"You don't sound convinced."

"Riggs is on the verge of senile dementia, if not over it. He speaks Latin half the time. He's the friggin' coroner-or was until they retired him-not an orthopedic surgeon."

"Roger, trust me. We need a canoemaker, not a carpenter. Charlie Riggs is going to tell the jury why Philip Corrigan died. It's a hole in their case, and I'm going to ride the U.S. Cavalry through it."

Finally the two women set sail for our table. One looked straight at me from under a pile of auburn hair that reached her shoulders and kept going toward Mexico. She had caramel skin and l.u.s.trous ebony eyes. The other had thick, jet black hair that only made her porcelain complexion seem even more delicate. She wore one earring shaped like a golden spermatozoan and another of ivory that could have been a miniature elephant tusk. Both women wore tourniquet-tight slacks, high-heeled open-toed shoes, and oversized cotton sweatshirts, with spangles and shoulders from here to the Orange Bowl.

"May we join you for a moment?" Miss Caramel Skin asked. The you was a chew.

Roger Salisbury looked up and grinned. Even the punitive damage claim hadn't sent his hormones into 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 a.n.a.lysis-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 sc.u.mbag 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 a.s.sumed 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-h.e.l.l 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-b.i.t.c.h." Sunavabeach. "Liked the Cigarette more than he liked me. Now he's at FCI."

Salisbury wore a blank look. I said, "Federal Correctional Inst.i.tution. Probably used the boat to bring in bags of the white stuff."

"S. Hizo el tonto. He played the fool for others. And, como s 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.

"S, cobwebs. But yours, chico, is thick like camo. And rubianco."

"Like hemp and almost blond," Caramel Skin said, helpfully. Her friend gave a tug on my theek rubianco camo, 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 sc.r.a.pe 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 h.e.l.los.

"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 surrept.i.tiously 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 & 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 a.s.sume 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 ident.i.ty-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 s.p.a.ce."

"Yeah sure. The point is, she's likely to be a very good witness. The men in the jury all want in her pants, the women want to mother her."

"Okay already, I get the point."

"Good. I don't want to concern you, but the lovely widow is a real problem for us. She can make the jury forget all our medical mumbo jumbo. That gray silk dress today with the strand of white pearls. Cla.s.sy but not too flashy."

Salisbury laughed. "You ought to see her in a strapless c.o.c.ktail dress."

Uh-huh is what I say when I don't know what to say. I would have liked Salisbury to fill me in here, but he didn't give me any help. After a moment I asked, "Since when are you Mrs. Corrigan's fashion consultant?"

"Oh that. I probably never told you. When Philip started seeing me for the back and leg pain, we became friendly. I wasn't dating anybody. They were just married. He started asking me over to their house in Gables Estates. c.o.c.ktail parties, dinners, sometimes just the three of us."

"So you know Mrs. Corrigan?"

"Melanie. Sure."

"Melanie, is it?"

He looked at me with a what's-the-big-deal look and I didn't have an answer so I polished off the palomilla and thought it over. No big deal. I just would have liked to have known about it sometime before trial.

In a moment our new friends cruised back, eyes a thousand watts brighter, ready to roll. I mumbled my apologies to Miss Earrings, who, with no apparent regret, shifted her electrified look to the blandly handsome doctor. I left them there, two women with a buzz on, and the man who had entrusted his career to me, the man who hadn't told me everything. What else, I wondered, had he left out?

I paused at the door to look back. The restaurant was filled now.

Some of the yuppies were crowding the bar, making too much noise, pushing limes into their Mexican beer, a trendy brand aged about as long as their attention spans. If you have to put lime in your beer, you might as well drink Kool-Aid.

Back at the table, one woman sat on each side of Roger Salisbury. They all laughed. I left the three of them there, the mathematical possibilities of their union crowding Melanie Corrigan's testimony into a dusty recess of my mind.

3.

THE WIDOW.

"Mrs. Corrigan, do you love your husband?"

"I do." A pause, a catch in the throat, a quiver, the beginning of a tear, then like a lake swollen by a summer storm, an overflow cascading down sculpted cheekbones. "That is, I did. I loved him very much."

Blessed timing. They don't teach that in finishing school. Dan Cefalo continued his questioning. "Do you miss him?"

Another leading question, but only a dunce would incur the jury's wrath by interrupting the soap opera with a news bulletin.

"Very much. Every day. We shared so much. Sometimes, when a car pulls into the driveway, I forget, and I think, well, maybe it's Phil."

And maybe it's the paperboy. G.o.d, could she lay it on thick. She looked toward the jury and then away as if the memory was too much to bear. A lace handkerchief appeared out of a navy leather clutch and the big, brown, wet eyes were dabbed dry. The pain radiated from her, but I was the one who was dying. Every question launched an arrow, and every answer pierced my heart. The widow was majestic, thick russet hair swept straight back to lay bare those chiseled lines, to expose her suffering. All for the glory of justice and a seven-figure award for mental anguish, loss of society, comfort, and consortium.

