To speak for the dead

by Paul Levine

  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."

  "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."

  5

  THE CORONER

  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 visita-tione 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.

  "I took a pair of tweezers and probed the bathtub drain," Charlie Riggs told the jury. He paused. Several jurors exhaled in unison.

  "It was just a hunch. Up came pieces of skin, and I knew the answer."

  Charlie Riggs smiled a knowing smile and stroked his beard, everybody's favorite professor.

  "Both had come home drunk, and she passed out. The boyfriend tried to revive her in the bathtub, but sailing three sheets to the wind, he turned on the hot water and left her there. The scalding water burned her to death. When the boyfriend sobered up, he panicked, so he dried her off, dressed her, p
ut her on the sofa, and called the police."

  The jury sat entranced. There's nothing like tales of death, well told. Riggs testified about matching tire treads to the marks on a hit-and-run victim's back, of fitting a defendant's teeth to bite marks on a rape-murder victim, of finding teeth in a drain under a house, the only proof of the corpus delicti, the body of a man dissolved in sulfuric acid by his roommate.

  The litany of crime had its purpose, to shock the jury with deeds of true miscreants, to deliver a subtle message that the justice system should prosecute murderers, not decent surgeons, even if they might make mistakes. Errare humanum est. If that's what it was, an honest error.

  I hadn't told Charlie Riggs about the conversation with Susan Corrigan. What would I tell him, that a dead man's daughter, poisoned with grief and hate, thinks my client is a murderer? She had no physical evidence, no proof, no nothing, except the allegation that Roger Salisbury and Melanie Corrigan were getting it on. I would talk to Salisbury about it, but not now.

  While Charlie Riggs testified, I watched Roger. He kept shooting sideways glances at Melanie Corrigan's perfect profile. She watched the witness, oblivious to the attention. She was wearing a simple cotton dress that, to me, looked about two sizes too large, but I supposed was in style. A wide belt gathered it at the waist and it ended demurely below the knee. It was one of those deceiving things women wear, so simple it disguises the name of an Italian designer and a megabucks price tag.

  I tried to read the look in Roger Salisbury's eyes but could not. Was there a chance that it was true? Not just that he might have been diddling his patient's wife. I didn't care about that. But that he might have killed Corrigan. That it was all a plot, that the malpractice trial was just a cover, or better yet, a way to pick up another million. If that's what it was, there'd be plenty of chances for Salisbury to tank it. He was scheduled to testify after Riggs.