An Engineered Injustice (Philadelphia Legal)

by Myers, Jr. , William L.

  “He’s right,” says Tommy. “And one of my guys on the railroad says he has something for me. I’m going to meet him this afternoon. Who knows what’s out there?”

  Mick and Susan look hard at each other, then Susan turns to Vaughn. “At some point, we have to take this to the government.”

  “I don’t think we’ll need to,” says Vaughn. “If the preliminary hearing goes as I hope, the government will come to us.”

  Mick studies Vaughn. “You’re planning to present evidence at the preliminary hearing?”

  Ordinarily, preliminary hearings are where the prosecution presents just enough evidence to convince the judge that it’s more likely than not that a crime has been committed and that the defendant is the perpetrator. Defense attorneys use the hearings to find out what they can about the prosecution’s case. Sometimes, they’ll cross-examine witnesses. Although they have the right to present evidence of their own, they hardly ever do; in all but the rarest cases, it’s a foregone conclusion that the judge will bind the defendant over for trial. So there’s no reason for the defense to tip its own hand by showing its cards to the prosecution.

  “You actually think there’s a chance you can get the judge to let Eddy go?” Susan asks, incredulous.

  “Right now, I have the video, and the prescient complaints and websites,” Vaughn answers. “That won’t be enough. But if I find more . . .”

  Susan sighs. “I know you want to do right by your cousin. And if you’re right about Day and Balzac, I want them to hang. But I just can’t envision a scenario where the judge won’t bind the case over for trial, no matter what you find.”

  Vaughn nods. “You’re probably right. But I have to try. I have to get Eddy out from under this as fast as I can. And not just because of the law.”

  “Jimmy Nutzo,” Tommy says, catching Mick’s eye.

  “He’s going to kill Eddy, I have no doubt of it. Unless I give him one helluva reason not to. And soon,” he adds, recalling Nunzio’s warning: Sometimes soon isn’t soon enough.

  Royce Badgett clicks off his cell phone, then starts dialing.

  “Whatcha doin’?” Coraline asks over her shoulder.

  “I’m making a call.”

  “You just made a call.”

  “No. I received a call. From the boss. Now I got to make one.”

  “You have to do it right now?” Coraline is annoyed. Royce is sitting on his La-Z-Boy. Coraline is on his lap, facing the other way. They are both naked.

  “Just sit still. It’ll only take a minute.”

  “A minute my ass,” says Coraline.

  “If that’s what you want, just slide me in.”

  “You’re disgusting, you know that?”

  He puts a hand on her back. “Now turn around.” He likes fornicating with Coraline well enough, but only if she’s facing the other way. She’s got an okay body, but even with the dental work, her face is nasty. Her nose looks like a beak. She’s jowly, and she has a wandering eye. He doesn’t remember her having the eye thing in high school. He wouldn’t be surprised if Coraline’s husband, Denny, hit her on the head and knocked it loose. First, because Denny is a rough-ass son of a bitch. Second, because Coraline can be really annoying.

  “Jack?” Badgett says when Bunting answers the phone.

  “Hey, Badger. What’s up?”

  “Boss says it’s time to take care of the track foreman.”

  “We should’ve gotten rid of him three weeks ago. What’s the plan?”

  “Just bring him to my place.”

  “On what pretext?”

  “Who gives a shit? Tell him you’re taking him to pick up his money. That we’re getting him down to some Caribbean island for a few months and I need to take his picture for a fake passport.”

  Bunting smiles. “I like that.”

  “I’m good on my feet.” He kills the phone and grabs Coraline’s hair.

  And on my La-Z-Boy.

  25

  FRIDAY, JULY 25 THROUGH SATURDAY, JULY 26

  It’s 8:00 p.m., and Tommy is nursing his Miller Lite in the back room just off the bar. The guy he’s supposed to meet, George Haley, is already half an hour late, and Tommy is getting nervous that he won’t show. Haley is an Amtrak track supervisor. Tommy met George five years earlier, when Mick represented his brother, Dave, in a bar-fight felony-assault case. Tommy worked hard to drum up witnesses to testify that George’s brother wasn’t the aggressor, and George was grateful. So when Tommy wanted background information on Amtrak, George was the first person he called. But Haley has stood Tommy up twice now, and it’s obvious he’s scared of something. Probably why he insisted they meet at a rundown tavern in Essington, ten miles south of the city.

