To speak for the dead

by Paul Levine

  In fifteen minutes we were half a mile from the Whaler, trying to be inconspicuous. I dropped anchor and peered through binoculars. Melanie Corrigan was still soaking up rays. Sergio was bent over the starboard side, away from us. He had a gaff or a fishing rod or a net in his hand. Too far to be sure.

  There was only one way to get closer without attracting attention. It was awkward, but I rigged a six-square-meter sail onto a sixteen-foot mast, nearly falling over the rub rail. I dropped the board over the side, jumped in, and jammed the mast into the universal joint while treading water. The water was warm and clear. Susan stayed in the boat and looked at me skeptically. "Do you know what you're do-ing?"

  "Trust me. I've sailed from Key Biscayne to Bimini on one of these."

  I uphauled the sail in a measly ten knots of wind, and tugging at my oversize drawers, I sailed closer to the Whaler. Out of my customary charcoal gray suit, standing in the shadow of the sail, I figured they wouldn't recognize me. Just another bozo sailing standing up.

  I sailed cautiously, eyeing dozens of floating purple-blue sacs with poison-packed tails trailing underneath. Our waters are filled with biters, shockers, and stingers. Sharks, of course, are biters. You see them sometimes near Virginia

  Key on Key Biscayne, feeding a mile or so offshore. They seldom bother anyone. There are Atlantic rays, some weighing as much as a good-sized running back, and their tails pack over two hundred volts of electricity. They can explode out of the water and scare the bejesus out of sailors and windsurfers alike. Then, each winter, we get the Portuguese men-of-war, prehistoric animals of unearthly beauty with their iridescent bluish-purple sacs and crests of orangish red. For those lured to the luminous sac, there is only betrayal. Underneath the water, hidden from view, are dozens of tentacles, undulating with the currents, straining to inject their poison into those seduced by the beauty.

  I tipped the mast forward to head downwind and sailed off the stern of the Whaler. Sergio was still bent over the side, a net now visible in his hand. I saw a fishing rod jammed into a rod holder. Okay, maybe after some grouper. I wanted to get closer, so I jibed and came back the other way. About a hundred yards away, I trimmed the sail and tried to pick up a little speed. I wanted to pass by without taking too long to do it, not give them a good look at me. It would have worked, too, if I hadn't dropped my drawers. Trying not to draw attention to yourself is hard to do when your bare ass is staring at the people you would just as soon avoid.

  Not wanting to make a further spectacle of myself, I headed back to our boat where Susan Corrigan was shaking her head. "Showing off for the widow?" she asked as I climbed aboard.

  "Just distracting her," I replied. "A diversion from my adorable face."

  "Maybe she recognizes both ends of you," Susan said without the hint of a smile.

  "If that's a question, the answer is no."

  She measured that one, believed me, and we took the Chris Craft back to the marina. Mission bungled. I still had no idea why Melanie was at Roger's house last night or on the bay with Sergio today. But I was starting to get the idea that the lady had a plan for everything and everybody. Inviting me to her house had to be part of the plan. I wished I knew what part.

  Susan and I headed to Coconut Grove, the Olds 442 purring in third gear. I pulled into the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree in front of my house, and she turned to me.

  "Jake, we have to talk."

  "Uh-huh."

  "About the other night."

  "The other night?"

  "Don't be dense! At your Granny's. And last night, in your shoebox there behind the weeds. Have you forgotten?"

  I put the stick into neutral and turned off the ignition. The engine groaned and died. "I haven't forgotten. I remember every parry and thrust."

  "That's not what I mean. Don't you think we should talk about how we feel about each other?"

  Uh-oh. I should have known. Somehow I assumed that Susan Corrigan was different from other women. Which she was, of course, in certain respects. She cared less about clothes than whether to pass or run on third-and-four. But she was still a woman… and women want to talk about relationships. I went into my big, dumb guy routine. It comes naturally.

  "I'm not too good at postcoital conversation," I said.

  "I know," she said compassionately. "Like most men, you have trouble expressing your emotions."

  "Not all of them. Anger I'm good at."

  She scowled and waited. I had one hand on the door handle, but she wasn't stirring. Trapped.

