The Killdeer Connection

by Tom Swyers

  “How many floors?” David asked.

  “Eleven.” The bell rang, the doors glided open, and they both got on.

  “Wow, do you occupy the entire building?”

  Amber pushed the button for the eleventh floor. David went to the other side of the elevator, which was carpeted and lined with cherry paneling.

  “No, just the upper floors for now. We’re not sure if we want to rent out the other floors, or save it for expansion.”

  “Have you always worked in the Albany office?”

  “No, I worked at the New York City office before moving here.”

  “How many lawyers do you have in Albany?”

  “Fifty.”

  “I didn’t know you had such a presence here.” David figured that they must be one of the largest law firms in Albany now.

  When the elevator stopped and the doors opened with a discreet, trilling chime, they stepped off and turned down a broad hallway. “We’re expanding all over the country. ‘Go big or go home’ is our motto. We want to be a full-service firm.”

  Offices for lawyers ranged both sides of the wide expanse, all offering views of the capital city. Their solid-wood raised-panel doors, some open and some closed, had frosted-glass sidelights on either side. Each office door boasted a gold nameplate. In between, there were secretarial stations in cubicles made from the same dark cherrywood as the doors. As they headed down the hall to the side of the building that overlooked the Hudson River, older male lawyers passed. They purposefully nodded to one another but not to Amber, the younger attorneys, or other staff members. It reminded David of the old saying about Boston: where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God.

  That’s when the flashback hit. David recalled walking the halls of Baxter & Chadwick in the New York City office, ignored by the partners and most of the associates, especially on the partner floor, the top floor of the building. He realized then that he was back on the partner floor, only in Albany; the firm’s Brahmin culture had endured during his thirty-year absence.

  Then David spotted a familiar figure looming ahead. He recognized the shape that waddled down the hall before berthing in an office. Years ago, when David had slaved away in the supply closet, Richard Pottenger, a Harvard man, had a corner office overlooking New York Bay. His office held a huge Replogle globe that stood over four feet tall, perched on a handcrafted mahogany stand. Of course, it was one of the most expensive models available. Pottenger used it to locate his clients’ worldwide maritime traffic, but often he would just spin it as he watched the ships moving in the harbor, dreaming of collision cases. The globe was advertised in the Replogle company brochure as a “perfect office companion.” Pottenger evidently took that to heart, as there was a convergence of appearance over the years between the man and his globe. The globe’s equatorial circumference matched his waist size. David suspected the globe would fit nicely inside the man’s body cavity, supported from his shoulders by his handcrafted red suspenders.

  Amber didn’t break stride and gave the partners who looked up from their office desks quite a show as her hair and chest bounced with every step. Her upper thigh peeked through the rear slit in her skirt while she made her way to a conference room at the far end of the floor. The conference room was flanked on either side by corner offices that had two views of the city, uptown or downtown. A view of the Hudson spanned its entire length.

  David followed Amber through the glass conference-room door, closing it behind him. The room took up almost the entire length of the building, glassed in for its full span, floor to ceiling. The two corner offices on each end had no solid walls; they were separated just by glass. Looking through the conference-room glass and through the exterior glass of the uptown-facing corner office, David could see the neighborhood quickly transition from spotty gentrification to old industrial buildings to impoverished housing projects. Looking through the downtown corner-office glass, David saw the white marble, monolithic Corning Tower, the tallest building in New York State outside of New York City. Standing side by side behind it were four identical smaller towers, less than half the size, lined up like obedient quadruplets in the shadow of a parent. On a weekday, all the towers were filled with state workers.

  David knew that in Baxter & Chadwick culture, the two corner offices were larger than the rest and reserved for the most senior partners. Both sat empty, drapes open, probably because the old guys had left early for an extended lunch. They’re probably at Jack’s having oysters and a martini. Some things never change.

  A massive dark-cherry table that seated twenty ran the length of the conference room. Amber went to the other side of the table and pulled out a brown-leather high-back chair at the end so she could face the offices through the interior window. David followed her to the other side but walked to the outer window and stopped at a brass telescope mounted on a tripod. The panorama outside drew his gaze like a magnet. The sky was cloudless, cerulean blue, reflecting on the water below. He looked down at I-787, the north-south highway that runs along the Albany side of the Hudson River. A train hauling only black oil-tanker cars ran on tracks in the median. Its final destination was the Helmsley Oil facility in the Port of Albany, where Ben Prior had been injured. David had a clear view of the river and recognized the sail pattern of the sloop Clearwater heading to New York City. The USS Slater, a World War II cannon-class destroyer escort turned floating museum, was anchored along the Albany side of the river. She sported the same color gray as Amber’s suit.

  “That’s quite a view you have here,” he said before turning around to face her.

  Amber sat with her legs crossed, facing David, ready to get down to business. She pulled a file off the table where she had placed it after reserving the conference room earlier that morning.

  “We think so,” she said, bouncing her top leg. Her red-soled shoe swung from her toes like it was begging for attention.

