Sue Me td-66

by Warren Murphy

  But Smith had said no. Precisely because they were lawyers they had to be destroyed by legal means. It was the law that CURE was trying to protect. Remo thought momentarily of burying them all under lawbooks. He held up the card.

  "We're good. That's all. You want us to take your aunt's case? You got it. Hit me."

  Remo gave him his card. Rizzuto wanted another. "Who deals with your technical people?"

  "Palmer. Hit me."

  Remo gave him another card. Rizzuto went over twenty-one and sat drumming his hands on the table. Remo dealt a card again. Rizzuto bet again. Remo held up the next card.

  "What does Schwartz do?"

  "Tactics. Palmer does strategy on the general idea of what we should do. Schwartz shows how to do it. And on the big cases, I do it myself in a courtroom. I'm a trial lawyer. I'm wonderful. Another card, please."

  Remo dealt. Then he dealt to himself. He won again by getting closer to twenty-one.

  "Why would you say you are so successful? More successful than any single lawyer or law firm?"

  "Because we know what we're doing and we'll take care of your aunt. We have law offices all over the country. We travel all over the world. When you get Palmer, Rizzuto you get a world of protection. Now deal, dammit."

  Remo played blackjack with Rizzuto for almost two hours, getting little information he felt he could use, but winning seventy-five thousand dollars without thinking about it. Ten thousand in cash and sixty-five thousand in IOU's.

  He walked with Rizzuto to the giant auditorium, wired now to reach out live to the world. When they got to the aisle with screaming fans and televison cameras and paparazzi, Remo ducked into the crowd and moved through it, hidden by the dense sea of people. He caught up with Rizzuto by coming up on the blind side of a guard who was posted to ensure that no one crossed the line to be with the celebrities. "Gambling's pretty expensive for you," said Remo.

  "No. Not expensive."

  "You lost seventy-five thousand dollars in two hours. "

  "You figure wrong. That was the total loss. But do you know how much was wagered in winning and losing, and going back and forth? Maybe almost a million dollars. I got a million dollars of action for seventy-five thousand. Now where else can you get a return on your money like that? Take buying shoes for my kid. Fifty bucks for a pair of shoes. That's it. They're labeled fifty dollars. You pay fifty dollars, good-bye. Now when you gamble, that money can come back. For fifty dollars that I waste on a pair of my kid's shoes I get maybe five hundred dollars in action. And that's if I lose."

  "You're a compulsive gambler, Genaro," said Remo. This might be a weakness he could work on to get some sort of legal case for CURE to transfer to some prosecutor.

  "No. I'm not a compulsive gambler."

  "If you're not, who is?"

  "People who are worse than me. There are guys who will bet the clothes off their backs. I mean it. Guys who get killed by loan sharks because they borrow to pay loans from other killers."

  "Where do you draw the line, then?"

  "Right beneath me," said Rizzuto, who bet Remo there was an odd number of performers on the stage. Remo refused to bet. The stars were packed on the stage like so many cattle. The lights in the center of the auditorium were blinding, and the heat was oppressive. But the stars all managed to look as though they couldn't be happier, even when having to quaff emergency water rations. It was like a marathon run for the singers, except the singers had to smile. Rizzuto wore a lavender tuxedo with a neon-blue cummerbund and a diamond-studded bow tie. On this stage he looked subdued. Remo tried to stay near him, but he saw Chiun in the rear signaling to him.

  Debbie Pattie, who was going to do the last solo, needed special wiring held by her bodyguards. Since none of them were here after Remo got into a shoving match with them, and since the new ones for some reason hadn't arrived yet, would Remo do the decent thing and carry Debbie's wires?

  "Which ones?" asked Remo, looking at the dark tangle of wires.

  "I don't know. My regular equipment didn't get here for some reason, and all this stuff is new. All I know is I have to have powerful amps on my voice and guitar or I sound like a squeaky little kid."

  "Like at Gupta."

  "Yeah. Although it's still real Debbie Pattie."

