The Knowland Retribution

Locator.

Reputations grow most quickly in sensitive lines of work. Walter had a talent made for an apparently insatiable market. The sons and daughters of notable people-rich ones, celebrities, public figures; mostly, in fact, the daughters-were opting for the AWOL life in very impressive numbers. Almost all of the younger ones, the kids in their early teens, were into sex and drugs. Once they had some of either they couldn’t get enough. For the older ones, the college kids, it was parents driving them over the edge, and they just had to get away. Rarely did any have any idea of how to avoid being captured. Their survival skills amounted to a credit card and a Holiday Inn. They were easy for Walter, if not others, to catch.

He found wives who’d slammed the door and peeled off in the Mercedes and forgotten the way back. There were endless embarrassing family members, the boozy, brawling brother-in-law, the loving husband gone deep underground, the off-kilter auntie who thought the better of coming home from the club one day. It might be the CEO taking a breather from heterosexual pretense, so much in love that he failed to notice the passing of the time. It might be his horsehide-happy spouse. The kinkier the sex, the more anxious the contracting party; the more the client was more than willing to pay.

Famous, wealthy, and public people, Walter quickly discovered, can be embarrassed by almost anyone close to them. When those close disappeared, when they went missing or lost, and especially when they seriously intended to stay that way, Walter was the man their protectors found to find them. He much preferred the droll situations, the high-priced peccadilloes. It was the melancholy Walter could do without, the hard-core human interest.

He made it his business to offer his clients the commodity they held most precious: privacy. He didn’t start a firm. He didn’t promote himself. He did not become Walter Sherman, P. I. He didn’t print cards, open an office, have a secretary, or even a phone. He worked only by referral. You couldn’t get to him unless you knew someone who knew someone who knew someone else. Consequently, he did not do this work often, and for another year continued his shifts at the warehouse. But that, his mother pointed out, was how to really advertise discretion.

Back then, if you did your due diligence and actually managed to talk to Walter Sherman, you did so on his mother’s line. And before he stepped foot out of her house, you’d had someone hand-deliver a box full of fifties and hundreds.

St. John

“Off the rack?” asked the old black man sitting at one of Billy’s tables, the square, chronically creaky one nearest the front. “I don’t think so!”

He was short and thin like an old broom handle. He wore a close-cut white beard and had almost no hair under a pink baseball cap sporting the red bulldozer logo of a construction company on St. Thomas. His small, delicate, deeply creased face always seemed to be smiling, and maybe it was. The smile showed a full set of wonderfully large and strong-looking yellow teeth. Ike had to sit near the front because he smoked cigarettes one after another and Billy hated smoke. That particular dislike struck Walter as a singular disadvantage for a man who owned a bar. But there it was.

“Tailor made,” said Walter.

Ike nodded contentedly. “New York or Hong Kong? I’ll say Hong Kong. They make a lot of suits over there in Asia.” Ike nodded again, this time definitively.

“Italy.” Walter told him.

“Italy?” Ike half-whispered, half in agreement, half not. “What you think, Billy?”

Billy Smith wasn’t his real name-William Mantkowski was-but the locals laughed at that jumble of sounds and divided it into five parts, with witty pauses between each and prolonged laughter at the end. After a month on St. John, William Mantkowski rechristened himself Billy Smith. He bought a bar called Frogman’s and, once in charge, changed absolutely nothing except the name on the sign out front. No one on St. John asks a white man where his money comes from. That was eleven years ago. Walter had been a regular at Frogman’s, and, like the furniture, stayed.

“New York,” said Billy, leaning back on the other side of the bar opposite Walter at the far end. His skinny, ostrich-skinned elbows rested on the faded gray formica liquor shelf behind him. He stood there, tall and bone-white, almost as white, it seemed to Walter, as his ugly rugby shirt, shaking his head like he had some great wisdom he was about to impart. “Italian tailor, maybe, but the suits are from New York. Where exactly, who knows. But New York.” He meant that he couldn’t specify where in Manhattan this New York tailor tailored. He jutted his thick, black-stubbled jaw.

“They all from New York?” Ike squinted as he pursued the investigation, absently blowing smoke from his mouth into his nose.

