hibernation. I could have used the distraction. My social life was as empty as a Miami Beach hotel in July. But I took inventory quickly, knowing I had several hours of work ahead. There is a time for dallying, but the middle of a trial is not such a time. I wanted to finish the postmortem on the day’s events and prepare for tomorrow and the widow’s testimony. Still, an old reflex, maybe eons old, had the mental computer figuring a sort of cost- benefit analysis-how long it would take-the flirting time, make-nice time, bone-jumping time, and call-you-again time. Too long.
They already were sitting down and Caramel Skin was chattering about her ex-boyfriend, a Colombian, and what a scumbag he was. Skoombag. She was Costa Rican, Miss Earrings Honduran.
I shouldn’t have brought Roger to Bay side, a yuppie hangout with shops, restaurants, and bars strung along Biscayne Bay downtown. It was a pickup place, and these two probably assumed we were in the hunt-two decent- looking guys under forty in suits-when all we wanted was solitude and an early dinner. Outside the windows, the young male lawyers, accountants, and bankers headed for the nearby singles bars, suitcoats slung over shoulders, red suspenders holding up Brooks Brothers suit pants. They slouched against open-air bars waiting for their frozen margaritas to ooze out of chrome-plated machines that belong in Dairy Queens, not taverns. Nearby the young women-mirror images in business suits or no-nonsense below-the-knee dresses-their mouths fixed in go-to-hell looks, struggled with the degree of toughness and cool necessary to beat the men at their own game. Altogether, a smug clique of well-dressed boys and girls.
“Carlos had a Cigarette,” Caramel Skin was saying. “Used to go like a son-of-a-bitch.” Sunavabeach. “Liked the Cigarette more than he liked me. Now he’s at FCI.”
Salisbury wore a blank look. I said, “Federal Correctional Institution. Probably used the boat to bring in bags of the white stuff.”
“ Si. Hizo el tonto. He played the fool for others. And, como si esto fuera poco, he used to beat me. Tie me up and spank me with a hairbrush. It was fun at first, but then…”
Roger Salisbury was into it now, asking Caramel Skin whether Carlos the Con used leather or plain old rope. Scientific study or kinky curiosity, I wondered. Miss Earrings was telling me that they were fashion models-aren’t they all?-who really didn’t have work permits. Came here on tourist visas. Which meant they also were following the scent for the Holy Grail, green cards. Bagging American husbands would do the trick.
The earrings dangled near my face. Our knees touched and her voice dropped to a whisper, a ploy to get me to lean closer. Do they teach this stuff or is it in their genes? A long fingernail traced the outline of my right ear. In the right time and place, it could have been erotic. In a brightly lit restaurant with my mind on business, it itched.
“Thick hair, Mister Broad Shoulders,” she said. Theek and Meester. “Some of the Yankees, their hair is like, how they say, telaranas?”
“Cobwebs,” Caramel Skin said.
“ Si, cobwebs. But yours, chico, is thick like canamo. And rubianco.”
“Like hemp and almost blond,” Caramel Skin said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek rubianco canamo, which did not help me get a fried plantain into my mouth. “And ojos azules,” she said, giggling, looking into my eyes.
The women excused themselves to go to the restroom, probably to divide up the spoils. Caramel Skin would get the smaller guy with neat, salt-and-pepper hair who was practically smacking his lips over images of sweet bondage. Earrings was stuck with Meester Broad Shoulders, who at least had neither cobwebs nor spiders in his mop but who seemed distracted.
Salisbury lit a cigarette, dragged deeply, and sent a swirl of smoke into the overhead fan. Doctors who smoke puzzle me. You know they know better. Maybe lack of discipline and self-control. I couldn’t imagine a personal injury lawyer riding a motorcycle, not after seeing those eight-by-ten glossies taken by the Highway Patrol. Need a shovel to scrape up body parts.
I wanted to draw Roger away from his Latin American fantasy and talk about tomorrow’s testimony. But he was saying something about a doubleheader that had nothing to do with Yankee Stadium. I shook my head no, and he gave me that puzzled look. I’d seen the same expression the first time he walked into my office about eighteen months earlier.
“You must like representing doctors,” he said that day, after we exchanged hellos.
“Yeah, it’s a great honor.”
He gave me that look and dropped the malpractice complaint on my desk as if it carried the plague. While I read it, he walked around my office, ostensibly admiring the view of the bay, but surreptitiously looking for merit badges on the walls. He couldn’t find any. No diplomas, no awards from the Kiwanis. I hung my Supreme Court admission ticket above the toilet at home. Covers a crack in the plaster. He stopped in front of a photo of my college football team, one of those posed shots with a hundred twenty guys filling the bleachers.
“You played football,” he said. Impressed. He couldn’t be sure I ever graduated from law school, but he was happy I could hit a blocking sled.
“A lead-footed linebacker,” I said. “Better at lawyering than covering the tight end over the middle.”
“Been defending doctors long?”
“Not as long as I played games in the PD’s office, keeping some very bad actors on the street.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“It made me puke.”
“Huh?”
“Realizing every client I ever had was guilty. Not always with what they’re charged, but guilty of some crime, sometimes worse than the charge.”
I told him how it felt to see some slimeball go free after a warrantless search, then pimp-roll back into the courtroom for pistol-whipping a sixty-year-old liquor store clerk. Ja-cob, my man, they got no probable cause.
Told him I quit and did plaintiff’s PI. Half my clients were phonies. Phony injuries and phony doctors or real injuries and no insurance.
“So representing doctors is a step up,” Roger Salisbury had said brightly.
“From the gutter to the curb.”
That look again.
“I sold out, joined the high-rise set at rich, old Harman amp; Fox,” I told him. “Ordinarily, the dark-wood- and-deep-carpet types wouldn’t give a guy like me a second look. Afraid I’d spill the soup on my vest, if I owned one. But they woke up one day and figured they didn’t have anybody who could try a case. They could shuffle papers and write memos, but they didn’t know how to tap dance in front of a jury. So I won some cases, a few for very dangerous doctors.”
Now his puzzled look changed to one of concern.
“Bottom line,” I said, using a favorite expression of the corporate gazoonies who ruled the firm. “I’ve spent my entire career looking for the good guys and have yet to find them.”
He was quiet a moment, probably wondering if I was incompetent. Good, we were even. I always assume the worst. Fewer surprises later.
Things improved after that. I checked up on him. His rep was okay. Board certified and no prior lawsuits. He probably checked me out, too. Found out I’ve never been disbarred, committed, or convicted of moral turpitude. And the only time I was arrested it was a case of mistaken identity-I didn’t know the guy I hit was a cop.
So here we were, waiting for dos chicas to powder their noses or inhale something into them, and my mind was stuck on the mundane subject of the pending trial.
“Roger, let’s talk about tomorrow. Cefalo will put the widow on first thing. Today I was watching you out of the corner of my eye and you were staring at her. I know she looks like a million bucks, but if I saw it while I was getting blindsided by Wallbanger Watkins, I’m sure the jurors did, too. It could be mistaken for a look of guilt, like you feel sorry you croaked her old man. That’s worse than having the hots for her.”
“Okay, didn’t know I was doing it. Probably just staring into space.”
