“That’s a very charitable way to put it,” Melissa said.
“So who killed him?”
“I don’t know. But I know who didn’t kill him—and that’s enough for me.”
PART FOUR
Shoot the Lawyer Twice
Q: It’s 1933. You’re in a locked room with Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and a lawyer. You have a revolver with two bullets in the cylinder. What do you do?
A: Shoot the lawyer twice.
—Popular Lawyer Joke
Chapter 28
“Your halo is lovely, but you look completely spent.”
“It was a very demanding meeting.” Melissa handed her coat gratefully to Rep, then staggered into the living room and collapsed on the couch. “I had to affect a casual attitude while it was going on, but when it was finally over I hit an emotional wall.”
“I put water on for tea when I heard your key in the door.”
“Bless you.”
“And I’ve made something special for dinner.”
“What?”
“Reservations at Coquette.”
“You are now officially the one with the halo.”
“They’re not until eight, so I’ll draw you a bath with some of that stuff you have while you enjoy your tea. That way you can relax a bit before we need to leave.”
A shrill whistle from the kitchen spared Rep further accusations of spousal sanctity. By the time he returned with a steaming mug of herbal tea, Melissa had taken her shoes off and propped her feet cross-ankled on the coffee table. Rep felt he could safely ask for details about the day.
“Mission accomplished.” Before sipping the tea Melissa held the mug just in front of her mouth and let the aroma waft toward her nose. Then she gave him a quick summary.
“So first you got Bleifert to open up and now you’ve cleared her.”
“Right. Now I’m sure she told me the truth.”
“Therefore she had nothing to do with Angstrom’s murder.”
“Correct. Which means that my speculations about her mischief the night of the break-in couldn’t shed any useful light on the killing.”
“No need to share those conjectures with the police, then,” Rep said.
“Right again.”
“I’m comfortable with that, if you are.”
“I am so comfortable with it.” Melissa cradled the mug in her lap and lay her head back against the sofa cushion’s crushed green leather. “I’m sorry that Angstrom was murdered and I feel for Valerie Clevenger, even though I wouldn’t bet her son is innocent. But that’s no excuse for turning into a—what’s the legal term for busybody?”
“‘Officious intermeddler.’”
“Right. I’m not going to turn into one of those. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have a moral obligation to rat out Tereska Bleifert. I don’t. End of story. Exit Melissa, stage right. The police now have center stage, and they’re welcome to it.”
“Exactly.”
“You agree with me, then?”
“Yes.”
Ten seconds of silence passed. Melissa lifted her head long enough to drink some tea, then laid it back again. Six more seconds passed. She opened her eyes without raising her head and shifted them toward Rep.
“What are you waiting for?” she asked. “In a 1940’s movie, this would be the ‘thanks, I needed that’ scene, where a no-nonsense male tells the spunky heroine she’s better than that and gives her a brisk little slap to punctuate his point.”
“Spousal battery is out of fashion these days, especially with heroines spunky enough to hit back. More important, I really do think you’re absolutely right. You’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty already. No need for you to make more blips on anyone’s radar screen.”
“Then why am I waiting for the other shoe to drop?”
“Um, yes. That. Well. The thing is, I’ve been looking for the right psychological moment to mention that Valerie Clevenger left a message asking that you call her.”
“Hmm. I wonder what provoked that.”
“Probably the approaching retrial date for her son’s case.”
“I don’t see how I can help her with that. The only thing I can contribute is information, and the only information I have that she doesn’t already know is something Tereska told me in absolute confidence.”
“That should make for an interesting conversation.”
“Interesting and short. Well, I can’t face it right now. This heroine is taking a break from spunkiness for the rest of the night. After I finish this tea and take that bath you recommended, the most ambitious thing I’m going to do before we leave for Coquette is email my brother.”
“I’ll draw your bath. Lavender bath oil or vanilla?”
