Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (8 page)

“Get what? Look, I’m defending a man accused
of professional malpractice. I don’t know what the truth is. I
never know. I just take the facts—or as much of them as I can get
from people biased on all sides—and throw them at the jurors. You
never know what jurors hear or remember or care about. You never
know why they rule the way they do. They can right terrible wrongs
or do terrible wrongs. They can shatter lives and destroy careers,
and that’s what I’m worried about with Roger Salisbury.”

“Bring out the violins.”

Suddenly a shout from behind us: “Heads up!”
I looked up in time to see a brown blur dropping from the sky.
Susan Corrigan’s hands shot out and she caught the ball with her
fingertips. A cheer went up from the wide receivers, anonymous
behind their face masks.

“Soft hands,” I said, “and a lot of quick.” I
gave her my best smile. It had been good enough for several
generations of University of Miami coeds, their brains fried from
working on their tans. It had lowered the minimal resistance of
stewardesses from half a dozen failing airlines. It did not dent
the armor of Susan Corrigan.

“Sit on this,” she said, lateraling the ball
toward my gut.

I felt like popping her one. Instead I took
my frustrations out on the funny-shaped ball. Fingertips across the
laces, I heaved a hard, tight spiral to the punter half the field
away. He took it chest high and nodded with approval. The toss
surprised even me.

Susan Corrigan whistled. “You’ve played some
ball.”

Her tone had subtly changed. Good, maybe if I
went a few rounds with Mike Tyson, she’d give me the time of
day.

“A little,” I said. I decided not to tell her
my right arm just lost all its feeling except for a prickly
sensation where the wires had been frayed.

“Quarterback?”

“No, I decided early I’d rather be the hitter
than the hittee. Linebacker with lousy lateral movement.
Occasionally I’d hit people returning kickoffs if they came my way.
Sometimes filled in when games were already won or lost and I’d
smack fullbacks who trudged up the middle. Mostly I polished the
pine, which is actually aluminum and can freeze your butt in places
like South Bend and Ann Arbor in November. Gave me time to
philosophize about cheerleaders’ thighs.”

“You look like you stay in shape.”

“Used to windsurf a lot. Now I just hit the
heavy bag a couple times a week and never miss a Wednesday night
poker game.”

“I can beat almost any man at almost any
sport,” she said. She didn’t sound boastful. If you kin do it, it
ain’t braggin’.

“We should play ball sometime,’’ I
suggested.

She showed me the first hint of a smile. Her
face didn’t break. “Are you being a smartass now?” she asked,
almost pleasantly.

“No. I just want to talk to you.”

“I’ll talk if you can beat me in a race.”

“What?”

“The goal line,” she said, pointing across
the empty practice field. “Let’s see who can score.”

Only the punter was still on the field. He
took his two-step approach and kicked the ball with a solid
thwack.
The same motion, time after time, a machine
following the path designed for it on the drawing board. Like a
surgeon clearing out the disc, the same motion, time after time.
But the punter had shanked one off the side of his foot, and even
Roger Salisbury could have booted one. There I go again, mind
slipping out of gear.

“Yes or no?” she demanded. “I’ve got to
interview Shula, and that’s no day at the beach the way the Bills
dropped buffalo shit all over them last Sunday.”

“Okay,” I said, taking off my Scotch brogue
wing tips. “I suppose you want a head start.” She laughed a wily
laugh.

The sun was just dropping over the Everglades
to the west and a pink glow spread across the sky, casting Susan
Corrigan into soft focus. I stretched my hamstrings and concocted a
plan. I’d run stride for stride with her without breathing hard,
maybe make a crack or two, then shoot by her, and run backwards the
last ten yards. I’d let her jump into my arms at the goal line if
she were so inclined. Then, I’d be a gracious winner and take her
out for some fresh pompano and a good white wine.

