Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (2 page)

1. Morning in Court

Department 606, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, The Honorable Oscar W. Bemis presiding, was a thoroughly, almost reassuringly human place for Antigone Wells.

Morning sunlight coming in through the deep-set casements had, over the years, bleached and cracked the varnish on the lower portions of the room’s oak paneling. At the same time, caustic ultraviolet rays from the fluorescent ballasts had darkened that same paneling up near the ceiling until it looked almost like old walnut. Although the janitors waxed the floor’s linoleum to a high gloss each month—or, with recent cutbacks, more likely once each quarter—the passage of many feet had scuffed dull pathways through the room’s center. Contact with the moist palms, ring binders, and briefcases belonging to generations of attorneys had dulled the polished wooden surfaces of the two tables for opposing counsel. Only the angular dentils in the wooden fretwork across the front of the judge’s bench seemed sharply defined and unworn. Only the vivid colors sewn into the flags of both the United States and the State of California hanging behind his high-backed leather chair stood out bright and fresh.

Antigone Wells thought she could smell the age of the room, although that might have been her imagination, based on hundreds of other courts she had appeared in over close to three decades. The lingering ghosts of old sweat and stale perfume would follow those tracks in the linoleum from the endless parade of plaintiffs, defendants, their attorneys, and witnesses. The bindings of the blue-and-beige law books on the shelf behind the clerk’s desk would exude odors of fine, acid-free paper and crackling buckram. The very air would hold dust from the mill of the law, which ground slow but exceedingly fine.

Someone had once told Wells that partners were not supposed to appear in court themselves. Or if they did, they never stood up, addressed a jury, and fired questions at witnesses. Partners were the elder statesmen, the grand strategists, the generals who led from the rear. Instead, the associates, younger attorneys like Carolyn Boggs and Suleiman “Sully” Mkubwa, who were seated at the table next to her, were the ones who stood forth and gave battle. But Antigone Wells loved the law. She loved the battle. The courtroom was her playing field, her boxing ring … sometimes her bull ring. Bryant Bridger & Wells, LLC had enough other cases in the backlog to keep their associates in good voice.

Wells drew in a little breath, after her precisely timed pause, and began to drive into the heart of her case against Praxis Engineering & Construction Company
et al.
She had already seen her first expert witness sworn in and had worked to establish his professional credentials for the jurors. Ralph M. Townsend had flown out from the American Institute for Structural Analysis, or AISA, in Fair Oaks, Virginia. Now it was time for him to enlighten the jurors on the facts of the case—none of which, as Wells had made clear during her opening statement, were in dispute between the two parties.

“Mr. Townsend,” she began, “would you please describe what you discovered when the Board of Directors of St. Brigid’s Hospital Foundation retained you to examine specimens of the reinforced concrete from their new medical center at Alemany Boulevard and Ocean Avenue in San Francisco?”

“Yes, of course.” The blade-thin man licked his lips—but more from nerves than from hungry anticipation. “We received fifty-four fragments, ranging in size from nine ounces to more than five pounds, taken from various parts of the complex. Each piece was accompanied by a photograph showing exactly where it had been cut, or in some cases where it had spalled—that is, had already expelled itself from the surrounding material …”

Praxis Engineering & Construction had contracted to build St. Brigid’s new hospital complex in the Outer Mission District. While the main building and its two conjoined wings, each three and four stories tall, were constructed of steel frame with glass curtain walls, the basements and the floor pads in all three parts of the building, as well as the entire five-story, open-air parking garage, had been poured—supposedly to specification—with reinforced concrete. Even before the structures were completed, they had betrayed evidence of cracks and spalling. The workmen on the site had dutifully patched over these spots and proceeded on schedule.

After the complex was finished and accepted by the hospital foundation, after all of the facility’s expensive, delicate, and complicated equipment had been installed, and after it was opened for business and occupied by staff and patients, only then had divots the size of dinner plates begun dropping out of the floor pads. Two load-bearing walls in the basement—one at the far end of the east wing, the other at the junction of the west wing and main building—had partially collapsed, jeopardizing the entire structure. Concrete chunks the size of a cocoanuts began raining down in the parking garage. Within a month, the entire hospital had to be shut down and condemned. It was a write-off to the tune—at the time—of $90 million, plus compensation for injuries to staff and patients, as well as damage to equipment and automobiles. And none of
that
was in dispute in this case, either.