  David could have sat at the head of the table beside Amber, but that felt too forward, especially since he knew instinctively that this was the partners’ conference room. This was the inner sanctum, the room where all the bigwigs sat around to discuss important decisions, like how much money each would make, who would join their partner club, and who would get the corner offices. He knew Amber was a seven-year senior associate, according to her website biography. Next year, she would either make partner or be asked to leave, in accordance with the firm’s longstanding up-or-out policy. David admired her brazen move to hold their meeting in the partners’ conference room but wondered if that same quality was about to bite him in the ass. After all, she was the Black Widow.

  Instead, David chose a chair across from her, facing the river. She adjusted her seat so that partners or anyone walking down the hallway could see her, perhaps associate her with being at the helm of Baxter & Chadwick. He opened his briefcase and removed a pen and reached for a legal pad of paper from a stack on the conference table. Baxter & Chadwick was printed in gold at the top. He thought about stuffing the entire pile in his briefcase as payback for the hours he’d slaved in their salt mines.

  “I want to explore settling this case,” she opened.

  “Okay, I’m listening.”

  “Helmsley Oil is prepared to settle this case for fifty thousand dollars.”

  David tapped his pen on the table. “Plus the legal pad,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m serious, David,” she said, placing both hands on the table. No wedding band, no engagement ring.

  “I am, too, Amber. I want the pad. It’s a deal-breaker if I don’t get the pad.”

  “What about the fifty thousand?”

  “Well, that’s mighty generous of you, considering Ben Prior is a young man of thirty-five with his entire working life ahead of him, and with a son to support. Unfortunately for Ben, his livelihood up until this point depended solely on his hands, and in case you haven’t noticed, Ben’s hands melted when your client’s Bakken oil lit him up like a Roman candle. He will like
ly never have the use of them again. He made more than sixty thousand dollars last year by offloading oil, along with his other duties. So what you’re saying is that his hands are worth less than one year’s worth of earnings?”

  “Let me be perfectly clear. We are not admitting any liability with respect to his injuries. My client has authorized me to try and settle the case for nuisance value. He doesn’t want to keep paying for the defense of this case.”

  “So, Ben’s hands and his life are a nuisance to Helmsley Oil?”

  “You’re putting words into my mouth.”

  “No, I’m merely translating your bullshit. Who at Helmsley Oil is heading these negotiations?”

  “I’m not authorized to say.”

  “Donovan Kincaid is the guy, right? He needs to micromanage everything.” Kincaid was the president and CEO of Helmsley Oil. He was always in the media responding to any criticism of his company, no matter how trivial.

  “I’m not authorized—”

  “Never mind. Your nondenial just then confirmed my belief. I’m looking forward to his deposition.”

  “Look, David, your problems are well known. You’re having money issues, and this case is a drain on you. You’ve lost your expert witness, and you’re a suspect in his death—”

  David wondered how she knew more than what had been made public. “My problems are well known? Really? The media hasn’t picked up on them yet.”

  “It’s just a matter of time—”

  “Before what? Before you talk to them and ask them to run a story on me?”

  “If you’re arrested, things will take on a life of their own. All I’m suggesting is that it may be time to cut your losses.”

  David resented the fact that Amber was trying to leverage his personal problems as a means to dispose of Ben Prior’s case. “Since when are you and Helmsley Oil so concerned about me?”

  “My client is willing to listen to any counteroffer—”

  “Well, I want the entire pile of legal pads then. And I also want the telescope. Throw in some evening cruises aboard the Clearwater, and we have a deal.”

  “Please be serious. Let’s stick to business—”

  “Business? You’re the one who brought in my personal life, and now you want to stick to business. I don’t see how any of my personal issues are in any way relevant to the case of Ben Prior.” David’s eyes narrowed, his jaw clenched. “What are you so afraid of, anyway?”

  “We’re not afraid of anything—”

  “If you weren’t afraid of anything, you wouldn’t be willing to talk settlement at this point. No, I think you’re afraid of facing a jury made up of people who live near the Port of Albany or in other impoverished areas close to the tracks where you ship and store this explosive oil. Isn’t it amazing that all this wonderful oil is being transported around the country through mainly poor, minority-populated neighborhoods without their knowledge or consent? You’re afraid that these folks in Albany will see Ben Prior’s black gloves, his hands, and think that those hands could belong to them.”

  “Look, this is simply a business decision—”

  “Right, I’m sure you have a bunch of economists on retainer that have put together a spreadsheet and determined that your client can continue to ship this toxic, explosive mix of Bakken through the backyards of America at a substantial profit in the face of hundreds, if not thousands, of Ben Priors. Your client sees more profit in seeing people maimed or killed than in fixing its product. That’s your client’s business decision in a nutshell, and it’s outrageous.”

  “Nobody in the United States has been killed—”

  “How about the forty-seven people who died in the disaster at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec? Or don’t Canadians count? Do we have to wait for Americans to die in large numbers from Bakken explosions before the rules are changed?”

