An Engineered Injustice (Philadelphia Legal)

by Myers, Jr. , William L.

  Erin seems to have more to say, but she stops herself. The amusement drains from her eyes, which are suddenly sad. “Vaughn, I’m sorry. For Eddy. For you. For . . . all of it.”

  Vaughn leans back, empties his bottle, and looks away.

  They sit in silence for a while, until Erin says, “I know you come from the criminal side. You still do mostly criminal defense, right?”

  Vaughn nods.

  “Well, let me tell you a little about how civil practice works. Civil litigation is dominated from the top by a handful of glamour firms run by guys like Geoffrey Day. They get the biggest cases, so they win the biggest verdicts and settlements. They splash their windfalls on their websites and in the Legal Intelligencer. The small-firm lawyers read the headlines. When a big case walks into their doors, they’re quick to hand it off to the Days and the Balzacs for the promise of fat, easy referral fees. The cases generate more huge verdicts and settlements and headlines, and the circle of life goes round and round.”

  “And they live like princes. Mansions, yachts, airplanes. I know. My bosses have referred cases to P.I. firms,” he says.

  “And don’t forget the biggest trophies of all: the law schools.”

  Vaughn nods. “Starting with our own alma mater.”

  Twenty years earlier, Philadelphia trial attorney Jim Beasley pledged $20 million to Temple University, in return for which the Temple University School of Law became the Temple University Beasley School of Law. More recently, one of Beasley’s protégés, Tom Kline, gifted $50 million to Drexel Law School, which became the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law.

  “And ending with my boss’s acquisition of the crown jewel.”

  Two years earlier, the legal community was stunned by the announcement that Geoffrey Day had made a “historic pledge” to the University of Pennsylvania, in return for which Penn Law, the commonwealth’s only Ivy League law school, became the Geoffrey Day School of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.

  “I bet Day’s buddy Balzac threw him one hell of a party when Day bought Penn,” says Vaughn.

  “Are you kidding? Balzac was apoplectic when he found out. He was thinking about buying the law school himself. That’s what my friend Laurie Mitzner told me, anyway. She works for Balzac.”

  “So those two aren’t quite the fuck buddies they appear to be on TV?”

  Erin laughs. “Hardly. Although something brought them together on this train case. Something that’s not quite right. The associates at my firm all think so, and Laurie says people at her firm are whispering about it, too.”

  Vaughn lets the remark sit, and he and Erin pick at the food that’s been getting cold on their plates.

  “So,” Vaughn says, “you clearly aren’t fond of your boss, or Balzac. How can you keep working for someone like Geoffrey Day?”

  Erin looks away, then back at Vaughn. She has anger in her eyes. “Day may pay me, but I don’t work for him. I work for the clients. And say what you will about our firm, but the people who walk through our doors are really hurting. It would break your heart. Just the other day, I met with the parents of a five-year-old girl permanently brain damaged by careless ER doctors who failed to diagnose bacterial meningitis. That child has no chance at a normal life, and her parents face life-care costs that would bankrupt them were it not for me. And I wouldn’t be able to mount the legal case it’ll take to save that family without the financial firepower of a firm like Day’s.”

  “And the other lawyers at your firm?”

  “Most are like me. The younger ones, at least. They care about our clients and work hard—fourteen-hours-a-day hard—to fight for them.” Erin pauses. “It’s just . . . over time, as the successes accumulate, as the bonuses get bigger . . . it changes people.”

  Vaughn sees something flash across Erin’s eyes and wonders whether she fears that her own success will change her. Before he can ask, she stops him with a question of her own.

  “So what are you going to do? About Eddy?”

  Vaughn shrugs. “What can I do? Other than walk him through the investigation with the NTSB and hope it doesn’t go any further.”

  Erin nods. “I wish you luck. I really do.”

  Vaughn studies Erin. She’s stopped talking, but he hears the unspoken “but” at the end of her sentence. She hopes I get Eddy through this safely, but she doesn’t think that’s going to happen.

