A Civil Action (24 page)

“When? Now?” replied Love.

“How would you describe the water during the 1960s?”

“Fine.”

“How about the seventies?”

“Odor.”

“What did it smell like?”

“Chlorine, or something,” said Love. “Very pungent smell.”

“And how about the color? What did it look like?”

“Sometimes very dark.”

“Seem to have things in it? A residue?”

“Yes.”

“Did you drink it or did you—”

“Yeah, I drank it,” said Love abruptly.

“Were you concerned when you found out the wells were contaminated?”

Cheeseman objected. Donald Frederico, one of Facher’s young associates, had been listening to the deposition with only half an ear. He had no particular interest in Love’s testimony because it did not involve Beatrice, but Facher wanted a Hale and Dorr lawyer present at every deposition. Frederico had already sat through Shalline and Barbas, and on this morning he’d spent most of his time reading the
Boston Herald
. He had a low regard for personal injury law in general and a growing dislike for Schlichtmann in particular. “Plaintiffs’ lawyers feed on death,” Frederico once remarked. “They see a dead person as an opportunity to make a bundle.” Now, when Cheeseman objected, Frederico looked up from the
Herald
and added his objection, too.

“Were you concerned for your own health?” asked Schlichtmann. Cheeseman objected again and Frederico joined him. Love answered yes.

“Were you concerned for the health of your family?”

More objections.

Love said yes again.

“Has any of your family experienced serious illness?”

The objections came with every question now, and they disturbed Love. He could not understand why Cheeseman and Frederico were objecting to questions about his family’s health. Cheeseman was supposed
to be on his side, but it seemed as if Schlichtmann was his ally, not Cheeseman.

Love said, “Yes, I’m concerned about their health. My youngest son has a seizure disorder. One of my daughters had a miscarriage and my granddaughter had a birth defect.”

“Have any of your children experienced rashes?” asked Schlichtmann.

Frederico had put down his newspaper. “Are we going to sit here and go through his entire family’s medical history?” he asked with a disbelieving laugh.

“You can leave,” said Schlichtmann.

“Such irrelevant matter,” snorted Frederico.

Love glanced darkly at Frederico. When he looked back at Schlichtmann, their eyes met for a brief moment. He thought he saw Schlichtmann give him a slight, almost imperceptible nod of understanding.

Then Schlichtmann’s gaze shifted to Frederico. “You can leave,” he said again.

“I’m not going to leave if you’re conducting a deposition,” snapped Frederico.

“Then sit and listen,” said Schlichtmann in the tone one would use on a troublesome child. He looked back to Love. “Have you or your wife had problems with burning eyes?”

“Objection!” said Frederico.

Love nodded. “In the shower, during the time the water was bad in east Woburn.”

“And your wife complained of it?”

“Objection!” said Frederico.

“Yes,” said Love at the same moment that Cheeseman added his objection.

“Slow down a bit,” said Cheeseman. “Give me a chance.”

“Are you aware,” asked Schlichtmann, “of any of your neighbors who have had leukemia in their families?”

“Several.”

“Have you read reports about the contamination found in the wells?”

“Yes,” said Love.

“Are you concerned about the health effect of what was found in the wells?”

“Yes.”

“You’re concerned for your family, is that right?”

“Yes.”

Schlichtmann looked straight at Love and smiled. “All right, we’re all set. Thank you very much, Mr. Love.”

Love nodded and smiled back at Schlichtmann.

As Love remembered it later, he felt confused and angry after the deposition. His head throbbed and he could feel a headache coming on as he and Cheeseman walked up the street.

“You did very well,” said Cheeseman in a kindly way. “I thought you’d be upset when he started asking personal questions about your family.”

“That didn’t bother me at all,” said Love.

Cheeseman changed the subject and asked Love about the Woburn plant manager. Cheeseman said that he’d heard that the manager, whose name was Vincent Forte, had a quick temper. “What kind of guy is he?” Cheeseman asked.

Love thought this question was singularly odd coming from Cheeseman. He knew that Cheeseman had spent quite a lot of time with the plant manager, and he felt the lawyer was probing him, trying to see if he had a grudge against the manager or the company. His headache felt worse. “I never had any problems with Vin,” Love replied. “I always got along with him pretty good.”