  “Oil is not explosive. Crude is crude—”

  “That’s total BS, and you know it. Bakken crude is filled with natural-gas liquids—heptane, pentane, propane, butane, ethane, isobutane, a little methane—making it highly explosive when those liquids evaporate in the tank cars. Bakken is not a consistent oil when you move from well to well. It’s a mile to two miles down, not like surface crude. Who knows what you’re pumping up from down there, especially if it’s being mixed with some fracking chemicals, the likes of which aren’t publicly known because oil companies want to keep their fracking recipes secret from their competitors and the public. When Bakken is at rest, it’s like a bottle of soda sitting on a grocery-store shelf. But when you shake and bake those black oil-tanker cars as they travel long distances in the sun, it’s like you’re shaking a bottle of soda. The Bakken becomes explosive, not to mention extremely flammable.”

  “There’s no science to show that Bakken crude is any more volatile than any other crude.”

  “Who told you that? The American Petroleum Institute, or some other industry-sponsored mouthpiece? Those guys are like the fox guarding the henhouse. Some senator called their study ‘smoke and mirrors.’ Anyway, who needs science when you have videos of Bakken train derailments causing explosions and three-hundred-fifty-foot-tall fireballs? Are you saying these videos aren’t real?”

  “Derailments are going to happen. Railroads have been moving hazardous chemicals for years, and now, all of a sudden, the environmentalists come out of the woodwork to oppose Bakken oil. There are far more hazardous materials than Bakken oil moving over the rails.”

  “The problem is not just the Bakken oil itself; it’s the volume of this stuff moving over the rails. There were nine thousand five hundred railcars carrying crude in 2008. Now we’re up to four hundred thousand. It’s not just one or two railcars filled with oil; you’re talking about entire trains, one hundred to one hundred twenty cars long. We’ve created a virtual, continuous pipeline moving over the rails through highly populated, low-income areas. These folks get no economic benefit from this oil. It creates no jobs for these communities. They just assume the risk of being incinerated because the oil companies are too cheap to stabilize their Bakken oil before shipment.”

  “Bakken-oil producers are conditioning their oil, bringing the vapor pressure below thirteen point seven pounds per square inch in the tank cars, which is now law in North Dakota.”

  “Come on, most Bakken oil is under thirteen point seven coming out of the ground, and almost all of the catastrophes over the past few years have involved Bakken oil with vapor pressure below thirteen point seven pounds per square inch. At Lac-Mégantic, the pressure was between nine and ten, and look what happened. Your client, along with others, has been trying to show that it’s doing something when, in reality, it’s doing nothing but putting on a public-relations blitz meant to confuse or mollify the public. If your client took the money it spent on trying to take the wind out of the sails of critics and applied it toward removing the gas out of its products through stabilization procedures, there’d be no lawsuit against Helmsley Oil, and we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation.”

  “More research is still needed to determine if stabilization would make rail transportation of Bakken crude safer.”

  “Says who? The head of the Federal Railroad Administration? What does she know about the science of oil? Before she got that job, she worked in corporate communications. Try asking an actual scientist, and you might get a different answer. The ‘more research’ argument is a classic delay tactic. Don’t you just love the video age we live in today? We use videos to cut through the crap. You know, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’ All I need to do is to show videos of the explosions to a jury, and they’ll figure out the truth. Do you think the jury will think it’s better to vaporize the Bakken gases, or vaporize people like Ben Prior or the forty-seven people who died in the Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, disaster? They were never able to find five of the bodies. Those people were killed and cremated in an instant. You fear a jury more than anything.”

  “You assume this case will make it to a jury
. You don’t have an expert witness any longer. He died before you submitted his report to the court and before we were able to depose him. You have to start from square one. Who are you going to get to replace Harold Salar?”

  David knew Amber was right. He didn’t have an expert to replace Harold Salar, at least not yet. Every respected expert seemed to be on the payroll of Big Oil, directly or indirectly. But he also knew that he wasn’t going to tell her squat about his quandary. At this point, David realized that her lowball offer was just some chum she threw in the water to see if he would bite. She wanted David’s reaction to see if he was wearing down, to see if he’d reveal a weakness in his approach going forward. He had now openly discussed his strategy with her, and he had some second thoughts about that. Amber had tried several cases in the US District Court for the Northern District of New York. David hadn’t tried any, anywhere. He couldn’t afford to give her an advantage, but David knew he’d have to let the cat out of the bag sooner or later. Now was as good a time as any.

  “I’ve got my short list, and I’ll let you know when I’ve made a final decision about a new expert.”

  Amber fiddled with the third button of her blouse while she looked at David. “Just to be clear, you have no counteroffer, then, right?”

  David didn’t know what to make of her. Is she toying with me, or just attending to herself? “You have the demand in my complaint. It’s ten million dollars.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Not as ridiculous as your offer.”

  “Give me a number then.”

  “Making a counter to fifty thousand is like I’m negotiating against myself. I don’t do that. Get serious, and maybe we can talk.”

  “My client has authorized me to offer only fifty thousand. Are you going to take the offer to your client?” Amber pushed her hair back over her shoulder. David sat there and stared at her. She was beautiful, and she knew it.

  “I’ll tell you what. If he accepts your offer, I’ll get back to you. But don’t wait by the phone for me to call. Where’s Clara Ashworth these days?”