Three Classic Thrillers (67 page)

Carl thought for a long time, then smiled and said, “I like it. I like it a lot.”

T
he law office of F. Clyde Hardin & Associates had no associates. It was just Clyde and Miriam, his feeble secretary who outranked him because she had been there for over forty years, far longer than Clyde. She had typed deeds and wills for his father, who came home from the Second War without a leg and was famous for removing his wooden one in front of juries to distract them. The old man was gone now, long gone, and he had bequeathed his old office and old furniture and old secretary to his only child, Clyde, who was fifty-four and very old himself.

The Hardin law office had been a fixture on Main Street in Bowmore for over sixty years. It had survived wars, depressions, recessions, sit-ins, boycotts, and desegregation, but Clyde wasn’t so sure it could survive Krane Chemical. The town was drying up around him. The nickname Cancer County was simply too much to
overcome. From his ringside seat, he had watched merchants and cafés and country lawyers and country doctors throw in the towel and abandon the town.

Clyde never wanted to be a lawyer, but his father gave him no choice. And though he survived on deeds and wills and divorces, and though he managed to appear reasonably happy and colorful with his seersucker suits, paisley bow ties, and straw hats, he silently loathed the law and the small-town practice of it. He despised the daily grind of dealing with people too poor to pay him, of hassling with other deadbeat lawyers trying to steal said clients, of bickering with judges and clerks and just about everybody else who crossed his path. There were only six lawyers left in Bowmore, and Clyde was the youngest. He dreamed of retiring to a lake or a beach, anywhere, but those dreams would never come true.

Clyde had sugared coffee and one fried egg at 8:30 every morning at Babe’s, seven doors to the right of his office, and a grilled cheese and iced tea every noon at Bob’s Burgers, seven doors to the left. At five every afternoon, as soon as Miriam tidied up her desk and said goodbye, Clyde pulled out the office bottle and had a vodka on the rocks. He normally did this alone, in the solitude of the day, his finest hour. He cherished the stillness of his own little happy hour. Often the only sounds were the swishing of a ceiling fan and the rattling of his ice cubes.

He’d had two sips, gulps really, and the booze was beginning to glow somewhere in his brain when there
was a rather aggressive knock on his door. No one was expected. Downtown was deserted by five every afternoon, but there was the occasional client looking for a lawyer. Clyde was too broke to ignore the traffic. He placed his tumbler on a bookshelf and walked to the front. A well-dressed gentleman was waiting. He introduced himself as Sterling Bitch or something of that order. Clyde looked at his business card. Bintz. Sterling Bintz. Attorney-at-Law. From Philadelphia, PA.

Mr. Bintz was about forty years old, short and thin, intense, with the smugness that Yankees can’t help but exude when they venture into decaying towns of the Deep South.

How could anyone live like this? their smirks seemed to ask.

Clyde disliked him immediately, but he also wanted to return to his vodka, so he offered Sterling a cocktail. Sure, why not?

They settled around Clyde’s desk and began to drink. After a few minutes of boring chitchat, Clyde said, “Why don’t you get to the point?”

“Certainly.” The accent was sharp and crisp and oh so grating. “My firm specializes in class actions for mass torts. That’s all we do.”

“And you’re suddenly interested in our little town. What a surprise.”

“Yes, we are interested. Our research tells us that there may be over a thousand potential cases around here, and we’d like to sign up as many as possible. But we need local counsel.”

“You’re a bit late, bud. The ambulance chasers have been combing this place for the past five years.”

“Yes, I understand that most of the death cases have been secured, but there are many other types. We’d like to find those victims with liver and kidney problems, stomach lesions, colon trouble, skin diseases, as many as a dozen other afflictions, all caused, of course, by Krane Chemical. We screen them with our doctors, and when we have a few dozen, we hit Krane with a class action. This is our specialty. We do it all the time. The settlement could be huge.”

Clyde was listening but pretending to be bored. “Go on,” he said.

“Krane’s been kicked in the crotch. They cannot continue to litigate, so they’ll eventually be forced to settle. If we have the first class action, we’re in the driver’s seat.”