Townsend began to describe the composition of those concrete fragments: various percentages of moisture content; a small but pervasive amount of calcium silicates mixed with clinker or slag containing aluminum and iron oxides, collectively known as “portland cement”; and then a much larger amount of aggregate. And there Wells interrupted him. “Excuse me, sir. ‘Aggregate’? What is that?”

“Oh, that’s a vital component of any concrete mix—in fact, as much as sixty to seventy-five percent, on a volume basis.”

“But what
is
aggregate?”

“It could be many things: graded amounts of sand, gravel, small stones—even bits of used construction materials, like concrete rubble and crushed brick. Aggregate is what gives the concrete its strength. Without those solid bits, the liquid portland cement surrounding them dries to a hard but brittle mass, like porcelain, and is likely to crack under strain. The cement really only serves to bind the sand and stones together.”

“You mentioned ‘crushed brick.’ Do builders use a lot of that?”

“Very sparingly, ma’am. Never more than five percent.”

“What about the kind of brick called ‘refractory’?”

Until this case came to her, Antigone Wells wouldn’t have known a refractory brick from a refried bean. Refractory was made from the kind of clay formulated for high-temperature environments like ovens, kilns, boilers, and open-hearth furnaces. She had been introduced to this special kind of brick when AISA returned their initial report on the concrete fragments. It was one of the chief discoveries of the plaintiff’s case.

“Oh, no, ma’am! Refractory brick is specifically excluded from use as construction aggregate. It contains large amounts of magnesium oxide, also called ‘periclase,’ and so it tends to absorb water. Then it expands. When mixed with wet portland cement, particles of refractory brick gradually become slaked. That is, they kind of explode in slow motion. They crumble, lose their strength, and weaken the concrete.”

All of this—and much else—had been stipulated between the parties before the case even went to trial. But Townsend and his technicians had uncovered a long and winding trail of errors of both omission and oversight. Unknown to anyone at the time of construction—although since confirmed with sample borings throughout the condemned hospital complex by Townsend’s field team—was the fact that the aggregate added to the cement at the batch plant had contained between eight and ten percent of not just crushed red brick but of refractory brick.

What was in dispute between the parties was how to account for its presence. Saint Brigid’s Hospital Foundation sought to recover damages from Praxis Engineering & Construction—which was at once the overall building contractor, construction manager, and deepest pocket—for failure to adequately monitor and test the concrete pours. Praxis blamed the batch company, Chisholm Cement of Stockton, California, for providing bad concrete. Chisholm in turn blamed its aggregate supplier, Yucca Sand & Stone of Indio, Riverside County, for improper fulfillment of their order. Yucca blamed the software integrator, Datamatron of Los Angeles, for faulty material coding when they installed the system that coordinated between its automated order-intake software and the mapping of the stockpile yard and the printing of instructions for the drivers of their front-end loaders that filled the trucks. And Datamatron blamed the original software supplier, Jian Zhu Anye Company of Taiwan, for various untrapped bugs in their underlying code.

Wells had already written out her closing arguments, to be polished and supported by testimony over the coming days. “What we have here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she planned to say, “is a simple matter of human negligence, a failure of human oversight of the machines they use. We all tend to think computer systems are infallible, because they supposedly cannot make mistakes. And in matters like adding two plus two, I suppose this assumption is usually correct. But they are only machines, after all. And we are all aware, too, of the programmer’s watchword: ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’ ” She would pause here for the obligatory chuckle, then again for the jurors to apply the maxim to loading refractory brick on a truck. “It’s only when a person begins to think that computers and their calculations can incorporate any kind of awareness or common sense, well then, you put yourself on greased rails toward the disaster that occurred at Saint Brigid’s Hospital.”

