I nodded in agreement. Companies don’t willingly offer information on benefits that will add to their insurance premiums. Especially looking at a case like Louisa’s, where she was getting major medical payments besides her disability check.
“But what about their union?” I asked. “Wouldn’t the shop steward have notified them?”
He shook his head. “It’s a single-shop union and it’s pretty much a mouthpiece for the company. Especially now —there’s so much unemployment in the neighborhood they don’t want to rock the boat.”
“Unlike the Steelworkers,” I interjected dryly.
He grinned for the first time, looking even younger than before. “Well, you can’t blame them. The Xerxes union, I mean. But anyway, the two guys had read someplace that Xerxine could cause these health problems, and since they were both up against it financially, they thought maybe they could at least collect workers’ comp for not being able to work. You know, job-related condition and all that.”
“I see. So you went to Humboldt and tried to work something out? Or you went directly to litigation?”
“I had to work fast—it wasn’t clear how long either of them would live. I went to the company first, but when they didn’t want to play ball I didn’t fool around—I filed a suit. Of course if we’d won after they died, their families would have been entitled to an indemnity payment. And that would make quite a difference to them financially. But you like your clients to be alive to see their victories.”
I nodded. It would have made a big difference, especially to Mrs. Pankowski with all her children. Illinois insurers pay a quarter of a million to families of workers who die on the job, so it was worth the effort.
“So what happened?”
“Well, I saw right away the company was going to stonewall, so we sued. Then we got an early docket. Even being stuck down on the South Side, I’ve got a few connections.” He smiled to himself, but declined to share the joke.
“Trouble was, both guys smoked, Pankowski was a heavy drinker, and they’d both lived all their lives in South Chicago. I guess if you grew up there, I don’t have to tell you what the air was like. So Humboldt socked us. They said on the one hand that there wasn’t any way to prove Xerxine had made these guys sick instead of their cigarettes or the general shit in the air. And they also pointed out that both of them had been working there before anyone knew how toxic the stuff was. So even if Xerxine did make them sick, it didn’t count—you know, they operated the plant based on current medical knowledge. So we lost handily. I talked to a really good appellate lawyer and he felt there just wasn’t anything to go on with. End of story.”
I thought about it for a minute. “Yeah, but if that’s all that happened, why is Xerxes jumping like a nervous rabbit when it hears those guys’ names?”
He shrugged. “Probably same reason I didn’t want to talk to you to begin with. They don’t believe you’re on your own. They don’t think you’re looking for a long-lost father. They think you’re trying to stir the pot up again. You’ve got to admit your story looks pretty farfetched.”
Reluctantly, I looked at it from his point of view. Given all this history I hadn’t known about, I could understand, sort of I still couldn’t figure out why Humboldt felt he had to intervene. If his company had won the case fair and square, what difference did it make if his subordinates talked to me about Pankowski and Ferraro?
“And also,” I added aloud, “why are you so upset? Do you think they were wrong? I mean, do you think the trial was rigged somehow?”
He shook his head unhappily. “No. Based on the evidence, I don’t think we could have won. I think we should have. I mean, I think these guys deserved something for putting twenty years of their lives into the company, especially since it’s probable that working there killed them. I mean, look at your friend’s mother. She’s dying too. Kidney failure did you say? But the law spells it out, or the precedents do—you can’t fault the company for operating under the best knowledge they had available at the time.”
“So that’s it? You just don’t like to talk about it because you feel bad that you couldn’t win for them?”
He communed again with his glasses and his tie. “Oh, that would get me down. No one likes losing, and God, you couldn’t help wanting these guys to win. But then, you know, the company could see that plant go belly-up if we set a successful precedent. Everyone who’d ever been sick or died there coming back for these big settlements.”
He stopped. I made myself sit very quietly.
At last he said, “No. It’s just that I got a threatening phone call. After the case. When we were considering the appeal.”