Irreparable Harm (A Legal Thriller) Page 9

  Chapter 8

  At eight twenty-five, Sasha walked into the Mellon conference room. Instead of numbering the conference rooms, the decision makers at Prescott had chosen to name them after prominent old Pittsburgh families and luminaries. Sasha assumed all the industrialists and robber-barons whose names graced the conference rooms had once been clients of the firm; some still were.

  She knew for a fact the naming system was confusing to everyone from new employees to clients to visiting attorneys. There were seven floors of offices, each home to four conference rooms, and a second floor conference center, which held another eight. That made for a total of thirty-six conference rooms, none of them numbered or identified by location.

  As she entered the conference room, Sasha smiled to see Lettie, her secretary, fussing around with the catering tray and restacking napkins and coffee stirrers that had been stacked perfectly neatly in the first place, as far as Sasha could tell.

  “Hi, Lettie.”

  Lettie looked up from the pastries. “Good morning, Sasha.”

  Sasha waited for the barrage of information that was coming. Lettie Conrad had gone to secretarial school right after graduating from Sacred Heart High and took her career seriously. She was pleasant, meticulous, always helpful, talkative, and probably one of about four people who knew exactly where every conference room was by name.

  Lettie took a breath and launched in. “After I saw your e-mail, I reserved this conference room for one hour a day for the next month. That’s as far out as the scheduling software will let me block out, but I’ll talk to Myron about extending it. I ordered breakfast for twelve and coffee for eighteen.”

  She paused and pursed her lips to remind her boss how she felt about her coffee consumption and then continued, “I arranged for Flora, from the secretarial pool, to be assigned to the work station right outside. She can make copies, set up conference calls, or whatever you need. If you need me, though, just buzz me and I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

  Sasha nodded, peering through the door at Flora, who smiled widely and waggled five very long, dark purple fingertips at her. Sasha glanced down at Lettie’s short, neatly trimmed nails and made a mental note not to ask Flora to do any word processing.

  “Sounds good, Lettie. Thanks.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Lettie’s hand snaked behind a coffee carafe and reappeared holding a clear plastic cup of yogurt parfait and a spoon.

  “Here. I know you won’t eat that stuff,” she nodded toward the danishes and softball-sized chocolate muffins on the catering tray, “so I ordered this for you. Yogurt and granola. Please eat it.”

  She placed the cup in front of Sasha and patted it gently.

  “Thanks.”

  Lettie turned to leave, then remembered something and turned back. “How was your date?”

  Sasha looked at her blankly.

  “Your date? With the architect?”

  “Oh. I had to cancel because of the plane crash.”

  Lettie fixed her with a long, disapproving look but said nothing.

  She crossed paths with Peterson on her way out and greeted the senior partner formally, “Good morning, Mr. Peterson.”

  “Good morning, Mrs. Conrad.”

  Noah might not have been able to pick any of the junior associates out of a lineup, but he knew all the veteran staff members by name and, in most cases, knew their spouses’ and kids’ names, too.

  He crossed the room and plucked a frosted cinnamon bun roughly the size of a salad plate off the tray. As he raised it to his lips, he tilted his head toward the door. “Is your secretary angry with you?”

  Sasha shook her head. “More like disappointed in me,” she said, prying the domed lid off the parfait. “I canceled another date last night.”

  Peterson laughed softly. “She’ll never get you married off at this rate, Mac.”

  He sat down at the head of the table and turned his attention to his cinnamon bun, as its frosting began to ooze down the side, coming perilously close to his muted, silk tie.

  Despite Prescott’s move to a business casual dress code during the tech boom in the late 1990s, Peterson, like many of the older partners, still wore suits most days. Sasha, who joined the firm after the switch, did too. She figured the senior attorneys were more comfortable in business suits because they’d worn them for decades. She wore suits for the practical reason that most casual clothes in her size involved glitter, ruffles, and lace and made ample use of the colors pink and lavender.

  She could, however, find petite suits and have them altered to fit. Pants were problematic—too much tailoring involved—so she had settled on a uniform of sorts. She wore sheath dresses with matching jackets. Occasionally, she swapped out the jacket for a cardigan.

  Today, because she would be sitting in on the meeting with Metz, she was wearing one of her most conservative suits. A navy sheath with white piping and a long matching jacket. She’d added pearl earrings and a choker and had pulled her hair back into a low, loose chignon. She watched Peterson appraise her. She knew she’d pass muster. Not like the legendary flameout of an associate who’d shown up for a client meeting with a new neck tattoo peeking out from above his collar. She couldn’t even remember his name, but he lived on as a cautionary tale to new hires.

