Impact (18 page)

The action is for statutory damages under Code of Civil Procedure 377 for wrongful death, and for loss of society under the case law.
Krouse v. Graham
, 137 Cal. Rptr. 863 (1977).

Defendants are as follows:

SurfAir Coastal Airways—the claim is for negligence, based on a breach of the duty of a common carrier.
Acosta v. Southern California Rapid Transit Dist.
, 466 P.2nd 72, 77 (Cal. 1970).

Hastings Aircraft Corporation—we sue Hastings on the basis of both negligence and strict liability in tort for the manufacture of a defective product. Until evidence of a defect is available, proceed under the doctrine of
res ipsa loquitur
—the thing speaks for itself, i.e., the plane wouldn't have crashed unless something was wrong with it. Eventually we will amend
res ipsa
out, and plead specific defects.

Cross and Dolby—they made the engines, and Alec always joins the engine people. Same liability as Hastings.

Federal Aviation Administration—the plane was within the control of the San Francisco tower, hence failure to warn of approaching traffic or erroneous approach instructions are possible causes, particularly if it turns out to have been a near miss. Secretary of Transportation Dole has just admitted that 955 additional controllers are needed in the system, and
Newsweek
is coming out with a cover story in two weeks calling 1987 “The Year of the Near Miss” (they're up 35 percent), so if we play our cards right, we can make hay with this one.

National Weather Service—there was a storm that night, as far as we know at this point not a particularly severe one, but we want to allege on information and belief that the weather service negligently forecast conditions, causing the pilot to fail to take adequate safety precautions. If the crash ultimately turns on pilot error, we can plead the so-called Caged Brain Syndrome—that pilots in rainstorms are subject to extranormal magnetic forces that impair their judgment in emergencies.

That's all the defendants we name specifically. Use John Does to cover the subcontractors, etc., as well as the pilot, owner, operator, and manufacturer of the small aircraft. Put in standard claims for failure to properly equip and maintain, for breach of express and implied warranties of safety, for lack of crashworthiness, and for punitive damages, though at this point they're window dressing.

Ask for $20 million, for publicity purposes—the newspapers still like to print the damage claims, even though they're meaningless. File in federal court in San Francisco, Jurisdiction based on diversity of citizenship between the plaintiffs and defendants, venue on the place of the accident.

Keep our clients informed of developments, which includes sending them copies of pleadings. People in their situation often feel hopeless and helpless, and the litigation gives them a focus, even though it may amount to nothing more productive than a desire for revenge. Don't feel it inappropriate to discuss the case with them. Some of our most rewarding strategic points, particularly on the issue of damages, have originated in casual conversations with our clients. Also remember that if you don't do these things, the client may grow to hold you as responsible as the defendants for their ordeal. There is no worse publicity for an attorney than to be reviled by his client, so beware. Also keep in mind that if it takes a decade to get the plaintiffs the money they deserve, our clients will hate us no matter
what
we do. That's why we go full tilt in crash cases from day one. Keep the pressure on, or the pressure will be on you.

Incidentally, the rumors that Alec intends to retire are being spread by our competitors to divert potential SurfAir plaintiffs from this office. Assure anyone who asks that Alec will be back in action, full time, in a few weeks.

If you have any other questions, see me.

Martha

SIX

The view mesmerizes as it always does—the bay, the green lump of Angel Island, San Francisco's skyscrapers rising in the distance like the sails of an approaching armada. Once he could stare across this slice of the world for hours and in the process stare deep within himself, but of late the dazzle is only momentary. He has asked the view to heal his heart when all it ever promised was to empty excess from his brain.

With a final glance across the sequined water, Alec Hawthorne reaches for a button. At its command, his head and shoulders, inclined at forty-five degrees, sink toward the horizontal. When he is level, he looks at the appointment calendar now accessible on the table beside him, finds the day, and crosses off the one just past. The big black
X
is number sixty-four.

