To speak for the dead

16

When you live outside the law, you forfeit certain privileges. Like calling the police when you need them. In these parts, drug dealers are frequently robbed. Sometimes by other drug dealers, sometimes by cops. It's a fact of life that dopers won't blow the whistle. Their cars get blown up, their houses riddled with automatic weapons, their drugs and cash stolen. They write off the losses as part of overhead.

So here we were, a couple of upstanding, taxpaying citizens, a journalist and a lawyer, unable to call the cops. A smart cop would ask too many questions. You say this drug might have killed Philip Corrigan. Say, wasn't his body stolen over the weekend? A dumb cop wouldn't do us any good.

We cleaned up the mess. Nothing else was missing. Even the X-rated tape was still on the shelf, tucked away in a stack of exercise videos and feature films.

I tried to put two and two together. I kept getting Melanie Corrigan. The drug came from Melanie's bedroom, but Susan found it more than a year after Philip Corrigan died. Why keep a murder weapon around?

To use it again.

Maybe, I told myself. But Charlie Riggs says suc-cinylcholine will lose its potency unless it's kept cold. Maybe Melanie doesn't know that. Or maybe she doesn't care. Maybe Roger Salisbury had already used it to kill her husband.

Roger a killer? No way. Not even concerned that we've got the body. A trifle weird, maybe. Walking a little close to the border of Fantasyland, as Charlie Riggs suggested. But not a killer.

Okay, I try something else. When Melanie finally gets around to putting on some underwear, she notices the drug's gone. It must incriminate her, or she wouldn't care about it. She suspects Susan, her nemesis. She has to get back the evidence to get rid of it, so she has Sergio bust up the front door of the cabana to make it look like a two-bit B amp;E. Or what was it the Nixon White House called Watergate? A third-rate burglary.

But what if I'm wrong about Roger? Maybe he and Melanie snuffed the old man. She keeps the drug as insurance against him fingering her. When it's gone, she tells him to get it back or they're both looking at a Murder One.

I didn't buy it. Maybe there was no burglary. Maybe Susan Corrigan ruffled her own sheets, got rid of the drug for her own reasons. But looking at the tears in her eyes as she cradled the empty golf bag, that made no sense to me, none at all.

I didn't want Susan staying in the little cabana, not with the door split open, so we headed to Coconut Grove and my coral rock fortress. I told her to wait outside under a jaca-randa tree. Then I opened the front door slowly, stepping into the stale air, seeing shapes in the darkness. Looking for a karate freak crouched behind the sofa, waiting for the hardwood floor to creak. But the shadows held only dust and the only sounds came from a dripping faucet.

I turned on the lights and Susan stepped in boldly, and with a look of amusement, examined the spare furnishings. Her eyes sized up my little house like a broker on commission. She might wear sweats and sneakers, but underneath, she was still a rich girl who knew Chippendale from flea market.

"What's a guy like you doing in a place like this?" she asked, a lilt to her voice.

"What's a girl like you doing with a guy like me?"

She just smiled and stripped off her jeans. The adrenaline rush had ebbed, but I had enough energy left to carry her up the narrow staircase.

This time she let me take the lead, maybe content that she had already established her strength and independence. Once, she whispered, "Never stop," and at the end, she gave a yelp usually reserved for overtime victories in playoff games, and I let go with a little whoopee-ti-ti-yo myself. She fell asleep in my arms, her face innocent as a Norman Rockwell bride. But I was wide awake. I tucked her in and went downstairs to think.

Sometimes the best tactic is to wade right into it, pour gasoline on the flames, and see what's left after the explosion. First though, I poured myself a Grolsch. Then I dialed Roger Salisbury's number. It was nearly midnight.

"Jake, old boy, great to hear your voice. Just talking about you." Old boy. That was a new one, maybe into a polo-playing phase. Wonder if he'll be as chipper after I accuse him of icing Philip Corrigan. But I never got the chance. He said, "There's somebody here who'd like to say hello."

There was a short pause, a woman's soft laugh, then a silken voice. "Jacob Lassiter, how nice of you to call. We're having some champagne and caviar and other edible things. You can join us if you like. Two's company, three's a party."

