by Allen Weiner
Max agreed to the assignment but also didn’t want his disappointment to show. He needed to cover as much of the trial as possible to find out about Albrecht’s insurance scam. Still, he was only a few weeks into his probation period and in no position to argue with the boss.
“Sure, Ray. I’ll write up a short piece and turn it in before I go. I will come to see you right after lunch tomorrow. By the way, I was planning on going home this weekend to see my family. Do you think you’ll need me Saturday or Sunday morning? I’ll be back by five on Sunday for my regular shift.”
“That’s fine,” Ray said, clearly ready for the conversation to be over. Max noticed his boss sneaking a peek at his watch while they talked.
After a long day in court, Max was ready to go home but stopped at his desk and asked Sue to move so he could bang out an overview of the opening of the arson case. Working from memory, it did not take more than fifteen minutes. Sue picked up her things and moved across the room to an empty work spot.
Before leaving, Max remembered that he needed a new reporter’s notebook. He was terrible at shorthand and was getting the hang of taking detailed notes in high-pressure situations. Max always marveled that his aunt, who worked for a court reporting agency, could touch type seventy-five words a minute and operate one of those cryptic Stenotype machines used to take verbatim dictation at trials.
“Are you sticking around?” Sue asked from across the room as Max opened a drawer on the left side of his desk. “I’d love to get a cup of coffee if you have time.”
“Raincheck. I am gassed. This trial is exhausting, and I have some research to do before I go back to the courthouse tomorrow.”
Sue was disappointed. Lacking any understanding of women, Max wasn’t sure what was going on with Sue, putting him on edge. Was she trying to pick his brain for ideas or just looking for a friend in a new work setting? Throughout college, graduate school, and now in his chosen career, Max couldn’t imagine any woman finding him interesting or attractive. Given that assumption, he was sure there was no romantic interest on her part. Whatever her interest may be, it would have to wait for another day.
Max had a restless night overcome with far too many moving parts competing for space in his brain. Since joining the Chronicle, he had been having sleep issues, mostly due to an inability to shut down after intense days of work. The need to have at least eight hours of sleep had been impressed upon him when he was young; even now, Max was not sure why he lived in fear of what would happen if his sleep bank wasn’t filled to the brim.
The excitement of the trial got Max’s adrenaline going. A lot of those seated around him in the gallery looked at him as he made his way to a seat on the aisle near the back of the courtroom. The summary of the arson trial’s progress made the front page of the Carbon County section of the Chronicle, so folks—many of whom were Albrecht’s friends and family—figured this unfamiliar face was likely the reporter who wrote the news story. The story was straightforward, although Max’s description of the defendant was not complimentary, saying he was “callous in his appearance at the trial.”
Judge Schantz appeared forty-five minutes late and appeared harried as the courtroom rose upon his arrival. The judge motioned both attorneys to the bench to discuss some business related to the trial. Wolf was doing most of the talking, so the discussion may have had something to do with whether Albrecht would take the stand on his behalf. The impromptu meeting ended, leaving about thirty minutes before lunch, at which time Max had to return to the office.
Bennett Krause, a local car dealer and neighbor of Albrecht, took the stand. His home suffered damage from the fire, and was scheduled to testify that he had overheard Albrecht boast at a local bar that he was about to come into some big money. It was a thin heap of gossip, but the county didn’t have much in the way of witnesses aside from the fire investigator and a few of the defendant’s neighbors.
Krause was uneasy on the stand. Tobias did his best to lead the witness through his story of what he heard in the bar, but the Jim Thorpe auto jockey stumbled through his answers, giving the appearance of being carefully coached. Wolf then put Krause away with a few simple questions:
“Who else was in the bar when you heard Mr. Albrecht talk of this alleged plan?”
“I don’t exactly remember,” Krause mumbled.
“Did you have anything to drink that night, Mr. Krause?”
“I had a few,” he muttered, barely audible.
