by Paul Levine
"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 ray 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.
2
THE GOOD GUYS
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. 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 bar-stools 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, T 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 Bayside, 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."
"Si. Hizo el tonto. He played the fool for others. And, como si 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.
The earrings dangled near my face. Our knees touched and her voice dropped to a whisper, a ploy to get me to lean closer. Do they teach this stuff or is it in their genes? A long fingernail traced the outline of my right ear. In the right time and place, it could have been erotic. In a brightly lit restaurant with my mind on business, it itched.
"Thick hair, Mister Broad Shoulders," she said. Theek and Meester. "Some of the Yankees, their hair is like, how they say, telaranasV
"Cobwebs," Caramel Skin said.
"Si, cobwebs. But yours, chico, is thick like cahamo. And rubianco."
"Like hemp and almost blond," Caramel Skin said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek rubianco cahamo, which did not help me get a fried plantain into my mouth. "And ojos azules," she said, giggling, looking into my eyes.
The women excused themselves to go to the restroom, probably to divide up the spoils. Caramel Skin would get the smaller guy with neat, salt-and-pepper hair who was practically smacking his lips over images of sweet bondage. Earrings was stuck with Meester Broad Shoulders, who at least had neither cobwebs nor spiders in his mop but who seemed distracted.
Salisbury lit a cigarette, dragged deeply, and sent a swirl of smoke into the overhead fan. Doctors who smoke puzzle me. You know they know better. Maybe lack of discipline and self-control. I couldn't imagine a personal injury lawyer riding a motorcycle, not after seeing those eight-by-ten glossies taken by the Highway Patrol. Need a shovel to scrape up body parts.
I wanted to draw Roger away from his Latin American fantasy and talk about tomorrow's testimony. But he was saying something about a doubleheader that had nothing to do with Yankee Stadium. I shook my head no, and he gave me that puzzled look. I'd seen the same expression the first time he walked into my office about eighteen months earlier.
"You must like representing doctors," he said that day, after we exchanged hellos.
"Yeah, it's a great honor."
He gave me that look and dropped the malpractice complaint on my desk as if it carried the plague. While I read it, he walked around my office, ostensibly admiring the view of the bay, but surreptitiously looking for merit badges on the walls. He couldn't find any. No diplomas, no awards from the Kiwanis. I hung my Supreme Court admission ticket above the toilet at home. Covers a crack in the plaster. He stopped in front of a photo of my college football team, one of those posed shots with a hundred twenty guys filling the bleachers.
"You played football," he said. Impressed. He couldn't be sure I ever graduated from law school, but he was happy I could hit a blocking sled.
"A lead-footed linebacker," I said. "Better at lawyering than covering the tight end over the middle."
"Been defending doctors long?" "Not as long as I played games in the PD's office, keeping some very bad actors on the street."
"Why'd you leave?"
"It made me puke."
"Huh?"
"Realizing every client I ever had was guilty. Not always with what they're charged, but guilty of some crime, sometimes worse than the charge."
I told him how it felt to see some slimeball go free after a warrantless search, then pimp-roll back into the courtroom for pistol-whipping a sixty-year-old liquor store clerk. Ja-cob, my man, they got no probable cause.
Told him I quit and did plaintiff's PI. Half my clients were phonies. Phony injuries and phony doctors or real injuries and no insurance.
"So representing doctors is a step up," Roger Salisbury had said brightly.
"From the gutter to the curb."
That look again.
"I sold out, joined the high-rise set at rich, old Harman amp; Fox," I told him. "Ordinarily, the dark-wood-and-deep-car-pet types wouldn't give a guy like me a second look. Afraid I'd spill the soup on my vest, i
f I owned one. But they woke up one day and figured they didn't have anybody who could try a case. They could shuffle papers and write memos, but they didn't know how to tap dance in front of a jury. So I won some cases, a few for very dangerous doctors."
Now his puzzled look changed to one of concern.
"Bottom line," I said, using a favorite expression of the corporate gazoonies who ruled the firm. "I've spent my entire career looking for the good guys and have yet to find them."
He was quiet a moment, probably wondering if I was incompetent. Good, we were even. I always assume the worst. Fewer surprises later.
Things improved after that. I checked up on him. His rep was okay. Board certified and no prior lawsuits. He probably checked me out, too. Found out I've never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude. And the only time I was arrested it was a case of mistaken identity-I didn't know the guy I hit was a cop.
So here we were, waiting for dos chicas to powder their noses or inhale something into them, and my mind was stuck on the mundane subject of the pending trial.
"Roger, let's talk about tomorrow. Cefalo will put the widow on first thing. Today I was watching you out of the corner of my eye and you were staring at her. I know she looks like a million bucks, but if I saw it while I was getting blindsided by Wallbanger Watkins, I'm sure the jurors did, too. It could be mistaken for a look of guilt, like you feel sorry you croaked her old man. That's worse than having the hots for her."
"Okay, didn't know I was doing it. Probably just staring into space."
"Yeah sure. The point is, she's likely to be a very good witness. The men in the jury all want in her pants, the women want to mother her."