Paul Levine - Riptide

Harry let it ring six times. Let her think about it. Bitch came down too hard on me tonight. Been bustin’ my chops. I’m the one had his dick on the chopping block. Twice. Coulda gotten killed by those friggin’ greasers. Would have, except one swung a bat like a rusty gate and the other kicked with spaghetti legs.

Awright.

Enough.

Now I’m calling the shots. He picked up the phone but was silent.

“Harry. Harry. Answer me. You got ‘em?” “The eagles have landed,” Harry Marlin said firmly, sounding very much like a man who had the world by the balls.

Doctor Charles W. Riggs used a stubby thumb to push his lopsided glasses up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, scratched his bushy beard, and said, “Diethylstilbestrol.”

The court reporter squeezed her eyes shut and tried to take it down phonetically on her Stenograph. Winston P. Hopkins HI, two years off the Andover-Princeton-Yale express, studied the 173 questions he had prepared in longhand on his yellow pad. His first solo deposition.

“Dethel still…” Hopkins muttered.

Jake Lassiter sat at the end of the polished teak conference table. His job was to watch Winston Hopkins depose the plaintiff’s expert witness and fill out a scorecard on his performance. Law firm bureaucracy.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Stuart Zeman, leaned back and dozed. Manicured and immaculately groomed, he wore a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit of beige silk. The wages of representing the widowed and crippled. His client, a beefy Air Force sergeant with a brush cut and tiny ears, tugged at the choking collar on his dress-blue shirt and loosened the regulation knot in his solid black tie. They were gathered in the thirty-second-floor deposition room at Harman amp; Fox, a hallowed, dark place where many thousands of hours have been billed at enormous rates.

The bearded pathologist paused and chewed on his cold pipe. His testimony, delivered in deliberate, measured cadences, resembled a lecture by a well-prepared professor to a class of nitwits. “Diethylstilbestrol is synthetic estrogen, commonly called DES. Thirty years ago, doctors prescribed the drug to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. A generation later, the women’s daughters began dying from cancer. Instead of protecting the female offspring, technology was killing them. That’s what happened to Gladys Ferguson… the late Mrs. Gladys Ferguson.” Doc Riggs nodded across the conference table in the direction of Sergeant Claude Ferguson, USAF, the widower and father of a baby boy.

“But how can you be sure of that?” Winston Hopkins whined. The young lawyer had removed his suit coat to reveal paisley suspenders against his white-on-white custom-made shirt. The left cuff was emblazoned with a monogram in blue script “WPH.” Fighting the boredom, Lassiter scribbled imagined middle names across a legal pad. Percival… Pilkington… Plimpton. “Her cervical cancer could have been caused by a host of things, could it not?” Hopkins asked.

Dr. Riggs gave the young lawyer a kind, forgiving smile. “Given the history of Mrs. Ferguson’s mother using DES, given Mrs. Ferguson’s age and the fact that she acquired cervical cancer following childbirth, statistically there can be little doubt. I have concluded to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the DES was the causa causans, the initiating cause of the cancer. But for the DES, she would not have contracted cancer, and hence, she would not have died.”

The sergeant’s face was puffy. A single tear gathered, then rolled down a cheek. Seeming not to notice, Winston Hopkins stormed ahead. “But for the DES, Mrs. Ferguson might never have existed, correct?”

“How’s that?” Dr. Riggs asked.

“Her mother might have had a miscarriage without the drug.”

“No sir!” Riggs yanked the pipe from his mouth and gestured toward the young lawyer. “That’s the irony here, the damned tragic irony. DES never worked, never prevented miscarriage. If a woman was going to carry to full term, she’d do it with or without the drug. Gladys Ferguson would have been born, fine and dandy, hale and healthy, without that damned DES. As a drug, it was totally useless except to poison one’s female issue.”

Jake Lassiter looked up from his doodling. If they had been in a courtroom, the spectators would have oohed and aahed, the reporters would have scribbled notes, and Marvin the Maven would have smacked his gums. It was one of those moments when a witness drives a stake through the heart of your case. Give Doc Charlie Riggs a second chance, and he’ll give that stake another whack.

“One moment, please,” Hopkins said, pretending to review his notes while trying to regroup without peeing on his Italian kid leather loafers. If the kid took on Doc Riggs again, the savvy old coroner would probably spank him and send him to bed without his dinner.

A lifetime of experience on the witness stand, thirty-two years as medical examiner of Dade County, now retired and living in a fishing cabin on the edge of the Everglades, Doc Riggs was as sharp as ever. He had dueled with the city’s best criminal defense lawyers, savvy street fighters who could eviscerate a weak or confused witness. But they never got to Charlie Riggs. He had never botched an autopsy. Never lost a tissue sample, never failed to weigh, measure, or test the right organs, fluids, and gristle. A small man with dark, unkempt hair and a full beard, Charlie Riggs looked at the world through eyes that twinkled with a mixture of boyish delight and lethal wisdom.

Jake Lassiter wondered if Winston Hopkins was smart enough to shut up. Lassiter looked at the deposition scorecard, Form B83-184 in the firm’s parlance. The product of endless partners’ meetings, the scorecard had three categories: Preparation, Poise, and Thoroughness.

“PPT,” Managing Partner Marshall Tuttle formally announced at one law firm meeting, as if the term were inspired by genius. Lassiter figured preparation meant ripping off a checklist of questions from the computerized form files, poise required equal portions of arrogance and callousness, and thoroughness could be demonstrated by asking the same question three times or until the opposing lawyer began snoring, whichever came first. Lassiter cast the dissenting vote, saying his grading system would use Balls, Brains, and a touch of Humanity.

“How do you measure balls?” the managing partner had sniffed.

“If you gotta ask, you ain’t got ‘em,” Lassiter said, a remark he figured cost him ten grand in the pig pool, the year-end division of profits.

Winston P. Hopkins in plucked at his suspenders and flipped through his yellow pad. He had colorless eyes, a weak jaw, and hair that was thinning before its time. He shot a look at Lassiter, who gave him no signals, then back to Doc Riggs, who waited patiently. Across the table, Sergeant Ferguson stretched his thick neck and cracked his knuckles, one at a time, the sound of cartridges ejecting from a Beretta 9 mm.

“You’re being paid for this performance today, aren’t you, Dr. Riggs?” Hopkins asked, finally.

Stuart Zeman emerged from his postlunch nap, examined his diamond-encrusted Piaget, yawned, and swiveled toward the court reporter. “Objection to the form…”

“Ill rephrase the question,” Hopkins said, with just the hint of a sneer. “You’re being paid for your time, Doctor?”

“As you are,” Riggs said, pleasantly.

Lassiter hoped the twit would shut up soon. He knew Hopkins was a weasel but didn’t figure him stupid.

“And how much is the plaintiff paying for your testimony?”

“For my time, young man, Mr. Zeman offered to pay me two hundred fifty dollars an hour. Because of my feelings about DES and the gross irresponsibility of your client in marketing it, I agreed to accept only my expenses plus an Orvis graphite fly-casting rod.”