The foundation’s Board of Directors didn’t care who paid, ultimately, so long as someone did. But until the hospital had actually brought suit, no one had bothered to follow the trail backward from the concrete samples and test borings to the batch plant, to the stone yard, to the software assumptions and the faulty system. Antigone Wells and her associates at Bryant Bridger & Wells had brought in Townsend’s analytical firm, and they had traced the whole unlucky chain and proved that the concrete’s failure was not any kind of unforeseeable circumstance or
force majeure.
None of it was hard to unravel—it had just taken persistence and digging.

Normally, Wells hated going after a family-owned business like Praxis. Such companies tended to be small, honest, mom-and-pop affairs. They were usually under-funded in terms of subsidiary functions and supporting staff, and so vulnerable to predation by the better-funded giants of the corporate world. Family-owned businesses were traditionally the underdogs that juries loved to favor. But in the case of Praxis Engineering & Construction, the better descriptive would be “privately held.”

Praxis was either the third or fourth largest—depending on how you counted certain state-owned Chinese enterprises—of the world’s civil engineering, architectural design, and construction firms. Praxis had grown rich from the building boom in the Middle East during the past forty years. In the previous decade, they had moved strongly into joint ventures in China and Indonesia. The company’s strength was in projects generally known as “infrastructure”—roads, bridges, transit systems, water and sewage projects, power stations, industrial plants, and medical facilities like Saint Brigid’s.

Once Praxis might have been a small family business—way back in the early 1900s. Then Alexander Praxiteles, a Greek immigrant to the United States and sometime fisherman, had started taking on paving jobs in the new beach communities of Pacifica, Montara, Moss Beach, and El Granada that began springing up as the now-defunct Ocean Shore Railroad made its way from San Francisco down the western side of the Peninsula. But now, more than a century later, the eagle-browed, silver-haired man sitting in court behind the defense table was the surviving grandson of Alexander Praxiteles—whose surname had long since been shortened to “Praxis.” The two gray-haired men sitting at his side were the great-grandsons of that earnest entrepreneur. All of them were prosperous and well-fed. None of them had ever lifted a shovelful of dirt in their lives, other than at some formal groundbreaking using brand-new shovels spray-painted in gold. Antigone Wells would have bet money on that.

She finished questioning her expert witness and turned him over to the Praxis Engineering counsel for what was sure to be a perfunctory cross examination. As she did so, the thought again crossed her mind—although she would never mention it to the jury, even obliquely—that the Praxis people should have settled when St. Brigid’s made their offer. After all, the initial claim had only been for $140 million, and that was chicken feed in the current economic environment. Then Praxis Engineering & Construction could have gone after the subcontractors themselves for recovery. But instead they had held out from the beginning and then propounded that weak-kneed
force majeure
defense. It only made them appear brazen and callous—not to mention just a little bit stupid. … And juries loved
that,
too.

* * *

The San Francisco courtroom where the civil trial against his company was being argued was not, John Praxis decided, a place that seemed completely comfortable with technology.

The tables where the lawyers sat were festooned with power cords and data cables leading down from their laptop computers to exposed junction boxes on the floor, rather than more modern, molded-in-place connections. The last-generation WIFI repeater with its upright horns sat on a makeshift shelf above the door to the judge’s chambers, with more wires hanging down. A flat-panel television screen—a full five inches thick, so not the latest generation—was bolted under the clock on the wall that faced the jury box and had its own dangling wires. The computer monitors on the desks of the clerk and bailiff were positioned at odd, oblique angles, so that those officials could perform their duties while still facing the court itself. Only the judge, high above the proceedings, operated in a virtual technology-free zone.

Praxis knew his mind was wandering now. He had been sitting for the past two hours in the folding, theater-style seats for spectators behind the courtroom’s central railing. They were surprisingly small seats, more like transplants from a junior high school auditorium. They were too narrow for his hips and too close to the row ahead for his knees. With his six-foot-four-inch frame, Praxis could only perch stiffly upright, unable to cross his legs and afraid to move his arms for poking his sons on either side—and, Heaven knew, Leonard and Richard had resented such familiar contact even as boys.