[Damien Harrington 01.0] The Alibi

by Rachel Sinclair

  “I know that. I don’t really feel comfortable getting in and speaking with them under false pretenses, but I don’t really know what else to do. God, I never wanted to be one of those ambulance chasers. You know the guys – the ones who hang out at hospitals, hoping to pick up a case. The ones who go to funerals and hand the widows their business cards. But I think that you’re right – these people aren’t going to come to me. I need to round them up. I could send them a letter in the mail, but who knows if they’ll get it? They need to know what’s going on with them, and they probably need to get somebody to pay their medical bills, at the very least. I would love to figure out some other way to reach them, but I think that you’re right – I need to get in and speak with them, and I probably have to do it under false pretenses.”

  “If you want, I’ll do it. I’ll get in there, look around, see the mold, ask if anybody is sick in the house, and when they say ‘yes,’ I’ll tell them that they’re entitled to money. I’ll ask them to call you. My guess is that if these people are poor, which they are, since they’re living in squalor, they’ll jump at the chance to speak with an attorney. I’ll set it up for you to go and speak with them.”

  I nodded my head. “You might be right about something, though. They might be immigrants. Do you speak Spanish by any chance?”

  “I do.” He nodded his head. “I learned it growing up in my neighborhood. I grew up around the Boulevard, you know that everybody speaks Spanish around there. What about you?”

  “I learned it in prison,” I said. I smiled as I realized how much my rough background, and Garrett’s, helped us both. “So, if they’re immigrants from a Spanish-speaking country, we’re golden. But if the people are from other countries, I got nothing.”

  “Well, none of them had names that sounded Vietnamese, if that’s what you’re thinking. A couple of them had names that sounded Hispanic though.”

  “Go ahead, go over there and knock on their doors and see if they’ll let you in. Tell them that you’re there to fix their apartments. They’ll let you in. And, hopefully, you can convince them to let me pay them a visit. I’ll go to them, of course. Most of them will have problems coming to see me at my office, and that’s okay. Just set it up.”

  “Will do.”

  I realized, as I spoke with Garrett some more, that I was not only hopeful about these mold cases, but I felt energized. Gina, with all her lies and games, was sapping my energy, day by day. She was making me depressed about my job. But this – the possibility of actually helping somebody – this was why I got into law in the first place. It was like it was when I was in prison, and I was helping guys who were not only helpless, but hopeless. When I was actually able to help guys get a new trial or get their convictions overturned, there was no feeling like it.

  If these cases turned out how I hoped that they would, with the people not only getting money, but justice and, most importantly, they hopefully would be able to move out of their filthy apartments, then I would feel that I actually did something good.

  Criminal defense, more often then not, was a thankless job. Not just a thankless job, but one that came with huge risks that I would end up letting a murderer back on the street. I did it with Erik Gregorian – I got him off, but all I did was put him back on the streets, where he was resuming his criminal activity. It was a hollow victory, to say the very least.

  But with these mold cases – I had a real chance to get people justice. I had a real chance of actually helping somebody. These people were poor, they were the dregs of society, and they probably never had anything in their lives that was positive. I had the chance to maybe give them that, and that’s what made it all worthwhile.

  Chapter 7

  The first apartment I went to was that of Enrique Martinez and his wife, Aurelia. Garrett had gone over there on the pretense of fixing the apartment, and then he was able to explain to them, in Spanish, what he was really there for. It turned out that not only was Aurelia sick, and had been for quite some time, but they had a newborn child that died of SIDS. I did my research and I had found out that there were quite a few cases, nationwide, of newborns who allegedly died of SIDS, but actually died of mold exposure. I also found out that newborns, and the elderly, were the most likely to die of mold exposure. Sometimes young adults died of mold exposure, but usually they, like Arnetta, had some kind of underlying issue that weakened them and made them more susceptible.

  Aurelia was the one who let me in the door. She nodded to me and tried to speak in broken English, but I just shook my head and explained to her, in Spanish, that I knew her language fluently. She looked relieved. “Ah, si,” she said, “gracias.” Then she told me, in Spanish, what was happening with her.

  “A man came the other day,” she said in Spanish, “he told me his name was Tom Garrett. He told me that he was going to fix our mold problem. I was hopeful, but then he told me that he was actually working for a lawyer. That lawyer is you.” She smiled and nodded her head. “I told him about how I’ve been feeling. I’ve never been sick before. Now, I’m sick all the time. Rashes, headaches, trouble breathing. And my son, he was only 6 months old, he died in his crib. I had taken him to the doctor several times, because he seemed to have problems breathing. Then he died.” She shook her head and started to cry. “He died, just like that. Tom Garrett told me that the mold in my apartment might be the reason why I’m so sick and my baby died. He said that you might be able to help.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and spoke to her in Spanish. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. “And I am here to help you. You need to move out of this apartment, and you need to do it as soon as possible.”

  “I’m in a lease,” she said. “I can’t move out for another three months.”

