A Civil Action (10 page)

“It’s my only case,” protested Schlichtmann, who had the distinct impression that Reed did not think him capable of handling it. “Why don’t we work on it together?”

Reed didn’t appear to like this idea. He tried again to talk Schlichtmann out of the case, but Schlichtmann refused to give it up. In the end, Reed agreed to let Schlichtmann work with him, perhaps if only to keep a close eye on the young lawyer. “Okay,” said Reed. “You can work out of the conference room at my office.”

Schlichtmann began spending most of his time at Reed & Mulligan. Reed would stop by the conference room occasionally to see how the “kid” (as he began referring to Schlichtmann) was doing. Usually the kid was there when Reed left the office at night. Usually he was there when Reed arrived in the morning. These hours were something new at Reed & Mulligan. Sometimes the kid would disappear for a few days. Then he’d burst into the office brandishing a piece of the Piper Arrow or an article of clothing he’d found while combing a Long Island beach. The kid did not work quietly. Each new discovery brought shouts of jubilation from the conference room. The office settled back into tranquillity when the kid went to Atlantic City to trace the last days of gambling, drinking, and high living of the businessman and his three companions. It erupted when the kid returned with the businessman’s credit-card receipts and affidavits from the bartenders and cashiers who’d seen the four revelers on their last day.

Schlichtmann believed the businessman had been drunk and therefore negligent in operating the plane. Furthermore, he’d earned his pilot’s license only four months before the accident and was not qualified to fly on instruments. Yet he’d left Atlantic City at six o’clock in the evening, taking off into overcast skies. He had entered the cloud cover near Long Island and encountered sleet and snow. Schlichtmann got a tape recording of the pilot’s last conversation with an air-traffic controller at Kennedy Airport. The entire office of Reed & Mulligan gathered around to listen. They heard the businessman, his voice panicky as he lost his bearings in the clouds, request a lower altitude from the air-traffic controller. The controller instructed him to turn to the right during his descent. He turned to the left instead. He apologized, and then there was an unintelligible sound, high-pitched and keening. Perhaps it was a scream. Seconds later the Piper Arrow disappeared from the radar screen.

Schlichtmann filed suit in Massachusetts Superior Court three months after the accident. Within a matter of days he and Reed began negotiating with the insurance company that held the million-dollar
policy on the pilot. The case would settle, Schlichtmann believed, for a sum close to the policy limit.

Never in the history of Reed & Mulligan had a case been put together so swiftly. Reed began to treat Schlichtmann like a son. He mentioned one morning that there were other cases in the office that needed work. “The kid is like a bulldog,” Reed told his partner, Joe Mulligan. “Once he gets hold of something, he doesn’t let go.”

3

Donna Robbins had been calling the office of Reed & Mulligan off and on for nearly three years, ever since Joe Mulligan had taken the malpractice case concerning Robbie’s hip. That case, a difficult one to begin with, had been rendered essentially worthless since Robbie’s death by leukemia. Mulligan felt he’d be lucky to get Donna a few thousand dollars, a “nuisance-value” settlement.

Four months had passed since Mulligan had signed up the families in the Woburn case, and Anne Anderson had begun calling the office, too. Mulligan answered most of the calls at first. “These things take time,” he’d explain to Anne, the very same words Donna used to hear when she called about Robbie’s case. After a while Mulligan let his secretary handle most of the calls. She would tell Anne or Donna that Joe was out of the office or in a meeting. The secretary began feeling sorry for the women. After making yet another excuse, she’d walk into the office of one of the firm’s associates and say, “What are we going to do with these poor people?” But the associate was a lowly member of the firm. He could only shrug. The case wasn’t his.

Reed & Mulligan had many personal injury cases in its files. Mulligan was fond of calling especially promising cases “gold mines.” A new case might look promising at first, but further investigation sometimes revealed a fatal flaw, and the case would die quietly in the files. Many cases in many firms across the nation expired in such a fashion.

