Three To Get Deadly

by Lee Goldberg

  The young Cubans, the teenagers born in Miami, look at matters differently. With their 280Z's, late nights in Coconut Grove discos, and weekends on Key Biscayne beaches, they have no desire to take up arms or swing machetes in the sugarcane fields. If they don battle fatigues, it is only because the look is fashionable this season at the Banana Republic boutique.

  When hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees flooded Miami in the 1960s, there were few directions to go. East was the small downtown and Biscayne Bay. South was pricey Coral Gables, and it would be years before most exiles could move there. North was Liberty City, officially the Central Negro District on old police reports, a place the Great Society passed by, the scorching pavement without the palm trees of the Gables or the pines of South Dade.

  The only direction was west, and those who fled Castro pushed Miami that way, blowing the city out at the seams, bringing new food and music and clothing, and in a generation, they owned the gas stations and restaurants and auto dealerships and furniture stores and even banks. From the bay westward for one hundred forty blocks, onto the fringes of the Everglades, on both sides of Tamiami Trail, they lived and worked and prospered. In the middle of what was a sleepy Southern town another country grew, strange and forbidding—Fantasias Ropas, Vistas Funeraria, Clínicas Quiroprácticas—its premises off-limits to English speakers.

  The Anglo immigrants of a generation before came from Georgia and Alabama. They lived in small concrete block stucco houses with no garages, and in their front yards pickup trucks were hitched to airboats, ready for midnight frogging in the Glades. These whites—airline mechanics, truck drivers, power company linemen—already feared the mean street blacks and resented the Miami Beach Jews. Culture shock for these Southern Baptists was a Florida town turned upside down, where native-born whites got the hell out, bumper stickers pleading sarcastically, WILL THE LAST ANGLO TO LEAVE MIAMI PLEASE TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.

  * * *

  Traffic thinned after I passed the sprawling campus of Florida International University. Now it was a straight shot across the Trail, all the way to Naples if I wanted to air it out. At first I pretended not to know where I was headed. But I knew. I knew the little dirt road that came out of the Everglades near Shark Valley just this side of the phony Miccosukee village where a bored Indian wrestles a stoned gator, tourists clicking their Nikons.

  I slid into the turn, sending up a swirl of dust and startling a dozen snowy egrets in the sawgrass. A great white heron with matchstick legs eyed me from the shallow water, then stutter-stepped away like a man on crutches. The high ground—barely two feet above the swamp—was a mile off the Trail, just a patch of dirt behind a stand of scraggly trees. The house was an old fishing cabin, weatherbeaten boards topped by a corrugated aluminum roof that caught the late afternoon sun. An old fishing cabin is what you're left with when your wife's lawyer is a B-52 bomber with a mouth like a nuclear warhead. A Spanish-style house with an orange barrel-tile roof on a shady Coral Gables street is what your wife gets when the mushroom cloud has lifted.

  In a dilapidated lawn chair, bare feet propped on a milk carton, sat Charles W. Riggs, M.D., retired medical examiner of Dade County, Florida. He put down a dusty book and motioned me toward another plastic chair with frayed straps for a seat. I looked at the book. Select Coroners' Rolls, 1265-1413, A.D. Must have missed it on the bestseller list. Riggs wore khaki bush shorts that stopped just above his knobby knees. His legs were short and pale, the legs of a man with enough sense to stay out of the Florida sun. His faded T-shirt advertised an oyster bar in Key West and bulged at the middle. His graying beard needed trimming or at least combing. His half-glasses had tossed a screw and were mended with a bent fishhook. The glasses sat cockeyed on his small nose. Behind the lenses, his eyes—the color of sawgrass during a drought—took it all in and let only some of it out.

  "You make a wrong turn heading for the beach?" he asked.

  "No, just thought I'd be neighborly, drop by. Que pasa, Doc?"

  "Mosquitoes biting, fish ain't. What're you doing this far west?"

  "Lately haven't known east from west, up from down."

  "Sounds like one of those country ballads. You're not in love are you, Jake?"

  I fiddled with the old book. "Not in love, though there's a woman. But this isn't about her, not exactly. It's Stanton. We finished today, defense verdict."

