A Civil Action (11 page)

Conway had decided to go into practice for himself. He descended from a position of relative prestige in the legal world—from an office on the fiftieth floor of a fancy building in New York—to the lowly status of a solo practitioner, close to the legal profession’s bottommost rung. He moved into the basement of a century-old building in Belmont, a suburb of Boston. From the window of his office in Cushing Square, he had a pavement-level view of a working-class neighborhood of small shops. He knew this world well. He’d grown up near Belmont, not far from his new office, the second of nine children, the son of a schoolteacher. There had never been much money in the Conway family, but there had always been plenty of warmth and conviviality. Every Sunday afternoon the entire Conway clan would assemble in the living room with their musical instruments for a concert. The house was always a thick tangle of kids, crowded with Conways, but so inviting that many neighborhood kids gathered there, too.

For his new office in Belmont, Conway hired a secretary, a pretty woman in her early thirties named Peggy Vecchione who had once dated Conway’s younger brother. By her own admission, Peggy could barely type and she knew nothing about legal work. But she needed a job badly. She had recently gotten divorced and had two children to support. Conway didn’t think twice about hiring her.

Together they handled the legal problems of anyone who walked in Conway’s door. Most of these problems were simple matters—wills, minor criminal infractions, house closings. Also some divorces, though Conway did not like divorces because they saddened him and he invariably spent too much time trying to reconcile the unhappy spouses. Peggy watched one couple walk out the door, irritated by Conway’s counseling. “Don’t you understand?” the man said, his voice raised. “We want a divorce!” Peggy told Conway he must have done a good job. “At least they’re angry at you instead of each other,” she said.

Conway came dutifully to work every day, even though there wasn’t always much to do. He’d consult with Peggy about how much to charge a client. For a will of moderate complexity, she would advise one hundred fifty dollars. “They can’t afford that,” Conway would say of an elderly couple. He would charge fifty dollars. He’d ask Peggy how long it would take her to type the will, and she’d say, anticipating many errors and retyping, “Oh, about a week?” Conway would respond, “Hmm, that long?” But he wouldn’t complain. When business
was slow, he went to the arraignment courts and represented indigent defendants. For each case, he got paid seventy-five dollars by the state. He made only as much as he needed, and his needs weren’t great.

After a few years in Belmont, Conway married a woman he’d courted since his New York days, and his needs grew slightly greater. He had known Joe Mulligan for several years, and when Mulligan invited him to come work at his firm, Conway accepted. He brought Peggy along with him. He didn’t draw a salary. He got paid only from the proceeds of cases he helped to resolve.

He’d been at Reed & Mulligan two years, working out of a small cubicle, when Schlichtmann showed up. Peggy would never forget that day. “Kevin used to tell me, ‘There’s no passion in my life.’ He was bored with what he was doing. Then Jan burst into the office. He represented somebody in an airplane crash, a client that Barry Reed wanted. Barry didn’t have a chance against Jan. He was overpowering. Kevin was stunned by him. Kevin said, ‘Jan’s exactly like what you hope you’re going to be when you get out of law school.’ ”

Conway had helped Schlichtmann draft the complaint in the Piper Arrow case. When Schlichtmann began digging through the files at Reed & Mulligan, Conway was his guide. Conway unearthed a case in which a three-year-old girl, vomiting and with a high fever, was examined by a doctor, treated with aspirin, and sent home. She developed fulminant meningitis and suffered brain damage as a result. Schlichtmann and Conway settled the case for $675,000. They worked together every day. In the evening they’d go downstairs to the Emperor of China restaurant on Tremont Street for dinner and then come back to the office and work some more. They took on a case in which a hospital incubator had overheated, causing brain damage in a newborn infant. They settled that case for $1.15 million. When an insurance company refused to settle a claim in which a surgical clamp had been left for nine years in the abdomen of a elderly man, Conway and Schlichtmann prepared for trial. It was an Essex County case, on the north shore of Massachusetts, not far from Schlichtmann’s old office in Newburyport. They rented a room at a cheap motel near the Essex County courthouse. They lived there for two weeks, amid piles of lawbooks, medical texts, and legal pads. On the bureau was a portable
typewriter, on which Schlichtmann typed last-minute motions. They ate their meals at a diner next to the motel, keeping company with long-haul truck drivers. They worked until two or three o’clock in the morning, and then got up to go to court. Conway felt punchy from lack of sleep, but he also felt exhilarated. “Working with Jan,” Conway said of that time, “was the difference between being alive and being dead.” The jury awarded their client $492,000.

