“Now, I’ve told Donald what the deal is and it’s okay. I handle the financial end of the business. He supervises the outdoor work. You go ahead and tell Donald about the case.”
Hawley kept looking me over as though a little reluctant to accept me at face value, but at length seated himself, took a filing jacket from his brief case, put the filing jacket on his knee and then didn’t refer to it but rattled off the facts and figures from memory.
“Carter J. Holgate, a real estate sharpshooter,” he said. “A money-maker with a horror of being stuck for damages in an accident, carries unlimited public liability insurance with us. On August thirteenth, was driving north in the city of Colinda, when he came to a traffic signal.
“He has admitted to us that he was tired and that he may have been inattentive. He had been following a light car through the city. They approached a traffic intersection at Seventh and Main Streets. The signal light changed to red, the car ahead of Holgate stopped, Holgate says very abruptly, but we can’t establish this by any other evidence.
“Holgate smashed into the rear of the car ahead. That car was driven by Vivian Deshler, Apartment six-nineteen Miramar Apartments, Colinda, California; age, twenty-six, blonde, five feet four; weight, a hundred and twelve; apparently a divorcee living on a lump-sum property alimony settlement that is about used up. Her car was a fast sports job, but low and light.
“She claims a whiplash injury to the neck.
“Of course you know a whiplash injury is an insurance company’s nightmare. There’s no question on earth but what they can be exceedingly serious and that the symptoms can be delayed for some time. On the other hand, there’s virtually no way of checking. A person says, I’ve got a headache, how are you going to prove she doesn’t have a headache? You can’t do it.
“There’s no question at all about the liability of our insured. He was road-weary and tells us confidentially he’d hoped he could get around the string of traffic ahead. He’d speeded up to make it around, found out he couldn’t, had swung back into line going much faster than the traffic and just failed to see the red light at the intersection ahead. His reaction time was slowed down so that he crashed into the rear end of the car in front of him, and of course it would have to be a light car.”
“All right,” I said, “where do we come in on this?”
“In injuries of this sort,” Hawley said, “we try to find out something about the background of the injured person. We like to find out who they are, where they came from, what they’re doing, and we are particularly concerned with trying to find out how their day-to-day activities fit into the picture of serious injuries.
“In other words, a young, attractive woman gets on the stand and shows lots of nylon to the jury. She smiles at them and then begins to describe her symptoms. Her voice shows that she’s suffering, her smile indicates she’s bravely bearing up as she faces the prospects of a ruined life. She tells about the headaches, about the periods of sleeplessness, about her increasing nervousness, and all the rest of it.
“Now, quite obviously, if we can take her on cross-examination and say, ‘Well now, let’s take a typical day in your life, Miss Deshler. Let’s take September nineteenth of the present year, for instance. You complain of sleeplessness, yet you didn’t bring in the newspaper and milk on your doorstep until ten-fifteen. Then at eleven-ten you left your apartment and went to the beach. You were surf swimming during the afternoon. In the evening you and your escort went to a dance. You drove from the dance up on the ocean highway, parked where you could look out over the ocean and were there for two hours and a half. Then your escort drove you home, went into your apartment and was there for an hour and forty minutes.’
“Then we show motion pictures of her in a tight-fitting bathing suit running along the beach, turning her head and laughing invitingly at her escort. We show her in the surf. We show her on the beach displaying her figure to advantage.
“By the time we get done showing the motion pictures and cross-examining the young woman, the jurors feel her life hasn’t been unduly circumscribed. Her activities haven’t been interfered with too greatly.”
“Now, wait a minute,” I said, “do you want me to start dogging this girl around, getting motion pictures of her when she goes to the beach, finding out what time she opens the apartment door to get the newspaper, watching her boy friend—”
“No, no,” Hawley interrupted. “That’s highly specialized work. We have our own methods of getting that information and we have our own trick cameras with telephoto lenses. Also, Mr. Lam, you want to remember the way I approached the subject.
“Notice that I say that on cross-examination we say, ‘Now, Miss Deshler, let’s take a typical day of your life,’ and then we pull out the list of things that happened on that particular day.
“Now, note that we don’t ask her if that was a typical day in her life. Instead, our attorney says, ‘Let’s take a typical day in your life,’ and then he starts listing all of the things that happened on this particular day. He gives the impression that we’ve been covering her activities in minute detail from the time the suit was filed until the case came to trial. Actually we may only have a couple of days of coverage and those days may have been days of unusual activity, but we lead up to it by saying, ‘Let’s take a typical day in your life,’ and then start bringing out motion picture films and voluminous records. We convey the impression we want and at the same time frighten the witness, because she doesn’t know just how much we know. In other words, she probably feels that we have been covering her activities day by day, minute by minute, and night by night.”
“I see,” I said.
“Now, don’t act as though we were stealing candy from babies, Lam,” Hawley said with a magnetic, keen-eyed smile. “We’re dealing with a racket. This whole thing has become highly specialized.
“Take, for instance, this Vivian Deshler. She may be the isolated individual we’re working on at the moment but remember that she isn’t isolated. She has a whole organization behind her. She has an attorney at law who—”
“Who is her attorney?” I interrupted.
“We don’t know,” Hawley said. “She hasn’t filed suit as yet. She’s made a claim, and of course we’d like to settle the claim without having suit filed. The point I’m trying to make is that she has an attorney, even if we don’t know who he is as yet. The attorney is one who has specialized in representing plaintiffs in automobile accident cases. He’s a member of an organization that gives mutual aid.
“In other words, any time one attorney finds out some little trick that gets a bigger verdict out of a jury he passes that on to all the members in the association. Any time someone gets a whopping big verdict for a broken leg, that information is flashed around to all the members of the organization and right away that establishes a new standard for a broken leg. And so it goes.”
“So you’re fighting the devil with fire?” I asked.
“Well, we don’t look at it in exactly that way,” Hawley said. “We simply have to protect ourselves. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any automobile driving or any automobile insurance. Premiums would go up to such a point that people simply couldn’t afford to carry insurance.”
“Let’s get back to what you want me to do,” I said.
“We want you to locate Vivian Deshler.”
“But I thought you said she lived—”
“We know where she did live, but we don’t know where she is now. She made a claim. She was very helpful. She agreed to let our doctor examine her. She permitted us to take X rays. She was most co-operative and friendly and she said she didn’t want to fix the amount of her claim just at present, that she had plenty of time before the statute of limitations would cause the suit to outlaw, and that she wanted to see how her injuries responded to treatment and all that.”