Bearing Witness (6 page)

But that meant box number three tonight. My shoulders sagged.

As I stood facing the rows of boxes, trying to get motivated, there was a knock at the outer door to my office. I turned toward the sound, concerned. I wasn't expecting anyone. Ruth had already been by to drop off several old issues of
Commerce Business Daily
.

Cautiously, I opened my office door and walked through the reception area toward the outer door. There was a spyhole at eye level. I peered through it and saw a most unusual sight: a grinning Benny Goldberg holding aloft several carryout pizza containers. He was wearing a black T-shirt with the legend,
Please Help Me—I Am An Endomorph
. Behind him stood five young men and women casually dressed in jeans or khakis. One of the guys was holding two six-packs of beer.

“Benny?” I said in amazement, still peering at him through the spyhole.

“Come on, Rachel,” he hollered, “open the door already. These goddamn pizzas are hot.”

I unlocked the door and pulled it open. Benny moved quickly toward Jacki's desk to set down the carryout containers. As he did, the room filled with the yummy scents of spicy tomato sauce, crusty dough, oregano, and pepperoni.

“Professor?” the young guy with the two six-packs asked. “Where should I put these?”

Benny surveyed the office. “Over there, Jake,” he said, pointing to a side table. Benny turned to me with a broad smile. “Well?”

I gave him a baffled look. “Well what?”

The other five had gathered around us. Benny gazed at them with a smile. “Folks, this is the great Rachel Gold—lawyer extraordinaire and total babe, with the brains of a Brandeis and the stems of a showgirl. Rachel,” he said, making a sweeping gesture toward the others, “these are your shock troops.”

I smiled at them uncertainly, not sure what to make of Benny's description.

Benny turned to me. “Your law student volunteers, remember? These are Wash U's finest. That's Jake over by the beer, and Zack next to him.”

Jake and Zack were a pair of big burly kids with lovely blue eyes and shy smiles. Jake was wearing an Amherst College sweatshirt and Zack had on a St. Louis Blues jersey.

“They both have engineering degrees,” Benny explained, “which means they ought to be good with the technical stuff. And this is Josh.” He gave him a playful punch in the arm “This dude is my man.”

Josh looked like a dude: a slender athletic build, long brown hair, and one gold earring. He was wearing baggy army pants, a green Miles Davis T-shirt, and a battered St. Louis Browns baseball cap turned backwards. “Hey,” he said to me, flashing a marvelously roguish grin that revealed perfect white teeth.

“And this is Kayla,” Benny said.

She had short, dark brown hair and stunning brown eyes.

“You're a CPA, right?” Benny asked her.

She nodded and turned to me with a lovely smile. “I used to work at Price Waterhouse.”

“That means she can make sense out of all the cost-accounting documents in the bid materials,” Benny said. “Believe me, she's smarter than shit. And finally, say hi to Hanna.” He pronounced the name to rhyme with Donna.

Hanna stepped forward with a cheerful smile and held out her hand to shake mine. “Benny told us all about the case, Miss Gold.” Hanna was striking in a Cindy Crawford sort of way: tall, long brown hair, exotic green eyes. “We're really excited to be able to help you and Mrs. Alpert.”

“That's—that's wonderful,” I stammered, overwhelmed.

“So,” Benny said, rubbing his hands together, “have the documents arrived?”

I nodded. “Thirty-three boxes. They're stacked in my office. I've been through the first two.”

“Thirty-three?” Benny said. “No problem. We ought to be able to knock off a third tonight, a third tomorrow, and finish by our deadline.”

“What deadline?” I asked.

“Seven o'clock Sunday.” Benny winked. “Your mom has invited us all for dinner.” He solemnly placed his hand over his heart and looked heavenward. “She's making her brisket, praise the Lord.”

He paused as he felt something in the breast pocket of his T-shirt. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He removed two blue birthday candles from his shirt pocket and handed them to me. “Almost forgot.”

I took the candles from him. “What are these?”