“How many is a few?”
“Two or three beers, maybe.”
“Was it two or three? Or more. What if I told you the bartender that night could testify you were drunk on the evening in question?”
“I guess I had more than two or three.”
Wolf looked at Krause and then the judge. “I’ve had enough of this witness, Your Honor.”
With that, the court was in recess for lunch, and Max needed to head back to the office in Nesquehoning. There was a drizzle, so Max flicked on his windshield wipers at low speed. He reached for the radio, and much to his dismay, the local station was playing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a duet from Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond. Max was indeed thankful he reached the parking lot by the office just as the chorus “Well, you just roll over . . . And, you turn out the light . . . And you don’t bring me flowers anymore . . .” came on. He was quick to shut the engine off so he could end this musical misery.
As Max entered the office, he was surprised to find his desk chair was nowhere to be found. He looked around and asked one of the circulation department staffers if he had seen it. Tim, a balding guy of about forty-five who worked in circulation and enjoyed yelling at young newspaper delivery kids, shook his head no. Max was about to go back to Ray to talk about his assignment and ask about his chair when he spotted his chair through a crack in the door of the open men’s room.
That’s weird, Max thought to himself.
Max opened the door to the restroom and immediately recognized his chair. It was relatively new with the sticker “Property of the Chronicle” on the bottom of the backrest. Not sure what was going on—was it a rite of passage or hazing or something else?—as he wheeled the black leather office chair the thirty feet back to his desk, he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“Oh, you found it, Jewboy.”
There stood all six-foot, four inches of Stan Raidler, a disheveled man with a broom in one hand and a giant smirk across his unshaven face. Raidler was the office gofer, doing odd jobs and janitorial work such as cleaning the bathrooms and mopping the floor. A native of nearby Lehighton, Max had heard—but never confirmed—that Raidler recently was released from a state prison where he served three years of a five-year sentence for statutory rape. Whether or not the rumor was true, his presence gave Max the creeps and he had as little interaction with Stan as possible.
Growing up in a Philadelphia neighborhood that was north of 90 percent Jewish, anti-Semitism was new to him. In college, someone did ask him where his horns were, believing that Jews had horns. A year later, someone in Max’s Sociology 101 class asked him why he was wearing a shirt and tie to class. When Max said that he taught religious school at a nearby synagogue after class, his fellow sociology student’s reaction was alarming yet predictable.
“You’re Jewish?” the guy declared rather loudly. “You don’t look Jewish?”
Raidler’s chair prank was far more serious as he was a rather large dude who possibly was recently released from the hoosegow. Max had never been in a fight in his entire life, and squaring off against a rough-hewn bully was not the place to start.
“I don’t like what you said about my friend Chris,” Raidler said as Max pushed his chair under the desk. “Neither do a lot of other people around here, so you’d better watch your step. Maybe you should go back to your mommy and daddy in Philly.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Max replied, rattled from the exchange with this menacing weasel. Max looked down at his briefcase, rummaging through it,
pretending to look for a pen. He was waiting for Raidler to walk away, and after another minute of glaring, the bully and his broom walked out the front door.
It took Max a good ten minutes to stop shaking and regain his composure. After his fight-or-flight trembling eased, Max walked back to meet with Ray. In his quick walk to the back of the office, Max decided not to mention the incident with Stan. Instead, Max would seek the counsel of Tex, a level-headed guy whose worldly experience gave him crisp insight into other people.
“How was court this morning?” Ray asked, pushing his reading glasses up to the bridge of his nose.
“Not much happened since the judge was late.”
“Okay. I have an assignment for you. The newspaper in Wilkes-Barre is on strike, and I want you to drive up there and talk to the head of the union. It seems the reporters and pressmen who are out picketing are considering starting a rival paper.”
