“Dr. Christophersen did a lot of work, calling Louisa’s and Steve Ferraro’s doctors and doing all that checking,” was the only comment I could get out at first.
“She was horrified—most horrified—at what she was seeing, I gave her the names of two patients I knew could be checked on and she did the follow-up this afternoon. At least in the case of your friend and Mr. Ferraro, it seems abundantly clear that they had no idea what was happening to them,”
I nodded. “It makes a hideous kind of sense. Louisa starts having vague symptoms that she thinks are menopause—at thirty-four?—but then she never had any sex education to speak of, maybe it’s not so incredible. Anyway, she wouldn’t blab it around the plant. A lot of them come from the kind of background she did—where anything having to do with private body functions was shameful and never to be discussed.”
“But, Victoria,” Lotty burst out, “what is the sense of all this? Who besides a Mengele is so cold, so calculating in keeping these kinds of records, and saying nothing, not one word, to the people involved?”
I rubbed my head. The spot where I’d been hit was pretty well healed, but now that my brain was so stressed out, the injury was throbbing in a dull way, the pounding drum in the jungle of my mind.
“I don’t know.” Lotty’s enervated state had infected me. “I can see why they don’t want any of it coming out now.”
Lotty shook her head impatiently. “Not so I. Explain, Victoria.”
“Damages. Pankowski and Ferraro sued for indemnity payments they believed were rightfully theirs—they tried to build a case saying their illnesses were the result of exposure to Xerxine. Humboldt defended himself successfully. According to the lawyer who handled their suit, the company had two workable defenses—the first was that these guys both smoked and drank heavily, so no one could prove that Xerxine had poisoned them. And the second, which seemed to do the trick, was that their exposure had taken place before Xerxine’s toxicity was known. So that …”
My voice trailed off. The problem with Jurshak’s report to Mariners Rest became staggeringly clear to me. He was helping Humboldt hide the high mortality and illness rates at Xerxes to get favorable rate consideration from the insurance carrier. I could imagine a couple of different ways they could work it, but the likeliest seemed to be that they’d buy a better package from Mariners Rest than they offered the employees. Employees would be told that they didn’t have coverage for certain tests or certain amounts of hospital stay. Then when the bills came in they’d go through the fiduciary and he’d fix them before sending them to the insurance company. I thought about it from several different angles and it still looked good. I got up and headed for the phone extension in the kitchen.
“So that what, Vic?” Lotty called impatiently behind me. “What are you doing?”
Turning off the chicken for starters: I’d forgotten the dinner I’d left simmering happily on the back of the stove. The olives were little charred lumps while the chicken seemed to have welded itself to the bottom of the pan. Definitely not the most successful recipe in my repertoire. I tried scraping the mess into the garbage can.
“Oh, never mind the dinner,” Lotty said irritably. “Just put it in the sink and tell me the rest of your thinking. The company argued that they couldn’t be responsible for the illness of anyone who worked for them if it took place before 1975 when Xerxine’s toxicity was established by Ciba-Geigy. Is that it?”
“Yeah, except I didn’t know about Ciba-Geigy or that 1975 was the critical year. And my bet is that they claimed to have lowered their ppm of Xerxine to whatever the decreed standard was, and that that’s what their reports to Washington show. The ones that Jurshak sent out for Humboldt. But that the analysis SCRAP did at the plant shows much higher levels. I need to call Caroline Djiak and find out.”
“But, Vic,” Lotty said, absently scraping charred chicken from the skillet, “you still don’t explain why they wouldn’t tell their workers their bodies were being damaged. If the standard wasn’t set until 1975, what difference did it make before then?”
“Insurance,” I said shortly, trying to find Louisa’s number in the directory. She wasn’t listed. Snarling, I went back to the spare room to dig my address book out of my suitcase.
I returned to the kitchen and started dialing. “The only person who might tell us definitely is Dr. Chigwell, and he’s missing right now. I’m not sure I could make him talk even if I could find him—Humboldt scares him much more than I do.”