  Tommy lifts his cell phone to call Haley when he sees the big man pausing in the doorway, looking around. Tommy waves his hand, and Haley walks across the bar to the back room. Haley looks like an older Orson Welles and has the actor’s baritone voice. What he lacks is Welles’s confident demeanor. Haley’s eyes, Tommy notices, dart back and forth like he expects someone to grab him at any moment.

  The two men shake hands, then sit down at the long table that takes up most of the back room. A waitress comes in and asks Haley if he wants something to drink. He waves her off, says no.

  “George, thanks for doing this,” Tommy says. “We have a tough fight on our hands with this Coburn kid.”

  Haley looks around the room, behind him, and through the doorway to the bar. “Okay.”

  “Let’s start with a little background. What do you know about the track foreman, Reggie Frye? The one who’s gone missing.”

  “Pain in the ass. Always bitching.”

  “He worked under you?”

  “Worked? More like he put in time. He’s the kind who never does more than he has to.”

  “Then why’d he join the track department? You guys work harder than anyone.”

  “That’s part of his problem. He didn’t start out in track. He was an engineer. Thinks he’s better than the guys on the ground.”

  “So how’d he end up working track?”

  “I heard he tested dirty, twice, while he was an engineer. Drugs or booze, I don’t know which. That happens, and a guy gets bounced from the railroad. But he found a way to stay with the company.”

  Haley reaches into his pocket, pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and lights one up. Smoking in a public restaurant is illegal, but since they’re in the back room, it’s allowed anyway.

  Tommy chews on what Haley’s told him. “Any idea whether Frye knew Eddy Coburn?”

  Haley shakes his head. “Not that he ever mentioned to me. But if they were both engineers working the corridor, they probably ran into each other, at the very least.”

  Tommy pauses before asking the big question. “Any chance Frye was unhappy enough with his job that he’d want to wreck a train?”

  George Haley stares at Tommy.

  “Right now,” Tommy says, “the official theory is that random vandals moved the TracVac onto Track 2 after Frye and his crew left for the day. Any chance it wasn’t vandals?”

  Haley sits back in his seat. “What are you saying here?”

  Tommy shakes his head. “Not saying anything. I’m asking, that’s all.”

  “If you’re asking me whether Reggie Frye would have deliberately caused a train crash, my answer is, how the hell should I know?”

  Tommy picks up the anger in Haley’s tone and switches gears.

  “So tell me about Jack Bunting. I know he was one of Amtrak’s representatives on the NTSB go-team.”

  “He was the first one in the locomotive after the crash. He downloaded the information from the black box. He said there was nothing to download from the video recorders because the cameras were on hold until the railroad and the union ironed out their differences.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Haley takes another deep drag of his cigarette, then looks to the door to make sure it’s closed.

  “
World-class SOB.”

  “How so?”

  Haley thinks for a minute, then answers. “Before he got bumped up to management, we worked together as track supervisors on a couple of big jobs. From what I saw, he worked his men like dogs. Wrote them up for infractions every chance he got. If one of ’em got hurt, Bunting would make sure the guy was charged with ten different rules violations and blamed for his own accident.”

  Haley lights another cigarette, takes a deep drag. “One time, I heard, he kept his men working even after one of them died. They were laying track out near Paoli. It was the middle of summer, hot as hell. One of the older guys keeled over. Haley ordered the crew to move the body away from the track, put a shirt over the dead guy’s face, then told everyone to get back to work.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Ask around. Everyone’s heard about it.”

  “You know whether there was anything between Bunting and Eddy Coburn?”

  Haley pauses. “I don’t know if those two even knew each other.”

  Tommy hears hesitance in Haley’s voice. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  George Haley checks the door again. “I don’t know whether Jack knew that engineer or not. But he knew Reggie Frye.”