“Ike, that shit will kill you,” Billy growled. “Yeah, they’re all from New York, and the suits too. Right Walter?”

Walter shook his head. “Made in Italy.”

“Hong Kong,” mumbled Ike.

“Write it up, Billy,” said Walter, confirming closure.

Billy shambled to the center of the bar, grabbed a blue chalk stub from beside the fifty-year-old cash register, and carefully printed several more words onto the four-foot-square rimless blackboard propped against the streaked and pitted mirror. They were: “New York/Hong Kong/Italy.” He was confident New York would garner the most votes.

“Walter, you know the problem with New York?”

“No, Ike, what’s the problem with New York?”

“Too big,” the old man said gravely. “Too damn big.”

In that instant Walter’s thoughts alighted again on Tom Maloney and the substantial possibility that by bedtime he’d have in hand just the type of assignment he liked best-one involving excellent money and minimal human interest-which caused him to surprise his friends with a sweetly incongruous smile. “And too fucking cold in the winter,” he said.

Atlanta

“Sorry, no time,” said Leonard Martin.

Nina turned to him, disappointed.

“Harvey just called. He wants me there. You know he wouldn’t bother me if he didn’t have a reason.”

Nina’s frown stayed put. He knew what she was thinking and took her unspoken point. “He’s not imagining things. It’s a difficult deal. He spoke with the client last night. The old man’s in a mood.”

She gave him the smirk that never changed, narrowing her left eye-clear and hazel-bright as ever-bunching up the smooth, curved lips that still held their exquisite shape. Through it all, he’d loved her skepticism.

“Did Harvey tell you that?”

“Not in so many words. He hates to admit he can’t handle it. But he said he’d like me there. And I bet that’s what it is. But you make the decision. I can have breakfast with you and the kids, and I’d really love to do it. But if something goes wrong with this big ol’ deal, and something or other falls through the cracks, and it’s all ’cause an old client’s gout is making him act difficult…”

She turned to the bowl of batter she’d been fixing. They’d had a good night, the first in a while. She was feeling happy and too unsure to risk his eyes going distant. “Then get your big ass to wherever you’re going.” She turned her head back for a kiss and said, “I’ll tell the boys you’re making millions to build a basketball court behind their house.”

“I’ll do it, too,” said Leonard Martin, “and don’t you think I won’t.”

His daughter pulled into the drive as he closed the front door behind him. The boys poured out of the van.

“Where you going, Grandpa? Ain’t you having breakfast?” Mark, the eight-year-old, grabbed him around the waist. Mark’s younger brother Scott hung back. Scott was thinner, quiet as an infant, reserved and grave as a child-very much his father’s child, and far more deeply affected when his father moved out. Leonard told his grandson he had to skip breakfast and added, loud enough for Ellie to hear, “Tell your mom not to pay much attention to anything your nana might say about basketball courts.”

“See you later, Daddy. We’re going to go shopping. Why don’t you come home for lunch?” She kissed his cheek and gave his belly a pat. He stood in the driveway, listening as the three of them bustled inside.

It was eight forty-five on a beautiful Thursday morning in June. From the driveway he could see bright sunlight pouring into the high kitchen windows. The still, cool air shifted gently. The doors to the back deck were open and he imagined the air slipping through the house and into the kitchen, bringing with it the sounds around him, the early morning bird calls, the voices of golfers already on the second fairway not thirty yards from the house.

And they had a fine breakfast without him. Nina and Ellie threw apple chunks into the scratch batter in the bowl, and they heaped each plate with Georgia’s Own pork sausage, honey-sweet and dripping with country flavor, grilled on an open skillet, filling the house with the scent of heaven itself. The boys gulped milk and the women sipped cappuccino from the coffee machine Leonard forced his wife to buy on the last day of their last trip to Milan. Harvey Daniels had been right. This client was in a mood. It wasn’t that the deal would go bad. They were all too committed for that. But when any client starts picking at legal language, delay was in the cards. He did it to satisfy some inner need, very likely to make whatever his ailment behave, and nine times out of ten it was mistaken for conscientious representation.

The firm of Stevenson, Daniels, Martin, had long ago learned that client whims meant time lost sprinting in circles. They’d also discovered the remedy: Leonard’s patented, “Fuck with us Jim or John or Joan and it all goes down the crapper” speech, delivered in a corner, in a serious, menacing tone, but always accompanied by a semi-friendly poke or elbow-squeeze.

