Bearing Witness (5 page)

Without answering, he left my side and headed toward the car, moving with grim resolve.

Someone had bashed in the windshield and side windows. As I approached the car, I could see broken glass scattered on the asphalt. In the dim light from a distant streetlamp I could make out what appeared to be white streaks of paint on the car hood. As I got closer, the pattern became clear.

“Oh, no,” I said.

Spray-painted on the hood of Jonathan's car was a swastika. He stared down at it, his face implacable. I said nothing, waiting. I could see his jaw muscle flexing. His eyes shifted from the hood to the interior of the car, which was strewn with broken glass. He surveyed the seats and carpet, moving slowly along the side of the car toward the rear and then back to the front.

At last he turned to me, his eyes cold. “Do you have a phone in your car?”

I glanced toward my car, which was a parked a few spaces over, and then I looked back at him. “I do.”

He reached into his suit jacket, removed his wallet, and took out a card. “Do me a favor,” he said, his voice calm. He handed me the card. “Call this number.”

I squinted at the card. It was for a Lieutenant Hendricks of the state police. I looked at Jonathan.

“Tell them where I am,” he said. “Explain what happened, and ask them to find Hendricks. Tell them to send someone from Forensics over here.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

He turned to his car.

“Jonathan.”

He looked back at me. His utter composure was almost eerie.

“This is”—I gestured toward his car, struggling for words—“this is terrible.”

He nodded.

I gestured helplessly. “I'm sorry.”

He mumbled a “Thanks” and turned back to his car.

Chapter Four

I was never supposed to represent Ruth Alpert.

When I reluctantly agreed to meet with her a year ago last November, I warned my mother in advance that I wasn't going to take her case, regardless of its merits. Age discrimination cases against large companies are hard enough to prove without the complicating factor of a corporate downsizing that permanently eliminates your client's position. Moreover, Beckman Engineering Co. was a particularly unappealing target, especially in front of a St. Louis jury. It was not merely that Beckman was headquartered here, employed more than two thousand local citizens, and spent millions of dollars a year burnishing its public image, as personified by its revered chairman, Conrad Beckman. No, what made Beckman Engineering especially unappealing was its reputation as a tenacious litigant. It tended to respond to a lawsuit with wrath, indignation, and an abundance of litigators. All of which meant that this was not a company to sue unless you had a deep-pocket client and a large support staff. I had neither back when I met with Ruth, and things sure hadn't changed in the year since then.

So why had I taken her case?

It was a good question.

As I sat at my desk rapping a pencil against a legal pad, I could hear Ruth Alpert's voice in the outer office. She had arrived a few minutes early for our one-thirty meeting and was out there now boring poor Jacki with one of her interminable Lauren stories. Lauren was Ruth's niece, and she played a minor character on
Gold Fillings
, a moronic sitcom about a Beverly Hills dental practice that seemed the nightmare offspring of an unholy coupling between
ER
and
Married With Children
. One of the first rules of survival with Ruth was learning how to interrupt her latest Lauren story before she got rolling. Jacki had yet to master that skill.

So why had I taken Ruth's case?

Partly because of my mother. Ruth was her friend and Ruth had been wronged. What else could I possibly need to know? My mother's powers of persuasion and guilt are wondrous to behold and virtually impossible to resist. Trust me.

Another reason, of course, had been the injustice of it all. Here was a woman—a widow, no less—cut adrift at age sixty-three after more than two decades of loyal service. BECKMAN ENGINEERING ANNOUNCES ADDITIONAL LAYOFFS, read the headline. INDUSTRY ANALYSTS APPLAUD LEANER PROFILE. In an era of perpetual corporate “rightsizing,” the familiar headlines could dull you to the individual victims and their pain. Ruth's had been one of 150 JOBS TO BE TRIMMED IN THIRD ROUND OF CUTS and her anguish was palpable. Here was a woman who took great pride in her secretarial skills, who bragged during our first meeting that she had graduated as the top secretarial student in her class at Soldan High, who could type seventy-five words per minute (“eighty-five on a computer, Rachel, but that's easier”), who knew several computer programs, including WordPerfect, Lotus, and DisplayWrite (“that's capital D, capital W, no space”), who had taken only seven sick days in two decades and just two personal days (one to bury her husband, one to sit
shiva
). On the Friday before I saw her, she had applied for unemployment compensation—“As God is my witness, Rachel, the most humiliating experience of my life.”