Conway felt as close to Schlichtmann as a brother, although in most respects they appeared to be complete opposites. Schlichtmann was tall and slender, Conway short and stout. Schlichtmann’s shoes were always polished to a high gloss, Conway’s were always scuffed. Schlichtmann’s tailored shirts were perfectly pressed, Conway’s were taut over his substantial belly and billowed out of the back of his pants. Schlichtmann’s tie, perfectly knotted, was held in place with a gold collarpin. The knot in Conway’s tie had usually descended an inch or two by the time he arrived at work. Schlichtmann, fastidious about health and diet, watched Conway eat doughnuts for breakfast and drink “gallons” of coffee. “You treat your digestive tract like a sewer,” Schlichtmann once told him. Conway had a kind word for everyone he encountered—the receptionist, the filing clerk, the office boy—while Schlichtmann, impatient and always hurrying, often failed to observe even common civilities. Conway tried never to judge anyone harshly. “You can never know enough about why someone acts the way they do,” he would say.

They differed in their approach to money, too. Conway lived frugally, saving to buy a house and start a family. Schlichtmann spent every penny he earned. Conway noticed that Schlichtmann usually seemed depressed when he had money in the bank. He seemed driven by a need to get rid of money as quickly as possible, and when he had spent it all, he would burrow into another case and his spirits would rise.

Conway found the cases in the files of Reed & Mulligan and got Schlichtmann interested in them. But Conway didn’t like the Woburn case. Whenever Schlichtmann mentioned it, Conway tried to steer him away. “It’s a black hole,” he’d warn Schlichtmann. Conway had never met the families, and he could view the case in a cold, unemotional light. He had learned by then that Schlichtmann never did anything in
half measures, and the full measure of Woburn—the size, the complexity and the cost—scared Conway. “We don’t want that one,” he would say when he and Schlichtmann went downstairs after work to the Emperor of China restaurant and discussed new cases.

5

For a time after her son’s death, Anne Anderson had rarely left the house, fearful she would break down and weep in public. She used to dream that Jimmy was still alive, and then she would awake, stunned by the fresh realization that he was gone. In the grocery store she’d see something he had liked and her tears would start to flow.

She recovered slowly. A few months after Jimmy’s death, she began working at her brother’s stonecutting business in Somerville, partly to pay the bills, but also to try to get her mind off Jimmy. She worked in the office, answering telephones and keeping accounts. But her thoughts kept returning to the contaminated wells. She wanted answers, and she wanted to bring to account whoever had caused her son’s illness and suffering. As far as she could see, neither Mulligan nor Schlichtmann had done anything. Schlichtmann didn’t even return her phone calls.

Driving home from work one afternoon in the fall of 1981, Anne turned on the radio and began listening to the Jerry Williams talk show on WRKO. The subject that day was lawyers. Listeners were invited to call in and ask questions of two lawyers who were guests on the show. Anne was listening with half an ear when she realized that one of the voices was familiar. It was Schlichtmann’s voice. Here he was, on the radio, pontificating about the law, about serving clients, and she could never even get him on the phone. She drove home as fast as she dared. She ran into the house, picked up the kitchen phone and dialed the station without pausing to take her coat off.

“I’ve got a question for Mr. Schlichtmann.”

“Go ahead, please,” said the talk show host.

“What should you do when your lawyer never calls you back?”

“Wait a minute!” said Schlichtmann. “I know this voice. Is this Anne?”

“Jan, I call and call and never get to talk with you.”

Over the air, Schlichtmann laughed painfully. “Your messages are right next to my mother’s,” he said. “I haven’t called her back either.” Then he added, “You can talk with Kathy, you know.”

“Kathy doesn’t have the answers,” said Anne.

Schlichtmann didn’t have any answers either, but he did not say so. He promised to call Anne the next morning.