“Surprise me.” Melissa’s head sank back into the cushion with a delicious moan of anticipatory pleasure.
***
As the delicate lavender scent from the first elegant beads of oil splashing into running water rose toward Rep, Carolyn Hoeckstra’s nose twitched at the stronger smell of a different type of oil. Rich and oddly sweet, the odor of Cosmoline seemed to surround her as she walked up and down rows of heavily laden tables in the Great Exhibition Hall at Wisconsin State Fair Park, about three freeway miles west of Milwaukee’s baseball stadium.
She stopped at a table and picked up one of a dozen handguns displayed on it. The weapon was a small automatic, a Beretta thirty-two caliber. She looked at it, hefted it in the palm of her right hand, then seemed about to do something else with it when another gun caught her eye. She put down the Beretta and picked up a larger automatic with a back-slanting checkered grip.
“That’s a Luger,” a woman in a red-and-black plaid lumberjack shirt said from behind the table.
“I know. Replica?”
“It’s a genuine replica,” the heavyset lumberjill said after a moment’s hesitation. “Manufactured by Charter Arms in the ’sixties to the original specs, with shop drawings traced from the original blueprints and tooling cast from the original molds.”
Hoeckstra clicked the clip out and slid it back home, then pulled back the twin knurled knobs on top of the bolt. They snapped into a blunt triangle, leaving an extra two inches of deeply blued barrel exposed.
“So it would be nine millimeter?”
“Absolutely. A lot of knock-off replicas made in the ’sixties were twenty-two caliber, like for guys who just wanted something offbeat looking for plinking. But the ones Charter made are the real deal. They sent their machine shop manager and a master machinist to Essen—”
“Skip it,” Hoeckstra said. “How much?”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Sold.” Handing the Luger to the lumberjill, Hoeckstra squatted to open an ancient, battered American Tourister attaché case with rounded corners that were thought to be chic in the early ’seventies. She took eight hundred-dollar bills and a business card from it and handed them to the woman behind the counter. “Write it up. And don’t keep the change.”
Transactions at gun shows in the United States aren’t heavy on paperwork. The lumberjill dropped the Luger unceremoniously into a brown paper bag, together with a four-page pamphlet explaining its historical significance. She then pulled a pad of forms from next to a slotted cash-box behind the table and pinned the business card next to it with her left thumb so that she could look at it while she wrote. Next to NAME on the top form she carefully printed JANE SCHMIDT.
***
“You’re spoiled rotten. You do realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” Melissa said around seven twenty-five. she typed [email protected] into the email address box on her computer screen. “You are deeply appreciated. I feel like a million dollars, and I’ll be ready to leave in five minutes.”
She typed “Goodies” in the subject box, then tabbed to the message portion of the screen and typed:
Frank,
1 dzn brownies and 1 dzn Rice K
rispie treats going out Monday. Should I add a box of Smores or would that be overdoing it? More later.
Love,
’Lissa
“Okay,” she said as she hit SEND and stood up. “Let’s go.”
“Should we take the car or walk?”
“What is it outside?”
“Around thirty without much wind. And the sidewalks are pretty clear.”
“Let’s walk then,” Melissa said. “It’s less than half-a-mile.”
“You’re turning into a real Milwaukean.”
***
Just after eight-twenty, as Rep was accepting biftec au frites from a waiter at Coquette, René Mignon thoughtfully riffled the pages of a paperback book. The cover featured a lurid picture of a woman wearing a badly ripped blouse and cowering before a snarling panther. The title, stamped on the cover in blood red letters, was Pawn’s Gambit. “A New Thriller by Taylor Gates!” appeared above the title.
What to do? Mignon had an academic’s aversion to destroying books. Leaving aside the occasional bit of French pornography, however, this was the first fiction he could remember reading in decades. Explaining why he happened to have a novel whose fourth chapter included a detailed description of how to come up with a lethal dose of curare might be a bit delicate.