Ray knew that Max’s grad school studies covered all sorts of media companies and their business models, so the bureau chief saw the young reporter as the perfect choice to cover the story. Ray also thought it would be a nice change of pace for Max to get out of the area for a day and tackle something different from his usual assignments. Wilkes-Barre was forty miles north of Nesquehoning, so Ray instructed Max to take his car and turn in an expense form for his mileage.
Max spent the early part of the afternoon reviewing his trial notes before heading home to pick something out of the freezer for a late lunch or early dinner. He wanted to get an early jump on the day by leaving for Wilkes-Barre before 9 a.m. for his meeting with Ray Chorba, the union president representing the reporters. The assignment was different than any other Max had covered in his short career. Still, he had a keen understanding of how media companies work and was ready to utilize that knowledge.
Before heading home—which was less than a mile from the office in Nesquehoning—Max needed to take a detour which was way out of the way. He headed toward the Carbon County Courthouse with the intent of quickly tuning in to his hidden FM transmitter in hopes of catching some juicy gossip. Max figured it might be time for an afternoon break or early recess, at which time a juror, witness, attorney, or even Albrecht might be caught spilling some secret beans.
A young man in his thirties and an older woman, perhaps in her early sixties, were seated on Max’s bench smoking when he reached the courthouse. Max’s memory scanned the pair and remembered them from the jury, which meant they were on recess. Max parked his car across the street from the courthouse and waited for the pair of jurors to head back inside. As they flicked their cigarette butts on the ground, Max took out his transistor radio and tuned to 93.4.
Max kept time in his head, and after what seemed to be two minutes, the voices of a man and woman came in clearly. They were in the middle of a conversation:
“I think you’d like my daughter,” the woman said, taking a deep breath. “She just got out of a bad marriage and is taking classes at Penn State’s Hershey Campus.”
“If this thing is ever over,” the man responded, clearly wishing he were anywhere else, “maybe I’ll give her a call. I wish they would move along and let us deliberate.”
“I’m with you because my boss isn’t happy about this prolonged jury duty. I do have one question that is bothering me. Have you heard anyone mention whether Albrecht had fire insurance for his crappy house? It seems he had to have some, right?”
With that, the elevator reached its destination.
Max’s nascent reporter’s intuition was heating up. I’ve got to get on that fire insurance question. And I better do it fast.
Chapter Seven
Max left early the next day for Wilkes-Barre and decided to take the Pennsylvania Turnpike instead of local roads to expedite the trip. Radio stations came in and out on his journey until he landed on WKRZ, a rock station in Forty Fort, a Wilkes-Barre suburb. As he entered the town, Max spotted the picket line along Market Street in the center of the city and grabbed a parking spot across the street from the newspaper entrance.
Ray Chorba was easy to spot. Chain-smoking Chesterfields with a cup of coffee in his right hand, Chorba looked like his picture, which Max found in an AP story from the start of the strike. Like many who grew up in the hardscrabble of Pennsylvania’s coal mining district, Chorba looked to be in his mid-fifties, but, through his research, Max learned the union president was thirty-eight.
The two reporters sat at a card table that acted as a desk/gathering spot for the men and women on the picket line. Chorba, a senior metro reporter for the Times-Bulletin, was an easy interview on the asking side of the questions for close to a decade. Max listened to Chorba, who explained the paper had not offered a wage increase in five years, despite a 7 percent cost of living increase for most of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
The entire session took less than an hour. Max snapped a few pictures of the hearty souls on the picket line and was on his way, wishing Chorba good luck. A few months into the job, Max had not thought much about pay increases and other personal finance issues. His time with the union boss gave him pause to think about those considerations for the future.
It was only 11 a.m. when Max pulled out of Wilkes-Barre and onto Exit 105 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Northeast Extension. Heading south, he figured he would get to the Carbon County Courthouse just before recess. Max might catch a stray comment from a juror or attorney making his or her way down the elevator with any luck.
