Paul Levine - To speak for the dead

Sergio was moaning, but Tyrone was short on sympathy. "Shee-it, just a little shoulder separation. When it happens to me, they jam it back into place, tape me up, and I don't miss but one series."

Sergio did not seem to be NFL material. As he hobbled away, he turned to me and said weakly, "I owe you one, hombre."

"And I know you're good for it." I started up the ramp to retrieve my briefcase.

"Now git!" Tyrone ordered, and the two men took off, wobbling, limping, and cursing until they disappeared into the darkness.

Charlie Riggs was tending a fire and scalding peanut oil in an iron skillet when I pulled up at his fishing cabin just off Tamiami Trail a few miles east of Shark Valley. The old upholstery in the 442 was smeared with mud, and I made squishing sounds as I eased out and walked barefoot into the campsite.

"Jacob, where you been?" Charlie Riggs didn't sound alarmed. "Either I'm seeing things or you've got a water lily in your ear."

"Been up to my ass in alligators, Charlie."

"I do believe there's a story in this. You'll find a bucket, a towel, and some shorts on the porch. Then tell me."

I cleaned up and told him. As I did, Charlie fixed dinner. He bent over a slab of pine with a nail stuck through it. He jammed a Glades bullfrog onto the nail, piercing its belly, then made a quick incision with a knife, and with a pair of pliers, he pulled off the pants of the frog.

"You like frog legs?"

"Like eating them better than watching them prepared."

Charlie shrugged. "Thirty years in the ME's office, I don't get queasy about much."

He heated some fresh tomatoes in the skillet, poured milk over the frogs' legs, dragged them through seasoned flour, then sauteed the whole mess in a sauce fragrant with butter and garlic.

"Love that country cooking," I said.

"Country nothin'. This is cuisse de grenouilles provenqale."

We ate and I talked, Charlie listening silently. Finally I asked him what to do.

"I suggest we visit Susan at once," he said. "This has taken on a whole new dimension. Those two thugs might have killed you. They were certainly going to hurt you."

"What's this have to do with Susan?"

"They must know she gave you the tape. For whatever reason, they seem to place great importance on getting it. Frankly, I don't know why."

"That's easy, Charlie. First, it's embarrassing to the widow, prancing around with three men. Second, it contradicts her sworn deposition. She denied having an affair with Roger."

Charlie licked his fingers, sticky with garlic butter. "You may be right, but I get the feeling there's something more to the videotape than that. Regardless, the widow apparently will do anything to get it. Maybe harm anyone who's seen it. Shall we leave?"

We shall, I said. Not really believing Susan was in danger. But making a mental note to watch the videotape again, to look for something. Something Melanie Corrigan didn't want us to see, something other than her swiveling bottom.

We tried calling Susan Corrigan from a gas station on Tamiami Trail. No answer at the cabana. We roared toward town, an evening thunderstorm slanting gray torrents across the two-lane road. For a while we listened to the machine gun rhythm of the rain on our canvas top. Cement trucks lumbered along, tossing filthy spray over our windshield. Charlie was thinking so I kept quiet. Then we argued.

"Your strategy won't work," Charlie Riggs said. "You want the jury to believe that Melanie Corrigan and this martial arts thug killed Philip Corrigan, then framed Roger to cover it up, right?"

"Sure, if you can tell me how they did it, how whatever they did ended up looking like succinylcholine poisoning."

Charlie Riggs stroked his beard. "Who says it looks like succinylcholine?"

"The ME says, choline and succinic acid found in the brain and liver."

"But none around the needle track in the buttocks?" "Right."

"Hmmm," Charlie Riggs said, tamping tobacco into a corncob pipe.

"Well?"

"Regardless whether the succinylcholine played a role in Philip Corrigan's death, your strategy is flawed. The timing is way off. What motive would they have for framing Salisbury now? It would only draw attention to themselves."

"Plenty of motive once we dug up the body. They knew something was going on, needed to plant the drug and get Roger charged."

Charlie concentrated on lighting his pipe. "Foolish. They'd be better off sitting it out."

I laughed. "You're too logical. You're smarter than they are, Charlie, but you're forgetting one thing. The malpractice suit was intended to blame Roger or at least focus attention on the aneurysm. It's what Susan called the old fumble-rooski."

"The what?"

"A misdirection play. A plaintiff's verdict would establish the aneurysm as the cause of death and close the case. Even the defense verdict was no problem for them because the evidence still showed an aneurysm killed Corrigan. The jury just didn't blame Roger Salisbury for it. But then we grab Corrigan's body, and all of a sudden, they need a fall guy in case the tests are positive for poisoning. They break into Susan's cabana to get the drug, then plant it and get the murder indictment against Roger. Everything's coming up roses until they learn a nurse can place both of them in the hospital room after Roger left. Plus they know we have the videotape."

Charlie's face was shadowed in the lights of oncoming traffic. "No good. The video establishes Roger's motive for the murder, his lust for Melanie."

"But it also shows Sergio was just as bewitched, bothered, and bewildered and therefore would have the same motive to kill Corrigan. The tape furnishes reasonable doubt as to which of Melanie's admirers did him in. It also shoots some sizable holes in Melanie's grieving widow routine."

Charlie shot me a new look, one within an inch or two of respect. "If you're right, Jake, they're panicking. They know you still have the videotape. And that you must have gotten it from Susan." He thought about it a moment. "You might step on it a bit."

I was already doing seventy-five, but we were still half an hour from Susan's place. The rain came in gusts, sweeping out of the Glades, washing across the blacktop. Airboats were tied up in canals along Tamiami Trail, the operators sitting on the bank under thatched roofs, waiting for a break in the weather to head out for nighttime frogging. The Olds 442 roared eastward, the wet pavement hissing under its tires. I took my eyes off the road long enough to turn toward Charlie. "What's their next step? What will they try? Put the data into that computer on top your shoulders and give me a printout."

Riggs shrugged and sucked on his pipe. "I haven't the foggiest."

"Not a clue?"

"Nothing besides mere guesses. What I do is figure out things that already have happened, the hows, whos, wheres, and whens of death. Not even the whys. And you want 'What happens next.' No can do. Look at this sudden storm. Science can't even accurately predict the weather past seventy-two hours. How can we predict what men and women, perhaps psychotic men and women, will do when we have so little information compared to the data we have about pressure systems, winds, moisture, temperatures?"

I was quiet again, and Charlie blew some cherry-flavored smoke at me. "If I had to guess," he said, "it's that you're in some danger. You're the one unraveling the web they've spun. But then again, if you lose the trial, they're home free. Why should they risk it all by going after you?"

"But I know they'll try something. Melanie won't let it rest. I can predict that with virtual certainty."

"Your intuition tells you that, but your data is woefully insufficient. There is no way you can know thousands of incidents in her life that make her what she is so as to predict what she'll do."