Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (7 page)

“Judge, we offered the policy,” I said
apologetically. “A million dollars even, all we’ve got, no excess
coverage. They oughta take it and spare the court all this time and
effort.”

Cefalo shook his head. “Our liquidated
damages alone, lost net accumulations for the estate, are over
three million. To say nothing of the widow’s mental anguish and
consortium claims.”

The judge laughed. “Danny, your widow lady
don’t look like she’ll be without consortium for long.”

Good. I liked hearing that. Maybe the jurors
will feel the same. Then we only get hit with three million, enough
to wipe out the good doctor several times over.

The judge straightened. “All right, boys.
Let’s cut through the bullshit. Danny, how much will you take,
bottom line?”

“Two-point-five. Today. No structured
settlement. All cash.”

The judge raised his eyebrows and ran a hand
over his bald head. “Attaboy. I always figured you to bet the
favorites to show, but you’re no ribbon clerk, hey? Jake, whadaya
got?”

I turned my pockets inside out and shook my
head. “A million, judge, just the policy. Client’s only been in
private practice five, six years. Just finished paying off his
debts. He’s pulling down big income, but no assets yet. We can’t
pay it if we don’t have it. Besides, he’s simply not liable.”

“Okay, Jake, but it’s halftime, and you’re
getting your ass kicked from here to Sopchoppy. You see what’s
coming, don’t you?”

“Sure judge, but you haven’t heard my
halftime speech.”

“Fine, we start with your first witness at
one o’clock. Court’s in recess.” With that, he banged the gavel,
and the hollow explosion echoed off the high, beamed ceiling. Roger
Salisbury slumped onto the defense table as if felled by a rifle
shot.

I headed into the corridor, nearly smashing
into the lovely widow. She didn’t notice. She was toe-to-toe with
another young woman. Each was jawing at the other, faces inflamed,
just a few inches apart like Billy Martin and an umpire. I didn’t
recognize the other woman. No makeup, short-cropped jet black hair,
a turned-up nose and a deep tan, blue jeans and running shoes,
maybe the last pretty woman in Miami with thick glasses.
Tortoiseshell round frames, giving her a professorial look. Her
language, though, was not destined to win tenure. “You’re a
conniving slut and a little whore, and when I get to the bottom of
this, we’ll see who’s out in the cold!”

The widow’s eyes had narrowed into slits. No
tears now. Just sparks and flames. “Get away from me you ingrate,
and clear your junk out of the house by six tonight or your ratty
clothes will be floating in the bay.”

Dan Cefalo stepped in and separated the two.
“Miss Corrigan, I think you best leave.”

Oh, Miss Corrigan. The one with the colorful
vocabulary must be Philip Corrigan’s daughter by his first
marriage. I followed her down the corridor.

“May I be of assistance?” I asked politely.
Trying not to be your typical lawyer scavenging on the perimeter of
misfortune.

She lowered the thick glasses and studied me
with steaming eyes the color of a strong cup of coffee. The eyes
had decided not to make any friends today. She looked me up and
down, ending at my black wingtips. I could check for wounds later.
Her nostrils flared as if I emitted noxious fumes.

“You’re that doctor’s lawyer, aren’t you?”
She made it sound like a capital crime.

“Guilty as charged. I saw you discussing a
matter with Mrs. Corrigan and I just wondered if I might help
…”

“Why? Are you fucking her or do you just want
to?” She slid her glasses back up the slope of the ski-jump nose
and headed toward the elevators.

“No and yes,” I called after her.

My desk was covered with little white
telephone messages. Office confetti. You think the universe comes
to a halt when you are locked into your own little world, but it
doesn’t. It goes on whether you’re in trial or at war or under the
surgeon’s knife. Or dead. Dead rich like Philip Corrigan laid out
on smooth satin in a mahogany box, or dead poor, a wino facedown in
the bay.

