To speak for the dead

29

I was playing a wicked first base, stretching this way and that, digging low throws out of the dirt, trying to avoid pulling a hamstring. The shortstop was a check bouncer with a weak wing. The third baseman was a bunco artist who threw hard but wild. The second baseman was a veteran, three falls for DUI, but I didn't know much about his arm. Every grounder trickled through his legs and into right field.

Seven days in the Dade County Stockade. Like a vacation. No phones, no partners' meetings, no hearings with cantankerous judges and disagreeable clients. Almost as good as a week-long cruise to St. Thomas, although chipped beef on toast is seldom served on the S. S. Norway. The stockade is different from the county jail, that dungeon attached to the Justice Building. The jail is for your hard guys-robbers, killers, rapists, and multikilo dopers. Here, just a bunch of misdemeanants, including my own contemptuous self.

I had just done my best imitation of a Nureyev split, scooping up a shin buster in time to nab a three-hundred-pound grocer doing ninety days for selling pork loins as kosher lamb chops. The applause from my teammates did not break my eardrums. "Good grab, shyster," the second baseman declared for the group.

Then, a familiar voice behind me: "Did I hear something crack or you just fart?"

I turned around. Now coaching first base for the Stockade Short Timers, Abraham Socolow.

"Hey, Abe. What'd they get you for? Purloining state-owned paper clips?"

He didn't laugh. "Looks like you been working on your tan."

"Yeah, lifting, too," I said. "Gonna get strong again. Maybe even take up karate like your favorite witness."

"Funny you mention him," he said, as if it weren't funny at all. "Machado-Alvarez is in Mount Sinai, got some weird sickness."

"I'll send flowers."

"You'll do better than that. You'll go there with me while I take a statement."

"You deputizing me?" I asked, keeping an eye on the runner at second, a shoplifter who would steal anything, including third base, if given the chance.

"He was busting up some boards at a karate exhibition over at Convention Hall, suddenly gets a fever, the shits, then he's paralyzed. One of the Beach cops working security ID'ed Salisbury hanging around the stage just before macho man did his stuff. I'll need to talk to Salisbury. Thought you'd want to be present. As usual, old buddy, I'm going out of my way to do you a favor."

Next time he does me a favor, I'll probably do a month in solitary. The pitcher, a pickpocket, called a conference on the mound. He slipped the ball to the shortstop, who hid it in his glove then tagged the runner leading off second. Time was called, the runner whimpered, and there ensued some plea bargaining with the umpire, a trusty.

"I can't leave," I told Socolow. "Got another three days to satisfy the judge."

"Let's go. I sprung you."

I put on my best Edward G. Robinson. "You sprung me? You dirty screw. I was going over the wall tonight with the boys. What'll they think?"

He didn't smile; he didn't scowl, just the same straight-faced look. Ten years and he has yet to laugh at one of my jokes.

With Socolow running interference, we sailed through the paperwork for my return to society. We headed east in his government Chrysler-four doors, blackwalls-toward Miami Beach. Abe wore a dark three-piece suit with his Phi Beta Kappa pin slung from a vest pocket. I wore a blue chambray shirt with a nine-digit number. If we went to a Coconut Grove club, I'd be considered highly trendy and he'd be stashed next to the kitchen with a busload of retirees from Century Village. We took the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which connects the mainland with Arthur Godfrey Road on

Miami Beach. It's a great drive, high above Biscayne Bay, sailboats swooping beneath the pillars of the bridge, a fine view of the white and pink buildings of Miami Beach. From the top of the causeway you appreciate the fragility of that long, skinny sandbar with the bay on one side, the vast ocean on the other.

On the way Socolow told me he'd asked Charlie Riggs to meet us there. I thought that over a second. "Why not the ME? He's the guy on your side."

Socolow was silent. Like a good soldier, he wouldn't squawk about intramural warfare. Then he surprised me. "Maybe too much on my side."

I let it go. But he didn't. "MacKenzie's a turd," he said stiffly.

I had noticed a certain scatological bent to Abe's patter lately, but this was not the time to question whether he had been toilet trained at the appropriate age.

"A turd?" I delicately inquired.

"I can't prove it, but I think he cooked those chromatographic tests that night in the morgue, the guys who died in surgery. He wouldn't let me near Blumberg all night."

Why was he telling me this?

"You're probably surprised I'm telling you this," he said.

Mind reader.

"There won't be a new trial," Socolow continued. "The widow refuses to testify."

