John Grisham - The Appeal

Experts rose up and were soon shouted down.

F. Clyde Hardin walked over from his law office and immediately took center stage.

His class action had been ridiculed by many of the locals who felt he was just riding the Paytons' coattails with a bunch of opportunistic clients. He and his good pal Sterling Bintz from Philadelphia were claiming almost three hundred "severely and permanently injured" members of their class action. Since its filing in January, it had gone nowhere. Now, however, F. Clyde had instantly gained stature. Any settlement had to include "his people." He would have a seat at the table on Friday, he explained to the silent crowd. He would be sitting there along side Wes and Mary Grace Payton.

Jeannette Baker was behind the counter of a convenience store at the south edge of Bowmore when she received the call from Mary Grace. "Do not get excited," her lawyer warned, rather sternly. "This could be a lengthy process, and the possibility of a settlement is remote." Jeannette had questions but did not know where to begin.

Mary Grace would be at the Pine Grove Church at 7:00 p.m. for a full discussion with all of her clients. Jeannette promised to be there.

With a $41 million verdict attached to it, Jeannette Baker's case would be the first one on the table.

The settlement news was too much for Bowmore to handle. In the small offices downtown the secretaries and Realtors and insurance agents talked of nothing else. The languid human commerce along Main Street stopped dead as friends and neighbors found it impossible to pass one another without comparing gossip. The clerks in the Cary County Courthouse collected rumors, amended them, embellished some, and reduced some, then passed them along. In the schools the teachers gathered in their coffee rooms and exchanged the latest news. Pine Grove wasn't the only church where the faithful and the hopeful met for prayer and counseling. Many of the town's pastors spent the afternoon on the phone listening to the victims of Krane Chemical.

A settlement would close the town's ugliest chapter, and allow it to begin again.

The infusion of money would compensate those who had suffered. The cash would be spent and re-spent and boost the dying economy. Krane would certainly be required to clean up its pollution, and once it was finally gone, perhaps the water would become safe again.

Bowmore with clean water-a dream almost impossible to believe.

The community could finally shake off the nickname Cancer County.

A settlement was a fast and final end to the nightmare. No one in the town wanted litigation that would be prolonged and ugly. No one wanted another trial like Jeannette Baker's.

Nat Lester had been pestering newspaper editors and reporters for a month. He was furious at the misleading advertising that had drenched south Mississippi, and even angrier at the editors for not railing against it. He put together a report in which he took the Fisk ads-print, direct mail, radio, Internet, and television-and dissected them, pointing out every lie, half-truth, and manipulated word. He also estimated, based on direct mail media buys, the amount of cash that was pouring into the Fisk campaign. His figure was at least $3 million, and he predicted that the vast majority was coming from out of state. There was no way to verify this until after the election.

His report was e-mailed and sent overnight to every newspaper in the district, then followed up with aggressive phone calls. He updated it every day, then re-sent it and grew even more obnoxious on the phone. It finally paid off.

To his amazement, and great satisfaction, the three largest papers in the district informed him, separately and off the record of course, that they planned to run stinging editorials on the Fisk campaign in the upcoming Sunday editions.

And Nat's luck continued. The same-sex marriage issue caught the attention of the New York Times, and a reporter arrived in Jackson to poke around. His name was Gilbert, and he soon made his way to the McCarthy campaign office, where Nat gave him an earful, off the record. He also gave Gilbert the phone numbers of the two gay law students who were stalking Meyerchec and Spano.

Speaking off the record, they told Gilbert everything and showed him their file.

They had spent four days in Chicago and learned a lot. They met Meyerchec in his bar near Evanston, told him they were new to the city and looking for friends. They spent hours in the place, got roaring drunk with the regulars, and never once heard anyone mention anything about a lawsuit in Mississippi. In the photos in the Jackson paper, Meyerchec had blond hair and funky eyeglasses. In Chicago, the hair was darker and there was no eyewear. His smiling face was in one of the group photos they had taken at the bar. As for Spano, they visited the design center where he worked as a consultant for lower-end home buyers. They pretended to be new residents in an old building nearby, and they spent two hours with him. Noticing their accents, Spano at one point ask *l where they were from.

When they answered Jackson, Mississippi, he had no reaction to the place.

"Ever been there?" one of them asked.

"I've passed through a couple of times," Spano said. This, from a registered voter, a licensed driver, and a current appellant before the state's supreme court. Though Spano was never seen at Meyerchec's bar, it appeared as if the two men were indeed a couple. They shared the same address, a bungalow on Clark Street.

The law students had continued to call and visit the near empty apartment in Jackson, with no response. Forty-one days earlier, while knocking on the door, they stuck a piece of junk mail into a small gap near the doorknob. It was still there; the door had not been opened.

The old Saab had not been moved. One tire was flat.

Gilbert became captivated by the story and pursued it doggedly. The attempt to get married in Mississippi smelled like a cynical ploy to thrust the same-sex marriage issue to the forefront of the McCarthy-Fisk race. And only McCarthy was getting hurt.

Gilbert badgered the radical lawyer who represented Meyerchec and Spano, but got nowhere. He dogged Tony Zachary for two days but couldn't get a word. His phone calls to Ron Fisk and his campaign headquarters went unanswered. He spoke to both Meyerchec and Spano by phone, but was quickly cut off when he pressed them on their ties to Mississippi. He gathered a few choice quotes from Nat Lester, and he verified the facts dug up by the law students.

Gilbert finished his report and sent it in.

The first fight was over the question of who would be allowed in the room. On the defense side, Jared Kurtin had full command of his battalion and there were no problems.

The brawl was on the other side.

Sterling Bintz arrived early and loudly with an entourage that included young men who appeared to be lawyers and others who appeared to be leg breakers. He claimed to represent over half of the Bowmore victims, and therefore deserved a lead role in the negotiations. He spoke with a clipped nasal voice and in an accent quite foreign to south Mississippi, and he was instantly despised by everyone there. Wes settled him down, but only for a moment. F. Clyde Hardin watched from the safety of a corner, crunching a biscuit, enjoying the argument, and praying for a quick settlement. The IRS was now sending registered letters.

A national toxic tort star from Melbourne Beach, Florida, arrived with his support staff and joined in the debate. He, too, claimed to represent hundreds of injured people, and, since he was a veteran of mass tort settlement, he figured he should handle things from the plaintiffs' side.

The two class action lawyers were soon bickering over stolen clients.

* There were seventeen other law firms jockeying for position. A few were reputable personal injury firms, but most were small-town car-wreck lawyers who had picked up a case or two while sniffing around Bowmore.