John Lescroart: The Hunt Club

So be it.

For ten yearsI've lived in a rent-controlled, barn-size warehouse south of Market, essentially in the shadow of the 101 Freeway. When I'd first moved in, it was empty space with a twenty-five-foot ceiling. I'd drywalled off and enclosed a little over a third of the three thousand square feet, and within that area, I'd put down industrial carpet and further subdivided it into three discrete units-a living room/kitchen, my bedroom, and the bathroom.

Five months after I quit, I was on my futon reading the final pages of The Last Lion , the great second volume of Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill. When I finished, I put the book down and sat for a while, contemplating the life of the man about whom I'd just been reading. Brilliant military leader, mesmerizing public speaker, superb watercolorist, Nobel Prize-winning author, prime minister of England and-oh, yeah-savior of the Western world. His personal trials between the two world wars, when he was discredited and vilified by enemies and friends alike, put my setback with Mayhew and the CPS into some sort of perspective.

Which isn't to say I didn't have some issues with rage. Mostly I'd been working those issues off by windsurfing for a couple of hours nearly every day down at Coyote Point. I was also in two men's basketball leagues where elbows got thrown. I jogged the Embarcadero a lot. Plugged in my Strat and nearly blew the windows out of the warehouse. With Devin Juhle, several times a month, I'd stop by Jackson's Arms in South City and shoot a few hundred 9 mm rounds at what I imagined to be Wilson Mayhew's head. Amy Wu, a sympatico lawyer in town I'd met through CPS, was a good platonic drinking buddy with a light-handed knack for keeping in check my temper, always hair-trigger and worse since I'd quit work.

But as I say, I was working on it.

I got up and went to check the contents of my refrigerator. Standing barefoot in my kitchen area, the crud under my feet made me realize that I hadn't done a stem-to-stern clean of my rooms in a while, and without thinking too much about it, I grabbed a mop. When I'd finished with the floor, I emptied my hamper into the washing machine off my bedroom, added detergent, and set it for a heavy load. I wiped down the counters in the bathroom and kitchen, then scoured the corners for cobwebs and dust. Next, I ran the dishes that I'd been stacking rinsed in the dishwasher for the past week or so-mostly coffee mugs, a few utensils, and small plates.

Now I was undressed, ready for bed. My clothes spun, thumping in the dryer. The counters and floors were clean enough to eat off. The dishwasher was silent. My bedroom, like the living room, featured windows high in the wall facing Brannan Street, and because of the streetlights outside, my quarters were almost never entirely dark. With all of my own lights off, as they were now, the rooms and the warehouse in general retained about the brightness of moon glow.

The telephone rang and I picked it up. "French Laundry," I said.

"If this is really the French Laundry," a female voice said, "I'd like to make a reservation."

"I'm sorry. We don't do reservations."

"I thought if you called precisely two months to the day before you wanted to eat, exactly at nine A.M., you could get one."

"That's only if there's a free table and if the phone's not busy, which it always is."

"But not now."

"No, but it's not nine A.M. So I'm sorry."

"Is there any way I could get a reservation now?"

"Are the first three letters of your last name m-r-l ?"

"Those aren't the first three letters of anybody's last name. Besides, my last name has only two letters."

"Then I'm sorry, we can't fit you in."

"You don't take people with two-letter last names?"

"Only very rarely." But we'd played that out as far as it would go. I asked Wu if she were looking for a partner to drink with tonight.

"Afraid not. I'm working."

"Still?" I looked at my watch. "At ten thirty?"

"Billable hours wait for no one, Wyatt. They're here, I jump on 'em." She paused for a beat. "You want to guess whose name just came across my desk?"

"Winston Churchill."

"Good guess but wrong. Wilson Mayhew. Ring a bell?"

"Vaguely."

"Have you heard anything about him recently?"

I wasn't entirely able to hide the jolt of excitement. "What do you know, Wu? Tell me it's bad news. He's not dead, is he? That would be too fair."

"No, he's not dead. But apparently he is hurt. Or at least he says he's hurt."

"What kind of hurt?"

"Terrible, fully debilitating, work-induced, stress-related back pain."

"Wow. Those are a lot of adjectives."

"Yes, they are."

"So what do they all mean? That somehow it's not physical?"

"No. The pain is real pain if, in fact, he feels it. But the exact physical diagnosis can be difficult."

"So how did you find out about Mayhew? Is he your client somehow?"

"No. But one of our biggest single clients is the California Medical Insurance agency, which handles workers' comp benefits for state workers. But we also have a section that specializes generally in exposing medical fraud."

"Okay."

"Okay. Well. Have you ever heard of Chief's Disease?"

"No. Does Mayhew have it?"

The question slowed her down. "Actually, that may not be a bad call. Do you know what it is?"

I had never heard of it and she filled me in. Evidently each one of the previous six directors of the California Highway Patrol had filed workers' comp claims for disability in the final months of their respective terms in office, and every one of them was now drawing over one hundred thousand dollars a year in disability payments on top of their regular pension from their retirements. One of the ex-chiefs, she went on, whose inability to continue working at the Highway Patrol had been caused by a diagnosis of stress-induced hypertension, had taken over as the director of security at the San Francisco International Airport, a post that paid over one hundred fifty thousand dollars per year. Between his full pension from the Highway Patrol, the disability, and the new job, this hardworking law-enforcement officer was making nearly four hundred thousand dollars, much of it tax-free, all from taxpayer funds.

"That's a good job," I said.

"It's a great job," she replied. "And we've been hired to see that he gets a chance to lose it or at least the disability-pay part of it."

"And how do you find that out?"

"Mostly legal stuff. We depose witnesses who work or worked with the guy, subpoena medical records, demand reexamination with our own doctors, check his medications, like that. But we also use private investigators to follow these people around, see for example if they forget to wear their neck brace when they go waterskiing and think nobody's looking. Or, in the case of our airport security director, if he still pursues the low-stress sport of bungee jumping with his son."

"You're kidding."

"We haven't caught him red-handed yet, but we've got hearsay witnesses. We'll find out one way or the other. But the point-the reason I called you-isn't Mr. Airport Security. It's Wilson Mayhew."

"You're reviewing his claim."

"No flies on you," she said. "We got the latest batch of paperwork from CalMed this afternoon, and I was doing my pro forma review of red-flagged claims, and I recognized Mayhew's name from our many fascinating talks."

"As well you should, Ames. So what happened? Wilson got flagged?"

"Yes, he did. But don't get your hopes up too far about that, Wyatt. It's automatic for all permanent, full-disability claims. Beyond that, it's any claim over a hundred grand a year. Then also Mayhew's claiming stress-related, nonspecific injury-back pain is the classic-where there's no immediate and apparent physical cause. He didn't fall down an elevator shaft and break his back, for example. He doesn't have a herniated disk or anything else we can see in the X-rays or pick up on the MRI. Evidently, he was helping one of his employees lift something at work, and he felt a bad tweak and went down. The next morning, he couldn't get out of bed, although apparently he's semi-ambulatory now." She took a breath. "So he gets flagged on all counts."