  "Jake, if it helps, I'm not too good at this either. But here goes. I want you to know I wouldn't have crawled into your bed unless I felt something for you. Something more than a physical attraction. I don't know how much or where it's going. But it's real, and I wanted you to know."

  She waited some more.

  I was silent. Overhead, a snowy egret headed toward the Everglades. Free to roam. I fidgeted, and the old leather upholstery squeaked underneath me.

  "The ball is in your court, Counselor," Susan Corrigan said.

  "I appreciate what you said. Thank you."

  "Thank you? You big lummox! Are there any feelings inside that block of granite that sits on your shoulders? I am so tired of commitment-phobic men who panic when things get too good. Are you afraid of love, Jake? Is that it, are you one of those guys who sabotages a relationship when it gets too close?"

  I looked down and noticed I was stomping on the brake pedal. My right hand had the gearshift in a death grip. The car seemed to shrink around me, caught in one of those machines that pulverizes a two-ton sedan into a block of scrap metal the size of a sofa. "Don't you think you're overreacting to my limited ability to express myself?" I asked.

  "Is that code for inaccessibility and lack of emotional depth?"

  "No. You're important to me, Susan. There's so much going on right now that I haven't had a chance to figure it all out. But you've gotten to me, right through the granite. You challenge me. You make me think about the way I live, my work, everything. You turn me on, and you light me up. But it's not even halftime. Let's go into the locker room, then see what happens in the second half."

  She smiled. "Not a bad speech. Not a great speech, but it'll do. .."

  Then I leaned down and kissed her, and she grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head back. "… For now," she said, pushing me toward the door.

  A ringing phone greeted us in the little house. Charlie Riggs was on the line, breathing hard. "Thank God you're there. There's trouble, Jake, and his name's Abe Socolow."

  Oh no, Socolow.

  "They must have followed me here," Charlie said. "Two investigators from the State Attorney's Office plus Socolow. It's his case."

  "What, a lousy grave theft?"

  "No Jake, the murder of Philip Corrigan."

  That took the air out of me. "Where are you, Charlie?"

  "At Jane's house."

  "Jane?"

  "Jane! Jane Lassiter, your granny, for pete's sake."

  "Oh." The last time Granny was called Jane, the Wright Brothers were still tuning pianos.

  "Don't worry, Jake. I'm buying her out and I won't give you up."

  "Slow down, Charlie. What happened? Who's there?"

  "Socolow and two of his investigators are on the front porch. This is my one phone call, just like in the movies. Best I can figure, MacKenzie heard I was in the lab after hours. Lord knows how, he never works past five. Anyway, he busted balls on the toxicology staff. They gave him the liver and brain samples, all tested positive for succinic acid and choline. So Socolow put a tail on me. They figured I had the body. I'm giving it to them. We would have done it sooner or later anyway, and they promise no charges for the grave robbery."

  "Does Socolow know you're calling me?"

  "Yeah, but just as a lawyer. He doesn't know you were in the cemetery. Like I said, I won't give you up. He can't flip me."

  "Relax, Charlie. You sound like Jimmy Cagney."

  "I'm so sorry,
Jake. This couldn't have happened ten years ago. Fugaces labuntur anni. You wake up one morning and you're old."

  I thought Charlie was about to cry, then through the phone, I heard the unmistakable sound of Granny's screen door slamming shut. Then a voice, raspy and disagreeable, a voice from the past.

  "You're one rockin' rollin' mouthpiece, Jake, but you got your dick on the chopping block this time."

  "Hello, Abe," I said. "Long time."

  I pictured him on the other end of the line, smirking malevolently. Abraham Socolow was lean and balding, sallow of face and unpleasant of disposition. He was born mad at the world, and nothing had happened in the next forty-four years to change his mind. He believed that his fellow man was a miscreant until proven innocent. As chief of major crimes in the State Attorney's Office, he also believed it was his mission in life to personally convict and send away the worst of the low-life slimeballs who committed felonies in the twenty-seven municipalities of Dade County, Florida.