But injustice and a mother's guilt trip will get you only so far. The deciding factor had been Uncle Harry. On that chilly morning a year ago when Ruth and I first met, we'd both started our day reciting kaddish. For me, it had been two weeks before the first anniversary of my father's death. He had no son to say kaddish for him, so that first year I'd gone to the synagogue every Saturday morning to recite the prayer for the dead. For Ruth, it was the fifty-fourth anniversary of the harrowing night her beloved uncle Harry had been seized outside his little jewelry store while locking up. Later that night, his bullet-ridden corpse was dumped from a moving car onto the pavement in front of a police station. His wife died in a nursing home in 1964. His only sibling—Ruth's mother—died in 1973. His two sons died within six months of each other in 1979—one from heart disease, one from cancer.

From then on, there was no one but Ruth to say kaddish for her uncle, and she'd done it every year thereafter, less from a sense of familial duty than of profound devotion. Although she was only nine when he'd been killed, she cherished her vivid memories of him—of the card tricks he used to perform, the penny candies he used to sneak her, the silly bedtime songs he sang whenever she spent the night.

Ruth told me the story of Uncle Harry on that cold November morning last year, and when she finished, we both had tears in our eyes. “It's a
mitzvab
,” she explained in her gentle voice, “an honor to be able to say kaddish for that wonderful man.” So moved was I by the image of her bearing lone witness each November for her beloved uncle that I agreed to take her case.

Back then, of course, neither of us suspected what was to come. Our first hint: Beckman Engineering's response to Ruth's complaint. It included a vicious, petty counterclaim that accused her of everything from making personal telephone calls on company time to taking excessive lunch breaks. I remember reading through it when it first arrived. I was worried about Ruth's reaction. I'd seen many a client recoil at the first answering volley. Frankly, the best plaintiff in an employment discrimination case is one of those gritty, hard-scrabble types willing to go the distance. Ruth certainly didn't look the part. In fact, she looked more like a storybook Jewish grandmother, right down to the gray hair pulled back in a bun, the soft face, and the dowdy floral-print, calf-length dress. She actually wore granny glasses.

I can still remember the February afternoon she came in to read the counterclaim. She'd arrived around five o'clock, pausing outside the doorway to stomp the snow off her boots. It had been gently snowing all day—big, fluffy snowflakes floating out of a milky white sky. We talked about the weather and the traffic as I got her a cup of hot tea. I handed her the document and took my seat behind the desk. I watched as she slowly read through it, bracing myself for the tears. Beckman Engineering's counterclaim was startling in its spitefulness—as if the company had decided to stake Ruth Alpert out there on the hillside as an example to all would-be plaintiffs.

As she reached the last page of the counterclaim, I glanced toward the box of Kleenex tissues on my desk. A minute passed. She was still staring at that page, the only sounds the faint hum of my computer and the syncopated clicking of the radiator. I waited and watched, looking for a telltale sign—a sniffle, perhaps, or the trembling shoulders. Finally, she closed the document and looked up. Her eyes were clear, her expression firm.

“So,” she said in a calm voice, “they raised the ante.”

I gave her a smile of commiseration. “I'm afraid so.”

She rubbed the back of her neck thoughtfully. “Then we should, too.”

“We?” I asked, puzzled.

She nodded. “I worked there a long time, Rachel.” She paused, arching her eyebrows. “A girl hears things.”

“Things?”

She nodded again, this time with the hint of a smile.

***

Jacki brought me back to the present by poking her head in my office to announce, “Ruth's here.” She paused, widening her eyes in a show of relief at finally escaping from the latest Lauren saga.

I smiled. “Send her in.”

A moment later, Ruth Alpert came in. She was carrying a tin of what I knew were homemade ginger snaps. I loved her ginger snaps.

“Hello, Rachel dear.”

“Ruth, I love your hair.”

“Really?” she asked, self-consciously touching it. Since we'd last met two weeks ago, she'd had her long gray hair chopped off. “Your mother told me to do it,” she said with an embarrassed giggle. Her hair was cut in a close shag. “She told me I looked like an old
bubba
.”

“A new outfit, too?”

She nodded. “Your mother again.”

Ruth was wearing khaki slacks, a pink cotton Oxford shirt, and a navy blazer. I suppose she was aiming for that country club matron image—or perhaps the zoo docent look—but she actually reminded me of Miss Hodges, my high school field hockey coach who spent her summers in the Wisconsin Dells running a crafts store with her horsy companion, Miss Gulden. Still, it was a definite improvement over her usual outfit.

Despite the new 'do and clothing, she remained the same old Ruth—a woman who seemed a full generation older than my mother, not merely pre-Beatles but pre-Elvis, stuck in a Lawrence Welk world of accordions and tiny bubbles. During a pause in our conversation, she wrinkled her nose and made
tsk, tsk
sounds.

“What?” I asked.

“I keep thinking of that poor woman.” She shook her head in consternation. “Killed in front of your eyes. Barbarians.” She pressed an index finger against her plump, rouged cheek. “Do you think there might be a connection?”

