Page 1 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
CHAPTER ONE
Babies are disgusting. Oh, I know we’re all supposed to think they’re adorable and cuddly and ‘don’t the tops of their heads just smell marvelous.’ But the reality is different. They never sleep when you want them to—they’re meant to sleep at least fourteen hours a day (look it up on Yahoo! it’s correct), but somehow it’s never a convenient fourteen hours. They’re constantly crying for at least fifteen of the ten hours they’re awake and, worst of all, when theyareawake it’s mostly about sour smelly stuff going in and sour smelly stuff coming out. Repeatedly. Over and over again. Every. Single. Day.
Honestly, I don’t understand how humankind has survived this long, given the temptation to put the baby down, walk away, and never think about them again. Oh stop, I wouldn’t actually do it… But my god, the temptation!
Luckily, when my mother abandoned Emerald, my baby sister, with my Nana Cole and me, my grandmother’s friends Jan, Bev, Dorothy and Barbara stepped up and helped. Jan had even gotten a large sheet of card stock from Staples in Traverse and drawn a big grid with 31 days. Using colored Post-it notes and glitter pens—she couldn’t resist those—the ladies dividedup which days they’d come help, which was most. It had been working well enough for a bit more than five months.
I guess we’d have gotten less help if my Nana Cole wasn’t still iffy on her feet. She’d had a stroke last spring, which might or might not have been my fault, and had never fully recovered. There was the very real possibility she’d drop the baby into a pot of boiling water. Everyone thought that was a bad idea—even me.
Usually, we had help in the afternoon for three or four hours, which meant I could take a nap. Which is what I was doing that day in late January, sleeping on my stomach, snoring lightly, drool running down my cheek, when my cell phone chirped.
“It’s Ham.”
“Mmmghhh…”
Ham was Hamlet Gilbody, a private eye with an office down in Grand Rapids. I’d kind of saved his life when he was in Masons Bay the previous September, and he’d offered me a part time job. Since I’d been planning to head back to Los Angeles—and still was—I’d turned him down.
But then my mother pulled her disappearing act and abandoned my sister—words like that annoy my Nana Cole, so I use them as often as possible. She prefers words like ‘left’ or ‘entrusted’: My mother entrusted my sister to our care. I prefer dumped, flaked, bailed, took a powder, and most reliably, abandoned. When sheabandonedmy sister, I was forced to stay at the farm, at least a little while longer, so I contacted Hamlet Gilbody, PI, around Thanksgiving and accepted his offer.
“Were you asleep?” he asked. “It’s the middle of the afternoon.”
“There’s a baby in the house, remember? I have to sleep when I can.”
“Oh. Well.Canyou work? I have a job for you.”
“Yeah, I can work. What’s the job?”
There was no way I was turning it down. It was the first one he’d offered. Really, I thought he was never going to call again. Yeah, yeah, yeah… it would probably be difficult to juggle the baby and my grandmother and the job, but I needed to do something that brought in money and didn’t include changing diapers or watchingHannity & Colmes.
“A woman named Roberta LaCross. Goes by Bobbie. She’s around seventy. She went to a winery up that way, fell in the bathroom, and broke her arm. Claims she was overserved.”
Okay, that was disappointing. There had to be more exciting jobs than that. An old lady got drunk and broke her arm. What needed to be investigated? I tried to point that out. “You can’t fake a broken arm, she either broke it or she didn’t.”
“Something about it seems off. For one thing, it’s not her first time at the rodeo.”
“What rodeo?”
“She’s litigious. I got one of her former neighbors on the phone and apparently this lady breaks bones all the time.”
“She’s old.”
“You’re right. She’s old and bad things keep happening to her. And maybe that’s it. And maybe it’s not. I’m going to email you the file and you let me know what you think. Okay?”
“Sure.”
I mean, seriously, he’d pay me for my opinion? How could I turn that down? As promised, the email with the file arrived a few minutes later. I printed it out. I didn’t have to do that, but I’d moved back into my mother’s old bedroom and was using the French Provincial desk she’d had as a teenager. I’d bought some Pendaflex files for the bottom drawer and was excited about finally filling them up.
There were a handful of questions I hadn’t asked and probably should have. For one, who was his client? That was answered by the first two pages that came out of my printer.They were the contract with the client. In this case, it was Midwest Property, Casualty and Life. The agreement laid out how much Ham was being paid. He’d wisely blacked that out before scanning the document, so I knew it was a lot more than I was getting. Wait—how muchwasI getting? I hadn’t asked. I should have asked. Well, it was more than the nothing I’d be making if I turned it down, so it probably didn’t matter much.
The contract also provided a brief description of what was to be investigated. ‘On August 13th, 2002, Roberta LaCross claims she was overserved at Three Friends winery in Wyandot Township, fell in the ladies’ room after slipping on a puddle of water and broke her arm.’
Pretty much what Ham had said. The next thing out of my printer was the six-page lawsuit Roberta LaCross had filed. Her attorneys were Straub and Straub, whose office was on Main Street in Masons Bay. The suit laid out the same story, pretty much, though it used more sinister adjectives and tried to make it seem like the staff at Three Friend’s had forced the alcohol onto their client with “aggressive” sales techniques. And that the water on the bathroom floor was clear evidence of negligence. She was asking a million dollars for damages and emotional distress. That seemed excessive. I mean, she had to be on Medicare, and she probably didn’t work. Right? She wouldn’t need to be reimbursed for either medical expenses or lost wages. So that was a million dollars just for pain and suffering. That’s a lot of pain and suffering.
Next was the emergency room report on her injury. She had a displaced oblique fracture of the humerus just below the left shoulder joint. Surgery was not indicated. She was told to wear a sling at all times and remain as still as possible. She was also given a prescription for Oxy. A generous one. With refills.
Lucky lady.
The report included her X-rays, which printed out as dark blobs. They were easier to see on my iBook G3. Honestly, it looked a whole lot worse than it sounded. The bone had split into two jagged pieces that were floating near each other but not connected. It looked very painful.
