Free Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine Page B

called the police.”
    The jury sat entranced. There’s nothing like
tales of death, well told. Riggs testified about matching tire
treads to the marks on a hit-and-run victim’s back, of fitting a
defendant’s teeth to bite marks on a rape-murder victim, of finding
teeth in a drain under a house, the only proof of the corpus
delicti, the body of a man dissolved in sulfuric acid by his
roommate.
    The litany of crime had its purpose, to shock
the jury with deeds of true miscreants, to deliver a subtle message
that the justice system should prosecute murderers, not decent
surgeons, even if they might make mistakes. Errare humanum
est. If that’s what it was, an honest error.
    I hadn’t told Charlie Riggs about the
conversation with Susan Corrigan. What would I tell him, that a
dead man’s daughter, poisoned with grief and hate, thinks my client
is a murderer? She had no physical evidence, no proof, no nothing,
except the allegation that Roger Salisbury and Melanie Corrigan
were getting it on. I would talk to Salisbury about it, but not
now.
    While Charlie Riggs testified, I watched
Roger. He kept shooting sideways glances at Melanie Corrigan’s
perfect profile. She watched the witness, oblivious to the
attention. She was wearing a simple cotton dress that, to me,
looked about two sizes too large, but I supposed was in style. A
wide belt gathered it at the waist and it ended demurely below the
knee. It was one of those deceiving things women wear, so simple it
disguises the name of an Italian designer and a megabucks price
tag.
    I tried to read the look in Roger Salisbury’s
eyes but could not. Was there a chance that it was true? Not just
that he might have been diddling his patient’s wife. I didn’t care
about that. But that he might have killed Corrigan. That it was all
a plot, that the malpractice trial was just a cover, or better yet,
a way to pick up another million. If that’s what it was, there’d be
plenty of chances for Salisbury to tank it. He was scheduled to
testify after Riggs.
    I continued my direct examination: “Now Dr.
Riggs, have you had an opportunity to examine the medical records
compiled by the physicians and the hospital?”
    “Yes.”
    “And based on the records, and your years of
experience, do you have an opinion to a reasonable degree of
medical probability what caused the death of Philip Corrigan?”
    “I do.”
    The courtroom was silent except for the
omnipresent hum of the air conditioning. Everyone knew the next
question.
    “And what was the cause of death?”
    “A ruptured aorta. Internal bleeding, which
in turn caused a lowering of blood pressure. In layman’s terms, the
heart, which is the pump in a closed circulatory system, didn’t
have enough fluid to pump, so it stopped.”
    “And what, sir, caused the aorta to
rupture?”
    “There is no way to answer that with absolute
certainty. We can only exclude certain things.”
    “Such as?” Keep the questions short, let the
doctor carry the ball.
    “Well, Dr. Salisbury here certainly didn’t do
it with the rongeur. If he had, the rupture would be on the
posterior side of the aorta. But as reported by the surgeon who
tried the emergency repair of the aorta, the rupture is on the
anterior side, the front. Naturally a surgeon making an incision in
a man’s back, working around the spine, is not going to puncture
the front of the aorta, the part that faces the abdomen.”
    Dan Cefalo turned ashen. There aren’t many
surprises in trials anymore. Pretrial discovery eliminates most of
that. But Charlie Riggs gave his deposition before studying the
report of the second surgery, the chaotic attempt to close the
bursting aorta a dozen hours after the laminectomy. When he read
the report, bells went off. Nobody else had paid any attention to
where the rupture was, only that it existed.
    For the next fifteen minutes, it went on like
that, Charles W. Riggs, M.D., witness emeritus, showing the jury
his plastic model of the spine with