Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (4 page)

Salisbury knew the guy was looking at him,
now at his hands, just as he had done. Funny how hands can tell you
so much. Proud of his hands. Broad and strong. They could have
swung a pick, except there were no calluses. He had washed off the
blood, scrubbing as hard after surgery as he had before the endless
night began. Seventy-two hours with only catnaps and stale
sandwiches until the hospital cafeteria ran out. But he stood there
the whole time, one of the leaders, the chief orthopedics resident,
setting broken bones, picking glass and bullet fragments out of
wounds, calming hysterical relatives.

After showering at the hospital, he had
tossed the soiled lab coat into the trash and grabbed a blue blazer
from his locker. Now he was nursing a beer and trying to forget the
carnage. He could have gone home. Twenty-seventh Avenue was finally
open after the three-day blockade. But too tired to sleep, he wound
through unfamiliar streets and was finally lured out of the night
by the neon sign of the Tangiers on West Dixie. He would think
about it later, many times, why he stopped that night, what drew
him to such a strange and threatening place. Pickup trucks and old
Chevys jammed the parking lot. Music blared from outdoor
loudspeakers, a rhythmic, pulsating beat intended to tempt men
inside just as the singing of the Sirens drew Greek sailors onto
the rocks. It might have been the flashing sign. The throbbing
colors got right to the point –––– NUDE GIRLS 24 HOURS … NUDE GIRLS
24 HOURS –––– blinking on, blinking off, proof of bare flesh moment
after moment after moment.

The working guy was talking to him: “I say
let’em burn colored town down to the ground if they want to, no
skin offa my nose. I mean, the cops was wrong, killing one of the
coloreds, had his hands cuffed behind his back, no need for that.
But some of ‘em just looking for excuses to behave like animals.
They burned a poor Cuban alive in his car, heard it on the
radio.”

“We tried to save him,” Salisbury said
quietly.

The guy gave him a look. “Sure! You’re a
doctor. Should have known. Jesus, you musta seen it all. Wait a
minute, Sweet Jesus, here comes Miss Poster Ass. She’s worth a
twenty-dollar dance, or I’m the Prince of Wales.”

Roger Salisbury watched her walk toward them,
an inviting smile aimed his way. The other men around the small
stage hooted and slapped their thighs. Roger Salisbury lowered his
eyes and studied his drink.

“Your first time?” the man asked. Silence.
“Yeah, your first time. Loosen up. Here’s the poop. First the girls
dance out here on the bar stage. No big deal, they take it all off,
you stick a dollar bill in their garter and maybe one’ll kiss you.
In the back, where it’s darker, you got your table dances, twenty
bucks. That’s one-on-one and I may buy me an up-close-and-personal
visit with Miss Poster Ass. Haven’t been able to get here all week
what with the jungle bunnies staging their block parties.”

On stage now, grinding to the music, no
longer the Kansas cheerleader.
Ev-ry-bod-y’s talk-in’ ’bout the
new sound. Funny, but it’s still rock and roll to me.
In a few
moments, the bikini top was off, firm breasts bounding free. The
G-string came next, and then she arched her back, bent over, and
propped her hands on her knees looking away from the men. The
poster ass wiggled clockwise as if on coasters, then stopped and
wiggled counterclockwise. Salisbury stared as if hypnotized. The
ass quivered once, fluttered twice with contractions that Roger
Salisbury felt deep in his own loins, then stopped six inches from
his face. His fatigue gone, the swirl of blood and bodies a dreamy
fog, Roger Salisbury fantasized that the perfect ass wiggled only
for him. He didn’t see the other men, some laughing, some
bantering, others conjuring up their own steamy visions. None of
the others, though, seemed spellbound by an act as old as the
species.

The dance done, the girl smiled at Roger
Salisbury, an open interested smile, he thought. And though she
smiled at each man, again he thought it was only for him. She
sashayed from one end of the small stage to the other, collecting
dollar bills in a black garter while propping a red, high-heeled
shoe on the rim between the stage and the bar. Other than the
gaiter and the shoes, she was naked, but her face showed neither
shame nor seduction. She could have been passing the collection
plate at the First Lutheran Church of Topeka. Roger Salisbury
slipped a five-dollar bill into her garter, removing it from his
wallet with two fingers, never taking his eyes off the girl. A neat
trick, but he could also tie knots in thread with a thumb and one
finger inside a matchbox. Great hands. The strong, steady hands of
a surgeon.

