Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  Melissa hesitated. She didn’t confuse feeling with thinking. She felt a warm glow for her alma mater, the University of Michigan, but that had nothing to do with how she filled out her NCAA brackets each March.

  “I think Tereska Bleifert is psychologically fragile. Smart as a whip and studious, but about as worldly as a novice in a 1950s convent. She’s out of the south-side home/church/school cocoon for the first time in her life. She’s either a very spiritual person, or she’s neurotically obsessed with Catholicism.”

  “Or both.”

  “Or both.” Melissa nodded.

  “And if she’s on the edge of a nervous breakdown, you don’t want to be the one who pushes her over.”

  “That makes it sound like I’m thinking with my heart.”

  “No, you’re thinking with your gut. There’s a difference. For someone with sound instincts, like you, it makes sense. Please note that I said ‘sense’ and not ‘sensibility.’”

  “You are asking for it, mister.” Melissa giggled, relaxing as she realized that Rep understood. “But that’s the bottom line. Speculative suspicion isn’t enough for me to sic cops on an emotionally at-risk innocent.”

  “Which speaks well of you. But that charming ingénue wrote six names on the back of a card, and within the space of half-an-hour tonight three of them were the object of physical attack, burglary, or false imprisonment. One of those names was yours, and I don’t like the odds.”

  “I think I can explain the card. During Lent pious Catholics pray for Catholics who can’t receive communion during the Easter season because they’re in a state of mortal sin. I’m in that category, in her eyes, because I’m an apostate. Mignon probably is too. The names are in different colored ink, suggesting that she wrote them down at different times. I’m betting that she added my name after I casually mentioned that I was a convent school girl who was now agnostic.”

  “I’m officially blown away,” Rep said after taking a moment to digest the data-dump and parse Melissa’s logic. “You get credit for the fastest segue from heart to head since Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility.”

  “Who’s the professor here? I’ll handle the pretentious literary allusions.”

  “But wouldn’t she have to have kind of a long list? The way she sees it, isn’t everyone who’s not a practicing Catholic in a state of mortal sin?”

  “No, dear, that’s a heresy. The Church’s theory is that a benighted Protestant like you hasn’t had a fair shot at eternal truth yet. You can save your soul just by showing through a good life that you’re open to God’s grace, even though your invincible ignorance keeps you from embracing His Church.”

  “Whereas you can’t plead ignorance as a defense?”

  “Right. I had my chance and turned my back on it. So unless I repent, then as Tereska sees things I’m in for a rather warm time of it.”

  “It seems kind of unfair,” Rep mused. “Have you thought of taking a stab at repenting, just to hedge your bets?”

  “Theologians call that ‘Pascal’s Wager.’ Even if the odds against the Church being right are a million to one, a one-in-a-million risk of becoming the main course in an eternal barbecue argues for going to mass.”

  “But you’re betting the other way.”

  “The only God I could believe in would punish intellectual dishonesty far more harshly than apostacy. Anyway, to circle back to Tereska, hypothesizing a touching concern for my immortal soul makes more sense than believing she goes around throwing canisters of gas at people.”

  “You know her better than I do.”

  “So. Should I give her up to the police?”

  Rep thought for about thirty seconds. He picked invisible specks of lint from his robe between two sips of coffee. Then he spoke.

  “No. We have nothing to tie her to the gas attack, and for all we know the stuff at UWM was just academic shenanigans—a glorified panty raid. We’ll do our job and let the cops do theirs. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. As the frisky medieval maiden said to the pedophiliac prince, ‘We’re on the same page.’”

  “That’s a mood enhancer.”

  “It was intended to be.”

  PART TWO

  It’s Funny Until Someone Gets Hurt

  “It’s funny until someone gets hurt.”

  —Mom

  Chapter 14

  The third Monday in October, 2007

  T. S. Eliot was dead and Caucasian, so the man with East Asian features approaching Melissa’s classroom just before three P.M. was most likely someone else. Which was too bad, because a non-poet dressed in a three-piece, pin-striped, navy blue suit would probably be bringing unwelcome news—especially if he was the non-poet who had played phone-tag with her all morning in an unsuccessful effort to schedule a meeting.

