A Class Action (20 page)

The thought of showgirls has now left my brain and I’m back to realizing that my day has been ruined. Thanks to Ralph Eaton, my professional life has just dived into the dumper. His frame-up of Joe is working, his penalty-free murder of two people is working, his inheritance is working, and his insurance claim is working. What am I doing wrong? How can I stop this guy? Is he that much smarter than me?

From this moment on I intend to devote full time to bringing this guy down. The kid has been listening to me ranting and raving in anger at my last two unfortunate callers, Socrates Gutsue and Mister Berland. She has been peeking out of her stateroom door, probably to see if I turn green when I get mad. I call Jack B. and send him to the District Attorney’s office for a copy of the first recorded anonymous tip that was phoned in to them about Joe Morgan. I want to hear that voice and find out if it matches up with anyone else we might know. If my hunch is right, it’ll be Ralph Eaton’s voice.

His next job is to find out everything he can about Ralph Eaton’s background. I want to know more about this guy, because he’ a real piece of work.

The phone rings. It’s Victor at the autopsy store. He’s got some results on the fingerprints he ran from the brake tools in Joe’s service bay and Stuart’s trunk – the one the body was in.

There’s a coincidence that shows in the results. They’re both small-time crooks with similar records that date back thirty years in Chicago, Illinois. This is interesting, because investigators love to find patterns. These two guys must have known each other. Both from the same town, both with similar records, and now one has killed the other and somehow managed to get him into Stuart’s trunk.

The other interesting thing is that one of them was handling Joe’s tools. I call Jack B. and tell him to look very deeply into whether or not Ralph Eaton has ever been in Chicago – especially thirty years ago. Eaton and the other two are all about the same age, so I’m hoping we can tie them together, because if we can, it will mean that Eaton may have hired one to kill the other.

I call Mister Berland. Most of our conversation is my apologizing about my show of anger during our recent conversation earlier today, and the rest of it is to ask only one question. “During the time that Eaton was married to your daughter, are you aware of any trips for business or pleasure that both of them or he alone may have taken out of the country?”

Berland thinks about it for a few seconds and then tells me that he thinks the dealership sent Eaton to Taiwan a few years back, to investigate the possibility of making some automobile accessories there.

I’m glad to hear that, because it means that he must have applied for a passport, and that requires a birth certificate that shows exactly when and where you were born. I tell Jack B. to do whatever it takes to get us a copy of that passport application, and if the word ‘Illinois’ appears anywhere on it, that he should pack his bags, because he’ll be on a flight to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago.

Two days have gone by and Jack B. hasn’t got Eaton’s passport application info yet. He tells me that it might be coming to him later today.

There’s a knock on the hull. I look over the rail, but it’s no one I recognize. I ask the guy what he wants, and I’m told that it’s a special delivery for attorney Peter Sharp. I reach down, take the envelope out of his hand, and open it up to see that I’ve just been served with a Summons and Complaint. Ralph Eaton is suing me for five million dollars, claiming that I defamed him by making an accusation to the authorities that he is guilty of murder. I guess that my shouting in Myra’s office let everyone on the floor know my suspicions about Eaton. He probably pumped some information out of one of the secretaries by promising some repairs on her car and got the details of my tirade.

When a person gets served with a lawsuit, the law allows a certain amount of days to file an official ‘Answer’ with the court, but it’s almost a given that a first extension of another thirty days or so will be granted if the defense attorney calls the plaintiff’s attorney and asks for it. Paul Larkin is representing Eaton on this matter too, and I don’t want to creep myself out by hearing his voice on the phone, so I send an email to his office asking for the courtesy of one thirty-day extension to file my Answer.

My answer comes back by email. “Mister Sharp, we have discussed this matter with our client and he wishes to proceed with the case as expeditiously as possible, so we regret to inform you that your request for an extension is denied. Please file your Answer in the statutory period of time or we will be seeking a default judgment.”

What an asshole. I give the paperwork to our office manager to have a standard denial Answer prepared and filed with the court by mail. There’s only one good thing about this new lawsuit. In a criminal case, a person doesn’t have to testify at all, but in a civil case, the plaintiff must testify, if requested. This means that I’ll get a crack at this schmuck while he’s under oath in a deposition, and if I can use my brain properly, I may even get enough evidence to put him away.

Once a lawsuit is filed, either side has the right to what is referred to as ‘civil discovery,’ which can be written questions or an oral ‘deposition.’ All questions must be answered under penalty of perjury unless they’re justifiably objectionable or completely not related to any issue involved in the case.

In all my years of practice, I’ve never seen a set of written Interrogatories that didn’t start out requesting the basic statistics like birth date, birthplace, residential, educational, and employment history. It can take over a month to get the Interrogs drawn up, served and receive the answers, so we have some time to find if there are any skeletons in Eaton’s closet and prepare some nice questions that will give him enough rope to hang himself in a deposition or trial.

The office is being instructed to include with our Answer a Statutory Offer of Settlement in the sum of one dollar. That may not sound too significant, but I seem to remember some California case law that says if a Statutory Offer is refused and the person making the offer winds up with a more favorable disposition of the case, then the party who turned down the offer is responsible for the other party’s legal fees. Nothing would make me happier than to win this non-case and have Eaton and Larkin be forced by the court to pay Suzi’s hourly rate for the work she puts in on it.

I call Vaughn, my explosives expert. The questions I have for him concern the application for those two licenses that Joe wanted as a pyrotechnic operator and explosive blaster. As expected, Vaughn has both of those licenses. We talk about what type of background an applicant must have, how Joe’s military training qualifies him as a licensee, what exactly can be done to earn a living with each of the licenses, and the procedure of responding to complaints from third persons that might be presented during the license investigation process.

