Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  “Wow, to coin a phrase.”

  “I guess I’d better eat something,” Bleifert said a bit sheepishly. “I really turned into a motor-mouth, didn’t I?”

  “You did what I asked you to do. But you’re right—you’d better eat.”

  The sheer, glowing joy that radiated from Bleifert made the guilt shrouding Melissa seem all the more leaden. Bleifert was thrilled at the thought of Melissa coming back, rejoining Bleifert and roughly a billion others on the great, transcendent arc of History with a capital H. Melissa’s gray lie now seemed stygian black. When she eventually confessed it, Bleifert would be shattered. When the time came to make that confession, Melissa had no idea how she’d even start.

  “Listen, professor,” Bleifert said after a mouthful of bratwurst, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I feel like a hypocrite sitting here like this saint guiding you back to the one true faith and all that stuff when, ah, er—”

  “When what?” Melissa made the prompt as gentle as she could.

  “Okay. I, uh, I guess I wasn’t completely truthful with you when you asked me about the night of the break-in. The scream and everything.”

  “That was you?”

  “That was me. I mean ‘I.’ That was I.”

  “Good catch.”

  “I was outside Mignon’s office, trying to get in. I heard someone coming. I thought it was Mignon. I mean, who else would be coming up there at that time of night?”

  “Who indeed?”

  “I wanted to divert his attention, draw him away from the area, and hang him up for a few minutes.”

  “To give you a chance to cover your tracks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The idea of your escapade being to find something in Mignon’s office.”

  “Right.”

  “Specifically, to find the original of the papal document that you thought Mignon might have stolen from Professor Angstrom’s office.”

  Bleifert’s head snapped up and surprise washed the blush away from her candid features.

  “No. I wasn’t afraid he’d taken that. I mean, that wouldn’t do him any good, would it? He couldn’t use it without exposing himself as a thief.”

  “But he could keep Professor Angstrom from using it. Both out of spite and because it undermines his condemnation of Pius the Twelfth.”

  “No way.” Bleifert shook her head emphatically. “A document like that would be a bonanza for UWM. He wouldn’t pass up that kind of opportunity. He’d just say his thinking on Pius had ‘evolved’ and his previous views had been misinterpreted. Then he’d find some way to cut himself in on the action.”

  “There is nothing so bracing as the cynicism of the ingenuous.” Melissa muttered this under her breath, but not as far under as she thought.

  “That’s good,” Bleifert said, her eyes brightening with delight. “Who said that?”

  “I did. Just now.”

  “Props for the prof!” Bleifert tendered a high fist across the table. Melissa gamely dropped her knife and touched knuckles with the coed.

  “On reflection, I think you must be right about Mignon,” Melissa said then. “Your analysis fits in with the overture he made to me. But if it wasn’t the papal document, what were you afraid he had taken?”

  Bleifert’s head dropped and she rolled hooded eyes up to send a half-ashamed/half-defiant glare at Melissa.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a voice devoid of contrition. “I can’t tell you that.”

  Melissa nodded and looked idly to her right as she contemplatively chewed spiced sausage and sauerkraut. It took her about five seconds to be sure she was right.

  “Okay, Tereska, here’s where it is. We’re talking about a murder, and it has to be related somehow to the break-in.”

  “You’re not suggesting that I killed Professor Angstrom, are you? I loved him like a father, even though I had to brush off a proposition now and then.”

  Loved him like a father—paging Dr. Freud.

  “Of course I’m not suggesting that. What I’m saying is that someone is playing hardball. I don’t know who. But a guy came into this restaurant right behind us. He spent ten minutes waiting for a table in the smoking section. He has finished a cheeseburger and he’s been nursing a second cup of coffee for at least five minutes—and he still hasn’t smoked.”

  “So what?”

  “So he had a reason other than cigarettes to ask for the smoking section.”

  “Like what?”

  “On a wild guess, he wanted a seat where he could see both us and my car in the parking lot.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, that vantage point would come in handy if a buddy of his were messing with my car and this guy wanted to make sure of warning him in case we headed off before he thought we would.”