"You could lean on her," I suggested, hoping he'd already tried and failed. "You've done it before with reluctant witnesses."

"Not in a case like this," he said. "What's it mean, Jake, 342 if a woman won't testify against a man she swore killed her husband?"

I thought about it. "Different possibilities. That she knows the defendant didn't do it. Or the defendant did it and she helped him. Or she knows who did it and she's afraid a trial would bring that out."

Abe Socolow didn't say a word, just nodded to himself, watched the causeway straight ahead, and kept both hands on the wheel, at ten o'clock and two o'clock, just the way they teach you. Some guys play it strictly by the book.

Charlie Riggs was standing inside the double doors of the ICU talking to a young doctor in a white lab coat. The doctor was short and pale with a bushy, unkempt beard. Charlie stroked his own beard; the young doctor stroked his. Charlie barely noticed our arrival. No introductions, we just picked up listening.

"He went fast," the doctor said with a shrug. "Ambulance brought him in, eyes bulging, stomach pain, vomiting, diarrhea, stiff joints, then paralysis. We tried to stabilize him. Barely got the IV in. Bang! Liver and kidneys fail, goes into respiratory arrest."

"Classic indicia of food poisoning," Charlie said dispassionately. "We used to see two or three deaths a year, green beans at church picnics. Botulism."

The two doctors kept talking, ignoring us. There wasn't much two lawyers could add anyway.

"That's what we thought," the doctor said. "But we checked it out. Last two meals were banquet style for the karate convention. Three hundred people, no one else even burped."

Charlie scratched his beard. The young doctor did the same. I didn't have a beard, so I ran a hand through my shaggy hair. Socolow didn't have much hair, so he lit a cigarette, then ground it into the tile after a nurse wagged a finger at him.

"Have you checked the body for punctures, fresh injections?" Charlie asked.

"Sure did, after Mr. Socolow told us his suspicions. Noth-ing.

Charlie Riggs turned to Abe Socolow. They had worked together in the past, shared a mutual respect, even if Charlie thought Abe was a little sharp around the edges. "What was he doing just before he was stricken?"

"Best we can figure," Socolow said, "he just finished chopping up a stack of boards with his bare hands." Socolow looked at me. "Except nobody slugged him afterwards."

"I see," Charlie said. He was the only one who did. "I think I'll take a drive to Convention Hall."

I was sleeping in my own bed with two pillows for company when four headlights glared malevolently through my front windows, and two horns blared. I rolled over and looked at the clock. The green digital numbers flashed from 2:57 to 2:58 as my feet hit the floor. Downstairs, a flashing of high beams. Maybe the cops picking me up. Maybe I really did go over the wall.

I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the front door. Granny Lassiter and Charlie Riggs.

"Sorry to disturb you, Jake," Charlie said, sounding not a bit sorry.

"Let me guess," I said groggily, "you want my permission to marry this woman. Forget it. Elope if you like."

"I'm game," Granny said. "Only fellow my age I know still got lead in his pencil."

"C'mon Jake," Charlie commanded, his face serious, no twinkle in his eye. "Let's take a ride and talk."

If Charlie wanted to talk, I wanted to listen. I slipped on an old pair of gym shorts, running shoes, and a gray T-shirt, stepped into the humid night, and slid into the front passenger seat of Granny's mammoth 1969 Cadillac. Over the bay, lightning flashed and distant thunder followed, a thunderstorm brewing in the southeast, headed our way. Granny had the engine running and Charlie was already in the back. Before I had dented the velour upholstery, the smell rolled over me.

"Granny, you leave a mess of last week's grouper under the seat?"

She didn't even look at me, just jerked a thumb toward the backseat and flicked on the overhead light. My gaze followed the thumb and left me staring into the waxy, dissolving face of the late Sylvia Corrigan.

"What the hell!"

"Relax, Jake," Charlie said. "Jane did us a great favor by bringing the body here tonight."

Everybody was doing me favors today. As for "Jane," the name still struck me funny, like calling Charlemagne, "Chuck."

"Weren't nothing," Granny said. "That old gal been taking up room in my cooler anyhow."

"What's going on?" I demanded.

"I found the boards Sergio had broken at Convention 345

Hall," Charlie explained. "Easy enough. He did the noon demonstration. Slabs of pine were in the trash, stacked in nearly the same order that he broke them. I thought it quite natural to assume that the one with the cleanest break would have been the top board."

"Quite natural," I agreed.

Granny pulled onto Douglas Road, then turned right at Dixie Highway heading downtown. You expect traffic to be light after three a.m., but it never is. You wonder who these people are, looking for a party or heading for their night shifts.

