To speak for the dead

30

I awoke at five forty-five, same as always. Tired but alert. Aware of the strangeness of the room. There is a sixth sense that tells us something has changed. Someone has passed through our space, coming or going. Our sensors-keen as orbiting satellites-track the unseen movement.

I unfolded myself from the sofa and checked the master bedroom.

No Roger.

The sheets still warm. The rest of the house, empty. I checked the garage. No Porsche.

I called my house, woke Charlie, who must have been sharing the cubbyhole bedroom with Granny. Calmly, he said, "I'll drive to the Corrigan house. You stay put in case he comes back."

I didn't think he'd be coming back. Didn't picture him running to the 7-Eleven to buy juice and eggs. Charlie called in twenty minutes from a pay phone. Nobody at the Corrigan house.

I called a cab. In Miami that's like playing the lottery. Cab drivers hail from various Caribbean islands with one coast road and one mountain road. They can never find residential addresses. I called Roger's office and got the answering service. I didn't expect to hear back, and I was right. No cab, no phone call. After twenty-five minutes, I took off.

Jogging down Miami Avenue toward the causeway to Key Biscayne, then a right turn to pick up Coral Way, the pavement still slick from last night's rain. Roger's office was on Giralda in the Gables. Five miles tops. I needed the exercise but didn't know if I had the time.

I looked for friendly drivers. Most swerved to avoid me, one or two to hit me. No takers for a big lug with a grim look and a sweaty gray T-shirt. I should have slowed that last two hundred yards, but I tried to pick it up. Sprinting. Not much left in the legs, heart going wild. Too old to run gassers, coach's delight.

Roger's black Porsche Turbo gleamed in his reserved spot in back, Melanie Corrigan's green Jaguar in the next space. Good. Melanie must have come voluntarily, Roger calling her from the house. Running here, the mind pounding with each footfall, I had pictured her in the trunk of his car. But maybe Charlie Riggs was wrong. Maybe Roger had no intention of killing Melanie, maybe he just wanted to play some more doctor games. Except Charlie had been right about everything else.

I put my hands on my hips and bent over, sucking for oxygen. It was like breathing through a wet beach towel. One of those soggy Miami mornings without air, no wind from the ocean until the sun heats up the land.

The office was a tiny one-story stucco house with an orange, barrel-tile roof. From the thirties. A lot of doctors and lawyers have gone that route, getting out of the skyscrapers downtown, building equity and taking depreciation. No other cars in the eight-space lot. And there wouldn't be, no office hours Saturday.

The back door was locked. Front door, too. On the side of the house, a brown air conditioner poked out of a blackened window. House too old for central air. I tried yanking it through the window. No go. I gave it a shoulder, braced with legs made of spaghetti, and pushed it inside where it landed on a work table with a thud. I waited a moment. No other sounds. I crawled through. The X-ray room. Dark.

I opened the interior door into a corridor that led to the examination rooms. Then I padded around to the other side of the building past Roger's office, a file room, the bookkeeper's cubicle, and finally, the casting room, where a light shone under the door. I moved close, listening to my own breathing, still heavy. An air conditioner whirred from inside, muffling voices. A man and a woman. Normal tones, no screams, no threats.

I silently let myself in. Roger wore a green gown that was splattered white. His arms were bare and splotched with plaster. He kept dipping a roll of gauze into a bowl of water. Immediately the gauze became gooey, the water mixing with the impregnated plaster. Carefully he wrapped the soggy gauze around the cotton cast padding that circled Melanie Corrigan's left arm. He smoothed out the gauze with those strong, steady hands, tucking it into place, erasing any folds or creases. Then he dipped another piece of gauze into the water and kept building.

She lay spread-eagle on an examining table, both legs already casted from ankle to hip, the right arm a heavy circle of plaster from wrist to shoulder. She was naked except for a tiny white bikini bottom. Her breasts rose and fell with each breath.

"Hello Jake," Roger said, barely looking up. "I didn't want to wake you. Melanie looks lovely in white, don't you think?"

She smiled at me luridly. Her russet hair was loose and fell over the front of one shoulder. The hair hadn't been brushed, Roger probably waking her for the early morning visit. Tiny freckles dotted her chest. She wore no makeup and looked, I imagined, much as she did a decade earlier when Roger first met her in the jerk-off joint.