  He was.

  “Good afternoon, Professor Pennyworth. “I’m Robert Y. Li.”

  Melissa flirted with a joke about how He’s a Rebel would sound in Mandarin, but decided to skip it. This was a good move.

  “I’ve heard it,” Li said, reading her mind. “I’ve heard them all. I’m general counsel for the university. We’ve been missing each other.”

  “I’m delighted to meet you, Mr. Li, but I’m teaching a class on the nineteenth century English novel in less than two minutes.”

  “Standard apologies et cetera, but I’m hoping you might trust today’s class to your TA. Carolyn Hoeckstra found my inability to extract a mutually convenient meeting time from you and Ms. Bleifert frustrating. She isn’t accustomed to frustration and she is therefore now camped in my office.”

  “Teaching assistants don’t do plagiarism checks on term-papers for junior faculty, much less teach classes. I don’t suppose she could spend sixty minutes on a campus tour, could she?”

  “Patience is not her outstanding virtue. If you could come up with some way to accommodate her I would be very grateful—and the gratitude of lawyers is a commodity even rarer than the time of teaching assistants.”

  Well, that’s clear enough, isn’t it?

  “Give me thirty seconds.”

  She entered the classroom, stepped in front of the desk, and looked out over the aggressively unimpressed faces of forty-two students. At least half of them were there solely to check off a core-curriculum requirement without tackling poetry or Middle English.

  “The syllabus didn’t promise in-class writing exercises, so this is a bonus. No extra charge. Proposition: Austen wasn’t the last of the classicists, she was the first of the romantics. Reject or defend. Forty minutes. Go.”

  She executed a parade ground left face and strode toward the door. She ignored the mutterings of “bitch” that followed her, figuring that they were fair enough. When she heard a single, hissed “bastard” she looked over her shoulder only long enough to say, “Let’s leave my parents out of it.”

  “Commendably old school,” Li said as they began walking briskly down the corridor. “Well done.”

  “If you let diction slide, especially in obloquy, you might as well be teaching business administration.”

  “How did you miss becoming a lawyer?”

  “I married one.”

  “That would explain it.”

  “I take it Ms. Hoeckstra is used to getting her own way.”

  “Her father was Timothy Goettinger, grandson of Wilhelm Goettinger, who founded Goettinger Corporation. She has an office in the Wilhelm Goettinger Wing of the Mechanical Studies Building at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, where she administers the Wilhelm Goettinger Memorial Educational Trust. UWM likes to maximize opportunities for its own engineering graduates, and therefore finds it useful to maintain a strong working relationship with the buzz-cuts at MSOE—especially the buzz-cuts sitting on top of scads of money.”

  “Where does Ms. Hoeckstra stand on purloined papal documents?”

  “I don’t think she cares about them. Her concern is Goettinger Corporation, whose histo
ry Professor Angstrom was writing.”

  “Leading to unpleasant litigation in which my husband represented Professor Angstrom. I hope she doesn’t think I have any inside information about that—or that I could share it with her if I did.”

  “I doubt that very much. Whoever broke into Angstrom’s office was presumably after something. I suspect that she wants to know whether that something related to Goettinger and, if so, what it was and where it is.”

  They left Curtin Hall and angled toward a brick and glass tower where the university found office space for non-academic administrators.

  “You have my report on Saturday’s incident and I assume you have Ms. Bleifert’s as well.”

  “People don’t always put everything they know in reports,” Li said. “I suspect she’s hoping a little heart-to-heart might draw you out a bit more.”

  Carolyn Hoeckstra was the second thing Melissa noticed when she stepped into Li’s office eighty seconds later. The first was the largest telescope she had ever seen outside an observatory. It rested on a chest-high, cherry wood tripod next to a tall south window, dwarfing the green-bound legal tomes that lined the shelves of the intersecting wall.