"On close inspection I could see the top board had been coated with something. I took it to Dr. Kalian at the lab, and he confirmed my suspicions. Clostridium botulinum, and quite a liberal dose of it."

"The stuff that causes food poisoning," I said.

"The very stuff," Charlie said.

"What'd Sergio do, eat the boards for breakfast?"

"No, he just hit one with a hand that he had cut on the tile in the courtroom. Even without the cut, the abrasion from the board probably would be sufficient to allow the toxin to enter the blood. With the wound still healing and Sergio not wanting to show weakness by wearing a bandage -I asked around-it was an open invitation to the toxin."

"And you think Roger Salisbury cooked this up?" I asked.

"Chemical companies sell the toxin to universities and laboratories for research. A doctor would have no trouble ordering some."

I shook my head. "I don't know, Charlie, a little smear on a board killing a guy."

"It's perhaps the most toxic substance we know. A thousand molecules of botulinum toxin can kill an ox. Do you know how small a molecule is?"

About the size of all the gray matter in my brain, I thought. I'm the guy who trusted Roger Salisbury. But I wasn't ready to throw him over, not yet.

"Maybe Roger's got an explanation," I suggested, sounding hollow even to myself.

"That's what we'll find out," Charlie said.

We were at the intersection of Dixie and Miami Avenue. Granny swung the aircraft carrier across three westbound lanes of Dixie and we headed north on Miami, passing under the overpass to Key Biscayne. Roger lived halfway up a long block on the right, his house surrounded by finely aged royal poinciana trees.

"What's your friend in back have to do with it?"

Charlie sighed. "If I showed you her right buttock, upper quadrant, you'd know."

"An injection?"

"Twenty-gauge needle, I'd say."

"Wait a second, Charlie. Slow down. She died in the hospital. That could have been a routine sedative, a painkiller, anything."

"Could have been. We don't have the records."

"And you've done no test for succinylcholine or any other drugs?"

"Correct."

"So you have no proof?"

"Correct again, Counselor. Your cross-examination was always your strong point."

"With no evidence, where do you get off accusing Roger of killing Sylvia Corrigan?"

"Calm down, Jake. I'm not ready to accuse. But I've been at this a long time. I have a hunch, that's all."

"A hunch! Charlie. You're a scientist. I'm a lawyer. You deal with medical probabilities, I deal with evidence. And you have us hauling a corpse around on a hunch. I don't believe it."

When I don't get my prescribed six hours of shut-eye, I can be ornery, even to friends.

"What we believe and what is true," Charlie said, "are often quite different. Deceptio visus. It's probably healthy up to a point, to believe in your client's cause. Beyond that point, it will blind you."

I turned around to face him, and Sylvia Corrigan toppled forward, brushing my arm with a forehead the consistency of sponge cake left in the rain. The rotten fish smell washed over me. "What do you expect me to do?" I demanded. "Even if he confessed to me, I couldn't go to Socolow. The attorney-client privilege prevents that."

"It prevents your telling the authorities about past crimes, sure. But if you had probable cause to believe he's about to kill again, there is a different obligation."

"Who's left to kill?"

"The person who first made him a killer, of course."

A flash of lightning lit the sky and a thunderclap followed almost instantly, the storm closing in. I laughed but there was no pleasure behind it. "You think Roger will kill Melanie Corrigan. If you're right, why should I lift a finger to stop him? Maybe I'll help him."

"No, you won't. I know you, Jake. I know your code. It isn't written anywhere except all over your face. You're one of the last decent men. You're a guy who looks for broken wings to mend."

"Yeah, I'm an overgrown Boy Scout."

"You won't admit it. You've created this image of the indifferent, detached loner, but I know you better than you do."

I forced the same hollow laugh. "You're a great ca-noemaker, Charlie, but a lousy judge of character."

"All right. We're not here to protect Melanie Corrigan or anybody else, just to learn the truth. Will you help?"

Fat raindrops splattered the windshield, prelude to a downpour. Granny slowed, then hit the brakes hard, and the old Cadillac's bald tires slid to a stop in front of Roger's house. "Tell me what to do," I said with resignation.

"Be tough with him," Charlie ordered. "He's cracking. The murder of Sergio was an irrational, bizarre act. He's crying out, perhaps over guilt, shame, who knows? He wants to be caught. But his first reaction will be denial. He trusts and respects you. You're the one who has to do it."