Vaughn doesn’t disappoint me. From the information he provides me with, I now know that with those licenses Joe would be able to do just about any task that Mrs. Berland wanted to hire him for, from being a mere fireworks guy, to working with Berland’s other division that demolishes buildings and helps blast the way for tunnel and freeway routes. He also tells me that just about the only thing that would stop the licenses from going through would be a felony conviction or pending felony charges.

This means that if it really was Nancy Eaton who sent in that complaint letter, it would have been done while she was alive, so there were no felony charges to talk about. The only other thing she might have known about was the alleged bribery scheme for warranty repairs, and Vaughn doubts if an accusation like that, even if proved to be true, would stop them from licensing Joe as an official ‘powder man.’

I thought so. Not only did Eaton do everything I suspect him of doing, he must have also cooked up that phony complaint to the licensing boards, in an effort to manufacture some motive for my unsuspecting ex-wife District Attorney. But how the hell can I get her to believe me? I sure hope she doesn’t fall flat on her face with this one. I do want to win, but would hate to do it at the expense of her reputation or career.

*****

Chapter 14

It’s time to have another talk with the witness that Myra has about Joe’s alleged bribery scheme. Before getting into it I’d like to know a little more about some of those repairs. Jack B. has a full plate, but I convince him to make some room for a few other items before we find out if he’s going to Chicago or not. I want him to get a computer printout from the dealership of every warranty repair authorized by Joe that was made on any vehicle owned by either of the two witnesses, and I then want him to take that information to the local General Motors factory representative to find out how much of the work done actually would have been kosher under the warranties.

Jack tells me that he plans to inform the factory rep that they’re investigating charges of unauthorized warranty repairs having been made, and that if the rep cooperates, it might result in a nice refund check coming back from the dealership. Of course he’ll tell the dealership the opposite, leading them to believe that they may be getting some money from their customers.

I think Jack’s got the right cover stories to go with, so we give it a shot and he starts at the dealership. The printout is quite extensive, but Vaughn turns us on to an ex-cop from auto theft, and with his help we decipher the data. Now Jack has enough ammo to talk to the rep without making a fool out of himself.

After we get more answers we’ll be in a much better position to confront the Suburban owner-witnesses and also ask Joe some pointed questions. As much as I believe in his innocence on the murder charges, I still can’t forget the rule that all clients will lie to you. They may not be intentionally wanting to deceive or mislead you, but in their avid attempt to get you on their side to be a strong advocate, there’s too much of a chance for their autonomic exaggeration hormones to kick in.

While Jack is running himself ragged with the recent assignments, I sit back and start to compose some harmless looking questions for the written Interrogatories that will be sent to Larkin’s office for Eaton to answer. Along with the questions will be a polite note from me telling them that we’ll be expecting the answers in a timely fashion and that no extensions will be granted. What goes around comes around.

I’ll probably be using some boilerplate questions out of the law books that give examples of what questions to ask for each type of case, but the only answers I’ll be really interested in seeing are the statistical ones. To make them look especially easy, I construct long, probing and probably objectionable questions for the remainder of the Interrogs. I want them to answer the easy ones without even thinking about it so that they can waste all their efforts fighting off answering the rest of the questions that I don’t even care about. This shouldn’t be much harder than fooling a little kid by making some fancy motions with one hand and then pulling a quarter out of his ear with the other hand.

It’s amazing how fast time flies by when you’re having fun, and designing tortuous questions for Eaton to answer is definitely fun, especially when I don’t care what the answers to ninety-nine percent of them are.

Two days have gone by and the Interrogs are ready to be sent to Larkin’s office. Jack B. finally got the information from Eaton’s passport application. He wasn’t able to get a copy, but he was successful in learning that the birthplace was indeed Chicago, at the Michael Reese Hospital. I tell him to get packed. He’s flying to Chicago the day after tomorrow and I’ll arrange to have either Olive or Vinnie take him to the airport. He requests Vinnie. The kid has some leads for him to follow up there on the two thugs we got prints from, but most of Jack’s work will be talking to people who knew them both, and doing a background investigation on everyone involved.

The rep from General Motors calls and tells us that all repairs made to the two owners’ vehicles we questioned him about were within warranty limits. He explains that even though a dealership might be justified in denying the service in quite a few of those instances, it’s the dealership’s call on whether or not to treat them as warranty repairs, and in all cases the factory will usually back them up – especially when it’s a major dealership like the one we’re talking about here.

Interesting. All the repairs made to those owners’ vehicles actually qualified as warranty service, notwithstanding the fact that they were ‘iffy’ at most. This means that technically, there couldn’t have been a bribe for unauthorized repairs to be performed, because all that the owners received were things they were actually entitled to. So if their payments to Joe weren’t bribes, then what the hell were they?

I’ve seen plenty of instances where you have to ‘grease’ someone’s palm to get what you’re entitled to - that’s how good seats at a show in Vegas, a good and timely booth in a restaurant, preferred parking in a lot, and thousands of other things are obtained, but I don’t really know how to classify Joe’s situation. Was he receiving ‘tips,’ bribes, or gifts? Our office usually gives a Christmas gift to the mailman each year. Does that mean we’re supposed to believe that without giving the gift, we wouldn’t receive our mail each day? I think not. Now it’s time to talk to these alleged bribery witnesses.

I purposely planned Jack’s trip to Chicago for the day after tomorrow to give him a chance to interview the witnesses before he leaves.

He gets all his paperwork together and prepares a file on each customer, so that when he meets with them, they might possibly be under the impression that he’s working with the District Attorney’s office. I give him specific orders to say nothing to make the witnesses think he’s with the D.A., but at the same time to not dispel their mistaken beliefs if they don’t ask him to.