Absolute Liability

by Jennifer Becton

  That wasn’t good.

  All Helena’s talk of Vincent in a bathrobe last night must have invaded my psyche.

  I willed my brief moment of admiration to downgrade from attraction to professional respect for a colleague. Now was not the time for romantic notions.

  I turned away and opened the glass door, and as we walked into the parking lot I said, “I haven’t interviewed anyone at the wastewater treatment plant yet, and I’d like to see exactly where the worker fell in. I told them we’d be by sometime today. I figured we’d just ride out there together. I’ll leave my car here, and you can drop me off on the way back.”

  “Whatever you say.” He paused. “That’s a sewage treatment plant, right?”

  “Unfortunately.” I did not want to visit such a place any more than he did.

  The whole complaint originated with the ultimate workplace accident: a woman—Leona Winchell—had fallen into a tank of sewage, causing back injuries and mental distress. In the process of the post-incident inspection of the facility, it was discovered that the railings around the tanks did not meet the thirty-nine-inch height requirement mandated by Southeastern’s code.

  The railing was a full six inches too short.

  It sounds like a small discrepancy, too minor to be trifled with, but insurance companies take enormous financial risks on large corporate liability policies, and they have the right to deny coverage to any business that they deem unsafe. It would be bad practice to write a policy for a place that was blatantly dangerous to its employees or guests.

  So Southeastern Insurance required a thirty-nine-inch railing, and the existing structure at the plant had not met code.

  As legalistic as it sounds, I was willing to bet Leona Winchell would have appreciated those extra six inches on the day she lost her balance near one of the tanks.

  It was up to me to determine how the railing heights had been missed both during checks by the independent agent—Gerwalt Insurance Agency—and the official inspection by Southeastern.

  “What better way to follow up a nice lunch?” Vincent asked as he steered the car toward the south side of town. “I read your file, but it looks like we’ll have to take the full tour.”

  We were headed just past the industrial area, but not quite all the way to the countryside. The facility was located smack in the middle of no-man’s-land.

  I could smell the place before I saw it, and the odor only grew stronger as we approached. Still, I managed to grin at the sign at the plant entrance: Mercer Water Reclamation Facility. Giving a sewage plant a name like that was like putting makeup on a pig.

  We drove past large holding tanks and pulled into the lot. I’d expected a large indoor facility, but it appeared that everything took place in the outdoor tanks and ponds that surrounded us. I guess that was best for ventilation.

  Vincent and I wasted no time in heading inside the office building. I opened the glass door and hoped they had some kind of industrial air cleaner, but it didn’t smell much better inside than it had outside.

  The receptionist rose to greet us. She actually came around her desk and shook hands. I figured she probably didn’t have many visitors, so our arrival likely constituted an occasion. She introduced herself as Sally Winkle, and with her pink Ralph Lauren blouse, khaki skirt, and loafers, she looked as if she came directly out of some yuppie catalogue. Her blond hair was pulled away from her face in a puffy pink headband. All in all, she was clean-cut and well groomed, leaving me to wonder why on earth she was working at a sewage treatment plant.

  Then she spoke, and I understood; she was as personable as a head cold.

  “You picked a terrible day for a visit.” Her tone fell somewhere just short of being ghoulish. But only just short. “They’re running the filter press today. It always smells the worst when they run the filter press.”

  I cringed. I did not want to know what a filter press was.

  “We’re here to see Cat Smaha,” I said. Aside from having an unfortunate name, Cat had the misfortune of working at the plant full-time, and he also supervised Leona Winchell, the woman who had fallen into a storage tank and kicked off the fraud complaint.

  “Is he expecting you?” Sally returned to her seat and began leafing through some papers.

  “Yes, but we didn’t set a specific time. I only told him we’d be by sometime today,” I said.

  “He’s out in the plant.” She looked like she couldn’t be bothered to summon him, but I had no intention of going into that plant. Not when they were running the filter press. Whatever it was.

  Vincent and I stared at her. Thankfully, it seemed that he had no desire to go out there either.

  Sally Twinkle, as I would think of her henceforth thanks to her sparkling personality, picked up her phone. “I’ll page him.” She punched a few buttons with her French manicured nails and requested Cat’s presence in the office over the loudspeaker.

  Based on what I could discern about Sally Twinkle, I had the feeling that Cat would not be rushing right over. I felt fairly confident that no one rushed to answer Sally’s call.

  I was right. It took fifteen minutes for Cat to make it to reception. We identified ourselves, and when he shook Vincent’s hand, I found myself comparing the two men. Really, there was no comparison. Next to Vincent, Cat looked like a man who’d gotten shrunk in the wash.

  Cat turned to Sally and admonished, “You should’ve told me my visitors were here.”

  Sally looked up, scowled, and adjusted her headband. “Did you think I was inviting you up for my health? It’s not my job to keep up with your guests.”

  Cat gave us a long-suffering look and ran his hand through the greasy curls at the back of his head. “Don’t mind Sally.” Then, in a whisper, he added, “She’s going through a nasty divorce.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” Sally shot at him.