  “I, uh—whoa.”

  “So I’m having trouble with your not telling me what you thought Mignon was after. Protecting friends is admirable, but if more lives may be in danger you have to make tough choices.”

  Bleifert shrank in her seat. She shook her head in a way that suggested both stubborn challenge and despair.

  “Maybe I can get by without it,” Melissa said musingly. “You’ve probably already gotten the email about a meeting in Li’s office next week. I know Mignon broke into Angstrom’s office and took something. When I accuse him at that meeting, he’ll probably justify himself by saying what it was.”

  “No!” Bleifert snapped. “You can’t do that.”

  “What’s going to stop me?”

  “I mean you mustn’t do that. Because it isn’t true. Mignon wasn’t the one who did the break-in.”

  “How do you know?”

  Bleifert gulped air and then took a quick swig of water. She looked like she might be about to cry. Melissa shriveled inside in a spasm of self-disgust.

  “I saw him come back,” Bleifert said, her voice now very soft. “Mignon. He used the faculty entrance, and I could see it from the stairwell where I was hiding. That was after the break-in had already happened.”

  “Fair enough. Taking Mignon off the hook, though, makes my question that much more urgent. He’s the least scary suspect in the scenario. If it’s someone else, the danger is greater.”

  “I can’t take a chance on betraying Professor Angstrom,” Bleifert said miserably. “Even by accident.”

  “Betrayal is something I can promise to avoid.” Reaching across the table, Melissa took Bleifert’s right hand in hers. “If what you tell me doesn’t suggest a physical threat to someone else, I won’t repeat it unless you and I agree that I should. I can’t offer you the seal of the confessional. I won’t put my hand on the Bible. I won’t swear by the Blessed Virgin or by all that’s holy. But I will give you my word.”

  Bleifert relaxed a little as she grinned in recognition.

  “Chesterton, right?”

  “Yes, and pretty obscure Chesterton at that. I’m impressed.”

  “I only had three dates in high school,” Bleifert said, flippantly tossing her hair. “I had plenty of time to read.”

  “Professor Angstrom and Dean Mignon,” Melissa said then.

  “Okay.” Bleifert took a deep breath, expelled it, and looked for a moment as if she were re-thinking the whole stop-smoking business. “Uh, you know Professor Angstrom had some sidelines in addition to his work at the University, right?”

  “That doesn’t come as a complete surprise.”

  “Well, technically, he’s not supposed to use any university resources for that kind of thing.”

  “Right. We can sleep with our students, but when it comes to money we’re supposed to be purer than the Vestal Virgins.”

  “Professor Angstrom wasn’t particularly virginal in this respect. I kept a separate file for him with hard copies of expense records on his sideline projects. He needed them for taxes. That file was the first
thing I looked for when I saw that his office had been broken into. It was missing.”

  “You were afraid Mignon had taken it so that he could retaliate against Angstrom for humiliating him at the Brontë conference?”

  “Right. Mignon could have used those records to get Professor Angstrom in a lot of trouble. Maybe even get him fired.”

  “Tereska, it means a lot to me that you’ve trusted me with this. But if you want Professor Angstrom’s killer to be caught, you’re going to have to tell me one more thing.”

  “Namely?”

  “What did you tell McHunk during the jury deliberations about the sex-or-swim case?”

  “WHATTT?”

  Melissa could tell that Bleifert was doing her level best to feign astonished indignation. She didn’t come close to bringing it off.

  “Professor Angstrom rounded up some UWM students for the mock-jury exercise that a jury consulting firm did in preparation for the first trial,” Melissa said. “He kept some of the information from that exercise—because he thought it would come in handy in one of his sidelines, I suspect. You saw it. The jury analysis predicted a defense verdict based on certain information. For some reason that I can’t figure out, the defense lawyers chose not to use all of it. The real sex-or-swim jury was warned not to discuss the case, but it wasn’t sequestered. The most logical reason for Grady Schoenfeld becoming the only holdout on the panel is that he had the information the mock-jury heard but the other real jurors didn’t. And the most logical explanation for that is that you told him. How am I doing?”