  Later, as they leave, Vaughn smiles and asks, “Hey, how about we—”

  “How about we not.” The words are harsh, but Erin is smiling. She leans in and gives Vaughn a friendly peck on the cheek. “It was good to see you.”

  They turn and start to walk away from each other. Then Vaughn hears his name. He turns back, hoping he’ll see a familiar spark in Erin’s eyes. But her look is deadly serious.

  “Be careful,” she says. “Day and Balzac might’ve been grandstanding, but they’re going after your cousin for real. They’ll do everything in their power to crucify him, and they won’t let anything stand in their way. Or anyone.”

  7

  SATURDAY TO MONDAY, JUNE 21–23

  Standing at the conference-room table, Vaughn and Mick pore over Google Earth satellite images of the track leading up to, and through, the accident site. They’re looking for some clue as to why Eddy didn’t notice the huge yellow track machine and didn’t even try to slow down the train.

  “There’s no way around it,” Mick says. “The track ahead was clear. There’s no visual obstruction blocking your cousin’s view down the roadway. He should have seen the TracVac the instant he rounded the curve. How fast was he going, again? How far down was the machine?”

  “Eighty miles an hour. Eighteen hundred feet.”

  Mick googles a solution to the math. “Which means he’d have had a full fifteen seconds to apply the emergency brakes. Probably not enough time to stop the train completely, but enough to slow it down, so that the collision wouldn’t have been so catastrophic.”

  Vaughn exhales. “Something must’ve been going on inside the cab that took Eddy’s attention away from the track ahead.”

  “But your cousin can’t say what it was because he doesn’t remember anything.” Mick casts Vaughn a hard look. “Was he alone in the cab?”

  “Amtrak only has one engineer operating a train. Not like an airplane, where you have a pilot and a copilot. It’s a practice that some of the talking heads are taking issue with; they’re saying that it’s foolish to have a lone engineer.”

  “Any chance there was someone in the cab who wasn’t supposed to be there? Like a friend or . . . ?” Mick leaves the rest hanging.

  Vaughn blinks. “No way. I mean, I can’t see it. Kate, Eddy’s wife, is pregnant with their first child. I can see he loves her. And she dotes on him. There’s been no talk of problems between them in our family.” Vaughn pauses, then it hits him: “And Eddy was the only one they found inside the cab after the crash.”

  “Could someone have been there and left? Gone back to the passenger cars?”

  “If they left, Eddy wouldn’t have been distracted. He would have seen the TracVac.”

  “Unless he was knocked out.”

  Vaughn shakes his head. “Are you saying someone clobbered him and ran away? They’d still be stuck on the train. They’d be putting their own life at risk.”

  They go back and forth a few more minutes, then Vaughn leaves the conference room. He finds Mick’s second-person suggestion, and the whole notion of foul play, to be far-fetched. In the hallway, he comes across Susan. She gives him a quick glance before looking away. The air between them chills as they pass each other.

  Before returning to the office on Sunday, Vaughn drops in on Eddy. Kate’s in his hospital room, and so are her mother and Eddy’s mother, Claire. Vaughn asks them to take a break, go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat; he’ll fill in. Once they’re gone, he replays for Eddy the conversation he’d had the day before with Mick.

  “No way,” Eddy says, his v
oice stronger than the last time Vaughn spoke with him. “There was no one else there. No one from the crew. And no one . . . else.”

  Eddy’s indignation is palpable, so Vaughn moves on. “The NTSB wants to interview you,” he says. “I haven’t committed one way or the other.”

  “I have no problem talking to them. Or anyone else. I want to help.”

  Vaughn frowns. “Of course, and if I do agree to let them interview you, I’ll prep you ahead of time. The reason I haven’t agreed already is that we don’t know what the NTSB is going to find. And”—Vaughn pauses—“I don’t want to say anything that could get you into trouble with law enforcement.”

  Eddy does a double take. “Law enforcement?”

  Vaughn explains what he’s learned about previous rail disasters. “In two of the three largest crashes, the engineers died. In the Metro-North crash, he lived, but it turned out he had a medical condition that caused him to pass out. That meant he wasn’t at fault, so the district attorney decided not to prosecute.”