  Cat only shrugged, apparently not caring one way or the other. “Let’s go on back to the conference room.”

  We followed his slight frame down a narrow hall and past several small offices. The conference room was standard: one long table with a wood laminate top surrounded by rolling office chairs. There was a diagram of some sort on the whiteboard. I chose to ignore it on the off chance that it might divulge the nature of the filter press. I never wanted to find out more about that.

  Cat took a chair and gestured to the other side of the table. We sat, and despite the fact that everything looked clean and orderly, I had the strange compulsion not to touch anything more than necessary.

  Cat sat down, arms outstretched across the tabletop. “What can I do to help fix this Leona Winchell mess?”

  I pulled the requisite file out of my bag, placed it on my lap, and opened it to the main page. “My files indicate that you were responsible for contacting Southeastern for your worker’s comp and liability insurance. Is that correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I called my buddy James Gerwalt. I know him from the University of Georgia.”

  “And he wrote the policies.” That was more of a statement than a question, but Cat nodded anyway.

  “Our records indicate that Mr. Gerwalt did a preliminary inspection of the property,” I continued. “Were you with him at the time?”

  “Sure was.”

  “Did he indicate that there might be anything lacking in your safety measures?”

  “No.” He said this with candor, and I believed him.

  “He didn’t mention any corrections that might be needed before the policy could be written?”

  “No, he did not. And neither did the inspector that came later.” He leaned back and scratched his chin. “It’s been so long, I don’t remember his name.”

  All independent agents were required to look over the property they insured to make certain it met the safety codes, and on large commercial properties, a company inspector also visited to go over the finer points of the code. In this case, the inspector on record was Sam Dwight, and he had died last year.

  “It
all checked out,” Cat said. “That’s why I was surprised as hell when I had so much trouble after Leona fell into the settling tank and sued us. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration went apeshit—they require thirty-nine-inch railings too—and the Southeastern adjustor denied our claim.”

  “And neither Mr. Gerwalt nor the inspector mentioned anything about your railings previously?” Vincent asked.

  “No, but they’re up to code now. OSHA practically had a gun to my head.”

  “What does Ms. Winchell do here?” I asked, desperately hoping she might have been an office worker who happened to be out in the plant that day.

  He scratched his chin again. “She works out in the plant.”

  “And how exactly was she injured?”

  “She fell into one of the holding tanks.”

  I went silent, trying to suppress the images of a woman falling into a vat of excrement.

  Apparently noticing my inability to speak, Vincent asked, “When did this take place?”

  “A couple months ago. At the end of her shift. No one saw her fall, but several of us saw her coming back to the office, dripping wet and smelling to high heaven. I think Sally was the one who hosed her off.”

  Good God! She had to be hosed off? I didn’t want to know more, but I was afraid I was going to have to find out. I took a fortifying breath. “Can you show us where she worked and where the accident occurred?”

  “You want to go out to the plant?”

  Not particularly, I thought.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Cat stood up and we followed him out of the conference room, down a different narrow hallway, and out a side door. We continued to walk quite a distance from the office and ended up among the spread-out concrete ponds and above-ground vats.

  “Doesn’t the smell bother you?” I asked.

  “Nah.” Cat shook his head. His curls waved back and forth as he moved. “To me, it’s the smell of money.”

  I wondered if that wasn’t some kind of unintentional statement about the way money affected some people, but I wasn’t in a philosophical mood. And I don’t think Cat was a philosophical man. What I did know, however, was that if Cat Smaha went home smelling like this place, he didn’t get a lot of dates, no matter how much money he made.

  Vincent had his notebook out. “Where in the plant did Ms. Winchell work?”

  “She ran the filter press.”

  That was the worst thing I’d heard all day. We were headed straight for the dreaded filter press.

  The monstrous machine was housed under a steel structure with open sides. When we stepped under the roof, it was clear that this one building was the source of most of the stench. The press itself was painted a cheerful blue, but the stuff pouring in and oozing out of it was anything but cheerful.

  Cat went into tour guide mode. “The filter press does just what it sounds like. You start with sludge that settles out of the water.” He pointed outside the structure to the murky retention pond we’d passed earlier. “It filters out the solids. The sludge gets stuck in those screens, and then the screens are pressed together to extract the rest of the water. Then it goes on to be processed, and the cakes—the leftover biosolids—get mixed with peanut shells and are used for fertilizer.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  Gross, I thought.

  “Where exactly did Ms. Winchell fall?”

  “She fell into the settling tank.”

  “Where is that?”

  Cat led us out of the filter press building and toward a large pond. It was surrounded by a two-foot retaining wall and a shiny new railing that appeared to be at least thirty-nine inches high.

  I gestured at the railing. “This was added after the accident?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why wasn’t the railing up to code to begin with?” Vincent asked.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” Cat said. “We knew we were in violation of some minor codes, but since no inspectors ever mentioned them, we let them slide.”

  “That’s not exactly ethical,” Vincent said.