Traffic was moving quickly, and forty-four minutes after getting on the road, Max was parked in front of the Carbon County Courthouse. Having bolted from home with only time to make a cup of instant coffee, Max rifled through his briefcase, looking for something to eat. His choices were a half-empty box of Mike and Ikes, a crushed package of Lance peanut butter crackers, or hard candy. With little regard for dietary concerns, Max ate all three food scraps, which would tide him over until he got to the office.
A few people came out of the front door, but Max did not recognize them from the jury. They could have been in the building for anything from getting a marriage license to filing for a permit to get a new septic tank. Max turned the key to start the engine so he could listen to the radio while he waited. Max forgot that when he parked the car, he left the radio on top volume, listening to “You’re the One That I Want” from Grease. He nearly jumped out of the driver’s seat when “Y.M.C.A.” came blaring out the car’s speakers at ninety decibels. Just as he hit the radio’s power button, Max saw a juror he recognized leave the courthouse.
Max grabbed his transistor radio and tuned into the secret courthouse elevator station.
After some static, Max heard, loud and clear, Albrecht speaking to another male whose voice he did not recognize.
“That was a close call,” Albrecht said to his elevator companion. “When they asked me about the fire insurance on the house, I nearly shit a brick.”
“Look, I know we had an agreement about this second policy, but I’m getting nervous they might find out,” the other man said.
“One more day. All we must do is get through one more day. The policy they found was for less than the house was worth. That should be enough to throw them off.”
“Okay, if you say so. I am putting my life and my family on the line here. This better be worth it.”
Max watched as the two men left the building. Albrecht went right and sat on the infamous bench and lit up a nasty looking cheroot cigar. While Max was not necessarily a cigar aficionado, his days sitting in the grandstand at baseball games with his father gave him a tutorial on cigars. The smell of most cigars—cheroots aside—brought Max a wave of warm nostalgia.
The other gentleman, who Max speculated was an insurance agent, walked left out of the courthouse. Tall and slender, Max could not get a good look at his face, but the man had the gait of an athlete, walking on the balls of his feet with long, smooth strides. As Max dubbed him, “Mr. Insurance Man” was quickly out of sight, no doubt parking his car around the co
rner out of plain sight. If he was indeed an insurance salesman, he was probably off on another appointment.
Max returned to the office by 1:30 p.m., stopping to pick up a hamburger and fries at Carbon County’s lone McDonald’s. Sitting at his desk, the young reporter ate with one hand and typed with the other. He batted out twelve hundred words on the Wilkes-Barre newspaper strike and handed both the story and the film from his camera to Al Hickey, who was manning the editor’s desk. Al had been nice to Max from day one, and Al’s knowledge of both the art and science of reporting impressed everyone in the bureau, as well as at the main office in Allentown.
The insurance issue related to the arson case became an intellectual itch that Max needed to scratch and understand its role in the trial. With an hour to kill, before he was given an assignment for the night, Max went to the Panther Valley Library in Coaldale to find out what he could about insurance policies. On a hunch, looking through some reference books on insurance, he was able to confirm that one person could have more than one policy on a home, car, boat, or whatever. What if Albrecht bought a standard policy that would not raise suspicion but somehow got a second high-value policy under another family member’s name?
Max headed back to the office, remembering he wanted to talk to Tex about the incident with that scumbag Stan Raidler. As Max was pulling into the bureau’s parking lot, Tex was just getting out of his car. Besides being a superb writer, Tex was a car buff and took pride in his spiffy new BMW 6 Series sedan. He loved showing off the sleek automobile, taking Max on the occasional ride during which he would gleefully ramble on about the features of the car: the powerful six-cylinder engine; the metallic paint imported from Italy to the BMW factory outside Munich; the ability to go from zero to sixty in three seconds; and a cool, in-dash cassette player with four surround-sound speakers. Max would politely smile, as he viewed cars as merely a way to get from one place to another. Max did like the cassette player since he felt the car radio and stereo were any automobile’s best accessories.