The Litigators

CHAPTER 5


Helen Zinc arrived at the Trust Tower a few minutes after noon. Driving downtown, she had tried to call and text her husband for the umpteenth time, with no recent success. At 9:33 he had sent her a text message instructing her not to worry, and at 10:42 he’d sent his second and final text, in which he had said: “No swaet. Am ok. Don’t wory.”

Helen parked in a garage, hurried down the street, and entered the atrium of the building. Minutes later she stepped off the elevator on the ninety-third floor. A receptionist led her to a small conference room where she waited alone. Though it was lunchtime, the Rogan Rothberg culture frowned on anyone leaving the building to eat. Good food and fresh air were almost taboo. Occasionally, one of the big partners would take a client out for a splashy marathon, an expensive lunch that the client would ultimately pay for through the time-honored tricks of file padding and fee gouging, but as a general rule—though unwritten—the associates and lesser partners grabbed a quick sandwich from a machine. On a typical day, David had both breakfast and lunch at his desk, and it was not unusual to have dinner there as well. He once bragged to Helen he had billed three different clients an hour each as he shoved down a smoked tuna with chips and a diet soda. She hoped he was only joking.

Though she wasn’t sure of the exact number, he had put on at least thirty pounds since their wedding day. He ran marathons back then, and the extra weight was not a problem yet. But the steady diet of bad food along with a near-complete absence of exercise worried both of them. At Rogan Rothberg, the hour between 12:00 and 1:00 was no different from any other hour of the day or night.

It was Helen’s second visit to the office in five years. Spouses were not excluded, but they were not invited either. There was no reason for her to be there, and, given the avalanche of horror stories he brought home, she had no desire to see the place or spend time with the people. Twice a year she and David dragged themselves to some dreadful Rogan Rothberg social gathering, some miserable outing designed to foster camaraderie among the battered lawyers and their neglected spouses. Invariably, these turned into sloppy drinking parties with behavior that was embarrassing and impossible to forget. Take a bunch of exhausted lawyers, ply them with booze, and things get ugly.

A year earlier, on a party boat a mile out on Lake Michigan, Roy Barton had tried to grope her. If he hadn’t been so drunk, he may have succeeded, and that would have caused serious problems. For a week she and David argued about what to do. David wanted to confront him, then complain to the firm’s Standards Committee. Helen said no, it would only harm David’s career. There were no witnesses, and the truth was that Barton probably didn’t remember what he’d done. With time, they stopped talking about the incident. After five years she had heard so many Roy Barton stories that David refused to mention his boss’s name at home.

Suddenly there he was. Roy walked into the small conference room with a snarl on his face and demanded, “Helen, what’s going on here?”

“Funny, I have the same question,” she shot back. Mr. Barton, as he preferred to be called, ran over people by barking first and trying to embarrass. She would have none of it.

“Where is he?” he barked.

“You tell me, Roy,” she said.

Lana, the secretary, and Al and Lurch appeared together, as if they’d been subpoenaed by the same marshal. Quick introductions were made as Roy closed the door. Helen had spoken to Lana many times on the phone but had never met her.

Roy looked at Al and Lurch and said, “You two, tell us exactly what happened.” They tag-teamed through their version of David Zinc’s last elevator ride and without the slightest bit of embellishment presented a fairly clear picture of a troubled man who’d simply snapped. He was sweating, breathing hard, pale, and he actually dived headfirst back into the elevator, landing on its floor, and, just as the door closed, they heard him laughing.

“He was fine when he left home this morning,” Helen assured them, as if to emphasize the point that the crack-up was the firm’s fault and not hers.

“You,” Roy barked in the direction of Lana. “You’ve talked to him.”

Lana had her notes. She had spoken to him twice, then he stopped answering the phone. “In the second conversation,” she said, “I got the clear impression that he was drinking. His tongue was a bit thick; his syllables were not as sharp.”

Roy glared at Helen as if she were to blame.

“Where would he go?” Roy demanded.

“Oh, the usual place, Roy,” Helen said. “The same place he always goes when he cracks up at 7:30 in the morning and gets plastered.”

There was a heavy pause in the room. Evidently, Helen Zinc felt free to sass Mr. Barton, but the others certainly did not.

In a lower tone, Mr. Barton asked her, “Is he drinking too much?”

“He doesn’t have time to drink, Roy. He comes home at ten or eleven, sometimes has a glass of wine, then he’s out on the sofa.”

“Is he seeing a shrink?”

“For what? Working a hundred hours a week? I thought that was the norm around here. I think all of you people need to see a shrink.”

Another pause. Roy was getting his ass handed to him, and this was very unusual. Al and Lurch stared at the table and worked hard to conceal grins. Lana was a deer in headlights, ready to be fired on the spot.

“So you have no information that might help us here?” Roy said.

“No, and evidently you have no information to help me either, right, Roy?”

Roy had had enough. His eyes narrowed, his jaws clenched, his face turned red. He looked at Helen and said, “He’ll show up, okay, sooner or later. He’ll get in a cab and find his way home. He’ll crawl back to you, and then he’ll crawl back to us. He gets one more chance, you understand? I want him in my office tomorrow morning at 8:00 sharp. Sober, and sorry.”

Helen’s eyes were suddenly wet. She touched both cheeks and, in a cracking voice, said, “I just want to find him. I want to know he’s safe. Can you help me?”

