Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  “Do you have a new trial date for Jimmy Clevenger yet?”

  “Scheduling conference week after next. I’d bet on late March. I’m really hoping I can figure out what Angstrom was planning on selling to Jimmy’s mom before he went to his eternal reward.”

  “Any progress on that front?” Melissa asked.

  “Not much. Whoever iced him took his computer, his briefcase, and his Blackberry—so they definitely didn’t want mom to have whatever it was.”

  “Well,” Melissa said, “the tease that he sent to Valerie Clevenger was Finnegan’s letter closing the Goettinger investigation. She represented the company, so she must know most of the details. Could Angstrom have known something she didn’t that could hurt the case against Jimmy?”

  “Sure,” Kuchinski said. “Just as a wild guess, something about how maybe the investigation shouldn’t have been dropped and about why it was anyway. He could have picked it up researching that corporate history. But that doesn’t tell us what the dirty linen was.”

  “You two barristers are going to have to help the absent-minded professor out on this one. Suppose Angstrom could prove that Finnegan handled the Goettinger matter incompetently or even corruptly. Why would that be a defense for Jimmy? He either threatened Carolyn Hoeckstra or he didn’t. What does Finnegan’s integrity have to do with that?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Rep said.

  “And it doesn’t have a pretty answer,” Kuchinski said. “What it comes down to is the way juries decide cases.”

  “Explain,” Melissa said, realizing a bit late that she sounded like she was addressing an undergraduate who’d said something flippant about Yeats.

  “In a criminal case, the government starts off wearing a big white hat. The jury assumes the government attorneys are the good guys and must know something bad about the defendant, whether they can say it in court or not.”

  “So if the defense can somehow show that the government’s hat is tattletale gray, its natural advantage evaporates and the evidence suddenly looks a little different.”

  “Exactly. I’m not sure that’s what the barons at Runnymede had in mind when they put trial-by-jury in Magna Carta, but that’s the way it’s worked out here in the colonies.”

  “You’re not going to try to make the jury believe that the government killed Angstrom to suppress the evidence, are you?” Melissa asked.

  “I’m not that crazy. There are too many suspects that make a lot more sense—starting with Taylor Gates, who has used poison in half his thrillers.”

  “How would Gates being the killer work?” Rep asked. “You figure Angstrom got Amy Lee to shop his story because he had something on Gates and Gates decided to shut him up?”

  “It’s a theory. The mock-jury exercise gave Angstrom a story idea. There has to be some explanation for a newby hooking Amy Lee.”

  “Do we know if Gates was at the Notre Dame conference?”

  “No idea.”

  “Hmm,” Rep said.

  “Hmm,” Melissa said.

  “Like I said, it’s a theory.”

  “It’d be more fun to pin it on Mignon,” Rep said. “At least we know he was in Chicago on the day of the murder.”

  “Without any obvious reason to be,” Kuchinski said. “Except an apparently urgent desire to talk to Carolyn Hoeckstra.”

  “He certainly had a motive,” Melissa said. “But I’m having trouble seeing him acquiring an exotic poison and forcing it into Angstrom’s mouth.”

  “Right.” Kuchinski arched an eyebrow. “Tell the Scarsdale Diet doctor how harmless you mild-mannered academics are.”

  “Fair point. He dumps a prep school headmistress and the next thing he knows she’s using him for target practice.”

  “A poor example of anger management,” Rep said, “but a real tribute to the quality of American marksmanship.”

  “As long as we’re indicting people,” Kuchinski said, “it would be very convenient for my client if we could pin it on Carolyn Hoeckstra. Motive, opportunity, and she’s no one’s candidate for Miss Congeniality.”

  “You really think she’d kill someone just to keep Angstrom from getting helpful information to Clevenger?” Rep asked.

  “If the information made her father or his company look bad I could see her taking a dim view of anyone shopping it around, whether it hurt the case against Jimmy or not,” Melissa said.

  Rep glanced over at Melissa. With the rim of her champagne flute pressed against her lips she looked pensively toward the east, where the newborn year crept over the reveling city.