Harvey had tried it once. The client took offense and nit-picked all the more fiercely. None of them ever considered Nick Stevenson for the role. This time the ploy worked especially well; Jim allowed that Honest to God he had no serious problems. The papers got signed and another developer staked his claim to fifty more acres of doomed Georgia pine.

Leonard Martin, Harvey Daniels, and Nicholas Stevenson partnered in 1973. Lenny and Harvey, novice attorneys, were part of Atlanta’s late sixties population explosion. They’d come for jobs at the same big downtown firm. Every time it snowed in New York or Chicago, two dozen lawyers applied for a job in Atlanta. That was the office joke. There were kernels of truth in the gag and they didn’t try to deny it; Atlanta was warm and wonderful.

Lenny and Harvey bought pricey new homes in the growing northern suburbs. They were among the first to join an exclusive North Fulton golf club. A partner joked that the club was so far north that they should have done it right, found one in Tennessee. They were also among the first to see the riches that real estate law had to offer down the road. Atlanta was growing so fast, so many people were moving in, so many homes were being built-and so few lawyers were even half awake-that they took one good look and made the leap. They approached Nicholas Stevenson, a laid-back Southern gent with a one-man real estate practice out in Dunwoody. Stevenson was a few years older and the butt of collegial humor concerning his ethics. He was considered obsessively honest. He agreed that the boom was only beginning. They formed Stevenson, Daniels, Martin, Attorneys at Law, and set their sights on closing more real estate deals than any firm in Atlanta.

Five years later they were in six locations. By 1983 they had eleven-in Fulton, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. The next ten years took them farther north-into Cherokee county, Forsyth, and Hall. Now they had sixteen offices, all doing upscale residential work-from sleek, modern condos in Buckhead, to million dollar retreats up on Lake Lanier, to old-boy mansions down in the wool hat country around West Paces Ferry. But their focus remained on Atlanta’s astounding northern sprawl. They soon got into commercial transactions, helping to turn north metro into a land of office towers, convention hotels, and mall developments everywhere. When they celebrated their twentieth year, each of the three was earning eight hundred thousand dollars plus.

Leonard and Nina vacationed in Europe and week-ended at their beachfront condo on Hilton Head Island off South Carolina. They educated Ellie in Atlanta’s top private schools, then sent her off to Duke, the school everyone in their circle called the Princeton of the South. When Ellie came home she married a systems analyst, Carter Lawrence. Leonard and Nina helped them buy a house in nearby Roswell. When, after Scotty was born, Ellie lost interest in her marriage, they tried to turn her around. But she’d done nothing very exciting at Duke and wildness took hold of her ten years late. While they could not keep Ellie and Carter together, they did keep Carter close. Now that she was quieting down, Leonard hoped they might try again, but Nina had her doubts. Carter never found anyone else, and the boys were his only real interest, and he’d set himself up as some kind of consultant, and seemed to be making a go of it… and Leonard had his hopes.

Leonard had two hobbies. He played golf, badly. Unlike most men, however, he really enjoyed it. He cared nothing about the score. “You’re the only one I ever play with,” Harvey told him, “who doesn’t cheat.” Why should he? Four, five, six, whatever-it didn’t matter. Leonard liked getting up early and going out to the course while the grass was still wet and you could see the steam and haze all the way down the fairway. He liked riding in those silly golf carts, racing up hills, taking the turns too fast, always scaring Harvey, who seemed in constant fear that they were about to crash. Most of all he liked hitting the ball. Where it went was secondary. He was thrilled by the feel of the metal clubhead against the cover of the ball. The tension in his arms and legs. The sound-the hoped-for sharp click. The divot. The flight of the ball even when it went into the woods. Leonard had a wonderful time playing golf. Aside from his family, his business, and golf, Leonard’s great passion was reserved for acting. He joined the North Georgia Community Players soon after he and Nina moved to Alpharetta. “Go on,” she’d urged him when he mentioned it one day. He did some acting in college. He was in a few plays and Nina knew he loved it. In his thirties he often played the male lead, the romantic lead if lucky, or the featured male role, the best friend, partner, sidekick, even villain. In his forties his frame got heavier and his parts got smaller, but his years of experience seemed to bring a deeper understanding to all his roles than they usually received in community theater productions. His biggest success was as Lenny in Of Mice and Men. The play was such a hit that the company brought it back, by popular demand, every two or three years. No matter who played the other roles, Leonard Martin was always the slow-witted, vulnerable Lenny. His friends kidded him about it, pretending to be a little retarded themselves, and Leonard’s real name didn’t hurt his association with the role. “You really are Lenny,” was something he heard many times. He considered it a compliment.

