Cold Winter Rain Read Online Free

practice.  I couldn’t help thinking I should be recording my time, noting “Review file” in the billing software.  I’d have plenty to record this afternoon.  I had a lot to learn, and I settled in to read.
     
     
     
    By three I had reviewed half the documents and had made a few notes on a legal pad someone had left in the document case, perhaps for me, but more likely because lawyers leave legal pads everywhere.
    First, these documents related only tangentially, if at all, to the oil lease cases Kramer had prosecuted twenty years earlier.  Those cases were securities swindles where some crooks from New Orleans sold partnerships on properties in Texas and Oklahoma that had never existed.  Assessments, legal opinions, all the pieces of paper had been in place, but the deals were wholly fraudulent.
    The documents in Kramer’s document case instead related to an ongoing, present-day legal matter.
    Kramer and the Woolf firm were investigating information they had learned from two independent sources about underreporting, or under-recording, of gas and oil pump volumes by small independent production companies operating in several sites in Alabama, all south of Birmingham.
    Gas and oil leases were priced based on volume, and underreporting these volumes and thereby shortchanging landowners on lease revenues had generated lawsuits since someone thought to drill a well where oil seeped out of the ground.
    Recording production volume remained to this day in the hands of the production companies, not the landowners, and the temptation to cheat proved difficult to resist.
    The file looked interesting enough from a plaintiff’s lawyer’s perspective; more than one potential class action suggested itself, though the size of the alleged losses would not rival the Bernie Madoff scandal.
    Such cases were grist-of-the-mill civil litigation.  Similar lawsuits were probably pending in every state with working oil and gas wells, and I could see little that should make anyone desperate enough to kidnap the daughter of a lawyer.
    And why had Kramer told me these files related to the work he’d done a generation ago?
    But then I reached a subsection of the file containing information a little outside the workaday findings of a law firm preparing to represent a client in a business dispute.  One dark brown folder, the type with a ribbon that could be tied for security, was marked Confidential  -- Qui Tam .
    Inside the folder were the usual files marked Drafts, Notes, Research, as well as a thin tan envelope marked Client Information.  The envelope was sealed, and, redundantly, bore the legend SEALED in heavy black marker.
    So I opened the envelope with my lockblade knife.
    Inside were eleven pages of handwritten notes on yellow legal paper.  Nothing else.  The notes began with a name and address:  Michael Godchaux, 123 Royal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.  A cell phone number and email address followed.
    After this information the word Relator appeared, underscored twice.  The notes described a pattern of bribery and corruption in the operation of oil and gas wells on state lands in the State of Alabama which, if true, not only would support a cause of action in a qui tam lawsuit but might also implicate current and past holders of constitutional offices in Alabama in criminal activity.
    No link between the name Michael Godchaux and the information about wrongdoing appeared in the notes.  Godchaux’s address provided the only hint of any connection to Kramer’s oil lease cases from years before.
    I memorized the telephone number.  Some facts are better left out of the electronic memories of computers or cell phones.  Memorizing numbers is something I can do, though I have no idea why or how.  Names of people, not so much. Numbers, like music, have a rhythm that names rarely manage.
     
     
     
    Qui tam.  The Latin words literally mean “who comes.”
    Historically, kings and lesser rulers in Europe from time to