“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. Goodbye.” 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