Sara Paretsky - Blood Shot

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.”

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?”