  Every prosecutor's office has one Abe Socolow but could use ten. He viewed the job as a calling, not as a stepping stone to a cushy life defending drug dealers. Abe Socolow was smart, tough, mean, and unforgiving. And messianic. He considered plea-bargaining a sacrilege, probation unthinkable, and second chances were for basketball players at the free throw line.

  As much as Socolow detested robbers, rapists, and druggies, he had a special contempt for murderers. On a chart above his green metal desk in a tiny office that smelled of stale coffee and cigarettes was a poster with mug shots of fifty-eight men and three women. Sixty-one buckets of slime, Socolow liked to say. A diagonal slash cut across five of the faces and a caricature of Socolow's beakish face peeked over the top of each slash. "Slimebusters," the poster said in red ink, drawn to look like drops of blood.

  The greatest anguish in Socolow's life was that he had convicted sixty-one slimeballs of first degree murder but only thirty-eight had been sentenced to death, and of those, only five had been executed. The rest were tied up in endless appeals. When I was a public defender, Socolow confided to me that he sometimes dreamed he would die before his murderers, a vision that left him frightened and alone. It was the only time I knew him to confess weakness of any kind.

  "You gonna defend him, Jake?"

  "Defend who?"

  "Hey, don't jerk me off. Roger Salisbury. Dr. X, the 201 great white defendant, purveyor of poison, seducer of women…"

  "You writing headlines now, Abe?"

  "No, just getting indictments and convictions."

  "What's the charge?"

  He laughed. "I'd say Murder One after the grand jury meets tomorrow."

  "You got a corpus delicti?"

  Another laugh, like a horse's whinny. "Right here on ice, along with some hog snapper."

  "And a weapon?" I asked. Might as well do some pretrial discovery if he was in a talkative mood.

  "Implements of the crime. About an hour ago, we served a warrant on Salisbury's house. Found a real interesting vial with two hypodermics. Lab will have it back tonight. Wanna bet on the contents?"

  So that's what happened. A lot of things about my late-night phone call to Roger's house were coming into focus.

  "Sure I'll bet. I'll bet you got the search warrant based on an affidavit from a charming widow. I'll bet she swore she saw the stuff in Salisbury's house within the last twenty-four hours."

  "What of it?"

  "She planted it there!" I thundered. "Last night. I know she was there. She wanted me to know she was there. It corroborates her affidavit. But I also know where she got the vial and the hypodermics and it wasn't from Roger."

  "I'm listening," Socolow said.

  But I wasn't talking. Melanie Corrigan must have known I wouldn't drag Susan into it. Susan would swear the drug came from Melanie's bedroom but could not prove it. That left Susan holding the drug. Roger was trapped, but I was too. Nowhere to turn. Finally I said, "Roger Salisbury isn't a murderer. He may look at life through a zipper, but last time I checked, that wasn't a capital crime."

  "Fine, Lassiter, argue that to the jury. And this is what I'll argue. Roger Salisbury is banging his patient's wife. He asks her to kill her husband. She refuses. He has access to a dangerous anesthetic. The husband dies after routine surgery. The anesthetic is found in the doctor's home and traces are present in the corpse. That's our case, a simple, straightforward path to Murder One."

  "Anything else?"

  "Only this. It's premeditated. It's a cold-blooded, calculated murder for lust and money. It's a heinous, atrocious crime without any pretense of moral or legal justification. You know where I'm heading, doncha Jake, old buddy."

  I wasn't his old buddy but I knew where he was heading. He was reciting Section 921.141. Like the Pledge of Allegiance, he knew the death penalty statute by heart.

  "I know. You want twelve men, good and true, not just six."

  "You got it. Warming up the hot seat at Raiford."

  Abe Socolow wanted me to sweat. And I was sweating. But thinking, too. His case all wrapped up like that. Something was missing. The same thing Charlie Riggs and I couldn't figure out: How could Roger have killed Philip Corrigan- how could anyone?-if the cause of death was a spontaneous rupture of the aorta?

  But if I was right, if nobody killed Philip Corrigan, why would Melanie frame Roger? It made no sense. She only needed Roger out of the way to cover her own tracks. If her husband had died of natural causes, there would be nothing to hide, nothing to gain.