Anne hung up the phone and then she picked it up again and called Donna Robbins. “Guess what I just did,” Anne said.

Despite all its difficulties, the case tantalized Schlichtmann. He believed that it had merit. He kept thinking that if he was destined for something great in life, this case might be his opportunity. If he were to win it, he would set new legal precedents and gain a national reputation among his fellow plaintiffs’ lawyers. He would no doubt make a lot of money. And he would have helped the families of east Woburn. Fame, fortune, and doing good—those were, in combination, goals worth striving for, he thought.

But by the winter of 1982 Schlichtmann still had not made a decision on the case. The statute of limitations—three years for a personal injury action in Massachusetts—had begun to run on the day the Woburn wells had closed, on May 22, 1979. If he was going to drop the case, he had to tell the families soon. If not, he had to start working quickly to prepare the complaint. As ambitious as he was, he also liked to think of himself as a businessman, a pragmatist. Conway had called this case a “black hole,” and Conway was probably right. Schlichtmann decided there were other worthy cases he could devote himself to, cases he could win.

So in February he called Anne and asked her to arrange a meeting with the families at Trinity Episcopal. On the evening of the meeting, as Schlichtmann prepared to leave for Woburn, Conway came into his office. Conway made him promise that this time he would level with the families. He’d tell them that he didn’t have sufficient basis to file a lawsuit. Conway followed Schlichtmann to the door. “When you come back, we won’t have the Woburn case anymore. Right, Jan?”

“Right,” said Schlichtmann.

•     •     •

At Trinity Episcopal, the small gathering of men and women sat in metal folding chairs around a long wooden banquet table that was usually used for church suppers. Reverend Young sat among them. The church hall was dimly lit and cold. Some of the women kept their coats on. Everyone but Anne thought that Schlichtmann had come to inform them of new developments in the case. She alone suspected that he had come to wash his hands of it, but she had not voiced her suspicion to the others, not even to Donna or Reverend Young.

Schlichtmann sat across from the families and recited the now familiar litany of difficulties—the absence of a defendant, the problem of proving that the chemicals had caused the leukemias, and the cost, especially the cost. “There are a lot of questions,” said Schlichtmann, “and we don’t have any of the answers yet. I’m afraid the resources to pursue this simply aren’t there.”

A sense of bleakness came over the group. Anne thought to herself, He’s done everything but say good-bye.

For a moment, no one spoke. Schlichtmann, it seemed, couldn’t bring himself to say good-bye, to get up and leave. Then Reverend Young cleared his throat and said, “What if I told you I know where we can get some money?”

Schlichtmann looked doubtfully at the minister. This was not a case that could be financed by church bake sales.

Reverend Young explained that he had spoken that very afternoon with a lawyer in Washington, D.C., the executive director of a new public-interest law firm called Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

Schlichtmann grew suddenly alert. He knew about the firm! he exclaimed to Reverend Young. He was, in fact, one of its founding members! Six months ago, at a convention of trial lawyers in San Francisco, he had contributed a thousand dollars to help get the organization started. He had, of course, liked the name, and he was sympathetic to the goal of using the legal system to bring about social change.

The conversation with the Washington lawyer, continued Young, had come about by coincidence, the result of a call from a staff member in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office. The staffer had read that Trial Lawyers for Public Justice was looking for a good environmental case. Woburn had come to her mind. She’d called Reverend Young, and
then, at four o’clock that afternoon, she’d set up a conference call between him and the executive director, whose name was Anthony Roisman. Over the phone, Young had described the situation in Woburn, and Roisman had said the case sounded interesting. Moreover, Trial Lawyers for Public Justice had some funds already earmarked for an environmental case. But, Roisman had also said, he could not just step in and take the case away from another lawyer.

And that, Reverend Young told the gathering at Trinity Episcopal, was why he had not mentioned the conversation until this moment.

Schlichtmann, greatly animated now, questioned the minister closely about every detail of his conversation with Roisman. He remarked several times on the “amazing” coincidence of events. He told the families he would call Roisman the first thing tomorrow morning. He hoped that he and Roisman could work together on the case. When he left Trinity Episcopal that evening, the mood among the families was no longer somber.