Another laugh and Roger Salisbury was back on the line. "Jake, I'm so damn happy. Just like the old days. And I'll be forever grateful to you. You're a real friend."

"Sure Roger. Sure."

A little giggling, two sweethearts pressed up to the phone, ear to ear. Roger breathed a long whoosh into the phone and said, "Melanie, that can wait, whoa! Hey Jake, I got a hard-on that could plant the flag on I wo Jima."

"Semper Fi," I said, thinking these two are made for each other. She accuses him of murder; he wants to stick her with a needle. One day, he's punching her out; next day, she's running it up his flagpole.

I wished him well, hung up, and tried to sort it out. Now I believed more than ever in Roger's innocence.. If Roger was in it with Melanie Corrigan, he wouldn't let me know she was there. The two of them would go through the ruse of hating each other, particularly if they sensed an investigation would start up after the body disappeared. Unless it was a double twist, the old trick from "The Purloined Letter," making the fruit of the crime so obvious that it's hard to see. Too complicated. I rejoined Susan and fell asleep thinking about it, hearing a woman's laughter-mocking me-in my dreams.

At mid-morning Susan and I drove back to her cabana to look around in the light of day. I heard a motor cranking up as we walked around the house, and we caught sight of a Boston Whaler Temptation, a twenty-two-foot outboard, pulling away from the dock. Handling the wheel was a chunk of muscle who looked familiar and stretched out on a cooler in front of the console was the bikini-clad body of Melanie Corrigan. The widow had covered a lot of territory in the last twenty-four hours.

We ducked behind a poinciana tree and watched them slowly cross the lagoon into open water.

"Gone fishin'," I said.

"Doubt it," Susan said. "I don't think that woman's ever been on the Whaler. It's really a tender for the yacht. The man is Sergio Machado-Alvarez."

"We've met. Where do you suppose they're going?"

Susan shaded her eyes against the sun and shrugged. The Whaler headed into the bay between the channel markers, lazing at low speed. Still within sight, it dropped anchor.

"Great. We may have enough time if they stay put," I said.

The ancient Olds resisted, but I peeled rubber like a teenage punk and we slid around curves on the winding road to the marina at Matheson Hammock barely two miles away. The dockmaster there was an old client, but not exactly blue chip.

Bluegill Ovelman was shirtless and barefoot. He had a belly like a rain barrel and hands like grappling hooks. He was an old salt, an ex-commercial fisherman who earned his ex the third time he was arrested by the Marine Patrol. I kept him out of jail each time the patrol found a mess of undersize Florida lobsters in his cooler. The last time I persuaded the jury that Bluegill measured his catch in centimeters instead of inches, and being a mite poor at algebra, got confused on the conversion tables. Tired of using his drinking money to post bond, he retired and now tended rich men's yachts at the marina.

"Ey Counselor!" Bluegill Ovelman grinned. His cheeks were redder than a broiled lobster, and the lines under his eyes could map the trails to the Jack Daniel's distillery. "Wanna take the little lady fishing?" He eyed Susan Corrigan, who gave him a smile that he wasn't likely to see on his best day.

"I hate fishing and you know it," I lied. "I like my seafood caught, cleaned, and cooked by someone else."

This was a necessary routine, a dance we'd done before. He called me a leather-shoed, high-rise, pickpocket shyster and I called him a no-count, whiskey-riddled, lobster-poaching bottom feeder. Then he gave me a hug and asked what I wanted. I wanted a boat and a sailboard and he gave me both, an old Chris Craft inboard he used as a tow boat and a banged-up Mistral windsurfing rig he tossed onto the deck. I borrowed an old pair of his swim trunks that had to be a size forty-four and kept hitching them up as we motored into the bay.

"I wouldn't do any swimming today," Bluegill Ovelman shouted as I leaned on the throttle. "Water's full of men-of-war. Big ones, too. Enough poison for a week's room and board at Jackson Memorial."