  “Well,” Kuchinski said, slapping his thighs and rising, “thanks for the hospitality. We’ve seen the new year in and I’d better get back home before the streets are littered with drunken ethnic stereotypes.”

  Rep and Melissa rose to show him out. Rep noticed that Melissa did so a bit distractedly.

  “Something on your mind?” he asked as they strolled back to the couch.

  “I’m thinking of the least likely suspect.”

  “Valerie Clevenger?” Rep’s voice rose in astonishment.

  “Unless I was delusional the afternoon of the murder she isn’t a suspect at all. Tereska Bleifert was at the Notre Dame conference. And I got a call this afternoon from one of the Chicago detectives asking whether she had a history with Angstrom—seduced and abandoned, bad grades, that kind of thing.”

  “Any hints about what stimulated that provocative query?”

  “Someone apparently saw her speaking with Angstrom at the conference. She seemed very intense.”

  “From what you’ve said about her I’d say she’s often intense,” Rep said. “Besides, I’d find it a lot easier to see her as a candidate if the killer had cut off Angstrom’s testicles with a fish fillet knife. There’s something treacherous and cowardly about poison that clashes with your description of her.”

  “Some people call poison the woman’s weapon.”

  “That’s sexist.”

  “That doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

  “Sounds like a reach to me. I suspect the only reason you’re struggling with it is that you’d blame yourself if she did it.”

  Their phone rang. Melissa recognized Bleifert’s number as she answered.

  “Hello, Ms. Bleifert.”

  “Hi, Professor Pennyworth. I’m not calling too late, am I?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I was wondering how Father Huebner worked out.”

  “He said that you and I should talk.”

  “Us? About, uh—”

  “Yes, about that. Are you free this coming Friday?”

  “I guess. I mean, I’m like, sure. Absolutely.”

  “How about Ma Fischer’s? My treat.”

  “Uh, great,” Bleifert stammered. “I mean, thanks.”

  “No, thank you. I’ll see you at seven.”

  “Very artful,” Rep said after Melissa hung up. “Everything you said was at least approximately true.”

  “Do I detect a note of reproach, beloved?”

  “Hardly. After standing here without objecting, I couldn’t reproach you without indicting myself. Qui tacet consentit.”

  “That seems like the third Latin phrase I’ve heard out of you in the last month, and the third one I haven’t understood.”

  “‘Silence implies consent.’ Your grammy Seton could probably have translated it for you.”

  Melissa drained her champagne flute then abruptly lowered it and looked levelly toward Rep.

  “You know what? You’re absolutely right.”

  “Don’t look so surprised.”

  “I have a feeling that I’m going to have a busy weekend.”

  “After you talk to Bleifert?”

  “After I talk to Bleifert and Hoeckstra, which I’d like to do before I talk to Bleifert.”

  “And when you said you were going to have a busy weekend, I take it you meant we.”r />
  “Two souls in one body.”

  “My torts professor told me to stick with English,” Rep said. “I should have listened to her.”

  Chapter 23

  The first Friday of January, 2008

  “‘Weight to value ratio’ are the last words I remember dad saying to me,” Hoeckstra said to Melissa as she nodded toward a pigeon-holed rack. “Hand me a blank from the middle hole on the bottom, willya?”

  “Do you mean this metal bar?” Melissa pulled a hunk of dull silver steel about two feet long and two inches square from the hole.

  “Right. Virgin bar stock. Sorry for the jargon. Habit.”

  “Thanks for agreeing to see me.”

  “It was the least I could do after pissing you off last fall. I really didn’t mean to. I probably should have written you a formal apology, but my mother figured she’d pretty much done the mom-thing once she got me on the pill at fifteen. She never got around to teaching me manners.”

  Hoeckstra was wearing black jeans and a green t-shirt with ENGINEERS DO IT TO SPEC printed in white on its front. She stood at a machine that she’d called a CNC lathe when she pointed it out to Melissa. It was one of four that dominated the basement room of a building tucked between the Walter Schroeder Library and the Allen Bradley Hall of Science on the downtown campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering.