She dropped into sprinter’s stance, shouted
“Go,” and flew across the field. I bolted after her, my tie
flapping over my shoulder like a pennant at the big game. She was
five yards ahead after the first two seconds. Her stride was
effortless, her movements smooth. My eyes fixed on her firm, round
bottom, now rolling rhythmically with each stride. Halfway there I
was still in second place, the greyhound chasing the mechanical
rabbit. So I picked it up, still three yards back with only thirty
to go. So much for the plan. Chasing pride now. Longer strides,
lifting the knees too high, some wasted motion, but letting the
energy of each step power the next one. Two steps behind and she
shot a quick glance over her shoulder. A mistake, but only ten
yards to go, no way to catch her, so I lunged, grabbing at her
waist, hand slipping down over a hip, tumbling her into the grass
with me rolling on top and her glasses, notepad, and pen whirling
this way and that.

We ended up near the goal line, her on the
bottom looking up, moist warm breath tickling my nose. A lot of my
body was touching a lot of her body, and she wasn’t
complaining.

“First and goal from the one,” I
whispered.

I looked straight into her eyes from a
distance any quarterback could sneak. Was it my imagination or was
the glacial ice melting? I was ready for her to get all dewy and
there would be some serious sighing going on. But I had come up a
yard short. She flipped me off her like a professional wrestler who
doesn’t want to be pinned, one of her knees slamming into my groin
as she bounced up. She stood there squinting in the dusk, looking
for her glasses while I sucked in some oxygen.

“You really don’t know, do you?” she said,
standing over me.

“Not only that, but I don’t know what I don’t
know.” My voice was pinched.

“Then listen, because you’re only going to
hear it once. Your client isn’t guilty of medical malpractice.”

“He’s not?”

“No. He’s guilty of murder. He killed my
father. He planned it along with that slut who ought to get an
Academy Award from what I saw in court today. I can’t prove it, but
I know it’s true.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Believe it. Your client’s a murderer. He
should be fried or whatever they do these days. So pardon me if I
don’t get all choked up over his career problems or insurance
rates. He was planking the slut—something that doesn’t exactly put
him in an exclusive club—and they planned it together. The
malpractice suit is just a cover.”

“I still don’t get it.” I was starting to
feel like a sap, something Susan Corrigan seemed to know the moment
she met me.

“The lawsuit makes it look like the doctor
and the widow are enemies. That’s their cover. And the way I figure
it, Lassiter, you’re supposed to lose. Or at least it doesn’t
matter. If you lose, the insurance company will pay her, and she’ll
probably split the money with him. Or maybe he gets it all. She’ll
get more than she needs from the estate. And if she wins more than
his insurance coverage, he doesn’t have to worry because she won’t
try to collect.”

I sat there with a look as intelligent as a
vacant lot. “Murder and insurance fraud. You have no proof of that.
And I just can’t believe it.”

“I can see that, now,” she said. “You’re not
a bad guy, Lassiter. You’re just not fast enough to be a
linebacker, and you don’t know shit from second base.”

Charlie Riggs took the stand with a smile on
his face and a plastic model of the spine in his back pocket. I
felt better just looking at him. Bushy gray moustache and beard, a
brown tweedy jacket more at home in Ivy League libraries than art
deco Miami, twinkling eyes full of experience. A trustworthy man.
Like having Walter Cronkite on my side.

He’d testified hundreds of times for the
state and was comfortable on the witness stand. He crossed his
legs, revealing drooping socks and pale calves. He breathed on his
eyeglasses and wiped them on his tie. He slipped the glasses onto
his small nose that was almost buried by his beard. Then Charlie
Riggs nodded. He was ready.

“Please state your name and profession for
the jury,” I instructed him.

“Charles W. Riggs, M.D., pathologist by
training, medical examiner of Dade County for twenty-eight years,
now happily retired.”

“Tell us, Dr. Riggs, what are the duties of a
medical examiner.”

“Objection!” Dan Cefalo was on his feet. “Dr.
Riggs is retired. He is incompetent to testify as to the current
medical examiner’s duties.”

In the realm of petty objections, that one
ranked pretty high, but it was the first one of the day, and you
could flip a coin on it.

“Sustained,” Judge Leonard said, unfolding
the sports section, looking for the racetrack charts.

I had another idea. “Let’s start this way,
Dr. Riggs. What is a medical examiner?”