  Hoeckstra sat with crossed legs in front of Li’s desk. She seemed dressed for church on Easter Sunday, in a pearl gray silk jacket-and-skirt suit, ivory satin blouse, ecru stockings, and black heels. She wore them like a costume, the kind of outfit someone who spends most of her time in jeans and pullovers throws on three times a year for special occasions. Her blond hair was styled in a brisk, no-nonsense flip that would be good to go seven or eight brush strokes after she got out of bed.

  She didn’t look like she’d hit thirty yet, but something about her beyond the retro-Vogue outfit seemed distinctly un-young, almost consciously anachronistic. Her wristwatch, Melissa realized, that was it. No more than ten percent of Melissa’s students bothered with them. Most just checked their cell-phones if they wanted the time. Hoeckstra had burdened her wrist with what looked like two-thousand dollars worth of oversized chronometry, complete with movable, beaded bevel, four function buttons, and enough inset mini-dials to tell time from Tashkent to Toledo—the one in Spain or the one in Ohio.

  Heirloom from dad. Has to be.

  Li introduced Hoeckstra to Melissa, then picked up his phone and instructed someone to “show Ms. Bleifert in.” Bleifert promptly appeared. Hoeckstra started talking about five seconds after that, while Bleifert was still looking for a place to sit.

  “I apologize for this imposition,” she said in a clipped, attention-to-orders voice. “I won’t take up any more of your time than necessary.”

  “What can we do for you?” Li asked.

  “I have the following information. One: some material was stolen from Professor Angstrom’s office last Friday. Two: Ms. Bleifert was the first one to see the office after the break-in. And three: Professor Pennyworth was with the campus cop who came upon it shortly afterward.”

  “No argument so far,” Li said.

  “I told the campus police what I know,” Bleifert said. “I have a copy of the report they prepared. You’re welcome to take it, if you like.”

  “I already have one. It’s quite clear, as was Professor Pennyworth’s.”

  “In that case,” Melissa said, “why are having this conversation?”

  Hoeckstra pulled a mini-legal pad from purse.

  “I paid a lawyer three-hundred dollars an hour to write this, so I want to be sure I get it right: ‘If anyone provides me with information leading to recovery and return to me of all copies of documentary information in any form relating to Goettinger Corporation that was taken from Professor Angstrom’s office Saturday night, I will pay a reward of ten-thousand dollars in money or money’s worth, as is, where is, without warranty or representation of provenance, no questions asked.’”

  “What?” Li asked.

  “You paid three-hundred dollars an hour for that?” Melissa asked.

  “Are you inferring that I’m a thief?” Bleifert asked.

  “Certainly not,” Melissa said. “She’s implying that you’re a thief. And she’s not exactly nominating me for Citizen of the Year, either.”

  “Now, now,” Li said, “don’t blame the client for her attorney’s tactlessness.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult anyone,” Hoeckstra said. “Useful knowledge isn’t necessarily guilty knowledge.”

  Necessarily? Melissa saw Bleifert begin fumbling with her purse, and surmised that she had picked up Hoeckstra’s stress on the adverb as clearly as Melissa herself had.

  “If you’re looking for a cigarette, could you skip it for ten more minutes?” Hoeckstra asked. “I hate to sound prissy, but it really does annoy me.”

  “I don’t have any anyway,” Bleifert said. “I gave my last pack away on Friday when I impulsively decided to quit smoking.”

  “Thank you,” Hoeckstra said. “Now, if I’ve offended you—”

  “If you’ve offended me?” Bleifert erupted. “If I’d grown up on the east side instead of the south side and my mother was a lawyer instead of a keypuncher, would you be offering me money to tell the truth or not keep something that didn’t belong to me?”

  “Well, yeah, actually. Although I guess I’d be offering more.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Save the class warfare number,” Hoeckstra said as she stood up. “I’ve heard it all before. I’ve worked at least as hard in my life as you have. I know what it’s like to scrape industrial lubricant out from under your fingernails at the end of a shift.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like to know you’ll be scraping it out every working day of your life for forty years.”

