by Paul Levine
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. Steady hands, 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 barstools 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, ‘I 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 Bay side, 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 earring
s 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, telaranas?”
“Cobwebs,” Caramel Skin said.
“ Si, cobwebs. But yours, chico, is thick like canamo. And rubianco.”
“Like hemp and almost blond,” Caramel Skin said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek rubianco canamo, 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-carpet types wouldn’t give a guy like me a second look. Afraid I’d spill the soup on my vest, if 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.”
“Okay already, I get the point.”
“Good. I don’t want to concern you, but the lovely widow is a real problem for us. She can make the jury forget all our medical mumbo jumbo. That gray silk dress today with the strand of white pearls. Classy but not too flashy.”
Salisbury laughed. “You ought to see her in a strapless cocktail dress.”
Uh-huh is what I say when I don’t know what to say. I would have liked Salisbury to fill me in here, but he didn’t give me any help. After a moment I asked, “Since when are you Mrs. Corrigan’s fashion consultant?”
“Oh that. I probably never told you. When Philip started seeing me for the back and leg pain, we became friendly. I wasn’t dating anybody. They were just married. He started asking me over to their house in Gables Estates. Cocktail parties, dinners, sometimes just the three of us.”
“So you know Mrs. Corrigan?”
“Melanie. Sure.”
“Melanie, is it?”
He looked at me with a what’s-the-big-deal look and I didn’t have an answer so I polished off the palomilla and thought it over. No big deal. I just would have liked to have known about it sometime before trial.
In a moment our new friends cruised back, eyes a thousand watts brighter, ready to roll. I mumbled my apologies to Miss Earrings, who, with no apparent regret, shifted her electrified look to the blandly handsome doctor. I left them there, two women with a buzz on, and the man who had entrusted his career to me, the man who hadn’t told me everything. What else, I wondered, had he left out?
I paused at the door to look back. The restaurant was filled now.
Some of the yuppies were crowding the bar, making too much noise, pushing limes into their Mexican beer, a trendy brand aged about as long as their attention spans. If you have to put lime in your beer, you might as well drink Kool-Aid.
Back at the table, one woman sat on each side of Roger Salisbury. They all laughed. I left the three of them there, the mathematical possibilities of their union crowding Melanie Corrigan’s testimony into a dusty recess of my mind.
3
THE WIDOW
“Mrs. Corrigan, do you love your husband?”
“I do.” A pause, a catch in the throat, a quiver, the beginning of a tear, then like a lake swollen by a summer storm, an overflow cascading down sculpted cheekbones. “That is, I did. I loved him ver
y much.”
Blessed timing. They don’t teach that in finishing school. Dan Cefalo continued his questioning. “Do you miss him?”
Another leading question, but only a dunce would incur the jury’s wrath by interrupting the soap opera with a news bulletin.
“Very much. Every day. We shared so much. Sometimes, when a car pulls into the driveway, I forget, and I think, well, maybe it’s Phil.”
And maybe it’s the paperboy. God, could she lay it on thick. She looked toward the jury and then away as if the memory was too much to bear. A lace handkerchief appeared out of a navy leather clutch and the big, brown, wet eyes were dabbed dry. The pain radiated from her, but I was the one who was dying. Every question launched an arrow, and every answer pierced my heart. The widow was majestic, thick russet hair swept straight back to lay bare those chiseled lines, to expose her suffering. All for the glory of justice and a seven-figure award for mental anguish, loss of society, comfort, and consortium.
“Tell us about your husband, your late husband, Mrs. Corrigan. And I know it’s a painful subject, so if you need a recess to gather yourself, please just say so.” Cefalo extended his arms toward the widow and bowed from the waist, as if she were royalty. And she did look regal, white gloves setting off a navy and white double-breasted cardigan that covered a matching skirt. Maybe the gloves hid Racy Red nail polish, already slathered on for a night of romping through Coconut Grove clubs. Maybe on cross-examination I should order her to take off the gloves and bare her claws. Sure, or maybe I should just grab a sword and mutter a hara-kiri chant.
“I don’t know where to begin, there’s so much to say,” she said, obviously knowing exactly where she would begin. I wanted her to say: He was boffing half the stewardesses in town while his first wife lay dying; he made millions bribing county commissioners to grant zoning variances; and if it weren’t for high-placed friends in Washington, he would have been indicted for tax evasion.