“No, I can see you wouldn’t have.” I thanked him for his frankness and got up.

“If you come across anything else you think I could help you with, let me know,” he said, shaking my hand. “Especially if it might give me some grounds for a writ of certiorari.”

I assured him I would and left. I was wiser than I’d been when I came in, but no less confused.

16

House Call

It was well past noon by the time Manheim and I finished talking. I headed for the Loop and picked up a Diet Coke and a sandwich—corned beef, which I reserve for occasions when I need special nourishment—and took them to my office.

I could see Manheim’s point. Sort of. If Humboldt lost a suit like that, it could spell disaster, the kind of problem that drove Johns-Manville to seek bankruptcy protection. But Manville’s situation had been different: they had known asbestos was toxic and covered up their knowledge. So when the ugly truth came out workers sued for punitive damages.

All Humboldt would have faced was a series of comp claims. Even so, that might be sticky. Say they’d had a thousand workers at the plant over a ten-year period and they all died: at a quarter of a million a pop, even if Ajax was paying for it, that was a lot of balloons.

I licked mustard from my fingers. Maybe I was looking at it wrong—maybe it was Ajax not wanting to make the payout—Gordon Firth telling his good buddy Gustav Humboldt to cool out any attempts to reopen the case. But Firth couldn’t have known I was involved—the word wouldn’t have run around Chicago that fast. Or maybe it would. You’ve never seen gossip and rumor mills until you’ve spent a week in a large corporation.

And then, why had someone threatened Manheim about the appeal? If Humboldt was dead to rights on the legal issues, there wasn’t any percentage in going after Manheim—it would just cause a judge to vacate the decree. So it couldn’t have been the company trying to brush him back.

Or maybe it was some very junior person. Someone who thought he could make a name for himself in the company by putting a little muscle on the plaintiffs. That wasn’t a totally improbable scenario. You get a corporate atmosphere where ethics are a little loose and subordinates think that the way to management’s heart is across their opponents’ bodies.

But that still didn’t explain why Humboldt had lied about the suit. Why dump a charge of sabotage on the poor bastards when all they wanted was some workers’ comp money? I wondered if it would be worthwhile to try to speak to Humboldt again. I visualized his full, jovial face with the cold blue eyes. You have to swim carefully when your waters are shared by a great shark. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to the big man just yet.

I groaned to myself. The problem was spreading out in front of me like ripples in a pond. I was the stone dropped in the middle and the lines were moving farther and farther away from me. I just couldn’t handle so many intangible waves on my own.