Greeting me in my bay front office was the
clutter of messages that would not be answered—lawyers who wouldn’t
be called, clients who wouldn’t be seen, motions that wouldn’t be
heard while my world was circumscribed by the four walls of
Courtroom 6-1 in the Dade County Courthouse. Next to the phone
messages were stacks of pleadings, letters and memos, carefully
arranged in order of importance with numbers written on those
little yellow squares of paper that have their own stickum on back.
What did we do before those sticky doodads were invented? Or before
the photocopier? Or the computer, the telecopier, and the car
phone? It must have been a slower world. Before lawyers had offices
fifty-two stories above Biscayne Bay with white-coated waiters
serving afternoon tea, and before surgeons cleared four hundred
thousand a year, easy, scraping out gristle from knees and
squeezing bad discs out of spines.

Lawyers had become businessmen, leveraging
their hourly rates by stacking offices with high-billing
associates, forming “teams” for well-heeled clients, and raking in
profits on the difference between associates’ salaries and their
billing rates. Doctors had become little industries themselves,
creating huge pension plans, buying buildings and leasing them
back, investing in labs and million-dollar scanning machines,
getting depreciation and investment income that far outpaced
patient fees.

Maybe doctors were too busy following the
stock market to be much good at surgery anymore. Maybe the greed of
lawyers and doctors equally contributed to the malpractice crisis.
But maybe an occasional slip of the scalpel or a missed melanoma
just couldn’t be helped. What was it old Charlie Riggs said the
first day he reviewed the charts in Salisbury’s case?
Errare
humanum est.
To err is human. Sure, but a jury seldom
forgives.

I grabbed the first message on stack one.
Granny Lassiter called. I hoped she hadn’t been arrested again.
Granny lived in Islamorada in the Florida Keys and taught me
everything I know about fishing and most of what I know about
decency and principle. She was one of the first to speak against
unrestrained construction in the environmentally fragile Keys. When
speaking didn’t work, she got a Key West conch named Virgil Thigpen
drunk as an Everglades skunk and commandeered his tank truck. The
truck, not coincidentally, had just sucked up the contents of
Granny’s septic tank and that of half a dozen neighbors. Granny
drove it smack into the champagne and caviar crowd at the grand
opening of Pelican Point, a plug-ugly pink condo on salt-eaten
concrete stilts that would soon sink into the dredged muck off Key
Largo. While the bankers, lawyers, developers, and lobbyists stood
gaping, and TV cameras whirred, Granny shouted, “Shit on all of
you,” then sloshed twelve hundred gallons of crud onto the canape
table.

The judge gave her probation plus a hundred
hours of community service, which she fulfilled by donating a
good-sized portion of her homemade brew to the Naval Retirement
Home in Marathon.

I returned the call. Granny just wanted to
pass the time of day and give me a high-tide report. Next message,
the unmistakably misshapen handwriting of Cindy, my secretary:

Across the River,

A Voice to Shine,

Tempus Fugit,

Doc Speaks at Nine.

What the hell? A headful of tight, burnt
orange-brown curls popped through my door. To my eye, Cindy’s hair
seemed to clash with the fuchsia eye shadow but clearly matched her
lipstick. If the lipstick were any brighter, you could use it for
fluorescent highway markers.

“Cindy, what’s this?”

“Haiku,
el jefe
.”

“Who?”

“I do.”

“What you do?”

“I do haiku,” she said, laughing. “Haiku is
three-line Japanese poetry, no breaking hearts, just recording the
author’s observations of nature and the human experience.”

“What’s it mean?”

“C’mon boss. Get with it. Crazy old Charlie
Riggs is set to testify at nine tomorrow morning. He’ll tell one
and all what killed filthy rich Philip Corrigan.”

“Good, he’s our best witness.”

“I don’t know,” Cindy said, twirling a finger
through a stiff curl. If a mosquito flew into her hair, it would be
knocked cold. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this case. Your Dr.
Salisbury has a weird look in his eye.”

“All men look at you that way, Cindy. Try
wearing a bra.”

“I never thought
you
noticed.”

“Hard to miss when the air conditioning turns
this place into a meat locker. Now c’mon Cindy, help me out. We
have anything on Corrigan’s daughter by his first marriage?”

“Sure, a little.” Cindy was not as ditsy as
she looked. She could turn heads with her hyped-up looks, bouncy
walk, and easy smile, but underneath were brains and street smarts,
an unusual combination.

“Susan Corrigan,” Cindy said, without
consulting the file. “About thirty, undergrad work at UF, then a
master’s in journalism at Northwestern. Sportswriter at the
Herald
.”

