Ford County Page 10

  and was now just waiting. The men pulled the coffin from the van. Butch and Leon gently placed their mother’s wheelchair on the ground and pushed her as they followed the coffin.

  They lowered it with ropes, and when it settled onto the four-by-four studs at the bottom, they withdrew the ropes. The preacher read a short verse of Scripture, then said a prayer. Leon and Butch shoveled some dirt onto the coffin, then thanked the men for their assistance.

  As they drove away, the backhoe was refilling the grave.

  The house was empty—no concerned neighbors waiting, no relatives there to mourn. They unloaded Inez and rolled her into the house and into her bedroom. She was soon fast asleep. The four boxes were placed in a storage shed, where their contents would weather and fade along with the memories of Raymond.

  It was decided that Butch would stay home that day to care for Inez, and to ward off the reporters. There had been many calls in the past week, and someone was bound to show up with a camera. He worked at a sawmill, and his boss would understand.

  Leon drove to Clanton and stopped on the edge of town to fill up with gas. At 8:00 a.m. sharp he pulled in to the lot at McBride Upholstery and returned the van. An employee explained that Mr. McBride wasn’t in yet, was probably still at the coffee shop, and usually got to work around 9:00. Leon handed over the keys, thanked the employee, and left.

  He drove to the lamp factory east of town, and punched the clock at 8:30, as always.

  Fish Files

  After seventeen years of grinding out a living in a law practice that, for some forgotten reason, had gradually been reduced to little more than bankruptcy and divorce work, it was astonishing, even years later, that one phone call could change so much. As a busy lawyer who handled the desperate problems of others, Mack Stafford had made and received all sorts of life-altering phone calls: calls to initiate or settle divorces; calls to pass along grim court rulings on child custody; calls to inform honest men that they would not be repaid. Unpleasant calls, for the most part. He had never thought about the possibility that one call could so quickly and dramatically lead to his own divorce and bankruptcy.

  It came during lunch on a bleak and dreary and otherwise slow Tuesday in early February, and because it was just after noon, Mack took it himself. Freda, the secretary, had stepped out for an errand and a sandwich, and since his little firm employed no one else, Mack was left to guard the phone. As things evolved, the fact that he was alone was crucial. If Freda had answered it, there would have been questions, and lots of them. In fact, most of what followed would not have happened had she been at her post in the reception area near the front door of a little shop known as: Law Offices of Jacob McKinley Stafford, LLC.

  After the third ring, Mack grabbed the phone on his desk in the back and offered the usual, brusque "Law office." He received on average fifty calls a day, most from warring spouses and disgruntled creditors, and he had long since developed the habit of disguising his voice and withholding his name when forced to take calls unfiltered by Freda. He hated answering the phone cold, but he also needed the business. Like every other lawyer in Clan-ton, and there were plenty, he never knew when the next call might be the big one, the big catch, the big case that could lead to a handsome fee and maybe even a way out. Mack had been dreaming of such a phone call for more years than he cared to admit.

  And on this cold winter day, with a slight chance of snow in the air, the call finally arrived.

  A male voice with a different accent, from somewhere up north, replied, "Yes, Mr. Mack Stafford, please."

  The voice was too polished and too far away to worry him, so he replied, "This is Mack."

  "Mr. Mack Stafford, the attorney?"

  "Correct. Who's calling?"

  "My name is Marty Rosenberg, and I'm with the Durban & Lang firm in New York."

  "New York City?" Mack asked, and much too quickly. Of course it was New York City. Though his practice had never taken him anywhere near the big city, he certainly knew of Durban & Lang. Every lawyer in America had at least heard of the firm.

  "That's correct. May I call you Mack?" The voice was quick but polite, and Mack suddenly had a visual of Mr. Rosenberg sit' ting in a splendid office with art on the walls and associates and secretaries scurrying about tending to his needs. Yet in the midst of such power he wanted to be friendly. A wave of insecurity swept over Mack as he looked around his dingy little room and wondered if Mr. Rosenberg had already decided he was just an-other small-town loser because he answered his own phone.

  "Sure. And I'll just call you Marty."

  "Great."

  "Sorry, Marty, to grab the phone, but my secretary stepped out for lunch." It was important for Mack to clear the air and let this guy know that he was a real lawyer with a real secretary.

  "Yes, well, I forgot that you're an hour behind us," Marty said with a trace of contempt, the first hint that perhaps they were separated by far more than just a simple hour.

  "What can I do for you?" Mack said, seizing control of the conversation. Enough of the small talk. Both were busy, important attorneys. His mind was in overdrive as he tried to think of any case, any file, any legal matter that could conceivably merit interest from such a large and prestigious law firm.

  "Well, we represent a Swiss company that recently purchased most of the Tinz,o group out of South Korea. You're familiar with Tinz,o?"

  "Of course," Mack replied quickly, while his mind racked its memory for some recollection of Tinzo. It did indeed ring a bell, though a very distant one.

  "And according to some old Tinzo records, you at one time represented some loggers who claimed to have been injured by defective chain saws manufactured by a Tinzo division in the Philippines."

