Behind the house, a wooden deck led to a swimming pool. Fifty yards long but only twelve feet wide, a serious pool for laps. It smelled of salt water, not chlorine, probably a pipe right to the bay. Beyond the pool was a concrete dock, a boathouse, and a private lagoon that opened onto Biscayne Bay. Tied to the dock was a yacht that in time of war would be impounded for transporting troops.
The cabana was an architect's idea of Tahiti. Whatever the building was made of was disguised by a bamboo front and topped, chickee style, with a palm frond roof. Half a dozen coconuts sat in primitive bowls on the front porch. A machete was wedged into one of the husks. I could hear the swish of a paddle fan through the open front door. I knocked on the bamboo.
"Lassiter, come in and make yourself a drink. There's some Gatorade in the fridge."
My potassium level seemed okay so I demurred on the Gatorade. I nosed around. Her voice was coming from what had to be the bedroom. The rest of the place was one room, a galley kitchen that opened into a small living room with TV, stereo, and VCR. A bookshelf with some sports reference books, some poetry anthologies—maybe a woman's heart lurked beneath the sweats—and a survival manual for Miami, a Spanish/English dictionary.
Rustling noises women make when dressing were coming from the bedroom. She could have been changing into something sheer and flimsy and dabbing sweet essence behind her ears. But she emerged with a freshly scrubbed face,
sans
makeup, the faint aroma of Ivory soap in the air. Cut-off jeans revealed strong legs, calves that flexed with each step. Her short black hair was even shorter in a pony tail tied with a rubber band. She wore a Miami Dolphins' jersey that still had room for me inside.
"You like my place?" Susan asked.
"Sure. When you called, I didn't realize you
lived
in the cabana. Thought you were inviting me to a pool party. Have you been banished from the castle by the wicked stepmother?"
She shook her head. "I lived in the house until Dad married that … woman. Then I decided to give them some privacy. I do my mile in the pool every night. This is all I need."
"I like it. It's one of the few houses in Miami smaller than mine."
"Until yesterday I kept some things in the main house. My skis, scuba equipment, some clothes. She tossed everything out on the patio after we exchanged words in the courthouse."
"I heard some of those words. You can exchange them with the best. Mind telling me what you were arguing about?"
She was silent. I was sitting on a rattan loveseat and she sat facing me, legs crossed, enveloped in a peacock chair. She smiled. That made two smiles if you counted one on the football field.
She was doing something with her hands, buying a little time to get into whatever it was that prompted her to call me. She started slowly. "You finish the case tomorrow, don't you?"
"That's right."
"You think you're going to win."
That might have been a question. "I have my hopes."
"Would you feel badly if you get off a guilty man?"
"
Guilty
is a criminal law word. In civil practice, there's no such thing. I'm hoping for a no-liability verdict. But civil liability is a gray area. So I can't respond to the question as phrased."
"A real lawyer's answer," she said contemptuously.
"You don't care much for my profession, or is it just me?"
"Either way, you're defending a murderer."
"Allegations without proof are meaningless."
"Maybe you should look at something." She hopped up and pushed a button on the VCR and another on the small Sony TV. She sat down again and turned away. The set blinked on, a typical home movie, jerky camera, panning too quickly through a lushly appointed room. It looked like a Beverly Hills hotel suite, piano bar, Lucite furniture, starlight ceiling. No people visible, just modern, expensive furniture, some lighted artwork, and a nighttime sky indoors.
"That's the main salon of the
Cory
," Susan Corrigan said.
"The
Cory
?"
"Didn't you see the boat outside?"
"Oh that. I thought it was the
Nimitz,
four thousand sailors on shore leave."
"Wouldn't that make her happy?" she asked, icily, gesturing toward the house. "The
Cory
is a custom-made Hatteras, about eighty-two feet. One of Dad's toys."
The picture broke up, some snow, then Melanie Corrigan in a bikini on the screen, cocking a hip at the camera, pouting a come-hither look to stage left. The screen went to black for a second as a shoulder blocked the camera, a man walking into view. He was medium size, wearing swim trunks and a T-shirt, and he turned self-consciously to the camera. Roger Stanton. If it was supposed to surprise me, it didn't.
