Noah's Law

  ‘What happened in 1999?’

  ‘I was working as a forklift operator for a recycling company. I was on the job when I injured meself.’

  ‘Can you explain the incident to us?’

  ‘The factory I was working at was closing down. We were moving to another site. So we were loading the truck to transport the company boxes and equipment to the new site.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was operating the forklift, loading pallets onto the back of the freight truck. Then I got a call. I went to take the call and one of the other workers took me place on the forklift. When I finished with the call I was walking back. Joe was reversing. He didn’t see me. I threw meself to the side to get out of his way and injured meself.’

  ‘What injuries did you sustain?’

  ‘I fractured me right arm and hurt me back, neck and legs. I’ve been in chronic pain ever since.’

  ‘Did you receive compensation?’

  Bernie, his confidence increasing, sat up. ‘Yeah, I got a lump sum payment and I get weekly workers’ comp payments.’

  ‘And are they continuing?’

  ‘Damn right they are! The pain is a shocker. I can’t work.’

  ‘Do you have any dependents?’

  ‘Nah. We weren’t blessed with children.’

  Well thank God for that, you miserable bastard, I thought to myself.

  ‘How much were you receiving at the time of your wife’s death?’

  ‘Three hundred and fifty a week.’

  ‘Net or gross?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a tough one. I can never remember the difference,’ he said with a chuckle.

  ‘Before or after tax?’

  ‘Oh, um, after.’

  ‘You were expected to live off three hundred and fifty a week?’

  Wallace shot up. ‘Objection.’

  ‘Sustained,’ Judge Monahan called out.

  ‘Withdrawn. Bernie, what other income sources did you have?’

  ‘None. Me wife supported me.’

  Wallace stood up. ‘Your Honour, that wasn’t the question,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Bernie asked, a confused expression on his face.

  ‘Your wife’s support is not income,’ Judge Monahan explained gently.

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  Valopolous continued. ‘Bernie, did you have any other income sources besides the weekly workers’ compensation payments you received?’

  ‘Nuh.’ Bernie shifted in his seat.

  ‘Did you receive financial support from your wife?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can you please explain to the court what that financial support consisted of?’

  ‘Maureen paid the bills, the mortgage repayments. She bought the food and groceries. She paid all our insurance.’

  ‘What insurance?’

  ‘Private health. House and contents. Car. She paid for extra physio sessions for me when the insurer stopped paying for me rehab.’

  ‘And how much did these physiotherapy sessions cost?’

  ‘About a hundred bucks an hour.’

  ‘And how often did you attend such sessions?’

  ‘I used to go every month.’

  ‘Do you still attend physiotherapy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t afford it.’ Bernie flashed a menacing look at Rodney’s legal team. The timing was perfect, the acting spot on.

  ‘Did your wife provide any other financial support?’

  ‘She basically paid for everything. Petrol, clothes, holidays – although there weren’t many of those, what with me poor health and money being tight.’

  ‘Well what did you do with the money you received from your workers’ compensation insurer?’

  ‘It wasn’t much. I used to use it to take her out for dinner every week. I bought her gifts. All those little payments that you forget to put in your budget, you know?’

  ‘Incidentals?’

  ‘Yeah, that. Sometimes I’d put it towards the odd bill. When she was strapped for cash.’

  ‘Mr White, how did you feel about the fact that your wife supported you?’

  Bernie pulled a grim face. ‘I hated it. I was ashamed. I know these days it’s more acceptable for women to be the breadwinners but that’s not how I was brought up. I wish I could have worked. But that accident left me with no choice.’

  ‘Mr White, since your wife’s death, what have your financial circumstances been like?’

  Bernie face was animated. He was at the heart of his claim and he’d been waiting a long time to have his say. ‘I’d say dire.’

  ‘Dire?’

