The problem is, online dating can turn into a full-time job.”
For an insane split second, I considered saying, “I’m about to be really busy raising an out-of-wedlock baby I accidentally fathered,” but instead I opted for, “Heavens, Chloe, I can barely handle the job I’ve already got.”
“Oh, nonsense.” The phone rang, and she stuck out her tongue at the display. “Mr. DeVriess’s office,” she answered cheerfully. “…I’m so sorry, Judge Wilcox, he’s taking a deposition right now…. I know, I told him, but he’s been tied up all day…. I’ll make sure he calls you as soon as he’s free…. Yes, sir, I’ll remind him it’s important…. Thank you. Good-bye.” She made a face as she hung up. “What a pompous ass. Thinks he was appointed by God Almighty.” Her lips pursed. “Or thinks God Almighty was appointed by him. Let me tell Mr. DeVriess you’re here.” She lifted the telephone receiver and pressed the intercom button. “Dr. Brockton’s here…. I’ll send him right back.” She hung up. “You know your way, right?”
“I do. But I thought you just said he was in a deposition.”
“I did. He is,” she laughed. “Every single time Judge Wilcox calls.” She waved me through the frosted-glass door behind her.
Burt DeVriess’s office was positioned in the eastern curve of Riverview Tower. A glass door behind his desk opened onto a private balcony overlooking the river, a marina, condos, the cozy runway of Island Home Airport, and a thirty-foot, tenton orange basketball, forever hanging in mid-swish, halfway through the forty-foot hoop atop the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. Out the broad band of windows to the side, the dark green river spooled beneath the bright green trusswork of the Gay Street Bridge, Knoxville’s bridge of choice for suicidal jumpers. Across the river, atop a kudzu-covered bluff stretching from the angular struts of the Gay Street Bridge to the graceful arches of the Henley Street Bridge, sprawled the vestiges of Baptist Hospital, torn down to make way for a new medical center that had been scrapped even before construction began.
DeVriess was seated behind a sleek glass table, which served as his desk. The glass — the same green as the building’s windows — was spotless and empty, except for an art deco reading lamp, a thick file folder, and the silk-sleeved elbows of DeVriess. “Hey, Doc, have a seat.” The two chairs facing the desk had slender, angular frames of glossy black wood; their backs and seats were strung crosswise with fine cords of nylon, thin as the strings of a violin.
I eyed the nearer chair doubtfully. “Are you sure this thing will hold me up?”
“Hell, Doc,” he said, “that would hold up you and me both, with a couple hundred pounds of legal files sitting on our laps. If it breaks, sue me.” I laid a hand on the seat and gave an experimental push. The taut cords scarcely moved. I plucked one with a fingernail, and it hummed like a guitar string. “Go ahead, try it.” I sat, nervously at first, then with increasing confidence. I’d expected the cords to dig into me, but the chair was surprisingly comfortable. “Aren’t they cool? Designed by a Canadian architect in the 1950s. Manufactured by a company that made tennis rackets. Simple but elegant.”
“Don’t you worry that somebody might sit down with something sharp sticking out of a back pocket? I’m guessing that if one cord got cut, the whole thing would implode.”
“Hadn’t occurred to me to worry about that,” he said. “Remind me to frisk you next time you come in.” He tapped the file in front of him. “I dug up some interesting history on Ivy Mortuary. They were sued in 1999 by the widower of a woman who died and was cremated. Seems the cremains came back with a shiny set of dentures tucked inside the bag, but the deceased had died with a jack-o-lantern handful of rotting teeth. Turns out the funeral home swapped her cremains with those of a guy who wore dentures. Needless to say, the toothless guy’s family wasn’t real happy about the mix-up either. They sued, too.”
“Who won?”
“Both families settled out of court. The sum wasn’t disclosed, but I hear it was around fifty thousand apiece. I could’ve gotten ’em a lot more.”
It wasn’t an idle boast. DeVriess had won a huge class-action lawsuit against a Georgia crematorium that had dumped bodies in the woods instead of incinerating them — a move that, in the short run, saved fifty or a hundred bucks’ worth of propane per body but that eventually cost millions of dollars in legal claims, as well as incalculable emotional pain. DeVriess’s own Aunt Jean, in fact, had been one of the 339 bodies the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had found amid the pines. I vividly remembered the day I’d identified her remains in a refrigerated semi trailer, one of five that served as makeshift morgues at the site of the gruesome discovery, and I also recalled the deep distress the discovery had caused DeVriess and his Uncle Edgar.
“There was a prior case against Ivy, in 1997,” he went on. “Fancy funeral, open casket, the family’s saying their final goodbyes, and the widow faints when she sees maggots in the mouth of her dearly departed husband.”
“Jeez. How long had the corpse been lying around at the funeral home? Was he embalmed? Didn’t they have him in a cooler?”
“He’d only been at the funeral home for about twenty-four hours. But he’d died three days before that, down in Mississippi, fishing. Somebody found him floating in his fishing boat around midafternoon, and he’d launched his boat early in the morning.”
“So the flies had plenty of time to lay eggs in his nose and mouth while he was drifting around outdoors. That doesn’t sound like the fault of the funeral home.”
“Ha,” he said. “That might be true, but try telling that to a jury that’s been reduced to tears by the traumatized widow. The funeral home — actually, their insurance company — settled for half a million, and they were lucky to get off that easy.”
“I could’ve gotten ’em a lot less,” I said, and he laughed at the topspin I’d put on his earlier comment. “So are you planning to share this with Culpepper?”
“Already have.”
“My, my, aren’t you helpful, Counselor?”
He lifted his hands in a magnanimous gesture. “Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it the truth? Plus, I figure it’s probably wise not to blindside Culpepper with my next move.”
I should have known that Grease would be working some sort of angle. “And what’s your next move?”
“I want to exhume more of the people Ivy buried. Turn over a few more rocks, see what else crawls out.”
“You planning another class-action suit, Burt? The funeral home’s out of business, remember?”
“But their insurance company’s not.”
“And the insurance company’s still on the hook for claims, years after their client’s ceased to exist?”
“Arguable,” he conceded, “but there’s probably a case here. Statutes of repose cover how long the insurance company is on the hook. Of course, if it’s a clear case of fraud, rather than a mistake, the insurance company will argue that they’re not liable — fraud would be the action of an individual, not the mortuary. But I’ll argue that there’s a pattern of negligence, since there were multiple problems.”
“Sounds like a lot of arguing,” I said.
“It’s not a slam dunk, but it’s worth a try.”
“Is it, Burt? No offense, but you’re already rich. How much richer do you need to be?”
“This one wouldn’t really be about the money, Doc.”