An Engineered Injustice

by William L. Myers Jr.

  “Learned? Meaning . . . ?”

  “He doesn’t remember the crash. I asked the doctor, and he said that sometimes when someone has a head injury, they can’t remember things.”

  Vaughn rubs his eyes with his free hand. He’d hoped that Eddy might have an explanation for why he didn’t notice the track machine and stop his train. His cousin’s amnesia would make things more complicated. And harder on Eddy.

  “I’ve heard about that happening, too,” he tells Kate. “And I certainly understand why he’s upset. Just keep doing your best to reassure him, and tell him I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  The next morning, Vaughn climbs out of bed after a fitful night. It’s going to be a challenging day. First, he’s going to have to talk to his cousin, get as much information as he can, and tell Eddy what he’s facing. He also has to make a decision whether to let the NTSB question his cousin and to let IIC Wexler know what the decision is. And he has to feel out Mick and Susan on the whole issue of his representing Eddy. The past couple of days have made it clear to him that he’s on thin ice, at least with Susan. She had come back to work on Wednesday with her arm in a cast and still in pain. When Vaughn went to her office to see how she was doing, she acted coolly toward him. He shared that with Mick, who said that Susan was still shaken by the crash and wasn’t comfortable with their firm representing the engineer. “Quite frankly,” Mick had told him, “unless something develops that shows Eddy to be completely blameless, I don’t think Susan’ll ever warm to you representing him.”

  Vaughn showers, dresses, and heads into the office. Visiting hours for the critical care unit don’t begin until 11:00 a.m., and he wants to give Kate and Eddy some time to get ready to see him, in any event. He figures he can put in a couple of hours at work before heading to the hospital. He has other cases that he has to catch up on.

  The look he sees on Angie’s face as he opens the door to the office lobby tells him his morning isn’t going to go as planned.

  “You better go right back to Mick’s office,” Angie says. “Something’s happened.”

  Mick and Susan are both there when he arrives; Mick at his desk, Susan in one of the visitor’s chairs. They’re both staring at the television. The split screen shows a CNN anchor on the left describing a horrific car crash, while on the right are photos of a police cruiser smashed head-on into a tree and a Ford Mustang bent-elbowed around another.

  Vaughn shakes his head. “Damn. I knew this would come out. I just didn’t know it’d be so soon. I should have gotten out in front of this.”

  “Eddy killed a police officer?” Susan looks at Vaughn, her voice thick with accusation.

  “It was an accident,” Vaughn says.

  “He was drag racing,” Susan counters. “The officer came upon him. Eddy and the patrolman both crashed. The officer died.”

  Vaughn closes his eyes, takes a breath. “I know. It was awful. Eddy was eighteen. He went to prison for three years.”

  “The reporter says that even before the accident, his nickname in high school was ‘Fast Eddy.’ I guess he had some kind of speed addiction?” She’s glaring at Vaughn.

  Of course that’s how the press is painting it. But it’s not fair. “He got that because of track. He was a sprinter on the track team.”

  Mick flips the channel to MSNBC, then to Fox. Both are running the same story. Vaughn knows it will headline tomorrow’s Inquirer and Daily News. It’s probably already on their web editions.

  Mick’s phone rings. He presses the speakerphone button. It’s Angie.

  “Mick? Is Vaughn still in there?”

  “I’m here,” Vaughn says.

  “Matt Lauer’s on the phone. He wants to talk to you.”

  Fuck Matt Lauer. “No press calls.”

  Vaughn tells Mick and Susan he has to get to the hospital. If Eddy was upset last night, he’s going to be beside himself now.

  The minute Vaughn leaves the building, his cell phone rings. It’s Kate. She’s rambling at a hundred miles an hour. It takes Vaughn the whole ride to the hospital to calm her. Two minutes after Vaughn hangs up, he’s racing through critical care. It’s still well before visiting hours, but he doesn’t care. The nurses don’t seem to care, either; no one stops him.

