Paul Levine: To speak for the dead

Greeting me in my bayfront office was the clutter of mes-^sa ges that would not be answered-lawyers who wouldn't be called, clients who wouldn't be seen, motions that wouldn't be heard while my world was circumscribed by the four walls of Courtroom 6-1 in the Dade County Courthouse. Next to the phone messages were stacks of pleadings, letters and memos, carefully arranged in order of importance with numbers written on those little yellow squares of paper that have their own stickum on back. What did we do before those] sticky doodads were invented? Or before the photocopier? Or the computer, the telecopier, and the car phone? It must | have been a slower world. Before lawyers had offices fifty J two stories above Biscayne Bay with white-coated waiters I serving afternoon tea, and before surgeons cleared four hun-1 dred thousand a year, easy, scraping out gristle from knees* and squeezing bad discs out of spines.

Lawyers had become businessmen, leveraging their hourly ^: rates by stacking offices with high-billing associates, forming "teams" for well-heeled clients, and raking in profits on the difference between associates' salaries and their billing rates, j Doctors had become little industries themselves, creating! huge pension plans, buying buildings and leasing them back, investing in labs and million-dollar scanning machines, getting depreciation and investment income that far outpaced ¦ patient fees.

Maybe doctors were too busy following the stock market to be much good at surgery anymore. Maybe the greed of lawyers and doctors equally contributed to the malpractice crisis. But maybe an occasional slip of the scalpel or a missed melanoma just couldn't be helped. What was it old Charlie Riggs said the first day he reviewed the charts in] Salisbury's case? Errare humanum est. To err is human. Sure, ¦ but a jury seldom forgives.

I grabbed the first message on stack one. Granny Lassiter called. I hoped she hadn't been arrested again. Granny lived in Islamorada in the Florida Keys and taught me everything I know about fishing and most of what I know about decency and principle. She was one of the first to speak against unrestrained construction in the environmentally fragile Keys. When speaking didn't work, she got a Key West conch named Virgil Thigpen drunk as an Everglades skunk and commandeered his tank truck. The truck, not coincidentally, had just sucked up the contents of Granny's septic tank and that of half a dozen neighbors. Granny drove it smack into the champagne and caviar crowd at the grand opening of Pelican Point, a plug-ugly pink condo on salt-eaten concrete stilts that would soon sink into the dredged muck off Key Largo. While the bankers, lawyers, developers, and lobbyists stood gaping, and TV cameras whirred, Granny shouted, "Shit on all of you," then sloshed twelve hundred gallons of crud onto the canape table.

The judge gave her probation plus a hundred hours of community service, which she fulfilled by donating a good-sized portion of her homemade brew to the Naval Retirement Home in Marathon.

I returned the call. Granny just wanted to pass the time of day and give me a high-tide report. Next message, the unmistakably misshapen handwriting of Cindy, my secretary:

Across the River,

A Voice to Shine,

Tempus Fugit, Doc Speaks at Nine.

What the hell? A headful of tight, burnt orange-brown curls popped through my door. To my eye, Cindy's hair seemed to clash with the fuchsia eye shadow but clearly matched her lipstick. If the lipstick were any brighter, yot could use it for fluorescent highway markers.

"Cindy, what's this?"

"Haiku, el jefe."

"Who?"

"I do."

"What you do?"

"I do haiku," she said, laughing. "Haiku is three-line Japanese poetry, no breaking hearts, just recording the au thor's observations of nature and the human experience."

"What's it mean?"

"C'mon boss. Get with it. Crazy old Charlie Riggs is set testify at nine tomorrow morning. He'll tell one and all wha killed filthy rich Philip Corrigan."

"Good, he's our best witness."

"I don't know," Cindy said, twirling a finger through stiff curl. If a mosquito flew into her hair, it would be knocked cold. "I've got a bad feeling about this case. You Dr. Salisbury has a weird look in his eye."

"All men look at you that way, Cindy. Try wearing a bra.'

"I never thought you noticed."

"Hard to miss when the air conditioning turns this place into a meat locker. Now c'mon Cindy, help me out. We have anything on Corrigan's daughter by his first marriage?"

"Sure, a little." Cindy was not as ditsy as she looked. She could turn heads with her hyped-up looks, bouncy walk, an‹ easy smile, but underneath were brains and street smarts, an unusual combination.

"Susan Corrigan," Cindy said, without consulting the file "About thirty, undergrad work at UF, then a master's in journalism at Northwestern. Sportswriter at the Herald." "You're amazing," I said, meaning it.

"In many splendored ways unbeknownst to you."

I chose not to wade in those crowded waters.

"Wait a second," I said. "Of course. Susan Corrigan. I know the by-line, the first woman inside the Dolphins' locker room." I picked up yesterday's paper, which had been gathering dust in a wicker basket next to my desk. I found the story stripped across the top of the sports section under the headline, "Dolphin Hex? Injuries Vex Offensive Line." by susan corrigan HERALD SPORTS WRITER On a team where the quarterback is king, something wicked keeps happening to the palace guard.

And the palace tackles. And the palace center.

"It's scary the things that happened to our offensive line in the last three weeks," Dolphin Coach Don Shula said yesterday. "When injuries hit us, they come in bunches."

Sure, Susan Corrigan. Made a name for herself playing tennis against Martina, sprinting against Flo-Jo, then writing first-person pieces. I'd read her stuff. Tough and funny. Today I'd seen half of that.

What's she have to do with Salisbury's case?" Cindy asked.

"Don 't know. But there's more to the second Mrs. Corrigan than tears and white gloves, and Susan knows something."

What's she look like, an Amazon warrior?"

Hardly. Cute, not beautiful. Long legs, short dark hair like Dorothy Hamill, wears glasses, wholesome as the Great Outdoors. No hint of scandal."

Cindy laughed. "Doesn't sound like your type."

"Did I mention foulmouthed?"

"We're getting warmer."

"Cindy, this is all business."

"Isn't it always?"

Practice was almost over and only a few players were still on the field. Natural grass warmed by the sun, a clean earthy smell in the late afternoon Florida air. It had been one of those days when it's a crime to be shackled to an office or courtroom. Winter in the tropics. Clear sky, mid-seventies, a light breeze from the northeast. On the small college campus where the Dolphins practice, the clean air and open spaces were a world away from Miami's guttersnipes and bottom feeders.

I spotted Susan Corrigan along the sideline. She wore gray cotton sweats and running shoes and seemed to be counting heads, seeing what linemen were still able to walk as they straggled back to the locker room. A reporter's notepad was jammed into the back of her sweatpants and a ballpoint pen jutted like a torpedo out of her black hair. All business. On the field in front of her only the quarterbacks and wide receivers were still going through their paces, a few more passes before the sun set. On an adjacent practice field, a ballboy shagged kick after kick from a solitary punter.

"Susan," I called from a few yards away.

She turned with an expectant smile. The sight of me washed it away. I asked if we could talk. She turned back to the field. I asked if she was waiting for somebody. She studied the yard markers. I asked who she liked in the AFC East. She didn't give me any tips. I just stood there, looking at her profile. It wasn't hard to take.