  “What does ‘CNC’ stand for?” Melissa asked as Hoeckstra fit the bar horizontally between two disks on the lathe and spun a handle to tighten it snugly into place.

  “‘Computer numerically controlled.’ The summer I turned sixteen I asked dad for a job. I was thinking of something intern-ish, like making photocopies and running errands, so I could stalk engineer-studs on their way back from coffee breaks. Dad told me he’d give me a job when I could cut a blank on a CNC lathe to the specs called out by the blueprint, plus or minus one-thousandth of a millimeter.”

  “Sounds pretty formidable for a sixteen-year old.”

  “Formidable is who dad was and what he did. Mom’s favorite chick cliché with him was, ‘If I make you so miserable, why do you stay?’ She eventually pulled it once too often and he said, ‘Duty is more important than happiness.’ She gaped at him for about five seconds, then burst into tears—and she never used that line again.”

  Hoeckstra consulted a blueprint unrolled on a metal work table and held down at the corners by chunks of slag. Blue lines and numbers surrounded a geometric drawing on blue-specked, ivory colored paper. Turning back to the lathe, she punched numbers into a keypad on its control panel. They showed up bright red against black on an LED screen above the pad.

  “He had a journeyman machinist named Stash train me. Gruff, monosyllabic, always had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. I was scared of him at first. I ended up inviting him to my wedding. Thinking back on it, I would have been better off if he’d been the groom.”

  Adjusting plastic safety goggles that she’d donned, Hoeckstra flipped a switch and put her right foot on a pedal. The lathe hummed to life. Almost immediately a piercing, metal-on-metal yowl split the still air, bouncing off the concrete floor and the brightly painted cinder-block walls. Melissa reflexively backed up as angry blue and yellow sparks shot from the steel. A viscous, white liquid—lubricant, Melissa guessed—oozed with almost erotic richness over the bar. With delicate hand movements Hoeckstra gently guided the disk-assembly that turned the bar over blades whirling so fast they were invisible. Her pressure on the foot-pedal varied subtly from moment to moment. Mesmerized by the steady hum and howling crescendos of the lathe, Melissa stood in silence, all but motionless as minutes passed.

  “It took me two weeks to get it done,” Hoeckstra said then, her raised voice intruding abruptly on the high-pitched grinding from the lathe. “I’ve never been so proud of anything in my life.”

  “Did you land your intern job?”

  “I told dad I wanted to work in the machine shop. He had to work out a deal with the union. They ginned up an apprenticeship program for me. They let me work there all summer, thirty-seven-and-a-half hours a week, but I had to have a union machinist standing right behind me every blessed minute.”

  “To protect you?” Melissa asked.

  “To protect the seniority list. Dad had laid off eighty machinists in three years. There were dozens of guys with union cards who had more right to that job than I did. So I had to be completely redundant. The only way I could work there was if a guy with a union card was getting full pay without doing a lick of work every minute I was on the shop floor.”

  Without warning the searing cry from the lathe stopped. Melissa’s eyes darted from Hoeckstra’s face to the machine. Lines of red light shot over the metal bar, now round instead of rectangular, as laser beams measured its dimensions against the specifications Hoeckstra had programmed into the lathe. Green numbers flashed on the screen: +0.000.

  “You’re showing remarkable patience,” Hoeckstra said, as she again examined the shop drawing. “You’ve been here almost fifteen minutes and I’ve spent the whole time showing off.”

  “I’ve watched hours of performance art without seeing anything remotely as beautiful or moving as what you just did. That was poetic.”

  Hoeckstra glanced over at her with a sly grin.

  “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  She flipped another switch and braced her hands on a different set of controls. With a deep whir a sinister looking tube rose from behind the machine and rotated into place above the freshly rounded bar. Hoeckstra took a chuck-key and a drill bit from a tool drawer in the lathe’s base, fit the bit into the chuck at the end of the tube, and tightened it with the key. When she flipped a second switch a high-speed hum greeted them. The tube descended inexorably toward the bar. Indifferent alike to the bar’s howling protest and the pathetic fallacy, the drill bored relentlessly into the bar, penetrating it with a subtle admixture of finesse and brutality.

