away from the men. The poster ass wiggled clockwise as if on coasters, then stopped and wiggled counterclockwise. Salisbury stared as if hypnotized. The ass quivered once, fluttered twice with contractions that Roger Salisbury felt deep in his own loins, then stopped six inches from his face. His fatigue gone, the swirl of blood and bodies a dreamy fog, Roger Salisbury fantasized that the perfect ass wiggled only for him. He didn't see the other men, some laughing, some bantering, others conjuring up their own steamy visions. None of the others, though, seemed spellbound by an act as old as the species.
The dance done, the girl smiled at Roger Salisbury, an open interested smile, he thought. And though she smiled at each man, again he thought it was only for him. She sashayed from one end of the small stage to the other, collecting dollar bills in a black garter while propping a red, high-heeled shoe on the rim between the stage and the bar. Other than the garter and the shoes, she was naked, but her face showed neither shame nor seduction. She could have been passing the collection plate at the First Lutheran Church of Topeka. Roger Salisbury slipped a five-dollar bill into her garter, removing it from his wallet with two fingers, never taking his eyes off the girl. A neat trick, but he could also tie knots in thread with a thumb and one finger inside a matchbox. Great hands. The strong, steady hands of a surgeon.
Her smile widened as she leaned close to him, her voice a moist whisper on his ear. 'I'd like to dance for you. Just you.' And he believed it.
Roger Salisbury believed everything she said that night. That she was a model down on her luck, that her name was Autumn Rain, that all she wanted was a good man and a family. They talked in the smoky shadows of a corner table and she danced for him alone. Twenty dollars and another twenty as a tip. He didn't lay a hand on her. At nearby tables men grasped tumbling breasts, and the girls stepped gingerly from their perches in four-inch spikes to sit on customers' laps, writhing on top of them, grinding down with bare asses onto the fully clothed groins of middle-aged men. 'Didja come?' the heavy girl at the next table whispered to her customer, already reaching for a tip.
'I've never seen anything like this,' Roger Salisbury said, shaking his head. 'It's half prostitution and half masturbation.' He gestured toward the overweight girl who was gathering her meager outfit and sneaking a peek at the president's face on the bill she had glommed from a guy in faded jeans. 'You don't do that, do you?' Salisbury asked.
She smiled. Of course not, the look said.
He asked her out.
Against the rules, she said. Some guys, they think if you're an exotic dancer, it means for fifty bucks you give head or whatever.
But I'm different, Roger Salisbury said.
She cocked her head to one side and studied him. They all thought they were different, but she knew there were only two kinds of men, jerks and jerk-offs. Oh, some made more money and didn't get their fingernails dirty. She'd seen them, white shirts and yellow ties, slumming it, yukking it up. But either way, grease monkeys or stockbrokers, once those gates opened and the blood rushed in, turning their worms into stick shifts, they were either jerks or jerk-offs. The jerk-offs were mostly young, wise guys without a pot to piss in, spending all their bread on wheels and women, figuring everything in a skirt-or G-string-was a pushover. Jerks were saps, always falling in love and wanting to change you, make an honest woman out of you. Okay, put me in chains, if the price is right. This guy, jerk all the way.
I'm a doctor, he said.
Oh, she said, sounding impressed.
He told her how he had patched and mended those caught in the city's crossfire, how he wanted to help people and be a great doctor. She listened with wide eyes and nodded as if she knew what he felt deep inside and she smiled with practiced sincerity. A doctor, she figured, made lots of money, not realizing that a resident took home far less than an exotic dancer and got his hands just as dirty.
She looked directly into Roger Salisbury's eyes and softened her own. He looked into her eyes and thought he saw warmth and beauty of spirit.
Roger Salisbury, it turned out, was better at reading X rays than the looks in women's eyes.
DECEMBER 1988
1
When the witness hesitated, I drummed my pen impatiently against my legal pad. Made a show of it. Not that I was in a hurry. I had all day, all week. The Doctors' Medical Insurance Trust pays by the hour and not minimum wage. Take your sweet time. The drum roll was only for eifect, to remind the jury that the witness didn't seem too sure of himself. And to make him squirm a bit, to rattle him.
First the pen clop-clop-clopping against the legal pad. Then the slow, purposeful walk toward the witness stand, let him feel me there as he fans through his papers looking for a lost report. Then the stare, the high-voltage Jake Lassitei laser beam stare. Melt him down.
I unbuttoned my dark suitcoat and hooked a thuml into my belt. Then I stood there, 220 pounds of ex-football player, ex-public defender, ex-a-lot-of-things, leaning against the faded walnut rail of the witness stand, home to a million sweaty palms.
Only forty seconds since the question was asked, but I wanted it to seem like hours. Make the jury soak up the silence. The only sounds were the whine of the air condition ing and the paper shuffling of the witness. Young lawyers sometimes make the mistake of filling that black hole, o clarifying the question or rephrasing it, inadvertently breathing life into the dead air that hangs like a shroud over a hostile witness. What folly. The witness is zipped up because he's worried. He's thinking, not about his answer, but of the reason for the question, trying to outthink you, trying to anticipate the next question. Let him stew in his own juice.
Another twenty seconds of silence. One juror yawned. Another sighed.
Judge Raymond Leonard looked up from the Daily Racing Form, a startled expression as if he just discovered he was lost. I nodded silently, assuring him there was no objection awaiting the wisdom that got him through night classes at Stetson Law School. The judge was a large man in his fifties, bald and moon-faced and partial to maroon robes instead of traditional black. History would never link him with Justices Marshall or Cardozo, but he was honest and let lawyers try their cases with little interference from the bench.
Earlier, at a sidebar conference, the judge suggested we recess at two-thirty each day. He could study the written motions in the afternoon, he said with a straight face, practically dusting off his binoculars for the last three races at Hialeah. A note on the bench said, 'Hot Enough, Rivera up, 5-1, ninth race.' In truth, the judge was better at handicapping the horses than recognizing hearsay.
Another thirty seconds. Then a cleared throat, the sound of a train rumbling through a tunnel, and the white-haired witness spoke. 'That depends,' Dr. Harvey Watkins said with a gravity usually reserved for State of the Union messages.
The jurors turned toward me, expectant looks. I widened my eyes, all but shouting, 'Bullshit.' Then I worked up a small spider-to-the-fly smile and tried to figure out what the hell to ask next. What I wanted to say was, Three hundred bucks an hour, and the best you can do is 'that depends. ' One man is dead, my client is charged with malpractice, and you're giving us the old softshoe, 'that depends.'
What I said was, 'Let's try it this way.' An exasperated tone, like a teacher trying to explain algebra to a chimpanzee. 'When a surgeon is performing a laminectomy on the L3-L4 vertebrae, can he see what he's doing with the rongeur, or does he go by feel?'
'As I said before, that depends,' Dr. Watkins said with excessive dignity. Like most hired guns, he could make a belch sound like a sonnet. White hair swept back, late sixties, retired chief of orthopedics at Orlando Presbyterian, he had been a good bone carpenter in his own right until he lost his nerves to an ice-filled river of Stolichnaya. Lately he talked for pay on the traveling malpractice circuit. Consultants, they call themselves. Whores, other doctors peg them. When I defended criminal cases, I thought my clients could win any lying contest at the
