Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (5 page)

Judge Leonard looked up again, unhappy to
have his handicapping interrupted. Three to one he didn’t hear the
objection, but a virtual lock that it would be sustained. The last
objection was overruled, and Judge Leonard believed in the basic
fairness of splitting the baby down the middle. It was easier to
keep track if you just alternated your rulings, like a kid guessing
on a true-false exam.

“Sustained,” the judge said, nodding toward
me and cocking his head with curiosity when he looked at Cefalo,
now thoroughly misbuttoned and hunched over the plaintiff’s table,
a Quasimodo in plaid polyester. Then the judge handed a note to the
court clerk, a young woman who sat poker-faced through tales of
multiple homicides, scandalous divorces, and train wrecks. The
clerk slipped the note to the bailiff, who left through the rear
door that led to the judge’s chambers. There, enveloped in the
musty smell of old law books never read much less understood, he
would give the note to the judge’s secretary, who would call Blinky
Blitstein and lay fifty across the board on Hot Enough.

“Your Honor, I’ll rephrase the question,” I
said, as if I had a choice. “Doctor, I think you would agree that
the rongeur blocks your view of the disc space, correct?”

“Substantially.”

A twenty-five-cent word. What does it take to
get a
yes
out of this guy? Dr. Watkins let his tongue dart
over his lips. Getting a little dry, are we? Eyes just a bit cloudy
and bloodshot. Cefalo put you up at the Sonesta Beach, I bet. Room
service probably brought up a bottle of Russia’s best. Maybe one of
Finland’s too. A Winter War in a tenth-floor suite overlooking the
Atlantic.

I walked to the rear of the courtroom so that
the jury was between the witness stand and me. I wanted all eyes on
Dr. Watkins as I broke him like a rotten mast in a gale.

“Doctor, isn’t it true that, because of the
narrow disc space, any time a surgeon performs this kind of
surgery, a known risk is that the rongeur will go too far, will
pierce the aorta?”

“A risk? Of course, it’s a risk, but …”

“And that’s what happened here, the
occurrence of that risk, that statistically will occur—”

“Objection! Your Honor, Mr. Lassiter refuses
to permit the doctor to finish his answer. He’s interrupting.” This
time Cefalo banged his knee on the plaintiff’s table as he stood up
and his tie flopped out of his misbuttoned coat like the tongue of
a thirsty dog. Most days Cefalo dressed as well as the next guy,
but in trial he figured he gained sympathy by looking like a
vagrant. He’d drop his drawers if it would win one juror’s vote.
This day his suit was old and wrinkled and smelled like an
overheated horse. But Dan Cefalo knew his stuff. Best to remember
that or get blindsided when he transformed from Buddy Hackett to
Gregory Peck in closing argument.

“Overruled,” the judge said without looking
up.

Thank you, Nathan Detroit.

I took a few giant steps toward the witness
stand, feeling my oats. I wanted to finish with a flourish. Dr.
Watkins had nailed us hard on direct examination. Now just trying
to get even, or close to it. I walked to the clerk’s table and
picked up the stainless steel instrument that resembled a small,
delicate pair of pliers. The clerk never looked up, leaving me
staring into the top of her Afro. She was reading a paperback with
a castle and a dark-eyed woman on the cover.

“Now, this rongeur, Plaintiff’s Exhibit Five,
is the perfect instrument for removing the herniated disc material,
isn’t it?”

“I don’t know if it’s perfect, but that’s
what’s used.”

They’ll be examining his liver under a
microscope before he’ll give a defense lawyer a
yes.
I
walked to the rear of the courtroom, the doctor’s eyes tracking me,
suspicion wrinkling his brow. He wouldn’t trust me with the petty
cash.

“But perfect as it is for one job, it poses a
real and known danger to the aorta, doesn’t it?”

Dr. Watkins smiled. The eyes seemed to clear.
His chin thrust out and he shot a look at the jury, just to make
sure they were paying attention.

“The rongeur poses no danger,” he said in
deep, senatorial tones. “The surgeon who is too hasty or too rough
or loses track of where he is, that’s the danger. A rongeur does
not do the damage except in a most elementary way, the same way a
gun kills, but it is the man pulling the trigger who is brought to
justice. A surgeon who is negligent, that is the danger. It is
professional negligence, or as you lawyers like to call it,
malpractice, to damage the aorta while doing a laminectomy—”

“Your Honor!” I am much too loud, a wounded
boar. “The witness is not being responsive. He is the one who is
speech making for the benefit of the party that pays him royally.”
Anything to distract the jury from my blood spilling across the
floor. One question too many, the classic bozo move on cross.

