The Mourning Sexton

by Michael Baron

  And she did, as Hirsch confirmed by flipping through the next hundred or so documents. On the Friday of each week that included claims hearings in In re Turbo XL Tire Litigation—usually two weeks each month—she created a document entitled Award Grid. The format was the same for each one. For example, the Award Grid dated Friday, December 11, apparently summarizing that week's proceedings, read as follows:

  CLAIMANT

  CASE NUMBER

  CLAIMANT'S CLAIM

  AWARD

  Alvey

  44782

  $1,650,000

  $1,200,000

  Annis

  34267

  $ 950,000

  $ 925,000

  Kalinowski

  49024

  $1,200,000

  $ 950,000

  Gerber

  33165

  $ 575,000

  $ 450,000

  He studied the grid, trying to make sense out of it. He turned back to her Chambers Notes and read again her rendition of McCormick's phone conversation with Guttner.

  He took out his calculator and ran the numbers on the Sanderson case. He could not find a way to make fifteen percent of anything come out to a number beginning with thirty-nine. Fifteen percent of $1.4 million was $210,000. Fifteen percent of $1.3 million was $195,000. Fifteen percent of one million was $150,000. He subtracted one million from $1.4 million, took fifteen percent of the remainder, and came up with $60,000. He tried the reverse. If thirty-nine was thirty-nine thousand, than it was fifteen percent of $260,000, but he couldn't figure out how to come up with $260,000 from the other numbers.

  He stood and stretched. The two cleaning women had come through more than an hour ago. The offices were completely empty now.

  He looked down at the stack of unread documents. Still about a third of the pile to go. At least another two hours of reading. He massaged the back of his neck with his right hand and yawned. He checked his watch. 10:52 P.M. He looked back at the stack of documents.

  Oh, well.

  CHAPTER 30

  He finished the last of Judith's documents around three that morning. Yawning, he stood up and stretched and checked his watch. He padded down the darkened hallway in his socks, flicked on the light in the small lunchroom, refilled his mug with the remaining coffee in the pot, and turned off the coffeemaker.

  On the way back down the hall, he took a sip of the coffee, which had been sitting on the warmer for more than two hours. It tasted as harsh and burnt as it smelled. Still, it was coffee and it was hot.

  Tilted back in his chair, his feet resting on top of his desk, he sipped the bitter coffee as he mulled over what he'd discovered and tried to formulate his next move. Although the pace of Judith's document creation gradually declined after her November 12 Chambers Notes memo describing the overheard telephone conversation, the complexity, and subtlety, of what followed increased. Certain basic documents were not affected. The Award Grid, which commenced the Friday after her November 12 memo, continued through the rest of her clerkship. So, too, various administrative documents, mostly based on forms she'd created during her first months as a clerk, continued as before.

  The most immediate change was the tone of her Hearing Notes and Chambers Notes. Gone was the animated style sprinkled with flattering references to McCormick. Subsequent Hearing Notes and Chambers Notes were written in a passive, bureaucratic voice shorn of praise or other editorial comment. He read every one of them, but the dead prose offered no glimpse into Judith's concerns.

  Not so, however, with what she had previously labeled Research Memos. Before November 12, those memos consisted of summaries of her legal research or summaries of her investigations into the factual issues raised by various motions. There were still some of those after November 12 as well, but now there was also a new subspecies. Though still entitled a Research Memo, these new ones—there were five in all created over the next eleven months—focused on different aspects of what Hirsch came to think of as the aftermath of the November 12 memo. Each of these five aftermath memos marked an important phase in what appeared to be Judith's ongoing efforts to make sense out of that November 12 telephone call.

  The first one described her follow-up conversations with Ada Hershey, the paralegal from Marvin Guttner's office that she'd spoken with about the Sanderson case. Judith called Ada, ostensibly trying to organize the court records on the costs to be awarded the prevailing party at the conclusion of each damages hearing. Since there was a hypothetical possibility, albeit remote, that Peterson Tire could be the prevailing party at one of the damages hearings, Judith told Ada that she was trying to get a handle on the types of costs Peterson Tire was incurring in defending each claim.

