The Wrong Man

28

Joel Lightner and I listened to the footfalls of Ray Rubinkowski, the arthritic clicking of his ankles, as he came back downstairs. Neither of us really understood what he was about to show us. When Ray came back into the parlor room, he handed me a two-page stapled document.

“I don’t know if this means anything to you,” he said. “Wendy said it didn’t to her.”

That was the second time he’d said that.

It was a legal document. The heading said Exhibit A: Response to Interrogatory #2. In the header of the document, right-adjusted, was the name of a lawsuit and a docket number: 09 CH 1741. That told me the lawsuit was a civil action in state court that was filed in 2009.

The lawsuit was styled LabelTek Industries Inc. v. Global Harvest International Inc.

I didn’t recognize LabelTek or Global Harvest International. Nothing in the document told me the subject matter of the lawsuit.

“This is a discovery document in a lawsuit,” I explained. “Kathy was a paralegal, so discovery would be her primary responsibility.”

“That’s right, it’s what she did,” said Ray.

Each side in a lawsuit gets to ask questions, and request documentation, from the other side to get ready for trial. We call this “discovery.” When a party submits written questions to the other side, they are known as “interrogatories.” I consider this aspect of being a lawyer “boring” and “unbearable.”

But maybe not this one time. The document I was holding was a response to an interrogatory. The answer was long, so the party answering this interrogatory had apparently made its response a separate exhibit. For all I knew, that was standard. But I didn’t really know. Discovery was largely for civil litigants. I avoided civil litigation like I avoided raw vegetables.

The response to the interrogatory listed a number of companies. The list filled two pages, with forty-seven companies. There were a couple of recognizable Fortune 500 companies on this list but mostly names I’d never heard.

I looked up at Ray Rubinkowski, who was watching me closely. “Kathy gave you this?” I asked.

Ray nodded. “A couple of days after Kathy died, I got a FedEx package. It was a birthday card for me, a gift-wrapped sweater, and this document.”

I didn’t see the relevance of this document to anything I wanted to know.

“For all I knew, it was accidental,” he said. “It fell in or something. I’ve been known to misplace an item now and again, and I figured she probably did just that.”

Sure, that was possible. “So she mailed this a day or two before her death?”

“Yeah.”

It was hard to believe that was a coincidence. “It was for your birthday-the package, I mean.”

“Yeah. My sixty-first birthday. Our birthdays were the same week. I turned sixty-one, she would’ve turned twenty-four. She wasn’t going to make it out here to see us until the following weekend, so I suppose she wanted to make sure I got my present on time before my birthday. That would be like her.”

Okay, so maybe a coincidence. “Do you still have the FedEx package?”

He shook his head no. That was okay. We knew the approximate date it was sent and the sender and recipient. If we needed proof of the delivery, we’d get it.

“On the back,” Lightner said to me.

I turned to him. “What?”

“The back of the document,” he said.

I flipped the document over. There was handwriting. A grand total of four letters, followed by two question marks: AN NM??

“I have no idea,” Ray said, when I asked him if the initials AN or NM meant anything to him.

“Did Kathy say anything about sending you something in the mail?” I tried.

“Not that I can remember. No, I don’t think so.”

“Did she say anything about her job near the time she died? Anything about trouble she was having at work or anywhere else, for that matter?”

Ray jabbed a finger at me. “You’re doing it again. You’re trying to dig up dirt on my little girl.”

I raised my hands. “I wasn’t. But never mind.”

Kathy’s parents stared at me for a long time. It was clear that I’d reached my limit.

I thanked them profusely and left their house with the document in tow. When we reached our car and were well out of earshot of the Rubinkowskis, Joel and I looked at each other.

“Probably nothing,” I said.

“Yeah, probably,” he agreed. “But the timing sure is interesting.”