Repeat As Necessary

Repeat As Necessary

By Lindsey Taylor

© 2013 Lindsey Taylor

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. It is not based upon a true story or inspired by a true story. All names and characters are either invented or used fictitiously. The events described are imaginary. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead, or anyone the reader thinks might deserve to be dead, is purely coincidental.

To Lisa, for her inspiration, encouragement and support. Also, thanks to Craig for his help with the cover.

PREFACE

Golden Touch Natural Anti-Dandruff Shampoo’s all natural formula provides all the dandruff relief as ordinary dandruff shampoo without the harsh chemicals. Perfected after 10 years of research and testing, Natural Dandruff’s unique formula of all-natural ingredients combine to give you the dandruff protection you need, while still providing the shine and bounce of Golden Touch’s other formulations. Natural Dandruff is easy on your hair, but tough on dandruff.

DIRECTIONS: Wet hair. Apply shampoo and lather. Rinse. Repeat as necessary.

– Back label for Golden Touch Natural Anti-Dandruff Shampoo

Chapter 1

The pilot called Mr. Wolfe again, but there was no answer. He was scheduled to return from the meeting by 4:00 and it was close to 5:00. He was becoming concerned because it was unlike Mr. Wolfe to be late and not call or email that he was going to be late.

Mr. Wolfe was Beau Wolfe, the attorney who was the owner of the Gulfstream the pilot was to fly back to Dallas that evening. Wolfe had first made his name in Dallas as a medical malpractice attorney. He became so successful at picking, and winning, good cases that the insurance adjusters automatically added 25% to the reserve if he was the plaintiff’s attorney. He and his Wolfe Pack became one of the most successful plaintiff’s firm in Dallas.

Purely by chance, Wolfe took the case of a three-pack-a-day smoker who was dying of lung cancer. He was originally looking at the case as a possible medical malpractice case to see of the doctor had missed early signs of cancer. The malpractice case didn’t look too good to Wolfe, but when the client described how cigarettes were advertised as safe when he was young, and how he had unsuccessfully tried to quit so many times, Wolfe thought he might have a case against the tobacco companies. It was a long fight, but Wolfe eventually won $50 million for his client. From there, he took other tobacco cases, then branched out into other defective drugs and false advertising class actions. He found that he could make a lot more money doing the same amount of work as his medical malpractice cases. He had made so much, in fact, that if he wanted to buy a small Caribbean island and retire to drink umbrella drinks for the rest of his days, he could have done so off the interest from his accumulated fees. However, sitting on a tropical beach was not Beau Wolfe.

Wolfe had flown to New Jersey to try to get a final deal done to allocate the fees from the settlement for the massive lawsuit involving Golden Touch All Natural Anti-Dandruff Shampoo.

The premise of the lawsuit was simple. Golden Touch Home Products, the consumer division of Amerita Pharmaceuticals, sold its All Natural Anti-Dandruff Shampoo at double the price of its regular shampoos. It said that while none of the individual ingredients alone provided anti-dandruff protection, the combination of ingredients worked well to fight dandruff, and it had clinical trials to back up its claims. Because of its all-natural billing, and because it made the consumer’s hair shiny and tangle free, it was the largest selling anti-dandruff shampoo in the country, adding around $2 billion annually to Amerita’s bottom line.

The first lawsuit began quietly enough. It was filed by a solo Hudson County attorney, Frank Amaroso, in Hudson County Superior Court. A neighbor complained to Amaroso that the Golden Touch Anti-Dandruff Shampoo didn’t do anything for her dandruff. Amoroso, in turn, called a college pal who had been a biochemistry major in college. The pal told him that there was no way that the combination of ingredients in the shampoo would do anything for dandruff, though they would be good for producing shiny, tangle free hair.

As soon Amerita served the lawsuit, it removed the case to Federal court in Newark. As soon as the removal papers were filed, the fact that the lawsuit had been filed hit the internet case filing services and it was off the races. All of the major plaintiffs’ firms scrambled to find clients and file similar cases. Within two weeks after news of the first case broke, there were 30 cases filed all over the country. The cases were all centralized in New Jersey, where Amerita Pharmaceuticals was headquartered.

After the cases landed in New Jersey, the plaintiffs’ attorneys organized themselves without a public fight with three firms as lead counsel, one local New Jersey firm, a Chicago firm and a Los Angeles firm. The three lead firms were backed up by a ten-firm executive committee, to coordinate strategy and allocate work. Wolfe’s firm was included on the executive committee, in part because of his reputation, in part for geographic diversity, and in part to keep him under control. The other attorneys reasoned that he was less likely to cause trouble if he was part of the leadership structure rather than sniping and second guessing everything the leadership did from the sidelines.