"The main stateroom," Susan said.
A king-size waterbed sat on a floor of black and white tile and was illuminated from below with neon tubes. The headboard was the skyline of Miami, etched into black glass. Rock music played in the background. Roger Stanton stood awkwardly at the foot of the bed and Melanie Corrigan began doing a striptease, if that's what you call it when you're starting out with only a black bikini that must have been made during a spandex shortage. The top was a strap slightly wider than dental floss, the bottom no bigger than your average Band-Aid. She was grinding to the music, rather expertly, some very fluid hip movements. She motioned for Roger to sit on the bed and he did, obedient little puppy.
She unhooked the halter top and squeezed her high firm breasts together, taking a deep breath as if the tiny scrap of fabric had been crushing her poor lungs to death. Acting right out of a high school play or a porno flick made on the cheap in Lauderdale. She tossed the halter at Roger. It landed on his head and slid over his nose and mouth. He could have robbed a bank in a B-Western.
Next the bottom came off, and she wiggled her can in Roger's face in time with the music. She wiggled left and wiggled right, wiggled fast and wiggled slow. I had a feeling this was not her maiden cruise.
It took a minute more and then they were at it. A moment later the photographer discovered the electric zoom. First the long shot of two bodies writhing beneath the etched glass Miami skyline. Then the bodies got larger until only one body part, or two parts joined, filled the screen. Finally the camera zoomed back to show us the writhing bodies.
Susan Corrigan looked at me, her back to the screen. I was half embarrassed for her, half bored for me. Like an ex-jock in the bleachers, I'd rather play than watch. It went on for a while, then a cut and roll 'em again. The scene might have been shot another day or later the same day. If there was any dialogue, it was lost in the music laid over the action. Now Roger Stanton was wearing a stethoscope and nothing else. Compared to Melanie Corrigan, however, he was overdressed.
Roger looked down her throat.
She said something. Ahhh.
Playing doctor. A little pantomime.
Open wide.
She did.
He took her pulse. Then she inhaled and jutted her breasts out, and he tapped her chest and listened to her lungs through the stethoscope. They seemed to pass the test.
She turned over and gave Stanton a view of a perfectly rounded bottom. He laid his right hand on her ass and tapped it slowly with his thumb. A medical procedure I'd never seen, more like checking a melon's ripeness. Whatever its purpose, Melanie thought it hilarious. Laughing, she turned over and the camera jiggled, some jollies from the photographer, too. Then Roger felt her forehead as if the poor child was fevered, and just to be sure, he took her temperature. With something too big to have been a thermometer.
The picture broke up, came back on and went to black as someone walked by the lens. I figured it was Philip Corrigan, dealing himself in, having put the camera on a tripod. But it wasn't Corrigan. It was Hercules, albeit a short one. He reminded me of the bulldog on the hood of a Mack truck, only not as cute. One of those sides of beef you see in the gym, a body builder, slabs on top of slabs of muscle, a thick neck and sloping shoulders, a tattoo of a lightning bolt on one arm. Dark complexion, a flat, broad, mean face, drooping black moustache. His arms hung out from his sides, pushed there by his overdeveloped lats. And he was naked, revealing one part of his body not pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian proportions. So now I was watching two naked men and one naked woman. There were arms and legs entwined, a couple of glances toward the camera, and much thrusting of loins.
A quick cut and the camera angle was different. I was trying to figure out how the photographer got over the bed, looking down at the goings-on like a dance number in an old Busby Berkeley musical. Then I saw the photographer on the screen, a neat trick. He was at the foot of the bed, aiming the camera up, a man in his fifties, thinning hair and pot belly, lying on his side, stark naked, shooting a trick shot at a mirror on the ceiling over the bed. Philip Corrigan. I consulted my scorecard: three men and a woman. Again, the zoom, and Philip Corrigan disappeared from view. The screen filled with the body builder's shoulders. Covered with pimples, the telltale sign of an anabolic steroid user.