Mulligan still regarded Woburn as a potential “gold mine,” but he had done little work on the case. He had gone once to speak with the state environmental people, hoping they could tell him who had contaminated the wells. But they’d been “tight” (as he later put it) with information. He had also hired at minimum wage two students from
Suffolk Law School, where he himself had gotten his degree, night division. He had instructed the students to collect whatever pertinent information they could find in Woburn, and he’d left them to work on their own. One of them quit after a few weeks, and the other one did little more than clip newspaper articles from the
Woburn Daily Times
.

Mulligan had followed Schlichtmann’s progress on the Piper Arrow case with interest. He was impressed with Schlichtmann’s industry, and he decided to recruit the young lawyer for the Woburn case. One evening that winter, before leaving the office, he stopped at the library and invited Schlichtmann out for a drink. “I’ll be at the Littlest,” said Mulligan. “Meet me there.”

The Littlest Bar on Province Street was Mulligan’s favorite haunt. It was not only tiny but also subterranean, down six steps from the street. By dusk on a winter evening, the Littlest was crowded with men, most of them Irish, many of them lawyers, a tight nest smelling of whiskey and tobacco. Mulligan cut a huge swath in the Littlest. He towered over the bar and his stentorian voice rose above the babble. Among some patrons at the Littlest, word had it that Reed’s hero in
The Verdict
, the dissolute but principled lawyer, was modeled after Mulligan. Mulligan never denied it.

When Schlichtmann arrived at the Littlest that evening, Mulligan bought him a drink and introduced him around. He put his arm around Schlichtmann’s shoulder (he was taller by several inches than Schlichtmann, who himself stood well above an average crowd) and steered him to a stool in the corner of the bar. He began talking about the Piper Arrow case, telling Schlichtmann that he was impressed by how quickly he’d put it together. “There are other good cases in the office,” Mulligan continued. “I’ve got one in particular I’d like you to look at, a mass-disaster case, best case in the office. This one could be a real gold mine. It’ll require some hard work, but you’re just the sort of guy to develop it.” Mulligan began describing the Woburn case.

Schlichtmann had read in
The Boston Globe
about the leukemia cluster, but he hadn’t known that Mulligan was involved, or that there was even a case. He felt flattered that Mulligan would ask him to work on a case of such importance and celebrity. “When can I see the file?” he asked.

Mulligan said he’d have his secretary get it for him tomorrow. “A lot of pieces are still missing from the puzzle,” Mulligan confided. They
talked about Woburn for an hour over drinks. Mulligan told Schlichtmann several times he was “delighted” to have him working on the case.

On the conference room table the next morning Schlichtmann saw a slender manila file labeled “Woburn Cases.” The file, less than an inch thick, looked very thin for a mass-disaster case. The Piper Arrow file, by contrast, occupied almost an entire cabinet drawer. Schlichtmann opened the Woburn file and saw newspaper clippings and Mulligan’s contingency fee agreements, standard forms in which the lawyer had agreed “to do any and all necessary things in the prosecution of any claims which the client may have against”—here Mulligan had filled in the words—“any and all Defendants identified by the attorneys.”

The only other item in the file was the report of the investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and the state department of health. Schlichtmann started reading the report. Some of it seemed promising—the fact, for instance, that it was very unlikely the cluster of childhood leukemias in east Woburn could have occurred merely by chance. But other items in the report gave Schlichtmann pause. “With few exceptions,” said the report, “investigations of leukemia clusters have failed to demonstrate significant associations or even promising leads as to environmental causes.… None of the chemicals found in Wells G and H are known to be leukemogenic, although trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene have been found to cause tumors in laboratory animals. The source of the present contaminants is unknown.”

When he finished reading, Schlichtmann felt dismayed. A dozen questions went through his head: Whose chemicals had polluted the wells? Who had dumped these chemicals, and when had they gotten into the water supply? Had they in fact caused leukemia? The file was silent on almost every question. It was apparent that Mulligan had spent little time on the case.