In fifteen minutes we were half a mile from the Whaler, trying to be inconspicuous. I dropped anchor and peered through binoculars. Melanie Corrigan was still soaking up rays. Sergio was bent over the starboard side, away from us. He had a gaff or a fishing rod or a net in his hand. Too far to be sure.

There was only one way to get closer without attracting attention. It was awkward, but I rigged a six-square-meter sail onto a sixteen-foot mast, nearly falling over the rub rail. I dropped the board over the side, jumped in, and jammed the mast into the universal joint while treading water. The water was warm and clear. Susan stayed in the boat and looked at me skeptically. "Do you know what you're do-ing?"

"Trust me. I've sailed from Key Biscayne to Bimini on one of these."

I uphauled the sail in a measly ten knots of wind, and tugging at my oversize drawers, I sailed closer to the Whaler. Out of my customary charcoal gray suit, standing in the shadow of the sail, I figured they wouldn't recognize me. Just another bozo sailing standing up.

I sailed cautiously, eyeing dozens of floating purple-blue sacs with poison-packed tails trailing underneath. Our waters are filled with biters, shockers, and stingers. Sharks, of course, are biters. You see them sometimes near Virginia

Key on Key Biscayne, feeding a mile or so offshore. They seldom bother anyone. There are Atlantic rays, some weighing as much as a good-sized running back, and their tails pack over two hundred volts of electricity. They can explode out of the water and scare the bejesus out of sailors and windsurfers alike. Then, each winter, we get the Portuguese men-of-war, prehistoric animals of unearthly beauty with their iridescent bluish-purple sacs and crests of orangish red. For those lured to the luminous sac, there is only betrayal. Underneath the water, hidden from view, are dozens of tentacles, undulating with the currents, straining to inject their poison into those seduced by the beauty.

I tipped the mast forward to head downwind and sailed off the stern of the Whaler. Sergio was still bent over the side, a net now visible in his hand. I saw a fishing rod jammed into a rod holder. Okay, maybe after some grouper. I wanted to get closer, so I jibed and came back the other way. About a hundred yards away, I trimmed the sail and tried to pick up a little speed. I wanted to pass by without taking too long to do it, not give them a good look at me. It would have worked, too, if I hadn't dropped my drawers. Trying not to draw attention to yourself is hard to do when your bare ass is staring at the people you would just as soon avoid.

Not wanting to make a further spectacle of myself, I headed back to our boat where Susan Corrigan was shaking her head. "Showing off for the widow?" she asked as I climbed aboard.

"Just distracting her," I replied. "A diversion from my adorable face."

"Maybe she recognizes both ends of you," Susan said without the hint of a smile.

"If that's a question, the answer is no."

She measured that one, believed me, and we took the Chris Craft back to the marina. Mission bungled. I still had no idea why Melanie was at Roger's house last night or on the bay with Sergio today. But I was starting to get the idea that the lady had a plan for everything and everybody. Inviting me to her house had to be part of the plan. I wished I knew what part.

Susan and I headed to Coconut Grove, the Olds 442 purring in third gear. I pulled into the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree in front of my house, and she turned to me.

"Jake, we have to talk."

"Uh-huh."

"About the other night."

"The other night?"

"Don't be dense! At your Granny's. And last night, in your shoebox there behind the weeds. Have you forgotten?"

I put the stick into neutral and turned off the ignition. The engine groaned and died. "I haven't forgotten. I remember every parry and thrust."

"That's not what I mean. Don't you think we should talk about how we feel about each other?"

Uh-oh. I should have known. Somehow I assumed that Susan Corrigan was different from other women. Which she was, of course, in certain respects. She cared less about clothes than whether to pass or run on third-and-four. But she was still a woman… and women want to talk about relationships. I went into my big, dumb guy routine. It comes naturally.

"I'm not too good at postcoital conversation," I said.

"I know," she said compassionately. "Like most men, you have trouble expressing your emotions."

"Not all of them. Anger I'm good at."

She scowled and waited. I had one hand on the door handle, but she wasn't stirring. Trapped.

"Jake, if it helps, I'm not too good at this either. But here goes. I want you to know I wouldn't have crawled into your bed unless I felt something for you. Something more than a physical attraction. I don't know how much or where it's going. But it's real, and I wanted you to know."

