He shrugged. “Probably same reason I didn’t want to talk to you to begin with. They don’t believe you’re on your own. They don’t think you’re looking for a long-lost father. They think you’re trying to stir the pot up again. You’ve got to admit your story looks pretty farfetched.”

Reluctantly, I looked at it from his point of view. Given all this history I hadn’t known about, I could understand, sort of. I still couldn’t figure out why Humboldt felt he had to intervene. If his company had won the case fair and square, what difference did it make if his subordinates talked to me about Pankowski and Ferraro?

“And also,” I added aloud, “why are you so upset? Do you think they were wrong? I mean, do you think the trial was rigged somehow?”

He shook his head unhappily. “No. Based on the evidence, I don’t think we could have won. I think we should have. I mean, I think these guys deserved something for putting twenty years of their lives into the company, especially since it’s probable that working there killed them. I mean, look at your friend’s mother. She’s dying too. Kidney failure did you say? But the law spells it out, or the precedents do—you can’t fault the company for operating under the best knowledge they had available at the time.”

“So that’s it? You just don’t like to talk about it because you feel bad that you couldn’t win for them?”

He communed again with his glasses and his tie. “Oh, that would get me down. No one likes losing, and God, you couldn’t help wanting these guys to win. But then, you know, the company could see that plant go belly-up if we set a successful precedent. Everyone who’d ever been sick or died there coming back for these big settlements.”

He stopped. I made myself sit very quietly.

At last he said, “No. It’s just that I got a threatening phone call. After the case. When we were considering the appeal.”

“That would be grounds for overturning the verdict,” I burst out. “Didn’t you go to the state’s attorney?”

He shook his head. “I just got the one phone call. And whoever called didn’t mention the case by name—just a generic reference to the dangers of using the appellate system. I’m not very tough physically, but I’m not a coward either. The call made me angry, angrier than I’ve ever been, and I pushed and prodded every way after that to build an appeal. There just wasn’t any way to.”

“They didn’t call you later to congratulate you for following their advice?”

“I never heard from the guy again. But when you showed up out of nowhere …”

I laughed. “Glad to know I could be mistaken for muscle. I may need it before the day is over.”

He blushed. “No, no. You don’t look—I don’t mean—I mean, you’re a very attractive lady. But you never know these days.… I wish I could tell you something about your friend’s father, but we never talked about anything like that. My clients and I.”