Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  “Isn’t there a faculty entrance that’s unguarded?”

  “Yes, but you have to have a pass card and know a numerical code that’s changed daily. And even that entrance is under video surveillance.”

  “Suppose Hoeckstra had gotten Angstrom’s card and code.”

  “How could she have managed that?”

  “Nisi bonum de mortui and all that, but Jimmy says he was a leche.”

  “I’ve heard people call him a skirt-chaser,” Melissa admitted.

  “Hoeckstra can play the hottie when she wants to. Say she put a move on Angstrom, suggested that they hook up in his office, and asked for his card and code so that she could wait there while he showed off at Villa Terrace.”

  “Surely he would have told her that the horizontal surfaces would be more comfortable at his flat in Shorewood.”

  “Say he did. She responds that sex in unconventional venues turns her on. That’s probably one of the seven tricks Cosmo was panting about.”

  “Okay.” Melissa shrugged. “As long as we’re just making things up, suppose she does say exactly that. And suppose he’s so excited that his brain shuts off and he immediately starts thinking with his testicles.”

  “Which wouldn’t exactly set a precedent with the male gender.”

  “Fair enough. Is Angstrom so besotted by lust in this hypothesis that he forgets he only has one key-card? If Hoeckstra takes his so that she can metaphorically warm up the sheets in his office while she’s waiting for him, how is he going to get in?”

  “He’s a well-known professor, in and out of Curtin Hall every day. He can walk in the front door and stroll right past the security desk. He wouldn’t even have to show i.d., much less swipe a pass-card.”

  “You’ve thought this through very carefully,” Melissa said, nodding as she reviewed Clevenger’s analysis. “It could have happened that way. Of course, the video surveillance at the faculty entrance would still have been a risk for Hoeckstra. When she got in using his card, the guard staffing the video monitors might still have noticed her.”

  “Sure. He would have noticed an apparently responsible adult who had a working card and knew the daily security code. There must be several hundred faculty and staff authorized to use that entrance. No guard could possibly knew them all by sight—certainly not well enough to sound an alarm based on a grainy image on a video screen. And even if she were challenged and a guard tracked her down, she’d shrug and say she was there to play slap-and-tickle with one of the eggheads.”

  “Absolutely right,” Melissa said. “As far as it goes. In that scenario, Hoeckstra gets into his office without major risk. But the reason she wants to get there in your theory is to toss the place in search of evidence that might compromise the prosecution of your son, right?”

  “Right. The most promising front in her vendetta against me.”

  “She hates you that much?”

  “For polluting her father’s bed? She hates me more than Captain Ahab hated the whale. Tim and I were mature adults with healthy sexual appetites, but she treated me like some seventeenth century cavalier who callously deflowered a maiden and besmirched the family escutcheon.”

  “Anyway,” Melissa said, “she’s in his office because she’s after something. She has to know that sooner or later someone is going to notice the burglary. At that point the security tapes from that night will be reviewed.”

  “Yes, that is precisely the question.”

  “You just lost me.”

  Clevenger took a healthy sip of scotch. Bright-eyed, face glowing with a tinge of excitement, she levered herself forward to emphasize her next point.

  “All video surveillance is not created equal. There are systems that use dummy cameras merely as a deterrent. There are systems that use real cameras running tape on a repeating sixty-minute loop, so that a guard with a monitor can see what’s going on at any given moment but you can’t retrieve tape of anything more than an hour in the past.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then, there are sophisticated and expensive digital video systems that store what the cameras record in large capacity computerized archives. I’m wondering whether UWM has one of those.”

  “I don’t know. But even if it does I couldn’t get it for you.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to. If we know it’s there and we know what to ask for, we can get it with a subpoena.”

  “But what do you accomplish if you do? Suppose you prove that Carolyn Hoeckstra was in Curtin Hall that night. Confront her with that on the stand during your son’s retrial and presumably she’ll blow it off with the same lust-in-the-ivy line you said she would have used on an inquisitive guard. You can’t use that tape to prove she ransacked his office.”

  “We don’t have to. We’re the defense. We’re not required to prove anything. All we have to do is raise a reasonable doubt.”

  Melissa sat still for a moment. With an unladylike slurp that would have earned her a glare from her grandmother, she gulped tea without tasting it.

  “And how does smearing Hoeckstra do that?” she asked then. “It makes her look bad, but it doesn’t make Jimmy look good. Whatever the exculpatory information itself might be, you still don’t have it.”

  “If you assume that Carolyn Hoeckstra went to great lengths to get evidence from Angstrom that was relevant to Jimmy’s case, and if she doesn’t produce that evidence herself, the jury will presume that the evidence would have hurt the government. In a perverse way, it’s almost better for us not to have the actual evidence. That way the jury can just let its collective imagination run wild.”

