Three To Get Deadly (13 page)

"In the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, in and for Dade County, Florida, Case Number eight-seven, one-eight-three-seven-six, Melanie Corrigan, as Personal Representative of the Estate of Philip M. Corrigan, deceased, versus Roger A. Stanton, M.D." She paused, cleared her throat,
ah-chem
. Oh get to it, already. "We, the jury, find for the defendant."

Boom. That was it. She sat down. Roger Stanton slapped me on the back. Dan Cefalo winced once, recovered like the pro he was, and asked the judge to poll the jury. He did. Each one affirmed the verdict. Melanie Corrigan looked over at Roger Stanton and gave him a small, bittersweet smile. Like it didn't matter. Like that's one for you. If that wasn't the damnedest thing.

Judge Leonard was doing his thank-yous to the jurors while his bailiff handed them certificates bearing a sketch of the judge that made his round face look like Abe Lincoln on Mount Rushmore. Good for a few votes in the next election.

Then it was over. The jurors picked up their things, the few spectators ambled down the corridor looking for more action. Roger Stanton began babbling about how brilliant I was, how great Charlie Riggs was, how beautiful Cindy was. He wanted to treat me to dinner, champagne, wenching.

I was spent. I told him I would be poor company. In truth I was tired of his company. I had given him a piece of myself. The camaraderie that comes from the shared experience evaporates when the experience ends. Like war buddies, you drift apart when the conflict is over. Quickly.

So why did I feel that the case of Corrigan versus Stanton was only just beginning?

Cindy headed back to the office and I aimed the 442 convertible west on Tamiami Trail toward the Everglades. No way I was going to return phone calls and compile expense account forms after coming out of trial. I wanted some open air. Tamiami Trail is
Calle Ocho
in Little Havana. I passed city parks where old Cuban men played dominoes, drinking espresso, cigars clenched in brown teeth, vowing to return to a
Cuba Libre
. They do not consider themselves
immigrantes
, a term that implies a voluntary move to a new home. They are
exilados
, refugees in exile. When their homeland is liberated from the Communist butcher, they will return.

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 the 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:

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."