Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor by Paul Levine Page B

clients who wouldn’t be seen, motions that wouldn’t be
heard while my world was circumscribed by the four walls of
Courtroom 6-1 in the Dade County Courthouse. Next to the phone
messages were stacks of pleadings, letters and memos, carefully
arranged in order of importance with numbers written on those
little yellow squares of paper that have their own stickum on back.
What did we do before those sticky doodads were invented? Or before
the photocopier? Or the computer, the telecopier, and the car
phone? It must have been a slower world. Before lawyers had offices
fifty-two stories above Biscayne Bay with white-coated waiters
serving afternoon tea, and before surgeons cleared four hundred
thousand a year, easy, scraping out gristle from knees and
squeezing bad discs out of spines.
    Lawyers had become businessmen, leveraging
their hourly rates by stacking offices with high-billing
associates, forming “teams” for well-heeled clients, and raking in
profits on the difference between associates’ salaries and their
billing rates. Doctors had become little industries themselves,
creating huge pension plans, buying buildings and leasing them
back, investing in labs and million-dollar scanning machines,
getting depreciation and investment income that far outpaced
patient fees.
    Maybe doctors were too busy following the
stock market to be much good at surgery anymore. Maybe the greed of
lawyers and doctors equally contributed to the malpractice crisis.
But maybe an occasional slip of the scalpel or a missed melanoma
just couldn’t be helped. What was it old Charlie Riggs said the
first day he reviewed the charts in Salisbury’s case? Errare
humanum est. To err is human. Sure, but a jury seldom
forgives.
    I grabbed the first message on stack one.
Granny Lassiter called. I hoped she hadn’t been arrested again.
Granny lived in Islamorada in the Florida Keys and taught me
everything I know about fishing and most of what I know about
decency and principle. She was one of the first to speak against
unrestrained construction in the environmentally fragile Keys. When
speaking didn’t work, she got a Key West conch named Virgil Thigpen
drunk as an Everglades skunk and commandeered his tank truck. The
truck, not coincidentally, had just sucked up the contents of
Granny’s septic tank and that of half a dozen neighbors. Granny
drove it smack into the champagne and caviar crowd at the grand
opening of Pelican Point, a plug-ugly pink condo on salt-eaten
concrete stilts that would soon sink into the dredged muck off Key
Largo. While the bankers, lawyers, developers, and lobbyists stood
gaping, and TV cameras whirred, Granny shouted, “Shit on all of
you,” then sloshed twelve hundred gallons of crud onto the canape
table.
    The judge gave her probation plus a hundred
hours of community service, which she fulfilled by donating a
good-sized portion of her homemade brew to the Naval Retirement
Home in Marathon.
    I returned the call. Granny just wanted to
pass the time of day and give me a high-tide report. Next message,
the unmistakably misshapen handwriting of Cindy, my secretary:

    Across the River,
    A Voice to Shine,
    Tempus Fugit,
    Doc Speaks at Nine.

    What the hell? A headful of tight, burnt
orange-brown curls popped through my door. To my eye, Cindy’s hair
seemed to clash with the fuchsia eye shadow but clearly matched her
lipstick. If the lipstick were any brighter, you could use it for
fluorescent highway markers.
    “Cindy, what’s this?”
    “Haiku, el jefe .”
    “Who?”
    “I do.”
    “What you do?”
    “I do haiku,” she said, laughing. “Haiku is
three-line Japanese poetry, no breaking hearts, just recording the
author’s observations of nature and the human experience.”
    “What’s it mean?”
    “C’mon boss. Get with it. Crazy old Charlie
Riggs is set to testify at nine tomorrow morning. He’ll tell one
and all what killed filthy rich Philip Corrigan.”
    “Good, he’s our best witness.”
    “I