"Wanna party?" Melanie said. She ran her tongue over her upper lip. "I love a sweaty man."

"Isn't she something?" Roger asked, a tone of pride. "I used to be jealous, you know. But Philip changed that. He taught me. What she gives to someone else doesn't take away from me. That's what he said. He was a great man."

Melanie Corrigan laughed, her chest rising from the table but her arms and legs staying put, weighted down by the casts. "Rog is the sentimental type," she said, derisively.

Roger kept scooping and dipping and molding the plaster. Patting it dry.

"Look at these casts," he instructed. "Smooth, eh?"

"Good workmanship," I agreed.

"Great hands," Melanie said. "He wants you to say, 'Great hands.'

"

"You have great hands, Roger," I said.

"Thank you, Jake. You always had confidence in me. You knew I didn't let the rongeur slip. Not in a million years."

He leaned over a work table and picked up a small tool, stainless steel gleaming. The rongeur. He twirled it around in one hand, tossed it to the other, back and forth without looking. Great hands.

He replaced the rongeur in a tray with half a dozen others, all different sizes, from the tiny pituitary model to the bone rongeur that looked like a pair of household pliers. He patted the last of the plaster into place, pausing to wipe his hands.

"Hurry up," Melanie ordered. "Colder than a witch's tit here. Hey Lassiter, wanna go first?"

Roger dried his hands and said, "You can if you want, Jake." His eyes were focused on Mars.

"Rog, I swear I'm going to pee all over your table, you don't hurry up," Melanie said. "Are you hard or you need me to talk dirty? Bring that worm over here."

Roger untied her bikini bottom and folded it over a chair.

"That's better," she laughed. "Hurry the fuck up before my tits freeze solid. Hey Lassiter, that's a joke isn't it? Hurry the fuck up

…"

Roger looked at me. "Jake, you're my friend, just like Philip. You can have her if you want."

"Maybe another time, Roger."

"There won't be another time," he said flatly.

A chill went through me. Maybe it was the blast of the air conditioner on my overheated body. But maybe it was because I knew. My face must have shown it. Melanie smiled seductively. "Don't worry, Lassiter. He always talks like that. We haven't fucked once the last two years, he doesn't threaten to off me."

"Only this time, it's real," Roger said.

She laughed. I didn't.

Melanie leered at me. "What's the matter, Lassiter? You afraid he'll kill me? He only kills little old ladies."

"Who do you kill?" I asked her.

"No one, smart guy. I got men friends always wanting to please me, do me favors."

"You're wrong about Roger," I told her. She looked puzzled. He hadn't told her. No wonder she was so calm. Thinking he was the same old Roger, her favorite lapdog. "Roger kills more than old ladies, and he's pretty good at dreaming up ways to do it. Painful ways."

She still didn't get it.

"Where's your pal, Sergio?" I asked, wanting her to know, wanting her to taste fear.

"Miami Beach, busting up some boards," she said, doubt creeping into her voice.

"Wrong. Dead wrong. The morgue's on this side of the bay."

Her eyes darted to Roger, who worked silently with the plaster. She looked back at me, seeking help. I hadn't moved. I could stop him any time. I was bigger and stronger than Roger, and his mind was diced into an asteroid belt of colliding rocks. He turned his back to me, oblivious. One shot to the kidneys and it would be over.

I could, but why should I? You are wrong about me, dear old Charlie Riggs. I want her dead. Stop Roger?

Why should I?

Roger stood there studying her, ignoring me, that glazed look fading in and out. He unrolled another length of gauze, dipped it into the water bowl, then slapped it into Melanie Corrigan's crotch.

"Hey, I don't need a chastity belt," she said, the voice a notch higher.

He slowly stretched out more gauze, soaked it, lifted her a few inches and wrapped it around the top of the left hip and through the crotch. He caressed it into place.

"She looks just like a little doll, doesn't she, Jake?" Another strip and then another and the two leg casts were joined. Melanie tried moving but could not, the weight was too much.

Then he pulled a white Dacron stocking out of a metal drawer, walked to the head of the table, brushed her hair back, and slipped the stocking over her head.