  ‘Yeah, dire. I’ve hired a real estate agent to sell the house ’cause I can’t afford the repayments. Luckily Maureen took out mortgage insurance ’cause I’ve been in default these past months. I just scrape by with the bills but I’ve cut out a lotta things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I scrapped private health care. I’m on a prepaid card for me mobile phone now ’cause I can’t afford to be on a monthly plan. I got rid of the house phone. I buy me food real cheap, try and get everything on sale.’ He looked at the judge and she nodded. ‘I avoid using the car. Petrol’s really expensive so I take the train when I can.’

  ‘How much were Maureen’s funeral expenses?’

  Bernie closed his eyes for a moment. When he reopened them he gave the judge a solemn look. ‘She was the love of me life. Her death was so horrible, so cheap . . . I didn’t want her to leave this earth in a simple wooden box.’

  ‘The witness hasn’t answered the question,’ Wallace sang out in a bored tone.

  Judge Monahan intervened. ‘Please refrain from tangential comments and simply answer directly, thank you.’

  ‘Her funeral expenses were about eleven and a half.’

  ‘Could you afford that amount?’

  ‘Objection,’ Wallace said.

  ‘Sustained.’

  ‘I’ll rephrase, Your Honour.’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Where did the money for the funeral expenses come from?’

  ‘Most of it, about ten grand, came from me mum.’

  ‘How old is your mother?’

  ‘Eighty-two.’

  ‘Was it a gift?’

  ‘No, a loan. I promised I’d repay her.’

  ‘Have you repaid her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How does that make you feel?’

  ‘Terrible. Cheap. Useless.’

  ‘Mr White, are you currently in a romantic relationship?’

  ‘Absolutely not. For Christ’s sake, Maureen’s still warm in her grave.’

  ‘This may be a sensitive question, Mr White, but I must ask it. The court is likely to hear that prior to your wife’s death you were, in fact, having an affair. Is that true?’

  Bernie took a deep breath. ‘I am ashamed to admit it, but yes, I had an affair. It lasted about four months. But it ended months before Maureen’s death. We were really trying to work things out.’

  ‘Thank you. No more questions.’

  Valopolous sat down and Wallace stood up, limping slightly as he approached the lectern. Casey, who was furiously taking notes, quickly turned the page.

  ‘Mr White, is it your evidence that you allowed your wife to pay for every single expense shared by you and that you spent the workers’ compensation payments you received by taking her out for dinner every week and buying her gifts?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, how often did you take your wife out for dinner?’

  ‘I wasn’t counting.’

  ‘Well I’m sure you could give us an estimate. Was it every day? Every second day? Every third day?’

  ‘I really dunno. I didn’t keep tabs.’

  ‘Well it must have been a frequent occurrence if your workers’ compensation payments were being put aside solely to fund these dinner outings and gifts?’

  ‘Objection,’ Valopolous called out. ‘Is there a questi
on in that?’

  ‘Overruled.’

  ‘Was it a frequent occurrence, Mr White?’

  ‘I guess you could say that.’

  ‘How frequent?’

  Bernie, flashing Wallace a hostile look, answered: ‘Maybe two or three nights a week.’

  ‘Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. And where did you take your wife out for dinner?’

  ‘Different places.’

  ‘Well was it Wildfire in Circular Quay or Dominos pizza?’

  Bernie paused. ‘Maureen liked Asian food.’

  ‘What kind of Asian food?’

  ‘Er . . . Thai, Chinese.’

  Wallace rubbed his hands together. ‘Okay, so your wife enjoyed Thai and Chinese and you invited her to these meals about two to three nights a week and paid for them yourself out of your workers’ compensation payments. Correct?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How much did each meal cost on average?’

  Valopolous stood up. ‘Objection. Your Honour, where is this leading?’

  ‘I am going somewhere with this, Your Honour. This is a claim based on an allegation that the plaintiff was wholly financially reliant on the deceased. I am entitled to put the plaintiff to proof on that allegation.’

  ‘Sustained,’ Judge Monahan said. ‘Just keep it moving along.’

