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“Ah, they’re starting to work. Good. I’d take another but then I’d get sloppy, start puttin’ things in the wrong order.”
“Tell me how I can help,” Phil said.
She threw back her head and gave a witch’s cackle. He saw that part of her neck had run down into her shoulder. “Help me sue the shit out of those fuckers, that’s how you can help.” And with that, she told her tale.
Christine Lacasse had lived with her husband and five children in Morrow Estates, a NEF-built community in the town of Albany, just south of North Conway. The lights in their house kept fizzing on and off, and sometimes smoke drifted out of the electrical sockets. Ronald Lacasse was a long-haul truck driver, making good money, but gone much of the time. Christine Lacasse did ladies’ hair at home, and her driers and blowers were always shorting out. One day the electrical panels in the utility rooms of their four-house bloc caught fire and they had no power for almost a week. Christine, not yet the Burned Woman, talked to the Estates superintendent, who merely shrugged and blamed New Hampshire Power and Light.
“I knew better than that,” she told Phil, sipping at her water. “I didn’t fall off a haytruck yesterday. A power surge wouldn’t cause the electric panels of four houses to catch afire. The fuses would blow first. Other blocs of houses in Morrow Estates had problems with their lights and their electric heat, but nothing like ours.”
When she got no satisfaction from the super, she called NEF’s Portsmouth office, spoke to a functionary there, and got the runaround. She investigated the corporation bigwigs at the North Conway library, found the number for NEF’s Boston HQ, called them, and asked to speak to the president. No, she was told, he was far too busy to speak to a housewife from East Overshoe, New Hampshire. She got another functionary instead, probably one with a better salary and better suits than the Portsmouth functionary. She told the Boston fella that sometimes when the power was flickering the wall in her little home salon got hot, and she could hear a buzzing, like there were wasps in there. She said she could smell a kind of frying. The functionary told her that she was probably using hair driers and blowers with a voltage too high for the electrical system. Mrs. Lacasse enquired if his mother had had any kids who lived, and hung up.
That Christmas, NEF put up Christmas lights all over Morrow Estates. “The Corporation did that?” Phil asked. “Not the Homeowners Association in the Estates?”
“Didn’t have no Homeowners Association,” she told Phil. “Nothing like that. Everyone got a flier from NEF in their mailbox after Thanksgiving. Said they were doing it in the spirit of the season.”
“Just out of the goodness of their hearts,” Phil said, scribbling on his legal pad.
The Burned Woman gave her witch’s cackle and pointed one deformed, half-melted finger at him. “I like you. You’ll kick me out like all the others, but I like you. And none of the others wrote down anything I said.”
“Do you still have that flier?”
“Mine burned up, but I’ve got a pile of other ones just like it.”
“I’ll want one. No, I want all of them. Tell me about the fire.”
She said her husband was home that Christmas. The presents were under the tree. Two nights before the holiday, with the kids all tucked up in their beds (dreams of sugarplums optional), their house and the Duffys’ house next door caught fire. Christine was wakened by screams from outside. The house was full of smoke, but she saw no flames. What she saw out the bedroom window was Rona Duffy, her next-door neighbor, rolling around in the snow, trying to put out her flaming nightgown.
“That house of theirs was burnin’ like a birthday candle. I shook Ronald awake and told him to get the kids out, but he never did. By then I was out of door and throwing snow over Rona.” Mrs. Lacasse added matter-of-factly, “She died. Her two kids were with her ex-husband in Rutland, lucky for them. Mine weren’t so lucky. I don’t know what happened to them. I think the smoke must have gotten to Ronnie before he could get to them. I went back in to do it myself and half the goddam living room ceiling fell on me. Lawyer Parker, that house went up six licks to the dozen. I crawled out, on fire. And you know what happened during the year I was in the hospital?”
“They played beanbag with the blame until that old beanbag disappeared,” Phil said. “Is that about right?”
The twisted finger pointed at him again. She gave another cackle. Phil thought it was the way the damned in hell must laugh.
“NEF said it was the fault of the company that did the wiring. The company that did the wiring said the state had inspected both the Christmas lights and the original wiring specifications, so it was the state’s fault. The state said the specs weren’t the same as the actual wiring in the houses still standin’ and the engineering firm must have cheated to save money. The engineering company said they took their orders from New England Freedom Corp. And do you know what New England Freedom Corp said?”