"Makes the plaster set more smoothly," he explained.

"Stop fuckin' around, Rog," she cried, each breath sucking the stocking into her mouth. "This ain't funny." Her voice rising, the beginning of fear.

He placed some padding over her mouth, but she shook her head and it dropped to the floor. He didn't seem to notice. He dipped another length of gauze into the water, waited a moment, and then began wrapping it around her mouth. Even through the stocking, her eyes reflected it.

The realization. The terror.

I studied that look, snapped it into place. I wanted to remember it. Susan was dead because of her, and now here she was, knowing what was about to happen, the horror of knowing probably worse than the pain itself,

She spit and coughed. The sticky mess stayed put, covering half her mouth. She breathed greedily through her nose and yelled something, muffled through the gauze. "Laschta, hughme." Lassiter, help me.

This time, Roger fashioned a longer piece and swaddled it twice around her head, covering both mouth and nose. She bucked up and down, involuntary thrusts from the diaphragm lifting her, the lungs searching for air. In another minute she would lose consciousness. Three minutes after that, irreversible brain damage. Then…

She looked toward me, eyes pleading, mouth working, the words unintelligible, her fear filling the room.

Why should I?

I didn't know. I just reacted the way I do to most things. Moved without thinking it through, doing what seems right at the time, listening to some voice inside, a smarter guy than me, someone who didn't want me to scream myself awake, seeing Melanie Corrigan turn blue under all that white.

I came up behind Roger, grabbed him by the left arm, and spun him around. From the way his right shoulder pivoted, I saw the punch coming but not the rongeur, the large one, in his right hand. His arm came hard and fast. I was going to take his punch and give back one that would sit him down. What I took was a fistful of stainless steel. It caught me on the left temple. Solid.

In the movies, guys get hit on the head all the time. Usually with a gun. Their knees buckle, they say oooh, and they gently fall and go to sleep. It doesn't work that way. There's a thunderclap, a blaze of lights behind the eyes, and a shooting pain, a loss of equilibrium. Then a gray fog settling.

I didn't fall down. I stumbled across the room on shaky pins, a wounded buffalo, bouncing off cabinets. Roger was standing to my left, my right, and straight in front. I took a drunk's swing at the guy in front but it wasn't him. He pushed me to the floor. I hooked an arm behind his knee and brought him down on top of me. On a good day, I could bench press him twenty times, then throw him from short to first. This wasn't a good day. He was back up and I was on one knee like a fighter taking the eight-count.

Then I felt the jab in my upper arm. Deja vu, his thumb pushing the plunger on a hypodermic. I swatted at it and missed. He emptied it into me and I tore away from him, the needle still stuck in me, the world's largest voodoo doll.

I came at him again and took a swing in slow motion, my arms bulky girders. I didn't hit him and he didn't hit me. I just sat down at the end of the punch, then rolled onto my side, my face resting on the cool, clean tile. Then, just like in the movies, I said, oooh, and went to sleep.

My mouth was dry and my head was filled with barking dogs. I was cold. My face was still on the tile. It could have been hours or days. It must have been hours. Roger was sitting in a swivel chair next to me, splotches of plaster in his hair, on his face, on his gown. From the floor, I could see only the bottoms of Melanie Corrigan's bare feet sticking out of the casts. Nice feet, finely arched, clean dainty lady feet.

The feet weren't moving. I didn't need to see the rest.

"I'll help you up," Roger said hoarsely. "Don't worry about the Pentothal. You'll just be groggy for a while."

I tried to stand but he had to boost me. If he wanted to, he could finish me right there. I finally looked toward the table. The face gone, wrapped from forehead to chin, a mummy. Only the ends of her hair stuck out from beneath the plaster.

I sagged against a metal cabinet. Roger said, "You didn't mean it last night, did you, Jake?"

"Mean what?" My voice was thick; my head weighed a ton.

"That you're no longer my lawyer or my friend." "What difference does it make?"

He swiveled in the chair to face me, his eyes dancing to a silent tune.

"Because I need you, Jake."

"Now? You need me now. What for?"

"To prove it, Jake. That I'm one of the good guys."