  What would a nineteenth-century lyric poet have made of this if it had baptized him into the machine age the way a locomotive did Wordsworth? Melissa wondered. Would we now have four stanzas—or twenty-four cantos—describing blue and yellow sparks as metallic blood? Would he have scandalized his Victorian audience with an offhand reference to the phallic bit drilling with controlled but pitiless violence into the virgin bar stock?

  Again the lathe stopped. The drill tube withdrew, shards of the metal it had shredded still clinging to the threads in the bit. Hoeckstra pulled a heavily padded mitten onto her right hand and removed the bar from the lathe.

  “Part one-a of a Dowling rocker-arm assembly. Sixty-five dollars, FOB seller’s dock.”

  “Very impressive.”

  “A journeyman machinist capable of turning out one of these every twelve minutes would earn thirty-one-seventy-five an hour. Call it thirty-two to make the math easier. Once you pay for workers’ comp, unemployment compensation taxes, payroll taxes, and health benefits, the total labor burden for someone making that much is forty-eight dollars an hour—and that’s just for labor. You haven’t paid for the bar stock or the machine or the light bill or the rent yet, not to mention carrying charges for inventory or interest on your line of credit or little extras like lawyers, accountants, and payroll clerks.”

  “It sounds like you could lose money pretty easily.”

  “You could, but that’s capitalism. The problem is China. Total labor burden for a machinist at a Chinese factory is less than eight dollars an hour U.S. And if some tree-hugger over there whines about how the slag runoff is hurting the fishies, the factory managers don’t call their lawyers. They just kick the tree-hugger’s ass into the nearest river.”

  “So how can a factory like Goettinger survive?”

  “Two ways. One: re-invent itself as a specialty job-shop. Eight machinists instead of a hundred-twenty. Special order, quick delivery stuff. Onesies and twosies. Custom work. Two: weight-to-value ratio.”

  “What’s
that?”

  “You make really heavy stuff—stuff that has a high weight and volume relative to its cost. A concrete casting with a four-meter radius, for example. You can’t make that in China and ship it here, even if you use slave labor. It doesn’t cost enough to cover the freight and material charges. The day before he died, dad was working on ways to apply that principle to machine tools.”

  Hoeckstra laid the bar lovingly in a bin at the end of the lathe and pulled off her mitten.

  “I’ll clean this up later. Let’s go into the little sanctuary that MSOE provides to thank me for all the money dad gave it.”

  Hoeckstra led Melissa toward a small, darkened office in the far corner of the basement. A white-on-black embossed plate on the door said:

  HOECKSTRA

  PRIVATE

  As soon as she was inside the office and had clicked on its fluorescent lights, Hoeckstra lifted the tail of her t-shirt to mop perspiration from her face. This exposed a midriff as taut and sleek as any model’s. Melissa noticed a faint but unmistakable odor of burned pipe tobacco.

  “Something to drink?” Hoeckstra asked, circling to the other side of a gray and silver metal desk.

  “Water is fine.”

  “Can do.”

  Hoeckstra took a shot glass out of the top right-hand drawer of her desk, set it on the surface, and pulled a small plastic bottle of Aqua Vita and a pint of Jim Beam from the bottom drawer. She filled the shot glass with whiskey, then handed the bottled water to Melissa. As Melissa took it, Hoeckstra’s fingers brushed hers, lingering for an insinuating half-second before breaking away.

  “I noticed that watch you’re wearing during the meeting in Li’s office,” Melissa said. “I’m guessing it was your father’s.”

  “Yep. Has everything but a slide rule.”

  “He must have meant a great deal to you.”

  “He meant everything to me. He was what winning was to Vince Lombardi: not the main thing but the only thing.”

  “Just out of curiosity, were you playing head games with Bleifert when you made a big deal about her not smoking during that meeting?”