No, no, no. It doesn't go like this.

Here is how it is supposed to go. Harry Lee Coe is ambling around the courthouse with his diet soda in hand, grinning at the TV cameras. No one is laying a glove on him.

Everybody slaps his or her forehead and says, with mock exasperation: "That Harry Lee Coe! How does he do it?" But in due time, the latest round of bad publicity fades away, and he goes on.

That is how it is supposed to go.

That's how it went for Hangin' Harry Coe all those years he was a headline-making circuit court judge. He handed out 99-year sentences like candy. He got reversed on appeal as often as some judges bang their gavel, but he didn't mind. The feds tried to link his name to scandals, even smeared him in court motions, but never scored a hit.

That, too, is how it went for Coe after he miraculously got elected as the Democratic state attorney of Hillsborough County in 1992, unseating the buttoned-down Republican incumbent, Bill James.

Coe smiled at fortune, no matter what misfortune came. He turned his first big trial into a circus. He lost two guns. He was not what you would call a detail man. His underlings learned to run the office around him, avoiding one disaster after another.

Through it all, the man still called "Judge Coe" met the world with sort of a dazed smile, incapable of embarrassment. No matter how bad the headlines, how harsh the criticism, he moved ahead serenely. That was how things were supposed to go for Harry Lee Coe.

Not like this.

Not with the state attorney's body under a white sheet, slumped against a vine-covered pylon of the Selmon Expressway in South Tampa, next to an overgrown stand of white and red oleander.

It was still sunny when he was found, within a short walk of his apartment. Even though the bridge overhead rumbled and shook with passing traffic, there was a strange kind of peace there down in the shadows, right where the southbound lanes split off at the exit for Bay to Bay Boulevard.

Within minutes of answering the "man down" call just before 11:30 a.m., the police had wrapped the familiar yellow tape around the bridge supports, creating a large holding pen for the fast-growing crowd of police, prosecutors and dignitaries.

The sky turned black from the northwest as the rain moved in fast. It beat down between the two spans of the expressway and the crowd moved underneath the twin ribbons of highway. Neighbors and joggers, passers-by and those who heard the news and came to gawk, all crowded shoulder to shoulder. Inside the police tape, prosecutors and police hugged each other. Some cried.

They said to each other:

This is not something Harry Coe would do. Certainly he would not do it over a couple of lousy headlines, like he had gotten this week, saying he borrowed $12,000 from a couple of employees. Coe had already answered: Big deal. They were my old, dear friends, not just my employees.

True, the governor had asked the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate. This was not so good. But Coe had been through a lot worse, especially back in the years that the feds were turning Tampa upside down, grabbing judges by their ankles and shaking their pockets empty.

Maybe it was the debt. He owed a lot of money. But that was not something new for Harry Coe, either, unless there is something about it that nobody knows.

Maybe it was this: At least two experienced prosecutors, Republicans both, were already in the race against him this year. Some of his oldest, closest advisers were wondering whether it was time for Coe to retire with dignity. For a man with no other identity, what kind of future might that have looked like?

And yet surely, the answer is: Better than this one. Better than this one.