Three To Get Deadly (31 page)

I was quiet so she kept going. "I'm sure you remember, Mr. Lassiter. You were kind enough to come over when I called you. After Philip's death, I had no one to turn to. I thanked you then, and I thank you now."

Ouch. So gracious. So ladylike. Socolow beamed. Palpable plea sure. Roger moaned. It was true, of course. Like so many big lies, this one was constructed of little truths. Roger
had
hit her. I
had
come over to keep him out of trouble. She
had
thanked me with a slippery tongue and a promise of more. Now she was making fun of me. Humbling men was sport to her. I decided to shut up before the quicksand rose above my neck. She glided out of the courtroom, elegant in her grief.

There was no time to regroup.

"The state calls Dr. Charles W. Riggs," Abe Socolow proclaimed.

The bailiff opened the door to the corridor, and Charlie bounded into the courtroom with rapid, short steps. His beard was still bushy, and his glasses still askew on his tiny nose. The bowl of a pipe jutted from the pocket of the old gray suitcoat he still kept for court appearances. He didn't need to be shown the way to the witness stand. He raised his right hand and promised to tell the truth even before the clerk asked him. He smiled at the jury and waited.

I figured Charlie wouldn't give Socolow any problems. All the state needed was chain of custody, a formality having nothing to do with Roger's guilt or innocence. Abe Socolow approached the witness stand warily. He was politic enough to skip the night in the cemetery. Just asked if Charlie had made dissections of Philip Corrigan's liver, brain, and buttock material and passed them on to the Medical Examiner's Office.

Charlie gave him the right answers and was ready to step down. Something passed behind Socolow's dark eyes. I saw the shadow of his thought. When the defense stepped to the plate, Socolow knew, Charlie would testify that Corrigan died of natural causes. Socolow wanted an extra turn at bat.

"Dr. Riggs, not to steal your thunder, but you're prepared to testify for the defense that Philip Corrigan died of a spontaneous aortic aneurysm, isn't that right?"

"Correct."

Socolow had Riggs tell the jury what that meant and Charlie took him through it, an encore of his testimony in the malpractice trial. Great. I didn't know where Socolow was headed, but if he wanted to hear my best testimony twice, fine. "Lots of things can cause an aneurysm, correct?"

"Sure. Hypertension, arteriosclerosis, syphilis, trauma."

"Trauma. How about a huge injection of succinylcholine, not the steady drip of an IV tube as in surgery. Wouldn't that cause trauma to the heart, the kind of trauma that could cause an aneurysm?"

So that's where he was going. Worried about my cross of MacKenzie, trying to tie the injection to the aneurysm. Give the guy a boost of the drug, it blows out an artery. A long shot.

"You'd have to ask a cardiologist," Riggs said. "But I had a different kind of trauma in mind." He smiled at Socolow, a witness at ease with himself and his surroundings. He had testified for the state hundreds of times. If Socolow wanted to debate medicine, Charlie Riggs was happy to oblige.

"Right. You previously testified that a driver can suffer an aortic aneurysm if he hits the steering wheel following a crash, isn't that right?"

Abe had done his homework, had read the transcript of the malpractice trial.

"Yes. I've seen several of those."

"In such an accident, there's quite a shock to the system, isn't there?"

"Surely," Charlie Riggs agreed.

"And can you say conclusively that the aneurysm is caused by the impact of the steering wheel or could it be the shock to the system, to the heart?"

He was winging it now, trying to find a parallel between an injection of succinylcholine and an auto accident. It wasn't going anywhere. Not helping or hurting his case. Just one of those tangents lawyers sometimes take.

Charlie Riggs wouldn't bite. He shook his head, and several jurors did likewise. "My impression has been that it's the trauma, the impact that causes the blowout of the aorta. It takes a serious blow, but a steering wheel, or a very well-thrown punch by a trained boxer could do it."

"Even a punch," Socolow repeated, apparently happy that so many things could cause an aneurysm.

"A punch, a kick, even a karate chop."

Socolow went on, detailing every cause of aneurysm known to man, monkeys, and little white rats. But my mind stayed right there.