On the sidewalk outside Cheeseman’s office building, they paused for a moment. Love was anxious to leave Boston and get home, but Cheeseman was still talking. “If you’ve got any questions, or want to talk, I’m only a phone call away,” Cheeseman said. Then, in a friendly voice, he asked, “Are you going back to work?”

Love looked at the April sky. It was overcast and a little chilly, but shafts of sunlight pierced the clouds. “No,” he said with a touch of defiance. “I think I’m going to play some golf.”

The more Al Love thought about it, the angrier he got at the way Cheeseman and especially Frederico had acted when Schlichtmann had asked about the health of his family. On a morning a week after his deposition he sat at his desk contemplating the telephone. Finally
he dialed Cheeseman’s number. He felt nervous and his words came awkwardly. “I’ve been thinking about this situation,” he told Cheeseman. “I feel like I’m betwixt and between. I don’t know which side I should be on, but I don’t think everything that went on around here is getting told.”

Cheeseman said he was planning to come out to the plant the next day. “Why don’t we talk?”

The following afternoon Cheeseman appeared at the door of the receiving office. He suggested to Love that they go to the conference room, where they could talk in private. “Tell me what’s bothering you, Al,” said Cheeseman as he closed the door.

Love said that he was concerned about the health of his family. “I’m wondering if I should get a lawyer for my children’s sake,” he said.

“I can’t advise you one way or the other about getting a lawyer,” replied Cheeseman. “That’s something you’ve got to decide for yourself.” Cheeseman paused, and then he added: “As a practical matter, I don’t believe those chemicals in the water made anyone sick.”

“What about the leukemia cluster? That’s been documented.”

“No one knows what causes leukemia,” explained Cheeseman. “And no one knows what caused this cluster. I personally think it’s just a matter of chance. If you took a hundred pennies and threw them in the air, half would land heads and the other half would land tails. If you looked around carefully, you’d probably be able to find some heads grouped together in a cluster. But it’s purely a matter of chance. No one can explain it.”

Love thought about that for a moment. He shook his head slowly and said, “I can’t buy it. I know that water was contaminated. And I know from people around here that barrels have been buried and things have been dumped. I wasn’t the one who did it, but I know it happened.”

“Al, this is very important,” said Cheeseman. “I want you to tell me the names of those people.”

Love did not want to become an informer. He had already named Barbas and Meola at his deposition, but he’d been under oath then. He and Tommy Barbas had known each other almost their entire lives. When Barbas had started work at the plant, fresh out of high school, Love had taken it upon himself to look after the younger man. At the company Christmas parties, Love and his wife, Evelyn, always sat at the same table
with Tommy and his wife. They’d had the Barbases over to dinner at their house. Love wasn’t about to cause any more trouble for Barbas. If Tommy had anything to tell the lawyers, he himself should be the one to do it. “I can’t do that,” Love told Cheeseman, shaking his head.

“Can you speak to these people and ask them to come to me?”

Love said, “Let me think about that.”

“It’s very important that we learn about everything that went on around here,” said Cheeseman.

Listening to Cheeseman speak, it suddenly dawned on Love that perhaps the lawyer really did not know what had happened at the plant. Certainly Vin Forte, the plant manager, knew everything. If Cheeseman was in the dark, then Forte must have lied to the lawyers to protect himself. And Tommy Barbas must have lied, too.

“We need the information so we can disclose it to the appropriate officials,” continued Cheeseman. “We need it so we can get the Environmental Protection Agency in, so we can clean up everything that might be in the ground.”

Love shook his head.

Word spread quickly around the plant that day that Cheeseman had come to see Love. Some people whispered that Al had gotten himself into a predicament of some sort with the lawyers. Love had not risen far in the plant hierarchy, but he had a quiet authority that had led others to respect him and his word. When one of Love’s friends, Cy Witmer, who worked in the sheet metal shop, heard the rumors, he took a break and came to see Love. “What’s going on, Al?” Witmer asked.

“I do believe I’m on the wrong side of this whole thing,” Love said.