  Take the Sanderson case, for example, she told Ada. The damage award entered by the judge included an award of Mrs. Sanderson's costs. The bill of costs that Mrs. Sanderson's lawyers filed included a court filing fee, photocopying charges, court reporter fees for various depositions, and two expert witness fees (one for the doctor who testified about Mrs. Sanderson's injuries and one for the economist who testified about her damages).

  But what if Peterson Tire had prevailed, Judith asked. What kinds of costs would Peterson Tire have included in its bill of costs?

  Ada promised to look into it and get back to her. She called the next day and said that the answer was more complicated than she'd realized. In most lawsuits, she explained to Judith, her law firm advanced all litigation costs and then included the disbursements on the client's monthly bills. Thus, for example, a court reporter would send the firm a bill for transcribing a deposition, the firm would pay the bill, and then the firm would put that disbursement on the client's bill for reimbursement directly to the firm. But with Peterson Tire, the only costs the firm paid were internal ones, such as photocopying costs, long-distance charges, and computer research fees. All other costs were billed directly to Peterson Tire by the vendor, and Peterson Tire paid the bill directly to the vendor.

  Was there any record of the costs that Peterson Tire paid directly? Judith asked.

  Presumably there was, Ada told her, but the law firm didn't have a copy.

  Could she get a copy?

  Ada told her that she'd already asked Mr. Guttner that very question. Mr. Guttner told her in no uncertain terms that in the highly unlikely event that court costs would ever became an issue, all necessary information would be disclosed. Until that happened, no such information would be made available to anyone.

  Judith asked Ada about her call on November 12 seeking the amount of Mrs. Sanderson's final demand at the hearing. Ada confessed that she wasn't sure why it had become an issue. However, now she was under orders to keep track of that information in the form of a grid for each claim showing the amount of the claim and the amount of the award. She told Judith that she had to send one copy of the grid memo to Mr. Guttner and fax one copy to Donald Foster, the CFO of Peterson Tire. Mr. Guttner hadn't told her why, she said, but she was guessing that maybe he wanted that information to show the client how much money they were saving them, since often there was a several-hundred-thousand-dollar gap between what the claimant sought at the hearing and what Judge McCormick actually awarded.

  Below that statement, Judith had added a final sentence: I hope she's right.

  Judith wrote the next aftermath memo a little over a month later, in December—indeed, almost a year to the day before her death. At first, it seemed an ordinary Research Memo. The topic was Peterson Tire's responses to various discovery requests served on it by the plaintiffs. Hirsch had seen other such memos from Judith in connection with the many discovery motions filed by the parties. The format was fairly consistent: she would review the contested discovery response, examine other relevant information provided by the objecting party, research the pertinent case law, and conclude with a recommendation to the judge and a proposed order. This Research Memo started out in the same way, but by the second page Hirsch realized that there was no reference to any pending motion. In
stead, the memo appeared to be a compendium of interrogatory answers, responses to document requests, and deposition excerpts on one topic: the identities and job descriptions of all employees at Peterson Tire's corporate headquarters in Knoxville. Judith didn't yet have all, or even most, of the names on the chart. Instead, her Research Memo set out a strategy for compiling that information from the various discovery requests in the case.

  Hirsch didn't make the connection until the last paragraph of the memo, which mentioned that she had requested floppy disks containing the discovery database put together by Drahner Cortez LLC. The date on the Research Memo confirmed the connection. Missy Shields and Judith had first met toward the end of November. By the middle of December, according to Missy, Judith had asked for a copy of her firm's discovery database.

  Another one of the aftermath memos, dated in April of the following year, was the follow-up memo to the December one. This memo filled in most of the blanks in the chart with names, job titles, home addresses, and home phone numbers (all with the 423 area code). Hirsch confirmed from his copy of Judith's phone bills that many of those phone numbers had shown up on her phone bills from that April through July. According to the document profile cover sheet, Judith made numerous edits to this memo from April through the last week in August.

