The Knowland Retribution (3 page)

Leonard's cell phone rang just before noon. He would not have taken it, but the phone was nearby and he saw that the call came from Ellie's cell. She rarely called him, and Leonard felt a sharp concern that something was wrong with the boys. The voice was Mark's.

“We're having a cookout, Grandpa. Mamma and Nana said they want you to come here right now and eat some burgers with us by the pool. Okay?”

It was then that Nina took the phone from Mark. She said, “How about it? You want some?”

“How come the boys are still there?”

“They've been here all morning, in the pool mostly. They look like a couple of prunes. Ellie went shopping, but she's back and we're going to have a cookout—delicious, juicy, rare burgers. I know how much you like that.”

The invitation was more than appealing—grilling outdoors with the boys running around making noise, Ellie talking sensibly as she had now for several months, and Nina looking hopeful and young. Just then he would have preferred to be home, but he couldn't leave Dahlonaga.

“Sorry dear,” he said. “I can't. See you tonight.”

By one thirty Mark and Scott had stomach pain. By two they were throwing up. As the afternoon wore on their rising fever frightened Ellie and Nina. They put the boys in Ellie's van and headed for North Fulton Regional Hospital, less than fifteen minutes away. “Mom,” said Ellie as she turned the car north on Alpharetta Highway, “I don't feel well either.” Nina Martin didn't say anything. She didn't want to worry her daughter. But Nina's effort to stay calm failed minutes later, when she fell to her knees in the hospital parking lot and vomited all over herself.

Leonard was still in Dahlonaga when Nick called, asked him where he was, and then, without waiting to be answered, told Leonard to get to the hospital as fast as he possibly could. When he arrived, police from the City of Alpharetta, and Fulton County cops, were crawling all over the North Fulton grounds. State Troopers too. Leonard parked and made his way to the main reception desk. He gave his name and two women quickly approached. They identified themselves as employees of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The first—dark, dumpy, and sweet-voiced—said, “Mr. Martin, do you know what your wife and family ate this morning? What they had for lunch? Did you eat the same food yourself?”

“We'll need to examine you too,” said the other, slimmer, pale, and gruff. “Make sure you check with us before you leave.”

“What's going on here?” he said.

A tall man in a white coat appeared. “What's your name?” he asked, and when Leonard told him, he took Leonard firmly by the arm, saying, “Please come with me.” They walked down a noisy, crowded hallway, chaos gaining a foothold around them. It was almost four o'clock. The man in the coat told Leonard that both boys had died an hour before. Then he dropped him off in a bad-smelling room where Nina lay beside two other women, all slack, pallid, unconscious. He sat there for twenty minutes and then found Ellie four rooms down. She was in and out of consciousness, sometimes moaning, sometimes saying, “Daddy, where are the boys?”

Nina died at four thirty, her moist hand limp in Leonard's. Ellie finally went at five seventeen.

At six, Leonard attempted to leave. Police still surrounded the building. Official-looking people rushed through the halls. One of them seemed to know who he was and led him to an examination room. A doctor showed up minutes later and worked him over, asking questions he did not hear, or did not understand. And then he was outside, sitting in his car, staring at glints of the late afternoon southern sun in the hospital's dark reflective glass.

He remembered talk of a virus, bacteria, something—people may have mentioned meat. It had no particular meaning. He'd been sitting in the car for an hour before a Georgia State Trooper asked if he was feeling all right.

He did not know how he got home, but Carter was in the driveway when he did—skinny frame more insubstantial than ever, all too likely, it seemed to Leonard, to blow away in the slightest breeze, reddened eyes sunk impossibly deep in colorless hollows. They'd missed each other, somehow, at North Fulton. Carter followed him into the house, into the darkening living room, neither speaking nor moving where they sat. And then the phone started ringing.

People said Harvey Daniels took it the worst. From the moment they met he'd mistaken Lenny for his older brother—the one his parents neglected to provide; the strong, good-natured gentleman brute who'd be there when little Harvey cried for protection. Harvey knew from the instant he got the news that Leonard Martin was lost to him. He wept so inconsolably that Ginny, his wife, had him put on medication. And she kept him from daily haunting the Martin house, sensibly aware that Leonard had enough to carry.

