“Interesting guy. Sounds born in the USA, no accent at all, but underneath he was a starry-eyed immigrant. The American dream and all that, but the explosion turned it into a nightmare. I go by his shop whenever I have an appearance in federal court. Every time I walk in I’m surprised he’s still there. I thought he’d have blown his brains out by now.”
“He took it that hard?”
“It wasn’t the money. It was losing his wife and kid, and plain old corporate betrayal. The company hired a PR firm before the fire was even out, got a lot of mileage saying how they were going to help the families, how they’d get to the cause of the explosion, how everybody would be taken care of, scholarships for all their kids. They even had Porzolkiewski appear with them at a press conference, televised around the world. I guess they were trying to reassure the folks at their foreign drilling operations and refineries. At the same time, their insurance carrier is lying in wait to attack, setting up to blame one of the dead guys, a pipe fitter-”
“To make it a workers’ comp case so the company wouldn’t be liable and wouldn’t have to pay out.”
“Exactly.”
“I imagine four dead guys would’ve been worth a lot of money once the jury got a peek at the autopsy photos.”
“That’s what we figured, too, but after we met Porzolkiewski and got a sense of him and his kid and what they’d been through, the case stopped being about money for us.”
“What was Meyer’s part in it?”
Skeeter tugged at the right shoulder of his sweatshirt, pulling it closer to his neck, then did the same with the other. Biceps and triceps pumped, skin tight.
“Can’t say.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“I mean I have a trial starting in his court next week. I’m not even going to speak his name outside of the courtroom until the case is over.” Skeeter extended his open hands. “You know what happened the last time I appeared in front of him? I’ll tell you what happened. He screwed us all through trial and we lost. And we can’t appeal until this next trial is over because it means pointing the finger at him.”
“For what?”
“You know how he cuts off witnesses, then rephrases what they have to say? That’s what he kept doing all the way through the trial. And every time I’d object, he’d tell me to move on. Even if I got to ask the question again, the punks on other side would jump up and make some bogus objection and he’d sustain it. Every time. Chopped us off at the knees.”
Skeeter stood up, hands on hips. He glared down at Gage.
“You know what we found out when we interviewed the jurors afterward?” Skeeter jabbed the air. “You know what the critical evidence was for them? What they talked about in the jury room? The exact testimony that made them find against us?”
“Meyer’s restatement of what the key witnesses said.”
“That asshole. His version of the real testimony was a complete fiction, the whole thing constructed so the other side would win the trial.”
“But you can’t appeal based on jurors’ thought processes. You need actual jury misconduct.”
“I know. A couple of the jurors now realize what happened. They’ll help us. I’ll find something when this next trial is over. It’s a class action stock fraud. I’ve got half a million dollars invested in it. Slam dunk unless he screws us.”
“Then you’ll talk about Meyer’s role in TIMCO?”
Skeeter ripped off his lifting gloves, threw them into his gym bag, then reached down and yanked it over his shoulder.
“Who’s Meyer?”
T he manila envelope Tansy delivered to Gage’s office late in the afternoon turned out to be a whole lot thicker than he expected.
“This came by messenger,” she said, approaching his desk. She pointed at the handwriting on the front after setting it down. “What does ‘Graham Gage: 221 pounds’ mean?”
“I suspect it means I’m in for some heavy lifting.”
Chapter 18
Gage heard the floor squeak as someone inside crept toward the front door of the tiny shingled bungalow along Seventeenth Avenue in the flatlands south of Golden Gate Park. He leaned in toward the door as a hot afternoon wind gusted up the street and rattled leaves on the sidewalk. Another squeak. The curtain behind a wood-framed window to the right fluttered, then came to rest. Finally, a squeak close to the threshold. Gage watched the pinprick of light in the peephole vanish.
“Mr. Porzolkiewski?”
“Who is it?”
“My name is Graham Gage.”
“What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you about TIMCO.”
“Ancient history.”
“Two months ago isn’t ancient history.”
“What does two months ago have to do with TIMCO? It was fourteen years ago.”
“That’s when you talked to Charlie Palmer.”
Gage heard the floor squeak twice in the silence that followed, as though Porzolkiewski had rocked back and forth.
“Mr. Porzolkiewski?”
The floor squeaked again.
“Mr. Porzolkiewski?”
“I think you better leave now.”
“Can I give you my card?” Gage said, hoping that would get Porzolkiewski to open the door.
“Just leave it.”
“I’d rather hand it to you. I don’t want it to blow away.”
Gage reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a business card, then held it up in front of the peephole. He heard the scrape and click of a dead bolt, then the rattle of the loose door handle as Porzolkiewski turned it. Gage could see the left side of Porzolkiewski’s face when he opened the door a few inches and reached out his hand. Eye moist and bloodshot, in a deep socket surrounded by pale and droopy skin. He looked as though he’d once been a boulder of a man, but had been eroded by tragedy.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Gage said, handing him the card.
“Lots of people were sorry. Didn’t bring him back.”
A Siamese kitten darted through the open door. Gage reached down and picked it up. Porzolkiewski slipped the card into his pants pocket, then stretched out his palm to receive the cat, but Gage cradled it on his left forearm, holding it hostage. Porzolkiewski dropped his hand to his side.
Since Porzolkiewski hadn’t denied talking to Charlie, Gage took a shot: “I really just came for the wallet.”
Porzolkiewski’s face didn’t react. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Look. If Meyer wanted to press charges, he would’ve. There were fifty-six depositions in the TIMCO case. You were with him at more than thirty.”
“I wasn’t with him. I was against him.”
“He was against you is more like it. In any case, he knows who you are. Lawyers tend to remember people who dive at them from across a conference table.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Where is it?”
“I gave it to somebody.”
“Palmer?”
Porzolkiewski glanced away for a second, then nodded.
“He said if I gave it back, I’d never be bothered again. They didn’t want any trouble because it would slop back on Landon Meyer’s presidential campaign.”
That explanation made no sense. Palmer never came at people without some kind of leverage to move them the way he wanted, and Porzolkiewski’s glancing away told Gage he wasn’t a good liar.
“You mean he promised you your probation wouldn’t get violated and you’d stay out of state prison.”
Porzolkiewski shrugged. “Something like that. Palmer said they could get me for robbery. But that’s not what happened. I didn’t steal the wallet, it just fell out during the scuffle. The little putz Meyer ran away. Just left it on the sidewalk and I picked it up.”
“A Good Samaritan.”
“Sort of.”
“What was the scuffle about?”
“You mean did I go hunting for him?”
“No. I wasn’t assuming anything. It was just a straight question.”
“I was on my way to the night drop at the bank. Meyer was coming the other way. I blocked the sidewalk just to see what the asshole would do.”