  "Congratulations. When I saw your face, I thought the jury might have stuck it to you. Would have been a shame. That rongeur never got close to the aorta."

  My white shirt, angelic for verdict day, was beginning to patch with sweat. No breeze cut through the great river of grass today. "I believed you about the rongeur," I said. "The jury believed you. There's a young woman, Corrigan's daughter, who says the malpractice case was just a cover, that Stanton and the widow poisoned her father with a drug, succinylcholine."

  Charlie Riggs didn't bat an eye. "What's the motive?"

  "Money. Melanie wanted her husband's. Stanton wanted Melanie, the money, too, I suppose."

  "Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas."

  "Easy for you to say."

  "The love of money," Charlie Riggs explained, "is the root of all evil. Not money itself. There's nothing inherently evil about money, but the love of it, that's what does them in. Money never meant beans to me. Martha, my ex, was always yammering about money. Wanted me to go into private practice, form my own P. A., start a chain of labs, pay kickbacks to the internists, the whole lousy deal. Imagine me a businessman, or even worse, looking at slides all day, a bookkeeper in a white coat with a microscope."

  I kept my mouth shut and let him think about it, a brilliant career of public service, a wrecked family life. He smiled sadly and said, "Loved the scent of money, she did, and hated the smell of formaldehyde."

  I navigated the conversation back on course. "I'm having trouble believing it, murder I mean. But Susan Corrigan came up with a vial that supposedly has the drug, a couple of hypodermics, all in a leather valise belonging to Stanton."

  Charlie Riggs shook his head. "Succinylcholine, a lousy way to die. You'd be conscious, fully aware, but paralyzed until your lungs and heart gave out. Ugly. Somebody must have a lot of hunger for money to do that."

  "That doesn't surprise you, does it, Charlie? Man is the cruelest animal."

  He waggled a finger at me. "A common misconception. There are animals in nature capable of the cruelest torture. Take the ichneumons, a variety of wasps. The ichneumon injects its eggs right into a caterpillar's body after shooting it with a paralyzing toxin. Sort of a succinylcholine in nature. When the eggs hatch, the wasp larvae begin eating the caterpillar, slowly and painfully. They keep that poor caterpillar alive so the innards don't spoil, first eating the fat and the digestive organs, saving the heart for last. Finally nothing is left but the shell. Nature is just as cruel as man."

  This was standard fare for Doc Riggs, a mix of Biology 101 and Basic Philosophy. I said, "Sure Charlie, but the icky-whatchamacallit does it for food, for survival."

  "Is that really an important distinction?"

  Pulling the old Socratic method on me. "Sure it is," I said. "Killing for food is justifiable homicide in the animal kingdom. I've watched enough Marlin Perkins to know that. Man kills for money or out of anger or passion. I've tried enough criminal cases to know that."

  He looked at me over the repaired glasses that hung lopsided on his nose. "Either way, the victim is just as innocent, the pain just as real, is it not?"

  I didn't answer, just sat there and listened to the sound of the swamp, the water stirred by unseen animals. Overhead I heard the short, mellow whistle of an osprey, the Florida fish hawk, and imagined its sharp eyes on full alert for catfish, talons at the ready.

  Two mosquitoes buzzed around my left ear, debating who would dine first.

  Finally Charlie Riggs said, mostly to himself, "Succinylcholine. Be hard to trace. Breaks down into succinic acid and choline and both substances are normally present in t
he body. A physician would know that. We could check for needle tracks, though."

  "Isn't it a little late for that?"

  He sprang from the chair and bounded into the cabin, banging the screen door behind him. "Read the book," he called out. "Right where the mark is. I'll fix us some limeade. Key limes, sour as my ex-wife's disposition."

  I blew some dust off the book and it fell open to the year 1267. A crummy time to be alive unless you were handy with a sword. The book was in Latin on the left-hand pages and English on the right. Riggs had been reading the left side, making little notes. Never having gotten past amo, amas, amat, I opted for the English:

  It happened in the village of Goldington after vespers the eve of the feast of St. Dunstan that strife arose on the Green between William Read and John Barford concerning sheep. William received a wound on the head from which he seemed to recover. Then he died of ague and his wife raised the hue. The coroner found that William Read had already been buried and instructed that he be dug up. When he be dug up, the coroner said that William Read died of the wound, not the illness, and ordered John Barford attached.

