Gray Mountain (13 page)

All she wanted was a will, one “that didn’t cost anything.” Simple wills are straightforward documents, the preparation of which can easily be undertaken by even the greenest of lawyers. Indeed, rookies jump at the chance to draft them because it’s difficult to screw them up. Suddenly confident, Samantha led Mrs. Crump back to a small meeting room and left the door open so she could keep an eye on the front.

Mrs. Crump was eighty years old and looked all of it. Her husband died long ago, and her five children were scattered around the country, none close to home. She said she had been forgotten by them; they seldom came to visit, seldom called. She wanted to sign a simple will that gave them nothing. “Cut ’em all out,” she said with astonishing bitterness. Judging from her appearance, and from the fact that she was looking for a free will, Samantha assumed there was little in the way of assets. Mrs. Crump lived in Eufaula, a small community “deep in Jacob’s Holler.” Samantha wrote this down as if she knew exactly where it was. There were no debts, nothing in the way of real assets except for an old house and eighty acres, land that had been in her family forever.

“Any idea what the land is worth?” Samantha asked.

Mrs. Crump crunched her dentures and said, “A lot more than anybody knows. You see, the coal company came out last year and tried to buy the land, been trying for some time, but I ran ’em off again. Ain’t selling to no coal company, no ma’am. They’re blasting away not far from my land, taking down Cat Mountain, and it’s a real shame. Ain’t got no use for no coal company.”

“How much did they offer?”

“A lot, and I ain’t told my kids either. Won’t tell them. I’m in bad health, you see, and I’ll be gone pretty soon. If my kids get the land, they’ll sell to the coal company before I’m cold in the ground. That’s exactly what they’ll do. I know ’em.” She reached into her purse and pulled out some folded papers. “Here’s a will I signed five years ago. My kids took me down to a lawyer’s office, just down the street, and they made me sign it.”

Samantha slowly unfolded the papers and read the last will and testament of Francine Cooper Crump. The third paragraph left everything to her five children in equal shares. Samantha scribbled some useless notes and said, “Okay, Mrs. Crump, for estate tax purposes, I need to know the approximate value of this land.”

“The what?”

“How much did the coal company offer you?”

She looked as if she’d been insulted, then leaned in low and whispered. “Two hundred thousand and change, but it’s worth double that. Maybe triple. You can’t trust a coal company. They low ball everybody, then figure out ways to steal from you at the end.”

Suddenly the simple will was not so simple. Samantha proceeded cautiously, asking, “All right, so who gets the eighty acres under a new will?”

“I want to give it to my neighbor, Jolene. She lives across the creek on her own land and she ain’t selling either. I trust her and she’s already promised to take care of my land.”

“You’ve discussed this with her?”

“Talk about it all the time. She and her husband, Hank, say they’ll make new wills too, and leave their land to me in case they go first. But they’re in better health, you know? I figure I’ll pass first.”

“But what if they pass first?”

“I doubt it. I got high blood pressure and a bad heart, plus bursitis.”

“Sure, but what if they pass first, and you inherit their land to go along with your land, and then you die, who gets all this land?”

“Not my kids, and not their kids either. God help us. You think mine are bad.”

“Got that, but someone has to inherit the land. Who do you have in mind?”

“That’s what I came here for, to talk to a lawyer. I need some advice on what to do.”

Suddenly, with assets on the line, there were different scenarios. The new will would certainly be contested by the five children, and other than what she had just skimmed in the seminar materials, Samantha knew nothing about will contests. She vaguely recalled a case or two from a class in law school, but that seemed like so long ago. She managed to stall, take notes, and ask semi-relevant questions for half an hour, and succeeded in convincing Mrs. Crump that she should return in a few days after the firm had reviewed her situation. Barb was back, and she proved skillful in helping to ease the new client out the front door.

“What was that all about?” Barb asked when Mrs. Crump was gone.

“I’m not sure. I’ll be in my room.”

D
onovan’s office was in much better shape than the legal aid clinic’s. Leather chairs, thick rugs, hardwood floors with a nice finish. A funky chandelier hung in the center of the foyer. Samantha’s first thought was that, finally, there was someone in Brady who might be making a buck or two. His receptionist, Dawn, greeted her politely and said the boss was waiting upstairs. She was off to lunch. As she climbed the circular staircase, Samantha heard the front door close and lock. There was no sign of anyone else.