Her smile widened as she leaned close to him,
her voice a moist whisper on his ear. “I’d like to dance for you.
Just you.” And he believed it.

Roger Salisbury believed everything she said
that night. That she was a model down on her luck, that her name
was Autumn Rain, that all she wanted was a good man and a family.
They talked in the smoky shadows of a corner table and she danced
for him alone. Twenty dollars and another twenty as a tip. He
didn’t lay a hand on her. At nearby tables men grasped tumbling
breasts, and the girls stepped gingerly from their perches in
four-inch spikes to sit on customers’ laps, writhing on top of
them, grinding down with bare asses onto the fully clothed groins
of middle-aged men. “Didja come?” the heavy girl at the next table
whispered to her customer, already reaching for a tip.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Roger
Salisbury said, shaking his head. “It’s half prostitution and half
masturbation.” He gestured toward the overweight girl who was
gathering her meager outfit and sneaking a peek at the president’s
face on the bill she had glommed from a guy in faded jeans. “You
don’t do that, do you?” Salisbury asked.

She smiled.
Of course not
, the look
said.

He asked her out.

Against the rules, she said. Some guys, they
think if you’re an exotic dancer, it means for fifty bucks you give
head or whatever.

But I’m different, Roger Salisbury said.

She cocked her head to one side and studied
him. They all thought they were different, but she knew there were
only two kinds of men, jerks and jerk-offs. Oh, some made more
money and didn’t get their fingernails dirty. She’d seen them,
white shirts and yellow ties, slumming it, yukking it up. But
either way, grease monkeys or stockbrokers, once those gates opened
and the blood rushed in, turning their worms into stick shifts,
they were either jerks or jerk-offs. The jerk-offs were mostly
young, wise guys without a pot to piss in, spending all their bread
on wheels and women, figuring everything in a skirt—or G-string—was
a pushover. Jerks were saps, always falling in love and wanting to
change you, make an honest woman out of you. Okay, put me in
chains, if the price is right. This guy, jerk all the way.

I’m a doctor, he said.

Oh, she said, sounding impressed.

He told her how he had patched and mended
those caught in the city’s crossfire, how he wanted to help people
and be a great doctor. She listened with wide eyes and nodded as if
she knew what he felt deep inside and she smiled with practiced
sincerity. A doctor, she figured, made lots of money, not realizing
that a resident took home far less than an exotic dancer and got
his hands just as dirty.

She looked directly into Roger Salisbury’s
eyes and softened her own. He looked into her eyes and thought he
saw warmth and beauty of spirit.

Roger Salisbury, it turned out, was better at
reading X rays than the looks in women’s eyes.

When the witness hesitated, I drummed my pen
impatiently against my legal pad. Made a show of it. Not that I was
in a hurry. I had all day, all week. The Doctors’ Medical Insurance
Trust pays by the hour and not minimum wage. Take your sweet time.
The drum roll was only for effect, to remind the jury that the
witness didn’t seem too sure of himself. And to make him squirm a
bit, to rattle him.

First the pen
clop-clop-clopping
against the legal pad. Then the slow, purposeful walk toward the
witness stand, let him feel me there as he fans through his papers
looking for a lost report. Then the stare, the high-voltage Jake
Lassiter laser beam stare. Melt him down.

I unbuttoned my dark suitcoat and hooked a
thumb into my belt. Then I stood there, 220 pounds of ex-football
player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, leaning against the
faded walnut rail of the witness stand, home to a million sweaty
palms.

Only forty seconds since the question was
asked, but I wanted it to seem like hours. Make the jury soak up
the silence. The only sounds were the whine of the air conditioning
and the paper shuffling of the witness. Young lawyers sometimes
make the mistake of filling that black hole, of clarifying the
question or rephrasing it, inadvertently breathing life into the
dead air that hangs like a shroud over a hostile witness. What
folly. The witness is zipped up because he’s worried. He’s
thinking, not about his answer, but of the reason for the question,
trying to outthink you, trying to anticipate the next question. Let
him stew in his own juice.

