Chapter 17
From just inside the entrance, Gage scanned Stymie’s Gym in East Oakland at five forty-five the next morning until he caught sight of trial lawyer Skeeter Hall in a corner struggling under an Olympic bar. Gage tossed down his gym bag and slipped around the back of the weight bench to spot him.
“Breathe out, Skeeter,” Gage said, looking down at his grimacing face, “or you’re going to bust a gut.”
Air exploded through Skeeter’s clenched teeth.
Gage helped him guide the bar onto the crutches at the top of the roller tubes, then walked around and sat down on the next bench.
“Two twenty,” Gage said. “Not bad for a sixty-five-year-old.”
“Sixty-four,” Skeeter said, sitting up. He wiped his face with the bottom of his sleeveless sweatshirt, then swung his leg over the bench to face Gage. “What are you pushing up, youngster?”
“For reps? No more than one ninety. I don’t put these old joints at risk anymore.”
“What could you do if you did?”
Gage grinned. “Two twenty-one.”
“Smart-ass. You want me to spot you?”
“Just some information.”
Skeeter glanced up at the wall clock above the entrance. “Isn’t this a little early in the A.M. for gumshoeing?”
“I’m not a gumshoe. I’m a modern PI. This is called multitasking.”
Gage reached into his gym bag and handed Skeeter a water bottle.
“Thanks.” Skeeter flipped the top open and took a sip. “What task concerns me?”
“You remember the TIMCO case?”
“As if it was yesterday.” Skeeter’s mouth went tight. “Those assholes.”
“You mean corporate assholes in general, or this particular one?”
“This particular one. I’ve never seen a company try to torpedo its own employees that bad. You got four dead guys, three of them with kids. One with a great engineering career ahead of him…”
“Porzolkiewski.”
“Yeah… Porzolkiewski… Tom Fields helped me out on the case, may he rest in peace.”
“Fields is dead?”
“Heart attack at Pebble Beach. Eleventh hole. A family history of heart disease and he was seventy pounds overweight. Did it to himself. A waste.” Skeeter took another sip. “You know that kid Porzolkiewski was a paraplegic, right? A rookie cop chasing after a stolen car drop-kicked him out of a crosswalk. No lights. No siren. He was nineteen. A student at Berkeley.”
“Looks like nothing came easy in that family.”
“The kid used to haul himself up those huge fractionating towers hand over hand.”
Gage understood the technology, so didn’t ask for an explanation. Crude oil was heated at the base of the tower and the rising product was separated out by boiling point and then siphoned off.
“Forearms like piston rods. He was trapped a couple of hundred feet up when the thing blew.” Skeeter put the bottle down on the bench beside him. “It was a chain reaction. A pressure release valve failed on the line carrying kerosene. It sprayed onto a generator they were using to run scrubbers to clean a drain. Set the thing off. The fire ran up the tower, then exploded. The diesel line blew. The gasoline line blew. A firestorm. None of the guys could get down. They were like marshmallows on a stick. It still makes me heartsick to think about it.”
Skeeter lowered his head and rubbed his temples. His eyes were wet when he looked up.
“It was a tough case to lose…” Skeeter’s face hardened. “Except we didn’t lose it. It was stolen.”
“What do you mean?”
“We…” Skeeter paused, as if finding himself halfway down a trail he had no idea why he was taking, and it was heading toward a cliff. “Why are you interested?”
“I’m not sure about the why, but I can tell you the what. I’m trying to find out more about Brandon Meyer’s role in the case and I’m especially interested in Porzolkiewski’s father.”
“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
