Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (6 page)

The earrings 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.

“
Sí
, cobwebs. But yours,
chico
,
is thick like
cáñamo.
And
rubianco
.”

“Like hemp and almost blond,” Caramel Skin
said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek
rubianco
cáñamo
, 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 & 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.

“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 very 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.

What she said was: “Phil was the most giving
man I’ve ever known. The way he cared for his first wife when she
was terminally ill, if you could have seen that, if you all could
have seen it.” Then she turned to the jury, an actress facing her
adoring audience. “He never thought he could love again, but I
brought something to his life. And to me, he was everything—a
lover, a friend, even the father I never had. Then for him to die
like this, in his prime.”

Clever. Very clever. So well rehearsed it
didn’t look rehearsed. Explaining how a twenty-six-year-old woman
marries a fifty-five- year-old man. A father, for crying out loud.
No mention that the champagne corks were popping only six weeks
after he buried his beloved first wife. And if I bring it out on
cross, I’m a cad. It was a virtuoso performance. Even Judge Leonard
was listening, practically a first. He had been in a fine mood at
motion calendar in the morning, as well he should after Hot Touch
paid $10.40, $5.40, and $4.80.

When Dan Cefalo turned to me and said, “Your
witness,” he was smiling so broadly I almost didn’t notice that his
fly was half undone and he had buttoned his shirt into his
suitcoat.

The occasion called for brilliance. Roger
Salisbury looked at me as if I were his last friend in the world. I
approached the witness stand with a solicitous smile. I still
hadn’t made up my mind. Behind those tears I saw a flinty toughness
that I would love to bring out. But make a mistake, reduce her to
tears or hysterics, and the jury would lynch me and nail enough
zeroes on the verdict to buy an aircraft carrier. She looked
straight back at me. The full lips lost a bit of their poutiness
and set in a firm line. It’s there somewhere, I knew. But my
investigators couldn’t find it in six months and my pretrial
deposition came up empty. I couldn’t risk it now.

I turned to the judge. “Your Honor,” I said,
as if seeking his approval, “I believe it would be unfair for us to
keep Mrs. Corrigan on the stand to discuss this painful subject. We
have no questions.” Roger Salisbury sank into his chair looking
hopeless and abandoned. Men on Death Row have brighter futures.

“Very well,” Judge Leonard said, aiming a
small smile in my direction. “Mr. Cefalo, call your next
witness.”

“The plaintiff rests,” Dan Cefalo said, his
goofy grin still lighting up the room.

“Any motions?” the judge asked. We approached
the bench and the judge sent the jurors out to lunch.

“At this time, the defense moves for a
directed verdict,” I said without a great deal of conviction.

“On what ground, Mr. Lassiter?” the judge
asked.

“On the ground that there’s insufficient
evidence of proximate cause, first that the surgery caused the
aneurysm, and second that the aneurysm caused the death.”

“Denied,” the judge said before Cefalo even
opened his mouth. “The plaintiff’s expert testified to that. Whatsa
matter, Jake, it’s a jury question at least.”

I knew that. Somewhere between his Bloody
Marys and his White Russians, Dr. Watkins had stuck us on proximate
cause, at least sufficiently to beat a directed verdict, but I was
giving the judge a little preview of our defense. Oh Dr. Charles W.
Riggs, I need you now.

The judge looked over the courtroom, which
was emptying, and waved us closer to the bench. With a hand, he
signaled the court stenographer to take a hike. “You boys talk
settlement?”

A practical enough question. If he could
clear us out of the courtroom, he could spend the rest of the week
at the track.