Schlichtmann took the file back to Newburyport and found himself looking at it again. He could not even pronounce the names of the chemicals in the Woburn wells, but he felt instinctively that they probably had caused the cluster of leukemias. He himself had always been vigilant about what he ate and drank. His grandfather, owner of a pharmacy and soda fountain, had once caught Schlichtmann’s father eating a handful of maraschino cherries. “Don’t ever eat those,” the grandfather had warned. “They’re full of chemicals that’ll make you sick.” Warnings of this sort had in turn been impressed on Schlichtmann at
an early age. His father had always done the family’s grocery shopping. He’d read labels obsessively, long before most people gave labels any thought, and pointed out to his sons all the chemicals in canned foods. Dutiful in this respect at least, Schlichtmann never took any drug stronger than aspirin, nor had he ever smoked or drunk coffee. He rarely ate red meat and he avoided tap water, preferring instead bottled water, the more expensive the better.

At a glance, the Woburn case did look, as Mulligan had said, quite promising—polluted drinking water had apparently caused an epidemic of leukemia. But Schlichtmann knew that such a claim would be difficult to prove. He’d have to delve into the question of what causes leukemia, a question that medical science itself had not yet resolved. And it would be expensive. The Eaton case, by comparison, had been a simple affair, and yet he’d spent fifteen thousand dollars and seven months working on it. At this point in his career, Schlichtmann had been practicing law for only three years. He had taken only one case to trial. Woburn was too big, he told himself, too expensive, too complicated.

Mulligan’s secretary began directing the phone calls from Anne and Donna to Schlichtmann. The message slips soon grew into a small pile. One evening that spring, Schlichtmann went out to Woburn to meet the families. It was dusk when he left the office. He drove through the Pine Street neighborhood, past the quiet orderly homes, the forsythia in full bloom. When he arrived at Anne’s house, the families were gathered in the living room, awaiting him. He introduced himself and explained that Mulligan had asked him to work on the case.

He knew that these people wanted to hear what progress he and Mulligan had made. He explained that he had no basis yet for filing a lawsuit. That action would have to wait until the government agencies had identified the source of the contaminants in the wells. “Toxic waste dumps are surfacing all over the country,” he told the families. “The EPA doesn’t have the capacity or the leadership to investigate each one. You have to organize, you have to force them to do their job. This is a political battle now, not a legal one. We’re not ready for the legal battle yet.”

He stayed at Anne’s house for nearly two hours, answering questions, getting a sense of his new clients. Anne’s child had died four months earlier, and she looked pale, her eyes rimmed in red as if she had been
crying just moments ago. But Schlichtmann was struck by her forcefulness and the intelligence of her questions. He talked for a while with Richard and Mary Toomey, whose son Patrick had also died earlier that year. Richard, a sheet-metal worker for nearly thirty years, was a reserved man, but he had a blunt, honest face, and Schlichtmann liked him immediately. “We’re not in this for money,” Toomey told Schlichtmann. “We just want information. No one will tell us anything.”

Schlichtmann left the meeting feeling sorry for these people. But he also felt he could do little to help them.

4

In the files at Reed & Mulligan, Schlichtmann found dozens of other cases, many of them gathering dust, waiting for someone to take interest. They were, he thought, like unpolished stones, like lumps of coal. Many were of such small value—the one concerning Donna Robbins’s boy, for example—that they would barely justify his labor. A few were completely worthless. But some looked as if they might contain a diamond at the core. He kept searching for the most promising ones. Soon the Woburn file was buried beneath the other cases.

Assisting Schlichtmann was a lawyer who occupied a small cubicle next to Mulligan’s office. The lawyer’s name was Kevin Conway. He was in his mid-thirties, several years older than Schlichtmann, short and stoutly built, with a belly that was edging toward portliness. He had a manner, unpracticed and unconscious, of conveying warmth and concern. The office workers all seemed to come to Conway with their troubles. When, for instance, Mulligan’s secretary became upset by the plight of the Woburn mothers, she went to Conway.

Conway had been at Reed & Mulligan for two years, doing piecework, getting paid by the case. The job was his third since graduating in the top half of his class at Georgetown University Law School. He had started his career working for a big company in New York, where he’d had an office with a view and made a handsome salary. But after six years there, he’d felt as if life were passing him by. He had no sense of accomplishment. He’d looked at the people around him, people who’d spent their lives working for the company, and he’d realized that if he didn’t leave soon, he might never get away.