  Oh, that Tinzo! Now Mack was in the game. Now he remembered, though the details were still not at his fingertips. The cases were old, stale, and almost forgotten because Mack had tried his best to forget them.

  "Terrible injuries," he said anyway. Terrible as they might have been, they had never been so grievous as to prompt Mack to actually file suit. He'd signed them up years earlier but lost interest when he couldn't bluff a quick settlement. His theory of liability was shaky at best. The Tinzo chain saws in question actually had an impressive safety record. And, most important, product liability litigation was complicated, expensive, way over his head, and usually involved jury trials, which Mack had always tried to avoid. There was comfort in filing divorces and personal bankruptcies and doing an occasional will or deed. Little in the way of fees, but he and most of the other lawyers in Clanton could eke out a living while avoiding almost all risk.

  "We have no record of any lawsuits being filed down there," Marty was saying.

  "Not yet," Mack said with as much bluster as he could manage.

  "How many of these cases do you have, Mack?"

  "Four," he said, though he wasn't certain of the exact number.

  "Yes, that's what our records show. We have the four letters you sent to the company sometime back. However, there doesn't seem to have been much activity since the original correspondence."

  "The cases are active," Mack said, and for the most part it was a lie. The office files were still open, technically, but he hadn't touched them in years. Fish files, he called them. The longer they sit there untouched, the more they stink. "We have a six-year statute of limitations," he said, somewhat smugly, as if he just might crank up things tomorrow and commence all manner of hardball litigation.

  "Kind of unusual, if I must say so," Marty mused. "Not a thing in the files in over four years."

  In an effort to steer the conversation away from his own procrastination, Mack decided to get to the point. "Where is this going, Marty?"

  "Well, our Swiss client wants to clean up the books and get rid of as much potential liability as possible. They're European, of course, and they don't understand our tort system. Frankly, they're terrified of it."

  "With good reason," Mack jumped in, as if he routinely extracted h
uge sums of money from corporate wrongdoers.

  "They want these things off the books, and they've instructed me to explore the possibility of settlement."

  Mack was on his feet, phone wedged between his jaw and shoulder, his pulse racing, his hands scrambling for a fish file in a pile of debris on the sagging credenza behind his desk, a frantic search for the names of his clients who'd been maimed years ago by the sloppy design and production of Tinzo chain saws. Say what? Settlement? As in money changing hands from the rich to the poor? Mack couldn't believe what he was hearing.

  "Are you there, Mack?" Marty asked.

  "Oh yes, just flipping through a file here. Let's see, the chain saws were all the same, a model 58X, twenty-four-inch with the nickname of LazerCut, a heavy-duty pro model that for some reason had a chain guard that was defective and dangerous."

  "You got it, Mack. I'm not calling to argue about what might have been defective, that's what trials are for. I'm talking about settlement, Mack. Are you with me?"

  Damned right I am, Mack almost blurted. "Certainly. I'm happy to talk settlement. You obviously have something in mind. Let's hear it." He was seated again, tearing through the file, looking for dates, praying that the six-year statute of limitations had not expired on any of these now critically important cases.

  "Yes, Mack, I have some money to offer, but I must caution you up front that my client has instructed me not to negotiate. If we can settle these matters quickly, and very quietly, then we'll write the checks. But when the dickering starts, the money disappears. Are we clear on this, Mack?"

  Oh yes. Crystal clear. Mr. Marty Rosenberg in his fancy office high above Manhattan had no idea how quickly and quietly and cheaply he could make the fish files disappear. Mack would take anything. His badly injured clients had long since stopped calling. "Agreed," Mack said.

  Marty shifted gears, and his words became even crisper. "We figure it would cost a hundred thousand to defend these cases in federal court down there, assuming we could lump them together and have just one trial. This is obviously a stretch since the cases have not been filed, and, frankly, litigation seems unlikely, given the thinness of the file. Add another hundred thousand for the injuries, none of which have been documented, mind you, but we understand some fingers and hands have been lost. Anyway, we'll pay a hundred thousand per claim, throw in the cost of defense, and the total on the table comes to half a million bucks."

  Mack's jaw dropped, and he almost swallowed the phone. He was prepared to demand at least three times any amount Marty first mentioned, the usual lawyer's routine, but for a few seconds he could neither speak nor breathe.

  Marty went on: "All up-front money, confidential, no admission of liability, with the offer good for thirty days, until March 10."

  An offer of $10,000 per claim would have been a shock, and a windfall. Mack gasped for air and tried to think of a response.

  Marty went on: "Again, Mack, we're just trying to clean up the balance sheet. Whatta you think?"

  What do I think? Mack repeated to himself. I think my cut is 40 percent and the math is easy. I think that last year I grossed $95,000 and burned half of it in overhead—Freda's salary and the office bills—which left me with a net of about $46,000 before taxes, which I think was slightly less than my wife earned as an assistant principal at Clanton High School. I'm thinking a lot of things right now, some really random stuff like (1) Is this a joke? (2) Who from my law school class could be behind this? (3) Assuming it's real, how can I keep the wolves away from this wonderful fee? (4) My wife and two daughters would burn through this money in less than a month; (5) Freda would demand a healthy bonus; (6) How can I approach my chain-saw clients after so many years of neglect? And so on. I'm thinking about a lot of stuff, Mr. Rosenberg.