  "I don't like gadgets."

  "You know how many people would give an arm to be this close to me, Remo? Chiun, you tell him. You know what's going on."

  "This is all craziness, Remo," said Chiun in Korean. "Why now do you balk at this added craziness? Carry the wires or we will have to keep talking to this little fool."

  "Okay," said Remo in English.

  "Thanks, Chiun. You're the decent one. You understand what I mean by saving the world."

  "Until you know where the money goes you don't know what you're doing," said Remo.

  "Why are you so negative? Even the reporters don't ask questions like that. Reporters never ask questions like that. They ask when I became so knowledgeable about world affairs, when I became so philosophical."

  "You don't know until you know where the money goes," said Remo, and took a handful of Debbie Pattie's wires. They were thick, almost as wide as hot dogs, and they seemed to stick to his skin as he held them, as though they were covered with some form of gelatin. Remo looked around the stage to see if there were others like them, but there weren't. The others were the normal thin wires that didn't glisten with this strange substance on them. The closest thing to it in Remo's mind was the substance people used to make electrocardiograph electrodes more effective in reading the heart.

  The first song was the now famous "Save." A hundred stars, amplified by a million megawatts, blared out that one word over and over again. "SAVE. SAVE. SAVE. WE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE. PEOPLE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE. WE SAVE. SAVE SAVE SAVE."

  The crowd screamed. The singers screamed. The stagehands screamed. The noise onstage could have deafened people sitting outside the auditorium.

  Chiun shouted into Remo's ear. "White music."

  "Not all white music is like this," Remo yelled back.

  "Doesn't have to be. This is enough."

  The noise went on for fifteen minutes. When it subsided to the level of an avalanche, an announcer called it the most meaningful experience of the twentieth century.

  Then one of the singers introduced Genaro Rizzuto and Remo discovered what Palmer, Rizzuto had up its sleeve.

  "We have here someone who is fighting for the poor," said the lead singer. "We have here someone who takes his care and concern into the field. This man was on the scene even before the doctors. This man was Gupta. This man was the suffering. This man was the dying. This man was the first to say 'save.' He said we couldn't let our brothers die anywhere in the world, or we would let them die everywhere. "

  The last piece of absurdity was met with hysteria, and when it died down the singer said, "I give you Genaro Rizzuto of the law firm of Palmer, Rizzuto They care. They save. And they have an important message for you."

  Rizzuto came forward among the bangles, the rags, the glitter, the heat, and the noise. And he too managed a big smile.

  He thought of the thousands of yelling people as a jury, and in so doing he felt at home.

  "I'm just a lawyer," yelled Rizzuto.

  The crowd screamed back. One girl fainted and another desperately lunged forward to touch his shoes before she died.

  It was then that Rizzuto realized the rock crowd was better than a jury.

  "I am just a lawyer, and I just defend the rights of people to live safely, to live in peace, to live in an environment that doesn't kill them, to drive cars that don't maim them, to visit doctors who will not murder them with their incompetence. I am just a lawyer."

  The crowd screamed its answer. "Save. Save. Save."

  "And we went to Gupta so that these people, these poor people, would not suffer in vain. And what did we find? We found that the world does not care. The world does not care about a person if he's brown, if he lacks power,
if he doesn't live in some white country. The world does not care."

  "Destroy the world," screamed out one young man with a peace symbol on his T-shirt.

  "No. Let us save the world," yelled Rizzuto, ripping off his tie and popping buttons off his shirt, then flinging his arms wide, his chest exposed like the other stars, the lights playing off his glittering teeth. "Save the world. Save. Save. Save."

  "Save. Save. Save," the crowd yelled back.

  "We cannot put a price on a life because of the color of a man's skin."

  "No," yelled back the crowd.

  "We cannot put a price on a person's life because of where that person was born."

  "No," yelled back the crowd.

  "Everyone has the same right to life that we have. "

  "Yes," yelled back the crowd.