He has spent nine weeks in his living room, for much of that time leaving it only to use the bathroom or to endure his designated therapy with the drill sergeant assigned to hound enough strength into his heart to carry it into the twenty-first century. But enough has finally been enough. Although he has been urged to continue his therapies for another month, on Monday last he dismissed his entire retinue—cardiologist, internist, physiotherapist, and nurses of all shapes, sizes, and demeanors—but for the minimal follow-up required by their malpractice-avoidance procedures.

He is determined to complete his recovery by his own devices. Minimally, during the weeks of his recuperation he should have formulated a plan, a “wellness program” in the current argot, that had at its core a dazzling array of dietary sacrifices and rehabilitative schemes designed to rid both his soul and his arteries of any residue of pleasure. Instead, he has gone back to work, bowing to the blandishments of his white-garbed advisers only by reducing the hours of his former routine by half. He knows he should change his habits, but can think of no other regimen that is capable of beating back the fear that the law firm with his name on it can function just fine without him.

Still, he is being a good boy. Every other afternoon is spent at home, walking for a vigorous hour, then resting and reading the classics. Deeply into
War and Peace
, he wonders why so many of the great books were written by the subjects of czars or monarchs and whether the empty drone of modern fiction is the fault of its authors or of a form of government that permits them to be irrelevant. Such musings are digressive, however. The Franklin Library edition of Tolstoy's masterwork lies closed on the table beside him, because Hawthorne is awaiting the arrival of his very first wife.

Hygiene is her name, the legacy of a fastidious father and his submissive spouse. Too late, Hawthorne realized that Hygiene had been raised to be resentful by parents who were convinced that—despite their damnation of everything in the universe less perfect than their God—they deserved much more than they got from life, on fronts from the financial to the philosophical. Hygiene's parents not only wanted to be rich, they wanted to be revered.

Hygiene continued the tradition with an accusatory vehemence more common to political columnists and youth gangs. In spite of this, Hawthorne had married her. The reason was sex—from the moment he met her, Hygiene made it clear she was willing to erase his deficit in exchange for an option on his surname.

The marriage lasted until Hawthorne had partaken of every wanton exercise he had ever dreamed or read of, and Hygiene discovered that her husband's savoir faire came from books and movies rather than a family fortune. Oddly, Hygiene remains convinced that despite a combative divorce and their itchy encounters over the ensuing twenty years, they are friends. She is as wrong as their marriage was, but he has never had the nerve to tell her so.

The doorbell rings. The maid hurries to answer it. After a moment, footsteps echo on the foyer tiles. Hawthorne presses the button to raise himself to a conversational tilt, then rolls to his side and waits for his visitor to move into his range of vision. Dressed in pajamas and dressing gown, he is determined to remain bedridden over the course of the visit, to appeal to whatever cinder of sympathy might smolder within Hygiene's morally blackened body.

Suddenly she is beside him—stylish, vibrant, dressed in slacks and shirt beneath a jacket cut in the style of a vice cop, an instant reminder of why he made her the first of four. Given her age, he wonders how she does it.

She doesn't speak, not yet, not until she has assessed the scene. Looking down her narrow nose, moving with the slide of the cocktail waitress she was when they first met, the former Hygiene Dillon circles the bed like an agricultural inspector regarding the first fruit of the season.

When she has confirmed that the rumors that have brought her here are true, she strikes a pose. Arms akimbo, chemically blonded head cocked at a quizzical tilt, she stands on one foot while the other swivels like a machine gun on the point of its high heel, until it zeroes on his chest. Then it stops and waits, presumably for him to surrender.

“Hygiene,” he begins, determined to be minimalist in everything from etiquette to chitchat.

“Alec. You look
much
better than I expected.”

“You, too.”

She shakes her head and purses her perfect lips. “Now, now. Don't I at least deserve a smile?”

“You deserve a great deal more than that, Hygiene.”

She shakes her head with resignation. “Are we going to be like this, or are we going to be grown-up?”

