Blood Shot (12 page)

15

Chemistry Lesson

Manheim’s office lay between a beauty parlor and a florist among the little storefronts crowding Ninety-fifth Street. He had put his name on the plate glass in those black-and-gold transfers that are supposed to look old-fashioned and discreet—Frederick Manheim, Attorney-at-Law.

The front of the place, the part the little shops used as their sales floors, had been turned into a reception area. It held a couple of vinyl chairs and a desk with a typewriter and an African violet set on it. A few old copies of Sports Illustrated sat on a pressed-wood table in front of the vinyl chairs. I flipped through one for a few minutes to give the help a chance to make an appearance. When no one showed up I tapped on the door at the back of the room and turned the knob.

The door opened on a tiny hallway. A few pieces of wall-board had been stuck in the area where the stores held their excess inventory to create an office and a little bathroom.

I knocked on the door that had Manheim’s name on it—this time in solid black Gothic—and got a thick “Just a minute.” Paper rustled, a drawer slammed, and Manheim opened the door still chewing, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He was a young man with rosy cheeks and thick fair hair that hung over the tops of heavy glasses.

“Oh, hi. Annie didn’t tell me I had an appointment this morning. Come on in.”

I shook his proffered hand and told him my name. “I don’t have an appointment. I’m sorry to just come barging in, but I was in the area and hoped you might have a minute or two.”

He waved me in. “Sure, sure. No problem. Sorry I can’t offer you any coffee—I get mine from the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way over.”

He’d crammed a couple of visitors’ chairs in between his desk and the door. If you leaned back in the one on the left, you ran into the filing cabinet. The one on the right was jammed against the wall; a line of gray scuff marks showed where people had rubbed too hard against the pasteboard. I felt kind of bad about not being able to infuse a little cash into the operation.

He’d taken out a pad of legal paper, carefully setting the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee to one side.

“Can you spell your name for me, please?”

I spelled it out. “I’m a lawyer, Mr. Manheim, but these days I work primarily as a private investigator. A case I’m involved in has brought me to two clients of yours. Former clients, I guess. Joey Pankowski and Steve Ferraro.”

He’d been looking at me courteously through his thick lenses, his hands clasped loosely around his pen. At the mention of Pankowski and Ferraro he let the pen drop and looked as troubled as a man with rosy cherub’s cheeks could.

“Pankowski and Ferraro? I’m not sure—”

“Employees at Humboldt Chemical’s Xerxes plant in South Chicago. Died two or three years ago.”

“Oh, yes. I remember now. They needed some legal advice, but I’m afraid I couldn’t do much for them.” He blinked unhappily behind his glasses.

“I know you don’t want to talk about your clients. I don’t like talking about mine, either. But if I explain what’s gotten me interested in Pankowski and Ferraro, will you answer a couple of questions about them for me?”

He looked down at the desktop and fiddled with his pen. “I-I really can’t—”

“What is going on with these two guys? Every time I mention their names grown men tremble in their shoes.”

He looked up at me. “Who are you working for?”

“Myself” Myself, myself, it is enough, or so Medea said.

“You’re not working for a company?”

“You mean like Humboldt Chemical? No. I was hired originally by the young woman who used to live next door to me to find out who her father was. It seemed remotely possible that one of those two—most likely Pankowski—could have been the guy and I started poking around trying to find someone at Xerxes who knew him. This woman fired me on Wednesday, but I’ve gotten piqued by the way people are reacting to me. Lying to me, basically, about what went on between Pankowski and Ferraro and Xerxes. And then a guy I know at the Department of Labor told me you used to represent them. So here I am.”

He smiled unhappily. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason the company would send someone around after all this time. But it’s kind of hard for me to believe you’re on your own. Too many people got too excited over that case, and now you come in out of the blue? It’s too—too strange. Too pat.”

I rubbed my forehead, trying to coax some ideas into my brain. Finally I said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my whole history as an investigator. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. If after that you still feel you can’t trust me, so be it.”