  "Everyone has a right to a life as good as everyone else's. "

  "Everyone."

  "Here. "

  "Here," yelled back the crowd. "In America."

  "America," yelled back the crowd.

  Now Genaro's voice hushed, forcing the people to strain to listen. "But I am sorry to say, my friends, that big rich corporations know how the world works. The little people, you and me, the people who suffer, don't know how the world works. The big rich corporations with their rich lawyers know that if they put a dangerous plant in a poor country, the lives of the poor won't matter that much. They know all lives are not equal. They know they can make money from the suffering of the poor. And they know they're going to get away with it."

  "No," screamed the crowd. Someone called out for the death of all corporations.

  "No," said Genaro. "We don't want them to die. We don't want them to collapse. We just want them to stop killing our planet, killing our brothers, and there's a way to do it."

  "Do it," screamed the rock stars along with the crowd.

  "We can say to them, 'Hey! Our brothers' lives are worth something. You can't keep killing our brothers and getting away with it.' We can say to them, 'You've got to pay for your misdeeds, just as if you did them in our home. Just as if you did them in San Francisco or New York City or here in Chicago. Our brothers are our brothers wherever they are.' "

  And thus with the mob screaming "Save our brothers," Genaro Rizzuto brilliantly made a public appeal for change of venue. He started a mass movement to make crimes committed in a foreign land punishable in the home country of the corporation, because in America a life was not worth an average of seven dollars, but more like a quarter of a million, and the fifty percent Palmer, Rizzuto would collect on a quarter of a million dollars would be enough to pay for Palmer's love life, Schwartz's investments, and Rizzuto's willingness to gamble with strangers who carried guns and didn't bet on hands they didn't deal themselves.

  Remo listened to all this and both he and Chiun sensed something else was at work here, something far more dangerous than a change of venue, something that was going to kill.

  They were right. What they didn't know was that it was about to happen onstage.

  Chapter 8

  At first everyone thought it was part of the song, a great new song, the rock hit of the decade. All the singers were screaming, some of them clawing to get off the stage. Others crawled and still others punched and pushed, and someone at a microhone cried out. "Lord help us. Help us. Help."

  The audience applauded as the center of the wooden stage began to sag and then with a sickening crack, it collapsed. Bodies fell into each other. Guitars and bones cracked in the onslaught. The center-stage singers were crushed under the load, smothered by the bodies of those who fell on top of them. It was a full minute before the audience realized this wasn't the best rock piece they had ever heard but a disaster.

  Remo and Chiun saw immediately that the people were in trouble, not singing about it. Using the wires, they pulled Debbie and her guitar free and then dove into the center of the surging mass of bodies, lifting off rock stars, passing them up over the side of the stage. Those on the bottom could not be saved, but they managed to get the upper layers free so that doctors could get to those who were still alive at the bottom.

  At the lower levels the bodies were slippery from the blood.

  Some of the rock stars didn't realize what happened for the whole evening. One of them, with a punctured lung and enough cocaine coursing through his blood to numb the whole of southern California, only discovered he was injured when he tried to sing and nothing came out but blood.

  Another with a broken hip, completely smashed on Quaaludes, thought she couldn't walk because this time she'd taken one pill too many. The idea made her giggle.

  Debbie Pattie was furious that Remo and Chiun yanked her off the stage before she could get in front of the cameras.

  "I hated all this anyway. All those other people sharing the attention. I was going crazy. I had withdrawals. I know others did, too."

  One thing did make her feel better. At least it showed Remo that rock stars not only gave of their time and money but also of their blood.

  "You can't say we're not saving now," said Debbie. Remo ripped off the wires, and so did Chiun. "Why do you use such sticky wires?" he asked.

  "Hey, I'm talking to you. I said you can't say we're not saving now," said Debbie. "I mean, people are bleeding on that stage."

  "I didn't say you didn't mean well," said Remo. "I just said jumping up and down and screaming 'Save' over and over doesn't mean anything. You're not saving people by dying, any more than you're saving people by screaming."