  Of particular interest on this memo were the entries under the name Donald Foster, chief financial officer of Peterson Tire. In the version of the Research Memo that had been printed out, which, according to the document profile, had last been edited on August 24 of Judith's final year, the CFO's secretary was identified as Marcella Vitale. There was an asterisk after her name, and at the bottom of the page the following note appeared:

  Ms. Vitale started her job on July 15. She was formerly a secretary at the Allstate Insurance regional claims office in Knoxville. Mr. Foster's prior secretary, Ruth Jones, apparently resigned earlier in the summer and moved to Chicago. According to sources, she had been with Foster for many years. Her new address and phone number are presently unknown. Need to find her. Must talk with her!

  If she ever found Ruth Jones, there was no mention of it in any of the rest of the documents he read that night.

  There was another aftermath memo dated in March of that final year. It was basically a bullet-point outline devoted to Judith's efforts to make sense out of McCormick's reference to the Brookfield warehouses, which apparently were involved in a pair of condemnation cases dating back sixteen years earlier. The cases had made it into the newspaper, and Judith's memo cited three articles from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She also had the name and phone number of Patrick Markman, the reporter on the stories. She had apparently gone out to the St. Louis County courts to review the files in the cases. She had learned that the government entity was something called the Brookfield Shopping District Redevelopment Corporation; its attorney was Mitchell Monroe, identified as the city attorney of Brookfield, Missouri; the property owner was Eagle Valley Storage Corporation; and its attorneys were Emmanuel Castleman and Marvin Guttner. Both cases went to trial during the same summer, and both were tried in Division 25 of the Circuit Court of St. Louis County. The trial judge for both cases was St. Louis County Circuit Judge Brendan McCormick.

  No commentary from Judith. Just the facts—one by one in bullet points down the page. Both cases were the subject of post-trial motions. Both cases settled prior to the hearings on those motions.

  The fifth and final aftermath memo was dated September 17—just three months before her death and about a week after her trip to Knoxville. There was no mention of the trip in the memo. Instead, the topic hearkened back to the claim at the center of the November 12 memo and of the memo on the follow-up conversation with Ada Hershey. This final aftermath memo read, in its entirety, as follows:

  According to internal company records, the following are the costs incurred by Peterson Tire Corporation in connection with its defense of the claim of Dorothy Sanderson:

  • Boudreau Court Reporting (transcripts) $ 2,552.29

  • Metro Region Orthopedics (medical expert) $ 11,400.00

  • Pembris-R Productions (video depositions) $ 875.00

  • Felis Tigris LVII, Ltd. (litigation support) $ 25,500.00

  • St. Martin's Radiology (X-rays) $ 2,225.50

  • Klingel & Craven, P.C. (economic expert) $ 9,500.00

  • Kwik Copy Services (photocopies) $ 784.25

  All amounts paid by check or wire transfer out of the CFO's office.

  No commentary, no questions, no speculations. Just the facts.

  He searched back through the documents to the November 12 memo. He read again the excerpt from McCormick's telephone conversation with Guttner:

  “They asked for one point four. I gave them a mil. Do the math. Fifteen percent is thirty-nine. I've got the statement in my hand and guess what? The number I'm looking at starts with a two.”

  He stared at the column of costs, and then he reached for his calculator.

  CHAPTER 31

  “Oh, yes,” Cassie Markman said with a smile. “Pat was impressed with that little gal. Told me more than once that she could have been one heck of an investigative reporter. ‘Far better than me,' he used to say. ‘Far better than me.'”

  “Did your brother say why?” Hirsch asked.

  She frowned as she thought back. “I can't say for sure. I just know he was real taken with her.” She placed her hand on her chest. “He was just devastated when that poor girl died. He went to her funeral.”