  ‘Thank you, Your Honour.’ Wallace cleared his throat and then launched back into his cross-examination. ‘Mr White, how much did each meal cost on average?’

  ‘About fifty bucks.’

  ‘So is it your evidence that despite your difficult financial circumstances, you and your wife dined on Thai or Chinese for approximately one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars a week?’

  Bernie shifted in his seat. ‘Yeah. But not every week.’

  ‘But you just told Mr Valopolous you dined out every week.’

  ‘I, um, I didn’t mean literally every week.’

  ‘If you literally didn’t mean every week you could have told Mr Valopolous every other week, or every couple of weeks, but you specifically said—’ Wallace frantically flipped through his notes, ‘—you said, “It wasn’t much. I used to use it to take her out for dinner every week.” Were you lying, Mr White?’

  ‘No. I just got confused.’ Bernie looked at the judge. ‘It’s me first time in the witness box. I just got confused.’

  ‘Mr White, your evidence is that you received three hundred and fifty dollars in weekly payments from your workers’ compensation insurer. In fact, each week you received three hundred and ninety dollars net. The defendant tenders Exhibit 1, the plaintiff ’s workers’ compensation payout schedule.’ The court clerk took the document from Wallace and Wallace handed a copy to Valopolous.

  ‘Yeah, I was forty dollars off. I can’t remember the exact amount.’

  ‘Mr White, how often did you buy gifts for your wife?’

  Bernie paused. I could tell he was struggling to decide how to answer. ‘I honestly dunno.’

  ‘Would you say you bought her a gift every week?’

  ‘Er . . . yeah, maybe.’

  ‘What kind of gifts?’

  ‘Perfume, chocolate, flowers.’

  ‘Was this on a rotational basis?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sorry, that wasn’t very clear. I’ll withdraw that.’ Wallace took a breath and tried again. ‘You bought your wife a gift every week, correct?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you buy her chocolate one week, flowers the next, perfume the following week?’

  ‘Yeah, something like that.’

  ‘And how much would you spend on a bottle of perfume?’

  ‘About fifty bucks.’

  ‘What a lucky woman. So every three weeks your wife received a fifty-dollar bottle of perfume?’

  ‘She deserved it.’

  ‘Okay, fine. And how much did you spend on flowers and chocolate?’

  ‘Flowers about thirty bucks, and chocolate about ten.’

  ‘Okay, let’s work out an average. Ninety dollars every three weeks on gifts is thirty dollars a week. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So you spent one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars on dinner each week, and thirty dollars in gifts each week?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your answer. Could you speak up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bernie repeated in an aggressive tone.

  ‘So in total, you spent one hundred and thirty to one hundred and eighty dollars on dinner and gifts for your wife each week. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yeah, your maths is brilliant.’

  Judge Monahan raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. Bernie’s sarcasm was like water off a duck’s back to Wallace, who pretended not to hear and continued.

  ‘That left two hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars remaining from your weekly worker’s compensation. Do you agree?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And what did you do with that money?’

  ‘Like I said, helped out with incidentals. Paid bills.’

  ‘Well that’s not exactly true, is it, Mr White? You told Mr Valopolous you paid the “odd bill” when your wife was “strapped for cash”. ’

  ‘Yeah, okay. So I paid incidentals.’

  ‘Well what incidentals?’ Wallace consulted his notes again. ‘You said your wife paid for petrol, clothes, food, bills, everything.’

  ‘I dunno. You know what money is like. It just gets spent. We weren’t the world’s best budgeters. But I didn’t hoard it, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Actually, Mr White, I put it to you that you were not financially reliant on your wife as a matter of necessity but that you relied on her as a matter of convenience.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘I put it to you that you were more than capable of contributing to the household expenses but that you were perfectly happy with the arrangement that existed, which is that your wife would pay for everything while you enjoyed the extra income derived from your workers’ compensation payments.’

  ‘That’s a lie. You’ve got no proof of that.’