  “Did you line up a paralegal?”

  Legal assistant, Sasha thought, but didn’t bother to correct him. “Naya Andrews.”

  “Excellent.” Peterson dabbed the icing from his lips with a napkin. There was something dainty about the gesture. He scowled at his watch. “It’s 8:32. Where is everyone?”

  “Probably wandering the halls trying to figure out which room is Mellon.”

  Peterson half-smiled, conceding the point. He brushed a stray piece of lint off his jacket lapel. “We’re in Frick for the lunch with Metz.”

  Sasha poured herself a cup of coffee and looked out the window toward Point State Park and the three rivers that met there. The sun was struggling out from behind the clouds but the water looked gray and cold.

  Sasha had been disappointed to learn as a child that, despite Pittsburgh mythology, the rivers didn’t really form a triangle. Her disappointment had been tempered some when her father told her there were actually four rivers. A secret river flowed underground, beneath the city. In fact, it was this fourth, unnamed river that provided the water for the enormous fountain at the Point.

  She turned away from the window and took the seat to Peterson’s right as a small group started to filter into the room. She smiled a little at the symbolism. She was widely perceived as Peterson’s right-hand woman; she figured she might as well make it official.

  She watched with mild interest while, as a mass, the lawyers claimed the seats furthest from her and Peterson—as though they were going to avoid being called on by sitting in the back of a law school lecture hall. After depositing their legal pads, pens, and Blackberries at their seats, most of them headed for the drinks and pastries. Kaitlyn stood over the tray, her hand hovering above a cruller for a long minute, before she pulled it away and chose a muffin instead. Apparently, she’d convinced herself the muffin was a healthier choice despite it being nothing more than a slab of chocolate cake in a paper liner. She’d learn. New associates were always enthusiastic about the ample free food at Prescott & Talbott—until the freshman fifteen appeared out of nowhere.

  Naya came in, ignored the food, and took the seat next to Sasha. She handed Sasha a folder. “Articles on the crash. Check out the flagged one.”

  Sasha flipped through the printouts until she came to one marked with a red sticky flag. It was from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the more conservative of the city’s two daily papers. In the grand tradition of local papers, its coverage of the event was focused on the regional angle. There was a sidebar describing Hemisphere Air as a Pittsburgh company, headquartered in the South Hills, and a longer piece listing the known crash victims who had ties, however tenuous, to Western Pennsylvania.

&nbs
p; Naya had highlighted one victim whose connection wasn’t at all tenuous: a retired city laborer named Angelo Calvaruso, who lived in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Morningside, had been on the doomed flight. The brief biographical information said he had recently been hired as a consultant by Patriotech, a Bethesda, Maryland company, and was survived by his wife, Rosa, four children, and four grandchildren.

  Sasha scanned the other names on the list. Some victims had relatives in Pittsburgh. One had graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in the late 1990s. One was a former local weatherman who had moved up to a station in Virginia. But Mr. Calvaruso appeared to be the only resident of Pittsburgh who had been on the flight.

  She looked at Naya and said, “We found the class representative.”

  Naya nodded, her braids bouncing, “It’s gotta be him.”

  Peterson must have caught a snippet of the conversation. His head swiveled their way, his eyes interested. Sasha handed him the printout, and he skimmed it, stroking his left eyebrow with his index finger as he read. “Looks like he’ll be the guy.”

  Sasha turned back to Naya. “Do you know anyone in the clerk’s office?”

  Noah, Sasha, and Naya knew Mickey Collins had either stumbled upon the existence of the late Angelo Calvaruso the night before or, at the latest, when he read this morning’s paper. They had no doubt he’d already paid Rosa Calvaruso a visit, consoled her in her time of grief, and promptly signed the widow up as his class representative. If he hadn’t, the lion of the plaintiffs’ bar was slipping.

  With a named representative onboard, Mickey would have slapped together a complaint to get on file first thing in the morning. Hell, he’d probably been waiting outside the federal courthouse when it had opened. The complaint itself would likely be laughable—heavy on emotion, thin on allegations—but that wouldn’t matter; he could amend it later. What did matter was getting their hands on a copy of the complaint before Mickey started calling his reporter buddies, so they could help to prepare Metz for the inevitable press inquiries.

  The joke underlying all this urgency was, under the federal rules, Mickey had sixty days after filing before he had to serve Hemisphere Air with a copy of the complaint. Sixty days in a mass accident case was a lifetime. Even if Mickey waited two months to officially serve their client, the assembled lawyers would spend every one of those sixty days gathering information and performing research to aid in the company’s defense.

