Paul Levine - Solomon and Lord Drop Anchor

“The police were stumped for a murder weapon,” Charlie Riggs said. “Sometimes it’s best to consider everyday items. I searched the grounds and, in a dumpster near the marina, I found a woman’s red shoe with blood on the metal spiked heel. The blood type matched the playboy’s, the heel matched the wound, and the owner of a French shoe shop at Mayfair identified the woman who bought the six- hundred-dollar shoes two weeks earlier. The woman confessed to doing him in. A lover’s spat, she didn’t want to kill him, just brain him.”

Then there was the mystery of the burned woman. She was sitting there, fully clothed, on her sofa, burned to death. Her clothes were not even singed. There was no smoke or evidence of fire in the apartment. The woman’s boyfriend had found the body. He said she came home drunk, took a shower, and next thing he knew, she was sitting on the sofa dead.

“I took a pair of tweezers and probed the bathtub drain,” Charlie Riggs told the jury. He paused. Several jurors exhaled in unison.

“It was just a hunch. Up came pieces of skin, and I knew the answer.”

Charlie Riggs smiled a knowing smile and stroked his beard, everybody’s favorite professor.

“Both had come home drunk, and she passed out. The boyfriend tried to revive her in the bathtub, but sailing three sheets to the wind, he turned on the hot water and left her there. The scalding water burned her to death. When the boyfriend sobered up, he panicked, so he dried her off, dressed her, put her on the sofa, and called the police.”

The jury sat entranced. There’s nothing like tales of death, well told. Riggs testified about matching tire treads to the marks on a hit-and-run victim’s back, of fitting a defendant’s teeth to bite marks on a rape-murder victim, of finding teeth in a drain under a house, the only proof of the corpus delicti, the body of a man dissolved in sulfuric acid by his roommate.

The litany of crime had its purpose, to shock the jury with deeds of true miscreants, to deliver a subtle message that the justice system should prosecute murderers, not decent surgeons, even if they might make mistakes. Errare humanum est. If that’s what it was, an honest error.

I hadn’t told Charlie Riggs about the conversation with Susan Corrigan. What would I tell him, that a dead man’s daughter, poisoned with grief and hate, thinks my client is a murderer? She had no physical evidence, no proof, no nothing, except the allegation that Roger Salisbury and Melanie Corrigan were getting it on. I would talk to Salisbury about it, but not now.

While Charlie Riggs testified, I watched Roger. He kept shooting sideways glances at Melanie Corrigan’s perfect profile. She watched the witness, oblivious to the attention. She was wearing a simple cotton dress that, to me, looked about two sizes too large, but I supposed was in style. A wide belt gathered it at the waist and it ended demurely below the knee. It was one of those deceiving things women wear, so simple it disguises the name of an Italian designer and a megabucks price tag.

I tried to read the look in Roger Salisbury’s eyes but could not. Was there a chance that it was true? Not just that he might have been diddling his patient’s wife. I didn’t care about that. But that he might have killed Corrigan. That it was all a plot, that the malpractice trial was just a cover, or better yet, a way to pick up another million. If that’s what it was, there’d be plenty of chances for Salisbury to tank it. He was scheduled to testify after Riggs.

I continued my direct examination: “Now Dr. Riggs, have you had an opportunity to examine the medical records compiled by the physicians and the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“And based on the records, and your years of experience, do you have an opinion to a reasonable degree of medical probability what caused the death of Philip Corrigan?”

“I do.”

The courtroom was silent except for the omnipresent hum of the air conditioning. Everyone knew the next question.

“And what was the cause of death?”

“A ruptured aorta. Internal bleeding, which in turn caused a lowering of blood pressure. In layman’s terms, the heart, which is the pump in a closed circulatory system, didn’t have enough fluid to pump, so it stopped.”

“And what, sir, caused the aorta to rupture?”

“There is no way to answer that with absolute certainty. We can only exclude certain things.”

“Such as?” Keep the questions short, let the doctor carry the ball.

“Well, Dr. Salisbury here certainly didn’t do it with the rongeur. If he had, the rupture would be on the posterior side of the aorta. But as reported by the surgeon who tried the emergency repair of the aorta, the rupture is on the anterior side, the front. Naturally a surgeon making an incision in a man’s back, working around the spine, is not going to puncture the front of the aorta, the part that faces the abdomen.”

Dan Cefalo turned ashen. There aren’t many surprises in trials anymore. Pretrial discovery eliminates most of that. But Charlie Riggs gave his deposition before studying the report of the second surgery, the chaotic attempt to close the bursting aorta a dozen hours after the laminectomy. When he read the report, bells went off. Nobody else had paid any attention to where the rupture was, only that it existed.

For the next fifteen minutes, it went on like that, Charles W. Riggs, M.D., witness emeritus, showing the jury his plastic model of the spine with the blood vessels attached like strings of licorice. The report of the thoracic surgeon who tried unsuccessfully to save Conigan’s life came into evidence, and the jurors kept looking at Dr. Riggs and nodding.

It was time to slam the door. “If Dr. Salisbury did not puncture the aorta with the rongeur, could not have, as you have testified, what might have caused it to rupture?”

“We call it spontaneous aortic aneurysm. Of course, that’s the effect, not the cause. The causes are many. Various illnesses or severe trauma to the abdomen can cause the aorta to burst. Arteriosclerosis can weaken the aorta and make it susceptible to aneurysm. So can high blood pressure. It could be a breakdown that medicine simply can’t explain, as they said in the Middle Ages, ex visitatione divina.”

I smiled at Dr. Riggs. He smiled back at me. The jury smiled at both of us. One big happy family.

I was nearly through but had one more little surprise for Dan Cefalo. A nail in the coffin. I handed Riggs Plaintiff’s Exhibit Three, a composite of Philip Corrigan’s medical history. “Dr. Riggs, did Philip Corrigan have any prior medical abnormalities?”

Charlie Riggs scanned the document but already knew the answer from our preparation sessions. “Yes, he was previously diagnosed by a cardiologist as having some degree of arteriosclerosis.”

“And the effect of such a disease?”

“Weakening of the arteries, susceptibility to aneurysm. Men in their fifties or beyond commonly show signs of arterial disease. Blame the typical American diet of saturated fats, too much beef and butter. In that condition, Mr. Corrigan could have had an artery blow out at any time.”

“At any time,” I repeated, just in case they missed it.

“Yes, without a trauma, just watching TV, eating dinner, any time.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” I nodded toward the witness stand in deference to the wisdom that had filled the courtroom. Then I turned toward Dan Cefalo, and with the placid assurance of a man who has seen the future and owns a fine chunk of it, I gently advised him, “Your witness, Counselor.”

Cefalo stood up and his suitcoat fell open, revealing a dark stain of red ink under his shirt pocket, the trail of an uncapped marking pen. Or a self-inflicted wound.