He shook his head, amused. “Now that you're Miss Super Jew, I figured you'd be getting
spilkes
about lighting the
Shabbat
candles.” He nodded toward the birthday candles. “It's the best I could do on short notice. God won't mind.” He turned to the others. “What do you say, gang? Let's put on the old feed bag.”

As the students moved toward the pizzas and beer, I grabbed Benny by the arm and pulled him back.

“Thanks,” I said, kissing him on the cheek, my eyes watering.

“Aw,” he said, shrugging it off, “no big deal.”

Chapter Five

It was four o'clock on Saturday afternoon. Two hours ago we'd finished the last of the thirty-three boxes. In celebration and gratitude, I'd taken everyone to lunch at Balibans in the Central West End. After lunch, the students headed back to Wash U and Benny, Jacki, and I walked back to my office.

It had been amazing—no, wonderful—to see how quickly those fresh, intelligent eyes could review and categorize seventy thousand documents. They'd ended last night's session at eleven o'clock, started again this morning at eight-thirty, and finished by two. Even Benny—the man who had earned the nickname “Iron Butt” during our years together at Abbott & Windsor for his marathon document review sessions in
In re Bottles & Cans
—was impressed.

As a result of their efforts, we'd at last defined the universe: one hundred forty-eight federal construction projects in the field of wastewater, groundwater, and other water control on which Beckman Engineering had submitted bids over the past ten years. It was a much larger universe than Ruth or I had imagined. Almost twice as large. Then again, until that snowy day last February, I'd no idea that any such universe existed, large or small.

***

A girl hears things,” Ruth had told me that day.

“Things?”

“Bad things.”

Specifically, she'd heard over the years that something fishy was going on with the bids on certain federal government water-control projects in the Midwest.

“It was odd,” Ruth said with a puzzled look, her index finger pressed against her cheek. “It was as if we knew in advance which contracts we would win and which we would lose.” She raised her eyebrows knowingly. “You might want to keep that in mind, Rachel. It could embarrass them.”

I can still remember that moment. I can remember turning toward the window to watch those big snowflakes waft down out of a pale sky. I can remember the bottom of the window scalloped with miniature snowdrifts like a Hallmark Cards Christmas scene. I can remember a vision of huge stacks of money, mountains of dollar bills thrusting upward into that pale sky. But most of all I can remember another vision, a far more troubling one—a vision of our tidy little lawsuit morphing into that rarest of litigation weapons, a lethal juggernaut known to few within the law and even fewer outside. Even its name is tinged with portent:
qui tam
.

I had probed gingerly at first, asking in an almost offhand manner whether she had any specifics, any examples of what she had labeled the “inside track.” She'd overheard talk among her superiors about certain bids: “This one's ours” and “We don't get that one” and “We're supposed to bid this one at nine point five mill.” She'd observed odd conduct surrounding certain bids. Some took weeks to prepare and included several site visits; others were literally slapped together overnight—an impossible time frame for a real bid. Even more unusual, she remembered a major project for the construction of a new wastewater treatment plant on an air force base in Oklahoma; the project team worked around the clock for two weeks to come up with a bid of $9,232,350, and then, unbeknownst to them, one of the higher-ups “rounded” the number up to $10.6 million—and Beckman Engineering was
still
low bidder.

But most of all, I can remember Ruth's complete obliviousness to the implications of what she had observed. She saw it as gossip that might make her former employers squirm—that might embarrass them in the eyes of the federal government the way their counterclaim had embarrassed her in the eyes of her former colleagues. I saw something far different. If the bits and pieces of what she had observed were more than mere coincidence, then Beckman Engineering was a participant in an illegal bid-rigging conspiracy in violation of the Federal False Claims Act. That meant that Ruth had an opportunity to become a
qui tam
relator—in plain English, a bounty hunter.