“Well, in merry old England, they were called
coroners. You can trace coroners back to at least the year 1194.
They were part of the justice system, part judge, part tax
collector. The coroner was the
custos placitorum coronae,
the guardian of the pleas of the Crown. If a man was convicted of a
crime, the coroner saw to it that his goods were forfeited to the
Crown.”

Cefalo looked bored, the judge was not
listening as usual, but the jurors seemed fascinated by the bearded
old doctor. It works that way. What’s mundane to lawyers and judges
enchants jurors.

“Later the coroner’s duties included
determining the cause of death with the help of an inquest. The
sheriff would empanel a jury, much as you have here.” He smiled
toward the jury box, and in unison, six faces smiled back. They
liked him. That was half the battle.

“The jury had to determine whether death was
ex visitatione divina,
by the visitation of God, or whether
man had a hand in it. Even if death was accidental, there was still
a sort of criminal penalty. For example, if a cart ran over someone
and killed him, the owner had to pay the Crown the equivalent value
of the cart. That got to be quite a problem when steamships and
trains began doing the killing.”

The jurors nodded, flattered that this wise
old man would take the time to give them a history lesson. “Still
later, coroners began recording how many deaths were caused by
particular diseases. Sometimes I spend my evenings with a glass of
brandy and a collection of the Coroner’s Rolls from the 1200s.
You’d be surprised how much we can learn. At any rate, Counselor,
the job of the coroner, or medical examiner, is to determine cause
of death. Our credo is ‘to speak for the dead, to protect the
living.’”

“And how does a coroner determine cause of
death?” I asked.

Charlie Riggs pushed his glasses back up his
nose with a chubby thumb. “By physical and medical examination,
various testing devices, gas chromatography, electron microscopes,
the study of toxicology, pharmacology, radiology, pathology. Much
is learned in the autopsy, of course.”

“May we assume you have determined the cause
of death in a number of cases?”

“Thousands. For over twenty years, I
performed five hundred or more autopsies a year and supervised many
more.”

“Can you tell us about some of your methods,
some of your memorable cases?”

A hand smacked the plaintiff’s table and Dan
Cefalo was on his feet, one pantleg sticking into the top of his
right sock, the other pantleg dragging below the heel of the left
shoe where the threads had unraveled from the cuff. “Objection,” he
said wearily. “This retired gentleman’s life story is irrelevant
here.”

Taking a shot at Riggs’s age. I hoped the two
older jurors were listening. “Your Honor, I’m entitled to qualify
Dr. Riggs as an expert.”

Cefalo was ready for that. He didn’t want to
hear any more than he had to from Charlie Riggs. “We’ll stipulate
that Dr. Riggs was the medical examiner for a long time, that he’s
done plenty of autopsies, and that he’s qualified to express an
opinion on cause of death.”

That should have been enough, but I still
wanted Riggs to tell his stories. When you have a great witness,
keep him up there. Let the jury absorb his presence.

“Objection overruled,” Judge Leonard said.
Good, my turn to win one.

“Dr. Riggs, you were about to tell us of your
cases and methods of medical examination of the cause of
death.”

So Charlie Riggs unfolded his memories. There
was the aging playboy who lived at Turnberry Isle, found dead of a
single bullet wound to the forehead. Or so it seemed. The autopsy
showed no bullet in the skull, no exit wound, just a round hole
right between the eyes, as if from a small caliber shell.

“The police were stumped for a murder
weapon,” Charlie Riggs said. “Sometimes it’s best to consider
everyday items. I searched the grounds and, in a dumpster near the
marina, I found a woman’s red shoe with blood on the metal spiked
heel. The blood type matched the playboy’s, the heel matched the
wound, and the owner of a French shoe shop at Mayfair identified
the woman who bought the six- hundred-dollar shoes two weeks
earlier. The woman confessed to doing him in. A lover’s spat, she
didn’t want to kill him, just brain him.”

Then there was the mystery of the burned
woman. She was sitting there, fully clothed, on her sofa, burned to
death. Her clothes were not even singed. There was no smoke or
evidence of fire in the apartment. The woman’s boyfriend had found
the body. He said she came home drunk, took a shower, and next
thing he knew, she was sitting on the sofa dead.