“By ‘we' you mean the sick guy, right?”

She raises a brow that is as defined as a scimitar. The lazy string of her lip is supposed to indicate that she knows far better than he why he is doing what he has just done, saying what he has just said in just the way he said it. She had used the smile a dozen times a day when they were married.

“If you do that once more I'll have you thrown out,” Hawthorne declares, wishing he were as assured as she, knowing he is for some reason only able to manage it when he is in a courtroom speaking on behalf of someone other than himself.

Hygiene remains impervious. After a moment, she nods briskly. “Let's pretend I just rang the bell. Door opens, I come in, smile, blow you a kiss. Now we start over. Hello, Alec. You're looking well. How are you feeling?”

He grins sheepishly, despite his determination to remain aloof. It seems she is not here to gloat, so he decides to be as nice as she will let him be. “I'm fine, Hygiene. Yourself?”

“Wonderful,” she says, then abandons the charade for candor. “Did you have a bypass? I heard you did and then I heard you didn't.”

He shakes his head. “They're trying to handle it medically. I take some stuff that's supposed to dissolve deposits in my arteries. In the meantime, they stuck a little drill in there to open them enough to keep things moving.”

“A Rotoblator,” Hygiene murmurs.

“Very good. It's supposed to be a new procedure.”

She shrugs. “I try to keep up with the latest techniques, in case I meet a cardiologist I want to impress. They average three hundred thousand a year, you know.” She licks her lips to show she's joking, and in the process shows her most endearing smile. “But are you … that is, did it work?”

He shrugs. “There's an eighty percent opening in the affected artery now, as opposed to twenty when I keeled over. Unless I have an urge to perform in stag films, they tell me I can live with that. And if I conk out again, they can always cut. Pig valves and plastic pipe and such. If that doesn't work, I'll get a job where a heart isn't required. With an insurance company, for instance.”

Hygiene's smile is a tepid acknowledgment of his well-worn wit. “I hope for the best, Alec. I really do.” She grabs his eyes and squeezes them with hers. “And what I
really
hope is that you know that.”

“I do. I guess.” What he knows is that she is up to something. What he doesn't know is what.

“We're still friends, at least,” she comments as her eyes complete an inventory of the room. In the event he decides to liquidate, as Martha has suggested, Hygiene will be the first he asks to tell him what his house is worth. “It's really quite amazing, isn't it, given what we said to each other during that last month?”

“To say nothing of what we did to each other.”

She brushes at his words, daintily, as though they are crumbs from a croissant. “That was nothing, Alec. You know that. It was just my way of fighting back against your precious job. Surely you don't still hold
that
against me.”

“I suppose not. But if I held anything at all against you, that's what it would be.”

She wrinkles her forehead as she considers if he has a hidden agenda, one that encompasses a reexamination of her several infidelities. “If I thought you meant that, I'd be mad.”

He returns her careful smile and waits. With women he has always been a counterpuncher. But he is far from undefeated.

Hygiene uncrosses her arms, unshoulders her leather bag, sits on the edge of his bed. Her weight on the mattress causes him to roll uncomfortably close to her. Her perfume makes him cough, giving him an excuse to reestablish distance. For some reason, Hygiene has always fancied a fragrance that makes her smell like laundry soap.

“So, Alec,” she says, patting his knee. “Are you going to do what four wives and who knows how many mistresses have been begging you to do for years?”

“What's that—consult a sex therapist?”

She punches his thigh. “I mean slow
down
, you idiot. Hop off the treadmill.”

He gestures toward the bed they sit on. “I've pretty much slowed to a stop.”

She looks dubious. “You haven't been to the office yet? Not even once?”

He avoids her eyes. “In and out, is all.”

She shakes her head disgustedly. “In at seven and out twelve hours later.” She looks at him with an intensity he interprets as concern. “Do you really miss it that much?”

“Some of it.”

“Like what?”

“Earning a fortune off the misery of others is its main attraction, I think.”