Paul Levine - Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor

We ended up near the goal line, her on the bottom looking up, moist warm breath tickling my nose. A lot of my body was touching a lot of her body, and she wasn’t complaining.

“First and goal from the one,” I whispered.

I looked straight into her eyes from a distance any quarterback could sneak. Was it my imagination or was the glacial ice melting? I was ready for her to get all dewy and there would be some serious sighing going on. But I had come up a yard short. She flipped me off her like a professional wrestler who doesn’t want to be pinned, one of her knees slamming into my groin as she bounced up. She stood there squinting in the dusk, looking for her glasses while I sucked in some oxygen.

“You really don’t know, do you?” she said, standing over me.

“Not only that, but I don’t know what I don’t know.” My voice was pinched.

“Then listen, because you’re only going to hear it once. Your client isn’t guilty of medical malpractice.”

“He’s not?”

“No. He’s guilty of murder. He killed my father. He planned it along with that slut who ought to get an Academy Award from what I saw in court today. I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“Believe it. Your client’s a murderer. He should be fried or whatever they do these days. So pardon me if I don’t get all choked up over his career problems or insurance rates. He was planking the slut-something that doesn’t exactly put him in an exclusive club-and they planned it together. The malpractice suit is just a cover.”

“I still don’t get it.” I was starting to feel like a sap, something Susan Corrigan seemed to know the moment she met me.

“The lawsuit makes it look like the doctor and the widow are enemies. That’s their cover. And the way I figure it, Lassiter, you’re supposed to lose. Or at least it doesn’t matter. If you lose, the insurance company will pay her, and she’ll probably split the money with him. Or maybe he gets it all. She’ll get more than she needs from the estate. And if she wins more than his insurance coverage, he doesn’t have to worry because she won’t try to collect.”

I sat there with a look as intelligent as a vacant lot. “Murder and insurance fraud. You have no proof of that. And I just can’t believe it.”

“I can see that, now,” she said. “You’re not a bad guy, Lassiter. You’re just not fast enough to be a linebacker, and you don’t know shit from second base.”

Charlie Riggs took the stand with a smile on his face and a plastic model of the spine in his back pocket. I felt better just looking at him. Bushy gray moustache and beard, a brown tweedy jacket more at home in Ivy League libraries than art deco Miami, twinkling eyes full of experience. A trustworthy man. Like having Walter Cronkite on my side.

He’d testified hundreds of times for the state and was comfortable on the witness stand. He crossed his legs, revealing drooping socks and pale calves. He breathed on his eyeglasses and wiped them on his tie. He slipped the glasses onto his small nose that was almost buried by his beard. Then Charlie Riggs nodded. He was ready.

“Please state your name and profession for the jury,” I instructed him.

“Charles W. Riggs, M.D., pathologist by training, medical examiner of Dade County for twenty-eight years, now happily retired.”

“Tell us, Dr. Riggs, what are the duties of a medical examiner.”

“Objection!” Dan Cefalo was on his feet. “Dr. Riggs is retired. He is incompetent to testify as to the current medical examiner’s duties.”

In the realm of petty objections, that one ranked pretty high, but it was the first one of the day, and you could flip a coin on it.

“Sustained,” Judge Leonard said, unfolding the sports section, looking for the racetrack charts.

I had another idea. “Let’s start this way, Dr. Riggs. What is a medical examiner?”

“Well, in merry old England, they were called coroners. You can trace coroners back to at least the year 1194. They were part of the justice system, part judge, part tax collector. The coroner was the custos placitorum coronae, the guardian of the pleas of the Crown. If a man was convicted of a crime, the coroner saw to it that his goods were forfeited to the Crown.”

Cefalo looked bored, the judge was not listening as usual, but the jurors seemed fascinated by the bearded old doctor. It works that way. What’s mundane to lawyers and judges enchants jurors.

“Later the coroner’s duties included determining the cause of death with the help of an inquest. The sheriff would empanel a jury, much as you have here.” He smiled toward the jury box, and in unison, six faces smiled back. They liked him. That was half the battle.

“The jury had to determine whether death was ex visitatione divina, by the visitation of God, or whether man had a hand in it. Even if death was accidental, there was still a sort of criminal penalty. For example, if a cart ran over someone and killed him, the owner had to pay the Crown the equivalent value of the cart. That got to be quite a problem when steamships and trains began doing the killing.”

The jurors nodded, flattered that this wise old man would take the time to give them a history lesson. “Still later, coroners began recording how many deaths were caused by particular diseases. Sometimes I spend my evenings with a glass of brandy and a collection of the Coroner’s Rolls from the 1200s. You’d be surprised how much we can learn. At any rate, Counselor, the job of the coroner, or medical examiner, is to determine cause of death. Our credo is ‘to speak for the dead, to protect the living.’”

“And how does a coroner determine cause of death?” I asked.

Charlie Riggs pushed his glasses back up his nose with a chubby thumb. “By physical and medical examination, various testing devices, gas chromatography, electron microscopes, the study of toxicology, pharmacology, radiology, pathology. Much is learned in the autopsy, of course.”

“May we assume you have determined the cause of death in a number of cases?”

“Thousands. For over twenty years, I performed five hundred or more autopsies a year and supervised many more.”

“Can you tell us about some of your methods, some of your memorable cases?”

A hand smacked the plaintiff’s table and Dan Cefalo was on his feet, one pantleg sticking into the top of his right sock, the other pantleg dragging below the heel of the left shoe where the threads had unraveled from the cuff. “Objection,” he said wearily. “This retired gentleman’s life story is irrelevant here.”

Taking a shot at Riggs’s age. I hoped the two older jurors were listening. “Your Honor, I’m entitled to qualify Dr. Riggs as an expert.”

Cefalo was ready for that. He didn’t want to hear any more than he had to from Charlie Riggs. “We’ll stipulate that Dr. Riggs was the medical examiner for a long time, that he’s done plenty of autopsies, and that he’s qualified to express an opinion on cause of death.”

That should have been enough, but I still wanted Riggs to tell his stories. When you have a great witness, keep him up there. Let the jury absorb his presence.

“Objection overruled,” Judge Leonard said. Good, my turn to win one.

“Dr. Riggs, you were about to tell us of your cases and methods of medical examination of the cause of death.”

So Charlie Riggs unfolded his memories. There was the aging playboy who lived at Turnberry Isle, found dead of a single bullet wound to the forehead. Or so it seemed. The autopsy showed no bullet in the skull, no exit wound, just a round hole right between the eyes, as if from a small caliber shell.