A punch, a kick, even a karate chop
.

I hadn't thought of it before. But I did now. Nurse Rebecca Ingram said Roger left the room at ten o'clock. Sometime between ten-thirty and eleven, Melanie Corrigan waltzed in with the little hunk of martial arts skills.

A karate chop
.

I didn't know whether to risk it now or wait until I had Charlie on my part of the case.

Your witness, Abe Socolow said.

I plunged ahead. "Dr. Riggs, are you telling the jury that one karate punch to the abdomen could puncture the aorta?"

Charlie Riggs looked toward the jury and stroked his beard. Say
yes,
I prayed. Say
yes
, you hairy wizard.

"Yes. The concept is
ikken hissatsu
, to kill with one blow. Some of it is exaggerated to the point of myth, but it does happen. Martial arts assassins are quite capable of it. The essence of karate is
kime
, an explosive attack using maximum power over a short distance. Of course, it would be difficult to rupture the aorta of a well-trained athlete with strong abdominal muscles, particularly if he expected the blow."

I let out a breath, awed at the range of Charlie's knowledge. Time to set the scene. "After a laminectomy, how would a patient be lying in bed?"

"After back surgery, you put a patient on his back. The pressure helps prevent further bleeding."

"With stomach exposed?"

"Yes."

"Muscles relaxed."

"Quite. The patient would be sedated."

"And, assuming a man in his fifties not in the best of physical condition was lying on his back, sedated, stomach muscles slack, could a karate expert rupture his aorta with one blow?"

Socolow leapt up. "Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence, irrelevant, beyond scope of direct, beyond witness's expertise."

"Anything else?" the judge asked.

Socolow shook his head. Already he had protested too much.

"Denied," the judge said.

"Yes. A well-placed blow, a
shuto uchi
, the sword handstrike, could burst the pipe, the aorta, that is. Perhaps even the
stoshi hiji-ate
, the downward elbow strike."

Charlie demonstrated the movement of each blow, smiling shyly toward the jury box. "I learned a little of this on Okinawa after the war," he added.

Oh bless you, Charlie Riggs, master of a thousand subjects, encyclopedia of the esoteric, bestower of life on the condemned.

"Nothing further," I said, easing into my heavy wooden chair as if it were a throne.

The five of us sat on my tiny back porch swatting mosquitoes, drinking Granny Lassiter's home brew, and arguing how to use the gift imparted by Abe Socolow.

"Show a video of Sergio winning the Karate King title," said Cindy. Ever efficient, she already had fished around town and found the tape. "Let him split your head open with a shoe-toe oochi-koochi," Granny said. "Show his mean streak."

"Drop it now while we're ahead on the point," Roger Stanton argued. His face was drawn, and he looked like he hadn't been getting much sleep. Being a defendant in a first-degree murder trial can do that. "Socolow will be ready for anything more about the karate."

Charlie Riggs drained the dark, headless beer from a mug that was once a peanut butter jar. "Not a bad idea. That was all off the cuff today. No matter what, we can't prove Sergio struck the decedent."

I shook my head, both at Charlie and at Granny, who was offering me a refill. Too heavy with hops, like an English bitter. "You're forgetting something, Charlie. We don't have to prove anything. All we need is to create a reasonable doubt that Roger aced him."

Charlie nodded and helped Granny into the hammock where she had decided to spend the night. I didn't think there was room for two.

"But it must be a reasonable doubt," Charlie Riggs declared. "Not a possible doubt, a speculative, imaginary, or forced doubt."

I laughed. "Whoa, Charlie, when did you start memorizing jury instructions?"

"I been in trials before you got out of knickers."

"Used to wet his knickers till he was four," Granny called out from the hammock.

Roger Stanton leapt to his feet from an aging lawn chair. "I didn't kill Philip Corrigan!" Silently, three heads turned toward him. His normally placid face was twisted with pain. "When you talk about strategy, you seem to be trying to hide something, to get off a guilty man. You all forget I didn't kill Philip! He's the one person I could never kill. He was my friend."