“The police don't really know what to make of it yet.” I shrugged. “Neither do I. That's why I'm going up there on Sunday to talk to them.”

“The police?”

“No, the two men in jail.”

Ruth's eyes widened in concern. “My heavens, is that safe?”

I nodded reassuringly. “Perfectly. I've done it before, and this time I'll be with a friend who used to be a prosecutor.”

“Oh, I could never.” She shuddered. “I would be so horrified.”

“Well,” I said with a weary sigh, “if you're looking to be horrified, you don't need to go to Springfield. There's plenty to horrify you in this case right here—including yet another day of your deposition before the end of the month. Let me tell you what happened in court yesterday afternoon.”

I brought her up to date, including the decision by the Department of Justice to pass on our case. “Looks like we're on our own, kiddo,” I said with a fatalistic smile.

“What can we do, Rachel?” she said, a tremor in her voice. “Everyone at Beckman pretends they don't know anything. Former employees won't talk to us. That woman in Springfield—good heavens.” She was wringing her hands.

I gave her a plucky smile. “Don't bury us yet, Ruth. There's still a heartbeat.”

“Barely,” she said, her eyes welling up in frustration.

“Hang in there, Ruth.” I leaned forward and took one of her hands in mine. “We've had some setbacks, but it's not over. If there was a conspiracy, we'll find it. Trust me, you can't hide something that big and that complicated without leaving behind some stray pieces of evidence. They're out there. We'll just have to keep looking.”

“But where?”

“For starters,” I said, “the bid documents on the water and sewer projects. Beckman Engineering is delivering them today.”

Ruth frowned. “What will that do for us?”

“Define the universe.”

“What universe?”

I patiently explained it to her again, for what seemed like the tenth time. Our lawsuit alleged a bid-rigging conspiracy on certain federal water and sewer projects in the Midwest. That meant that the bad guys got together to divide up the bids and decide who would win each one. The documents Beckman Engineering was delivering today would presumably identify the universe of projects involved in the alleged conspiracy. Once we defined that universe—no easy task—we'd have to figure out who had the winning bid on each of the projects, since Beckman Engineering's alleged co-conspirators would presumably be among the winners.

Ruth looked confused. “But that won't be in the bid documents. They announce winners after the bids are in.”

I nodded. “But apparently we can get that information from that publication you once mentioned to me. The
Commerce Business Daily
. Do you have any copies?”

“I'm sure I do. I'll drop some off later today.”

There was a knock on my door. Jacki opened it and peered in. “They've arrived,” she said.

“The bid documents?” I asked.

She nodded ominously.

“A lot?”

She gestured toward my office window. “See that?”

There was a yellow Ryder truck parked out front. Its rear doors were open. A worker was pushing a handcart loaded with three boxes down the ramp from the back of the truck to the street.

“How many boxes?” I asked.

“Thirty-three,” Jacki said.

I sat back in my chair and stared at her. “Thirty-three?”

She nodded. “Containing seventy-three thousand pages. I signed the receipt.”

I groaned. “Wonderful.”

***

At 5:35 p.m. I leaned over, put the lid on the box, and slumped back in my chair.

“Two down,” I announced to the empty office. Glumly, I surveyed the solid wall of boxes. They were stacked four feet high and ran the entire length of the side wall of my office. Two down, thirty-one to go.

Once all the boxes had been unloaded and stacked along the wall, I'd closed the door, taken a deep breath, psyched myself up, and reached for the first box. Three hours later, I'd gotten through a grand total of two. At that rate it would take at least forty more hours to finish them all—and the task would have to be divided into small segments spread out over many days. Examining just two boxes of documents—thousands of pages of technical financial and engineering materials—had turned my mind to mush. I didn't know whether I had enough mental stamina to look at any more documents tonight.

I bent down, grasped box number two through the handhold openings on either side, lugged it over to the side wall, and dropped it on top of box number one. I turned toward the far end of the mountain range of boxes and stared at box number three as I carried on a silent debate. It was 5:45 p.m. If I started another box now, I could finish it and be home by eight with the satisfaction that I'd gotten through one-eleventh of the documents on the first day. On the other hand, if I left now, I could be home by six o'clock. It was Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. I needed to get home to light the
Shabbat
candles—a ceremony I'd performed every Friday night since my father's death. You're supposed to light the candles at sundown to welcome the Sabbath. I glanced toward the window. Too late for that. I turned again toward box number three. Well, if I could knock off one more tonight, that would be three in one session. Three more tomorrow morning, maybe another three in the afternoon, three on Sunday, keep up the pace, and I'd be done by the end of the week.