To speak for the dead

by Paul Levine

  The judge was banging his gavel. I hadn't heard it during the ruckus. But there he was, banging away. And in his other hand was the . 357 Magnum from under the bench. Then dead quiet. The judge looked at the gavel and then at the gun. Sheepishly. Then his eyes darted from Channel 10's video camera to the Herald's still camera, whirring and clicking away. Preserving the sight for eternity, or at least until the next election.

  Straining to appear judicial, he turned toward the jury box. "The jurors shall disregard the last… uh… colloquy between the witness and defense counsel."

  Might as well ask the residents of Pompeii to ignore the volcano.

  Then, eyeballing me, Judge Randolph Crane did a slow burn. "The Court, sua sponte, grants a mistrial. The jury is excused. Mr. Socolow, I assume the state wishes to retry this defendant. If so, a new trial date will be set upon subsequent motion and notice of hearing. Mr. Lassiter…"

  He paused. He thought. His perpetual glumness was replaced with anger. It seemed real, not just a pose for the editorial boards.

  "Mr. Lassiter, I have never seen such a display in a courtroom. I don't know what you did to provoke that witness, but I do know you committed battery upon his person."

  Again he paused, and the courtroom waited. He was running out of steam. He shot a surreptitious glance at the press. No help. He banged his gavel three times. When no one moved, he banged it again, then looked at me sternly and in his deepest tones announced, "You have fomented anarchy in a court of law." A good quote, and from the front row, Helen Buchman nodded approvingly, her gray bouffant bobbing. Encouraged, the judge worked some righteous indignation into his voice. "In sum, Mr. Lassiter, you have flaunted… that is flouted

  … and in other words, you have affronted and offended the authority of this court. You are hereby ordered and adjudged in contempt of court. Report tomorrow morning at nine for sentencing. I suggest you bring counsel. And your toothbrush."

  The judge bolted through the rear door into his chambers and away from the madness. A corrections officer helped Sergio to his feet. Reporters swarmed over me. From the corridor, the cameramen and grips stormed in, knocking spectators aside. A mini-cam examined my right ear. A microphone poked at my eye. I'd be the lead story at six o'clock. Good story, too. Defendant goes free, at least for a while; his lawyer heads for the stockade.

  My ribs ached and my left hand was beginning to swell.

  Roger Salisbury hadn't moved. He sat at the defense table, probably trying to figure out if I was a great lawyer or just a guy with an adequate left hook.

  Abe Socolow looked at me and said, "You went too far this time, Jake, old buddy."

  "In a pig's ass!" Granny Lassiter had hurdled the bar separating the lions from the Christians, exposing gray wool socks beneath her sundress. She hugged me and narrowed her eyes at Abe Socolow. "My Jacob can whup any man in the house, and a couple weeks of county victuals never did no harm."

  29

  TWO OUT OF THREE

  I was playing a wicked first base, stretching this way and that, digging low throws out of the dirt, trying to avoid pulling a hamstring. The shortstop was a check bouncer with a weak wing. The third baseman was a bunco artist who threw hard but wild. The second baseman was a veteran, three falls for DUI, but I didn't know much about his arm. Every grounder trickled through his legs and into right field.

  Seven days in the Dade County Stockade. Like a vacation. No phones, no partners' meetings, no hearings with cantankerous judges and disagreeable clients. Almost as good as a week-long cruise to St. Thomas, although chipped beef on toast is seldom served on the S. S. Norway. The stockade is different from the county jail, that dungeon attached to the Justice Building. The jail is for your hard guys-robbers, killers, rapists, and multikilo dopers. Here, just a bunch of misdemeanants, including my own contemptuous self.

  I had just done my best imitation of a Nureyev split, scooping up a shin buster in time to nab a three-hundred-pound grocer doing ninety days for selling pork loins as kosher lamb chops. The applause from my teammates did not break my eardrums. "Good grab, shyster," the second baseman declared for the group.

  Then, a familiar voice behind me: "Did I hear something crack or you just fart?"

  I turned around. Now coaching first base for the Stockade Short Timers, Abraham Socolow.