  When Vaughn finally enters his cousin’s room, he finds Kate standing over Eddy, leaning down to hug him. Eddy’s breathing is labored. His right leg is casted and raised into an elevated position. He has an IV and a catheter draining urine into a plastic bag attached to his bed. And Kate wasn’t kidding about Eddy’s face; it’s the shape and color of a dark plum.

  Vaughn waits a minute, then moves toward the bed. His cousin and Kate look up at him, and Eddy goes right at the car-crash story.

  “It’s not right they should bring that up,” he says, working hard to push the words out of his misshapen mouth. “That happened sixteen years ago. And it wasn’t my fault, you know that. They’re making it sound like I deliberately ran that cop off the road. Like I’m some kind of cowboy engineer. I’m the safest guy out there. I don’t take chances. You can ask anyone who works with me.”

  Eddy grimaces and falls silent, all the talking taking its toll.

  “I know, buddy,” Vaughn says, putting his hand on his cousin’s relatively unscathed arm. “Kate told me you won a safety award.”

  “That’s right,” Kate says.

  She proceeds to vent for another couple of minutes, and Vaughn lets her. He can only imagine what she and his cousin must be going through. He’s going to have to be as sensitive as possible dealing with them. The whole family.

  “I hear you,” he begins. “The press are jackals. All they care about is ratings. Ratings and filling their airtime. They’re going to climb all over each other to dig up dirt and play up every possible angle. That’s what they do, and everyone knows it.” Vaughn pauses to let his words sink in. “The thing is,” he resumes, “you can’t let it get to you. They don’t know you—”

  “That’s right,” Kate says. “They don’t. And nobody watching knows him, either. So they’re all going to believe this crap.”

  “Not the people who matter—family, friends, coworkers. Certainly not me.”

  Eddy grabs for breath, then says, “It wouldn’t be so bad if I could just explain what happened. But I can’t remember. I can’t remember the crash. I can’t remember coming up on that track machine. I can’t even remember going into the curve. There has to be some reason I didn’t stop the train. But I search my mind and all I come up with is shadows. It’s all in my head, man. I know it is. I just can’t find it.”

  Eddy drops his head, and tears begin streaming down his cheeks. Vaughn tells Kate he’ll give them a few minutes together. He leaves critical care, uses the hallway bathroom near the elevators. As he exits, he’s approached by a well-dressed man in his twenties.

  “Are you all right?” the man asks. “You look upset.”

  “To say the least.”

  “It’s been tough—on all of us,” the man says.

  Vaughn’s about to ask the man whom he’s there to see, but he’s beaten to the punch.

  “You’re visiting someone from the train crash?”

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Quite a few,” the man says as he extends his hand, offers up the business card. “A bunch of people have asked my firm to represent them. We’re the best train-crash firm in the city, and—”

  “For chrissake.” Vaughn smacks away the man’s arm and brushes past him.

  Reentering Eddy’s room, Vaughn tells Eddy that he’s already spoken to the NTSB. “They told me your blood test was clear of alcohol and controlled substances. So you’re good on that front. Now, what about your phone?”

  Eddy and Kate exchange glances, then Eddy says, “What about my phone?”

  “Is there any chance you were talking on the phone at the time of the accident? Or texting?” he adds, remembering the Chatsworth crash.

  Eddy pauses. “My phone was in my knapsack, on the con
ductor’s chair next to me. And it was off. Haven’t they found it?”

  “I don’t know,” Vaughn says, making a mental note to ask Nelson Wexler the next time they speak. “Any chance you have a medical condition that could’ve caused you to pass out? Or maybe you were sleepy?”

  “No. And no.”

  “I already told you that,” Kate interjects.

  “I know, and I believed you. I just needed to hear it from Ed’s own mouth, that’s all.”

  Vaughn keeps on for another hour, questioning Eddy about everything he does remember about Monday. When he got out of bed and how much sleep he had. What he had for breakfast. What kind of mood he was in. Whether he’d fought with anyone that day. Whether he was upset by anything, preoccupied, or distracted for any reason. “Was there anything at all on your mind other than your job?”

