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messages that would not be answered—lawyers who wouldn't be called, 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 cell 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 Stanton'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 canapé 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 don't