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house. Though her office was no longer of the high-powered sort, any opponents who judged her to be soft in the courtroom soon learned not to evaluate her on her appearance.
    I’d met Jeannie in Winn-Dixie in the frozen-food aisle when one of her boys pitched a box of frozen waffles at my backside as I bent down to reach for a can of orange juice. Jeannie was totally unfazed by the incident. She just flashed me a boys-will-be-boys smile and introduced herself. She gave me her card. Later, when Red died and I needed a lawyer, I gave her a call.
    Jeannie lived in the neighborhood known as Sailboat Bend, an interesting blend of million-dollar waterfront homes right across the street from low-rent apartment
    buildings. Thrown in among these were some of the oldest homes in Lauderdale, old Conch cottages built by Bahamian carpenters in the ’20s and ’30s. Jeannie’s place was in a ’50s-vintage two-story concrete block and stucco house that had been divided into two apartments. She lived in the upstairs half of the building, and when I drove into the dirt yard, Andrew and Adair were up in the branches of a live oak tree, complete with eye patches, bandanas, and clip-on gold hoop earrings. I waved at the boys and climbed the outside staircase to the porch in front of Jeannie’s apartment.
    Peering through the screen, I called out, “Hello! Jeannie?”
    The dark shadow of her bulky silhouette completely blocked out the light coming from the kitchen at the end of the hall.
    “Seychelle!” she called out in her contralto voice as she burst through the screen door. Her bright tent-like muumuu surrounded me with folds of parrot-and-bamboo-print fabric. A squeeze from her arms threatened my air supply, and she smacked a wet kiss just in front of my right ear.
    “It’s so good to see you. I take it you made it past the pirate patrol out there.”
    I nodded and started to speak, but she held open the door and jerked her head in the direction of the interior. With a meaty hand in the small of my back, she propelled me into the small living room of her two-bedroom apartment.
    There was always a homelike feeling to being with Jeannie. Although physically she was nothing like my mother, her housekeeping reminded me of my childhood. Every level surface in the room was covered with papers, files, and books, and the local public radio station played classical music in the background.
    I knew better than to share the couch with Jeannie. I’d made that mistake once before and had ended up perched on a forty-five-degree slope, trying to keep myself from tumbling downhill into Jeannie’s lap during the whole visit. I cleared a dining room chair, pulled it over by the couch, and sat.
    “So, you must be in some kind of trouble again. I swear, girl, I never see you unless you need my help. Like that last time when you towed that Bertram charter boat, and it turned out the brokers had repoed the wrong boat, and everybody tried to hang it on you . . .” She chuckled.
    Compared to the uncontested divorces, guardianship cases, and real estate closings that were her mainstay, Jeannie thought the work she did for me was interesting, and she loved to go back over the cases, gossiping about the “glamorous” world of yachts.
    “You’re right, in a way.”
    She grabbed a bag of blue com tortilla chips off the pile of paperwork on the coffee table, propped open the bag, and offered it to me.
    I shook my head and offered a thin smile at another of her attempts to eat healthy. “I don’t know as I would call this trouble exactly, but I would like you to look into something for me.”
    “Fire away.”
    “I towed the Top Ten in this morning.”
    “Ha! Neal run out of gas or something and have to beg you for a lift?”
    When Jeannie saw I wasn’t smiling anymore, she dropped the joking tone and reached for my hand. I stared for several seconds at the wrinkles of fat around her wrist. Her small gold watch almost disappeared in a