“You mean like Humboldt Chemical? No. I was hired originally by the young woman who used to live next door to me to find out who her father was. It seemed remotely possible that one of those two—most likely Pankowski—could have been the guy and I started poking around trying to find someone at Xerxes who knew him. This woman fired me on Wednesday, but I’ve gotten piqued by the way people are reacting to me. Lying to me, basically, about what went on between Pankowski and Ferraro and Xerxes. And then a guy I know at the Department of Labor told me you used to represent them. So here I am.”
He smiled unhappily. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason the company would send someone around after all this time. But it’s kind of hard for me to believe you’re on your own. Too many people got too excited over that case, and now you come in out of the blue? It’s too—too strange. Too pat.”
I rubbed my forehead, trying to coax some ideas into my brain. Finally I said, “I’m going to do something I’ve never done in my whole history as an investigator. I’m going to tell you exactly what happened. If after that you still feel you can’t trust me, so be it.”
I started at the very beginning, with Louisa showing up pregnant in the house next door a few months before my eleventh birthday. With Gabriella and her quixotic impulses. With Caroline’s exuberant philanthropy at other people’s expense and the nagging feeling I still had of being her older sister and somehow responsible for her. I didn’t tell him about Nancy ending up in Dead Stick Pond, but I described everything that had happened at Xerxes, my conversation with Dr. Chigwell, and finally Humboldt’s intervention. That was the only episode I muted. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the owner of the company had had me in for brandy—I felt embarrassed because I’d let myself be gulled by the trappings of wealth. So I mumbled that I’d had a call from one of the company’s senior officers.
After I finished Manheim took off his glasses and went through an elaborate cleaning ritual involving his necktie. It was clearly a habitual gesture of nervousness, but his eyes looked so naked without their protective lenses that I glanced away.
At last he put the glasses back on and picked up his pen again. “I’m not a bad lawyer. I’m really a pretty decent lawyer. Just not very ambitious. I grew up on the South Side and I like it down here. I help a lot of the businesses on the street with leasing problems, employment issues, that kind of thing. So when those two guys came to me maybe I should have sent them someplace else, but I thought I could handle the case—I’ve done some comp claims—and it made a nice change. Pankowski’s sister owns the flower shop next door—that’s why they picked me—she told them I’d done a good job for her.”
He started for the filing cabinet and changed his mind. “I don’t know why I want the folder—nervous habit, I guess. I mean, I know the whole damned case by heart, even after all this time.”
He stopped, but I didn’t prompt him. Whatever he said now would be to himself more than to me and I didn’t want to intrude on the flow. After a few minutes he went on.
“It’s Xerxine, you know. The way they used to make it, it left these toxic residues in the air. Do you know any chemistry? I don’t either, but I made quite a study of this at the time. Xerxine is a chlorinated hydrocarbon—they add chlorine to ethylene gas usually and get a solvent. You know, the kind of thing you might clean oil from sheet metal with, or paint, or anything.
“Well, if you breathe the vapors while they’re manufacturing it, it doesn’t do you a whole lot of good. Affects the liver and kidneys and central nervous system and all those good things. When Humboldt first started making Xerxine back in the fifties, no one knew anything about that stuff. You know, they didn’t run the plants to kill the employees, but they weren’t very careful about controlling how much of the chlorinated vapors got into the air.”
Now that he was into his story his manner had changed. He seemed self-confident and knowledgeable; his claim to being a good lawyer didn’t seem at all farfetched.
“Then in the sixties and seventies, when people started thinking seriously about the environment, guys like Irving Selikoff began looking at industrial pollution and worker health. And they started finding that chemicals like Xerxine could be toxic at pretty low concentrations—you know, a hundred molecules per million molecules of air. What they call parts per million. So Xerxes put in air scrubbers and closed up their pipes better, and got their ppm down to federal standards. That would have been in the late seventies, when the EPA issued a standard on Xerxine. Fifty parts per million.”
He smiled apologetically. “Sorry to be so technical. I can’t think about this case in simple terms anymore. Anyway, Pankowski and Ferraro came to me early in 1983. They were both sick as hell, one with liver cancer, the other with aplastic anemia. They’d worked at Humboldt for a long time —since ’59 for Ferraro and ’61 for Pankowski—but they’d quit when they got too sick to work. That would have been two years earlier. So they couldn’t collect disability. I don’t think they were told it was an option.”