During the next week, Love slept poorly. He could barely eat. His wife, Evelyn, worried about him. At night, after dinner, while Evelyn cleaned the dishes, they talked about whether he should go over to see Anne Anderson. She lived just around the corner, on Orange Street, a two-minute walk. Although they had been neighbors for fifteen years, the Loves did not know Anne well. Al had seen an ambulance come to her house on more than one occasion when her son had been ill, and he knew that she and her husband had separated. When the Woburn leukemias began to attract media attention, Al had thought Anne was
“a fruitcake,” as he put it, a sad case who’d broken under the strain of the tragedies that had befallen her. But lately he’d begun to reconsider. He wondered how Anne would receive him if he went over and knocked on her door. It occurred to him that since he worked for Grace she might blame him for what had happened to her son.

Evelyn had always told Al that someone in Grace management would surely come forward with the truth, somebody whose responsibility it was. But now, witnessing the turmoil that Al was in, she told him he should go speak to Anne and tell her what he knew. They tried to weigh the consequences of such an act, whether Al would lose his job if it came out. But to Evelyn, losing a job now seemed less important than doing what Al thought was right, and what would set his mind at rest.

On Wednesday evening, the first of May, three weeks after his deposition, Al Love walked over to Anne’s house and knocked on the door. Anne invited him in, offered him coffee, and they sat at her kitchen table. He told her that he’d thought about coming to see her for some time, but he’d been afraid she might not want to talk to him because he worked for W. R. Grace. He said he cared about what had happened in the city and to her son, and he was angry about the way the company was handling itself.

Anne put her hand on his arm and said, “You have no idea how much this means to me.” She had tears in her eyes, and she apologized for crying. Love said he was worried about the health of his own family. He’d heard rumors at the plant about many drums being buried. “Fifty or more drums,” he said. “There’s a lot that’s not coming out.”

He and Anne talked for almost two hours. Love remembered feeling clearheaded and calm for the first time in weeks. As he was about to leave, Anne asked if he would be willing to speak to Schlichtmann, to tell him what he had told her.

Yes, Love said, he would talk to Schlichtmann.

Schlichtmann arrived by invitation at the Loves’ house the next evening. He and Al sat in the living room, talking for two hours about the Grace plant. Al told him about the rumors of fifty or more drums being buried under an addition that had been added onto the plant in
the early 1970s. Schlichtmann had brought along the deposition transcripts of Tom Barbas and Paul Shalline, and he asked Love to read them as soon as he could.

A few days later, after Love finished reading the lengthy transcripts, he and Schlichtmann met again. Love, shaking his head ruefully, said that Tommy Barbas had not told the truth at his deposition. Love recalled how he’d sat in the cafeteria at work three years ago with Barbas and a supervisor named Frank Kelly, listening to the two men talk about the drums of toxic waste buried out back behind the plant. He remembered how Kelly, laughing, had pointed at Barbas. “Tommy knows all about it,” Kelly had said. The other workers at the table had laughed, too, and even Barbas had smiled. Everyone had treated it like a big joke, Love told Schlichtmann.

Nearly every day for the next two weeks, Schlichtmann or Conway or someone else from the office called or stopped by Love’s house. One night Schlichtmann arrived with a thick stack of aerial photographs of the Grace plant dating back to 1960. Schlichtmann spread these on the dining room table and had Love study them with a magnifying glass, trying to identify the areas where he’d seen the pits and where Barbas and Meola had emptied their buckets of solvent and the degreasing machine. Schlichtmann went over every detail four, five, six times, probing for more, and Love answered patiently. They worked until late in the evening, the lights in the house blazing, the windows open in the soft spring air, people from Schlichtmann’s firm arriving and departing as if Love’s house had become its Woburn office.

Schlichtmann wanted the names of former Grace workers who might know more about the buried drums. Love mentioned Robert Pasqueriella, an electrician who used to work at the plant. Schlichtmann asked if he would call Pasqueriella right then, and Love did so.

Pasqueriella had not worked at Grace for six years, and he had to think a minute before it came back to him. Then he remembered a conversation he’d had with Frank Kelly. “Sure,” Pasqueriella said to Love. “Frank told me about those barrels.”