'Sold shares in herself like IBM.'
'Some guys can handle that. I couldn't. So I took off.' He looked away. This wasn't a story he broadcast around town.
'Roger, it's nothing to be embarrassed about. It's an old story. You meet a pretty young thing who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose. You overlook the fact that she's collected enough hoses to water Joe Robbie Stadium. You'd be shocked how many guys fall for young hookers. Want to change them. Old male fantasy. Some guys lose their marriages over it. Not many doctors, though. Most are too scientific to get involved.'
'She wasn't a hooker,' he said indignantly and louder than necessary.
Now the two women were doing their best not to show that our conversation was more interesting than their own. I smiled in their direction. One recoiled as if I had exposed myself.
Roger Salisbury poked the ice in his tea. 'Anyway, I hadn't seen her for probably five years when Philip Corrigan asked me over for dinner. He was seeing me for a cartilage problem in the knee. I scoped it. Then the disc started flaring up. We became friends. I had no idea he was married to Autumn… Melanie.'
'So you started slipping out of the hospital a little early. Sneaking in nooners while old man Corrigan was littering the Keys with ugly condos on stilts.'
He laughed a short, bitter laugh. 'Hardly.'
Then he clammed up again. I gave him a c'mon Roger look.
Finally he spoke in a whisper. 'This is where it gets a little sticky.'
'I'll bet.'
They didn't have to sneak around, he told me over the watery tea.
Why not? I asked.
Philip wanted to watch, Roger said. Sometimes to take part, sometimes to videotape. On their boat, a custom Hat-teras furnished like a Bal Harbour penthouse, in their mansion on a giant waterbed, in their swimming pool.
So Philip Corrigan was a peeper and an old letch. Probably got to an age where the money bored him, and his engine wouldn't start without some kinky provocation.
'Then, after doing a few lines of coke, we'd mix it up, menage a trois,' Roger said. He paused and gave me a sheepish look.
If the two women at the next table craned their necks any farther our way, they'd need a chiropractor.
Are you disappointed in me? he asked.
I don't make moral judgments about clients, I told him, because it interferes with my ability to give good advice.
Just the same I tallied a moral scorecard on the yellow pad of my mind. We all do that. We try to live and let live, but underneath it, we're left with a smug sense of superiority about ourselves and vague disgust for others who don't measure up. Roger Salisbury didn't measure up. He was doing drugs and a group grope like some kind of sleaze. But he was my sleaze, my client, and his bedroom-or swimming pool-activities didn't make him an incompetent doctor, much less a murderer.
After his mea culpa, I thought his morale could use a boost.
'Here's how I see it,' I told him. 'You got stuck in a little game with a tramp who slithered her way to Gables Estates and a guy who couldn't get his rocks off in the missionary position. That doesn't put you in a class with Charles Man-son, but if it ever came out in court or the newspapers, that's all anybody would know about you. You might be donating half your time to charity cases and feeding homeless cats, but the world would know you only as a sex-crazed doctor who aced his girlfriend's husband. Makes good reading. Now do you see why I have to know about this? If I make an uninformed decision at some point, it could hurt you. Badly. Understand?'
'Understood.'
'Is that all there is to it?'
'I guess so. Except that I'm still sort of under her spell.'
Oh brother.
'In all these years,' he said, 'nobody's been able to turn me on like her. She knows things, does things. She's totally uninhibited and free with herself. She's a pleasure giver. Do you know how hard it is for me to give that up?'
Dr. Ruth, I'm not, but I took a stab at it anyway. 'Roger, it sounds to me like Melanie Corrigan is a taker, not a giver, and you better stay the hell out of her hot tub.'
'There is a certain side to her, a kind of danger,' he said. 'Maybe that's part of the appeal, I don't know.' He just let it hang there, his mind working something over, not letting me in on it.
'Okay then, I've got it all, right? You played hide the weenie with the missus while the old man watched, videotaped, and once in a while jumped on the pile.'
'That's it.' He paused, looked side to side and added, 'There is one more thing.'
'There always is.'
'She asked me to kill her husband,' he said.
7
Waiting. Like making a movie or going to war, there is more waiting than working in a trial. First the judge hears motions starting at eight-thirty. Twenty different cases, forty lawyers, crowding chambers, spilling into the corridor, milling around like chickens waiting to be fed.
Waiting, an army of minutes slogging through the mud. The judge makes several phone calls from his chambers. His bookie, his mistress, his campaign contributors, who knows? Then a clerk is late bringing up the evidence, or a juror's child is sick, or an expert witness, usually a doctor, has an emergency.
That's how it was the morning Roger Salisbury was to testify. The seconds ticked off slowly, dulling my edge. I studied the filthy acoustical tile that covered the walls. At shoulder level, countless pencils and fingernails left signatures there. The heavy, straight-backed pews in the gallery tested the mettle and the cushioning of the spectators, a few vagrants lured by the air-conditioning. The courtroom ceiling was thirty feet high. Together with the dark pews and the raised bench, it gave the courtroom the air of a cathedral. But where was His Holiness?
Just then the gleaming head of Judge Leonard poked through the door behind the bench that led directly to his chambers. He scowled and ducked back in. I unpacked my briefcase and found a note signed by Cindy:
Sportswriting Lady Buzzing Like Bee Can't Get Number out of Me, Maybe Has Pollen for You to See.
Apparently Susan Corrigan had been calling, maybe wanted to tell me what a schmuck I am, just in case I forgot. A few more minutes passed, and finally all the courtroom players were there, the judge, the clerk, the jurors, the lawyers, and the witnesses, all ready at the same time. Sometimes at this point, the electricity goes off or there's a bomb threat, but today, we started working.
Roger Salisbury came off well, just as I thought he would. I had told him not to overdress, and he was just right in gray slacks, a blue sportcoat, and tie. I had him wear a beeper on his belt to remind the jury that here was a man who responded to emergencies, who could be called at any moment to mend the injured. His salt-and-pepper hair was neatly trimmed and his face reflected confidence without being cocky. He looked like a skilled, compassionate surgeon who took the greatest care when working inside a man's spine. He spoke quietly, evenly, with no trace of the condescension that marks so many doctors in court.
I took him through the story. Philip Corrigan's office visits, fixing the bad knee, then complaints of back and leg pain. Even hurt when he coughed. All the usual tests, ankle jerk, knee jerk, straight leg raising. Salisbury found sensory deficits, a myelogram confirmed it. Finally the diagnosis, acute herniated disc at the L3-L4 vertebrae.
'Was there anything unusual about the surgery?' I asked.
'No, it was routine,' Salisbury said.
I liked that. Here's a man who cuts into living flesh, fixes the problems inside, then puts it all back together again. And it's routine. No wonder we're in awe of doctors.
'I cut from approximately LI to just above the sacrum,' he said. 'Nothing out of the ordinary. Down through
