Pleading Guilty (14 page)

"Glyndora, it's this Litiplex thing. The money.- That stopped her. We were in front of a row of bone-colored cabinets. Her face was narrowed by her customary suspicion. "When you searched for the paperwork, I think you could have missed a memo. From Bert. Maybe attaching some kind of agreement with Peter Neucriss?"

She shook her head immediately, a copse of long hair, dulled by straighteners. I nodded firmly in response.

"Hey, man." She swept her hand wide. "I got 8o,000 files here and I had my nose in each one. You think you can do a better job, Mack, help yourself. We lock up at five." The phone rang then and she picked it up, long sinister sculpted nails painted bright red. Glyndora is past forty and showing little wear. This is one good-looking woman and she knows it--built like the brick shithouse you've always heard about, five foot ten in her stocking feet and female every inch of it, a phenomenal set of headlights, a big black fanny, and a proud imperial face, with a majestic look and an aquiline schnozzola that reports on Semitic adventures in West Africa centuries ago. Like every fine-looking human I have ever met, she can be charming when there's something she wants, and with me, in certain moods, she's even something of a tease, picking up, I guess, on a certain susceptibility. I've lived most of my life with women like this, who were suffering from the peculiarly female frustration of feeling there had never been any way out to start--and besides, a body can't ignore how she looks. I've heard men speak of Glyndora with admiration for years--but only from a distance. As Al Lagodis, an old pal from the Force, told me one day when he came by for lunch, you'd need a dick like a crowbar.

She had no use for me now. "I told you, Mack," she said when she was done on the phone, "I don't have time for this."

"I'll see you at five. You can show me what you went through." She laughed. Glyndora and non-essential overtime were mutually exclusive.

"When?" I asked.

She picked up her purse, dropping something into it, and gave me a little tight smile that said, Go jump. She was on her way down the hall, where I couldn't follow. I said her name to no avail. She left me by her desk. The newspaper from whic
h s
he'd ripped that item was still open. It looked like it had been an article, an eighth of a page. A little portion of the headline remained. wEs, maybe part of a T. \Vest? I looked up. Sharon, one of Glyndora's underlings, was watching me, a little brown woman in a pink outfit that was half a size too tight. Twenty feet away, she eyed me from her desk with suspicion--worker against boss, woman versus man, all of the workplace's silent little competitions. Whatever I was looking for, she figured, I shouldn't know.

I tried a silly smile and stepped away from the forbidden zone of what was Glyndords.

-Tell her to call me,- I said.

Sharon just looked. We both knew I had no chance.

B. Prince of Darkness

Trans
National Air Flight 397 went down in a horrible fireball at the Kindle County Municipal Airfield in July 1985. A TV crew was coincidentally at the airport to cover the arrival of the Peking Circus at a nearby gate and so the footage played again and again across the country, you've probably seen it, 397 bouncing on its front wheel and taking air again, looking a bit like a kiddie's book where the hippopotamuses dance ballet, all quite slo-mo and graceful until the thing canted forward, hit square on its nose, and fire ignited, flashing through the cockpit first and then rolling back through the plane, lighting the windows as it went, until the engines and underbelly blew off in a memorable eruption of orange and yellow flame. No survivors-247 fried. At this point, the plaintiffs' lawyers took the field, the guys and gals who prate to juries about the misery of the widows and orphans and then take a full third of what is forked over in sympathy. As someone who works the other side of the street, I'll spare the high and mighty--let me just note that Peter Neucriss, Barracuda-in-Chief of the local plaintiffs' bar, had filed three lawsuits in behalf of the families of crash victims not only before the remains were buried but in one instance before, quite literally, they had cooled. Within six months, there were more than 137 cases on file, including four class actions in which some enterprising lawyer claimed to represent everyone. All of these cases were consolidated before Judge Ethan Bromwich of the Kindle County Superior Court, a former law professor at Easton whose brilliance is exceeded only by his regard for his own abilities. And in every single suit, TransNational Air, our client, was the lead defendant.