I started at the very beginning, with Louisa showing up pregnant in the house next door a few months before my eleventh birthday. With Gabriella and her quixotic impulses. With Caroline’s exuberant philanthropy at other people’s expense and the nagging feeling I still had of being her older sister and somehow responsible for her. I didn’t tell him about Nancy ending up in Dead Stick Pond, but I described everything that had happened at Xerxes, my conversation with Dr. Chigwell, and finally Humboldt’s intervention. That was the only episode I muted. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the owner of the company had had me in for brandy—I felt embarrassed because I’d let myself be gulled by the trappings of wealth. So I mumbled that I’d had a call from one of the company’s senior officers.

After I finished Manheim took off his glasses and went through an elaborate cleaning ritual involving his necktie. It was clearly a habitual gesture of nervousness, but his eyes looked so naked without their protective lenses that I glanced away.

At last he put the glasses back on and picked up his pen again. “I’m not a bad lawyer. I’m really a pretty decent lawyer. Just not very ambitious. I grew up on the South Side and I like it down here. I help a lot of the businesses on the street with leasing problems, employment issues, that kind of thing. So when those two guys came to me maybe I should have sent them someplace else, but I thought I could handle the case—I’ve done some comp claims—and it made a nice change. Pankowski’s sister owns the flower shop next door—that’s why they picked me—she told them I’d done a good job for her.”

He started for the filing cabinet and changed his mind. “I don’t know why I want the folder—nervous habit, I guess. I mean, I know the whole damned case by heart, even after all this time.”

He stopped, but I didn’t prompt him. Whatever he said now would be to himself more than to me and I didn’t want to intrude on the flow. After a few minutes he went on.

“It’s Xerxine, you know. The way they used to make it, it left these toxic residues in the air. Do you know any chemistry? I don’t either, but I made quite a study of this at the time. Xerxine is a chlorinated hydrocarbon—they add chlorine to ethylene gas usually and get a solvent. You know, the kind of thing you might clean oil from sheet metal with, or paint, or anything.

“Well, if you breathe the vapors while they’re manufacturing it, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. Affects the liver and kidneys and central nervous system and all those good things. When Humboldt first started making Xerxine back in the fifties, no one knew anything about that stuff. You know, they didn’t run the plants to kill the employees, but they weren’t very careful about controlling how much of the chlorinated vapors got into the air.”

Now that he was into his story his manner had changed. He seemed self-confident and knowledgeable; his claim to being a good lawyer didn’t seem at all farfetched.

“Then in the sixties and seventies, when people started thinking seriously about the environment, guys like Irving Selikoff began looking at industrial pollution and worker health. And they started finding that chemicals like Xerxine could be toxic at pretty low concentrations—you know, a hundred molecules per million molecules of air. What they call parts per million. So Xerxes put in air scrubbers and closed up their pipes better, and got their ppm down to federal standards. That would have been in the late seventies, when the EPA issued a standard on Xerxine. Fifty parts per million.”

He smiled apologetically. “Sorry to be so technical. I can’t think about this case in simple terms anymore. Anyway, Pankowski and Ferraro came to me early in 1983. They were both sick as hell, one with liver cancer, the other with aplastic anemia. They’d worked at Humboldt for a long time —since ’59 for Ferraro and ’61 for Pankowski—but they’d quit when they got too sick to work. That would have been two years earlier. So they couldn’t collect disability. I don’t think they were told it was an option.”

I nodded in agreement. Companies don’t willingly offer information on benefits that will add to their insurance premiums. Especially looking at a case like Louisa’s, where she was getting major medical payments besides her disability check.

“But what about their union?” I asked. “Wouldn’t the shop steward have notified them?”

He shook his head. “It’s a single-shop union and it’s pretty much a mouthpiece for the company. Especially now —there’s so much unemployment in the neighborhood they don’t want to rock the boat.”

“Unlike the Steelworkers,” I interjected dryly.

He grinned for the first time, looking even younger than before. “Well, you can’t blame them. The Xerxes union, I mean. But anyway, the two guys had read someplace that Xerxine could cause these health problems, and since they were both up against it financially, they thought maybe they could at least collect workers’ comp for not being able to work. You know, job-related condition and all that.”