"Tell us about your husband, your late husband, Mrs. Corrigan. And I know it's a painful subject, so if you need a recess to gather yourself, please just say so." Cefalo extended his arms toward the widow and bowed from the waist, as if she were royalty. And she did look regal, white gloves setting off a navy and white double-breasted cardigan that covered a matching skirt. Maybe the gloves hid Racy Red nail polish, already slathered on for a night of romping through Coconut Grove clubs. Maybe on cross-examination I should order her to take off the gloves and bare her claws. Sure, or maybe I should just grab a sword and mutter a hara-kiri chant.

"I don't know where to begin, there's so much to say," she said, obviously knowing exactly where she would begin. I wanted her to say: He was boffing half the stewardesses in town while his first wife lay dying; he made millions bribing county commissioners to grant zoning variances; and if it weren't for high-placed friends in Washington, he would have been indicted for tax evasion.

What she said was: "Phil was the most giving man I've ever known. The way he cared for his first wife when she was terminally ill, if you could have seen that, if you all could have seen it." Then she turned to the jury, an actress facing her adoring audience. "He never thought he could love again, but I brought something to his life. And to me, he was everything-a lover, a friend, even the father I never had. Then for him to die like this, in his prime."

Clever. Very clever. So well rehea.r.s.ed it didn't look rehea.r.s.ed. Explaining how a twenty-six-year-old woman marries a fifty-five- year-old man. A father, for crying out loud. No mention that the champagne corks were popping only six weeks after he buried his beloved first wife. And if I bring it out on cross, I'm a cad. It was a virtuoso performance. Even Judge Leonard was listening, practically a first. He had been in a fine mood at motion calendar in the morning, as well he should after Hot Touch paid $10.40, $5.40, and $4.80.

When Dan Cefalo turned to me and said, "Your witness," he was smiling so broadly I almost didn't notice that his fly was half undone and he had b.u.t.toned his shirt into his suitcoat.

The occasion called for brilliance. Roger Salisbury looked at me as if I were his last friend in the world. I approached the witness stand with a solicitous smile. I still hadn't made up my mind. Behind those tears I saw a flinty toughness that I would love to bring out. But make a mistake, reduce her to tears or hysterics, and the jury would lynch me and nail enough zeroes on the verdict to buy an aircraft carrier. She looked straight back at me. The full lips lost a bit of their poutiness and set in a firm line. It's there somewhere, I knew. But my investigators couldn't find it in six months and my pretrial deposition came up empty. I couldn't risk it now.

I turned to the judge. "Your Honor," I said, as if seeking his approval, "I believe it would be unfair for us to keep Mrs. Corrigan on the stand to discuss this painful subject. We have no questions." Roger Salisbury sank into his chair looking hopeless and abandoned. Men on Death Row have brighter futures.

"Very well," Judge Leonard said, aiming a small smile in my direction. "Mr. Cefalo, call your next witness."

"The plaintiff rests," Dan Cefalo said, his goofy grin still lighting up the room.

"Any motions?" the judge asked. We approached the bench and the judge sent the jurors out to lunch.

"At this time, the defense moves for a directed verdict," I said without a great deal of conviction.

"On what ground, Mr. La.s.siter?" the judge asked.

"On the ground that there's insufficient evidence of proximate cause, first that the surgery caused the aneurysm, and second that the aneurysm caused the death."

"Denied," the judge said before Cefalo even opened his mouth. "The plaintiff's expert testified to that. Whatsa matter, Jake, it's a jury question at least."

I knew that. Somewhere between his b.l.o.o.d.y Marys and his White Russians, Dr. Watkins had stuck us on proximate cause, at least sufficiently to beat a directed verdict, but I was giving the judge a little preview of our defense. Oh Dr. Charles W. Riggs, I need you now.

The judge looked over the courtroom, which was emptying, and waved us closer to the bench. With a hand, he signaled the court stenographer to take a hike. "You boys talk settlement?"

A practical enough question. If he could clear us out of the courtroom, he could spend the rest of the week at the track.

"Judge, we offered the policy," I said apologetically. "A million dollars even, all we've got, no excess coverage. They oughta take it and spare the court all this time and effort."

Cefalo shook his head. "Our liquidated damages alone, lost net acc.u.mulations 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 bulls.h.i.t. 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 a.s.sets 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 a.s.s 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 gla.s.ses. Tortoisesh.e.l.l round frames, giving her a professorial look. Her language, though, was not destined to win tenure. "You're a conniving s.l.u.t and a little wh.o.r.e, and when I get to the bottom of this, we'll see who's out in the cold!"