Being the airline in an air crash case is sort of like driving a bumper car at the carnival. There are more drivers than you can count; no one knows or cares about rules of the road; everyone's headed in Isis or her own direction; and every single one of them seems to get his jollies out of ramming you in the behind. It's not just that there are 247 individual victims, each one with relatives and lawyers looking for money to assuage their misery, but you also have ten or twelve co-defendants, ruthlessly pissed off to be involved. Everybody gets sued, not just the airline and the pilot's estate, but any poor son of a bitch who left so
much
as a fingerprint on the plane: the folks who made the body, the engine manufacturers, the flight controllers, even the company that distilled the gas--anybody with deep pockets who might conceivably be blamed or forced by the prospect of a decade of expensive litigation to throw a few million bucks in the pot. And every one of those folks has a stop-loss insurer who steps to the plate looking for a way to deny coverage to the company that pays their premiums, or, if that won't work, to blame somebody else and get them to pay. There are weathervanes that do not point in as many directions. We blame the people in the flight tower; they in turn say the ailerons weren't working; the manufacturer speaks of pilot error. The plaintiffs all stand on the side and gloat.

About a year after 397 went down, Martin Gold began an effort that seemed to me as romantic and ill-considered as the Crusades: settling 397. Martin has a mind like a cloud chamber, that device where nuclear physicists trace the course of complex atomic reactions; he is probably the only lawyer I know who could even have embarked, let alone succeeded, on a negotiating process which, at one point, had him taking calls from i63 different attorneys.

Under what Martin is always careful to refer to, even sometimes in the office, as -Tin, Bromwich Plan- the defendants, meaning for the most part their insurance companies, put together a fund of $288.3 million. In return the plaintiffs, led by Neucriss, agreed that the damages in all the cases together could not exceed that sum. Over the last five years, every individual case has been either tried before a Special Master, or more often settled, with Captain Bert heading the TN litigation team and supervising administration of the settlement fund which G&G has held in an interest-bearing escrow.

Recently, as the last of the damage trials, have been resolved, we've had an unforeseen development: there's going to be millions left over which, accordingly, will remain the property of little ol' TransNational Air. Indeed, the only problem for TN has been keeping this news to ourselves, since it would be a public-relations nightmare to explain how, when everything is added and subtracted--legal fees, interest, the surplus, and TN's initial contribution to the fund--the company netted close to $20 million by killing 247 people. More pertinently, the plaintiffs' lawyers, who have never seen a dollar they didn't think was rightfully theirs, would use that vulnerability to weasel themselves a bigger share, and the co-defendants of course would wail piteously. We have been on a self-conscious campaign to make sure that every plaintiff has been paid out and signed a release before we submit our final accounting on the settlement fund to Judge Bromwich. Nonetheless, if you put liquor into Tad Krzysinski, TN's CEO, in an intimate setting, you can ge
t h
im to laugh pretty hard at the inevitable jokes about crashing more planes.

When I was finally allowed to see Neucriss about 4:3o, he had a tuna steak on a plate before him. Just out of court, he was enjoying a light supper, preparing for an evening's toil. He had a full kitchen and a chef in the office. The immediate air was savored with ginger, but there was still the frantic feel of trial. Peter's $100 foulard was dragged down; the sleeves were rolled on his white-on-white silk shirt; he stood as he ate, rumbling out every free-associated thought as a command. Four or five associates came charging in and out with questions about exhibits that they would need tomorrow. It was a bad-baby case, worth in Peter's hands at least $
in
million. The mother was going on in the morning.

Meanwhile, I sat there in the mendicant pose in which Peter prefers to see everyone around him. I was hoping to get a quick answer and go. I had brought over drafts of the payout documents on 397, and had casually mentioned Litiplex, using the routine Wash said had been employed with others--correspondence we couldn't place, maybe Peter had an idea?

"Litiplex." Peter touched his forehead. He stared, unseeing, toward the middle distance. "I did talk to somebody about that." "You did? Was it Bert?"