  "Hey, Abe. What'd they get you for? Purloining state-owned paper clips?"

  He didn't laugh. "Looks like you been working on your tan."

  "Yeah, lifting, too," I said. "Gonna get strong again. Maybe even take up karate like your favorite witness."

  "Funny you mention him," he said, as if it weren't funny at all. "Machado-Alvarez is in Mount Sinai, got some weird sickness."

  "I'll send flowers."

  "You'll do better than that. You'll go there with me while I take a statement."

  "You deputizing me?" I asked, keeping an eye on the runner at second, a shoplifter who would steal anything, including third base, if given the chance.

  "He was busting up some boards at a karate exhibition over at Convention Hall, suddenly gets a fever, the shits, then he's paralyzed. One of the Beach cops working security ID'ed Salisbury hanging around the stage just before macho man did his stuff. I'll need to talk to Salisbury. Thought you'd want to be present. As usual, old buddy, I'm going out of my way to do you a favor."

  Next time he does me a favor, I'll probably do a month in solitary. The pitcher, a pickpocket, called a conference on the mound. He slipped the ball to the shortstop, who hid it in his glove then tagged the runner leading off second. Time was called, the runner whimpered, and there ensued some plea bargaining with the umpire, a trusty.

  "I can't leave," I told Socolow. "Got another three days to satisfy the judge."

  "Let's go. I sprung you."

  I put on my best Edward G. Robinson. "You sprung me? You dirty screw. I was going over the wall tonight with the boys. What'll they think?"

  He didn't smile; he didn't scowl, just the same straight-faced look. Ten years and he has yet to laugh at one of my jokes.

  With Socolow running interference, we sailed through the paperwork for my return to society. We headed east in his government Chrysler-four doors, blackwalls-toward Miami Beach. Abe wore a dark three-piece suit with his Phi Beta Kappa pin slung from a vest pocket. I wore a blue chambray shirt with a nine-digit number. If we went to a Coconut Grove club, I'd be considered highly trendy and he'd be stashed next to the kitchen with a busload of retirees from Century Village. We took the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects the mainland with Arthur Godfrey Road on

  Miami Beach. It's a great drive, high above Biscayne Bay, sailboats swooping beneath the pillars of the bridge, a fine view of the white and pink buildings of Miami Beach. From the top of the causeway you appreciate the fragility of that long, skinny sandbar with the bay on one side, the vast ocean on the other.

  On the way Socolow told me he'd asked Charlie Riggs to meet us there. I thought that over a second. "Why not the ME? He's the guy on your side."

  Socolow was silent. Like a good soldier, he wouldn't squawk about intramural warfare. Then he surprised me. "Maybe too much on my side."

  I let it go. But he didn't. "MacKenzie's a turd," he said stiffly.

  I had noticed a certain scatological bent to Abe's patter lately, but this was not the time to question whether he had been toilet trained at the appropriate age.

  "A turd?" I delicately inquired.

  "I can't prove it, but I think he cooked those chromatographic tests that night in the morgue, the guys who died in surgery. He wouldn't let me near Blumberg all night."

  Why was he telling me this?

  "You're probably surprised I'm telling you this," he said.

  Mind reader.

  "There won't be a new trial," Socolow continued. "The widow refuses to testify."

  "You could lean on her," I suggested, hoping he'd already tried and failed. "You've done it before with reluctant witnesses."

  "Not in a case li
ke this," he said. "What's it mean, Jake, 342 if a woman won't testify against a man she swore killed her husband?"

  I thought about it. "Different possibilities. That she knows the defendant didn't do it. Or the defendant did it and she helped him. Or she knows who did it and she's afraid a trial would bring that out."

  Abe Socolow didn't say a word, just nodded to himself, watched the causeway straight ahead, and kept both hands on the wheel, at ten o'clock and two o'clock, just the way they teach you. Some guys play it strictly by the book.

  Charlie Riggs was standing inside the double doors of the ICU talking to a young doctor in a white lab coat. The doctor was short and pale with a bushy, unkempt beard. Charlie stroked his own beard; the young doctor stroked his. Charlie barely noticed our arrival. No introductions, we just picked up listening.