The lead attorneys hired several respected scientists as experts, who said that the combination of all-natural ingredients in the Golden Touch shampoo did nothing for dandruff. Amerita, however, stuck by its studies demonstrating the effectiveness of its product in treating dandruff.

As was usual in this type of case, Amerita was produced several million pages of documents elating to the development, testing, and marketing of the Golden Touch Anti-Dandruff shampoo. Also, as was usual, since many of the documents were emails and other electronic documents selected because they had the proper key words within the required space from each other, searching through the documents to find something which might be marginally useful was like looking for a needle in a haystack. It was quite typical to find only a few hundred useful documents in the millions of pages produced. As jobs like looking for needles in haystacks generally rolled downhill, the task of going through the millions of pages of documents fell to the youngest attorneys, law clerks and paralegals. Among the firms in the leadership, there was a small army of them.

This time there was golden needle in the haystack. Among the documents was an email which had what sounded like a sideways reference to the trials of the shampoo having been faked. The associate who found the email showed it to the senior associate, who told her to try to follow the email string, and concentrate on emails among the people who were on the email she had found. It took three days, but, after concentrating the search, the emails and attached memos clearly showed that the clinical trials had been faked and that Amerita had known that the so-called anti-dandruff ingredients didn’t do anything to fight dandruff. The shampoo had been marketed as anti-dandruff shampoo simply so the company could charge double for what was essentially regular shampoo.

It also appeared that Amerita’s general counsel, Sheila Phillips, had been part of the plan to fake the trial results, but the key documents to prove that fact had been designated as privileged. That led to a major court battle to get the documents, and as part of the motions to get Phillips’ documents, the plaintiffs revealed the smoking gun documents they had found that the shampoo didn’t do anything other than provide bouncy hair and that Phillips knew it all along. The plaintiffs eventually got the general counsel’s emails, which showed that she had, in fact, helped orchestrate faking the test results.

Within a week, there was a whirlwind of activity. First, another round of lawsuits was filed, this time securities fraud claims charging that the company’s financial projections were bogus because they were based upon inflated profits from the Golden Touch Anti-Dandruff shampoo. Those were closely followed by FDA, FTC and SEC investigations, and retaining new counsel to represent Amerita in the litigation. Amerita had been represented by a New York megafirm, but they were replaced by the New York office of a Chicago-based megafirm. The ostensible reason for getting new attorneys was to get a new perspective on the case. The real reason, however, was that Phillips fired the old attorneys for allowing the incriminating documents to be produced, notwithstanding the fact that they were legally and ethically obligated to produce them. The new attorneys, selected by the board of directors, made two immediate recommendations: fire Sheila Phillips, even though she had hired them, and settle the shampoo case because the only thing that could come from continuing to litigate it would be more bad press. The following day, Sheila Phillips resigned to pursue other career opportunities, and Amerita’s new counsel reached out to begin settlement talks.

From Amerita’s perspective, the settlement negotiations went relatively smoothly. They were relatively quickly able to settle for $1.5 billion, which would be paid as refunds to consumers, with $300 million to be taken out of the fund for attorney’s fees. Behind the scenes on the plaintiffs’ side, however, the discussions were much more contentious. Some of the firms on the executive committee, Wolfe included, smelled blood in the water and wanted to push for a lot more money. The more pragmatic majority knew that there were still potential problems with the case if it were contested and it made a lot more sense to agree to what was a very good deal for the class members rather than fighting on and potentially getting nothing on a case were the facts were very good, but which had some potentially significant legal landmines.

The court quickly got the settlement process going. While a gross number on attorney’s fees had been agreed to, there was still the issue of dividing those fees up. Wolfe demanded $50 million. That was not inherently an unreasonable number, since some of the firms were going to get more than that. The problem, though, was that Wolfe had done almost no work on the case. After being appointed to the executive committee, he rarely dialed in to conference calls to discuss strategy, and provided no feedback on papers which were circulated before filing. His time records, on the other hand, showed thousands of hours in legal research, though whatever research that might have been was never shared with anyone else, and thousands of hours in reviewing documents, though there was no record of him or anyone else from his firm ever accessing the joint database where the documents were stored.

After a considerable amount of negotiation, everyone finally agreed upon an allocation of the fees. Wolfe reluctantly agreed to take $25 million, which was offered finally just to get a deal done, on the condition that the allocation that had been agreed to wasn’t upset or changed in any way. If there had to be a reallocation for any reason, Wolfe said, all bets were off and he was going to take his chances with the judge.