Barbara Coffino joined the company when Leonard was at the height of his Mice and Men popularity. She was an artist, a jewelry designer with her own studio in Dahlonaga, a thriving arts and crafts village complete with a town square surrounded by antique shops, art galleries, and a scattering of coffeehouses and restaurants. Originally the town had been the site of the great gold rush that hit the Georgia Mountains years before anyone thought there might be gold in the west. Although many Californians would hate to know it, the famous call “there’s gold in them thar hills” referred to Dahlonaga, Georgia. The dome of the Georgia State Capitol on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard in downtown Atlanta shines brightly in the southern sun coated with pure Georgia gold. Every ounce of it came from Dahlonaga. Barbara Coffino used some of that gold to make her jewelry.

She was a little older and just a little heavier, but she was often told she looked like Debra Winger. She certainly had some of the actress’s sexy, self-confident attitude. Leonard did a Chekhov play with her during her first season with the Players. She played a Russian woman of high nobility, and her costume was a flowing gown with a high waist, plunging neckline, and significant cleavage. One night she came off stage and whispered in his ear, “You have to stop looking at me like that-or ask me out.”

Their affair began that night. He and Nina had been together for so long, since college. It’s not that they had grown apart, but the spark was not much more than an ember and the heat was on low flame. He couldn’t help himself. He wanted Barbara and she wanted him. Barbara was divorced. Leonard, of course, had a wife and family. That fact seemed to bother him more than her. Barbara was content to spend time with Leonard as the opportunity arose. She led a busy, independent life. She made no demands on him that he was unable to fulfill. She had no intention of breaking up his family or of ever marrying Leonard Martin or anyone. They didn’t sneak around. Leonard never told Nina he had to meet someone for dinner or go out of town on business. He was always home for dinner. He was his own boss, answerable only to his partners. He made his own schedule. He would drive the forty-five minutes to Dahlonaga, spend a morning or an afternoon with Barbara, then drive back. Sure, he told the small lies. He’d say to Nina he had to get going early for a morning meeting. Sometimes, when Nina would call to see if Leonard could meet her for lunch, he would beg off, using the excuse he had to be somewhere else or that he just couldn’t get away. Most of the time Nina thought he was looking at a piece of real estate for a client or for some other purpose. At least Leonard believed that was what she thought and she never gave him reason to believe otherwise. So he told the little lies, nothing big, nothing specific. He had no trouble telling them. If she didn’t know, she couldn’t be hurt. He almost convinced himself he was doing the noble thing. When he refused breakfast this morning it was not because he was driving to Dahlonaga. At least not until later. He hadn’t seen Barbara in more than a week. He looked forward to spending the morning in bed with her.

As Ellie and others were fond of observing, middle age brought unwanted physical change. Leonard’s waistline had grown apace with his escalating net worth. Throughout the Reagan boom and into the Clinton years his stock investments and property interests thrived. Each year brought larger bonuses and shame-faced trips to the tailor.

All in all, Leonard and Nina Martin thought they had a bit more than most-certainly more than folks who didn’t like work, or had no get-up-and-go. They enjoyed their church, and loved their friends, and though neither was ignorant, or dense, or callous, both considered themselves the most average of Americans.

Leonard’s cell phone rang just before noon. He would not have taken it, but the phone was nearby and he saw that the call came from Ellie’s cell. She rarely called him, and Leonard felt a sharp concern that something was wrong with the boys. The voice was Mark’s.

“We’re having a cookout, Grandpa. Mamma and Nana said they want you to come here right now and eat some burgers with us by the pool. Okay?”

It was then that Nina took the phone from Mark. She said, “How about it? You want some?”