Nick Stevenson was another matter. Now silver-haired, he'd long ago assumed the pose of a good grandee—a sometime southern progressive, a symbol of lawyerly elegance. He avoided the really taxing work, the mind-numbing legal cogitating that Harvey seemed to enjoy, the hard-boiled wrangling Leonard always seemed made for. He mobilized good looks, good golf, and good manners to constantly expand a roster of platinum-plated clients. He did his share of the thinking too, but mostly on a strategic level—who needed what from whom. His honesty no longer set off jokes; it was no longer quite so obsessive. But his handshake was absolutely firm and everyone in Atlanta knew it. There was a vault-full of equity in that.

He wept at the news, as did his wife, their kids, and their eldest grandchild—all of whom held the Martins closer than most of their larger family. But grief did not disable Nick. It turned him into a battle wagon. He thrust normal business into the hands of younger men and women. He spent the next weeks, when not with Leonard, in front of his own TV that he rigged to carry four channels at once, roaming the Internet, reading statute, calling around. He didn't learn much that the public did not learn, or recover legal precedents an intern could not have found. But he had it all by heart.

As time went on he came to favor the BBC, NPR, and a campus radio station that carried a radical network he'd never heard of. The anchors on the major American networks and cable were paralyzed by reluctance to think; once they'd done the headlines Nick found them useless.

On day two, it became settled fact that the deaths occurring throughout the south were caused by ground beef sold in five supermarket chains. The anchors and their expert guests speculated on what other chains might be involved. Before long consensus developed on this: all the ground beef and pre-packaged hamburgers, all marketed under store brand labels, came from one or more of six packing plants in the southeast. As a BBC reader observed, appalled, “Despite what shoppers seem to have thought, it all appears to have been the same meat—its origin, thus far, impossible to pinpoint.”

Throughout the week people sickened and died from Kentucky
to the Florida Keys, from western Louisiana across the south to the coastal Carolinas. By the time all the bad meat had been recalled, more than 17,000 people were stricken and 864 had died—disproportionately children. Because families often ate together, many suffered multiple
illness. Some children were left without a parent. Many parents lost a child. But Nick never heard of anything quite so bad as what happened to Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence.

Nick was not always entirely pleased with the way some media seemed to celebrate death in the U.S.A. He once told his wife, “These morons are happy as pigs in shit.” In America—the on-air personalities repeatedly told Nicholas Stevenson—food is everywhere. Fresh meat and fish, fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, every conceivable type of baked, fried, roasted, and cooked meal—available to millions of people in hundreds of thousands of close-by locations twenty-four hours a day.

One Republican state chairman, rotating from one cable network to the next, reminded Nick and all Americans that the genius of America “is the art of distribution, and no nation on earth gives a finer example to the peoples of the world than the closely coordinated efforts of the various industries supplying 275 million Americans, wherever they might be, with whatever they want to eat, whenever they want to eat it.”

There were, of course, sad and serious moments when anchors and guests confronted the fact that sometimes mistakes were made, but smiles and notes of fortitude always returned to their faces and voices in unison cried out in affirmation that America's God-given food supply was safe. Lest there be any doubt on that subject, experts strongly agreed with each other that the safety and security, and, yes, the credibility, of this vast distribution system was seen, in official circles, as essential to public well-being.

Many made the point that safe food was necessary to national security. Nick was amazed by the few who anxiously cried that the hand of Satan had made its way from the fires of hell to the supermarkets of the Southeast. But those voices came and went in a couple of days. The public needed to know that their supermarkets were fine. They needed to know the restaurants were safe. McDonald's was clean. You could eat there. Enormous amounts of money were spent on TV ads and public relations pleading with Americans to continue buying and eating ground beef as well as all other food.