Unfortunately for everyone, Amaroso upset the apple cart. He had been offered $1 million, which the leadership felt was more than generous because he had done no work on the case beyond filing the original complaint. From his perspective, though, he had come up with the idea in the first instance, and was extremely put out by the fact that the other firms had pushed him out of what he thought of as his own case. As far as he was concerned, since it was his idea, he was entitled to half the fee and everyone else could share the other half. No amount of reasoning, including upping his share to $2 million, then to $3 million, would change his mind to take less than half. He was taking the fee allocation issue to the judge. Since Amaroso was taking the fee allocation dispute to the court, as far as Wolfe was concerned, the allocation deal was off and he intended to take his part of the dispute to court as well. He knew that the chances were slim of his getting the $50 million he was asking for, but he believed that he would also probably do better than the $25 million he’d agreed to take.

When it was time for the fee allocation issue to be decided as part of the settlement approval process, most of the ire was directed at Wolfe, not Amaroso. The papers opposing Amaroso’s demand for half of the fee were relatively polite, more like trying to explain a lesson to a slow student. The lead attorneys pointed out that fees should be based upon the work put in and results achieved, and, in all fairness, he had not made any real contribution to the overall result. Lead counsel suggested that the $1 million they had originally offered was more than generous. There were, however, quite pointed and personal comments directed toward Wolfe, that he had backed out on a deal and that his time records were fraudulent, since no one had any recollection of him doing the least bit of work on the case.

On the day approval of the settlement was set to be heard, the settlement itself was approved with little discussion. The usual crew of professional objectors showed up to say their piece, but their objections were quickly addressed and overruled by the judge. Argument went on for five heated hours over the allocation of the fees. The judge finally cut off discussion because the time was getting late and he was tired of listening to the same ground being replowed. He said that he was going to decide the fee allocation issue as part of his opinion approving the settlement, but he strongly suggested that the attorneys give one last try to work out the allocation of the fees because somebody was not going to be happy. The judge’s suggestion led to the meeting that brought Wolfe to New Jersey. To him, the judge meant that someone else was going to be unhappy, so his plan was to push for a greater share of the pie.

Wolfe had flown in to the meeting on his private jet. He could also have afforded a limo service to drive him around to the meetings, but Wolfe preferred to drive himself because he didn’t have the patience to wait if the meeting let out early or if the driver mis-remembered the pickup time.

The pilot decided to try Wolfe one more time. He was becoming more concerned by the minute. In the parking lot, a passerby heard what sounded like a phone ringing in the trunk of a Lincoln Continental parked in the back row of spaces. He told the security guard what he had heard. Nothing seemed amiss with the car, but the guard stayed with the car for a few minutes in case the phone rang again. Five minutes later it did. The guard immediately got tools to open the trunk of the car. The phone started ringing again as the guard popped open the trunk.

Inside was the body of a man and a large amount of blood. It looked as if he had been shot in the head multiple times at close range. The guard called for an ambulance and the police. The phone rang again. The guard found something to cover his hand and answered it. Mr. Wolfe, the voice said.

Who’s this? the guard said.

I’m Mr. Wolfe’s pilot. Who’s this?

This is James Smith. I’m a security guard at the Morristown Airport. Are you here?

Yeah. I’ve been waiting for Mr. Wolfe all afternoon. We’re supposed to fly back to Dallas tonight.

Then I think you need to come to the parking lot. I think I just found Mr. Wolfe dead in the trunk of a car.

Chapter 2

Det. Elias Arnold of the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office drove into the parking lot at the Morristown airport. Known to everyone except his parents as Arnie, he had been about to leave for the day when he got a call to investigate a murder at the Morristown airport. When he arrived, the Florham Park police officers had secured the scene. An ambulance was waiting, but the EMTs were hanging around until the police were done with the body.

What have we got? Arnie asked the officer, who was standing by the ambulance with the pilot. The pilot was sitting on the bumper of the ambulance.

The victim is a Cleotus William Wolfe of Dallas, Texas. According to his pilot, the officer said, gesturing in the direction of where the pilot was standing, he went by the name of Beau. Apparently, he’s a lawyer and was in town for a meeting of some kind. He never called in to let the pilot know when they were supposed to leave, so the pilot called a bunch of times, but there was no answer. Finally, somebody heard a phone ringing in the trunk of a car, alerted security, and they found Mr. Wolfe.

Pilot? Arnie said. I guess the law business pays even better than I thought. Let’s see the body.

The officer took Arnie over to Wolfe’s car. Technicians from the Prosecutor’s Office, who had arrived just after Arnie, were beginning to take photos of Wolfe. The was a puddle of vomit near the back of Wolfe’s car. Any idea whose that is? Arnie asked the officer, pointing to the vomit.

The security guard called the pilot out to see what was going on with his boss and when the pilot saw what was in the trunk, he tossed his cookies.

I can understand why, Arnie said, looking into the trunk of the car. How’s it going? Arnie asked the photographer.

