Sue Me td-66

by Warren Murphy

  "How about environment? An environmental engineer?"

  "Sorry. Just know how to make things work. I see your clock is broken," said Dastrow. He took a little screwdriver from his pocket and within moments had the desk clock humming again.

  "You can't tell me you don't need a man like that," said Robert.

  "Unfortunately, that's just what I'm telling you," said the personnel manager.

  And so did many others. Because in the America of the 1970's the rage was not to make things work, but to make them more beautiful, more modern, and cheaper to produce.

  The engineers who got the jobs were those who dealt in theory. As one company put it to young Dastrow, "You should have seen the handwriting on the wall. At most engineering schools, they've closed the machine shops. Nobody cares whether something works well or not because they're designing new ones anyway. It's not important that it work. It's important that it's new. That it's cheap to make, and attractive."

  Robert Dastrow, with his degree in engineering, spent the first year of his employable life as a messenger. And then an accident changed his life and ultimately helped change America too.

  While visiting a relative in California he noticed a car go out of control. Robert saw the steering-wheel bearings were obviously misaligned. Anyone could see that. It was the manufacturer's fault.

  Being from the Midwest, he shared this knowledge with anyone who would listen. Every other witness to the accident suddenly claimed not to see a thing.

  A young lawyer, who just happened to hear an ambulance and just happened to be taking the identical route for the last fifteen blocks of the trip to the accident site, and just happened to stop to see what was going on, heard Robert Dastrow talking.

  "Would you swear to it in a court of law?"

  "Sure. It's the truth," said Dastrow. "But I've got to return home to Nebraska tomorrow. I may have a job. I'm not specifically saying I have a job. I'm not stating it is a sure thing. But golly, it looks good. Looks real good. Looks wicked good."

  "I understand," said the lawyer. "I would be the last one to expect you to hang around Los Angeles for a trial when it's costing you money. I would be the last one to expect you to pay money out of your own pocket. But I think I could arrange a little per-diem payment for you, just to stay around."

  "Is that legal?" asked Dastrow.

  "If you get it in cash, and no one knows, and you don't tell anyone, and I don't tell anyone, there's nothing illegal about it."

  "Sounds fishy to me," said Robert Dastrow. "Sounds like a bribe to me," said Dastrow.

  "What's your name?"

  "Dastrow. Robert Dastrow," said the unemployable engineer, and then sounding like a thousand steel guitars twanging their ugliest notes, he spelled out his name.

  "Robert, I'm a lawyer. The law is not open-and-shut like laymen think. Nothing is illegal unless a court and the written law say it is illegal. That's the law. No court ever ruled on anything it didn't know."

  "But concealing the truth doesn't make it less than the truth."

  "Robert, we're talking about five thousand dollars in cash, minimum."

  Robert Dastrow thought about truth and honesty. He thought about the values of his small Midwestern city. He thought about how he had been raised. Five thousand dollars would indeed go a long way toward a comfortable life in Grand Island.

  "You said minimum."

  "More if we win, Robert," said the young lawyer, who brought him back to his office to take a deposition. It was a storefront with some Spanish written on the front in case a passing Latino might need legal help.

  There were two pieces of furniture, a chair and an old scarred wooden desk. On that wooden desk young Nathan Palmer took down a deposition from Robert Dastrow.

  His other two partners listened in amazement as he described the make and the car and how he could tell the ball bearings in the steering system were not properly aligned.

  "Genius," said Arnold Schwartz, who recognized mathematical excellence.

  "Interesting," said Genaro Rizzuto. "but, will it hold up in court?"

  As a test all three of them went at Robert Dastrow for two hours, trying to break him. But when it came to the workings of a mechanical object, Robert was not only at home, he was king. He even explained how some engineers might try to defend the structure of the automobile. And he refuted those defenses for the three lawyers.

  At the end, Palmer, Rizzuto, and Schwartz were numb from talk of valves, ball bearings, balance, and structural design. Robert was fresh as a daisy and still talking.

  What they learned from this young Midwest engineer who didn't have a job was that they would put the manufacturer on trial on behalf of the plaintiff.

  The auto company took one look at Dastrow's deposition, passed it to their engineers, and the following morning not only agreed to the largest out-of-court settlement in the history of the industry, but promptly hired Palmer, Rizzuto on a large retainer. This meant that the firm and its technical support, namely its star witness, would never be able to act against them again.

  The old desk went into a glass case, and Robert Dastrow received a personal retainer from the law firm of a hundred thousand dollars a year. If Robert had any residual moral qualms, they died after his first really good date. Of course the date had been arranged by a dating service in Los Angeles and the beautiful young woman seemed to smile at anything and everything, but she was a woman. She was beautiful. And Robert Dastrow was no longer poor or lonely.

  The second thing he did after establishing human companionship of sorts was to build a machine shop in the basement of his new home back home in Grand Island. Unfortunately Grand Island did not have dating services, since in their lack of sophistication they called women providing companionship for money a form of prostitution.