  ‘I put it to you that these dinners and gifts, if in fact they occurred, were an unnecessary luxury and, if such expenses were foregone, the money saved could have been used by you to contribute to the household expenses.’

  ‘My wife worked hard. She deserved to be taken out. She deserved to be spoiled.’

  ‘Wasn’t she working hard because you were refusing to contribute your workers’ compensation payments towards the household expenses?’

  ‘No. I never refused.’

  ‘If you had helped out, wouldn’t it have eased her workload?’

  ‘She was a very hard-working woman.’

  ‘So you keep saying. How convenient for you. No further questions, Your Honour.’

  ‘You may step down,’ Judge Monahan said.

  Bernie stomped out of the witness box and out of the courtroom. Casey whispered in Valopolous’s ear and then stood up and followed Bernie.

  ‘Do you have another witness?’ Judge Monahan asked Valopolous.

  ‘Yes, Your Honour. But it’s now five to one. Perhaps . . .?’

  ‘Yes, let’s break for lunch and you can call your witness at two.’

  We ate lunch in one of the briefing rooms in the courthouse. Bernie was furious and too upset to sit down. He paced back and forth across the small room as Valopolous demolished several sushi rolls and Casey chewed on her tuna salad.

  ‘That was brutal!’ Bernie cried. ‘I’m going to lose.’

  ‘It’s Wallace’s job to try to discredit you,’ Casey said. ‘The worst is over. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of the case now, which is the defendant’s negligence.’

  ‘But Wallace crucified me up there.’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ Valopolous said. ‘He was clutching at straws. Perfume, chocolate and flowers. I nearly burst out laughing.’

  Bernie’s f
ace reddened. ‘Did you see me laughing?’

  ‘My apologies,’ Valopolous said and then took a gigantic slurp from his iced tea. ‘But Wallace couldn’t prove you were freeloading off your wife.’

  Bernie’s eyes flashed angrily. ‘Is that what you think?’

  Valopolous calmly wiped the side of his mouth with a napkin. ‘What I think is irrelevant.’

  ‘It matters to me.’

  ‘Bernie, take a seat. Drink your coffee. We’re on your side.’

  ‘Well what am I supposed to think when you make comments like that?’

  That Valopolous is finally waking up to the fact that you were a parasite of a husband?

  ‘I’m simply stating the defendant’s case against you. I believe you, okay?’

  Bernie slumped down into a chair and took a gulp of his coffee. ‘Yeah.’

  Valopolous turned to Casey. ‘Can you check if Carlos Banks has arrived? He’s due on the stand in ten minutes.’

  Casey left to look for Banks and Valopolous turned to me. ‘I need you to ask the defendant’s solicitor for access to the original WorkSafe Minutes of Meetings notebook. The copy I have is not clear.’

  I went to look for Humphries, finally finding him in one of the other briefing rooms. I asked for the original notebook and he took it from a folder and handed it to me. I noticed Rodney Marks staring at me as I took the notebook. He needed us to rely on it. I’d read and reread Amit’s list of text messages from Bernie’s phone so many times that I’d memorised them. Its called compensation 2 victims act. We can make a shit load out of this. You just need 2 keep it out of the courts & get me a settlement FAST. That text message from Bernie to Rodney could only point to one thing: Rodney needed to lose. It was the only way to make sure Bernie got compensation and Rodney got a cut. I was sure of it.

  But things were spiralling out of control. Valopolous was right: Wallace hadn’t completely destroyed Bernie. He might have put ideas into Judge Monahan’s head but he didn’t have any solid evidence to back up his theory. I didn’t think that Wallace had much chance of bringing Bernie’s case down based on him sponging off his wife. It would come down to the negligence claim.

  While Webb’s statement was damaging, there were still the WorkSafe meeting minutes and purchase order. They both proved Jenkins Storage World knew about the security risks but didn’t do anything about them. The trial would be over soon and I still had nothing to bring Bernie and Rodney down.