I think I’ve done about as much as I can until the body gets moved, the photographer said. The photographer, Jimmy Magic Fingers D’Antonio, was one of Arnie’s best friends in the office. Fingers specialized in electronics and computers, but had been recently pressed into service doing on-the-scene technical work due to budget cuts. Come take a look. Fingers took Arnie closer to the car. Somebody must have really hated this guy. See, there’s a .357 magnum and it looks like he got popped at least twice in the head.

I guess get the EMTs over and get him out of there.

Fingers motioned to the EMTs, who came to remove the body from the trunk. While the EMTs were packing up Wolfe, Arnie sent a text to his girlfriend, Melinda Devereaux. Got call 2 murder @ airport. May be late. Pls nothing w/ red sauce 4 dinner. As the EMTs were loading Wolfe into the back of the ambulance, a text came back. No prob. I may be late 2. Red sauce not on menu anyway. Call me later. xx oo. Devereaux was an attorney. Dinner was generally a joint project, but they switched off if someone was going to be home later than usual.

Fingers bagged the gun and began examining the trunk of the car. He took some additional photos of the trunk with the body removed. Hey, Arnie, he called. Check this out.

Arnie went back to the car. I found two bullets in the bottom of the trunk, which I’m pretty sure hit the guy first, Fingers said. I also found another hole there, he said, pointing, that went clean through the bottom of the trunk and the bullet is nowhere to be found. There were three empties in the gun, so it looks like our shooter missed once.

From that range?

Maybe the guy was moving around or something, but a miss that close tells me that this wasn’t a pro job.

Could be. Definitely could be.

So, what do you and Melinda have on the schedule for tonight? Fingers asked. As the office lecher, Fingers took an envious prurient interest in Arnie’s love life.

Making it up as we go. She said she might be late too.

You better make it up to her, Fingers said, thrusting his hips.

Gimme a break. How about if you finish up with this and make arrangements to have the car towed in.

Roger, dodger, boss. Fingers said, saluting. Give my best to Melinda later. Or better yet, give your best to Melinda later.

Arnie interviewed the pilot and the security guard, then went back to the office to write up his preliminary report while it was fresh in his mind. He was done at close to 8:00. He called Melinda before heading to her condo in Mendham. She said she would also be leaving within a few minutes, but she needed to finish something first. They agreed to have broccoli rabe pasta, since it was fast and easy. Usually, they made it with sausage, but, considering how Arnie had spent the last few hours, he decided against it. He volunteered to start dinner, since he would probably be home first.

After he changed, Arnie put on a pot of water to boil to make the pasta and did the prep work so he could make dinner as soon as Melinda got home. Melinda arrived about 20 minutes later. After a welcome home kiss, she quickly changed into shorts and a t-shirt. Even though it was mid-September and the evenings were cool, she was not ready to surrender to Fall. She let down her long brown hair because her ponytail was starting to give her a headache.

You ready to eat? Arnie asked.

Please. But I could really use a glass of wine while you’re cooking. It was one of those days. She was an associate at Sullivan Milano & Rosenblum, a law firm in Morristown. She specialized in litigation and had been promised she would become a partner at the end of the year.

Arnie poured her a glass of red wine. Do you need a hand? Melinda asked

Actually, I think I have it under control. Arnie generally played sous-chef, but he had learned a lot about cooking since he and Melinda had moved in together two and a half months before.

As Arnie started cooking the rest of dinner, he asked, Do you know a guy by the name of Beau Wolfe? According to the pilot, he was in your shampoo case. Melinda’s firm had been New Jersey counsel in the Golden Touch shampoo case. She had been the senior associate at the firm involved in the case.

He had his own plane? I hadn’t heard that before, but I can see it.

You met him in person?

Just one time, at the hearing last week.

What was he like?

Charming, in a snake oil salesman sort of way. Was he the one who got whacked?

Yeah. I know you said it got wrapped up last week, but his pilot said he was in town for some kind of meeting for the shampoo case.

Our end of the case was wrapped up last week, but there was a big fight over the attorneys’ fees on the plaintiffs’ side. The judge told them it would be a good idea if they worked things out. This is just a guess, but probably he was up here for a meeting to try to work out the fees.

What was the fight about?

How to divide up the pie. They were arguing for hours with the judge. Wolfe was saying he was entitled to $50 million based upon the work he put in and the main plaintiffs’ guys were saying that they had proof he didn’t do what he said he had done, so he was only entitled to be thrown a small bone. They kept going around and around over the same thing and it got uglier and uglier as time went on.

The pasta was done, so Arnie began to mix together the broccoli rabe, pasta and olive oil with garlic. He dished out bowls of pasta for each of them. Cheese? Arnie asked.

Definitely.

Arnie put some parmesan cheese into a dish. They took their dinners into the living room to watch the Yankee game. By the time they turned on the game, it was the top of the fifth inning. The Yankees