  "He went fast," the doctor said with a shrug. "Ambulance brought him in, eyes bulging, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, stiff joints, then paralysis. We tried to stabilize him. Barely got the IV in. Bang! Liver and kidneys fail, goes into respiratory arrest."

  "Classic indicia of food poisoning," Charlie said dispassionately. "We used to see two or three deaths a year, green beans at church picnics. Botulism."

  The two doctors kept talking, ignoring us. There wasn't much two lawyers could add anyway.

  "That's what we thought," the doctor said. "But we checked it out. Last two meals were banquet style for the karate convention. Three hundred people, no one else even burped."

  Charlie scratched his beard. The young doctor did the same. I didn't have a beard, so I ran a hand through my shaggy hair. Socolow didn't have much hair, so he lit a cigarette, then ground it into the tile after a nurse wagged a finger at him.

  "Have you checked the body for punctures, fresh injections?" Charlie asked.

  "Sure did, after Mr. Socolow told us his suspicions. Noth-ing.

  Charlie Riggs turned to Abe Socolow. They had worked together in the past, shared a mutual respect, even if Charlie thought Abe was a little sharp around the edges. "What was he doing just before he was stricken?"

  "Best we can figure," Socolow said, "he just finished chopping up a stack of boards with his bare hands." Socolow looked at me. "Except nobody slugged him afterwards."

  "I see," Charlie said. He was the only one who did. "I think I'll take a drive to Convention Hall."

  I was sleeping in my own bed with two pillows for company when four headlights glared malevolently through my front windows, and two horns blared. I rolled over and looked at the clock. The green digital numbers flashed from 2:57 to 2:58 as my feet hit the floor. Downstairs, a flashing of high beams. Maybe the cops picking me up. Maybe I really did go over the wall.

  I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the front door. Granny Lassiter and Charlie Riggs.

  "Sorry to disturb you, Jake," Charlie said, sounding not a bit sorry.

  "Let me guess," I said groggily, "you want my permission to marry this woman. Forget it. Elope if you like."

  "I'm game," Granny said. "Only fellow my age I know still got lead in his pencil."

  "C'mon Jake," Charlie commanded, his face serious, no twinkle in his eye. "Let's take a ride and talk."

  If Charlie wanted to talk, I wanted to listen. I slipped on an old pair of gym shorts, running shoes, and a gray T-shirt, stepped into the humid night, and slid into the front passenger seat of Granny's mammoth 1969 Cadillac. Over the bay, lightning flashed and distant thunder followed, a thunderstorm brewing in the southeast, headed our way. Granny had the engine running and Charlie was already in the back. Before I had dented the velour upholstery, the smell rolled over me.

  "Granny, you leave a mess of last week's grouper under the seat?"

  She didn't even look at me, just jerked a thumb toward the backseat and flicked on the overhead light. My gaze followed the thumb and left me staring into the waxy, dissolving face of the late Sylvia Corrigan.

  "What the hell!"

  "Relax, Jake," Charlie said. "Jane did us a great favor by bringing the body here tonight."

  Everybody was doing me favors today. As for "Jane," the name still struck me funny, like calling Charlemagne, "Chuck."

  "Weren't nothing," Granny said. "That old gal been taking up room in my cooler anyhow."

  "What's going on?" I demanded.

  "I found the boards Sergio had broken at Convention 345

  Hall," Charlie explained. "Easy enough. He did the noon demonstration. Slabs of pine were in the trash, stacked in nearly the same order that he broke them. I thought it quite natural to assume that the one with the cleanest break would have been the top board."

  "Quite natural," I agreed.

  Granny pulled onto Douglas Road, then turned right at Dixie Highway heading downtown. You expect traffic to be light after three a.m., but it never is. You wonder who these people are, looking for a party or heading for their night shifts.

  "On close inspection I could see the top board had been coated with something. I took it to Dr. Kalian at the lab, and he confirmed my suspicions. Clostridium botulinum, and quite a liberal dose of it."

  "The stuff that causes food poisoning," I said.

  "The very stuff," Charlie said.

  "What'd Sergio do, eat the boards for breakfast?"