  “Please don’t get him in trouble. It was my fault.”

  “I’ll do everything I can to keep you both out of trouble. But I gather that my theory is at least in the ballpark.”

  “Yeah. You’re right about all that. What you said.”

  “‘All that’ is the easy part. That was just putting two and two together, with a lucky guess or two thrown in. But I still don’t know what the information itself was.”

  Bleifert studied her plate intently, though without any apparent appetite. Then she looked up.

  “I’m not going to say no, but I’m not sure I can tell you, either. I need to think this through. Can you give me through the weekend?”

  “I left my thumbscrews at the office, so I guess I’ll have to.”

  “Okay. Sunday night. Or Monday at the latest. One way or the other. I promise.”

  “Fair enough,” Melissa said. “By the way, I enjoy hearing you talk about God. Do you feel like some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Bleifert’s appetite had clearly returned. By the time they’d finished their coffee she had also polished off the last of her brat mitt. Melissa paid the check and they left, walking past the booth of a guy who still wasn’t smoking.

  Melissa found her car snugly locked and apparently unmolested. She saw no scratches on the lock or on the window near the seal. When she slipped behind the wheel she didn’t notice any unfamiliar hairs or stray tufts of fabric, nor any unexplained smudges on the rear-view mirror. No hints of cologne that Rep didn’t use or other foreign odors. She couldn’t find any evidence at all, in fact, to support her feeling that some indefinable something was slightly off.

  She wondered if the theory about the non-smoker in Ma Fischer’s being a lookout that she’d pitched to Bleifert was so clever that she’d ended up believing it herself; or if it was actually true, and whoever had searched her car was good enough not to leave any trace of his intrusion behind.

  Or her intrusion, Melissa reminded herself.

  Chapter 26

  The first Saturday in January, 2008

  Tereska Bleifert sat in a pew toward the back on the right side of the main aisle at St. Josephats Basilica. On the first Saturday of Lent in 2005 she had come here for confession. Looking to her left, beyond the pews on the other side of the aisle, she could see the door of the reconciliation room where Father Huebner had heard her confession.

  Reconciliation room, not confessional. No booths, no grill, no kneeler, no screen. Just a couple of chairs facing each other in a room about the size of a small office. A real confessional, the old fashioned kind, stood to her right, across the side aisle that ran past the pew where she sat now. This one had a center booth for the priest, and a booth on either side of it for penitents. Each booth was smaller than the hall closet in the home she shared with her mother eight blocks away. Just enough room for the penitent to kneel in darkness and wait for the priest to slide up the cover over the grill separating the two compartments, so that in dim anonymity the age-old formula could begin: Bless me, father, for I have sinned.

  They hadn’t been using the confessional that day. Later in Lent, she knew, they would be. People would be lined up on both sides, anxious to be shriven before Easter so that they could receive communion with a clear conscience. As soon as the penitent in one booth had finished and the cover had shut and he or she had come out, the next person in line on that side would go in, kneel, wait for the priest to finish with the confession in the other booth and open the cover again on this side. They would be using that confessional and the reconciliation room and improvised stations in corners here and there around the church.

  Not on the first Saturday of Lent, though. That early, the reconciliation room was ample for the handful of people seeking absolution.

  “When I examined my conscience I found the pickings pretty slim.” That was the way she’d started with Huebner in the reconciliation room. “My chastity is protected by lack of opportunity, so I don’t have any sins against the sixth and ninth commandments, as the Church bashfully calls them. Two or three cigarettes a day won’t pass for gluttony. I’m almost seventeen so they probably don’t even count as disobedience. Idolatry seems like an interesting sin, but I’m having enough trouble believing in one God.”

  “How about something venial, just to get the ball rolling? Sneaking off to a kegger after you’ve told mom you’re going to a friend’s house to study? Swiping a Miller Lite from the ’fridge?”