  “I see,” Melissa said.

  “I know, it isn’t pretty. But neither is thirty months in a federal penitentiary for a boy whose only crime is an exaggerated sense of entitlement.”

  “I get your point.”

  “Angstrom’s murder has raised the stakes. We can’t make a subpoena stick if it’s based solely on supposition. But if we can say with a straight face that some electronic blips on a computer tape somewhere at UWM might reveal a murderer who killed a witness with potentially critical evidence, then I think we’ll get a look at them. Will you find out for me what type of surveillance system UWM uses?”

  “I’ll have to think about it. To tell you the truth, I’m not very comfortable about collaborating in innuendo. Suppose I could come up with the evidence itself: would you settle for that?”

  “What makes you think you could bring that off?”

  “A hint of a theory that’s been tickling the back of my brain since I found out that Angstrom was killed. He was apparently shopping two completely unrelated pieces of supposedly valuable information: a papal order dating from the Second World War, and the exculpatory facts you were looking for. The more I think about that, the more implausible it seems to me.”

  “I agree,” Clevenger said. “He was a professor, not a spook with tentacles reaching into the CIA. It’s hard enough to believe he came up with one of those, much less both of them. But where are you going with this?”

  “Suppose they weren’t unrelated. Suppose one was a cover for the other—camouflage.”

  “I’m supposing. That implies that if you find one you could find the other. But how do you get from supposition to proof?”

  “That brings me to a delicate question of my own,” Melissa said.

  “I have thick skin and plenty of scotch. Shoot.”

  “Is it true that Gates is Jimmy’s father?”

  “Yes. If you’ll forgive me, I’ll skip any maidenly blush over that confession. I’m not ashamed of it.”

  “I wouldn’t suggest that you should be.”

  “It wasn’t a casual fling, if that makes any difference. He was working in Houston when his break-out book hit it big. I liked his early stories that I pulled off the regional paperback racks. I thought his writing had some guts to it. I wanted a kid, my biological clock was ticking, I didn’t have the time or the taste
to dig up a husband, and I thought having some creative genes in my offspring would be a kick. I figured that Robert Ludlum was busy so I tracked Gates down and asked him how he’d like to have a groupie for a month or so.”

  “Well, that’s plain enough.”

  “I know. I make those calculating dowagers in Jane Austen’s novels seem like sentimentalists. But that’s neither here nor there. How much money do you need from Gates to prove your theory?”

  “I don’t need any money. I need to ask him two questions—and I need him to tell me the truth.”

  Chapter 30

  The third Friday in January, 2008

  “Please don’t tell me you’re trying to get a thriller published too,” were Taylor Gates’ first words when he called Melissa almost a week later.

  “The only thing I’m trying to get published at the moment is a piece on Trollope’s unacknowledged influence on the contemporary American action/adventure story. Using violence to blend politics into literature and vice-versa. I don’t think Amy Lee would be much help with it.”

  “Don’t underestimate her.”

  “So you heard about my theory concerning the late Professor Angstrom’s venture into popular fiction,” Melissa said.

  “I have instructions to answer two questions. Is that the first one?”

  “No. This is the first one: In the bound galleys of Pawn’s Gambit that your publisher circulated as advance copies to reviewers, you had a murder committed by substituting a poison for a prescription drug the victim was taking. Not terribly original, but more elegant than just smearing curare on a hash pipe, which is the way the murder is committed in the version of the book actually published. Why the change?”

  “That’s a rather embarrassing question.”

  “I’m told your ego is healthy enough to handle it.”

  “Okay. We sent the galleys around to prominent mystery and thriller authors, looking for blurbs. One of our targets was a doctor, although he’s now pursuing a different career. Short, round-faced, bright-eyed, and puckish, with a very dry wit. He declined to give me a blurb, but he told me the drug-substitution trick wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Prescription drug manufacturers are very particular about the shape, color, size, and texture of their products. They deliberately make them as distinctive as they can, precisely because they want to cut down on the risk of taking the wrong drug by mistake.”

  “So you couldn’t just, say, buy a pack of Contac off the shelf, replace the cold medicine in the capsules with something toxic, and then substitute one of the doctored capsules for the prescription drugs the victim was taking.”

  “Right,” Gates said. “The victim would know something was wrong. You’d have to somehow get your hands on some of the actual drugs, put the poison in them, and then get them back without the victim knowing it. I would have had to write an entire new chapter to make that work. It was simpler to just shoehorn some happy-hay into the story.”

  “Second question: What’s the narrative plausibility of someone obsessed with Catholicism going to a lot of trouble to kill a victim inside a basilica?”

  “Zero. That’s the kind of bullshit that happens in cheap thrillers by lazy writers instead of in the real world. Just out of curiosity, where did that question come from?”