It went on for a few more minutes, then the screen faded to black and then to snow. It stayed that way.
"Well, what do you think now?" Susan Corrigan asked softly.
"I think the hand-held camera technique is more suitable to documentaries. The lighting is too harsh, the plot a mite thin. The bit with the mirror is cute, but frankly, I prefer
The Lady from Shanghai."
"Is everything a joke to you?"
"Not everything, not even this. Susan, let it go. Every family has its dirty little secrets that are best left in the closet."
"My father wasn't like that. Not before her and Roger Stanton."
"Okay. So she corrupted him. Maybe Roger's no angel, either. But what can be gained now?"
Her eyes blazed at me. "What about catching his killers?"
That again. "I still haven't seen any proof he was killed, much less that Roger Stanton did it. What about Mr. Universe there? What about a dozen other guys you don't even know about?"
"More lawyer's games. Your beloved client is the only one who cut Dad open the day before he died. And as far as I know, he's the only one who carried poison around in his little leather case."
"What are you talking about?"
"This." She reached into a drawer, came up with something and tossed it at me. A small leather valise, a man's pocketbook if you're the kind of guy who carries that sort of thing. A gold monogram, "R.A.S." Roger Allen Stanton. I unzipped it. Two hypodermic needles, a clear small vial of colorless liquid, half empty. No labels, no instructions.
A nasty little package. I felt a chill. "What is it?"
"Succinylcholine, a drug used in anesthesia. It paralyzes the limbs, the lungs, too. In anesthesia, a respirator breathes for you. Without a respirator, you would just lie there and watch yourself die."
"How do you know all this? Where did this come from?"
"One question at a time, Counselor. First, I found it in Melanie's room. Hidden in a drawer with thirty pairs of black panties, which is an awful lot for someone who seldom wears any. I think she knows it's missing. Probably suspects me. That's why she changed the locks and tossed my things out. Second, I've done some research on it, had a lab test it. I'm a reporter, and I know a lot more than just box scores and yards-per-carry."
"Has this been in your possession continuously since discovering it?" Ever the lawyer, Lassiter, already thinking about chain of custody.
"The lab at Jackson Memorial took about five cc's out of the bottle. Otherwise, it's intact."
"What's this have to do with Stanton, assuming the stuff is his?"
"Of course it's his! Melanie was screwing him, must have gotten the drug from him. She hated my father, just used him. She couldn't divorce him. She'd get nothing because of an antenuptial agreement. But if he died while married to her, she got the house, the boat, plus thirty percent of the estate."
I nodded. "Items in joint name plus the marital share."
"Right."
"So she had the motive. But that's all you can prove. For a criminal case built on circumstantial evidence, you need a lot more. Your case against Melanie is weak and you don't have anything on Stanton. For one thing, your father didn't die of poisoning. He died of an aneurysm."
She turned her head away and blinked back a tear. "That's why I need your help."
"For what?"
"To figure out how they did it."
"Did what?"
"Oh Jake, think about it."
It was the first time she called me by my given name. I liked the sound of it.
"How they killed Dad with succinylcholine and made it look like an aneurysm," she said softly, her armor turning to tin.
I didn't buy it. "A hospital's a pretty risky place to kill somebody, doctors and nurses all around."
"That's what made it work. Who would object if Dr. Stanton came into Dad's room after the surgery? He could have given the injection then. And who would be looking for poison when the patient dies of an aneurysm? It's a classic misdirection play. Like the old Oklahoma fumblerooski, where the center and quarterback drop the ball. Everybody goes one way and the guard grabs the ball and walks in for the touchdown."
It was crazy. No evidence. Just an angry young woman searching for villains. Blaming others for her father's descent. The old fumblerooski, for crying out loud! I looked at her. A tear came to those dark eyes and then another. I looked at the hypodermics and the tiny bottle. And back at those wet, dark eyes.
"Where do we start?" I asked.
9
PROXIMATE CAUSE