Judge Leonard swiveled in his cushioned
chair. “Is that an objection?”

I toted up the judge’s prior rulings like a
blackjack player counting face cards. “Yes, Your Honor, I ask that
the jury be instructed to disregard the witness’s self-serving
soliloquy.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard the last
statement of the witness.”

Fat chance, the jurors figuring that anything
they’re supposed to forget must be worth remembering. How to rescue
the moment? I caught sight of Cefalo. If his smile were any wider,
his uppers would fall out.

“No further questions are necessary, Your
Honor,” I said with more than a touch of bravado. Then I swaggered
to my seat, as if I had just vanquished the witness. I doubted the
jury bought even a slice of it.
Lassiter, why didn’t you shut up
when you had the chance?

Ramrod straight, white hair in place, Dr.
Watkins strode from the witness stand, pausing to nod graciously at
the jury, a general admiring his troops. Then he walked by the
plaintiff’s table, bowed toward Dan Cefalo and tenderly patted Mrs.
Melanie Corrigan, the young widow, on the arm. As he passed me, he
shook his head, ever so slightly, a compassionate look, as if this
poor wretch of a mouthpiece couldn’t help it if he was on the wrong
side and an incompetent boob to boot. What a pro. The jurors never
took their eyes off him.

My eyes closed and behind them were visions
of green hills and cool streams, where the courthouses were only
for marriage licenses and real estate deeds. Then I wondered if it
was too late to coach powder-puff football at a prep school in
Vermont.

Roger Salisbury was pouring black bean soup
over the rice, then carefully layering a row of chopped onions on
top, building a little mound. Not a drop of the dark soup spilled.
The Cuban crackers, which in my hands crumble into dust, he split
down the middle with a thumb and index finger, a clean break like
marble under a sculptor’s chisel. Steady hands, the hands of a
surgeon. Not hands that would have slipped, letting the rongeur
puncture the aorta, leaving Philip Corrigan to die of internal
bleeding and Melanie Corrigan to live as a young, beautiful, and
very rich widow. Which is why Roger Salisbury was questioning my
strategy in cross-examining the white-haired baron of bombast who
nearly blew me out of the courtroom this very day.

“If our defense is that I didn’t nick the
aorta, why were you trying to get Watkins to admit that a surgeon
can’t see what he’s doing in a laminectomy? It sounded like you
were trying to excuse me for something I didn’t do.”

When a client thinks that you are letting him
sink into the treacherous waters of the justice system, it is best
to appear calm and knowledgeable, even when you are floundering
about, looking for the nearest lifeboat yourself. This is easier to
do when not distracted by two young women who are appraising you
with large, luminous, and inviting eyes.

“It’s called alternative pleading,” I said
with authority and a polite smile toward our observers, perched on
barstools at the counter. When confronted with large, luminous, and
inviting eyes, I am polite without fail. “We say to the jury,
first, the good doctor didn’t come within a country mile of the
damn blood vessel. Second, even if he might have sideswiped it,
that’s not negligence. It’s an accepted risk of this kind of
surgery because of the small disc space and the proximity of the
aorta.”

“I get the feeling you don’t believe me,”
Roger Salisbury said. He ladled more soup onto the rice with those
sturdy hands, and I watched the steam rise, a pungent aroma
enveloping us. One of the women was smiling now. At me, I thought.
Or was it at Roger? He was handsome in a nondescript way. Medium
height, medium build, medium features. The kind of guy who gives
police artists fits. Nothing to work with, no missing teeth, bent
nose, or jagged scars, nothing protruding, nothing receding.

I dug into my palomilla, a tough piece of
flank steak marinated in oils and spices and likely left on the
hood of a ’59 Chevy in the Miami sun. I was talking with my hands,
or rather my fork, which had speared a sweet fried plantain.

“It’s a historic legal strategy. In olden
times, a plaintiff might sue his neighbor and say, ‘I lent him my
kettle, and when he returned it, it was cracked.’ The neighbor
answers the lawsuit and says, ‘I never borrowed the kettle, but if
I did, it was cracked when he gave it to me.’”

Roger Salisbury shook his head. “Your
profession is so uncertain, so full of contradictions. I’ll never
understand the law.”