The house was one of those modern jobs, six concrete cubes at odd angles, a wall of glass bricks shielding an interior courtyard and a roof full of skylights. I rang the doorbell and waited. Three-thirty a.m. In Miami an unexpected visitor late at night is an excuse to set loose the guard dogs or open up with automatic weapons.

It took a while, then the intercom crackled with a sleepy, cranky, "Yeah?"

"Roger, it's Jake. Sorry to wake you. But there's news. Socolow won't refile. It's over."

Silence. Then, "Great. Call me in the morning."

"Can't. There's more. Got to see you."

"Minute," he said.

It was more like five. A hot, dank night. In the yard a row of crimson tobacco jasmine flooded us with a steamy perfume, even as the rain splashed under the portico.

Finally Roger eyeballed me through the peephole. I ducked to one side. I didn't have to move fast. By the time he turned the locks, slid the bolts, unhooked the chains, and punched the code into the digital alarm, I could have been appointed to the bench. Roger Salisbury opened the heavy beamed door to find a visitor sitting in a wicker chair on his front stoop, her head slumped to a shoulder, eyeless face melting under the ghoulish glow of the yellow bug light. Overhead, lightning crackled.

I heard Roger gag, a choking sound. I watched him slump to the Mexican tile floor of his foyer. My own stomach tossed as he clutched his throat, gagged again, and vomited. He stayed there awhile, emptying himself while the three of us stepped around him and into the house. Sylvia Corrigan stayed put.

"Why do this to me, Jake?" he whimpered, getting to his feet. Charlie steered him to a rust-colored leather sofa. Granny found a kitchen towel and helped clean his face. He sat there in a black silk bathrobe, bare feet on the floor, looking at me with vacant eyes. That bland, handsome face was gray now. "Jake, you're my lawyer and my friend. Why?"

"I'm resigning from both positions."

"Jake…"

"Why did you kill Sylvia Corrigan?"

His head shrunk back into his shoulders. "Why would I kill her?"

"Easy. Because Melanie asked you to. She very nearly told me you did it. When I asked her why anyone would steal Sylvia Corrigan's body, she said to ask you. It didn't make sense then, but it does now."

He cackled. Half a laugh, half a cry, a barely human sound. "I'm not a killer. You said so yourself in the malpractice trial. God you were good. I'm a healer. I took an oath. To give no deadly drug, to do no harm."

"You violated the oath, Roger. You gave it up. For flesh. You killed Sylvia and Philip and Sergio."

"I didn't kill Philip," he said softly.

Where I come from, that's an admission. Two out of three. I remembered what he said the other night on my porch. / didn't kill Philip. He's the one person I could never kill.

He started rocking back and forth, his head between his knees, his forearms resting on his knees. When he looked up, his eyes darted back and forth and his mouth hung slack. He cocked his head to one side and looked at me or through me, his mind somewhere on the far side of Betel-geuse. The look chilled the room. It could have frightened Sylvia Corrigan.

Then his eyes cleared. A calm voice, the old Roger Salisbury, "Jake, you remember what you said to me that first day in your office?"

I remembered fine but I didn't feel like reminiscing. "Probably that I was a lousy linebacker."

"No, that you kept looking for the good guys and couldn't find them. I admired you, wanted you to like me, to be my friend. I wanted to be one of the good guys."

He said it with sadness, finality. Knowing it was over.

"I didn't kill Philip," he repeated. "You can't believe that pig Sergio." Then he slipped into his best Cuban handyman accent: "E's the needle man." And he pushed his thumb against an imaginary plunger of an imaginary hypodermic just as Sergio had done on the witness stand, and there it was, the missing piece. Where it had been all along, on the videotape. That puncture in Sylvia Corrigan's backside could have been a routine injection in the hospital just before she died, but it wasn't.

Oh Susan Corrigan, you were right the first time. I am dumber than I look.

I put my hands on my knees and leaned over, my face close to Roger's. Our own little huddle. I wanted to look him in the eye. The sour smell of sweat mixed with vomit clung to him.

"Roger, I know it all now. You lied to me about when you met Philip Corrigan. You said it was after his wife had died. You were blocking it out, her death, staying a mile away from any talk about her. But you told me the truth about the succinylcholine. You did have it for two years before Philip died. And you did put an old dog to sleep with it. Plus an old lady you forgot to mention. You killed Sylvia Corrigan, and before the flowers wilted, the four of you were living it up on the Cory. You, Philip, Melanie, and the karate kid. A celebration cruise. Philip played cameraman. You played doctor with Melanie. After the examination, you gave her a little pat on the ass. That's what it looked like on the tape because you weren't holding anything. But what you were doing was giving her a pretend injection in the ass. She thought it was hysterical. Philip Corrigan laughed so hard he almost dropped the camera. You were showing off, letting them know how you killed her."