A grating whirr filled Mignon’s modest study as he turned on the paper shredder beside the desk. After a last glance at the cringing woman’s décolletage, he ripped the cover off and fed it into the machine. Over eleven tedious minutes, each and every page would follow.
***
Glancing at her watch as she and Rep returned from Coquette, Melissa frowned. Nine-forty-eight. If it were ten o’clock she could tell herself that it was too late to call Clevenger.
Well, tough. Maybe tomorrow.
She flipped her computer on and went to look for something to glance at while it booted up. Sartre? No. She wasn’t in the mood for someone who spent World War II snugly in Paris, scribbling plays that he tamely submitted to Nazi censors. She pulled down a volume of Malraux instead.
She made it through three bracing pages before her computer grudgingly beeped that it was ready to do computer stuff. She called up her emails, and the only non-spam entry was Lieutenant Commander Francis Xavier Seton’s reply to her missive earlier in the evening:
SETON, LCDR FRANCIS
_____________________________________________
FROM: Lt. Com. Francis X. Seton [[email protected]]
SENT: Saturday, Jan 26, 2008 9:27 P.M.
TO: Melissa Seton Pennyworth [[email protected]]
SUBJECT: Goodies
Sis,
Toastable Oreo Pop Tarts are actually more popular right now than Smores, and a box or two would be welcome. Believe me, the treats you send are REALLY appreciated. Midshipmen call this period between Christmas and Easter “the Dark Ages.” The weather is dreary, they’re not going to see their families for months, some can’t leave the Yard even on weekends, and the discipline is unrelenting. An Oreo Pop Tart goes a long, LONG way.
I followed up with an 06 chem prof on that murder up there you were telling me about. He said that deriving a lethal dose of curare wouldn’t be any particular trick if you had plenty of money and access to a decent college chem lab.
Love,
Frank
_____________________________________________
Melissa hit PRINT and looked over her shoulder while her printer coughed into action.
“Honey, are you in the kitchen?” she called
“No, but I can get there in about five seconds.”
“Would you write Oreo Pop Tarts on the whiteboard please?”
“Sure.”
Melissa closed her email window and started to log off her computer.
“Oreo what?” Rep yelled from the kitchen.
That’s why we print emails. Melissa plucked the freshly-printed sheet from the printer.
“Oreo Pop Tarts.”
She started to lay down the print-out, then suddenly stopped and gazed intently at the page. She was still studying it when Rep came in to report that he had completed his assignment. Noticing her close examination of the document he looked at it over her shoulder.
“Wouldn’t a class of 2006 graduate be kind of young for a chemistry professor?”
“‘Oh-six’ refers to rank, not class year,” she muttered distractedly. “It means a captain in the Navy or the Coast Guard and a colonel in the other three services. Frank is an oh-four.”
“Oh.”
Grabbing the phone, Melissa punched in Valerie Clevenger’s number. Clevenger answered on the first ring.
“Sorry to return your call so late,” Melissa said.
“Oh, that’s all right. I hate to be a pest—”
“Not at all. Would two o’clock Saturday afternoon be convenient?”
“Of course.”
“I’d come earlier, but I’m going to try to visit a doctor tomorrow morning.”
“Two o’clock is no problem at all. I’ll see you then. Goodnight.”
After hanging up, Melissa looked down at André Malraux’s prose, the work of someone who didn’t just write about being engagé but had actually traded gunfire with Franco’s soldiers and Hitler’s stormtroopers.
“Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”
Chapter 29
The second Saturday in January, 2008
You suggest residential exclusivity to a Milwaukean by saying “North Shore.” You suggest it to someone on the North Shore by saying “east of Lake Drive.” The sliver of land between Lake Michigan and the highway named for it doesn’t have streets but arcane “lanes” and “courts” and “places.” When the favored souls who dwell there share their addresses with the hoi polloi, they tack on the four magic words—“Bridge Lane, east of Lake Drive,” “North View Place, east of Lake Drive”—on the plausible assumption that without this additional clue simply naming the street wouldn’t help much.