  "That's singing," said Debbie.

  "Whatever," said Remo. "Do you always use wires that stick?"

  Debbie shrugged. She hired people for that. She honestly didn't know how a lightbulb worked, but when you made enough money, things just were supposed to work or you fired people.

  "That's the difference between singers and nobodies," said Debbie.

  Remo noticed that Rizzuto, who was standing at the front of the stage, had escaped the collapse of its center by simply jumping off. Being a good trial lawyer, he had the presence of mind to look for an open microphone. Finding one, he gave a last message to the people.

  "Do not let them die in vain. Do not let them bleed in vain, everyone, you here and across the world, support change of venue for negligence. Please, I beg you in the name of humanity, the suffering humanity you see here, and the suffering you don't see which is even worse, write your congressmen. March in the streets. Barricade your courtrooms, Americans, because if the venue isn't changed to America, if it stays in Gupta where human life routinely suffers extermination by the powerful, then, friends, no humanity is safe. No mother is safe. No child is safe. No one is safe. You are not safe."

  A stagehand wanted to borrow the microphone for a minute to get people in the rear to open a way for an ambulance. Rizzuto put his hand over the microphone.

  "In a minute. In a minute, all right?"

  "People are dying here, buddy. We got to get the ambulance. "

  "I said in a minute," said Rizzuto, and made one more appeal for the change of venue, this time telling the people in so many words that if they helped the class-action suit against International Carborundum , they would be saving their own air, their own water and, as Rizzuto put it with a trembling voice, "your own green, green grass of home. "

  Debbie Pattie saw Remo start to break away from her to get to Rizzuto.

  "Hey, you're the luckiest man in the world. I'm ready to ball you. Let's go."

  "Later," said Remo.

  "Hey, I'm the most sexually desirable female in America," said Debbie.

  "Sorry."

  "Then I'll ball the old man, and he'll tell you what you missed. Everyone says I'm great in bed, everyone lucky enough."

  "Fine," said Remo, easing his way through the stretchers and wounded. He knew that Debbie had as much chance of getting Chiun into bed as the pope. No, the pope would be easier. But if he told her that, she would keep bothering Chiun all night. Debbie Pattie wanted only one thing in li
fe, it seemed. Whatever someone told her she couldn't have.

  The thing that struck Remo about Rizzuto was that the man was only pressing the Gupta case. If each of those rock stars earned millions, and many of them would not be able to perform again, the size of the negligence suit would be awesome. And yet when Rizzuto dusted himself off, he went happily looking for what he called "action."

  In Gupta, according to what Chiun found out, Rizzuto was right on the scene with a well-prepared case. Here, he walked past millions of dollars in liability, telling Remo that he thought he might know of a crap game in the hotel. Remo followed him, and that was exactly where Rizzuto went. There was a bigger negligence case on that one stage that evening than in all of Gupta, but Rizzuto ignored it.

  And Palmer, Rizzuto with a man already on the scene, made no move to get any part of it. In fact, it was one of the few really major cases that year that the firm didn't get.

  Remo contacted Smith on a public phone. Somehow, and of course Remo did not know how, the line was secure the moment contact was made.

  "Smitty. I don't know that this detective thing is getting anywhere. I can't figure out a lot of this. A lot of things don't make sense. What if we just gently hang Rizzuto out of a window somewhere and find out what really makes them tick, and then you move the evidence somewhere?"

  "Holding someone out a window, Remo, is not evidence. Just find out how they're doing this, how they're causing these accidents, and I can get the evidence worked up from here for some prosecutor. We've got to destroy these guys in a courtroom. We've got to have the law appear as though it's taking care of its own. Legally we have to do what Chiun always wants us to do. Hang a head on the wall. "

  "I don't even know where the wall is in this case."

  "Keep on it. And by the way, are you all right?"

  "You mean that crazy business, or what you called that crazy business? Yeah. I'm fine. I haven't had a desire to do something decent for days. I just run around after people."