Donovan was on the phone behind a large wooden desk that appeared to be very old. He waved her in, pointed to a bulky chair, and said, “Gotta go.” He slammed the phone down and said, “Welcome to my domain. This is where all the long balls are hit.”

“Nice,” she said, looking around. The room was large and opened onto the balcony. The walls were covered with handsome
bookcases, all packed with the usual assortment of treatises and thick tomes meant to impress. In one corner was a gun rack displaying at least eight deadly weapons. Samantha didn’t know a shotgun from a deer rifle, but the collection appeared to be primed and ready.

“Guns everywhere,” she observed.

“I hunt a lot, always have. When you grow up in these mountains, you grow up in the woods. I killed my first deer at the age of six, with a bow.”

“Congratulations. And why do you want to have lunch?”

“You promised, remember? Last week, just after you were arrested and I rescued you from jail.”

“But we agreed on lunch at the diner down the street.”

“I thought we might have more privacy here. Plus, I try and avoid the local spots. As I told you, there are a lot of people around here who don’t like me. Sometimes they say things and make a scene in public. It can really ruin a good lunch.”

“I don’t see any food.”

“It’s in the war room. Come with me.” He jumped to his feet and she followed him down a short hallway to a long, windowless room. At one end of a cluttered table were two plastic carryout containers and two bottles of water. He pointed and said, “Lunch is served.”

Samantha walked to a side wall and stared at an enlarged photo that was at least eight feet tall. It was in color, and it portrayed a scene that was shocking and tragic. A massive boulder, the size of a small car, had crashed through a mobile home, shearing it in half and causing serious damage. “What’s this?” she asked.

Donovan stepped beside her and said, “Well, it’s a lawsuit, to begin with. For about a million years, that boulder was part of Enid Mountain, about forty miles from here, over in Hopper County. A couple of years ago, they began strip-mining the mountain, blew its top off, and dug out the coal. On March 14 of last year, at four in the morning, a bulldozer owned and operated by a roguish outfit called Strayhorn Coal was clearing rock, without a permit, and this boulder was shoved into the fill area down the valley.
Because of its size, it picked up momentum as it descended along this steep creek bed.” He was pointing to an enlarged map next to the photo. “Almost a mile from where it left the blade of the bulldozer, it crashed into this little trailer. In the back bedroom were two brothers, Eddie Tate, age eleven, and Brandon Tate, age eight. Sound asleep, as you might expect. Their father was in prison for cooking meth. Their mother was at work at a convenience store. The boys were killed instantly, crushed, flattened.”

Samantha gawked at the photo in disbelief. “That’s horrible.”

“Indeed it was, and is. Life near a strip mine is never dull. The ground shakes and cracks foundations. Coal dust fills the air and blankets everything. The well water turns orange. Rocks fly all the time. I had a case two years ago in West Virginia where a Mr. and Mrs. Herzog were sitting by their small pool on a warm Saturday afternoon and a one-ton boulder came from nowhere and landed square in the middle of the pool. They got drenched. The pool cracked. We sued the company and got a few bucks, but not much.”

“And you’ve sued Strayhorn Coal?”

“Oh, yes. We go to trial next Monday in Colton, Circuit Court.”

“The company won’t settle?”

“The company was fined by our fearless regulators. Hit ’em hard for twenty thousand bucks, which they have appealed. No, they won’t settle. They, along with their insurance company, have offered a hundred thousand.”

“A hundred thousand dollars for two dead kids?”

“Dead kids are not worth much, especially in Appalachia. They have no economic value because they, obviously, are not employed. It’s a great case for punitive damages—Strayhorn Coal is capitalized at half a billion dollars—and I’ll ask for a million or two. But the wise people who make the laws in Virginia decided years ago to cap punitive damages.”

“I think I remember this from the bar exam.”

“The cap is $350,000, regardless of how bad the defendant acted. It was a gift from our General Assembly to the insurance industry, like all caps.”

“You sound like my father.”

“You want to eat or stand here for the next hour.”

“I’m not sure I’m hungry.”

“Well, I am.” They sat at the table and unwrapped their sandwiches. Samantha took a small bite but had no appetite. “Have you tried to settle the case?” she asked.

