Next: A Novel (4 page)

“But he refused?”

“Yes. He said it was none of my business what he did with my cells.”

The jury reacted to that. Several turned and looked at Dr. Gross. That was a good sign, too, Alex thought.

“One final question, Mr. Burnet. Did you ever sign an authorization for Dr. Gross to use your cells for any commercial purposes?”

“No.”

“You never authorized their sale?”

“Never. But he did it anyway.”

“No further questions.”

The judge called a fifteen-minute recess, and when the court reconvened, the UCLA attorneys began the cross-examination. For this trial, UCLA had hired Raeper and Cross, a downtown firm that specialized in high-stakes corporate litigation. Raeper represented oil companies and major defense contractors. Clearly, UCLA did not regard this trial as a defense of medical research.

Three billion dollars were at stake; it was big business, and they hired a big-business firm.

The lead attorney for UCLA was Albert Rodriguez. He had a youthful, easy appearance, a friendly smile, and a disarming sense of seeming new at the job. Actually, Rodriguez was forty-five and had been a successful litigator for twenty years, but he somehow managed to give the impression that this was his first trial, and he subtly appealed to the jury to cut him some slack.

“Now, Mr. Burnet, I imagine it has been taxing for you to go over the emotionally draining experiences of the last few years. I appreciate your telling the jury your experiences, and I won’t keep you long. I believe you told the jury that you were very frightened, as anyone would naturally be. By the way, how much weight had you lost, when you first came to Dr. Gross?”

Alex thought, Uh-oh . She knew where this was going. They were going to emphasize the dramatic nature of the cure. She glanced at the attorney sitting beside her, who was clearly trying to think of a strategy. She leaned over and whispered, “Stop it.”

The attorney shook his head, confused.

Her father was saying, “I don’t know how much I lost. About forty or fifty pounds.”

“So your clothes didn’t fit well?”

“Not at all.”

“And what was your energy like at that time? Could you climb a flight of stairs?”

“No. I’d go two or three steps, and I’d have to stop.”

“From exhaustion?”

Alex nudged the attorney at her side, whispered,“Asked and answered.” The attorney immediately stood up.

“Objection. Your Honor, Mr. Burnet has already stated he was diagnosed with a terminal condition.”

“Yes,” Rodriguez said, “and he has said he was frightened. But I think the jury should know just how desperate his condition really was.”

“I’ll allow it.”

“Thank you. Now then, Mr. Burnet. You had lost a quarter of your body weight, you were so weak you couldn’t climb more than a couple of stairs, and you had a deadly serious form of leukemia. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

Alex gritted her teeth. She wanted desperately to stop this line of questioning, which was clearly prejudicial, and irrelevant to the question of whether her father’s doctor had acted improperly after curing him. But the judge had decided to allow it to continue, and there was nothing she could do. And it wasn’t egregious enough to provide grounds for appeal.

“And for help in your time of need,” Rodriguez said, “you came to the best physician on the West Coast to treat this disease?”

“Yes.”

“And he treated you.”

“Yes.”

“And he cured you. This expert and caring doctor cured you.”

“Objection! Your Honor, Dr. Gross is a physician, not a saint.”

“Sustained.”

“All right,” Rodriguez said. “Let me put it this way: Mr. Burnet, how long has it been since you were diagnosed with leukemia?”

“Six years.”

“Is it not true that a five-year survival in cancer is considered a cure?”

“Objection, calls for expert conclusion.”

“Sustained.”

“Your Honor,” Rodriguez said, turning to the judge, “I don’t know why this is so difficult for Mr. Burnet’s attorneys. I am merely trying to establish that Dr. Gross did, in fact, cure the plaintiff of a deadly cancer.”

“And I,” the judge replied, “don’t know why it is so difficult for the defense to ask that question plainly, without objectionable phrasing.”

“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you. Mr. Burnet, do you consider yourself cured of leukemia?”

“Yes.”

“You are completely healthy at this time?”

“Yes.”

“Who in your opinion cured you?”

“Dr. Gross.”