“Sue us if you don’t like it,” Phil said.
“Sue us if you don’t like it is exactly right. A big old corporation against a woman who looks like a chicken that got left in the oven too long. Okay, I said, I’ll see you in court. They did offer me a settlement, forty thousand dollars, and I turned em down. I want five million, one for each of my children, fourteen to three years old. They can have my husband for free, he should have got em out. Now is it time for me to go?”
For the first time since Sal died—maybe for the first time since Jake died—Phil felt a stirring of real interest. Also outrage. He liked the idea of going against a heavyweight corporation. Not for the money, although his piece of five million would be considerable. Not for the publicity, because he had all the business he could handle… or wanted to handle. It was something else. It was a chance to get his hands around a neck that wouldn’t fade away like smoke.
“No,” Phil said. “It’s not time for you to go.”
Phil pursued New England Freedom relentlessly for the next five years. His father disapproved, saying Phil had a Don Quixote complex and accusing him of letting his other cases slide. Phil said that was probably true but pointed out that he no longer had to save up to send his son to Harvard, and John—Old John, by then—never said another word about the case. Ted Allburton’s widow said she understood and was with him a hundred per cent. “You’re doing it because you can’t sue the cancer that took Jakey,” she said.
Phil didn’t disagree—there might have been an element of truth in what she said—but he was really doing it because he couldn’t get the Answer Man out of his mind. Sometimes when he couldn’t sleep, he’d tell himself he was being foolish; the Answer Man wasn’t responsible for his misfortunes or for those of the Burned Woman. All that was true, but something else was, as well: when he really needed answers, the man with the red umbrella was gone. And, like Mrs. Lacasse, he had to hold somebody responsible.
He got NEF into Boston District Court shortly before Mrs. Lacasse came down with pneumonia. He won. NEF appealed, as Phil and Christine had known they would, but she did have that one conditional victory before the pneumonia took her off in the fall of 1967. By then Phil had seen her wasting away almost by the day and knew, just as he’d known with Jake, that the writing was on the wall. He added Ronald Lacasse’s brother to the case. Tim Lacasse had none of the Burned Woman’s thirst for revenge, none of her fervor; he told Phil to go at it, knock himself out, and followed the case from his home in North Carolina. He refused to pay any fees, but would be happy to take some money if it fell out of the sky, wafted down south from Boston or New Hampshire. The Burned Woman left no estate. Phil continued anyway, paying expenses out of his own pocket. Twice NEF offered to settle, first for three hundred thousand dollars, then for eight hundred thousand. The publicity was making them très uncomfortable. Tim Lacasse urged Phil (via long distance) to take the money. Phil refused. He wanted the whole five million, because it was what Mrs. Lacasse had wanted. A million for each child. There were delays. There were continuances. NEF lost in the First Circuit and appealed yet again, but when the Supreme Court refused to hear their case, they ran out of road. The final bill for the Christmas lights—the straw that broke the camel’s back—and the shitty wiring Phil proved was standard NEF policy (focusing on other developments the corporation had built) was 7.4 million dollars awarded to Plaintiff Tim Lacasse. Plus considerable court costs. NEF, initially unable to believe it could not outlast a country lawyer from East Overshoe, could have saved almost two and a half million dollars by giving up.
Tim Lacasse threatened to sue when Phil informed him they would be splitting the award right down the middle. “Go right ahead,” Phil said. “Your three-point-seven will melt like snow in April.”
Tim Lacasse finally agreed to the split, and on a day in 1970, Phil hung a framed picture on his office wall, where he would see it first thing every day. The picture showed Ronald and Christine Lacasse on their wedding day. He was beefy and grinning. In her white wedding gown, Christine looked drop-dead gorgeous.
Below the photograph were six words in capitals Phil had carefully lettered himself.
ALWAYS REMEMBER OTHERS HAVE IT WORSE
Following the final adjudication of the suit against New England Freedom—a case that made him something of a star in legal circles—Phil could have had all the work he wanted. He eased up on the throttle instead, and because he was now financially comfortable, he began to take a greater number of pro bono cases. In 1978, fourteen years before the Innocence Project was founded, he got a new trial, and eventually freedom, for a man who had served twelve years of a life sentence in New Hampshire State Prison.