Qui tam
is derived from the Latin
qui tam pro domino rege quam proseippso
, which means “he who as much for the king as for himself,” or, for short, “in the king's name.” It's legal shorthand for a special type of lawsuit in which an ordinary citizen is allowed to wrap himself in official garb and take action in the name of the government. It dates back to thirteenth-century England, where clever litigants used the
qui tam
maneuver to avoid corrupt local tribunals, gain access to the royal court, and, by purporting to align themselves with the king's interest, claim as their reward a percentage of the penalties levied against the wrongdoers. The
qui tam
action entered this country in a statute enacted at the height of the Civil War in response to allegations of fraud and price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. The goal was to encourage whistle-blowers by giving ordinary citizens the chance to share in the bounty. In more recent years, Congress turbo-charged the statute by adding treble damages and a bigger slice of the pie (up to 30 percent) for the successful
qui tam
relator.

To move from an employment discrimination plaintiff to a
qui tam
relator was the equivalent of moving from church-basement bingo to Monte Carlo. Beckman Engineering had submitted bids on a hundred forty-eight relevant federal water-control projects over the past ten years. If—and it was still a huge if—we could prove an illegal bid-rigging scheme, then each of those bids constituted a separately punishable act of “false negotiation” under the Federal False Claims Act. Given the size of the contracts involved, the potential recovery was staggering. As an age discrimination plaintiff, Ruth's best-case scenario was an award of roughly $100,000—the difference between her “early retirement severance package” and the regular salary she could have earned through age seventy. As a
qui tam
relator, Ruth's share of the bounty could exceed $10 million.

All of which explained why Ruth and I were now the featured items on a Jurassic Park Blue Plate Special.

This was the first
qui tam
claim I'd ever handled.

It was also the last.

I'd long since taken that vow.

***

Unfortunately, identifying the universe of one hundred forty-eight bids was just the starting point, and we were still a long way from the finish line. Indeed, there was no way to determine from the bid documents we'd reviewed which of Beckman Engineering's one hundred forty-eight bids had been successful; nor was there any way to determine who else submitted a bid on that project, who won, and what the winning bid had been. Those were crucial facts, since the other winners could be Beckman's co-conspirators.

But the task of identifying the winning bids for those projects seemed even bigger and more tedious than the document review we'd just completed. The crucial information was buried within ten years of back issues of the
Commerce Business Daily
. I'd taken several issues with me to the restaurant and passed them out to Benny, Jacki, and the law students during lunch. I explained my next project: finding out who won each of the one hundred forty-eight bids. I waited as they leafed through the publication, watching as the enormity of the project began to dawn on them.

The
CBD
, as it's known to its readers, is a daily bulletin listing every U.S. government procurement invitation and contract award over $25,000. Printed on flimsy yellow paper by the U.S. Government Printing Office, each edition is 40 to 70 pages long and contains anywhere from 500 to 1,000 notices. The first two-thirds of every issue lists projects open for bids, that is, “U.S. Government procurement invitations.” Each invitation is set out in a dense, eye-glazing block of small type, ten to twenty invitations per page, thirty or more pages worth per issue—everything from an invitation for a bid to construct a new pier at the U.S. Coast Guard Station in Surfside, Texas, to an invitation for a bid to conduct a study of krill demographics in Antarctica for the National Marine Fisheries Service. At the back end of each issue are ten or so pages of winners, or “Contract Awards.” These were set out in even smaller clumps of type, thirty to forty announcements per page.

To make matters worse for us, there was no connection between the procurement invitations at the front of the issue and the contracts awarded at the back. Indeed, the bids submitted in response to one of those invitations would not be awarded (and reported) until months later. And as a final maddening twist, there was no cumulative index, and thus no way to correlate the contract announced as open for bid in, say, the August 12 issue with the contract award announced two or four or six months later.

Frankly, I felt guilty even mentioning the project. After all, my volunteers had already saved me hours and hours of monotonous work. The next task—essentially searching for one hundred forty-eight needles in a humongous haystack of back issues—would involve far more hours of mind-numbing tedium. It was the equivalent of handing them ten years' worth of Manhattan telephone directories and a list of one hundred forty-eight telephone numbers (just numbers, no names), each of which appeared only twice over the ten years, and asking them to find the match for each number.

