Lassiter 01 - To Speak for the Dead (11 page)

Build a house no wind blows over.

The lawyers—tell me why a hearse horse snickers

hauling a lawyer's bones.

"Do I win a new refrigerator with a correct answer, go on to the next round? Robert Frost, maybe."

She grimaced. "Carl Sandburg."

"Funny, he admired a pretty fair trial lawyer named Lincoln. And I was hoping your taste in poetry ran more to Grecian urns than lawyers' bones."

She steered the conversation back where she wanted it. "Murder is part of criminal law, isn't it?"

That didn't stir me so she kept going. "You said the other day I had no proof. Maybe you should look at something."

She hopped up and pushed a button on the VCR and another on the small Sony TV. She sat down again and turned away. The set blinked on, a typical home movie, jerky camera, panning too quickly through a lushly appointed room. It looked like a Beverly Hills hotel suite, piano bar, Lucite furniture, starlight ceiling. No people visible, just modern, expensive furniture, some lighted artwork, and a nighttime sky indoors.

"That's the main salon of the
Cory
," Susan Corrigan said.

"The
Cory?"

"Didn't you see the boat outside?"

"Oh that. I thought it was the
Nimitz,
four thousand sailors on shore leave."

"Wouldn't that make her happy?" she asked, icily, gesturing toward the house. "The
Cory
is a custom-made Hat-teras, about eighty-two feet. One of Dad's toys."

The picture broke up, some snow, then Melanie Corrigan in a bikini on the screen, cocking a hip at the camera, pouting a come-hither look to stage left. The screen went to black for a second as a shoulder blocked the camera, a man walking into view. He was medium size, wearing swim trunks and a T-shirt, and he turned self-consciously to the camera. Roger Salisbury. If it was supposed to surprise me, it didn't.

"That's the main stateroom," Susan said.

A king-size waterbed sat on a floor of black and white tile and was illuminated from below with neon tubes. The headboard was the skyline of Miami, etched into black glass. Rock music played in the background. Roger Salisbury stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed and Melanie Corrigan began doing a striptease, if that's what you call it when you're starting out with only a black bikini that must have been made during a spandex shortage. The top was a strap slightly wider than dental floss, the bottom no bigger than your average Band-Aid. She was grinding to the music, rather expertly, some very fluid hip movements. She motioned for Roger to sit on the bed and he did, obedient little puppy.

She unhooked the halter top and squeezed her high firm breasts together, taking a deep breath as if the tiny scrap of fabric had been crushing her poor lungs to death. Acting right out of a high school play or a porno flick made on the cheap in Lauderdale. She tossed the halter at Roger. It landed on his head and slid over his nose and mouth. He could have robbed a bank in a B Western.

Next the bottom came off, and she wiggled her can in Roger's face in time with the music. She wiggled left and wiggled right, wiggled fast and wiggled slow. I had a feeling this was not her maiden cruise.

It took a minute more and then they were at it. A moment later the photographer discovered the electric zoom. First the long shot of two bodies writhing beneath the etched glass Miami skyline. Then the bodies got larger until only one body part, or two parts joined, filled the screen. Finally the camera zoomed back to show us the writhing bodies.

Susan Corrigan looked at me, her back to the screen. I was half embarrassed for her, half bored for me. Like an ex-jock in the bleachers, I'd rather play than watch. It went on for a while, then a cut and roll 'em again. The scene might have been shot another day or later the same day. If there was any dialogue, it was lost in the music laid over the action. Now Roger Salisbury was wearing a stethoscope and nothing else. Compared to Melanie Corrigan, however, he was overdressed.

Roger looked down her throat.

She said something. Ahhh.

Playing doctor. A little pantomime.

Open wide.

She did.

He took her pulse. Then she inhaled and jutted her breasts out, and he tapped her chest and listened to her lungs through the stethoscope. They seemed to pass the test.