  Naya was still murmuring into the phone on the credenza, her back to the room, but Peterson was tapping his ring finger against the mahogany table. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. His wedding band beat out a rhythm. Not slow, not fast. Steady. Unrelenting.

  Sasha willed herself not to slam her own hand down on top of his to quiet it. “Noah, do you want to go ahead and get started?” she said instead.

  “Let’s.”

  Sasha raised her voice a notch to be heard over the Tuesday morning quarterbacking of the previous night’s Steelers game. Most of the group had probably set their DVRs to record it while they worked. “Okay, let’s get started.” She stole a glance at the time on her Blackberry display. “It’s twenty to nine. When I said eight thirty, I meant eight thirty. For today and today only, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you were looking for the conference room. Going forward, be here on time. A few minutes early if you want to get your grubby hands on the breakfast treats.”

  Eight heads bobbed their understanding. Kaitlyn opened her mouth, probably to apologize, but Sasha didn’t give her the chance. “Naya Andrews will be the legal assistant on this case.”

  Naya, still on the telephone, turned slightly and shot the group a peace sign. Or the devil’s horns. From this angle, Sasha wasn’t entirely sure which, and, knowing Naya, she figured they were equally probable.

  “Naya is a tremendous resource and we’re lucky to have her on our team. We need to use her time wisely. Any assignments for Naya are to run through me. If I approve it, then you can ask Naya to do it. On the flip side, if Naya asks you to do something, you should assume she’s already talked to me about it and get right on it.”

  Sasha hoped they all caught the subtext. They weren’t to give the legal assistant any bullshit assignments or busy work—or worse, personal errands to run—and they weren’t to give her any lip if she asked them to do something. Despite the warning, Sasha fully expected at least one, probably two, of the lawyers sitting at the table to violate the simple instructions. And heaven help whomever did; Naya would waste no time setting the offender straight and would throw in a few choice cracks about his or her looks, breath, or fashion choices.

  Naya placed the receiver back in the cradle and returned to her seat.

  “So?” Peterson asked.

  “Well, Mickey did file this morning, but get this: Calvaruso’s not the named rep.”

  “What?” Peterson and Sasha said together.

  “I know, weird, right? The deputy clerk said the putative class representatives are listed as Martin and Tonya Grant.”

  “Grant?” Sasha retrieved the article from in front of Peterson and started flipping through it. “Here we go. Celeste Grant, getting her masters in social work at the University of Maryland, is survived by her parents, Tonya and Martin Grant of Regent Square. She was on her way to a training session for some humanitarian group she had signed on to work with in South America next summer.”

  Peterson groaned. Sasha knew what he was thinking: the parents of a graduate student devoted to helping people made for pretty sympathetic plaintiffs. True, but she would have gone with Rosa Calvaruso. A widow, particularly one who wasn’t well off,—which this one almost assuredly was not, given her address and her late husband’s job—would resonate more with a Pittsburgh jury. Not that this case would ever see a jury. Hemisphere Air would settle if Prescott couldn’t get the case dismissed or the class claims kicked on legal grounds. But still, Sasha wondered, what was Mickey Collins thinking?

  “What was he thinking?” she said aloud.

  Peterson raised his shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “Perhaps the widow told him she wasn’t interested.”

  Several pairs of eyebrows shot up around the room. Even these inexperienced attorneys found the idea that a would-be plaintiff would turn down a potential jackpot a bit hard to swallow.

  “Maybe she was in shock,” Kaitlyn offered.

  “Maybe.” Sasha turned back to Naya. “Who caught the case?”

  Naya grinned. “Judge Dolans.”

  The Honorable Amanda Dolans, the last of the Clinton appointees still sitting on the Western District bench, was notoriously pro-plaintiff.

  Joe Donaldson cleared his throat. “Uh, Sasha, I e-mailed my memo to you just before the meeting, so you probably didn’t get a chance to see it yet.” He spoke with effort, like the words were lodged in his throat, fighting not to come out.

  “No, Joe, I didn’t.”

  His eyes, already bleary from the late night spent researching and drafting the memo, clouded over as he broke the news. “Um, well, of the three sitting judges who have MDL experience and who don’t currently have an active MDL case on their dockets, Judge Dolans is the worst for us.”

  Sasha smiled. “Of the other two, who would have been the best?”