“How come the boys are still there?”

“They’ve been here all morning, in the pool mostly. They look like a couple of prunes. Ellie went shopping, but she’s back and we’re going to have a cookout-delicious, juicy, rare burgers. I know how much you like that.”

The invitation was more than appealing-grilling outdoors with the boys running around making noise, Ellie talking sensibly as she had now for several months, and Nina looking hopeful and young. Just then he would have preferred to be home, but he couldn’t leave Dahlonaga.

“Sorry dear,” he said. “I can’t. See you tonight.”

By one thirty Mark and Scott had stomach pain. By two they were throwing up. As the afternoon wore on their rising fever frightened Ellie and Nina. They put the boys in Ellie’s van and headed for North Fulton Regional Hospital, less than fifteen minutes away. “Mom,” said Ellie as she turned the car north on Alpharetta Highway, “I don’t feel well either.” Nina Martin didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to worry her daughter. But Nina’s effort to stay calm failed minutes later, when she fell to her knees in the hospital parking lot and vomited all over herself.

Leonard was still in Dahlonaga when Nick called, asked him where he was, and then, without waiting to be answered, told Leonard to get to the hospital as fast as he possibly could. When he arrived, police from the City of Alpharetta, and Fulton County cops, were crawling all over the North Fulton grounds. State Troopers too. Leonard parked and made his way to the main reception desk. He gave his name and two women quickly approached. They identified themselves as employees of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

The first-dark, dumpy, and sweet-voiced-said, “Mr. Martin, do you know what your wife and family ate this morning? What they had for lunch? Did you eat the same food yourself?”

“We’ll need to examine you too,” said the other, slimmer, pale, and gruff. “Make sure you check with us before you leave.”

“What’s going on here?” he said.

A tall man in a white coat appeared. “What’s your name?” he asked, and when Leonard told him, he took Leonard firmly by the arm, saying, “Please come with me.” They walked down a noisy, crowded hallway, chaos gaining a foothold around them. It was almost four o’clock. The man in the coat told Leonard that both boys had died an hour before. Then he dropped him off in a bad-smelling room where Nina lay beside two other women, all slack, pallid, unconscious. He sat there for twenty minutes and then found Ellie four rooms down. She was in and out of consciousness, sometimes moaning, sometimes saying, “Daddy, where are the boys?”

Nina died at four thirty, her moist hand limp in Leonard’s. Ellie finally went at five seventeen.

At six, Leonard attempted to leave. Police still surrounded the building. Official-looking people rushed through the halls. One of them seemed to know who he was and led him to an examination room. A doctor showed up minutes later and worked him over, asking questions he did not hear, or did not understand. And then he was outside, sitting in his car, staring at glints of the late afternoon southern sun in the hospital’s dark reflective glass.

He remembered talk of a virus, bacteria, something-people may have mentioned meat. It had no particular meaning. He’d been sitting in the car for an hour before a Georgia State Trooper asked if he was feeling all right.

He did not know how he got home, but Carter was in the driveway when he did-skinny frame more insubstantial than ever, all too likely, it seemed to Leonard, to blow away in the slightest breeze, reddened eyes sunk impossibly deep in colorless hollows. They’d missed each other, somehow, at North Fulton. Carter followed him into the house, into the darkening living room, neither speaking nor moving where they sat. And then the phone started ringing.

People said Harvey Daniels took it the worst. From the moment they met he’d mistaken Lenny for his older brother-the one his parents neglected to provide; the strong, good-natured gentleman brute who’d be there when little Harvey cried for protection. Harvey knew from the instant he got the news that Leonard Martin was lost to him. He wept so inconsolably that Ginny, his wife, had him put on medication. And she kept him from daily haunting the Martin house, sensibly aware that Leonard had enough to carry.

Nick Stevenson was another matter. Now silver-haired, he’d long ago assumed the pose of a good grandee-a sometime southern progressive, a symbol of lawyerly elegance. He avoided the really taxing work, the mind-numbing legal cogitating that Harvey seemed to enjoy, the hard-boiled wrangling Leonard always seemed made for. He mobilized good looks, good golf, and good manners to constantly expand a roster of platinum-plated clients. He did his share of the thinking too, but mostly on a strategic level-who needed what from whom. His honesty no longer set off jokes; it was no longer quite so obsessive. But his handshake was absolutely firm and everyone in Atlanta knew it. There was a vault-full of equity in that.