  "That's very generous, Marty," Mack managed to say, finally. "I'm sure my clients will be pleased." After the shock, his brain was beginning to focus again.

  "Good. Do we have a deal?"

  "Well, let me see. I, of course, will need to run this by my clients, and that might take a few days. Can I call you in a week?"

  "Of course. But we're anxious to wrap this up, so let's hurry. And, Mack, I cannot stress enough our desire for confidentiality. Can we agree to bury these settlements, Mack?"

  For that kind of money, Mack would agree to anything. "I understand," he said. "Not a word to anyone." And Mack meant it. He was already thinking of all the people who would never know about this lottery ticket.

  "Great. You'll call me in a week?"

  "You got it, Marty. And, listen, my secretary has a big mouth. It's best if you don't call here again. I'll call you next Tuesday. What time?"

  "How about eleven, eastern?"

  "You got it, Marty."

  They swapped phone numbers and addresses, and said goodbye. According to the digital timer on Mack's phone, the call lasted eight minutes and forty seconds.

  The phone rang again just after Marty hung up, but Mack could only stare at it. He wouldn't dare push his luck. Instead, he walked to the front of his office, to the large front window with his name painted on it, and he looked across the street to the Ford County Courthouse, where, at that moment, some garden-variety ham-and-egg lawyers were upstairs munching on cold sandwiches in the judge's chambers and haggling over another $50 a month in child support, and whether the wife should get the Honda and hubby should get the Toyota. He knew they were there because they were always there, and he was often with them. And down the hall in the clerk's office more lawyers were poring over land records and lien books and dusty old plats while they bantered back and forth in their tired humor, jokes and stories and quips he'd heard a thousand times. A year or two earlier, someone had counted fifty-one lawyers in the town of Clanton, and virtually all were packed together around the square, their offices facing the courthouse. They ate in the same cafes, met in the same coffee, shops, drank in the same bars, hustled the same clients, and almost all of them harbored the same gripes and complaints about their chosen profession. Somehow, a town often thousand people provided enough conflict to support fifty-one lawyers, when in reality less than half that number were needed.

  Mack had rarely felt needed. To be sure, he was needed by his wife and daughters, though he often wondered if they wouldn't be happier without him, but the town and its legal needs would certainly survive nicely without him. In fact, he had realised long ago that if he suddenly closed shop, few would notice. No client would go without representation. The other lawyers would se-cretly grin because they had one less competitor. No one in the courthouse would miss him after a month or so. This had saddened him for many years. But what really depressed him was not the present or the past but the future. The prospect of waking up one day at the age of sixty and still trudging to the office—no doubt the same office—and filing no-fault divorces and nickel-and-dime bankruptcies on behalf of people who could barely pay his modest fees, well, it was enough to sour his mood every day of his life. It was enough to make Mack a very unhappy man.

  He wanted out. And he wanted out while he was still young.

  A lawyer named Wilkins passed by on the sidewalk without glancing at Mack's window. Wilkins was a jackass who worked four doors down. Years ago, over a late-afternoon drink with three other lawyers, one of whom was Wilkins, Mack had talked too much and divulged the details of his grand scheme to make a killing with chain-saw litigation. Of course the scheme went nowhere, and when Mack could not convince any of the more competent trial lawyers in the state to sign on, his chain-saw files began to stink. Wilkins, ever the prick, would catch Mack in the presence of other lawyers and say something like, "Hey, Mack, how's that chain-saw class action coming along?" Or, "Hey, Mack, you settled those chain-saw cases yet?" With time, though, even Wilkins forgot about the cases.

  Hey, Wilkins, take a look at this settlement, old boy! Half a million bucks on the table, $200,000 of it goes into my pocket. At least that much, maybe more. Hey, Wilkins, you haven't cleared $200,000 in the la
st five years combined.

  But Mack knew that Wilkins would never know. No one would know, and that was fine with Mack.

  Freda would soon make her usual noisy entrance. Mack hurried to his desk, called the number in New York, asked for Marty Rosenberg, and when his secretary answered, Mack hung up and smiled. He checked his afternoon schedule, and it was as dreary as the weather. One new divorce at 2:30, and an ongoing one at 4:30. There was a list of fifteen phone calls to make, not a single one of which he looked forward to. The fish files on the credenza were festering in neglect. He grabbed his overcoat, left his briefcase, and sneaked out the back door.

  His car was a small BMW with 100,000 miles on the odometer. The lease expired in five months, and he was already fretting about what to drive next. Since lawyers, regardless of how broke they may be, are supposed to drive something impressive, he had been quietly shopping around, careful to keep things to himself. His wife would not approve of whatever he chose, and he simply wasn't ready for that fight.

  His favorite beer trail began at Parker's Country Store, eight miles south of town in a small community where no one ever