  “Ethical? Have you read OSHA’s regulations and restrictions? Tell me subjecting plants to that level of control is ethical.” Cat must have comprehended the irony in his words, given that his faulty fencing had contributed to an accident, so he added, “The upgrades were expensive, and this place barely broke even as it was. We couldn’t afford to do any of it, but we did. We’ll be in the red for years.”

  I looked from Cat to the tank in question. It was easy to imagine someone inadvertently falling over a knee-knocker like that retaining wall, with or without a railing. The settling tank didn’t seem to smell as bad as the filter press area—or maybe I’d lost my sense of smell—but the water it contained was a thick greenish brown that managed to be both frothy and greasy at the same time.

  I could not imagine anyone surviving a fall into the unholy cauldron before us. Well, maybe they would survive it, but they might rather have died.

  “What was the nature of Miss Winchell’s injury?” Vincent asked.

  “Back pain. Lumbar something or other.”

  I was surprised she hadn’t gotten hepatitis A.

  Cat continued, “She filed the lawsuit right away, of course. And after she used up all her sick time, she went on disability. I didn’t give her injuries much thought after that because I was so busy trying to get OSHA off my case and get my claim paid. Then, a few weeks ago, a gym called here looking for her. Said she needed to pay her membership fee or she’d have it revoked.”

  “I see,” I said. My antennae went up. What was an injured woman on worker’s comp who was suing her employer for an unsafe working environment doing at a gym? It looked like Vincent and I would have to pay Leona a call.

  “Do you know the name of the gym?”

  He scratched his chin. “Afraid not. They all sound the same to me. But I could kick myself for not remembering.”

  “But the gym called here? At the plant?” Vincent asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Those calls come in through the switchboard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who answers those calls?”

  “Sally Winkle out front.”

  Great. We were going to have to talk to Sally Twinkle again.

  After leaving the working portion of the wastewater plant proper, Sally was a welcome change. This time she did not bother getting up when we walked into the office. “You’re back.”

  “We just had a few quick questions,” I said.

  “Did you witness Leona Winchell’s accident?” Vincent asked.

  “No, but I did help her clean off afterward.”

  “Did she appear injured?”

  “She was walking a little funny, but she was more angry than anything.”

  “Did you recently take any calls for Miss Winchell from a gym?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember the name of the gym?”

  “Yeah, I do. It pissed me off to realize that she was getting paid worker’s comp to exercise. If you ask me, she didn’t need to work out anymore. She was a freak already. I can’t imagine what she looks like now.”

  “The name of the gym?”

  “It’s Shred over on Riverdale.”

  While I wrote down the gym’s name, Vincent pulled out the picture of Amber. “While I have you both here, do either of you know this woman?”

  Cat shook his head and then handed the picture to Sally, who also responded negatively.

  “That everything?” Vincent asked me.

  “Yeah, let’s go.”

  Vincent and I didn’t linger at the plant. We went straight back to the truck and left the place with the windows wide open.

  Vincent spoke loudly over the rush of air. “So Leona fell into shit creek, probably by accident, and decided to get as much as she could out of it.”

  I nodded while trying to undo my bun and pull my hair into a tight ponytail to keep the flyaways from hitting me in th
e eyes.

  “But when the plant filed the liability claim,” Vincent continued, “the adjustor found discrepancies between the original inspection reports and what was actually on site.”

  “And now we’ve got to figure out how that happened.”

  “And if someone abducted Amber to keep Southeastern from finding out the truth.”

  Vincent and I decided to hold off on the visit to Shred for reasons of personal sanitation. We both still smelled the treatment plant as strongly as if we were there, and we were convinced that the filth had soaked into our clothes. We were getting tired of smelling each other, so we decided to go our separate ways to shower.

  It was almost the end of the workday anyway, and I reeked far too much to go anywhere, so Vincent dropped me off at my car. I drove home with all four windows down.

  Maxwell met me at the door, sniffed me a few times, and began rubbing against my leg. I stared down at him in shock and horror. Apparently, “eau de biosolid” appealed to him. You never could account for the particular taste of felines. Of course, they did enjoy disemboweling mice, so maybe raw sewage was like Chanel No. 5 to them.

  Well, it sure didn’t appeal to me.

  I tripped and stumbled over Maxwell as he weaved around me all the way to the bathroom. He beat a hasty retreat when I turned on the shower. I threw my clothes in a pile on the floor, thinking I might burn them later.

  I washed my hair twice and used my most fragrant floral body wash everywhere else, and by the time I got done I smelled like a French whore. Or at least what I imagined a French whore might smell like. I’d never met one personally.

  I put on my robe and saw that Maxwell had taken up residence on my sewage-scented clothes. I pushed him away with my foot, picked up the pile with the tips of my fingers, and tossed the clothes in the washing machine instead of the garbage can.

  What can I say? I was feeling hopeful.

  He’d parked two streets over in the driveway of a house with a “For Rent” sign in the overgrown front lawn—no one would notice a car parked there—and now he was hunkered down in some bushes along the perimeter of the backyard of the house he had decided to reconnoiter.