“I put a million on the table, they countered with a hundred thousand, so we’re miles apart. They, the insurance lawyers along with the coal company, are banking on the fact that the family was screwed up and not that close. They’re also banking on the fact that a lot of jurors in these parts are either afraid of Big Coal or quietly supportive of it. When you sue a coal company in Appalachia you can’t always count on an unbiased jury. Even those who despise the companies tend to stay quiet about it. Everybody has a relative or a friend who’s got a job. It makes for some interesting dynamics in the courtroom.”

Samantha tried another small bite and looked around the room. The walls were covered with enlarged color photos and maps, some marked as trial exhibits, others apparently waiting for trial. She said, “This reminds me of my father’s office, once upon a time.”

“Marshall Kofer. I checked him out. He was quite the trial lawyer in his day.”

“Yes, he was. When I was a kid, if I wanted to see him I usually had to go to his office, if he was in town. He worked nonstop. Ran a big firm. When he wasn’t jetting around the world chasing the latest aviation disaster, he was in his office preparing for trial. They had this large, cluttered room—come to think of it, they called it the war room.”

“I didn’t invent the term. Most trial lawyers have one.”

“And the walls were covered with large photos and diagrams and all sorts of exhibits. It was impressive, even to a kid. I can still feel the tension, the anxiety in the room as he and his staff got ready for the courtroom. These were big crashes, with lots of dead people, lots of lawyers and all. He explained later that most of his cases were settled right before trial. Liability was seldom an issue.
The plane went down, it wasn’t the fault of the passengers. The airlines have plenty of money and insurance, and they worry about their image, so they settle. For huge sums.”

“Did you ever consider working with him?”

“No, never. He’s impossible, or at least he was back then. Massive ego, total workaholic, pretty much of an ass. I wanted no part of his world.”

“Then he crashed himself.”

“Indeed he did.” She stood and walked to another photo, one of a mangled car. Rescue personnel were trying to remove someone trapped inside.

Donovan kept his seat and chewed on a chip. He said, “I tried that case in Martin County, West Virginia, three years ago. Lost.”

“What happened?”

“A coal truck came down the mountain, overweight and speeding, and it veered across the center line and ran over that little Honda. The driver was Gretchen Bane, age sixteen, my client, and she died at the scene. If you look closely, you can see her left foot at the bottom there, sort of hanging out the door.”

“I was afraid of that. Did the jury see this?”

“Oh yes. They saw everything. For five days I laid it all out for the jury, but it didn’t matter.”

“How’d you lose?”

“I lose about half of them. In that case, the truck driver took the stand, swore to tell the truth, then lied for three hours. He said Gretchen crossed the center line and caused the wreck, made it sound as though she was trying to kill herself. The coal companies are clever and they never send down one truck at a time. They travel in pairs, so there’s always a witness ready to testify. Trucks hauling coal that weighs a hundred tons, racing across old, twenty-ton bridges still used by school buses, and absolutely ignoring every rule of the road. If there’s an accident, it’s usually bad. In West Virginia, they’re killing one innocent driver per week. The trucker swears he was doing nothing wrong, his buddy backs him up, there are no other witnesses, so the jury falls in line with Big Coal.”

“Can’t you appeal?”

Donovan laughed as though she’d nailed her punch line. He took a swig of water and said, “Sure, we still have that right. But West Virginia elects its judges, which is an abomination. Virginia has some screwed-up laws, but at least we don’t elect judges. Not so over there. There are five members of the West Virginia Supreme Court. They serve four-year terms and run for reelection. Guess who contributes the big money to the campaigns.”

“The coal companies.”

“Bingo. They influence the politicians, the regulators, the judges, and they often control the juries. So it’s not exactly an ideal climate for us litigators.”

“So much for a fair trial,” she said, still looking at the photos.

“We win occasionally. In Gretchen’s case, we got a break. A month after the trial, the same driver hit another car. Luckily, no one was killed, just a few broken bones. The deputy on the scene got curious and took the driver in for questioning. He was acting weird and finally admitted he’d been driving for fifteen hours straight. To help matters he was drinking Red Bull with vodka and snorting crystal meth. The deputy turned on a recorder and quizzed him about the Bane accident. He admitted he’d been threatened into lying by his employer. I got a copy of the transcript and filed a bunch of motions. The court finally granted a new trial, one we’re still waiting for. Eventually, I’ll nail them.”