Another twenty seconds of silence. One juror
yawned. Another sighed.

Judge Raymond Leonard looked up from the
Daily Racing Form
, a startled expression as if he just
discovered he was lost. I nodded silently, assuring him there was
no objection awaiting the wisdom that got him through night classes
at Stetson Law School. The judge was a large man in his fifties,
bald and moon-faced and partial to maroon robes instead of
traditional black. History would never link him with Justices
Marshall or Cardozo, but he was honest and let lawyers try their
cases with little interference from the bench.

Earlier, at a sidebar conference, the judge
suggested we recess at two-thirty each day. He could study the
written motions in the afternoon, he said with a straight face,
practically dusting off his binoculars for the last three races at
Hialeah. A note on the bench said, “Hot Enough, Rivera up, 5-1,
ninth race.” In truth, the judge was better at handicapping the
horses than recognizing hearsay.

Another thirty seconds. Then a cleared
throat, the sound of a train rumbling through a tunnel, and the
white-haired witness spoke. “That depends,” Dr. Harvey Watkins said
with a gravity usually reserved for State of the Union
messages.

The jurors turned toward me, expectant looks.
I widened my eyes, all but shouting, “Bullshit.” Then I worked up a
small spider-to-the-fly smile and tried to figure out what the hell
to ask next. What I wanted to say was,
Three hundred bucks an
hour, and the best you can do is “that depends.” One man is dead,
my client is charged with malpractice, and you’re giving us the old
softshoe, “that depends.
”

What I said was, “Let’s try it this way.” An
exasperated tone, like a teacher trying to explain algebra to a
chimpanzee. “When a surgeon is performing a laminectomy on the
L3-L4 vertebrae, can he see what he’s doing with the rongeur, or
does he go by feel?”

“As I said before, that depends,” Dr. Watkins
said with excessive dignity. Like most hired guns, he could make a
belch sound like a sonnet. White hair swept back, late sixties,
retired chief of orthopedics at Orlando Presbyterian, he had been a
good bone carpenter in his own right until he lost his nerves to an
ice-filled river of Stolichnaya. Lately he talked for pay on the
traveling malpractice circuit. Consultants, they call themselves.
Whores, other doctors peg them. When I defended criminal cases, I
thought my clients could win any lying contest at the county fair.
Now I figure doctors run a dead heat with forgers and confidence
men.

No use fighting it. Just suck it up and ask,
“Depends on what?” Waiting for the worst now, asking an open-ended
question on cross-examination.

“Depends on what point you’re talking about.
Before you enter the disc space, you can see quite clearly. Then,
once you lower the rongeur into it to remove the nucleus pulposus,
the view changes. The disc space is very small, so of course, the
rongeur is blocking your view.”

“Of course,” I said impatiently, as if I’d
been waiting for that answer since Ponce de León landed on the
coast. “So at that point you’re working blind?”

I wanted a
yes
. He knew that I wanted
a
yes
. He’d rather face a hip replacement with a case of the
shakes than give me a
yes
.

“I don’t know if I’d characterize it exactly
that way …”

“But the surgeon can’t see what he’s doing at
that point, can he?” Booming now, trying to force a good
old-fashioned one-word answer. Come on, Dr. Harvey Wallbanger, the
sooner you get off the stand, the sooner you’ll be in the
air-conditioned shadows of Sally Russell’s Lounge across the
street, cool clear liquid sliding down the throat to cleanse your
godforsaken soul.

“You’re talking about a space maybe half a
centimeter,” the doctor responded, letting his basso profundo fill
the courtroom, not backing down a bit. “Of course you don’t have a
clear view, but you keep your eye on the rongeur, to be aware of
how far you insert it into the space. You feel for resistance at
the back of the space and, of course, go no farther.”

“My point exactly, doctor. You’re watching
the rongeur, you’re feeling inside the disc space for resistance.
You’re operating blind, aren’t you? You and Dr. Salisbury and every
orthopedic surgeon who’s ever removed a disc …”

“Objection! Argumentative and repetitious.”
Dan Cefalo, the plaintiff’s lawyer, was on his feet now, hitching
up his pants even as his shirttail flopped out. He fastened his
third suitcoat button into the second hole. “Judge, Mr. Lassiter is
making speeches again.”