"Bert?"

"He's been out of town, I haven't been able to ask him." "Right. Visiting his family on Mars." Neucriss rolled his eyes. "No. Who?" He drummed his fingers, he yelled for one of the secretaries, then stopped her with an explosive clap of his hands. "I know who asked me about Litiplex. Jesus Christ, what a squirrelly bunch you are. Don't you guys even talk to each other? Gold. Gold brought it up. Is he out of town too, or just out to lunch?"

My heart went flat, I wasn't even sure why, except I knew something was wrong. There were plaintiff's guys Martin could talk to with confidence, whereas even hello on the street with

Chapter
18

Peter required full body armor for Martin and an Alka-Seltzer afterwards.

"Martin?" I asked.

"No, good as. Yeah, Gold called three or four weeks ago. Doing the same soft-shoe as you, talking to me about something else, then trying to slide this Litiplex name in so I wouldn't notice. What the hell are you guys up to now?"

Nothing, I said. Lying to Peter is not even a venial sin: speaking to a Frenchman in French. Wash had said Martin phoned a couple of plaintiffs' lawyers with discreet inquiries about Litiplex, but it had never crossed my mind they 'night include Neucriss. In the meantime, 1 tried to smooth over the concerns all this Q and A about Litiplex seemed to have raised. Just getting ready for distribution, trying to cover all details, who more likely to know all than Peter?

With Neucriss, flattery is always the best way. Perhaps because it is the social world's realm of ultimate restraint, the law seems to attract more of these types, the utterly self-impressed who regard the bar as the pathway to a fedntier where will and ego can go virtually unbounded. The sole partner in a seventeen-lawyer firm, Neucriss is the only lawyer I know who earns more every year than a good left-handed pitcher makes in the National League. Between $4 and $6 million are the printed estimates, and this year, with some $30 million worth of settlements in the 397 litigation about to pay out, his income will, as he puts it in his own unctuous way, "reach the eight figures."

This success has not been achieved by adherence to scruple. Peter's political contributions are vast--he hits every limit and gives in the name of his sixteen associates, his wife, and his children. Even so, he leaves nothing to chance. His witnesses are skillfully tutored; documents disappear; and in the had old days, perhaps not entirely gone, when cash on the barrelhead bought judicial favor, Neucriss was figured to do this as well. Worst of all, his very prominence is a sort of revolting advertisement of the fallibility of the jury system. Ten minutes with this guy and you know the story: ego run wild, some form of character disorder. But somehow, from juries, Peter's schmaltzy performance, his self-congratulatory baritone and silvery mane, have drawn nothing but rave reviews for forty years. He goes on, with all of us knowing that no matter what his triumphs, his wealth, the national accolades, all the purchased adoration, the only motive force in nature surer than gravity is Peter's desire for more.

He continued talking about Martin, always a raw nerve with him.

"Oh yeah. What was Gold's line? Something like yours. A letter to be forwarded. I asked him, 'What game is this? Post Office? I thought that was adolescent foreplay.' "Neucriss roared at himself, his mouth still full. Being profane, he kept Martin on edge.

"But what about it, Peter? Litiplex? What is it?"

"Listen to this. How the hell do I know? For crying out loud. Call information. Ask them about Litiplex. Jesus Christ," he went on, "how do you stand stuff like this, Malloy? One hundred forty lawyers running around bumping into each other. Two senior partners sorting the mail. And now you'll bill Jake Eiger five hundred bucks for looking at an envelope and tell him it's the plaintiffs' lawyers who make legal expenses so high." Jake and Neucriss were sort of on speaking terms, since Jake's dad was one of those pols to whom Neucriss had barnacled himself decades ago. Peter, in the meantime, was off and running, going on about big law firms, the Gog and Magog of his universe. In his own oleaginous way, he was even attempting to appeal for my support. He knew where I stood at
G&G the
entire legal world, local and national, was mapped in his head. Hanging on there by my fingernails, I might be brought to side with him against my partners. Instead, I fended him off lamely with wit.