  Charlie Riggs toddled out of the cabin carrying two mason jars of limeade with no ice. I put down the book and asked, "You want to exhume Corrigan's body?"

  He handed me one of the jars, dropped into his rickety chair, and studied the swamp. "You'd be surprised how well embalming preserves tissues. Might be hard to find needle tracks, though. The skin will be moldy, and if he's buried in damp ground, it's probably turned to adipocere, sort of a waxy gunk. And he isn't going to smell like Chanel No. 5."

  He let that hang in the still air, then said, "If you're getting hungry, I'm about to put supper on. Fresh possum."

  I passed on the invitation, thoughts of parasitic wasps and moldy corpses failing to whet the appetite. I took a swig of the warm limeade. It puckered me up; he had left out the sugar.

  "Well how about it, Jake? You ready to rob graves?"

  "I've done worse, but Stanton is my client. I can't do anything against his interests."

  Riggs scowled. "The case is over, Counselor."

  "Not in the eyes of the Florida Bar. I can't use something I learned in the course of representing Stanton in a way that may harm him. I try not to break more than two or three of the canons each week."

  I must not have sounded convincing. I hadn't convinced Riggs, and I hadn't convinced myself.

  Charlie Riggs downed his limeade in one gulp, gave me his teacher-to-student look, and said, "It's not as if you're going to the authorities. Just a little private investigation to answer some questions, settle your conscience. Besides, it'll give me something to do. And maybe your young lady friend will appreciate you searching for the truth, kind of set you apart from most members of your profession."

  He knew how to push all the right buttons. "C'mon, Jake. To hell with your canons."

  "Come to think of it," I said, "they're not mine."

  "Good boy. Let's get to it. The grave is silent, magis mutus quam piscis, but you and I, Jake, we can speak for the dead."

  12

  KNIGHT ERRANT

  The city swallowed up the Stanton verdict just as it did everything else. A tiny morsel for the carnivorous media machines. Two paragraphs in the "Courthouse Roundup" section of the newspaper, no television or radio coverage at all. 60 Minutes did not call me for an interview; young lawyers did not stop me on Flagler Street and ask for words of wisdom; my partners did not toast me with champagne or vote me a bonus.

  If the jury had hit Stanton with a ten-million-dollar verdict, headlines would have screamed the news from here to Tallahassee. But a defense verdict sinks into the muck of the day's events, a fallen twig barely stirring a ripple in the malevolent swamp.

  I did receive a memo from Morris McGonigal, the senior partner, a guy with a gray flannel personality in a seersucker town. Or rather my secretary Cindy received a memo from his secretary. It said, "Please advise Mr. Lassiter that Mr. McGonigal congratulates him on his recent verdict."

  The personal touch.

  I wasn't complaining about the lack of notoriety. It probably was better for Stanton. A doctor gets hit with a big verdict, the public thinks he's a butcher. The doctor gets off, the public thinks the jury fouled up. Besides, it was a heavy news day, even by Miami standards. Federal agents arrested two Nicaraguans who had a dozen TOW missiles and an antitank rocket in their truck, the Miami version of a firearms violation. The Nicaraguans were planning to fight the Sandinistas, a holy mission hereabouts, and would probably get probation, if not a key to the city.

  A few hours later, most Miami police were busy pumping bullets into the van of a 63-year-old Cuban plumber. They had good reason. He had fired five shots at an undercover cop. But then the plumber had good reason. The cop, dressed like a thug, was stuck in a monstrous traffic jam on Calle Ocho. The cop waved his gun at the plumber to get him to move his van. His motherfucking Cuban van, witnesses would later recall the officer screaming. There was a convenience store robbery coming down a block away, and the cop, his Firebird socked in by the van, was hollering in English, a language as foreign to the plumber as Sanskrit.

  The plumber figured he was being robbed and opened fire. That drew seven police cars, a number of shotguns, and forty-seven holes in the van, three in the plumber, and one in his colostomy bag. The plumber survived, and the convenience store robbers got away with seventy-three dollars and a box of Dove Bars.