  So I was back at square one. I didn't know what caused Philip Corrigan's death, or who. And I didn't know the answer to Abe Socolow's first question. I didn't know if Roger wanted me to defend him. After all, if I hadn't dug up the body, there probably wouldn't be a murder charge. If I were Roger, I wouldn't hire me; I'd sue me.

  17

  TELLING LIES

  in the name and by the authority of the state of florida:

  The Grand Jurors of the State of Florida, duly called, empaneled and sworn to inquire and true presentment make in and for the body of the County of Dade, upon their oaths, present that on the 14th day of October, 1986, within the County of Dade, State of Florida, ROGER A. SALISBURY did, unlawfully and feloniously, from a premeditated design to effect the death of PHILIP CORRIGAN, a human being, kill PHILIP CORRIGAN, by injecting him with a dangerous drug, in violation of Florida Statute Section 782.04(l)(a), to the evil example of all others in like cases offending and against the peace and dignity of the State of Florida.

  The indictment was signed by the foreman of the grand jury and delivered to my house by a messenger from Abe Socolow's office. I telephoned Roger, regretful and apologetic.

  "I'll understand if you file a complaint with the Bar," I said.

  "Then who'd defend me? The phony malpractice case was bad enough. But a murder charge? It's crazy, and you're the only one I trust to beat it."

  He made it sound easy, as if I could pull a few strings, get him a bye. I halfheartedly tried to talk him out of it. "I'm a little rusty in Criminal Court. There are some big gun criminal lawyers you could get."

  "But you believe I'm innocent. None of them will."

  He had me there. I believed he was innocent, but I wanted to know. He was surprised when I asked him to take a polygraph test. When he agreed, I believed him a little more.

  "This machine is so primitive," Roger Salisbury said. "I don't trust it, not a bit."

  He was squirming in a hard wooden chair, a blood pressure cuff wrapped around his right arm, pneumograph tubes circling his chest and abdomen, electrodes attached to two fingers of his left hand. He sat on an inflatable rubber bladder and leaned back against another one, trying to balance his weight.

  He was right; the equipment was primitive. The polygraph hasn't changed much since a psychologist named William

  Marston started fooling around with blood pressure deception tests seventy years ago. Dr. Roger Salisbury would have been more comfortable lashed to a shiny chrome device with micro
chips and digital readouts, not this Rube Goldberg contraption.

  "Just try to relax," I said. "They used to throw people into wells to see if they were demons. The ones who drowned were found innocent. The ones who floated were obviously children of Satan deserving of death. We've progressed a bit."

  The technician had spent an hour with Roger getting him prepared, gaining his confidence. And setting him up. That's what polygraph examiners do. Some small talk, convince the subject he has to tell the truth, then try to solicit a lie to an irrelevant question to measure the response against the relevant one: Did you steal the petty cash, do you smoke dope on the job, then… did you murder Philip Corrigan?

  Roger Salisbury wouldn't know this. And he wouldn't know what every con learns while still in reform school- how to screw up the test with a nail in the shoe, a hard bite into the tongue, or other ways of jacking up blood pressure. Good. That's the way I wanted it. I wanted the truth about the death of Philip Corrigan. Not to determine whether to defend Roger. I could do that either way, guilty or innocent. Even if Roger told me he planned the murder for months and carried it out, I could still give him a defense, force the state to meet its burden of proof. That's our system. But I couldn't let him take the stand and lie. So I needed the knowledge for strategy purposes and for another reason, too. I just wanted to know. I had gotten too close to this one, nearly seduced by the widow, sleeping with the daughter, and now defending Roger Salisbury a second time.

  Regardless of the test result, it would not be admissible in the murder trial. Although juries frequently hear witnesses whose powers of observation are impaired by booze, drugs, or lack of intellect, polygraph tests are barred as not meeting scientific standards of proof. The courts constantly struggle to determine who lies and who tells the truth. Some judges claim to be experts on body language. A witness who raises one heel from the floor, bites a lip, or shifts his eyes is considered untrustworthy. I tell my witnesses to ogle the lawyer asking the question and not to keep time to show tunes with their feet. And I carry ChapStick for the biters.