“Thank you. Now, I believe you told the court that when Dr. Gross asked you to return for further testing, you thought that meant you were still ill.”

“Yes.”

“Did Dr. Gross ever tell you that you still had leukemia?”

“No.”

“Did anyone in his office, or did any of his staff, ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“Then,” Rodriguez said, “if I understand your testimony, at no time did you have any specific information that you were still ill?”

“Correct.”

“All right. Now let’s turn to your treatment. You received surgery and chemotherapy. Do you know if you were given the standard treatment for T-cell leukemia?”

“No, my treatment was not standard.”

“It was new?”

“Yes.”

“Were you the first patient to receive this treatment protocol?”

“Yes. I was.”

“Dr. Gross told you that?”

“Yes.”

“And did he tell you how this new treatment protocol was developed?”

“He said it was part of a research program.”

“And you agreed to participate in this research program?”

“Yes.”

“Along with other patients with the disease?”

“I believe there were others, yes.”

“And the research protocol worked in your case?”

“Yes.”

“You were cured.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Now, Mr. Burnet, you are aware that in medical research, new drugs to help fight disease are often derived from, or tested on, patient tissues?”

“Yes.”

“You knew your tissues would be used in that fashion?”

“Yes, but not for commercial—”

“I’m sorry, just answer yes or no. When you agreed to allow your tissues to be used for research, did you know they might be used to derive or test new drugs?”

“Yes.”

“And if a new drug was found, did you expect the drug to be made available to other patients?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sign an authorization for that to happen?”

A long pause. Then: “Yes.”

“Thank you, Mr. Burnet. I have no further questions.”

“How do you think it went?” her father asked as they left the courthouse. Closing arguments were the following day. They walked toward the parking lot in the hazy sunshine of downtown Los Angeles.

“Hard to say,” Alex said. “They confused the facts very successfully. We know there’s no new drug that emerged from this program, but I doubt the jury understands what really happened.

We’ll bring in more expert witnesses to explain that UCLA just made a cell line from your tissues and used it to manufacture a cytokine, the way it is manufactured naturally inside your body. There’s no ‘new drug’ here, but that’ll probably be lost on the jury. And there’s also the fact that Rodriguez is explicitly shaping this case to look exactly like the Moore case, a couple of decades back. Moore was a case very much like yours. Tissues were taken under false pretenses and sold. UCLA won that one easily, though they shouldn’t have.”

“So, counselor, how does our case stand?”

She smiled at her father, threw her arm around his shoulder, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Truth? It’s uphill,” she said.

CH003

Barry Sindler,divorce lawyer to the stars, shifted in his chair. He was trying to pay attention to the client seated across the desk from him, but he was having trouble. The client was a nerd named Diehl who ran some biotech company. The guy talked abstractly, no emotion, practically no expression on his face, even though he was telling how his wife was screwing around on him.

Diehl must have been a terrible husband. But Barry wasn’t sure how much money there was in this case. It seemed the wife had all the money.

Diehl droned on. How his first suspicions arose when he called her from Las Vegas. How he discovered the charge slips for the hotel that she went to every Wednesday. How he waited in the lobby and caught her checking in with a local tennis pro. Same old California story. Barry had heard it a hundred times. Didn’t these people know they were walking clichés? Outraged husband catches wife with the tennis pro. They wouldn’t even use that one on Desperate Housewives.

Barry gave up trying to listen. He had too much on his mind this morning. He had lost the Kirkorivich case, and it was all over town. Just because DNA tests had shown that it wasn’t the billionaire’s baby. And then the court wouldn’t award him his fees, even though he had cut them to a measly $1.4 mil. The judge gave him a quarter of that. Every damn lawyer in town was gloating, because they all had it in for Barry Sindler. He had heard that L.A. Magazine was doing a big story on the case, sure to be unfavorable to Barry. Not that he gave a crap about that. The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to a divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. And Barry Sindler was without a doubt the most ruthless, unscrupulous, publicity-hungry, self-aggrandizing, stop-at-nothing son-of-a-bitch divorce lawyer in Southern California. And proud of it!