  “Have it your way,” Hoeckstra sighed. “I’m a class enemy. Fine. Lenin would have had me shot. But Lenin is dead and I’m alive and my offer is on the table. We can do it the hard way or the easy way. Your call. Three-five-one-one-seven-zero-seven. Think it over.”

  Melissa deliberately waited until Hoeckstra was halfway out the door before she called out, “That was three-five-one-one-seven-oh-seven?”

  Hoeckstra half-turned with an ambiguous look on her face, as if not sure whether she was being teased.

  “Seventeen-zero-seven. ‘Oh’ is a letter. The number is zero.”

  Then she left.

  “Well, that could have gone better,” Li said.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Bleifert told him.

  “Neither was the My Lai massacre, but I still feel bad about it.”

  “What was that hard-way-or-easy-way stuff? Do I need a lawyer?”

  “When someone asks if they need a lawyer, the answer is generally yes.”

  “So that would be you, then?”

  “I’m the university’s lawyer.”

  “Cardinal Newman defined a university as a community of scholars.”

  “The State of Wisconsin defines this particular university as a body corporate sui juris, and since Wisconsin pays the bills around here I’m afraid its opinion carries more weight than Cardinal Newman’s.”

  “I’ll check with Rep, if you like,” Melissa said.

  “No, you know what?” Bleifert snapped. “Skip it. This was a set-up.”

  “No,” Li said, “it was a screw-up. Mine. But if incompetence were malice, Time magazine would lose a lot of libel suits.”

  “What’s that in plain English?”

  “If I’d had any idea she was going to pull that I wouldn’t have let her confront you without preparation. I was expecting a heartfelt plea for helpful information, not Catherine de Medicis on steroids.”

  “What information?” Bleifert demanded with fierce intensity.

  “Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?” Li commented.

  “Did Professor Angstrom ask you to do anything in connection with his history of Goettinger Corporation?” Melissa asked.

  “No.”

  “He’d better not have,” Li said. “
Faculty can freelance if they want to, but they can’t use university resources for their private projects. He shouldn’t even use his office phone for that stuff, much less a student aide.”

  “All right.” Bleifert let out an exasperated exhalation that charmingly fluttered wisps of hair straying over her forehead. “I learned nothing about Goettinger from Professor Angstrom. I took nothing from his office. I don’t know what anybody else took from his office. Clear?”

  “Pellucid,” Li said. “And you didn’t even have to pay someone three-hundred dollars an hour to write it for you.”

  “That’s a pretty good line,” Bleifert said as she stalked toward the door, “but I’m not in a mood to appreciate it. See ya.”

  “Exit Bleifert,” Melissa said.

  “Carolyn Hoeckstra isn’t a bad person,” Li said. “But she’s a quant, not a creative, as those business administration types you despise would put it. Her strength is numbers. She buys the words, and the words she bought for today created the wrong impression.”

  “If I’d had you hearing my confessions when I was twelve I’d never have gotten any penance.” Melissa rose and prepared to go.

  “Just give her the benefit of the doubt. And you might note that Ms. Bleifert did not say that she didn’t have any information about Goettinger Corporation. She just said she hadn’t gotten any from Angstrom.”

  Already at the door, Melissa paused and thought for a moment.

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  Chapter 15

  The third Friday in October, 2007

  “If you walked into a place called The Twisted Fork in San Francisco,” Rep commented, “you’d expect busboys in leather aprons and waitstaff with handcuffs. In Milwaukee, it’s just an upscale restaurant.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Melissa said. “In San Francisco, arugula this good would probably qualify as a sexual experience.”

  “Like most sexual experiences,” Kuchinski said, “I can’t spell it. The government filed its brief in the sex-or-swim case late this afternoon, by the way. More than a month early. The legal writing equivalent of the speed of light. Mr. Finnegan wants that appeal heard in a big damn hurry.”