  “In nearly seventeen years on this planet—close to eighteen if life begins at conception—I’ve never done anything remotely as interesting as that.”

  “Yet you’re here and you’ve come for a reason. What is it?”

  “Because no one my age does. I’m the resist-peer-pressure poster girl. I’d look down on my inferiors if I had any but I don’t. So I go to confession instead.”

  “You don’t think much of your peers?”

  “If there’s a heaven I hope it’s better than an afternoon at the mall, which is their idea of paradise. I don’t know who’s violating the sixth and ninth commandments with whom on The OC or Laguna Beach. Paging through People isn’t my idea of reading. It’s more like they don’t think much of me. Or they wouldn’t if they thought about anything. Maybe that sounds like envy.”

  “No, it sounds like pride. Like you blow off your classmates to let yourself off the hook. If they’re not worth the effort it doesn’t hurt as much when they don’t like you. Saying no one is inferior to you is your clever way of saying everyone is.”

  “Pride in my own humility? Didn’t Saint Teresa of Avila whip herself for that?”

  “I’m hearing your confession, not Saint Teresa’s. For your penance, I want you to spend five minutes out there thanking God for the quick tongue and the nimble wit he gave you. And if God says, ‘You know what? Maybe I did something right with some other people too’—think about that.”

  And so she had done what he said on that Lenten Saturday almost three years ago. Said her Act of Contrition, accepted absolution, thanked the priest, and gone out to find a pew where she could say a prayer against self-pity. She had been praying in the same pew where she was now when the old guy had caught her eye.

  Not all that old, really. Late fifties, she thought, but moving like someone fifteen years older. He wore a burnt orange polo shirt, mismatched with a tweed suit coat and pants. Not scruffy o
r seedy, like a homeless wino dressed by the Salvation Army, but looking disoriented.

  He’d slipped into the south booth of the confessional that wasn’t in use that day. She remembered shrugging, assuming that he’d figure out soon enough that there wasn’t any priest to open the cover and listen to his sins through the grill, no absolution to be had in that old-fashioned vestige of the Catholicism he’d known growing up. She had closed her eyes tightly and prayed. What if God answers me? What if he doesn’t?

  She hadn’t known if it was God talking, but less than two minutes into the prayer her conscience had prodded her, if a sharp rowel to the gut can be called a prod. The light was still on over the booth the elderly gent had entered, and by now he should have realized his mistake and emerged. Maybe he had early Alzheimers, maybe he was kneeling there confused and terrified in the dark. Rising and picking her way awkwardly along the pew, she had headed for the confessional.

  Still twenty feet away, she had stopped when she saw the door open. The guy was coming out after all.

  Except it wasn’t the guy. The one who’d stepped through the doorway was a well-dressed woman, cradling an aqua colored file folder in her left arm. She was tall and, by Midwest standards, slender. The kind of scarf Catholic women wore to church in the 1950s covered her hair and hid most of her face. She had left the door ajar and hustled toward the vestibule.

  Bleifert had hurried over and pulled the booth’s door all the way open. She had seen the man’s body crumpled in the rear corner, death deforming his kneeling posture into a grotesque squat, face twisted in agony, shocks of scraggly white hair falling in disorder over his forehead. The next day’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel would identify him as Timothy Goettinger, CEO and principal shareholder of Goettinger Corporation.

  Bleifert recalled sprinting for the back of the church, pulling her cell-phone out and punching in 9-1-1 as she’d looked for the woman in the scarf. She hadn’t see a sign of her in the vestibule or the parking lot, and when the 9-1-1 responder came on she’d stopped looking and concentrated on telling him to get an ambulance to St. Jo’s in a big damn hurry. She told the police later about the woman, of course, but the glimpse she’d gotten left her with scant material for description and anyway, the young cop’s expression said, so what? The med-techs said it was a heart attack. No wounds, no blood, no weapon. The old ticker just stopped. Besides, Bleifert’s was the second 9-1-1 call. The first had probably come from the woman, who wanted to help but didn’t want to kill her afternoon answering questions.