  Haley pauses again, and Tommy nods, signaling him to keep going.

  “When I told you that Frye found a way to stay on the railroad, maybe I should have said he found a who. The only way he could’ve saved his ass from getting kicked off the property was if he had someone watching out for him. Someone with clout.”

  “Like a division engineer.”

  “Jack Bunting barely had time for his men when he was a foreman and a track supervisor. He didn’t joke around with anyone. He didn’t even eat with them. And when he started moving up, he got even more aloof. But I saw him more than a few times talking with Reggie Frye. Struck me as kinda unusual, him giving a guy with less than a year of department seniority the time of day.”

  Tommy watches Haley take a deep drag off his Pall Mall. Then a second.

  “So you think Bunting is how Reggie Frye stayed on the railroad.”

  “I don’t think nothing. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  Tommy sits back. He’s confused. “You told me over the phone you might have something for me. So here we are, and you tell me that Bunting knew Frye and that someone high up on the railroad helped Frye keep working at Amtrak even after his piss test came up positive. But you won’t commit that it was Bunting. What gives?”

  Haley looks away.

  “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

  Haley bites his lower lip. “A rumor, that’s all.”

  Tommy opens his hands. Out with it.

  “It’s the inward-facing camera. I know a guy who thinks he caught Bunting watching a video from the inward-facing camera. Says he was at 30th Street real early one morning—like 4:30—and he passed a little conference room, one with a video setup. The conference room has those vertical windows on either side of the door so you can see inside if you’re out in the hall. Bunting was sitting at the conference table, watching a video. And on the video was that kid, Coburn, sitting in the engineer’s chair.”

  “But how could there be a video if Amtrak had the cameras off?”

  Haley laughs. “Amtrak said they’d keep the cameras off during contract negotiations. Doesn’t mean they did.”

  “You’re telling me Amtrak welched on the agreement?”

  “Welcome to the railroad.”

  Tommy and Haley look at each other for a long moment, until Tommy says, “This guy who saw all this—you think he’d testify to it?”

  “No way.”

  “But—”

  “Not a chance he’ll go public. Unh-uh.”

  “Will he talk to me, at least?”

  Haley smashes his cigarette in the tin ashtray on the table as he shoots up from his seat. “He just did.” He turns toward the doorway, takes a step, then turns back. “None of this gets back to me, right?”

  “We never met.”

  Tommy watches Haley move through the bar and out the door.

  Could Haley really be that afraid of Jack Bunting?

  Vaughn paces the bedroom while Erin watches him from the bed. It’s close to midnight, and both are too wired to sleep. They thought sex would tire them out, but it only amped them up more.

  “We have to get our hands on the locomotive-cab video,” Vaughn says. Tommy had shared what he learned from George Haley—about Jack Bunting having the engine video despite Amtrak’s claim that the video cameras were turned off pending contract negotiations. “The drone video is powerful, and the websites and the complaints will help. But the judge isn’t going to buy our claim that Day and Balzac caused the crash unless we can explain how they did it. The cab video could be the key, because it would show exactly what was going on inside the engineer’s cab leading up to the crash. And presumably will show Eddy doing nothing wrong.”

  “Agreed, on all points. But how do we get the video? We have no access to Amtrak’s offices at 30th Street Station, and Bunting wouldn’t produce it even in answer to a subpoena, because he’s said it doesn’t exist.”

  “There’s only one chance: we have to go on a fishing expedition. Two expeditions.”

  Erin knows instantly what he means. “Balzac’s office. And Day’s? You think they’d have copies? That Bunting wouldn’t have just destroyed the video?”

  “He hadn’t destroyed it as of the time Tommy’s contact saw it. And who knows what the arrangement was between him and the lawyers? If they knew about the video, they might have demanded he make them copies.”

  Vaughn stops pacing and looks at Erin. “Laurie can search Balzac’s office, and—”

  “And I can search Day’s.” Erin steels herself. “All right, I’ll do it. Geoffrey flew out to the West Coast for the weekend. I’ll go tomorrow—I mean today,” she corrects herself after looking at the clock and seeing it’s after midnight. “Early enough that no one else will be there.”