She turned over and gave Salisbury a view of a perfectly rounded bottom. He laid his right hand on her ass and tapped it slowly with his thumb. A medical procedure I'd never seen, more like checking a melon's ripeness. Whatever its purpose, Melanie thought it hilarious. Laughing, she turned over and the camera jiggled, some jollies from the photographer, too. Then Roger felt her forehead as if the poor child was fevered, and just to be sure, he took her temperature. With something too big to have been a thermometer.

The picture broke up, came back on and went to black as someone walked by the lens. I figured it was Philip Corrigan, dealing himself in, having put the camera on a tripod. But it wasn't Corrigan. It was Hercules, albeit a short one. He reminded me of the bulldog on the hood of a Mack truck, only not as cute. One of those sides of beef you see in the gym, a body builder, slabs on top of slabs of muscle, a thick neck and sloping shoulders, a tattoo of a lightning bolt on one arm. Dark complexion, a flat, broad, mean face, drooping black moustache. His arms hung out from his sides, pushed there by his overdeveloped lats. And he was naked, revealing one part of his body not pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian proportions. So now I was watching two naked men and one naked woman. There were arms and legs entwined, a couple of glances toward the camera, and much thrusting of loins.

A quick cut and the camera angle was different. I was trying to figure out how the photographer got over the bed, looking down at the goings-on like a dance number in an old Busby Berkeley musical. Then I saw the photographer on the screen, a neat trick. He was at the foot of the bed, aiming the camera up, a man in his fifties, thinning hair and pot belly, lying on his side, stark naked, shooting a trick shot at a mirror on the ceiling over the bed. Philip Corrigan. I consulted my scorecard: three men and a woman. Again, the zoom, and Philip Corrigan disappeared from view. The screen filled with the body builder's shoulders. Covered with pimples, the telltale sign of an anabolic steroid user.

It went on for a few more minutes, then the screen faded to black and then to snow. It stayed that way.

"Well, what do you think now?" Susan Corrigan asked softly.

"I think the hand-held camera technique is more suitable to documentaries. The lighting is too harsh, the plot a mite thin. The bit with the mirror is cute, but frankly, I prefer
The Lady from Shanghai."

"Is everything a joke to you?"

"Not everything, not even this. Susan, let it go. Every family has its dirty little secrets that are best left in the closet."

"My father wasn't like that. Not before her and Roger Salisbury."

"Okay. So she corrupted him. Maybe Roger's no angel, either. But what can be gained now?"

Her eyes blazed at me. "What about catching his killers?"

That again. "I still haven't seen any proof he was killed, much less that Roger Salisbury did it. What about Mr. Universe there? What about a dozen other guys you don't even know about?"

"More lawyer's games. Your beloved client is the only one who cut Dad open the day before he died. And as far as I know, he's the only one who carried poison around in his little leather case."

"What are you talking about?"

"This." She reached into a drawer, came up with something and tossed it at me. A small leather valise, a man's pocketbook if you're the kind of guy who carries that sort of thing. A gold monogram, "R.A.S." Roger Allen Salisbury. I unzipped it. Two hypodermic needles, a clear small vial of colorless liquid, half empty. No labels, no instructions.

A nasty little package. I felt a chill. "What is it?"

"Succinylcholine, a drug used in anesthesia. It paralyzes the limbs, the lungs, too. In anesthesia, a respirator breathes for you. Without a respirator, you would just lie there and watch yourself die."

"How do you know all this? Where did this come from?"

"One question at a time, Counselor. First, I found it in Melanie's room. Hidden in a drawer with thirty pairs of black panties, which is an awful lot for someone who seldom wears any. I think she knows it's missing. Probably suspects me. That's why she changed the locks and tossed my things out. Second, I've done some research on it, had a lab test it. I'm a reporter, and I know a lot more than just box scores and yards-per-carry."

"Has this been in your possession continuously since discovering it?" Ever the lawyer, Lassiter, already thinking about chain of custody.