“Start looking,” Roy said. “There are a thousand bars in downtown Chicago. You’ll find him sooner or later.” And with that Roy Barton made a dramatic exit from the room, slamming the door behind him. As soon as he was gone, Al stepped forward, touched Helen on the shoulder, and said softly, “Look, Roy’s an a*shole, but he’s right about one thing. David’s in a bar getting drunk. He’ll eventually get in a cab and go home.”

Lurch stepped closer too and said, “Helen, this has happened before around here. In fact, it’s not that unusual. He’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“And the firm has a counselor on the payroll, a real pro who deals with casualties,” Al added.

“A casualty?” Helen asked. “Is that what my husband is at this point?”

Lurch shrugged and said, “Yes, but he’ll be okay.”

Al shrugged and said, “He’s in a bar. I’d love to be with him.”

At Abner’s, the lunch crowd had finally arrived. The booths and tables were full, and the bar was packed with office workers washing down burgers with pints of beer. David had moved one stool to his right so that he was now next to Miss Spence. She was on her third and last Pearl Harbor. David was on his second. When she offered him his first, he had initially declined, claiming he had no taste for fussy mixed drinks. She insisted, and Abner whipped one up and slid it in front of David. Though it looked as harmless as cough syrup, the drink was a lethal combination of vodka, melon liqueur, and pineapple juice.

They found common ground at Wrigley Field. Miss Spence’s father had taken her there as a small girl, and she had followed her beloved Cubs her entire life. She had held season tickets for sixty-two years, a record, she was certain, and she had seen the great ones—Rogers Hornsby, Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, Billy Williams, Fergie Jenkins, and Ryne Sandberg. And she had suffered greatly, along with all Cubs fans. Her eyes danced as she told the well-known story of the Curse of the Billy Goat. Her eyes moistened when she remembered, in detail, the Great Fall of 1969. She took a long sip after recounting the infamous June Swoon of 1977. She let it slip that her late husband had once tried to buy the team but was somehow outmaneuvered.

After two Pearl Harbors, she was fairly smashed. The third was putting her away. She had no curiosity about David’s situation; rather, she preferred to do most of the talking, and David, who was in slow motion, was content to just sit and listen. Abner ventured by occasionally, making sure she was happy.

At precisely 12:15, just as Abner’s lunch business hit full stride, her Asian driver arrived to collect her. She drained her glass, said good-bye to Abner, made no effort to pay a tab, thanked David for the company, and left the bar, her left hand tucked inside her driver’s elbow and her right hand working the cane. Her walk was slow, but erect, proud. She’d be back.

“Who was that?” David asked Abner when he got close enough.

“I’ll tell you later. You having lunch?”

“Sure. Those burgers look good. Double cheese, with fries.”

“You got it.”

The cabdriver’s name was Bowie, and he was a talker. As they left the third funeral home, his curiosity could no longer be restrained. “Say, pal, I gotta ask,” he chirped over his shoulder. “What’s with all these funeral homes?”

Wally had covered the rear seat in obituary pages, city maps, and legal pads. “Let’s head over to Wood & Ferguson on 103rd Street near Beverly Park,” he said, temporarily ignoring Bowie’s question. They had been together for almost two hours, and the meter was approaching $180, a nice chunk in terms of cab fare but chump change in the context of Krayoxx litigation. According to some of the news articles Lyle Marino had given him, the lawyers were speculating that a wrongful death case involving the drug could potentially be worth $2 to $4 million. The lawyers would take 40 percent, and Finley & Figg would, of course, have to share their fee with Zell & Potter or another tort firm spearheading the litigation. Still, after all the fee splitting, the drug was a gold mine. The urgent issue was finding the cases. As they rushed around Chicago, Wally was confident he was the only lawyer out of a million in the city who was, at that moment, shrewd enough to be combing the streets in search of Krayoxx victims.

According to another article, the drug’s dangers had just been discovered. And another one, quoting a trial lawyer, said that the medical community and the public in general were not yet aware of the “Krayoxx fiasco.” But Wally was now aware, and he didn’t care how much he spent on cab fare.

“I was asking about all these funeral homes,” Bowie chirped again. He was not going away, and he would not be ignored.

“It’s one o’clock,” Wally announced. “You had lunch?”

“Lunch? I’ve been with you for the past two hours. You seen me eat lunch?”

“I’m hungry. There’s a Taco Bell up there on the right. Let’s use the drive-thru.”

“You’re paying, right?”

“Right.”

“I love Taco Bell.”

Bowie ordered soft tacos for himself and a burrito supreme for his passenger. As they waited in line, Bowie said, “So I keep thinking, ‘What’s this guy doing at all these funeral homes?’ you know? None of my business, but I’ve been driving for eighteen years, and I’ve never had a ride who popped in on funeral homes all over town. Never had a ride who had that many friends, know what I mean?”

“You’re right about one thing,” Wally said, looking up from even more of Lyle’s research. “It’s none of your business.”

“Wow. Zinged me on that one, didn’t you? Pegged you for a nice guy.”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“From bad to worse. Just kidding, you know, my uncle’s a lawyer. Jerk.”

Wally handed him a $20 bill. Bowie took the sack of food and distributed it. Back on the street, he crammed a taco into his mouth and stopped talking.