Within several days, intellectuals, athletes and entertainers, artists and physicians were talking about the virtues of dining out, and cooking in. Movie stars ate burgers flipped live on
Good Morning America.
A former American President filmed a public service announcement grilling steaks in his kitchen, his wife looking on approvingly, daintily taking a bite.

Eventually, those sickened recovered. After the summer, with holidays on the horizon, the cable news networks, the talk show producers, the magazine and newspaper editors turned their attention to other, newer matters. And only the survivors of the dead cared very much. Them and their lawyers . . . especially those few who were personally involved.

Nicholas Stevenson ran the wrongful death lawsuit. He listed Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence as plaintiffs. Nick felt that years of handling deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars—and harrowing weeks imbibing facts through his pores, and the eager support of Atlanta's leading liability attorneys—might offset his inexperience as a plaintiff's attorney. That, and the facts of the case, which arrayed themselves like Xerxes' Persian army at his back. Not knowing which of the six offending plants was responsible, he filed against each of them, and, if they had one, their parent company as well. Five of the six responded with an answer of complete denial. Their filings were not accompanied by even a phone call to Nicholas Stevenson.

It was surprising when Knowland & Sons and its owner, Second Houston Holding, retained a Boston law firm. A young associate called Nick, and after delivering the mandatory denials—given the lie by the call itself—he made an offer of settlement. It wasn't as if his client had done anything wrong, the young man told Nick. It's just that the nuisance of it all, coupled with the deep regret that any misfortune had befallen anyone, motivated Knowland and Second Houston to offer fifty thousand dollars to be split any way they like by Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence.

The offer was a foolish and miserly mistake. But that was fine with Nick. “Young man,” he said, meaning full well the contempt intended, “go back and tell the fella you work for that fifty thousand dollars won't pay the deposit on the expert testimony we'll be introducing.” Stevenson's studied southern accent and polished ease worked well with folks from up there. Northerners, he'd long ago discovered, were often thrown by the gentle self-assertion of the civilized southern white man—and the older he happened to be, the stronger the spell he was able to cast. The next day the same associate called back asking for a person-to-person meeting. “I've got some time tomorrow afternoon at three,” Nick said. “C'mon down.” Why, Nick wondered, would five of the six meat companies file court papers asserting zero liability, while one, Knowland & Sons, hires a bigshot law firm in Boston and immediately tries to settle? Although authorities continued to maintain that they could not trace the exact origin of the tainted beef, was it possible that Knowland & Sons itself knew it was responsible? It sure seemed that way to Nick Stevenson.

On behalf of the other worthies sent by Boston's Porter, Scudd, Porter—a full partner and two senior associates—junior partner Harkin Smith, a plump, self-possessed, forty-year-old Boston native, expressed his personal sorrow. He showed special sensitivity in framing PSP's awareness that Leonard Martin was Mr. Stevenson's partner and friend, as well as his client. Smith implied that the offer would be significantly larger for that; he all but said that it might be seen, although certainly never named, as a lawyer-to-lawyer bonus. He expressed a professional apology if Nick had been insulted by their assumption that he was a plaintiff's attorney accumulating E. coli cases, looking eagerly if not greedily for settlements. Until that little speech, Nick was unaware of such assumption. Nevertheless, he nodded his appreciation. They were certainly pleased that Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence were Nick's only clients. Again, Mr. Smith rehashed the horror of it all, and the soul-wrenching pain they faced together, as brothers at the bar. All this in Nicholas Stevenson's comfortable fifteenth floor office conference room, overlooking the junction of I-285 (East-West) and Georgia 400 (North-South), with seven lawyers and twelve more staff sitting statue-still at their desks outside, their minds alive with prayers and curses and tears and recollections.

Then Porter, Scudd, Porter presented its offer of $1.2 million dollars—along with the usual clause requiring silence on anything having to do with the case. The female senior associate, a frail-looking, long-nosed Ms. Wittlesy, handed Nicholas Stevenson a magnificent leather folder enclosing two cashier's checks. One was for Leonard Martin,
the other for Carter Lawrence. That, and a fully drawn-up agreement ready for both to sign.