don't get all choked up over his career problems or insurance rates. He was planking the slut-something that doesn't exactly put him in an exclusive club-and they planned it together. The malpractice suit is just a cover.'
'I still don't get it.' I was starting to feel like a sap, something Susan Corrigan seemed to know the moment she met me.
'The lawsuit makes it look like the doctor and the widow are enemies. That's their cover. And the way I figure it, Lassiter, you're supposed to lose. Or at least it doesn't matter. If you lose, the insurance company will pay her, and she'll probably split the money with him. Or maybe he gets it all. She'll get more than she needs from the estate. And if she wins more than his insurance coverage, he doesn't have to worry because she won't try to collect.'
I sat there with a look as intelligent as a vacant lot. 'Murder and insurance fraud. You have no proof of that. And I just can't believe it.'
'I can see that, now,' she said. 'You're not a bad guy, Lassiter. You're just not fast enough to be a linebacker, and you don't know shit from second base.'
5
Charlie Riggs took the stand with a smile on his face and a plastic model of the spine in his back pocket. I felt better just looking at him. Bushy gray moustache and beard, a brown tweedy jacket more at home in Ivy League libraries than art deco Miami, twinkling eyes full of experience. A trustworthy man. Like having Walter Cronkite on my side.
He'd testified hundreds of times for the state and was comfortable on the witness stand. He crossed his legs, revealing drooping socks and pale calves. He breathed on his eyeglasses and wiped them on his tie. He slipped the glasses onto his small nose that was almost buried by his beard. Then Charlie Riggs nodded. He was ready.
'Please state your name and profession for the jury,' I instructed him.
'Charles W. Riggs, M.D., pathologist by training, medical examiner of Dade County for twenty-eight years, now happily retired.'
'Tell us, Dr. Riggs, what are the duties of a medical examiner.'
'Objection!' Dan Cefalo was on his feet. 'Dr. Riggs is retired. He is incompetent to testify as to the current medical examiner's duties.'
In the realm of petty objections, that one ranked pretty high, but it was the first one of the day, and you could flip a coin on it.
'Sustained,' Judge Leonard said, unfolding the sports section, looking for the racetrack charts.
I had another idea. 'Let's start this way, Dr. Riggs. What is a medical examiner?'
'Well, in merry old England, they were called coroners. You can trace coroners back to at least the year 1194. They were part of the justice system, part judge, part tax collector. The coroner was the custos placitorum coronae, the guardian of the pleas of the Crown. If a man was convicted of a crime, the coroner saw to it that his goods were forfeited to the Crown.'
Cefalo looked bored, the judge was not listening as usual, but the jurors seemed fascinated by the bearded old doctor. It works that way. What's mundane to lawyers and judges enchants jurors.
'Later the coroner's duties included determining the cause of death with the help of an inquest. The sheriff would empanel a jury, much as you have here.' He smiled toward the jury box, and in unison, six faces smiled back. They liked him. That was half the battle.
'The jury had to determine whether death was ex visita-tione divina, by the visitation of God, or whether man had a hand in it. Even if death was accidental, there was still a sort of criminal penalty. For example, if a cart ran over someone and killed him, the owner had to pay the Crown the equivalent value of the cart. That got to be quite a problem when steamships and trains began doing the killing.'
The jurors nodded, flattered that this wise old man would take the time to give them a history lesson. 'Still later, coroners began recording how many deaths were caused by particular diseases. Sometimes I spend my evenings with a glass of brandy and a collection of the Coroner's Rolls from the 1200s. You'd be surprised how much we can learn. At any rate, Counselor, the job of the coroner, or medical examiner, is to determine cause of death. Our credo is 'to speak for the dead, to protect the living.' '
'And how does a coroner determine cause of death?' I asked.
Charlie Riggs pushed his glasses back up his nose with a chubby thumb. 'By physical and medical examination, various testing devices, gas chromatography, electron microscopes, the study of toxicology, pharmacology, radiology, pathology. Much is learned in the autopsy, of course.'
'May we assume you have determined the cause of death in a number of cases?'
'Thousands. For over twenty years, I performed five hundred or more autopsies a year and supervised many more.'
'Can you tell us about some of your methods, some of your memorable cases?'
A hand smacked the plaintiff's table and Dan Cefalo was on his feet, one pantleg sticking into the top of his right sock, the other pantleg dragging below the heel of the left shoe where the threads had unraveled from the cuff. 'Objection,' he said wearily. 'This retired gentleman's life story is irrelevant here.'
Taking a shot at Riggs's age. I hoped the two older jurors were listening. 'Your Honor, I'm entitled to qualify Dr. Riggs as an expert.'
Cefalo was ready for that. He didn't want to hear any more than he had to from Charlie Riggs. 'We'll stipulate that Dr. Riggs was the medical examiner for a long time, that he's done plenty of autopsies, and that he's qualified to express an opinion on cause of death.'
That should have been enough, but I still wanted Riggs to tell his stories. When you have a great witness, keep him up there. Let the jury absorb his presence.
'Objection overruled,' Judge Leonard said. Good, my turn to win one.
'Dr. Riggs, you were about to tell us of your cases and methods of medical examination of the cause of death.'
So Charlie Riggs unfolded his memories. There was the aging playboy who lived at Turnberry Isle, found dead of a single bullet wound to the forehead. Or so it seemed. The autopsy showed no bullet in the skull, no exit wound, just a round hole right between the eyes, as if from a small caliber shell.
'The police were stumped for a murder weapon,' Charlie Riggs said. 'Sometimes it's best to consider everyday items.
I searched the grounds and, in a dumpster near the marina, I found a woman's red shoe with blood on the metal spiked heel. The blood type matched the playboy's, the heel matched the wound, and the owner of a French shoe shop at Mayfair identified the woman who bought the six-hundred-dollar shoes two weeks earlier. The woman confessed to doing him in. A lover's spat, she didn't want to kill him, just brain him.'
Then there was the mystery of the burned woman. She was sitting there, fully clothed, on her sofa, burned to death. Her clothes were not even singed. There was no smoke or evidence of fire in the apartment. The woman's boyfriend had found the body. He said she came home drunk, took a shower, and next thing he knew, she was sitting on the sofa dead.
'I took a pair of tweezers and probed the bathtub drain,' Charlie Riggs told the jury. He paused. Several jurors exhaled in unison.
'It was just a hunch. Up came pieces of skin, and I knew the answer.'
Charlie Riggs smiled a knowing smile and stroked his beard, everybody's favorite professor.
'Both had come home drunk, and she passed out. The boyfriend tried to revive her in the bathtub, but sailing three sheets to the wind, he turned on the hot water and left her there. The scalding water burned her to death. When the boyfriend sobered up, he panicked, so he dried her off, dressed her, put her on the sofa, and called the police.'
The jury sat entranced. There's nothing like tales of death, well told. Riggs testified about matching tire treads to the marks on a hit-and-run victim's back, of fitting a defendant's teeth to bite marks on a rape-murder