He wept at the news, as did his wife, their kids, and their eldest grandchild-all of whom held the Martins closer than most of their larger family. But grief did not disable Nick. It turned him into a battle wagon. He thrust normal business into the hands of younger men and women. He spent the next weeks, when not with Leonard, in front of his own TV that he rigged to carry four channels at once, roaming the Internet, reading statute, calling around. He didn’t learn much that the public did not learn, or recover legal precedents an intern could not have found. But he had it all by heart.

As time went on he came to favor the BBC, NPR, and a campus radio station that carried a radical network he’d never heard of. The anchors on the major American networks and cable were paralyzed by reluctance to think; once they’d done the headlines Nick found them useless.

On day two, it became settled fact that the deaths occurring throughout the south were caused by ground beef sold in five supermarket chains. The anchors and their expert guests speculated on what other chains might be involved. Before long consensus developed on this: all the ground beef and pre-packaged hamburgers, all marketed under store brand labels, came from one or more of six packing plants in the southeast. As a BBC reader observed, appalled, “Despite what shoppers seem to have thought, it all appears to have been the same meat-its origin, thus far, impossible to pinpoint.”

Throughout the week people sickened and died from Kentucky to the Florida Keys, from western Louisiana across the south to the coastal Carolinas. By the time all the bad meat had been recalled, more than 17,000 people were stricken and 864 had died-disproportionately children. Because families often ate together, many suffered multiple illness. Some children were left without a parent. Many parents lost a child. But Nick never heard of anything quite so bad as what happened to Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence.

Nick was not always entirely pleased with the way some media seemed to celebrate death in the U.S.A. He once told his wife, “These morons are happy as pigs in shit.” In America-the on-air personalities repeatedly told Nicholas Stevenson-food is everywhere. Fresh meat and fish, fresh fruit and fresh vegetables, every conceivable type of baked, fried, roasted, and cooked meal-available to millions of people in hundreds of thousands of close-by locations twenty-four hours a day.

One Republican state chairman, rotating from one cable network to the next, reminded Nick and all Americans that the genius of America “is the art of distribution, and no nation on earth gives a finer example to the peoples of the world than the closely coordinated efforts of the various industries supplying 275 million Americans, wherever they might be, with whatever they want to eat, whenever they want to eat it.”

There were, of course, sad and serious moments when anchors and guests confronted the fact that sometimes mistakes were made, but smiles and notes of fortitude always returned to their faces and voices in unison cried out in affirmation that America’s God-given food supply was safe. Lest there be any doubt on that subject, experts strongly agreed with each other that the safety and security, and, yes, the credibility, of this vast distribution system was seen, in official circles, as essential to public well-being.

Many made the point that safe food was necessary to national security. Nick was amazed by the few who anxiously cried that the hand of Satan had made its way from the fires of hell to the supermarkets of the Southeast. But those voices came and went in a couple of days. The public needed to know that their supermarkets were fine. They needed to know the restaurants were safe. McDonald’s was clean. You could eat there. Enormous amounts of money were spent on TV ads and public relations pleading with Americans to continue buying and eating ground beef as well as all other food.

Within several days, intellectuals, athletes and entertainers, artists and physicians were talking about the virtues of dining out, and cooking in. Movie stars ate burgers flipped live on Good Morning America. A former American President filmed a public service announcement grilling steaks in his kitchen, his wife looking on approvingly, daintily taking a bite.

Eventually, those sickened recovered. After the summer, with holidays on the horizon, the cable news networks, the talk show producers, the magazine and newspaper editors turned their attention to other, newer matters. And only the survivors of the dead cared very much. Them and their lawyers… especially those few who were personally involved.

Nicholas Stevenson ran the wrongful death lawsuit. He listed Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence as plaintiffs. Nick felt that years of handling deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars-and harrowing weeks imbibing facts through his pores, and the eager support of Atlanta’s leading liability attorneys-might offset his inexperience as a plaintiff’s attorney. That, and the facts of the case, which arrayed themselves like Xerxes’ Persian army at his back. Not knowing which of the six offending plants was responsible, he filed against each of them, and, if they had one, their parent company as well. Five of the six responded with an answer of complete denial. Their filings were not accompanied by even a phone call to Nicholas Stevenson.