Stanton sagged back into the chair and turned toward the sprawling hibiscus that threatened to overrun the porch. Everyone quieted down for a while. I thought about Roger's little speech. Something vague and fuzzy bothered me, but I let it go. We weren't getting anywhere except mosquito-bitten and drunk.

* * *

I was nearly dozing when the phone hollered. Everybody I wanted to talk to was within spitting distance. By the sixth ring, I stirred just to stifle the noise. Usually at this time of night, it's a boiler room call, somebody selling frozen beef from Colorado or solar water heaters made in Taiwan. Usually it's not Abe Socolow.

Breakfast before court? Sure. Bay Club? Sure.

"What does he want?" Roger asked, a tremble in his voice.

"Don't know. Maybe just wants to do a Power Breakfast."

.5in; Granny Lassiter snorted. "Then why call you?"

* * *

The Bay Club sits on the thirty-fifth floor of a new office building overlooking Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. The dining room is chrome and glass, white tile, and a blinding brightness. All the charm of an astronaut's space capsule. The club was designed by a young architect adept at stealing ideas about modern design and making them worse.

Socolow was late. I looked around. There was Fat Benny Richards, all three hundred pounds of him, wolfing French toast with county commissioner Bradley Shriver. Fat Benny wore a six-hundred-dollar silk suit but looked like a ton of shit in a gunny sack. His clients called Fat Benny a lobbyist, which was a more polite term than bagman. Politicians courted him because he collected campaign contributions the way a sewage plant draws flies.

Fat Benny had the beady red eyes of an overfed rat, and his eyes were his best feature. His breath could kill a manatee and his toupee threatened to slide into his Bloody Mary. I picked up pieces of the conversation between the commissioner and the fat man. Arguing for a builder client, Benny wanted a variance from the ordinance requiring a parking space for every four hundred square feet of office space. A customary request by rapacious builders since parking garages cost a bundle and the cash return is diddly-squat compared to office space.

Fewer parking spaces, larger buildings, less green space, billboards the size of cruise ships—zoning was a scandal. But why not? In a town where William Jennings Bryan once hawked vacant lots from a floating barge, the hustle was still king.

Abe Socolow slid silently into his chair, folding his body like a scythe. He looked haggard. Black circles under his eyes, sunken cheeks, skin the color of a newspaper left in the sun. A waiter in a white vest and gloves took our order. Gloves at seven-thirty in the morning.

"Just coffee," Socolow said. "Black."

Naturally.

I ordered a large orange juice, a basket of sweet rolls, and shredded wheat with whatever fruit didn't come in a can. Let Abe suffer, I was hungry.

"That was some happy horseshit yesterday about a karate chop busting the aorta," he began irritably.

"Glad you liked it."

"Liked the bit about MacKenzie not testing stiffs who died after surgery, too."

"You ask me to breakfast to compliment my trial skills. How kind."

"Whadaya doing, Jake, just throwing shit on the barn door, seeing what'll stick?"

"Your breakfast conversation is most appetizing."

I didn't know where he was heading. He drained the coffee, and the waiter materialized silently with more from a silver pot. At the next table Fat Benny was offering the commissioner preferred stock in a cable television franchise.

"Just thought you should know," Socolow said, "I been at the morgue all night with MacKenzie …"

"The way you look, you're lucky they let you out."

He ignored me. "We got two stiffs out of surgery yesterday. Both had succinylcholine IVs as part of the anesthesia, and guess what?"

I didn't have to guess. No traces of succinic acid or choline. I figured Socolow would bust his balls to recoup after MacKenzie's debacle. Just didn't think he could do it so fast. Now I pictured him dashing from hospital to hospital, praying for patients to die in the OR, maybe pulling the plug in the ICU.

"As a personal favor, in a spirit of fairness," he went on, "I'll tell you about my rebuttal witness, an internal medicine guy. Feingold, head of the department at Jackson. He says a karate chop can't bust the aorta. No way. Too much padding in the abdomen, what with the fat and the stomach and all those organs."

"Kind of you to share your strategy with me, Abe. But we both know you can get Irv Feingold to say anything. I been around the rosy with him in two malpractice cases. Now, you didn't bring me here to talk about how strong your case is. What's up?"