“Damn,” Benny said, shaking his head, “this could take weeks.”

“Not necessarily,” Josh said, studying the small print on the cover page of one issue.

If the information reported in the
Commerce Business Daily
, he explained, was also available in a computer database on the Internet, they might be able to do the search far quicker than it would take to do manually. By way of analogy, the full text of the plays of William Shakespeare is available in an Internet database. To find the exact location of Hamlet's famous soliloquy in the “hard copy,” you'd need to leaf through the play, page by page, skimming the dialogue in each scene. To find that same text in a computer database, you'd type “To be or not to be,” press Search, and in seconds your screen would light up with the entire soliloquy from Act III, Scene 1.

Perhaps, Josh explained, they could conduct the same type of search through the
Commerce Business Daily
database. By entering the contract number, they might be able to pull up the original procurement invitation and the subsequent contract award for each of the one hundred forty-eight bids without having to look through any documents.

***

The phone rang.

It was Zack calling from the library to fill me in on their progress. When I hung up, I turned toward Benny and said, “These kids are terrific.”

He looked up from an issue of
Commerce Business Daily
and beamed. “Of course they are. I picked them. What's the word?”

“They're on a computer over at Wash U, and they found a Web site covering almost forty years of issues. He says they'll have the result no later than tomorrow.”

“Whoa.” Benny raised his eyebrows, impressed.

I gave him a thumbs-up. “If that works, Kayla has an idea for another search. They'll bring all the results to my mom's house tomorrow night.”

Jacki came in with the typed list of one hundred forty-eight bids fresh off the printer. “That's it,” she said as she handed it to me. She checked her watch. “I'm outta here.”

“Thanks, Jacki,” I said, standing up. “Have a good time.”

She inhaled deeply and nodded. “Thanks.”

“Hey, Jacki,” Benny said, “where you off to?”

She blushed. “Oh, just…out. Probably dinner.”

Benny grinned. “Who's the lucky guy?”

Jacki shrugged awkwardly. “Just someone from my civil procedure class.”

Benny winked. “Sic him, tiger.”

She turned to me, trying to regain her poise. “You need me to come in tomorrow?”

“Sunday?” I shook my head. “No, I won't be in, either. I'm going with Jonathan tomorrow morning to hear that Nazi creep give a sermon, and then we're driving up to Springfield to talk to the skinheads they arrested for Gloria's murder.”

She shook her head in disgust. “Those animals.”

I followed her to the outer door. “Wait,” I whispered, glancing back to see if Benny was listening. He wasn't. I turned to her. “Let me see.”

Uncertainly, she moved toward me. “Do I look okay?”

I smiled. “Extraordinary.” Then again, at six foot three and two hundred thirty-five pounds, it'd be hard for her to look anything else.

“Really?” she asked.

“Definitely.” We both kept our voices low. “I love the hair. Is it new?”

She nodded. “I bought it last weekend.” She touched the side curls doubtfully. “You're sure the permed look isn't too much?”

“Oh, no,” I told her. It was a big improvement over her last night-on-the-town wig, a platinum beehive that looked stiff enough to drive railroad spikes.

I turned back again. Benny was engrossed in an issue of
Commerce Business Daily
, oblivious to us. “Let's see,” I whispered as I reached over and unbuttoned the top button of her blouse. I stood back, studied her a moment, and nodded in approval. “Perfect.”

She took a deep breath. “Thanks.”

“See you on Monday. Have fun.”

When I came back into my office, Benny looked up from the
CBD
and asked, “How tall is her date?”

I shrugged. “She said he works days at an insurance company.”

“Does he—you know?”

I looked at him wearily. “Does he what?”

“Does he know about the magic surprise she's hiding under that skirt? Does he know that Jacki is everything you always wanted in a girl—and more?”

I tried to keep a straight face as I took a seat behind my desk. “That's none of our business.” I picked up the list of bids that Jacki had prepared and tried to focus. After a moment, I glanced over at Benny, who was grinning at me. I raised my eyebrows. “Oy, I sure hope he does.”