Free Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine

days. So pardon me if I
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

THE CORONER

    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 visitatione 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.