Solomon And Lord Drop Anchor Part 5

The widow's eyes had narrowed into slits. No tears now. Just sparks and flames. "Get away from me you ingrate, and clear your junk out of the house by six tonight or your ratty clothes will be floating in the bay."

Dan Cefalo stepped in and separated the two. "Miss Corrigan, I think you best leave."

Oh, Miss Corrigan. The one with the colorful vocabulary must be Philip Corrigan's daughter by his first marriage. I followed her down the corridor.

"May I be of a.s.sistance?" I asked politely. Trying not to be your typical lawyer scavenging on the perimeter of misfortune.

She lowered the thick gla.s.ses and studied me with steaming eyes the color of a strong cup of coffee. The eyes had decided not to make any friends today. She looked me up and down, ending at my black wingtips. I could check for wounds later. Her nostrils flared as if I emitted noxious fumes.

"You're that doctor's lawyer, aren't you?" She made it sound like a capital crime.

"Guilty as charged. I saw you discussing a matter with Mrs. Corrigan and I just wondered if I might help ..."

"Why? Are you f.u.c.king her or do you just want to?" She slid her gla.s.ses back up the slope of the ski-jump nose and headed toward the elevators.

"No and yes," I called after her.

4.

THE SPORTSWRITER.

My desk was covered with little white telephone messages. Office confetti. You think the universe comes to a halt when you are locked into your own little world, but it doesn't. It goes on whether you're in trial or at war or under the surgeon's knife. Or dead. Dead rich like Philip Corrigan laid out on smooth satin in a mahogany box, or dead poor, a wino facedown in the bay.

Greeting me in my bay front office was the clutter of messages 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 circ.u.mscribed 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 stick.u.m 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-two stories above Biscayne Bay with white-coated waiters serving afternoon tea, and before surgeons cleared four hundred thousand a year, easy, sc.r.a.ping 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 a.s.sociates, forming "teams" for well-heeled clients, and raking in profits on the difference between a.s.sociates' salaries and their billing rates. 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 La.s.siter 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, "s.h.i.t 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 pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.l? 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, you 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 j.a.panese poetry, no breaking hearts, just recording the author's observations of nature and the human experience."

"What's it mean?"

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

"Good, he's our best witness."

"I don't know," Cindy said, twirling a finger through a stiff curl. If a mosquito flew into her hair, it would be knocked cold. "I've got a bad feeling about this case. Your 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, and 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. .h.i.t 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 gla.s.ses, 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 gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.ses before the sun set. On an adjacent practice field, a ballboy s.h.a.gged 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.

She turned toward me again, a studious yet annoyed look through thick gla.s.ses, as if an interesting insect had landed in her soup. "Why should I help you?"

"Because you're not real interested in helping Melanie Corrigan. Because you know things about her that could help an innocent doctor save his career. Because you like the way I comb my hair."

"You're dumber than you look," she hissed.

"Is there a compliment buried in that one?"

"You're hopeless."

I can take being put down. Judges do it all the time. So do important people like a maitre d' in a Bal Harbour restaurant who insists that diners wear socks. But this was different. I looked at her, a fresh-faced young woman in cotton sweats that could not hide her athletic yet very womanly body. I gave her a hangdog look that sought mercy. She turned back to the field. Dan Marino was firing short outs to Mark Duper and Mark Clayton. Though each pa.s.s arrived with ferocious speed, there was no slap of leather onto skin at the receiving end.

"Soft hands," Susan Corrigan said, mostly to herself.

"These guys are good but Paul Warfield will always be my favorite," I said. "Had moves like Baryshnikov. Stopping him was like tackling the wind."

"Sounds like you know more about football than about your own client."

I gave her my blank look and she kept going. "You still don't get it. You still don't know the truth."

"Get what? Look, I'm defending a man accused of professional malpractice. I don't know what the truth is. I never know. I just take the facts-or as much of them as I can get from people biased on all sides-and throw them at the jurors. You never know what jurors hear or remember or care about. You never know why they rule the way they do. They can right terrible wrongs or do terrible wrongs. They can shatter lives and destroy careers, and that's what I'm worried about with Roger Salisbury."

"Bring out the violins."

Suddenly a shout from behind us: "Heads up!" I looked up in time to see a brown blur dropping from the sky. Susan Corrigan's hands shot out and she caught the ball with her fingertips. A cheer went up from the wide receivers, anonymous behind their face masks.