  I was mired in my typical psychological letdown after a trial, just puttering around the office, shuffling stacks of mail, trying to figure out where to go from here. I tried calling Susan Corrigan, but a bored voice on the copy desk said she was on the west coast, headed out early for pregame stories on the Dolphins' next opponent, their old nemesis, the Raiders. I wanted to see her, and not just to talk about digging up dear old Dad. I had a little buzz about Ms. Susan Corrigan. That happens sometimes when I get stiff-armed. Don't know why, maybe my ego needs bruising. Maybe too much easy flesh in the early years. Or maybe I had matured a notch or two until I finally appreciated a strong, savvy lady more than a lusty, dim one. Whatever the reason, the image of the suntanned and sharp-tongued sports writer was hovering just below the surface of my consciousness.

  I had just hung up with the newspaper when Cindy slipped me a note:

  Widow Not Merry,

  Do Not Tarry;

  Commotion, Line Two.

  I punched the flashing button and heard shouting in the background, a man's voice and a woman's voice. I couldn't make out the words. I said hello a bunch of times. The phone must have been put down. Some women need two hands to argue. The voices came closer. "You owe me," the man's voice said, booming over the wire. Then the sound of a woman laughing. More yelling, then a woman's loud voice telling the man to get out. I thought I heard a door slam. Then silence.

  "Hello." The woman's voice, under perfect control. "Mr. Lassiter?"

  I told her it was.

  She told me it was Mrs. Corrigan calling. I knew that.

  She said there was trouble. I knew that, too.

  Could you come over?

  "If you have trouble, why not call the police?" I suggested.

  "You wouldn't like that," she said, evenly. "Neither would your client."

  It was coming into focus. "Is Roger there?"

  "He is, and he's making quite a scene."

  "Put him on."

  "At the moment, he's pacing on the patio by the Jacuzzi. If it's just the same to you, I'd rather not have him in the house. He hit me. And I don't think he'll leave my property unless you come talk to him. Or should I just call the police and charge him with trespassing and assault?"

  "I'll be there in twenty minutes."

  She didn't ask if I knew the address and I didn't tell her I did. I just headed to the parking garage, and like a knight errant, saddled my steed and galloped south on Miami Avenue toward Coconut Grove and Gables Estates beyond. At the same time I wondered what Roger Stanton was d
oing, screwing everything up. Why wasn't he sawing bones and scraping kneecaps? What was it he'd said? That he was still under her spell. Didn't he know she was poison?

  * * *

  The water still tumbled through its man-made waterfall and the house still sat, silent as a tomb, atop its man-made hill. But no cars in the driveway, no voices to break the gentle roar of the waterfall, and no Roger Stanton. The winter sun, low in the afternoon sky, slanted narrow shadows from the royal palms, like jailhouse bars, across the Corrigan house. A chill was in the air, a cold front from the Midwest rustling the palm fronds with a crisp northwest breeze. I parked by the waterfall, patted the 442 on the rump and told it to stay put. Then, I walked up the front steps and rang the bell.

  "He threatened to kill me," Melanie Corrigan said.

  She had thrown open the double doors, a good trick in itself. Fifteen feet high, six inches thick, crossed-hatched by thick beams, a circus elephant could slip in sideways.

  "Where is he?"

  "He threatened to kill me," she repeated. There was a red splotch just below her left eye. A right-handed guy who doesn't know how to punch might have glanced one off there. "He left. Drove away like a madman. Cursing at me."

  She led me into the foyer and closed the door. An electric bolt clicked into place like a bullet shoved into the chamber. The foyer had a marble floor and a cathedral ceiling. Not as big as Madison Square Garden, but you still could play basketball there. Full court. Between the foyer and the living room was a pond stocked with fat orange fish. A fountain poured water over an island where bronze flamingoes and alligators eyed each other between rocks and ferns. We walked past the pond and around a glass-enclosed elevator, crossing no more than two county lines. We tiptoed down three marble steps without disturbing an eight-foot Zulu warrior carved from teak, and we landed in an octagonal, sunken living room.