“We?”

“Yes. My firm would like to associate with your firm.”

“You’re looking at my firm.”

“We’ll do all the work. We need your name as local counsel, and your contacts and presence here in Bowmore.”

“How much?” Clyde was known to be rather blunt. No sense mincing words with this little shyster from up north.

“Five hundred bucks per client, then 5 percent of the fees when we settle. Again, we do all the work.”

Clyde rattled his ice cubes and tried to do the math.

Sterling pressed on. “The building next door is vacant. I—”

“Oh yes, there are many vacant buildings here in Bowmore.”

“Who owns the one next door?”

“I do. It’s part of this building. My grandfather bought it a thousand years ago. And I got one across the street, too. Empty.”

“The office next door is the perfect place for a screening clinic. We fix it up, give it a medical ambience, bring in our doctors, then advertise like hell for anyone who thinks he or she might be sick. They’ll flock in. We sign them up, get the numbers, then file a massive action in federal court.”

It had the distinct ring of something fraudulent, but Clyde had heard enough about mass torts to know that Sterling here knew what he was talking about. Five hundred clients, at $500 a pop, plus 5 percent when they won the lottery. He reached for the office bottle and refilled both glasses.

“Intriguing,” Clyde said.

“It could be very profitable.”

“But I don’t work in federal court.”

Sterling sipped the near-lethal serving and offered a smile. He knew perfectly well the limitations of this small-town blowhard. Clyde would have trouble defending a shoplifting case in city court. “Like I said. We do all the work. We’re hardball litigators.”

“Nothing unethical or illegal,” Clyde said.

“Of course not. We’ve been winning class action in mass tort cases for twenty years. Check us out.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And do it quick. This verdict is attracting attention. From now on, it’s a race to find the clients and file the first class action.”

__________

A
fter he left, Clyde had a third vodka, his limit, and near the end of it found the courage to tell all the locals to go to hell. Oh, how they would love to criticize him! Advertising for victims/clients in the county’s weekly paper, turning his office into a cheap clinic for assembly-line diagnoses, crawling into bed with some slimy lawyers from up north, profiting from the misery of his people. The list would be long and the gossip would consume Bowmore, and the more he drank, the more determined he became to throw caution to the wind and, for once, try to make some money.

For a character with such a blustery personality, Clyde was secretly afraid of the courtroom. He had faced a few juries years earlier and had been so stricken with fear that he could hardly talk. He had settled into a safe and comfortable office practice that paid the bills but kept him away from the frightening battles where the real money was made and lost.

For once, why not take a chance?

And wouldn’t he be helping his people? Every dime taken from Krane Chemical and deposited somewhere in Bowmore was a victory. He poured a fourth drink,
swore it was the last, and decided that, yes, damn it, he would hold hands with Sterling and his gang of class action thieves and strike a mighty blow for justice.

Two days later, a subcontractor Clyde had represented in at least three divorces arrived early with a crew of carpenters, painters, and gofers, all desperate for work, and began a quick renovation of the office next door.

Twice a month Clyde played poker with the owner of the
Bowmore News
, the county’s only paper. Like the town itself, the weekly was declining and trying to hang on. In its next edition, the front page was dominated by news about the verdict over in Hattiesburg, but there was also a generous story about Lawyer Hardin’s association with a major national law firm from Philadelphia. Inside was a full-page ad that practically begged every citizen of Cary County to drop by the new “diagnostic facility” on Main Street for screening that was absolutely free.

Clyde enjoyed the crowd and the attention and was already counting his money.

__________

I
t was 4:00 a.m., cold and dark with a threat of rain, when Buck Burleson parked his truck in the small employees’ lot at the Hattiesburg pumping station. He collected his thermos of coffee, a cold biscuit with ham, and a 9-millimeter automatic pistol and carried it all to an eighteen-wheel rig with unmarked doors and a
ten-thousand-gallon tanker as its payload. He started the engine and checked the gauges, tires, and fuel.

The night supervisor heard the diesel and walked out of the second-floor monitoring room. “Hello, Buck,” he called down.