  They were in the small living room of Cassie Markman's bungalow on the far south side of St. Louis, just a block or so off Gravois. She'd grown up in that bungalow—she and her older brother Patrick, the two of them raised by their mother, who'd been widowed when her fireman husband died fighting a three-alarm factory fire. Cassie's brother was just eight at the time. She was five.

  Like her bungalow, Cassie Markman was small and neat. She was in her late sixties, barely five feet tall, trim, close-cropped white hair, keen eyes, high cheekbones. Her face and hands were weathered, no doubt from spending the summer months outdoors tending the gardens that took up most of her front yard and painting the dozen or so urban landscapes that hung on the walls of her house, all signed C Markman. She wore a simple, freshly starched white blouse, a long navy skirt, sturdy brown shoes, no jewelry, and a man's wristwatch.

  “More tea?” she asked, reaching for the teapot on the coffee table.

  “No, thanks.”

  He waited until she refilled her teacup. The scent of chamomile filled the room.

  So far he'd learned that Cassie's brother had joined the army after high school. His sister stayed put, taking a sales job at a department store. Patrick returned home after his honorable discharge and took a job as a police beat reporter with the old Globe-Democrat. When their mother died of cancer at the age of forty-six, Patrick moved back into his old room. The two siblings, bachelor and spinster for life, lived together in the family home for nearly forty years until his death.

  “How did your brother meet Judith?” Hirsch asked.

  “I think she actually called him up. Out of the blue. Said she was interested in some stories he'd written many years ago. He was a reporter, you know.”

  “I do,” Hirsch said.

  “And a darn good one, rest his soul.”

  Markman had died less than two months after Judith. He was a special assignment investigative reporter with the Post-Dispatch by then. According to the obituary Hirsch read on microfilm earlier that afternoon, he was killed in a one-car accident late at night on his way home from Jefferson City, where he'd gone to investigate a story on government corruption. The medical examiner said he'd apparently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven into an embankment.

  “She called him about a court case he'd covered,” Cassie continued. “I remember meeting her. A little thing. Even smaller than me. She came by one night to drop off some papers for Pat. As best I recall, they were copies of some court files.”


  “Did they involve any Brookfield condemnation cases?”

  “Brookfield,” she repeated. “Now that does sound familiar.”

  “I've reviewed her papers,” Hirsch said. “In one of them she mentioned some articles that your brother wrote on the Brookfield warehouse condemnations. I found the articles on microfilm this afternoon and made copies.” He reached into his briefcase and handed her copies of each.

  He watched as she read them, one by one.

  The first article, five paragraphs on the second page of the Metro section, ran under the headline: $3.75 MILLION AWARDED IN BROOKFIELD CONDEMNATION CASE; CITY OFFICIALS EXPRESS SURPRISE OVER AMOUNT. The story explained that a St. Louis county jury had awarded the owners of a pair of warehouses on the south side of Bulger Road $3,750,000 for the properties, which had been condemned as part of the city's proposed redevelopment plan. What made the case noteworthy, and the city officials concerned, was that the verdict exceeded the city's appraised value of the property by more than a million dollars. The article quoted the city's attorney, Mitchell Monroe, as “evaluating the possibility of an appeal.” The successful property owner's attorney, Marvin Guttner, told the newspaper that his client “is quite satisfied with the verdict and believed that justice has been bestowed.” The article closed by noting that the same parties would be back in court in two weeks for the trial of the condemnation of the two remaining warehouses on the north side of Bulger Road.

  Patrick Markman was there when they returned to court for that case, and his story made it onto the first page of the Metro section under the headline: BROOKFIELD OFFICIALS FEAR SECOND MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR VERDICT ENDANGERS REDEVELOPMENT PLAN. The story opened:

  A surprisingly acrimonious condemnation trial ended this afternoon with a multimillion-dollar jury verdict that one Brookfield city official labeled “the death knell” for his town's ambitious redevelopment project.