  “Hell yes, there was,” Eddy answers, nodding at Kate’s swollen belly. “My wife was eight months pregnant, and my run was taking me two hundred miles away. And, sure, that was on my mind. But it didn’t distract me from my job. I followed protocol, dotted all my i’s and crossed all my t’s. Like I always do.”

  Vaughn nods, jots some more notes onto his legal pad.

  “Who are they?” asks Kate, looking up at the TV.

  Vaughn and Eddy follow her gaze. Vaughn walks over and turns the volume back up. The two men, it turns out, are a pair of well-known Philadelphia personal-injury attorneys. They sit elbow to elbow at a gleaming glass conference table behind microphones from Fox 29, and Channels 6, 3, and 10. The lawyer on the left, Geoffrey Day, sits ramrod straight in his chair. He’s thin, with a ring of gray hair on the sides and back of his otherwise-bald head. Wearing a light-gray suit with a dark-gray tie and peering through gray-framed glasses, he looks more like an accountant than a personal-injury attorney. An accountant, or, from the look on his face, a middle-school teacher about to scold someone. To Day’s right sits his polar opposite, Benjamin Balzac, a powerful-looking, heavyset man with a large head, thick black hair and beard, and brooding dark eyes.

  Taking turns with their statements, the pair announces that they represent a number of victims of the train crash and that they intend to file a large group of cases in federal court. For the rest of the press conference, they take cheap shots at Eddy and at Amtrak.

  “The primary cause of the accident,” Day says with the dry certainty of someone stating the time, “was the engineer’s inexcusable inattentiveness.”

  “There’s no question that, had he been doing his job and paying attention,” Balzac adds in his slow, baritone voice, “he would have seen the hundred-foot-long TracVac and stopped his train.”

  “The engineer’s conduct,” says Day, “was incomprehensible—”

  “Criminal,” Balzac adds. “And sadly consistent with his deadly driving history, which must certainly have been known, and flagrantly ignored, by Amtrak.”

  “Which brings us to the railroad’s detestable and deadly choice to employ as an engineer an ex-convict with a history that proves he is addicted to speed, reckless with other people’s lives, and perfectly willing to make other people pay the ultimate price for his mistakes. As the family of Officer Gonzales knows all too well,” Day adds, offering the name of the police officer killed in the car crash sixteen years earlier.

  “All in all,” concludes Balzac, “the whole tragedy was an exercise in outrageous conduct, both by Amtrak and by its criminally culpable engineer.”

  Vaughn walks to the television and shuts it off. Turning back to the bed, he sees Kate stroking Eddy’s lowered head with her left hand and rubbing her belly with her right, her eyes wet.

  “Don’t let those two get to you,” Vaughn tells them. “They’re just a pair of P.I. hacks grandstanding for the press. Drumming up headlines to reel in more clients.”

  Vaughn knows what he’s saying is true, and he figures that, at some level, Eddy and Kate probably do, too. But the lawyers’ words must still feel like gut punches to them. He spends some more time trying to reassure them, then takes his leave.

  Vaughn leaves the hospital, and on the way back to the office he actually smiles at the transparency of Balzac’s and Day’s performances. Paper tigers. Still, he wonders why they’re pushing so hard on Eddy specifically when it’s Amtrak that has the deep pockets.

  In any event, the press conference has given him an excuse to call someone he hasn’t seen in a while. Someone who’s been on his mind.

  6

  FRIDAY, JUNE 20, CONTINUED

  As soon as he leaves the hospital, Vaughn pulls out his cell and dials the number from memory.

  “Well, well. Vaughn Coburn,” the woman says when she answers.

  “How—”

  “Caller ID.”

  “I’m surprised you answered.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

  “I need your help.”

  She pauses. “I’m listening.”

  “Not over the phone,” Vaughn says. Then he suggests they meet after work. “How about El Vez?”

  “Butcher and Singer,” she counters.

  “Pricey.”

  “You’re paying.”

  “Of course.”

  They hang up, and Vaughn smiles. Erin Doyle. It’s been months since he last saw her, at a bench-bar conference. They had spoken for only a few minutes—just long enough for him to get ideas. But Erin had cut the conversation short, saying she had to go back to her office.

  Vaughn sighs.