“Mornin’, Jake,” Buck said with a nod. “She loaded?”

“Ready to go.”

That part of the conversation had not changed in five years. There was usually an exchange about the weather, then a farewell. But on this morning, Jake decided to add a wrinkle to their dialogue, one he’d been contemplating for a few days. “Those folks any happier over in Bowmore?”

“Damned if I know. I don’t hang around.”

And that was it. Buck opened the driver’s door, gave his usual “See you later,” and closed himself inside. Jake watched the tanker ease along the drive, turn left at the street, and finally disappear, the only vehicle moving at that lonesome hour.

On the highway, Buck carefully poured coffee from the thermos into its plastic screw-on cup. He glanced at his pistol on the passenger’s seat. He decided to wait on the biscuit. When he saw the sign announcing Cary County, he glanced at his gun again.

He made the trip three times a day, four days a week. Another driver handled the other three days. They swapped up frequently to cover vacations and holidays. It was not the career Buck had envisioned. For seventeen years he’d been a foreman at Krane Chemical in
Bowmore, earning three times what they now paid him to haul water to his old town.

It was ironic that one of the men who’d done so much to pollute Bowmore’s water now hauled in fresh supplies of it. But irony was lost on Buck. He was bitter at the company for fleeing and taking his job with it. And he hated Bowmore because Bowmore hated him.

Buck was a liar. This had been proven several times, but never in a more spectacular fashion than during a brutal cross-examination a month earlier. Mary Grace Payton had gently fed him enough rope, then watched him hang himself in front of the jury.

For years, Buck and most of the supervisors at Krane had flatly denied any chemical dumping whatsoever. They were ordered to do so by their bosses. They denied it in company memos. They denied it when talking to company lawyers. They denied it in affidavits. And they certainly denied it when the plant was investigated by the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Then the litigation began. After denying it for so long and so fervently, how could they suddenly flip their stories and tell the truth? Krane, after fiercely promoting the lying for so long, vanished. It escaped one weekend and found a new home in Mexico. No doubt some tortilla-eating jackass down there was doing Buck’s job for $5 a day. He swore as he sipped his coffee.

A few of the managers came clean and told the truth. Most clung to their lies. It didn’t matter, really, because they all looked like fools at trial, at least those
who testified. Some tried to hide. Earl Crouch, perhaps the biggest liar of all, had been relocated to a Krane plant near Galveston. There was a rumor that he had disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Buck again glanced at the 9-millimeter.

So far, he had received only one threatening phone call. He wasn’t sure about the other managers. All had left Bowmore, and they did not keep in touch.

Mary Grace Payton. If he’d had the pistol during his cross-examination, he might have shot her, her husband, and a few of the lawyers for Krane, and he would have saved one bullet for himself. For four devastating hours, she had exposed one lie after another. Some of the lies were safe, he’d been told. Some were hidden away in memos and affidavits that Krane kept buried. But Ms. Payton had all the memos and all the affidavits and much more.

When the ordeal was almost over, when Buck was bleeding and the jury was furious and Judge Harrison was saying something about perjury, Buck almost snapped. He was exhausted, humiliated, half-delirious, and he almost jumped to his feet, looked at the jurors, and said, “You want the truth, I’ll give it to you. We dumped so much shit into those ravines it’s a wonder the whole town didn’t explode. We dumped gallons every day—BCL and cartolyx and aklar, all class-1 carcinogens—hundreds of gallons of toxic stuff directly into the ground. We dumped it from vats and buckets and barrels and drums. We dumped it at night and in broad daylight. Oh sure, we stored a lot of it in sealed
green drums and paid a fortune to a specialty firm to haul it away. Krane complied with the law. They kissed the EPA’s ass. You’ve seen the paperwork, everything nice and proper. Real legal like. While the starched shirts in the front office were filling out forms, we were out back in the pits burying the poison. It was much easier and much cheaper to dump it. And you know what? Those same assholes up front knew exactly what we were doing out back.” Here he would point a deadly finger at the Krane executives and their lawyers. “They covered it up! And they’re lying to you now. Everybody’s lying.”