  "No, he just hit one with a hand that he had cut on the tile in the courtroom. Even without the cut, the abrasion from the board probably would be sufficient to allow the toxin to enter the blood. With the wound still healing and Sergio not wanting to show weakness by wearing a bandage -I asked around-it was an open invitation to the toxin."

  "And you think Roger Salisbury cooked this up?" I asked.

  "Chemical companies sell the toxin to universities and laboratories for research. A doctor would have no trouble ordering some."

  I shook my head. "I don't know, Charlie, a little smear on a board killing a guy."

  "It's perhaps the most toxic substance we know. A thousand molecules of botulinum toxin can kill an ox. Do you know how small a molecule is?"

  About the size of all the gray matter in my brain, I thought. I'm the guy who trusted Roger Salisbury. But I wasn't ready to throw him over, not yet.

  "Maybe Roger's got an explanation," I suggested, sounding hollow even to myself.

  "That's what we'll find out," Charlie said.

  We were at the intersection of Dixie and Miami Avenue. Granny swung the aircraft carrier across three westbound lanes of Dixie and we headed north on Miami, passing under the overpass to Key Biscayne. Roger lived halfway up a long block on the right, his house surrounded by finely aged royal poinciana trees.

  "What's your friend in back have to do with it?"

  Charlie sighed. "If I showed you her right buttock, upper quadrant, you'd know."

  "An injection?"

  "Twenty-gauge needle, I'd say."

  "Wait a second, Charlie. Slow down. She died in the hospital. That could have been a routine sedative, a painkiller, anything."

  "Could have been. We don't have the records."

  "And you've done no test for succinylcholine or any other drugs?"

  "Correct."

  "So you have no proof?"

  "Correct again, Counselor. Your cross-examination was always your strong point."

  "With no evidence, where do you get off accusing Roger of killing Sylvia Corrigan?"

  "Calm down, Jake. I'm not ready to accuse. But I've been at this a long time. I have a hunch, that's all."

  "A hunch! Charlie. You're a scientist. I'm a lawyer. You deal with medical probabilities, I deal with evidence. And you have us hauling a corpse around on a hunch. I don't believe it."

  When I don't get my prescribed six hours of shut-eye, I can be ornery, even to friends.

  "What we believe and what is true," Charlie said, "are often quite different. Deceptio visus. It's probably healthy up to a point, to believe in your client's cause. Beyond that point, it will blind you."

  I turned around to face him, and Sylvia Corrigan toppled
forward, brushing my arm with a forehead the consistency of sponge cake left in the rain. The rotten fish smell washed over me. "What do you expect me to do?" I demanded. "Even if he confessed to me, I couldn't go to Socolow. The attorney-client privilege prevents that."

  "It prevents your telling the authorities about past crimes, sure. But if you had probable cause to believe he's about to kill again, there is a different obligation."

  "Who's left to kill?"

  "The person who first made him a killer, of course."

  A flash of lightning lit the sky and a thunderclap followed almost instantly, the storm closing in. I laughed but there was no pleasure behind it. "You think Roger will kill Melanie Corrigan. If you're right, why should I lift a finger to stop him? Maybe I'll help him."

  "No, you won't. I know you, Jake. I know your code. It isn't written anywhere except all over your face. You're one of the last decent men. You're a guy who looks for broken wings to mend."

  "Yeah, I'm an overgrown Boy Scout."

  "You won't admit it. You've created this image of the indifferent, detached loner, but I know you better than you do."

  I forced the same hollow laugh. "You're a great ca-noemaker, Charlie, but a lousy judge of character."

  "All right. We're not here to protect Melanie Corrigan or anybody else, just to learn the truth. Will you help?"

  Fat raindrops splattered the windshield, prelude to a downpour. Granny slowed, then hit the brakes hard, and the old Cadillac's bald tires slid to a stop in front of Roger's house. "Tell me what to do," I said with resignation.

  "Be tough with him," Charlie ordered. "He's cracking. The murder of Sergio was an irrational, bizarre act. He's crying out, perhaps over guilt, shame, who knows? He wants to be caught. But his first reaction will be denial. He trusts and respects you. You're the one who has to do it."