She waited some more.

I was silent. Overhead, a snowy egret headed toward the Everglades. Free to roam. I fidgeted, and the old leather upholstery squeaked underneath me.

"The ball is in your court, Counselor," Susan Corrigan said.

"I appreciate what you said. Thank you."

"Thank you? You big lummox! Are there any feelings inside that block of granite that sits on your shoulders? I am so tired of commitment-phobic men who panic when things get too good. Are you afraid of love, Jake? Is that it, are you one of those guys who sabotages a relationship when it gets too close?"

I looked down and noticed I was stomping on the brake pedal. My right hand had the gearshift in a death grip. The car seemed to shrink around me, caught in one of those machines that pulverizes a two-ton sedan into a block of scrap metal the size of a sofa. "Don't you think you're overreacting to my limited ability to express myself?" I asked.

"Is that code for inaccessibility and lack of emotional depth?"

"No. You're important to me, Susan. There's so much going on right now that I haven't had a chance to figure it all out. But you've gotten to me, right through the granite. You challenge me. You make me think about the way I live, my work, everything. You turn me on, and you light me up. But it's not even halftime. Let's go into the locker room, then see what happens in the second half."

She smiled. "Not a bad speech. Not a great speech, but it'll do. .."

Then I leaned down and kissed her, and she grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head back. "… For now," she said, pushing me toward the door.

A ringing phone greeted us in the little house. Charlie Riggs was on the line, breathing hard. "Thank God you're there. There's trouble, Jake, and his name's Abe Socolow."

Oh no, Socolow.

"They must have followed me here," Charlie said. "Two investigators from the State Attorney's Office plus Socolow. It's his case."

"What, a lousy grave theft?"

"No Jake, the murder of Philip Corrigan."

That took the air out of me. "Where are you, Charlie?"

"At Jane's house."

"Jane?"

"Jane! Jane Lassiter, your granny, for pete's sake."

"Oh." The last time Granny was called Jane, the Wright Brothers were still tuning pianos.

"Don't worry, Jake. I'm buying her out and I won't give you up."

"Slow down, Charlie. What happened? Who's there?"

"Socolow and two of his investigators are on the front porch. This is my one phone call, just like in the movies. Best I can figure, MacKenzie heard I was in the lab after hours. Lord knows how, he never works past five. Anyway, he busted balls on the toxicology staff. They gave him the liver and brain samples, all tested positive for succinic acid and choline. So Socolow put a tail on me. They figured I had the body. I'm giving it to them. We would have done it sooner or later anyway, and they promise no charges for the grave robbery."

"Does Socolow know you're calling me?"

"Yeah, but just as a lawyer. He doesn't know you were in the cemetery. Like I said, I won't give you up. He can't flip me."

"Relax, Charlie. You sound like Jimmy Cagney."

"I'm so sorry, Jake. This couldn't have happened ten years ago. Fugaces labuntur anni. You wake up one morning and you're old."

I thought Charlie was about to cry, then through the phone, I heard the unmistakable sound of Granny's screen door slamming shut. Then a voice, raspy and disagreeable, a voice from the past.

"You're one rockin' rollin' mouthpiece, Jake, but you got your dick on the chopping block this time."

"Hello, Abe," I said. "Long time."

I pictured him on the other end of the line, smirking malevolently. Abraham Socolow was lean and balding, sallow of face and unpleasant of disposition. He was born mad at the world, and nothing had happened in the next forty-four years to change his mind. He believed that his fellow man was a miscreant until proven innocent. As chief of major crimes in the State Attorney's Office, he also believed it was his mission in life to personally convict and send away the worst of the low-life slimeballs who committed felonies in the twenty-seven municipalities of Dade County, Florida.

Every prosecutor's office has one Abe Socolow but could use ten. He viewed the job as a calling, not as a stepping stone to a cushy life defending drug dealers. Abe Socolow was smart, tough, mean, and unforgiving. And messianic. He considered plea-bargaining a sacrilege, probation unthinkable, and second chances were for basketball players at the free throw line.