"The lab at Jackson Memorial took about five cc's out of the bottle. Otherwise, it's intact."

"What's this have to do with Salisbury, assuming the stuff is his?"

"Of course it's his! Melanie was screwing him, must have gotten the drug from him. She hated my father, just used him. She couldn't divorce him. She'd get nothing because of an antenuptial agreement. But if he died while married to her, she got the house, the boat, plus thirty percent of the estate."

I nodded. "Items in joint name plus the marital share."

"Right."

"So she had the motive. But that's all you can prove. For a criminal case built on circumstantial evidence, you need a lot more. Your case against Melanie is weak and you don't have anything on Salisbury. For one thing, your father didn't die of poisoning. He died of an aneurysm."

She turned her head away and blinked back a tear. "That's why I need your help."

"For what?"

"To figure out how they did it."

"Did what?"

"Oh Jake, think about it."

It was the first time she called me by my given name. I liked the sound of it.

"How they killed Dad with succinyleholine and made it look like an aneurysm," she said softly, her armor turning to tin.

I didn't buy it. "A hospital's a pretty risky place to kill somebody, doctors and nurses all around."

"That's what made it work. Who would object if Dr. Salisbury came into Dad's room after the surgery? He could have given the injection then. And who would be looking for poison when the patient dies of an aneurysm? It's a classic misdirection play. Like the old Oklahoma fumblerooski, where the center and quarterback drop the ball. Everybody goes one way and the guard grabs the ball and walks in for the touchdown."

It was crazy. No evidence. Just an angry young woman searching for villains. Blaming others for her father's descent. The old fumblerooski, for crying out loud! I looked at her. A tear came to those dark eyes and then another. I looked at the hypodermics and the tiny bottle. And back at those wet, dark eyes.

"Where do we start?" I asked.

PROXIMATE CAUSE

I was cruising on autopilot. On a very rough flight. I hadn't slept or thought about closing argument since Susan Corrigan handed me the vial and told me it was a murder weapon. I still felt it in the palm of my hand, the glass cool and smooth to the touch. Succinylcholine, a laboratory name. Like the clear liquid itself, impersonal as death.

The vial added a new dimension to Susan's bald allegation that Roger Salisbury killed her father. She had an exhibit. How juries love exhibits. The murder weapon, something to take back into the jury room and fondle.

My mind bounced it back and forth. I looked at Roger

Salisbury sitting next to me. Salt-and-pepper hair well groomed, an oval face that was nearly delicate, intelligent eyes. Almost a scholarly appearance, an overall impression of competence. He looked like what he was, a physician. A healer, not a killer. But I had seen him stripped bare— literally—and wondered if his taste in after-dark activities could lead him to murder.

That's what Susan Corrigan wanted me to think. Maybe I was playing the fool for an elaborate scheme, Susan Corrigan throwing me a curve. She could have had the mono-grammed leather valise made up in any shopping center. The liquid could have been water. She could be in cahoots with Melanie Corrigan to get me to tank the case. Or at least to distract me enough that I boot it. Hauling me over the night before closing argument. And me leaping for the bait, a wholesome dark-haired young woman, maybe underneath the Ivory soap just as mendacious as Melanie Corrigan. But I didn't have time to think about it. Dan Cefalo was clearing his throat and approaching the lectern. He looked remarkably normal in a dark blue suit and a white shirt that stayed inside his pants. He turned to Melanie Corrigan, gave her a fatherly smile, then bowed in the direction of the judge.

"May it please the court," he began, "and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. First I want to thank you all for coming down here and spending a week listening to a bunch of lawyers and doctors. I know it hasn't been easy, but without the aid of responsible citizens such as yourselves, we wouldn't have a justice system."

This is the
thank you folks
part of closing argument. It's a way to butter up the jurors, then get down to the nitty gritty: asking them to spend several million dollars of someone else's money.