Paul Levine - To speak for the dead

Susan Corrigan looked at me, her back to the screen. I was half embarrassed for her, half bored for me. Like an ex-jock in the bleachers, I'd rather play than watch. It went on for a while, then a cut and roll 'em again. The scene might have been shot another day or later the same day. If there was any dialogue, it was lost in the music laid over the action. Now Roger Salisbury was wearing a stethoscope and nothing else. Compared to Melanie Corrigan, however, he was overdressed.

Roger looked down her throat.

She said something. Ahhh.

Playing doctor. A little pantomime.

Open wide.

She did.

He took her pulse. Then she inhaled and jutted her breasts out, and he tapped her chest and listened to her lungs through the stethoscope. They seemed to pass the test.

She turned over and gave Salisbury a view of a perfectly rounded bottom. He laid his right hand on her ass and tapped it slowly with his thumb. A medical procedure I'd never seen, more like checking a melon's ripeness. Whatever its purpose, Melanie thought it hilarious. Laughing, she turned over and the camera jiggled, some jollies from the photographer, too. Then Roger felt her forehead as if the poor child was fevered, and just to be sure, he took her temperature. With something too big to have been a thermometer.

The picture broke up, came back on and went to black as someone walked by the lens. I figured it was Philip Corrigan, dealing himself in, having put the camera on a tripod. But it wasn't Corrigan. It was Hercules, albeit a short one. He reminded me of the bulldog on the hood of a Mack truck, only not as cute. One of those sides of beef you see in the gym, a body builder, slabs on top of slabs of muscle, a thick neck and sloping shoulders, a tattoo of a lightning bolt on one arm. Dark complexion, a flat, broad, mean face, drooping black moustache. His arms hung out from his sides, pushed there by his overdeveloped lats. And he was naked, revealing one part of his body not pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian proportions. So now I was watching two naked men and one naked woman. There were arms and legs entwined, a couple of glances toward the camera, and much thrusting of loins.

A quick cut and the camera angle was different. I was trying to figure out how the photographer got over the bed, looking down at the goings-on like a dance number in an old Busby Berkeley musical. Then I saw the photographer on the screen, a neat trick. He was at the foot of the bed, aiming the camera up, a man in his fifties, thinning hair and pot belly, lying on his side, stark naked, shooting a trick shot at a mirror on the ceiling over the bed. Philip Corrigan. I consulted my scorecard: three men and a woman. Again, the zoom, and Philip Corrigan disappeared from view. The screen filled with the body builder's shoulders. Covered with pimples, the telltale sign of an anabolic steroid user.

It went on for a few more minutes, then the screen faded to black and then to snow. It stayed that way.

"Well, what do you think now?" Susan Corrigan asked softly.

"I think the hand-held camera technique is more suitable to documentaries. The lighting is too harsh, the plot a mite thin. The bit with the mirror is cute, but frankly, I prefer The Lady from Shanghai."

"Is everything a joke to you?"

"Not everything, not even this. Susan, let it go. Every family has its dirty little secrets that are best left in the closet."

"My father wasn't like that. Not before her and Roger Salisbury."

"Okay. So she corrupted him. Maybe Roger's no angel, either. But what can be gained now?"

Her eyes blazed at me. "What about catching his killers?"

That again. "I still haven't seen any proof he was killed, much less that Roger Salisbury did it. What about Mr. Universe there? What about a dozen other guys you don't even know about?"

"More lawyer's games. Your beloved client is the only one who cut Dad open the day before he died. And as far as I know, he's the only one who carried poison around in his little leather case."

"What are you talking about?"

"This." She reached into a drawer, came up with something and tossed it at me. A small leather valise, a man's pocketbook if you're the kind of guy who carries that sort of thing. A gold monogram, "R.A.S." Roger Allen Salisbury. I unzipped it. Two hypodermic needles, a clear small vial of colorless liquid, half empty. No labels, no instructions.

A nasty little package. I felt a chill. "What is it?"

"Succinylcholine, a drug used in anesthesia. It paralyzes the limbs, the lungs, too. In anesthesia, a respirator breathes for you. Without a respirator, you would just lie there and watch yourself die."

"How do you know all this? Where did this come from?"

"One question at a time, Counselor. First, I found it in Melanie's room. Hidden in a drawer with thirty pairs of black panties, which is an awful lot for someone who seldom wears any. I think she knows it's missing. Probably suspects me. That's why she changed the locks and tossed my things out. Second, I've done some research on it, had a lab test it. I'm a reporter, and I know a lot more than just box scores and yards-per-carry."

"Has this been in your possession continuously since discovering it?" Ever the lawyer, Lassiter, already thinking about chain of custody.

"The lab at Jackson Memorial took about five cc's out of the bottle. Otherwise, it's intact."

"What's this have to do with Salisbury, assuming the stuff is his?"

"Of course it's his! Melanie was screwing him, must have gotten the drug from him. She hated my father, just used him. She couldn't divorce him. She'd get nothing because of an antenuptial agreement. But if he died while married to her, she got the house, the boat, plus thirty percent of the estate."

I nodded. "Items in joint name plus the marital share."

"Right."

"So she had the motive. But that's all you can prove. For a criminal case built on circumstantial evidence, you need a lot more. Your case against Melanie is weak and you don't have anything on Salisbury. For one thing, your father didn't die of poisoning. He died of an aneurysm."

She turned her head away and blinked back a tear. "That's why I need your help."

"For what?"

"To figure out how they did it."

"Did what?"

"Oh Jake, think about it."

It was the first time she called me by my given name. I liked the sound of it.

"How they killed Dad with succinyleholine and made it look like an aneurysm," she said softly, her armor turning to tin.

I didn't buy it. "A hospital's a pretty risky place to kill somebody, doctors and nurses all around."

"That's what made it work. Who would object if Dr. Salisbury came into Dad's room after the surgery? He could have given the injection then. And who would be looking for poison when the patient dies of an aneurysm? It's a classic misdirection play. Like the old Oklahoma fumblerooski, where the center and quarterback drop the ball. Everybody goes one way and the guard grabs the ball and walks in for the touchdown."

It was crazy. No evidence. Just an angry young woman searching for villains. Blaming others for her father's descent. The old fumblerooski, for crying out loud! I looked at her. A tear came to those dark eyes and then another. I looked at the hypodermics and the tiny bottle. And back at those wet, dark eyes.

"Where do we start?" I asked.

I was cruising on autopilot. On a very rough flight. I hadn't slept or thought about closing argument since Susan Corrigan handed me the vial and told me it was a murder weapon. I still felt it in the palm of my hand, the glass cool and smooth to the touch. Succinylcholine, a laboratory name. Like the clear liquid itself, impersonal as death.

The vial added a new dimension to Susan's bald allegation that Roger Salisbury killed her father. She had an exhibit. How juries love exhibits. The murder weapon, something to take back into the jury room and fondle.