As much as Socolow detested robbers, rapists, and druggies, he had a special contempt for murderers. On a chart above his green metal desk in a tiny office that smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes was a poster with mug shots of fifty-eight men and three women. Sixty-one buckets of slime, Socolow liked to say. A diagonal slash cut across five of the faces and a caricature of Socolow's beakish face peeked over the top of each slash. "Slimebusters," the poster said in red ink, drawn to look like drops of blood.

The greatest anguish in Socolow's life was that he had convicted sixty-one slimeballs of first degree murder but only thirty-eight had been sentenced to death, and of those, only five had been executed. The rest were tied up in endless appeals. When I was a public defender, Socolow confided to me that he sometimes dreamed he would die before his murderers, a vision that left him frightened and alone. It was the only time I knew him to confess weakness of any kind.

"You gonna defend him, Jake?"

"Defend who?"

"Hey, don't jerk me off. Roger Salisbury. Dr. X, the 201 great white defendant, purveyor of poison, seducer of women…"

"You writing headlines now, Abe?"

"No, just getting indictments and convictions."

"What's the charge?"

He laughed. "I'd say Murder One after the grand jury meets tomorrow."

"You got a corpus delicti?"

Another laugh, like a horse's whinny. "Right here on ice, along with some hog snapper."

"And a weapon?" I asked. Might as well do some pretrial discovery if he was in a talkative mood.

"Implements of the crime. About an hour ago, we served a warrant on Salisbury's house. Found a real interesting vial with two hypodermics. Lab will have it back tonight. Wanna bet on the contents?"

So that's what happened. A lot of things about my late-night phone call to Roger's house were coming into focus.

"Sure I'll bet. I'll bet you got the search warrant based on an affidavit from a charming widow. I'll bet she swore she saw the stuff in Salisbury's house within the last twenty-four hours."

"What of it?"

"She planted it there!" I thundered. "Last night. I know she was there. She wanted me to know she was there. It corroborates her affidavit. But I also know where she got the vial and the hypodermics and it wasn't from Roger."

"I'm listening," Socolow said.

But I wasn't talking. Melanie Corrigan must have known I wouldn't drag Susan into it. Susan would swear the drug came from Melanie's bedroom but could not prove it. That left Susan holding the drug. Roger was trapped, but I was too. Nowhere to turn. Finally I said, "Roger Salisbury isn't a murderer. He may look at life through a zipper, but last time I checked, that wasn't a capital crime."

"Fine, Lassiter, argue that to the jury. And this is what I'll argue. Roger Salisbury is banging his patient's wife. He asks her to kill her husband. She refuses. He has access to a dangerous anesthetic. The husband dies after routine surgery. The anesthetic is found in the doctor's home and traces are present in the corpse. That's our case, a simple, straightforward path to Murder One."

"Anything else?"

"Only this. It's premeditated. It's a cold-blooded, calculated murder for lust and money. It's a heinous, atrocious crime without any pretense of moral or legal justification. You know where I'm heading, doncha Jake, old buddy."

I wasn't his old buddy but I knew where he was heading. He was reciting Section 921.141. Like the Pledge of Allegiance, he knew the death penalty statute by heart.

"I know. You want twelve men, good and true, not just six."

"You got it. Warming up the hot seat at Raiford."

Abe Socolow wanted me to sweat. And I was sweating. But thinking, too. His case all wrapped up like that. Something was missing. The same thing Charlie Riggs and I couldn't figure out: How could Roger have killed Philip Corrigan- how could anyone?-if the cause of death was a spontaneous rupture of the aorta?

But if I was right, if nobody killed Philip Corrigan, why would Melanie frame Roger? It made no sense. She only needed Roger out of the way to cover her own tracks. If her husband had died of natural causes, there would be nothing to hide, nothing to gain.

So I was back at square one. I didn't know what caused Philip Corrigan's death, or who. And I didn't know the answer to Abe Socolow's first question. I didn't know if Roger wanted me to defend him. After all, if I hadn't dug up the body, there probably wouldn't be a murder charge. If I were Roger, I wouldn't hire me; I'd sue me.