Warren Murphy: Sue Me

At the company the engineers were dumbfounded. They couldn't figure out how it had happened. They knew they weren't supposed to lay cement over that broad an expanse all at once. And yet, somehow, every one of the daily construction orders called for that. It was as though some mysterious hand, a hand that knew exactly how the construction business worked, had cooked up a recipe for disaster.

The small company, already laden with debt, was going to be bankrupted by the lawsuit, not because they weren't covered by insurance. They were. But the next premiums would be so large that the firm would not be able to bid successfully on any future work.

In Los Angeles, in the shining new towers of Century Park City, the tragedy of Joe Piscella and Jim Wiedman was the first order of business at the offices of Palmer, Rizzuto Nathan Palmer himself had called a meeting of the partners.

Palmer, Rizzuto had started out in a small storefront in Palo Alto, chasing ambulances for cases. They still kept the secondhand desk from their first office as a memento, encased in glass in their ultraluxurious, wall-to-wall-carpeted, footballfield-size offices.

Nathan Palmer often referred to the desk as "our reminder of where we came from." Palmer, a graduate of one of the more prestigious Eastern law schools, played humble very well. Arnold Schwartz, who had barely gotten through one of the lesser law schools in California, never dared play humble. Arnold would tell passing cocktail waitresses the gross income of Palmer, Rizzuto Arnold wouldn't drive to the drugstore in anything but his Rolls-Royce lest someone he would never see again might think he couldn't afford a Rolls.

And Genaro Rizzuto would go into poetic raptures about the desk. They were so poor, he would say, that this secondhand desk was almost repossessed and a collection agency actually was carrying the desk out the door when Rizzuto was listening to a judge award their first multimillion-dollar judgment.

The three partners never quite agreed on anything except the need for money. The millions they had made somehow didn't seem to make them free of money worries, but instead added to them.

Nathan Palmer, of good blond patrician looks, tended to marry often, and his divorces were always expensive. Genaro Rizzuto referred to gambling as "harmless entertainment" and could actually prove other hobbies were more expensive. Being a good lawyer, he could prove anything, but he had an ability to lose several hundred thousand dollars in a night, making Palmer's marriages and subsequent alimony settlements seem cheap by comparison. But the biggest financial disaster among the three partners was Arnold Schwartz.

At an early age Arnold had figured out an investment strategy of such complexity that a college math teacher suggested he make a career in physics instead of law.

This mathematical organization of the variations of the stock market kept Schwartz in a state of near-bankruptcy, barely able to sustain his Rolls-Royce and Beverly Hills mansion, both heavily mortgaged by loans. Because of the intricacies of his investment strategies, he was one of the few people who had managed to lose money in the boom markets of the early eighties.

Since Nathan Palmer, Genaro Rizzuto, and Arnold Schwartz had stopped using that plain scarred wooden desk back in Palo Alto, their personal money problems had increased to gigantic proportions. So when Palmer called a meeting of the partners, the other two came immediately. And they came yelling.

Rizzuto had been interrupted in the middle of a three-day poker game and was down almost a half-million dollars. He was sure his luck was going to change, and he immediately accused Palmer of being responsible for his inability to be able to recover his current losses.

Genaro Rizzuto was handsome, with a deep bronze California tan. He wore tight-fitting gray slacks, a sport shirt open to the navel, and enough gold chain around his neck to open a traveling jewelry store. He had one wife, to whom he gave anything she wanted except himself. They had honeymooned in Las Vegas and did not consummate the marriage until they returned to California. Sex was not high on Genaro Rizzuto's list of pleasures.

"What's going on?" demanded Rizzuto.

"Disaster," said Palmer. He wore a light summer suit with his Ivy League tie.

"So? Everything's a disaster. It could have waited. I was down, and just coming back. But you and your disaster stopped me. I'm owed for this, Nathan."

"Your half-million dollars is penny-ante compared to this," said Palmer. He held a report on a death-by-negligence case in Darien, Connecticut, that Palmer, Rizzuto had just secured that morning, "We're all facing disaster. I don't know why we missed it before."

"What's we? You missed it. I never missed it," said Rizzuto, going to a glass bar set against a mirrored wall and pouring white wine into a Waterford crystal glass. Schwartz had insisted they buy expensive crystal even for the washrooms, lest by accident a plastic glass get transferred into an office and someone think they couldn't afford the good stuff.

"You don't even know what you missed?"

"What did I allegedly miss?" asked Rizzuto.

"That we're the biggest fools in the whole damned world," answered Palmer.

"How?"

"Wait for Schwartz," said Palmer.

Schwartz was delayed because he would not leave his house without his Rolex. He arrived looking as ever the epitome of prosperity. A dark three-thousand-dollar Savile Row suit fit his thin frame perfectly. Sedate but elegant horn-rim glasses made him appear thoughtful, and the gold Rolex just happened to appear from a cuff every few seconds as he adjusted one thing or another around his body.

"Don't tell me about disasters. I've just been on the phone with my broker."

"It's worse than the stock market."

"Nothing is worse than the market," said Schwartz.

"How the hell do you lose when everyone else is making money?" asked Rizzuto. He offered to get Schwartz a drink. Schwartz declined with a motion of his hand, the Rolex hand. He put his eight-hundred dollar Bazitti loafers on the long polished rosewood table and leaned back. Palmer could see the designer imprint on the bottom of the shoes. He was glad there was no such thing as expensive designer underwear; otherwise he would be in danger of being mooned by his partner.

Nathan Palmer did not like his partners. In fact, if he had met them in an elevator he would have gotten off at the wrong floor just to get away from them. But these were the men who had schemed with him to make Palmer, Rizzuto and he never had any thought of going off alone. He might despise them personally, but professionally he respected their legal cunning.

"We have here the end of Palmer, Rizzuto In Darien, Connecticut, we have secured a death-by-negligence case against a construction firm."

"It's insured, isn't it? We didn't go after something that wasn't insured," said Schwartz; who was an expert at freezing assets in danger of disappearing, a common occurrence when companies faced large judgments against them.

"Oh, it's insured," said Palmer.

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is the victims of this heinous crime of negligence they were both smothered in concrete-were two common laborers, Joe somebody and Jim watchamacallit. "

"So?" asked Schwartz.

"That's a three-hundred-thousand-dollar cap on their lives," Schwartz said. "That was the auditorium-roof construction, wasn't it?"

"Yes. Worked brilliantly," said Palmer.

"Who else was injured? Any engineers? A doctor, hopefully?" asked Rizzuto.

"Only the two laborers. Palmer, Rizzuto s share, gentlemen, should come to roughly three hundred thousand dollars."

"What's that after expenses?" asked Schwartz.

"A two-hundred-thousand-dollar loss. And Darien isn't all, there were the baby bottles. A perfect litigation against the company that produced the plastic wrong so it would shatter in the babies' mouths."