It was surprising when Knowland amp; Sons and its owner, Second Houston Holding, retained a Boston law firm. A young associate called Nick, and after delivering the mandatory denials-given the lie by the call itself-he made an offer of settlement. It wasn’t as if his client had done anything wrong, the young man told Nick. It’s just that the nuisance of it all, coupled with the deep regret that any misfortune had befallen anyone, motivated Knowland and Second Houston to offer fifty thousand dollars to be split any way they like by Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence.

The offer was a foolish and miserly mistake. But that was fine with Nick. “Young man,” he said, meaning full well the contempt intended, “go back and tell the fella you work for that fifty thousand dollars won’t pay the deposit on the expert testimony we’ll be introducing.” Stevenson’s studied southern accent and polished ease worked well with folks from up there. Northerners, he’d long ago discovered, were often thrown by the gentle self-assertion of the civilized southern white man-and the older he happened to be, the stronger the spell he was able to cast. The next day the same associate called back asking for a person-to-person meeting. “I’ve got some time tomorrow afternoon at three,” Nick said. “C’mon down.” Why, Nick wondered, would five of the six meat companies file court papers asserting zero liability, while one, Knowland amp; Sons, hires a bigshot law firm in Boston and immediately tries to settle? Although authorities continued to maintain that they could not trace the exact origin of the tainted beef, was it possible that Knowland amp; Sons itself knew it was responsible? It sure seemed that way to Nick Stevenson.

On behalf of the other worthies sent by Boston’s Porter, Scudd, Porter-a full partner and two senior associates-junior partner Harkin Smith, a plump, self-possessed, forty-year-old Boston native, expressed his personal sorrow. He showed special sensitivity in framing PSP’s awareness that Leonard Martin was Mr. Stevenson’s partner and friend, as well as his client. Smith implied that the offer would be significantly larger for that; he all but said that it might be seen, although certainly never named, as a lawyer-to-lawyer bonus. He expressed a professional apology if Nick had been insulted by their assumption that he was a plaintiff’s attorney accumulating E. coli cases, looking eagerly if not greedily for settlements. Until that little speech, Nick was unaware of such assumption. Nevertheless, he nodded his appreciation. They were certainly pleased that Leonard Martin and Carter Lawrence were Nick’s only clients. Again, Mr. Smith rehashed the horror of it all, and the soul-wrenching pain they faced together, as brothers at the bar. All this in Nicholas Stevenson’s comfortable fifteenth floor office conference room, overlooking the junction of I-285 (East-West) and Georgia 400 (North-South), with seven lawyers and twelve more staff sitting statue-still at their desks outside, their minds alive with prayers and curses and tears and recollections.

Then Porter, Scudd, Porter presented its offer of $1.2 million dollars-along with the usual clause requiring silence on anything having to do with the case. The female senior associate, a frail-looking, long-nosed Ms. Wittlesy, handed Nicholas Stevenson a magnificent leather folder enclosing two cashier’s checks. One was for Leonard Martin, the other for Carter Lawrence. That, and a fully drawn-up agreement ready for both to sign.

None of the folks from Porter, Scudd, Porter began to imagine the anger behind their opponent’s gentle smile. He spoke ever-so-slowly, quietly and confidently, in a deftly exaggerated drawl.

“My clients have lost everything.” He said the last word again, “everything,” with a sigh. “Mr. Martin’s wife, a woman who had been by his side, his soul mate since they attended college together. His only child. And his little grandsons too. And Mr. Carter Lawrence has seen his former wife, a beautiful young woman with whom he was in the midst of reconciliation, ripped from him, together with his two sons-sweet little boys hardly old enough to know what life’s all about. Two boys, I might add, who have napped on the couch right behind you there, on which your young Ms. Wittlesy took her ease a few moments ago, before we began.” Ms. Wittlesy stole a furtive glance at the couch. “I know you will all agree that no young man on God’s green earth should be made to suffer as Mr. Carter Lawrence has.”