  “You must move out,” I said. “You go ahead and find another place to live, and I’ll make sure that you get out of your lease.” I was going to tell her about the “Doctrine of Habitability,” which means that if you showed the landlord that the premises were not liveable, and if the landlord doesn’t do anything about these issues, you can withhold rent or repair and deduct. But, in this case, I was going to threaten the landlord and the owner. I was going to file suit against him, and I was going to tell the owner that if they try to collect from Aurelia and Enrique, I was going to go public with what they were doing. I had a feeling that they would, at the very least, not sue Aurelia and Enrique for “breaking” their lease.

  There was also the concept of “constructive eviction,” where a tenant may vacate their property and break their lease if the landlord interferes with the tenant’s enjoyment. All I had to do was show that the owner’s conduct was wrongful, which it certainly was, and this was another ground for Aurelia and Enrique to move out. Garrett’s research showed me that Aurelia and Enrique both had complained about the mold many times and, thus far, nothing was done about it – that showed wrongful conduct right there.

  She shook her head. “No. I’m afraid that they’ll sue us.”

  “When I file my suit, I’ll make sure that I can get an injunction against the landlord and the owner. I’ll get an injunction against any legal action against you and Enrique. What that means is that they won’t be able to sue you. Trust me, you need to move out. Your life might depend on it.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “This mold,” I said, pointing at the ceiling and the walls, both of which were covered in large black, green and brown spots, “is deadly mold. That’s why I want to take your case. I want the owner of this property to pay for this. I want the owner of the property to pay for the death of your newborn baby, and I want the owner to pay for your suffering. You’re entitled to money, Aurelia, both for your being sick and for your baby dying. I want to help you get that money.”

  She took a deep breath. “Enrique, my husband, he’s not here. He needs to make the decision on whether we want to file a lawsuit. He’s not sick.”

  “He works outside the home, right?”

&
nbsp; “Yes. He works 40 hours a week at Wal-Mart.”

  “And you stay home?”

  “Yes. I stayed home with Manuel, my son, and I was going to go to work after he died, but I couldn’t, because I started getting so sick. So, yes, I don’t leave the house very often.”

  “That’s why Enrique isn’t sick and you are. He gets out of he house, so he’s able to get fresh air for 8 hours a day. Plus, I have a feeling that you might be allergic to mold and Enrique isn’t. That also makes a difference. As for Manuel passing away, he was a newborn, and toxic mold is especially dangerous for newborn babies.”

  “Where are we going to live? We cannot afford much rent. Enrique’s parents are living in Mexico, and he sends money to them. He must send money to them, because if he doesn’t, they don’t eat. It doesn’t leave much money for us to live on, though.”

  It was then that I made a snap decision. I had all this money just sitting in the bank. I made some investments and bought a new house, but I still had $2 million left from the $4 million I got from my wrongful death settlement last year. Why didn’t I take a few thousand out of the bank and make sure that all my new mold clients had a decent place to live? What good was money if you didn’t use it to make a difference?

  “I’ll make sure you get a good apartment,” I said. “Leave that to me. In the meantime, talk to Enrique, tell them that I stopped by, and try to convince to him to let me take you on as a client. You and Manuel.”

  “We don’t have money to pay you.”

  “That’s okay. I take these cases on a contingency fee basis. That means that I just take a percentage out of your settlement, whatever that happens to be.”

  Aurelia took a deep breath and nodded her head. “I’ll talk to Enrique and I’ll call you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Over the next few weeks, I signed up six more clients for my pending class action lawsuit against the rich slumlord bastard Robert Weismann. There was Juanita Davis, a young African-American woman who was living in a two-bedroom apartment with two boys, age 6 and 4. Both boys had been in and out of the emergency room at Truman Hospital with respiratory illnesses. The youngest had developed a severe case of asthma. Both boys were continually sick with different flus and colds, and they had both developed rashes on different parts of their bodies and they both persistently complained of headaches. Juanita herself wasn’t sick, but she explained to me that she worked two jobs and wasn’t home that much. She had a baby-sitter come in and watch the boys, and I went and interviewed the baby-sitter, but she said that she wasn’t sick. I figured that was probably because her exposure to the mold was somewhat limited by the fact that she wasn’t in the apartment all the time, and the boys were.

  Juanita, as the guardian for her two boys, Marcus and Jamal, was my second client. The third client was Mariana Alba, who was an immigrant from Ukraine who, thankfully, spoke perfect English, albeit with a thick accent. It took me some time to adapt to translating what she was telling me, but, after a few hours of speaking with her, I got the gist of what she was saying. She told me that she had moved into her apartment within the past year, and that, prior to her moving into her place, she had never been sick before. After she had been in her apartment for a week, she started to develop a persistent, deep cough. The headaches and the rashes followed. She ended up in the ER at Truman Med several times because of her symptoms – once because she had a headache that had lasted for a week, despite her best efforts to cure it with over the counter medicines. Another time was for a severe respiratory illness – she was sick for a week, and then, one day, she woke up in the middle of the night and found that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was in the ER two more times because of recurring bladder and kidney infections. She also said that she was feeling a general sense of malaise – like she didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

  I also signed up Mariana’s boyfriend, whose name was Josh Dylan. He had been staying with Mariana, pretty much full-time, even though he technically had an apartment of his own. He, too, complained of respiratory illness, persistent infections, persistent migraine headaches and rashes. He also said that he had gone into the ER several times with chest pains – he thought that he might be having a heart attack.