  But before he could get his machine shop running, he was visited by the three young lawyers. They were all desperate. Mr. Palmer had just come back from his honeymoon, which had ended in divorce. Mr. Rizzuto had spent a week in Las Vegas and now his income for the next three years was owed to people who collected either their money or pieces of the debtor's body. And Schwartz, violently adamant about the stupidity of the American investor and how idiots ruined the stock market, had just lost his home, everything in it, and his last extra pair of shoes.

  "Golly, how'd you fellas spend so much money so quickly?" laughed Robert.

  "That's not the point," said Schwartz. "The point is how we can make more."

  "The point is how we can make you even richer," said Palmer. "How would you like to buy your own linear accelerator? How would you like your own atomic clock? How would you like anything in the world you fancy just to tinker with?"

  "A bimetric deep-sea evaluator?" asked Robert.

  All three young lawyers nodded, although none of them knew what it was. Palmer had read about the linear accelerator in a magazine on the flight to Grand Island from Los Angeles. He knew it had something to do with atoms. He knew it was expensive. He knew it might interest a nerd like Dastrow. He was, it turned out, very right about this.

  "Well, there's no such thing as a bimetric evaluator," laughed Robert, slapping his knee.

  "Whatever there is you want, you can get. What we need is for you to follow accidents with us and find the ones where a major rich company is at fault," said Palmer.

  "Not the best use of your time, gentlemen. Best use of your time is knowing where the accidents will happen. "

  "You thought about this already?" asked Palmer.

  "Just now. As I see it, fellas, once there's an accident there sure is a lot of competition for the cases, and everyone really starts sort of even, don't you think?"

  "Maybe," said Rizzuto. He didn't like the idea of this hayseed telling him his business.

  "Why start even?" asked Dastrow.

  "Why not start even? Are you saying we didn't go to top-notch law schools or something? Is that what you're saying?" asked Schwartz. "Because if you're saying that anybody from a
mail-order college is-"

  "Not sayin' that at all, sir," said Dastrow. "But let's not waste time. You want lawsuits you're going to get, and lawsuits you're going to win. You don't have all the clients you need or you wouldn't be chasing ambulances."

  "We're not ambulance chasers," said Schwartz.

  "We most certainly are," said Palmer, thinking about his divorce settlement. "Let's hear what you have to say."

  "The way to work this best," said Dastrow, "is to begin with the inside track. Now, my happening by was an accident. The ball bearings being wrong was an accident. Accidents are not how things work well."

  "What are you suggesting?" asked Palmer.

  "These companies, big companies, don't really care how things work. They don't. I'd be a rich man if they did. I wouldn't have been working in a crummy messenger job. Now, if I told you I didn't hold this against them, I would be the biggest liar in the world. I hate them. I hate them with all my heart. With all my soul. I hate them deep in the marrow of my bones. I want them to pay for it."

  "Just retribution," said Rizzuto.

  "A cause to make the world safer for all mankind," said Schwartz, his voice ringing with emotion. That would be a good line for Rizzuto to sum up with somewhere.

  "Go ahead," said Palmer.

  "What say we predict the accidents because we know exactly how the things are not going to work?"

  "How do we know that?" asked Palmer.

  "Leave those little mechanical details to me. You don't want to know that. You just want to know how the accidents are going to happen and be prepared before they do. And this time don't take some silly retainer from an auto company so you can't sue them again. "

  "The man makes sense," said Schwartz.

  "He's going to turn company negligence against them. The big bastards of the world are going to have to pay the little guy."

  "How are you going to do it?" asked Palmer.

  "That's not the question," said Dastrow. "The question is how are you going to pay me a million dollars in advance?"

  "Impossible," said Schwartz. "Even I couldn't figure out how to leverage that much."

  "You're sucking blood from the veins of your friends and allies," said Rizzuto.

  "You'll get it," said Palmer.

  The three lawyers left Grand Island muttering among themselves but with a new respect for Robert Dastrow. No one was calling him a hayseed anymore. In fact, when he came up with his first multiple accident and the money began to flow in, the word "genius" just naturally attended their descriptions of him.

  Robert's first project was what would become known in legal circles as the venerable bumper-tank cases. To a layman it would seem impossible that a major auto company would design a car in which the rear bumper contained the most explosive element in the entire vehicle.

  To Robert it was easy. He insinuated himself into the professional circles of the car designers and came up with better solutions to their problems. Robert Dastrow simply showed that if the rear bumper were to double as the gas tank, the car would have the distinctive expensive design of the "bubble back" and be three hundred dollars cheaper to make, and to boot, there would be more room inside the car. Cheaper, roomier, prettier, the little cars went out into the market and sold like firecrackers. That was also the way they blew up.

  And Palmer, Rizzuto was there with ready proof of the fault of the design, even with some inside papers from an engineer who had been fired when he warned that putting the gas tank in the bumper was an invitation to disaster.

  The hundreds of people who died or were badly maimed in these accidents quickly learned of a law firm that seemed to have the company dead to rights.