  “Either one would have been much better. Mattheis is a pro-business Bush appointee. Westman is an Obama appointee, but his decisions have been very well-reasoned. They both have good track records with MDLs. Mattheis just settled an enormous antitrust MDL, so he probably won’t be assigned another one for a while. But, man, it’s bad luck we got Dolans and not Westman. Based on the opinions I looked at last night, she finds a way to rule for the plaintiff every time.”

  He finished and dropped his gaze to his half-eaten doughnut, ashamed, as though he were somehow responsible for the case being assigned to an unfavorable judge.

  “Rewrite the memo to focus on Westman, summarize his significant opinions, and attach copies of them.”

  Joe looked up
.

  “Mandy Dolans is Mickey Collins’ ex-wife. She’ll recuse herself as soon as the complaint gets to her chambers. She always does when one of his cases is assigned to her. From what I hear, the divorce was ugly.”

  Joe smiled, equal parts relieved Dolans wouldn’t be hearing the case and chagrined he didn’t think to research the judges’ personal lives.

  “It’s difficult being married to a lawyer,” Peterson announced to no one in particular.

  Naya shot Sasha a look.

  Is he okay?

  Sasha shrugged and moved on, “Each of you will be responsible for putting together a dossier on one of the victims. Look for criminal records, unpaid parking tickets, compromising Facebook pictures, internet forum posts, anything you can find that they wouldn’t want us to know about. Naya will e-mail around an assignment list. I’ll take Calvaruso. Kaitlyn, once you finish the conflicts analysis, you take Celeste Grant.”

  Ordinarily, Sasha would have taken Grant herself, but something about Calvaruso was bothering her. She wanted to check it out.

  Parker, a blonde who looked like she should be riding a horse in a Ralph Lauren ad, raised her hand. “Why are we digging up dirt on the crash victims?”

  Sasha glanced at Peterson to see if he wanted to field this one. It was the type of question he was an expert at turning around, obfuscating the moral issue so completely that you ended up wondering how lawyers could claim to represent their clients’ interest if they weren’t trashing the plaintiffs. Peterson didn’t look up from his mug.

  “Don’t think of it as digging up dirt on the victims,” Sasha said. “To properly defend Hemisphere Air, we need to understand our opponents—their motivations, their strengths, and their weaknesses.”

  Parker twirled a long strand of hair around her finger and just looked at her.

  “You’ll be surprised at how much damaging information is out there about people. Last year, Noah and I were defending UPMC against an employee who claimed he couldn’t work because he had a debilitating fear that the building was toxic even though the results of environmental studies showed it wasn’t. But he said he experienced all the symptoms of sick building syndrome whenever he came to work.”

  She waited a minute to let her colleagues scoff and laugh derisively. It was absurd now, but at the time the medical center had been staring down the barrel at a high seven-figure demand and there was nothing funny about the case.

  She went on, “Plaintiff’s counsel retained a doctor from New Mexico who touted himself as the leading expert in this area. A three-minute Google search revealed a state medical board decision revoking his medical license, a Justice Department investigation into possible Medicare fraud for bogus billing of nonexistent treatments, and a federal court decision barring him from testifying because it viewed his opinion as junk science. After a very entertaining deposition of the good doctor, the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed with prejudice in exchange for our not filing a motion for sanctions and fees. Could we have really served UPMC’s interests in that case if we hadn’t thoroughly researched our opponent? Of course not.”

  The assembled attorneys bobbed their heads, sold on the idea. Caught up in the moment, they failed to appreciate the difference between discrediting a for-hire whore selling his opinions to the highest bidder and destroying the shell-shocked family members’ memories of their loved ones—men and women who were just trying to get from Point A to Point B.

  If averages held, two of the associates sitting around the table would stumble onto that distinction at some point. And one of them would care. That one would become a former Prescott attorney. The other would someday pick out the furniture for a corner office.

  The meeting broke up and people drifted out, talking about how awesome it must have been to shove that expert down plaintiff counsel’s throat.

  Sasha stayed behind to cadge the remaining pastries for Lettie and her friends. On her way out, she stopped to offer one to Flora, who deliberated before settling on a muffin.

  “Thanks,” she said, peeling back the paper with her purple talons.

  Naya came out of the conference room and caught up with Sasha at Flora’s work station. She put a hand on Sasha’s arm to keep her there.

  “What’s going on with Peterson?” Naya asked.

  Sasha shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Well, you’d better be ready to take the lead during the meeting with Metz. Look at him.” Naya pulled Sasha back into the doorway.

  Noah Peterson sat in the now-darkened, otherwise empty conference room, his eyes still on the mug on the table in front of him.