coverage. They oughta take it and spare the court all this time and effort.”
Cefalo shook his head. “Our liquidated damages alone, lost net accumulations for the estate, are over three million. To say nothing of the widow’s mental anguish and consortium claims.”
The judge laughed. “Danny, your widow lady don’t look like she’ll be without consortium for long.”
Good. I liked hearing that. Maybe the jurors will feel the same. Then we only get hit with three million, enough to wipe out the good doctor several times over.
The judge straightened. “All right, boys. Let’s cut through the bullshit. Danny, how much will you take, bottom line?”
“Two-point-five. Today. No structured settlement. All cash.”
The judge raised his eyebrows and ran a hand over his bald head. “Attaboy. I always figured you to bet the favorites to show, but you’re no ribbon clerk, hey? Jake, whadaya got?”
I turned my pockets inside out and shook my head. “A million, judge, just the policy. Client’s only been in private practice five, six years. Just finished paying off his debts. He’s pulling down big income, but no assets yet. We can’t pay it if we don’t have it. Besides, he’s simply not liable.”
“Okay, Jake, but it’s halftime, and you’re getting your ass kicked from here to Sopchoppy. You see what’s coming, don’t you?”
“Sure judge, but you haven’t heard my halftime speech.”
“Fine, we start with your first witness at one o’clock. Court’s in recess.” With that, he banged the gavel, and the hollow explosion echoed off the high, beamed ceiling. Roger Salisbury slumped onto the defense table as if felled by a rifle shot.
I headed into the corridor, nearly smashing into the lovely widow. She didn’t notice. She was toe-to-toe with another young woman. Each was jawing at the other, faces inflamed, just a few inches apart like Billy Martin and an umpire. I didn’t recognize the other woman. No makeup, short-cropped jet black hair, a turned-up nose and a deep tan, blue jeans and running shoes, maybe the last pretty woman in Miami with thick glasses. Tortoiseshell round frames, giving her a professorial look. Her language, though, was not destined to win tenure. “You’re a conniving slut and a little whore, and when I get to the bottom of this, we’ll see who’s out in the cold!”
The widow’s eyes had narrowed into slits. No tears now. Just sparks and flames. “Get away from me you ingrate, and clear your junk out of the house by six tonight or your ratty clothes will be floating in the bay.”
Dan Cefalo stepped in and separated the two. “Miss Corrigan, I think you best leave.”
Oh, Miss Corrigan. The one with the colorful vocabulary must be Philip Corrigan’s daughter by his first marriage. I followed her down the corridor.
“May I be of assistance?” I asked politely. Trying not to be your typical lawyer scavenging on the perimeter of misfortune.
She lowered the thick glasses and studied me with steaming eyes the color of a strong cup of coffee. The eyes had decided not to make any friends today. She looked me up and down, ending at my black wingtips. I could check for wounds later. Her nostrils flared as if I emitted noxious fumes.
“You’re that doctor’s lawyer, aren’t you?” She made it sound like a capital crime.
“Guilty as charged. I saw you discussing a matter with Mrs. Corrigan and I just wondered if I might help…”
“Why? Are you fucking her or do you just want to?” She slid her glasses back up the slope of the ski-jump nose and headed toward the elevators.
“No and yes,” I called after her.
4
My desk was covered with little white telephone messages. Office confetti. You think the universe comes to a halt when you are locked into your own little world, but it doesn’t. It goes on whether you’re in trial or at war or under the surgeon’s knife. Or dead. Dead rich like Philip Corrigan laid out on smooth satin in a mahogany box, or dead poor, a wino facedown in the bay.
Greeting me in my bay front office was the clutter of messages that would not be answered-lawyers who wouldn’t be called, clients who wouldn’t be seen, motions that wouldn’t be heard while my world was circumscribed by the four walls of Courtroom 6-1 in the Dade County Courthouse. Next to the phone messages were stacks of pleadings, letters and memos, carefully arranged in order of importance with numbers written on those little yellow squares of paper that have their own stickum on back. What did we do before those sticky doodads were invented? Or before the photocopier? Or the computer, the telecopier, and the car phone? It must have been a slower world. Before lawyers had offices fifty-two stories above Biscayne Bay with white-coated waiters serving afternoon tea, and before surgeons cleared four hundred thousand a year, easy, scraping out gristle from knees and squeezing bad discs out of spines.
Lawyers had become businessmen, leveraging their hourly rates by stacking offices with high-billing associates, forming “teams” for well-heeled clients, and raking in profits on the difference between associates’ salaries and their billing rates. Doctors had become little industries themselves, creating huge pension plans, buying buildings and leasing them back, investing in labs and million-dollar scanning machines, getting depreciation and investment income that far outpaced patient fees.
Maybe doctors were too busy following the stock market to be much good at surgery anymore. Maybe the greed of lawyers and doctors equally contributed to the malpractice crisis. But maybe an occasional slip of the scalpel or a missed melanoma just couldn’t be helped. What was it old Charlie Riggs said the first day he reviewed the charts in Salisbury’s case? Errare humanum est. To err is human. Sure, but a jury seldom forgives.
I grabbed the first message on stack one. Granny Lassiter called. I hoped she hadn’t been arrested again. Granny lived in Islamorada in the Florida Keys and taught me everything I know about fishing and most of what I know about decency and principle. She was one of the first to speak against unrestrained construction in the environmentally fragile Keys. When speaking didn’t work, she got a Key West conch named Virgil Thigpen drunk as an Everglades skunk and commandeered his tank truck. The truck, not coincidentally, had just sucked up the contents of Granny’s septic tank and that of half a dozen neighbors. Granny drove it smack into the champagne and caviar crowd at the grand opening of Pelican Point, a plug-ugly pink condo on salt-eaten concrete stilts that would soon sink into the dredged muck off Key Largo. While the bankers, lawyers, developers, and lobbyists stood gaping, and TV cameras whirred, Granny shouted, “Shit on all of you,” then sloshed twelve hundred gallons of crud onto the canape table.
The judge gave her probation plus a hundred hours of community service, which she fulfilled by donating a good-sized portion of her homemade brew to the Naval Retirement Home in Marathon.
I returned the call. Granny just wanted to pass the time of day and give me a high-tide report. Next message, the unmistakably misshapen handwriting of Cindy, my secretary:
Across the River,
A Voice to Shine,
Tempus Fugit,
Doc Speaks at Nine.
What the hell? A headful of tight, burnt orange-brown curls popped through my door. To my eye, Cindy’s hair seemed to clash with the fuchsia eye shadow but clearly matched her lipstick. If the lipstick were any brighter, you could use it for fluorescent highway markers.
“Cindy, what’s this?”
“Haiku, el jefe.”
“Who?”
“I do.”
“What you do?”
“I do haiku,” she said, laughing. “Haiku is three-line Japanese poetry, no breaking hearts, just recording the author’s observations of nature and the human experience.”