  He was smitten the first time he’d laid eyes on her. It was the fall semester of his second year in law school. Erin, also in her second year, transferred to Temple from Widener. He made a number of passes at her, some subtle, others so brazen they bordered on slapstick. Finally, when Vaughn had all but given up, Erin made her own pass, and they quickly became an item. The first time they went out, he learned she’d grown up in a small town just outside of Boston and graduated from Boston University.

  “Why Widener?” he asked. “If you wanted to come south, why not start out at Temple?”

  “Widener was the only school that accepted me.”

  This surprised him. “BU was so tough that you couldn’t get the grades? Or was it attendance issues?”

  She smiled. “My attendance was great. At concerts.”

  Vaughn and Erin were hot and heavy for six months. Then came the summer. Erin went to Europe for a clerkship in a big American law firm with an office in London while Vaughn stayed in Philly and worked for a community legal service. They kept in touch during the break, but their calls grew less frequent as the weeks passed, until they eventually stopped calling each other altogether. When Erin returned to Philadelphia for the fall semester, they tried to rekindle things, but it didn’t work. Erin talked on and on about visiting the great cities of Europe, the museums, the restaurants, the theaters. All Vaughn had to offer were his small trials representing the indigent. The sex was still good, if somewhat subdued, but there was a space between them that neither knew how to fill. So they split up. What made it worse was that Erin hooked up with Corey King, the son of a six-term congressman from western Pennsylvania who basked in his family’s status as small-town royalty. King was also tall and handsome, one of those guys who seemed to exude charisma. And, like Erin, King went to work right out of law school for Geoffrey Day.

  It’s close to 7:00 p.m. when Vaughn enters the restaurant. Erin is waiting at the bar, and Vaughn pauses to take her in. She’s wearing a crisp, blue business suit that accentuates her tall and toned physique. Her thick black hair is silky and drapes over her shoulders. From the side, he sees her strong jawline and the small profile of her nose. And when she turns her head in his direction, he sees the feature that never fails to amaze him: her eyes. Erin’s eyes are the brightest green he’s ever seen. They seem to give off their own light, sometimes to the degree that they could be fairly said to blaze.

  Vaughn sidles up to her. “Macallan twelve year?” he asks, nodding at Erin’s glass. The summer she l
ived in Europe, she developed a taste for single-malt scotch.

  “You take me for a troglodyte? It’s fifteen.”

  “I’ll have a Blue Moon,” Vaughn tells the bartender. “Just the bottle, not the glass.”

  As soon as the beer arrives, Vaughn pays the tab and they move to a booth along the east wall, beneath a cartoon print of dogs dressed up like humans and socializing at a bar. They exchange some small talk until the waiter comes and takes their orders. Then Vaughn gets down to business.

  “I saw your boss’s press conference,” he says. “With Balzac. I get that they’re trying to drum up business. But how does it help them to paint Eddy as an outright villain? Simple negligence on Eddy’s part puts Amtrak on the hook for damages.”

  “For compensatory damages, sure.” Erin pauses to sip her scotch. “The injured passengers’ pain and suffering, economic losses, medical care, loss of limbs, disfigurement. Loss of life. And those damages will be vast. But there’s an even bigger fish to reel in: punitive damages.”

  “But there’s a cap on what Amtrak can be forced to pay,” Vaughn says. “Two hundred million for all the claims combined, from what I read. And the injuries to the passengers are likely well above that already, at least that’s what all the talking heads are saying. A jury award of punitive damages would be an empty victory.”

  Erin shakes her head. “So pretty you are, and so naïve. Caps can be raised.”

  “Not this one. There’ve been big train crashes before, and the victims had no luck persuading Congress to increase the cap.”

  “But this is Geoffrey Day and Benjamin Balzac you’re talking about. Were you aware that the sons of two US senators work with me at Day and Lockwood? That Day’s partner is the former governor? That Day and Balzac have each hosted fund-raisers in their houses for presidential candidates? That cap is going to rise, Vaughn, and when it does, the hate that Day and Balzac garner for your cousin will add eight figures to their treasure troves.”