“I see. So you went to Humboldt and tried to work something out? Or you went directly to litigation?”

“I had to work fast—it wasn’t clear how long either of them would live. I went to the company first, but when they didn’t want to play ball I didn’t fool around—I filed a suit. Of course if we’d won after they died, their families would have been entitled to an indemnity payment. And that would make quite a difference to them financially. But you like your clients to be alive to see their victories.”

I nodded. It would have made a big difference, especially to Mrs. Pankowski with all her children. Illinois insurers pay a quarter of a million to families of workers who die on the job, so it was worth the effort.

“So what happened?”

“Well, I saw right away the company was going to stonewall, so we sued. Then we got an early docket. Even being stuck down on the South Side, I’ve got a few connections.” He smiled to himself, but declined to share the joke.

“Trouble was, both guys smoked, Pankowski was a heavy drinker, and they’d both lived all their lives in South Chicago. I guess if you grew up there, I don’t have to tell you what the air was like. So Humboldt socked us. They said on the one hand that there wasn’t any way to prove Xerxine had made these guys sick instead of their cigarettes or the general shit in the air. And they also pointed out that both of them had been working there before anyone knew how toxic the stuff was. So even if Xerxine did make them sick, it didn’t count—you know, they operated the plant based on current medical knowledge. So we lost handily. I talked to a really good appellate lawyer and he felt there just wasn’t anything to go on with. End of story.”

I thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, but if that’s all that happened, why is Xerxes jumping like a nervous rabbit when it hears those guys’ names?”

He shrugged. “Probably same reason I didn’t want to talk to you to begin with. They don’t believe you’re on your own. They don’t think you’re looking for a long-lost father. They think you’re trying to stir the pot up again. You’ve got to admit your story looks pretty farfetched.”

Reluctantly, I looked at it from his point of view. Given all this history I hadn’t known about, I could understand, sort of I still couldn’t figure out why Humboldt felt he had to intervene. If his company had won the case fair and square, what difference did it make if his subordinates talked to me about Pankowski and Ferraro?

“And also,” I added aloud, “why are you so upset? Do you think they were wrong? I mean, do you think the trial was rigged somehow?”

He shook his head unhappily. “No. Based on the evidence, I don’t think we could have won. I think we should have. I mean, I think these guys deserved something for putting twenty years of their lives into the company, especially since it’s probable that working there killed them. I mean, look at your friend’s mother. She’s dying too. Kidney failure did you say? But the law spells it out, or the precedents do—you can’t fault the company for operating under the best knowledge they had available at the time.”

“So that’s it? You just don’t like to talk about it because you feel bad that you couldn’t win for them?”

He communed again with his glasses and his tie. “Oh, that would get me down. No one likes losing, and God, you couldn’t help wanting these guys to win. But then, you know, the company could see that plant go belly-up if we set a successful precedent. Everyone who’d ever been sick or died there coming back for these big settlements.”

He stopped. I made myself sit very quietly.

At last he said, “No. It’s just that I got a threatening phone call. After the case. When we were considering the appeal.”

“That would be grounds for overturning the verdict,” I burst out. “Didn’t you go to the state’s attorney?”

He shook his head. “I just got the one phone call. And whoever called didn’t mention the case by name-just a generic reference to the dangers of using the appellate system. I’m not very tough physically, but I’m not a coward either. The call made me angry, angrier than I’ve ever been, and I pushed and prodded every way after that to build an appeal. There just wasn’t any way to.”

“They didn’t call you later to congratulate you for following their advice?”

“I never heard from the guy again. But when you showed up out of nowhere …”

I laughed. “Glad to know I could be mistaken for muscle. I may need it before the day is over.”

He blushed. “No, no. You don’t look—I don’t mean—I mean, you’re a very attractive lady. But you never know these days…. I wish I could tell you something about your friend’s father, but we never talked about anything like that. My clients and I.”