  “I remember that crash. The engineer raced through a curve. The press wanted to crucify him. And then, it seemed like nothing came of it. I never thought to find out why.”

  “Well, that’s why. In your case, you also lost consciousness. But that probably happened in the crash, when you suffered your head injury, not before. Until we know why you didn’t react to the TracVac, I’m hesitant to have you testify.”

  Eddy considers what Vaughn has told him. He closes his eyes and slowly shakes his head. After a moment, he looks up at Vaughn. “I just . . . there’s nothing there, man.”

  Monday morning, Vaughn walks through the doors to the office just as Angie is hanging up the phone. It’s only 8:30 and already she seems flustered. “You’ve had two calls today, not counting the news. The second one, just now, was that guy from the NTSB. Wexler.”

  “And the first one?”

  Angie pauses to catch her breath. “Jimmy Nunzio.”

  Vaughn’s heart skips a beat. “Nunzio?”

  “It was his secretary, actually. Or someone who said she was his secretary. She told me that Nunzio wants to meet you. He’s going to send a car.”

  “A car? I’m not getting in a car with that guy!”

  “You’ll have to tell him that yourself.”

  “Forget that,” Vaughn says, walking away.

  “They want you to call when you’re ready!” Angie shouts after him.

  Which will be exactly never, Vaughn resolves.

  A few minutes later he’s at his desk, finishing up his Starbucks slow-roasted ham-and-Swiss sandwich. He crumples up the wrapping paper, empties his coffee cup, and dials the phone. It takes a few minutes, but he’s eventually put through to Nelson Wexler.

  “Mr. Coburn, how are you?” Wexler begins pleasantly.

  “I have one question,” Vaughn says, getting right down to business.

  “All right. What is it?”

  “My client’s cell phone. I assume you found it. I’d like to know where you found it and what you learned.”

  “We’re still analyzing the phone. As for where it was found, we’d really like to talk to your cousin before—”

  “That’s not going to happen.” Vaughn hears the hardness in his own voice and eases up. “Look, I don’t mean to be difficult. I want to help your investigation. And so does Eddy,” he adds. “It’s just that I’d like some reassurance that there isn’t some kind of time bomb out there that you know about and Eddy doesn’t remember. I don’t want to be setting him up for prosecution.”

  Wexler says nothing for a long while. Then Vaughn hears him exhale. “Okay. That’s fair. Let me put you at ease. We haven’t uncovered any type of smoking gun. Quite frankly, we’re completely at a loss to explain your cousin’s actions.”

  “You mean his inaction. His failure to see the TracVac.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. And as to his phone, we found it zipped up inside his knapsack. We’re still studying it, like I told you. But our preliminary analysis is that he wasn’t on the phone at the time of the accident, or before the accident. The last time he appears to have used the phone at all was before the train pulled out of 30th Street Station.”

  Vaughn exhales. Thank God. He tells Wexler that he’s leaning strongly toward having Eddy talk to the NTSB. “Unless something happens to change my mind,” he says. “I’ll call you once my client is strong enough to leave the hospital.”

  Wexler says he’s glad to hear that, and they hang up on good terms.

  Vaughn mulls things over for a few minutes, then decides he’d better talk to Mick about Nunzio. When he arrives at Mick’s office, he finds Tommy sitting in one of the guest chairs.

  “Speak of the devil,” Tommy says.

  Vaughn looks at Tommy, then glances at Mick, who tells him, “We were just talking about you helping your cousin.”

  “Susan’s never gonna like that,” Tommy says.

  “I don’t like it much myself,” Vaughn answers. “The press and the plaintiff’s bar are making him out to be some kind of ex-con, speed-demon driver, and Eddy can’t defend himself—can’t say what really happened—because he has no recollection of the accident.”

  Vaughn catches something passing unsaid between Mick and Tommy, and it gets him hot. “Yeah, I know. The I don’t remember thing is a classic defense maneuver. Very convenient, right? But the thing is, he really doesn’t remember. I know because I can see him struggling to recall what happened. He wants to know what happened as much as everyone else. But he can’t find the answer, and it’s killing him.”

