mean?”
He wanted me to respect him. With most clients, winning is enough.
“Hey Roger, I checked around town. The med school has nice things to say about you. You’ve never been sued before, which in this town is an upset. Don’t let my general cynicism get you down.”
“Just so you believe me.”
He had thrown me off stride. I wanted to ask questions, not answer them. “Roger, you know how important it is to tell your lawyer everything?”
“Sure thing. Soul mates.”
“Right. Before you testify tomorrow, is there anything you want to tell me? Anything you left out?”
He cradled his chin in his hand. Something flickered behind his eyes but he blinked it away. “No, don’t think so. I told you all about the surgery. No signs of an aneurysm, no drop in blood pressure. I didn’t slip with the rongeur. I didn’t do it.”
“I know. Besides that. Anything personal with you and the Corrigans?”
“Like what?”
Oh shit. He wasn’t going to help me out. Sometimes the best way to get through the chop is to trim the sail tight and just go. “Like were you screwing Melanie Corrigan?” At the next table, a couple of spiffed-up fiftyish women with fancy shopping bags exchanged disapproving whispers.
“At what point in time?” Roger asked.
My client, and he talks like Richard Nixon.
“Hey Roger, this is your lawyer here, not a grand jury.” The waiter skulked by, his thumbs buried deep in the Caesar salad bowls. He wiped one hand on his apron, sucked some salad dressing off a thumb and brought us the beer, an anonymous American brand, devoid of calories, color, and taste. At least it was cold.
Roger took a small sip, a thinking-time sip, and said, “We were involved, sure.”
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it has nothing to do with the case.”
My voice cranked up a few decibels. “How about letting me decide that? If it comes out, Cefalo would claim you had a motive for being a little careless, or worse, having criminal intent.”
“I thought of that,” he said casually, “but Melanie could never use that. It would hurt her case, wouldn’t it, the unfaithful wife trying to profit from her husband’s death.”
“That’s not the way it would play. You’d be the smooth seducer, or a madman obsessed with her, chopping up the husband so she’d be all yours.”
Salisbury’s fork stopped in mid-air. A look of concern crossed his face, but when he caught me studying him, he chased it away with a laugh. “A madman maybe,” he said, smiling, “but when it comes to seduction, she’s in a league by herself. Besides, I knew her before Corrigan did, and well… there’s stuff you lawyers would call extenuating circumstances.”
“I’m waiting.”
“I’m not sure it’s any of your business.”
I drained my homogenized beer and tried to signal the brain-dead waiter to bring another. He looked right through me.
“Right now, my business is you, everything about you and the Corrigans,” I said, waiting for him to fill me in.
Nothing.
The stone crabs arrived. Fresh, no black mottled spots, the meat tearing cleanly out of the shell, the mustard sauce tangy. I yelled for the second beer, and the waiter brought iced tea. It tasted like the beer.
I dug into the crabs two at a time, but Salisbury must have lost his appetite. He fidgeted in his chair and his eyes darted from side to side. Finally, he looked me straight on, took a breath and let it go. “Okay, here it is. I met Melanie eight or nine years ago. I was just finishing my residency, hadn’t spent much time with women. You know how it is, premed in college, you bust your balls, then med school, internship, residency. Never any money or time. She was just a kid, mixed up, kind of an exotic dancer, but just for a while.”
“Yeah, after that she probably was Deb of the Year.”
“She wasn’t bad or anything. Called herself Autumn Rain. Just used her body to make a buck. So I sort of fell for her. I started my practice, bought her a car, gave her things. It didn’t last long. I found out other guys were doing the same. One guy paid for her apartment, another guy her clothes, another her trips.”
“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 Hatteras 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 Manson, 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?”