"Soft hands," I said, "and a lot of quick." I gave her my best smile. It had been good enough for several generations of University of Miami coeds, their brains fried from working on their tans. It had lowered the minimal resistance of stewardesses from half a dozen failing airlines. It did not dent the armor of Susan Corrigan.

"Sit on this," she said, lateraling the ball toward my gut.

I felt like popping her one. Instead I took my frustrations out on the funny-shaped ball. Fingertips across the laces, I heaved a hard, tight spiral to the punter half the field away. He took it chest high and nodded with approval. The toss surprised even me.

Susan Corrigan whistled. "You've played some ball."

Her tone had subtly changed. Good, maybe if I went a few rounds with Mike Tyson, she'd give me the time of day.

"A little," I said. I decided not to tell her my right arm just lost all its feeling except for a p.r.i.c.kly sensation where the wires had been frayed.

"Quarterback?"

"No, I decided early I'd rather be the hitter than the hittee. Linebacker with lousy lateral movement. Occasionally I'd hit people returning kickoffs if they came my way. Sometimes filled in when games were already won or lost and I'd smack fullbacks who trudged up the middle. Mostly I polished the pine, which is actually aluminum and can freeze your b.u.t.t in places like South Bend and Ann Arbor in November. Gave me time to philosophize about cheerleaders' thighs."

"You look like you stay in shape."

"Used to windsurf a lot. Now I just hit the heavy bag a couple times a week and never miss a Wednesday night poker game."

"I can beat almost any man at almost any sport," she said. She didn't sound boastful. If you kin do it, it ain't braggin'.

"We should play ball sometime,'' I suggested.

She showed me the first hint of a smile. Her face didn't break. "Are you being a smarta.s.s now?" she asked, almost pleasantly.

"No. I just want to talk to you."

"I'll talk if you can beat me in a race."

"What?"

"The goal line," she said, pointing across the empty practice field. "Let's see who can score."

Only the punter was still on the field. He took his two-step approach and kicked the ball with a solid thwack. The same motion, time after time, a machine following the path designed for it on the drawing board. Like a surgeon clearing out the disc, the same motion, time after time. But the punter had shanked one off the side of his foot, and even Roger Salisbury could have booted one. There I go again, mind slipping out of gear.

"Yes or no?" she demanded. "I've got to interview Shula, and that's no day at the beach the way the Bills dropped buffalo s.h.i.t all over them last Sunday."

"Okay," I said, taking off my Scotch brogue wing tips. "I suppose you want a head start." She laughed a wily laugh.

The sun was just dropping over the Everglades to the west and a pink glow spread across the sky, casting Susan Corrigan into soft focus. I stretched my hamstrings and concocted a plan. I'd run stride for stride with her without breathing hard, maybe make a crack or two, then shoot by her, and run backwards the last ten yards. I'd let her jump into my arms at the goal line if she were so inclined. Then, I'd be a gracious winner and take her out for some fresh pompano and a good white wine.

She dropped into sprinter's stance, shouted "Go," and flew across the field. I bolted after her, my tie flapping over my shoulder like a pennant at the big game. She was five yards ahead after the first two seconds. Her stride was effortless, her movements smooth. My eyes fixed on her firm, round bottom, now rolling rhythmically with each stride. Halfway there I was still in second place, the greyhound chasing the mechanical rabbit. So I picked it up, still three yards back with only thirty to go. So much for the plan. Chasing pride now. Longer strides, lifting the knees too high, some wasted motion, but letting the energy of each step power the next one. Two steps behind and she shot a quick glance over her shoulder. A mistake, but only ten yards to go, no way to catch her, so I lunged, grabbing at her waist, hand slipping down over a hip, tumbling her into the gra.s.s with me rolling on top and her gla.s.ses, notepad, and pen whirling this way and that.

We ended up near the goal line, her on the bottom looking up, moist warm breath tickling my nose. A lot of my body was touching a lot of her body, and she wasn't complaining.

"First and goal from the one," I whispered.

I looked straight into her eyes from a distance any quarterback could sneak. Was it my imagination or was the glacial ice melting? I was ready for her to get all dewy and there would be some serious sighing going on. But I had come up a yard short. She flipped me off her like a professional wrestler who doesn't want to be pinned, one of her knees slamming into my groin as she bounced up. She stood there squinting in the dusk, looking for her gla.s.ses while I sucked in some oxygen.

"You really don't know, do you?" she said, standing over me.