  Mick nods. “Well, it’s early in the game. Memory is tricky. It can seem like it’s lost forever, then come back in an instant. All it takes is something to trigger it.”

  “Yeah, and in the meantime, Eddy is being pressed for answers by the NTSB, the media, the public and now . . . Jimmy Nunzio.”

  Mick and Tommy freeze at the mention of the gangster’s name.

  “Jimmy Nutzo?” asks Tommy.

  “His son was on the train,” Mick says. “He was one of the passengers who was killed.”

  “I must’ve missed that,” Tommy says. He’s clearly wondering what Vaughn originally did: Why was a capo’s kid riding Amtrak? He thinks for a minute, then looks at Vaughn. “That’s not good—for Eddy or for you.”

  Vaughn purses his lips. “He wants to meet with me.”

  “Not a good idea,” Mick says.

  “I wouldn’t meet with him,” says Tommy.

  “He’s going to want to know what your cousin told you,” Mick says. “But you can’t tell him without violating attorney-client privilege. You also can’t let him use you as a conduit to carry threats to Eddy.”

  “You ever hear what happened to Jimmy’s fiancée, back in the day?” Tommy asks.

  It’s a rhetorical question. Everyone in Philly knows some version of the tale. Jimmy Nutzo was engaged to an Eagles cheerleader. A girl who grew up with him in South Philly. He wasn’t the big boss back then. Just a soldier. A guy higher up in the organization moved in on the fiancée, and, after a time, they both went missing. After a month, the police received a call tipping them off to look in the basement of the Pini Funeral Home on South Broad Street. The funeral director didn’t care, because, so far as he knew, all that was in the basement were some old caskets that had been gathering dust for years. But when the police searched, they found Jimmy’s fiancée and her new beau naked, bound together with duct tape, their faces mashed up against each other’s crotches.

  “Yeah, I know,” Vaughn says.

  “Some people say Nunzio shot them, but he didn’t. He just bound them up like that and left them. The coroner said they died of thirst and starvation. But not before vomiting, shitting, and pissing all over each other.”

  “What I never understood,” says Vaughn, “is why he left them where they might be found.”

  “The whole point was for them to be found—exactly like that,” Tommy says. “He was making a statement
. He’s probably the one who tipped off the police.”

  “You can’t meet with him,” Mick says.

  Vaughn studies Mick, then looks at Tommy. He nods. Mick’s right. Of course he’s right. Still, he can’t help wondering if maybe Nunzio’s son being on the train had something to do with why it crashed.

  Vaughn leaves Mick’s office, then walks down the hall to his own. He picks up his cell and dials.

  “You again?” says Erin.

  “I want to run something by you.”

  “Fire away.”

  “You’ve heard that one of the passengers killed in the train crash was Jimmy Nunzio’s son?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, Jimmy himself wants to meet me.”

  There’s a long pause at the other end of the line. “Not the best idea in the world.”

  “My boss says the same thing. It might be a conflict of interest for me. As his son’s beneficiary, Nunzio will be a plaintiff in the litigation against Amtrak and Eddy.”

  “Uh, there are other issues to consider, as well.”

  “Such as?”

  “You know what he did to his fiancée?”

  “Everyone knows that story.”

  “Vaughn, listen to me. Nothing good could come from meeting with Jimmy Nutzo.”

  “But what if it could? Hear me out.” Vaughn pauses, then explains. “Right now, Nunzio thinks that my cousin is to blame for his son’s death. He knows there was no booze or drugs in Eddy’s blood; the NTSB reported that. But he doesn’t know that Eddy’s phone was off and packed away. He also doesn’t know that Eddy won a safety award from Amtrak. I can tell him that.”

  “Or he can wait to hear it from the NTSB, along with their other findings.”

  “It could take months for them even to announce their preliminary conclusions. A year or more for their final report. I’m worried that Nunzio is going to rush to judgment and decide to punish Eddy himself. I might be able to persuade him to keep an open mind—”

  “Or maybe you’ll say something to piss him off. He supposedly has a hair trigger. He’s a grieving father, for chrissake.”