Free Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine Page A

“Still
later, coroners began recording how many deaths were caused by
particular diseases. Sometimes I spend my evenings with a glass of
brandy and a collection of the Coroner’s Rolls from the 1200s.
You’d be surprised how much we can learn. At any rate, Counselor,
the job of the coroner, or medical examiner, is to determine cause
of death. Our credo is ‘to speak for the dead, to protect the
living.’”
    “And how does a coroner determine cause of
death?” I asked.
    Charlie Riggs pushed his glasses back up his
nose with a chubby thumb. “By physical and medical examination,
various testing devices, gas chromatography, electron microscopes,
the study of toxicology, pharmacology, radiology, pathology. Much
is learned in the autopsy, of course.”
    “May we assume you have determined the cause
of death in a number of cases?”
    “Thousands. For over twenty years, I
performed five hundred or more autopsies a year and supervised many
more.”
    “Can you tell us about some of your methods,
some of your memorable cases?”
    A hand smacked the plaintiff’s table and Dan
Cefalo was on his feet, one pantleg sticking into the top of his
right sock, the other pantleg dragging below the heel of the left
shoe where the threads had unraveled from the cuff. “Objection,” he
said wearily. “This retired gentleman’s life story is irrelevant
here.”
    Taking a shot at Riggs’s age. I hoped the two
older jurors were listening. “Your Honor, I’m entitled to qualify
Dr. Riggs as an expert.”
    Cefalo was ready for that. He didn’t want to
hear any more than he had to from Charlie Riggs. “We’ll stipulate
that Dr. Riggs was the medical examiner for a long time, that he’s
done plenty of autopsies, and that he’s qualified to express an
opinion on cause of death.”
    That should have been enough, but I still
wanted Riggs to tell his stories. When you have a great witness,
keep him up there. Let the jury absorb his presence.
    “Objection overruled,” Judge Leonard said.
Good, my turn to win one.
    “Dr. Riggs, you were about to tell us of your
cases and methods of medical examination of the cause of
death.”
    So Charlie Riggs unfolded his memories. There
was the aging playboy who lived at Turnberry Isle, found dead of a
single bullet wound to the forehead. Or so it seemed. The autopsy
showed no bullet in the skull, no exit wound, just a round hole
right between the eyes, as if from a small caliber shell.
    “The police were stumped for a murder
weapon,” Charlie Riggs said. “Sometimes it’s best to consider
everyday items. I searched the grounds and, in a dumpster near the
marina, I found a woman’s red shoe with blood on the metal spiked
heel. The blood type matched the playboy’s, the heel matched the
wound, and the owner of a French shoe shop at Mayfair identified
the woman who bought the six- hundred-dollar shoes two weeks
earlier. The woman confessed to doing him in. A lover’s spat, she
didn’t want to kill him, just brain him.”
    Then there was the mystery of the burned
woman. She was sitting there, fully clothed, on her sofa, burned to
death. Her clothes were not even singed. There was no smoke or
evidence of fire in the apartment. The woman’s boyfriend had found
the body. He said she came home drunk, took a shower, and next
thing he knew, she was sitting on the sofa dead.
    “I took a pair of tweezers and probed the
bathtub drain,” Charlie Riggs told the jury. He paused. Several
jurors exhaled in unison.
    “It was just a hunch. Up came pieces of skin,
and I knew the answer.”
    Charlie Riggs smiled a knowing smile and
stroked his beard, everybody’s favorite professor.
    “Both had come home drunk, and she passed
out. The boyfriend tried to revive her in the bathtub, but sailing
three sheets to the wind, he turned on the hot water and left her
there. The scalding water burned her to death. When the boyfriend
sobered up, he panicked, so he dried her off, dressed her, put her
on the sofa, and