Nicholas Stevenson moved his head slowly from side to side. He breathed deeply, quite nearly sighing again. “Mr. Leonard Martin’s entire existence has now been called into question, if not destroyed. As you say, I am his friend and his partner. From that unhappy vantage I have looked into a soul as charred and blackened with grief as the fires of hell could themselves arrange. And now I must remind you that it is only your client, your client alone, who stands before the world as the author of this unspeakable tragedy.”

He paused again, allowing his turn at cornpone theatrics to have its effect-looking for an eye or two to roll.

“And I must also tell you in total candor that it’s gonna take a lot more money than you or the little pricks you work for have even thought about to begin to dissipate Leonard Martin’s sadness and put Carter Lawrence on the road to blessed recovery.”

“You know, $1.2 million dollars is a large amount of money, Mr. Stevenson.” The Boston lawyer, to Nick’s practiced ear, spoke uneasily. Nick watched his eyes, thinking that his gently flickering pupils signaled discomfort. “We’re not talking chump change here,” he said.

Nicholas Stevenson leaned back in his swivel armchair, clasping his hands behind his head. “Actually, $1.2 million dollars is less than the advance on an HBO movie,” he said. “It’s far, far less than what could be in the works from someone like Steven Spielberg or that fella Oliver Stone, about whom I do have my doubts in the ordinary context of things. I urge you to remember that Mr. Leonard Martin, and Mr. Carter Lawrence too, have suffered a greater loss than most any other survivor of this. Do you know what? I will tell you what. This does all sound like a movie. In the interest of a speedy and appropriate solution, we have kept the whole horrid business off the television, away from the press. Lord, everybody wants to talk. We’ve got newspapers from all over the United States, Europe, Japan, and all points east and west on our neck.

“We’ve got news magazines and TV programs- 60 Minutes and 20/20 -and all those folks at HBO who would make a movie out of God knows what if they had a way to, because they have no sense of shame in pursuing the almighty dollar-and, of course, the book publishers too. They call here all day long. Shall I get Ms. Betty Lee Washington in here to tell you how many calls she gets in a single day? How many agents and hangers-on would exploit my clients’ grief? Shall I call Ms. Betty in here this very minute?”

He paused again, now leaning forward, glaring at each by turn; focusing last on the junior partner’s light, uncertain eyes.

“Why, I could take a lunchtime break any day of the week and drive right down the highway here to visit with Mr. Larry King, or Mr. Ted Turner, as far as that goes. Or would you prefer Geraldo Rivera? And should my clients go public, your assumptions about eager, greedy lawyers might be a self-fulfilling nightmare. Would it please the misbegotten corporate criminals who pay for the gas in your Mercedes to see my clients sitting next to Oprah? I beg you now to think carefully; what is it you and your clients really want.”

“What exactly did you have in mind?” That came with a cough from the senior partner, a barrel-chested older man with a deep bass voice at the far end of the table-who’d been silent after initial words of condolence.

Agreements were signed the next morning. Six million dollars was wired into an account established for Leonard Martin, and the same was done for Carter Lawrence. Stevenson, Daniels, Martin took no fees.

None of it meant anything to Leonard. His parents had passed years ago. His sister was little more than a telephone call on holidays. His unspoken contract with Harvey was broken. They commiserated often, but that took more out of Leonard than he could give. Nicholas had done what he could. He remained a rock and offered himself for whatever service he might perform. But he faded into the background after settling the case-not because he wanted to, but only because it happened.

Leonard avoided his many other friends, and none of them seemed to mind. He and they knew that he carried the plague of grief. Only Carter Lawrence meant anything to him now.

Carter had youth on his side, and a large, supportive family. His life was not over, they told him, not by a long shot. But Carter dreaded the future, and he fled from it to the Martin house. The two of them sat together for scores of hours watching ballgames and movies in foreign languages they didn’t understand. Like Leonard, Carter stopped working regularly. He had very little appetite. He watched his father-in-law eat heavily, day and night, and drink. He watched him let himself go, stop shaving and bathing regularly. Carter told his mother he felt like the walking dead, and only Leonard Martin could walk by his side. He did not want to kill himself, and often wondered why. He took it for granted that Leonard also fought the demon, and Carter wondered which of them would prevail.