  There was even a television investigative report on the car and Rizzuto appeared for the partners. Schwartz worked out the words to be said, and Palmer worked out the fact that they had to use this television program to advertise themselves nationally as the one law firm that could win the big judgments against the manufacturer.

  When Robert Dastrow saw his first ugly picture of a burn victim, he had his first regret. This poor girl could never get her face repaired or her body mended. Her parents were gone, and she was alone.

  Dastrow thought about this for all of twenty minutes, and then realized that the art of making things work was to know what could not be changed. He couldn't bring back the dead, but he could certainly buy himself a cyclotron. With this new arrangement with the greedy lawyers in Los Angeles he would now have the entire world to tinker with.

  And all the American manufacturers who had no use for Robert Dastrow, the young man who only wanted to make things work, would now be shown up for what they were. He would see their embarrassed faces on television as reporters interviewed engineers and asked how they could design a car that worked more like a bomb than transportation.

  He would see aircraft designers get hauled over the coals for a faulty wing structure. He would see contractors sued out of business because they didn't know how to lay concrete properly. He would be vindicated and he would be rich.

  And of course, everything worked the way Robert Dastrow had planned.

  And since tinkering was life to him, when he noticed his main source of revenue under a new form of attack, he just had to find out what it was.

  While International Carborundum and the international media looked at the valves in the Gupta plant, only two people looked at the real cause of the accident. They had spoken to the newswriter and ultimately the wife who goaded her husband into violating the basic rule of how to make anything work: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

  What he had done was to use the social structure to convince most of the people in the city that the administration was broken because it used Americans in previously undesirable jobs.

  And the Oriental and the American who did not really have credible cover stories found that out within one day.

  None of his work had ever been discovered so quickly. And of course as any good tinkerer knew, Robert Dastrow had to find out what was going on here. Who were these two new people doing the right things?

  Did they have the same abilities that he did? A simple test proved they did not, when neither of them could fix the gauge. Therefore there had to be something else they had, and Robert Dastrow would have to figure it out, before he killed them. He had no doubt that he would. There wasn't anything in the world he couldn't figure out. He knew how everything worked.

  The remnants of families in Gupta crowded around waiting for their meager emergency rations, wondering why all the foreigners were coming to them and telling them they were going to be rich.

  They cared for their survivors and prayed that this thing would never happen again. In their own minds they believed that they were cursed and therefore some of them were embarrassed.

  But a few older women found out that when they cried before the cameras they could at times get a bowl of rice. And so they cried more, and kept crying until their families were fed. Sometimes there were too many women crying in front of the cameras, and that drove down the reward. Little wars between the surviving Indian women developed as to who would have crying rights before which cameras.

  Stories were other things. The people quickly found that those who had the most gruesome stories to tell were the ones who were visited most.

  But all of this enterprise was nothing compared to the savior of Gupta and what he did for the people there. He brought rice, he brought doctors, he brought promises of rich compensation for the evil done to them by the American factory. He told them they should not let the Americans get away with it.

  He was an American himself and he knew how bad the Americans could be. He was here to make them rich, to give them rice for the rest of their lives. Naturally, the offer sounded too good and no one signed up right away. But when he returned with the blessings of some high government officials, the survivors all happily lined up to give their palm prints as signatures to a contract that said he would give them ten percent of all he earned fro
m making the American factory pay.

  His name was Genaro Rizzuto, and he bet them all he would win.

  Remo and Chiun found this out the second day they were there, but they had great difficulty talking to the people. Gupta was now an official international disaster, and being labeled as such attracted more stars than Remo had ever seen in one place.

  Chiun pointed them out. He counted fourteen movie stars with their own camera crews, each posing with the same blinded woman, seven actors with current series on television, and a multitude of American organizations.

  There were the directors of Aid to the Famished, International Help, Pity the Children, Save All Humanity, End Racism, Fight Racism, and International Alliance Against Racism. Starring in all this was a woman dressed like an untouchable who had just scavenged through a dime-store garbage can left outside the plastics department. Her eyes were shaded neon green. Her hair looked like a swamp that had gotten caught in a yellow-spray-paint machine, and her clothes were as tattered as though she had been the center of attention at a ragpickers' convention.

  "There's Debbie Pattie," said one TV newsman who had already gotten his tear shots for the day. "She's new. She's not known for social causes."

  Immediately a crowd formed around the young singer. She was used to people forming crowds around her. What she was not used to was being ignored. And past the row of poor huts the victims lived in she saw two men, one Oriental and one white, who were not even bothering to look her way.

  She made fifteen million dollars a year, was on the cover of almost every major magazine in the West, and she was of absolutely no interest to these two. This she spotted despite the fifteen microphones in her face, cameras whirring behind them.

  "I soytinly don't need no more publicity in case yer asking," she said with a New York accent that advertised itself better than Broadway. "I'm here to help da people. All right? Whyn't youse guys go talk to da people. Dare the ones what's sufferin' around here. "

  "What do you think of the negligence of American factories?"

  "I'm against anything that hurts," said Debbie. "What hurts people is what I'm against. I hate unhappiness and they oughta outlaw it."