He stared off into space, his face devoid of emotion, without joy or pain. Charlie nodded, a signal I was playing the cards right. Granny had discovered a crystal decanter of port and a huge goblet. She drowned a look of sorrow with a healthy chug.

"One thing I can't figure," I continued, "is whether you and Melanie had it all planned. Kill Sylvia, Melanie marries Philip. After a decent interval, you snuff him, too."

"I would never kill Philip," he whispered. "Philip was my friend. I never had many friends. Philip taught me to share Melanie, something I never thought I could do. But she wanted him…"

"Dead," I helped out, as he drifted away again. "She wanted Philip dead. You were torn. The woman you never refused, the friend you longed for. She told you to kill him. You said you would. Just like before. But you didn't want to do it."

"I couldn't do it," he muttered, his voice thick, as if his tongue had swollen from thirst. "Philip shared his most prized possession with me. I watched him lying there in the hospital, my friend, knowing what that woman wanted me to do, but I couldn't…"

He floated off again, riding some inner current. I filled in the gaps. "So you duck out of the room carrying the valise. Nurse Ingram sees you. You run down the stairs to the lobby. Your pals Sergio and Melanie are waiting for the good news. But you don't have any. Melanie is furious. Sergio probably calls you a chicken-shit cobarde. He loves it- you're in pain-he can be the hero. You hand him the valise, and he tucks it into his bush jacket. Melanie goes with him, gives him a cover story for being there if he's seen. But he's nervous. This isn't like injecting himself with steroids. This is murder and there's a nurse right down the hall. So he hurries and doesn't get the hypodermic filled. Or he fills it and squirts it everywhere but inside Philip Corrigan. He makes a puncture, but it's a dry hole. Lucky for him and unlucky for Philip Corrigan, there's more than one way to kill a guy flat on his back. Ikken hissatsu. He kills him with one punch, probably the sword handstrike. Melanie keeps the valise with the drug and the hypodermics. You don't want to see it again, and you don't until she plants it in your house."

He was silent. What is it Charlie would say? Cum tacent clamant. Silence is an admission of guilt. Not in a courtroom, of course, but in human experience. A tremor went through Roger's body, and he wrapped his arms around himself and hugged as if to keep from splitting in two. His eyes kept clouding over, then clearing, slipping in and out of a haze like a foggy shoreline viewed from the sea.

"You knew Sergio did it," I said. "Why didn't you tell me?"

His lips moved but nothing came out. He tried again. "Because they threatened to tell Socolow about Sylvia. After the mistrial, they thought I must have told you about the karate punch. How else could you have figured it out?"

Charlie smiled, but only a little.

"Why did you kill Sergio?" I asked.

"He kept threatening me. I'll tell the cops this, I'll tell them that, I'll bust your head."

He was sing-songing it, sounding like a child. Coming and going, different people now.

I grabbed him by both shoulders. "Who killed Susan?"

"Sergio. With a poison fish or something. Melanie had him do it. She told me, laughed about it."

He said it so matter-of-factly, one woman dead, another woman laughing. Watching Roger self-destruct, I had buried it, the burning rage. The how and the who. My vow to Susan. Sergio was already dead. Only Melanie's laugh to stifle now. Melanie Corrigan, the source of the evil. Three murders, two by Sergio with Melanie's encouragement. One by Roger, same provocateur.

I let Roger go and talked to Charlie. He would take Granny back to my place. I'd babysit, spend the night on Roger's sofa.

Roger turned to me, his eyes bottomless holes. "Will you help me, Jake? Like you did before. I'm always being falsely accused, you know."

I didn't know what to say. Charlie did. "We can get you help," he said. "A very good doctor I know. In the morning, I'll make the call."

Charlie and Granny left, hoisted Sylvia Corrigan into the trunk of the Cadillac, and drove off.

Roger looked at me. Barely comprehending. I told him I would put him to bed. He didn't agree or disagree, just stood when I helped him up and moved where I guided him. He looked shrunken. So feeble and spent. His bare feet shuffled across the tile. I sat in a chair at the foot of his bed and watched him until he fell asleep. I figured the poison was drained from him now. Just the shell of a man, without the will or the weapons. Able to do no harm.