“Nor I, women.” Their eyes were lighting up
with magical, come-hither glints. I stayed put and Roger kept
talking.

“Jake, I have a lot of faith in you, you know
that.”

Oh boy, I got fired once by a client who
started off just like that. “Sure, and you should have,” I said,
showing the old confidence.

“But I can’t say I’m happy with the way the
trial’s going.”

“Listen, Roger. There’s a psychological
phenomenon every defendant goes through during the plaintiff’s
case. Try to remember it’s still the top of the first inning. We
haven’t even been to bat yet. Wait’ll old Charlie Riggs testifies
for us. He’s honest and savvy, and he’ll make Wallbanger Watkins
look like the whoring sawbones he is.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“Riggs is on the verge of senile dementia, if
not over it. He speaks Latin half the time. He’s the friggin’
coroner—or was until they retired him—not an orthopedic
surgeon.”

“Roger, trust me. We need a canoemaker, not a
carpenter. Charlie Riggs is going to tell the jury why Philip
Corrigan died. It’s a hole in their case, and I’m going to ride the
U.S. Cavalry through it.”

Finally the two women set sail for our table.
One looked straight at me from under a pile of auburn hair that
reached her shoulders and kept going toward Mexico. She had caramel
skin and lustrous ebony eyes. The other had thick, jet black hair
that only made her porcelain complexion seem even more delicate.
She wore one earring shaped like a golden spermatozoan and another
of ivory that could have been a miniature elephant tusk. Both women
wore tourniquet-tight slacks, high-heeled open-toed shoes, and
oversized cotton sweatshirts, with spangles and shoulders from here
to the Orange Bowl.

“May we join you for a moment?” Miss Caramel
Skin asked. The
you
was a
chew
.

Roger Salisbury looked up and grinned. Even
the punitive damage claim hadn’t sent his hormones into
hibernation. I could have used the distraction. My social life was
as empty as a Miami Beach hotel in July. But I took inventory
quickly, knowing I had several hours of work ahead. There is a time
for dallying, but the middle of a trial is not such a time. I
wanted to finish the postmortem on the day’s events and prepare for
tomorrow and the widow’s testimony. Still, an old reflex, maybe
eons old, had the mental computer figuring a sort of cost- benefit
analysis—how long it would take—the flirting time, make-nice time,
bone-jumping time, and call-you-again time. Too long.

They already were sitting down and Caramel
Skin was chattering about her ex-boyfriend, a Colombian, and what a
scumbag he was.
Skoombag.
She was Costa Rican, Miss Earrings
Honduran.

I shouldn’t have brought Roger to Bay side, a
yuppie hangout with shops, restaurants, and bars strung along
Biscayne Bay downtown. It was a pickup place, and these two
probably assumed we were in the hunt—two decent-looking guys under
forty in suits—when all we wanted was solitude and an early dinner.
Outside the windows, the young male lawyers, accountants, and
bankers headed for the nearby singles bars, suitcoats slung over
shoulders, red suspenders holding up Brooks Brothers suit pants.
They slouched against open-air bars waiting for their frozen
margaritas to ooze out of chrome-plated machines that belong in
Dairy Queens, not taverns. Nearby the young women—mirror images in
business suits or no-nonsense below-the-knee dresses—their mouths
fixed in go-to-hell looks, struggled with the degree of toughness
and cool necessary to beat the men at their own game. Altogether, a
smug clique of well-dressed boys and girls.

“Carlos had a Cigarette,” Caramel Skin was
saying. “Used to go like a son-of-a-bitch.”
Sunavabeach.
“Liked the Cigarette more than he liked me. Now he’s at FCI.”

Salisbury wore a blank look. I said, “Federal
Correctional Institution. Probably used the boat to bring in bags
of the white stuff.”

“
Sí. Hizo el tonto.
He played the fool
for others. And,
como sí esto fuera poco
, he used to beat
me. Tie me up and spank me with a hairbrush. It was fun at first,
but then …”

Roger Salisbury was into it now, asking
Caramel Skin whether Carlos the Con used leather or plain old rope.
Scientific study or kinky curiosity, I wondered. Miss Earrings was
telling me that they were fashion models—aren’t they all?—who
really didn’t have work permits. Came here on tourist visas. Which
meant they also were following the scent for the Holy Grail, green
cards. Bagging American husbands would do the trick.