When Melissa turned right onto Shore Drive on Saturday afternoon and began looking for Valerie Clevenger’s house, she was east of Lake Drive.
She checked her watch as she stopped at the crown of Clevenger’s semi-circular driveway. She rummaged through six boxes of Oreo Pop Tarts in the plastic Sendiks grocery bag beside her on the front seat, in the process knocking two of them onto the floor. They fell onto a cheaply bound booklet with a yellow paper cover that was sternly marked in black block letters:
PAWN’S GAMBIT
By TAYLOR GATES
BOUND GALLEY
NOT FOR RESALE!
While retrieving the Pop Tarts she checked to be sure she hadn’t lost the sales slip for the book, as she intended to deduct every penny of the six dollars she had shelled out for the thing. At length she returned to the Sendiks bag and extracted a palm-sized squeeze bottle of Chloraseptic Throat Spray with a white plastic cone attached to its top. Clevenger, dressed in khaki slacks and a yellow blouse cut like a man’s dress shirt, already had the front door open and was striding out onto an ample porch to meet her.
“Sorry I’m late,” Melissa said as she scurried to the porch. “I had a Nancy Northshore type in front of me in the checkout line, right down to the sweater with its sleeves tied around her neck. This week’s Cosmopolitan promises a story about ‘Seven Sex Tricks He’d Never Dream You Know!’ and she seemed to be agonizing over whether to buy it.”
“I hope she opted for erotic enrichment.” Clevenger showed Melissa into a foyer floored in black and dove gray marble.
“She did, but in the time she took to decide she could just about have memorized the article.”
After stashing her coat in a hall closet, Melissa followed Clevenger into the living room, where the color scheme on the marble changed to green and blue-veined white. She walked in expecting to see Eames chairs heavy on tautly stretched black leather and a coffee table with inch-thick glass and highly polished chrome. She didn’
t. Crayola-vivid red and blue leaped from the walls. Snow white and sable black area rugs shared the floor with green and yellow beanbag chairs. A set of hot pink Smartbelle walking weights sat on the white-brick perch beside the fireplace.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Clevenger asked.
“Something? You’re two bong hits away from Yellow Submarine.”
“I can do coffee, tea, or Johnny Walker Red. If that inhaler means you’ve picked up a sore throat I’ll be happy to get some designer water from the kitchen, but if I were you I’d treat it with scotch instead.”
“Tea. Please.”
Melissa dosed herself with a quick spray of Chloroseptic while Clevenger fussed at a drink caddy. She handed Melissa fragrant herbal tea in what looked like a genuine Limoges cup, then took two fingers of amber liquid in a tumbler for herself. While Melissa felt her way tentatively onto a beanbag chair, Clevenger stretched deftly on her side, Madame Recamier-style, on a pile of Persian carpets six rugs thick next to the crackling fire place. She leaned her back against a seventh rug rolled tightly to form an oversized cushion.
“It took me seven years to get this room exactly the way I wanted it,” she said. “I fired three decorators and finally just did it myself. The idea is that no one should ever imagine that a Nancy Northshore type lives here.”
“You’ve certainly accomplished that.”
Every word from Clevenger’s mouth, every gesture, every detail of her welcome struck Melissa as polished and confident. At the same time, though, the gloss on her performance seemed as slickly professional as the polish on the finished marble around the fireplace, as if Melissa were a potential client whose business Clevenger was trying to get.
“I asked you to come over because I have a delicate and unpleasant question to ask,” Clevenger said. “Could Carolyn Hoeckstra have gotten into Professor Angstrom’s office the night of the break-in?”
“Not likely. The university is very security conscious. There’s a guard desk at the only public entrance—and the guards know their business.”
Shoot the Lawyer Twice Page 16