No, Barry didn’t worry about any of those things. He didn’t even worry about the house he was building in Montana for Denise and her two rotten kids. He didn’t worry about the renovations on their house in Holmby Hills, even though the kitchen alone was costing $500K, and Denise kept changing the plans. Denise was a serial renovator. It was a disease.

No, no, no. Barry Sindler worried about just one thing—the lease. He had one whole floor in an office building on Wilshire and Doheny, twenty-three attorneys in his office, none of them worth a shit, but seeing all of them at their desks impressed the clients. And they could do the minor stuff, like take depositions and file delaying motions—stuff Barry didn’t want to be bothered with. Barry knew that litigation was a war of attrition, especially in custody cases. The goal was to run the costs as high as you could and stretch the proceedings out as long as you could, because that way Barry earned the largest possible fees, and the spouse eventually got tired of the endless delays, the new filings, and of course the spiraling costs. Even the richest of them eventually got tired.

By and large, husbands were sensible. They wanted to get on with their lives, buy a new house, move in with the new girlfriend, get a nice blow job. They wanted custody issues settled. But the wives usually wanted revenge—so Barry kept things from being settled, year after year, until the husbands caved. Millionaires, billionaires, celebrity assholes—it didn’t matter. They all caved in the end. People said it wasn’t a good strategy for the kids. Well, screw the kids. If the clients cared anything about the kids, they wouldn’t get divorced in the first place. They’d stay married and miserable like everybody else, because—

The nerd had said something that jogged him back to attention.

“I’m sorry,” Barry Sindler said. “Run that by me again, Mr. Diehl. What did you just say?”

“I said, ‘I want my wife tested.’”

“I can assure you, these proceedings will test her to the limit. And of course we’ll put a detective on her, see how much she drinks, whether she does drugs, stays out all night, has lesbian affairs, all that. Standard procedure.”

“No, no,” Diehl said. “I want her tested genetically.”

“For what?”

“For everything,” he said.

“Ah,” Barry said, nodding wisely. What the hell was the guy talking about? Genetic testing? In a custody case? He glanced down at the papers in front of him, and the business card. RICHARD

“RICK” DIEHL, PH.D. Barry frowned unhappily. Only assholes put a nickname on the card.

The card said he was CEO of BioGen Research Inc., some company out in Westview Village.

“For example,” Diehl said, “I’ll bet my wife has a genetic predisposition to bipolar illness. She certainly acts erratic. She might have the Alzheimer’s gene. If she does, psychological tests could show early signs of Alzheimer’s.”

“Good, very good.” Barry Sindler was nodding vigorously now. This was making him happy.

Fresh, new disputed areas. Sindler loved disputed areas. Administer the psychological test. Did the test show early Alzheimer’s or not? Who the fuck could say for sure? Wonderful, wonderful—whatever the test results, they would be disputed. More days in court, more expert witnesses to interview, battles of the doctorates, dragging on for days. Days in court were especially lucrative.

And best of all, Barry realized that this genetic testing could become standard procedure for all custody cases. Sindler was breaking new ground here. He’d get publicity for this! He leaned forward eagerly. “Go on, Mr. Diehl…”

“Test her for the diabetes gene, breast cancer from the BRCA genes, and all the rest. And,” Diehl continued, “my wife might also have the gene for Huntington’s disease, which causes fatal nerve degeneration. Her grandfather had Huntington’s, so it’s in her family. Both her parents are still young, and the disease only shows up when you’re older. So my wife could be carrying the gene and that would mean a death sentence from Huntington’s.”

“Umm, yes,” Barry Sindler said, nodding. “That could render her unfit to be the primary caregiver to the children.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t been tested already.”

“She doesn’t want to know,” Diehl said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance she may have the gene. If she does, she’ll eventually develop the disease and die writhing in dementia. But she’s twenty-eight. The disease might not appear for another twenty years. So if she knew about it now…it could ruin the rest of her life.”

“But it could also relieve her, if she didn’t have the gene.”

“Too big a risk. She won’t test.”