“You’re amazing,” I said, meaning it.

“In many splendored ways unbeknownst to
you.”

I chose not to wade in those crowded
waters.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Of course.
Susan
Corrigan.
I know the by-line, the first woman inside the
Dolphins’ locker room.” I picked up yesterday’s paper, which had
been gathering dust in a wicker basket next to my desk. I found the
story stripped across the top of the sports section under the
headline, “Dolphin Hex? Injuries Vex Offensive Line.”

BY SUSAN CORRIGAN

Herald Sports Writer

On a team where the quarterback is king,
something wicked keeps happening to the palace guard.

And the palace tackles. And the palace
center.

“
It’s scary the things that happened to
our offensive line in the last three weeks,” Dolphin Coach Don
Shula said yesterday.

“
When injuries hit us, they come in
bunches.”

Sure, Susan Corrigan. Made a name for herself
playing tennis against Martina, sprinting against Flo-Jo, then
writing first-person pieces. I’d read her stuff. Tough and funny.
Today I’d seen half of that.

“What’s she have to do with Salisbury’s
case?” Cindy asked.

“Don’t know. But there’s more to the second
Mrs. Corrigan than tears and white gloves, and Susan knows
something.”

“What’s she look like, an Amazon
warrior?”

“Hardly. Cute, not beautiful. Long legs,
short dark hair like Dorothy Hamill, wears glasses, wholesome as
the Great Outdoors. No hint of scandal.”

Cindy laughed. “Doesn’t sound like your
type.”

“Did I mention foulmouthed?”

“We’re getting warmer.”

“Cindy, this is all business.”

“Isn’t it always?”

* * *

Practice was almost over and only a few
players were still on the field. Natural grass warmed by the sun, a
clean earthy smell in the late afternoon Florida air. It had been
one of those days when it’s a crime to be shackled to an office or
courtroom. Winter in the tropics. Clear sky, mid-seventies, a light
breeze from the northeast. On the small college campus where the
Dolphins practice, the clean air and open spaces were a world away
from Miami’s guttersnipes and bottom feeders.

I spotted Susan Corrigan along the sideline.
She wore gray cotton sweats and running shoes and seemed to be
counting heads, seeing what linemen were still able to walk as they
straggled back to the locker room. A reporter’s notepad was jammed
into the back of her sweatpants and a ballpoint pen jutted like a
torpedo out of her black hair. All business. On the field in front
of her only the quarterbacks and wide receivers were still going
through their paces, a few more passes before the sun set. On an
adjacent practice field, a ballboy shagged kick after kick from a
solitary punter.

“Susan,” I called from a few yards away.

She turned with an expectant smile. The sight
of me washed it away. I asked if we could talk. She turned back to
the field. I asked if she was waiting for somebody. She studied the
yard markers. I asked who she liked in the AFC East. She didn’t
give me any tips. I just stood there, looking at her profile. It
wasn’t hard to take.

She turned toward me again, a studious yet
annoyed look through thick glasses, as if an interesting insect had
landed in her soup. “Why should I help you?”

“Because you’re not real interested in
helping Melanie Corrigan. Because you know things about her that
could help an innocent doctor save his career. Because you like the
way I comb my hair.”

“You’re dumber than you look,” she
hissed.

“Is there a compliment buried in that
one?”

“You’re hopeless.”

I can take being put down. Judges do it all
the time. So do important people like a maitre d’ in a Bal Harbour
restaurant who insists that diners wear socks. But this was
different. I looked at her, a fresh-faced young woman in cotton
sweats that could not hide her athletic yet very womanly body. I
gave her a hangdog look that sought mercy. She turned back to the
field. Dan Marino was firing short outs to Mark Duper and Mark
Clayton. Though each pass arrived with ferocious speed, there was
no slap of leather onto skin at the receiving end.

“Soft hands,” Susan Corrigan said, mostly to
herself.

“These guys are good but Paul Warfield will
always be my favorite,” I said. “Had moves like Baryshnikov.
Stopping him was like tackling the wind.”

“Sounds like you know more about football
than about your own client.”

I gave her my blank look and she kept going.
“You still don’t get it. You still don’t know the truth.”