  Vaughn smiles. He’s impressed that Erin didn’t have to be convinced to make the bold play.

  A gutsy woman.

  “I’m not sure we can count on Laurie, though,” Erin says. “She’s too spooked.”

  “Then let’s ask her to let us in, and you and I can search Balzac’s office ourselves.”

  “And how could we explain our being there if we get caught?”

  Vaughn considers the question. “We don’t get caught.”

  It’s Erin’s turn to smile.

  26

  SATURDAY, JULY 26

  Erin arrives at the firm at 4:30 a.m. The lobby and hallway are dark, which tells her that no one else has arrived yet. Still, she walks the floor, checking all the offices to ensure that they are unoccupied. Then she goes to her own office, where she turns on her computer and opens a legal brief she’s been finalizing to make it seem as if she’s working in case someone else shows up.

  Vaughn’s plan was to root through Day’s office for the engine-cab video and any potentially relevant documents she might find. But on her way out the door of her apartment, she decided to try something else as well. She pulled her midsize Tumi suitcase out of her front closet.

  She now wheels the suitcase through the hall to the elevator and descends one floor to the large evidence room where the firm stores the paper documents, broken products, and demonstrative evidence developed for trial. Erin pulls the Tumi to a wall of metal shelves. There she finds the silver, hard-shell aluminum case that contains the firm’s drone. The box says it’s a DJI Phantom 3 Professional Quadcopter equipped with a 4K camera. All Erin knows is that when Day flew it around the office, it was creepily futuristic-looking in a scary, Big Brotherish sort of way. Her thought in securing the drone is that perhaps the machine leaves digital fingerprints on its videos, the same way the rifling of a gun barrel leaves distinctive markings on a bullet fired from it.

  Erin opens the carrying case to make sure the
drone is inside, then closes it again and packs it into the Tumi. She returns to her own floor and parks the suitcase next to her desk. Then she walks to the kitchen and uses the Keurig, because no one will believe she’s working this early unless she has a cup of hot coffee next to her laptop.

  Erin sits for a minute behind her desk to gather herself, then sets off for Day’s office. She hates that the interior walls are made of glass; anyone walking by will see her inside.

  All right, let’s get this done and get out of here.

  Day’s desk—designed by the same architect who planned out their offices—is made of stone and teak, with chrome embellishments. Unlike Erin’s cluttered desktop, Day’s is immaculate—bare of pens, paper, books, or any other evidence of work. The few objets d’art that adorn the desk are precisely ordered. The drawers themselves appear to be organized. Everything in the top side drawers—business cards, stapler, scissors, calculator, Scotch tape, eyeglass cleaner, Aleve, toothpaste, Tic Tacs, personal grooming kit—is neatly positioned.

  In the bottom drawers, all the files are arranged in clearly labeled hanging folders. Erin quickly riffles through the folders, lifting each out of the drawer, opening it on the desktop, turning the pages, and then replacing it. After about ten minutes, she hits pay dirt: a folder containing versions of the new railroad sections of the firm’s website, heavily edited in Day’s own hand. Erin takes the folder, races to the copy room, and copies the contents. She takes the copies to her own office and hides them in her desk. Then she returns to Day’s office and replaces the folder.

  Erin turns her attention to the center drawer, where Day keeps more business cards along with his collection of obscenely expensive pens and his gold-plated Pez dispenser. She’s about to close the drawer when something tells her to lift the carved ivory drawer tray. Beneath it lies a manila envelope. Erin withdraws it, places it on the desk, and opens it. Inside is a single piece of stationery. It’s from 2020 Marketing, a company out of Manhattan that runs focus groups for Day. Erin met its CEO once in connection with an automobile-products liability case Day was about to take to trial. The CEO was a sketchy little man in a shiny suit who wore sunglasses even when he was inside. He leered at Erin the whole time she was in the room and kept asking her what there was to do in Philly at night.