bondage. Earrings was stuck with Meester Broad Shoulders, who at least had neither cobwebs nor spiders in his mop but who seemed distracted.
Salisbury lit a cigarette, dragged deeply, and sent a swirl of smoke into the overhead fan. Doctors who smoke puzzle me. You know they know better. Maybe lack of discipline and self-control. I couldn't imagine a personal injury lawyer riding a motorcycle, not after seeing those eight-by-ten glossies taken by the Highway Patrol. Need a shovel to scrape up body parts.
I wanted to draw Roger away from his Latin American fantasy and talk about tomorrow's testimony. But he was saying something about a doubleheader that had nothing to do with Yankee Stadium. I shook my head no, and he gave me that puzzled look. I'd seen the same expression the first time he walked into my office about eighteen months earlier.
'You must like representing doctors,' he said that day, after we exchanged hellos.
'Yeah, it's a great honor.'
He gave me that look and dropped the malpractice complaint on my desk as if it carried the plague. While I read it, he walked around my office, ostensibly admiring the view of the bay, but surreptitiously looking for merit badges on the walls. He couldn't find any. No diplomas, no awards from the Kiwanis. I hung my Supreme Court admission ticket above the toilet at home. Covers a crack in the plaster. He stopped in front of a photo of my college football team, one of those posed shots with a hundred twenty guys filling the bleachers.
'You played football,' he said. Impressed. He couldn't be sure I ever graduated from law school, but he was happy I could hit a blocking sled.
'A lead-footed linebacker,' I said. 'Better at lawyering than covering the tight end over the middle.'
'Been defending doctors long?' 'Not as long as I played games in the PD's office, keeping some very bad actors on the street.'
'Why'd you leave?'
'It made me puke.'
'Huh?'
'Realizing every client I ever had was guilty. Not always with what they're charged, but guilty of some crime, sometimes worse than the charge.'
I told him how it felt to see some slimeball go free after a warrantless search, then pimp-roll back into the courtroom for pistol-whipping a sixty-year-old liquor store clerk. Ja-cob, my man, they got no probable cause.
Told him I quit and did plaintiff's PI. Half my clients were phonies. Phony injuries and phony doctors or real injuries and no insurance.
'So representing doctors is a step up,' Roger Salisbury had said brightly.
'From the gutter to the curb.'
That look again.
'I sold out, joined the high-rise set at rich, old Harman amp; Fox,' I told him. 'Ordinarily, the dark-wood- and-deep-car-pet types wouldn't give a guy like me a second look. Afraid I'd spill the soup on my vest, if I owned one. But they woke up one day and figured they didn't have anybody who could try a case. They could shuffle papers and write memos, but they didn't know how to tap dance in front of a jury. So I won some cases, a few for very dangerous doctors.'
Now his puzzled look changed to one of concern.
'Bottom line,' I said, using a favorite expression of the corporate gazoonies who ruled the firm. 'I've spent my entire career looking for the good guys and have yet to find them.'
He was quiet a moment, probably wondering if I was incompetent. Good, we were even. I always assume the worst. Fewer surprises later.
Things improved after that. I checked up on him. His rep was okay. Board certified and no prior lawsuits. He probably checked me out, too. Found out I've never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude. And the only time I was arrested it was a case of mistaken identity-I didn't know the guy I hit was a cop.
So here we were, waiting for dos chicas to powder their noses or inhale something into them, and my mind was stuck on the mundane subject of the pending trial.
'Roger, let's talk about tomorrow. Cefalo will put the widow on first thing. Today I was watching you out of the corner of my eye and you were staring at her. I know she looks like a million bucks, but if I saw it while I was getting blindsided by Wallbanger Watkins, I'm sure the jurors did, too. It could be mistaken for a look of guilt, like you feel sorry you croaked her old man. That's worse than having the hots for her.'
'Okay, didn't know I was doing it. Probably just staring into space.'
'Yeah sure. The point is, she's likely to be a very good witness. The men in the jury all want in her pants, the women want to mother her.'
'Okay already, I get the point.'
'Good. I don't want to concern you, but the lovely widow is a real problem for us. She can make the jury forget all our medical mumbo jumbo. That gray silk dress today with the strand of white pearls. Classy but not too flashy.'
Salisbury laughed. 'You ought to see her in a strapless cocktail dress.'
'Uh-huh.' Uh-huh is what I say when I don't know what to say. 1 would have liked Salisbury to fill me in here, but he didn't give me any help. After a moment I asked, 'Since when are you Mrs. Corrigan's fashion consultant?'
'Oh that. I probably never told you. When Philip started seeing me for the back and leg pain, we became friendly. I wasn't dating anybody. They were just married. He started asking me over to their house in Gables Estates. Cocktail parties, dinners, sometimes just the three of us.'
'So you know Mrs. Corrigan?'
'Melanie. Sure.'
'Melanie, is it?'
He looked at me with a what's-the-big-deal look and I didn't have an answer so I polished off the palomilla and thought it over. No big deal. I just would have liked to have known about it sometime before trial.
In a moment our new friends cruised back, eyes a thousand watts brighter, ready to roll. I mumbled my apologies to Miss Earrings, who, with no apparent regret, shifted her electrified look to the blandly handsome doctor. I left them there, two women with a buzz on, and the man who had entrusted his career to me, the man who hadn't told me everything. What else, I wondered, had he left out?
I paused at the door to look back. The restaurant was filled now. Some of the yuppies were crowding the bar, making too much noise, pushing limes into their Mexican beer, a trendy brand aged about as long as their attention spans. If you have to put lime in your beer, you might as well drink Kool-Aid.
Back at the table, one woman sat on each side of Roger Salisbury. They all laughed. I left the three of them there, the mathematical possibilities of their union crowding Mel-anie Corrigan's testimony into a dusty recess of my mind.
3
'Mrs. Corrigan, do you love your husband?'
'I do.' A pause, a catch in the throat, a quiver, the beginning of a tear, then like a lake swollen by a summer storm, an overflow cascading down sculpted cheekbones. 'That is, I did. I loved him very much.'
Blessed timing. They don't teach that in finishing school. Dan Cefalo continued his questioning. 'Do you miss him?'
Another leading question, but only a dunce would incur the jury's wrath by interrupting the soap opera with a news bulletin.
'Very much. Every day. We shared so much. Sometimes, 33 when a car pulls into the driveway, I forget, and I think, well, maybe it's Phil.'
And maybe it's the paperboy. God, could she lay it on thick. She looked toward the jury and then away as if