  Candace Kaine, aka “Candy Kaine,” was my fifth client. She was a part-time stripper at a low-class joint who had been bedridden for several months at the time that I saw her. She explained to me that she had wanted to move out of her apartment and find something better, and she had hoped that her stripping job would help her do that. But she had been unable to dance since she had been so sick, and she was constantly afraid that her landlord was going to throw her out. She had ignored several eviction notices and she was more than relieved when I told her what I had told everybody else – I was going to pay for her to get a new apartment. Candace had the same symptoms as everyone else – debilitating headaches, rashes, respiratory illnesses, constant fatigue, etc. She also had chest pains, like Josh Dylan, and she also said that she felt light-headed most of the day.

  Candace was so happy after I told her that I was going to pay for her to get a new place that she cried. She put her blonde head on my chest and just let loose with a torrent of tears. “You don’t know how much this means to me,” she sobbed. “I thought I was going to die. I thought I was going to end up on the streets. I’ve got nobody to help me. I’m too sick to work. I applied for disability, but I was told that it would take months to approve me. I didn’t know where to turn. You don’t look like an angel, but, to me, you are. You are the answer to my prayers.”

  The sixth person who became my client was a gay man by the name of Mercury James. He was a pale, skinny guy with blonde hair that was almost white and pale blue eyes. When I explained to him that the mold in his apartment was killing him, he, like Candace, broke down and cried.

  “I thought I was in full-blown AIDS,” he told me. “I was too afraid to get tested. My boyfriend left me because he thought that I had AIDS, and he’s negative right now and he didn’t want to press his luck. He still loves me. If you think that my symptoms are because of this goddamn mold all over this shitty-ass place, then I think that me and him will get back together. I hope that you’re right.”

  Mercury told me that the reason why he thought that he had AIDS was because most of the symptoms he was having were the same as those patients who were suffering from full-blown AIDS. “Man, coughing all the time, rashes all over my body, can’t get out of bed most days. Body aching all the time, head to toe. Headaches that split my skull in two. Been in the ER several times, but I’ve never consented to them testing me for AIDS. I don’t want to know if I got that disease.”

  With each of the people I signed up, I offered them the same deal – they each got a new apartment to live in, and I sent each of them to a doctor for testing and treatment. I lined up specialists for them, including ear, nose and throat doctors and doctors who specialize in treating severe headaches. In addition to that, I even found a doctor who specialized in mold-related illnesses. That wasn’t his entire practice, but he did have a particular expertise in the growing field.

  After I signed up Mercury and I made sure that everyone was out of their apartments, and everyone had seen the doctor, I sat in my office reviewing all their files and thinking about how alive I felt at that very moment. I couldn’t possibly alleviate all the suffering of everyone in the world, but I did make a huge difference to these seven people – the five adults plus the two children – and I had to admit, I felt energized by it. I approached these cases with a focus that I hadn’t experienced in years. In my mind, Gina and her issues didn’t even exist.

  Until Pearl came in the office and informed me that Gina’s case had gone through the Grand Jury, which meant that I had to be in court for her formal arraignment. That wasn’t that big of a deal – formal arraignments were always more of a formality than anything – but, at the same time, I realized that her case was moving along and that I had to make a decision on
what I was going to do with her. If I was going to withdraw from her case, I was going to have to do it soon. I couldn’t just go along and prepare for trial and then withdraw. That wouldn’t be fair to her and it probably would result in a Bar Complaint. Plus, it would be a lot of time wasted on my part.

  No, I was going to have to figure out what direction I wanted to go with her. So, I called Garrett.

  “Garrett,” I said, when he picked up the phone. “You find any more victims of Vittorio’s? I need to speak with some of them. I need to make a decision on whether or not I still want on Gina’s case.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll e-mail you a list. I got some of the bios from them, so you can also determine which one of them might be at the top, as far as suspects go. I know that you were saying that you wanted to know which one of the victims might also want to get Gina, and I think that I found a couple who might fit that bill.”

  My ears perked up when he said that. “Really? You found some of Vittorio’s victims who might also have it in for Gina?” That was what I was looking for, really. The nexus between Vittorio and Gina – somebody who hated both of them. “Go on, tell me who you found who knew and hated both Vittorio and Gina.”

  “Well, there’s this lady. Her name is Bianca Cassavettes. I tried to speak with all the victims that I found, and I asked them some questions about Vittorio and Gina. Most of them didn’t know Gina, but Bianca did. So did one other lady whose name is Coretta Taylor. Other than that, the people I talked to had no clue who Gina was. They all spoke freely to me, though. They said that they felt that they could be open about Vittorio and what he did, now that he’s dead. I tell you, he was a piece of work, that one.”

  “Tell me about Bianca and Coretta,” I said. “How did they know Gina, and what did they tell you about her?”

  “Bianca said that she knew Gina because Gina confronted her in a bar. I guess that the two of them got into a cat fight because Bianca was messing with Vittorio.”