  “I think Timothy Goettinger was murdered. I think the same person who killed Professor Angstrom killed him.”

  “Okay. Two questions asked, two answered. Does Valerie get the inside details about UWM’s security camera system?”

  “Yes. You held up your end of the bargain, so I won’t renege on mine. I don’t expect to go to confession anytime soon, but you can’t be too careful.”

  ***

  Kuchinski was busily getting ready to defend Q Kazmaryck when Melissa stopped by the Germania Building later that afternoon to tell him and Rep about her conversation with Taylor Gates. Kuchinski whistled when she was through.

  “Making that crack to him was about as subtle as cold-cocking him with a kielbasa.”

  “Subtlety isn’t my strong point.”

  “So how do you put it together?”

  Melissa explained her theory to the two lawyers.

  “Have you shared this with Chicago’s finest?” Kuchinski asked.

  “As much as I could, without implicating Tereska or revealing information I’d promised to keep confidential.”

  “I take it they are not sending their most tactful senior detective up here to ask Milwaukee cops to arrest someone for them.”

  “Not exactly. They thanked me for my concern and assured me they would factor this information into their inquiries.”

  “‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,’ in other words.”

  “I can’t really blame them. Amateur speculation isn’t evidence, and aside from Frank’s email I had precious little more than that to offer them.”

  “And if the killer nails someone else while they’re processing all this data,” Rep said, “well, that would be outside their jurisdiction anyway.”

  Kuchinski stretched luxuriantly, spreading his arms into a gargantuan V and swiveling his chair so that he could extend his legs completely in front of him. The process took several seconds. Then he pulled back to a more lawyerly pose, folded his hands on top of his desk blotter, and looked from Rep to Melissa and back again.

  “So what it comes down to is that we’re pretty sure what happened, but we’re missing a few exhibits from our evidence folder.”

  “Quite a few,” Rep said.

  “And we don’t have any way of getting the proof we need to back us up.”

  “Not that I can see,” Melissa said.

  “Well, then,” Kuchinski said, picking up his phone and punching a speed-dial button, “I guess we’d better make some up.”

  Expecting Kuchinski to reach a secretary or voice-mail, Rep was surprised at the next words out of the older lawyer’s mouth.

  “Terry? Walt Kuchinski. Can I put you on speaker? I’ve got co-counsel in the office with me.”

  The answer must have been yes, because Kuchinski punched another button and Finnegan’s voice almost immediately came over the speaker.

  “Your boy finally ready to plead?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what’s on your mind?”

  “The local rule calls it meet-and-confer. We’re supposed to chat about certain motions before I file them. And to tell you the truth, I’d want you to see this one before I filed it anyway.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about you. Specifically, about bouncing your butt off this case so that you can go after drug-dealers and rum-runners like the founding fathers intended and let someone else handle Jimmy Clevenger’s little problem with keeping his fly zipped.”

  “Any grounds?” Finnegan asked in jovial and slightly bored voice. “Or are you just asking for disqualification on general principles?”

  “Well for starters, we’re fixing to make you a witness—and last time I checked there was a rule about that.”

  “There’s a rule about filing frivolous motions, too.”

  “Trust me on this one, son. We’ve gotta talk. Face to face. You really do want to see me.”

  “Okay. How about tomorrow morning, first thing?”

  “See ya then.”

  Kuchinski hung up. He bowed his head for just a moment. Then he looked up.

  “We’re looking at long night.”

  “Anything I can do to help, besides ordering the pizza?” Rep asked.

  “You know how to draft an offer of proof?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. You do that and I’ll do the motion.”

  Kuchinski picked up his Dictaphone as Rep and Melissa left.

  “All right,” Melissa said, “we’d better get to work.”

  “What do you mean ‘we?’”

  “Hey, I may not know any law but I kn
ow how to type. I’m the troublemaker here.”

  “True on both counts,” Rep conceded as they stepped into his office, “but aren’t you supposed to be finding out what type of surveillance system UWM uses so you can keep your promise to Valerie Clevenger?”

  “I pinned that information down about an hour ago. Li was right: in dealing with bureaucracies, few commodities are more precious than the gratitude of lawyers.”

  “What’s the answer?”

  “The one she was hoping for: the recordings on UWM’s security cameras are digitally made and computer-retrievable.”

  “When are you going to tell her?”

  “As soon as you hand me your phone. I’ll leave word on her answering machine at home, and I bet she calls back to react and follow up within twenty-four hours.”

  Chapter 31

  The first Wednesday in February, 2008

  Fortunately, Melissa didn’t give long odds. Instead of a phone call the next day she got a personal visit almost two weeks later, first thing on a cloudy Wednesday morning.

  “I hope I’m not intruding,” Clevenger said as she squeezed into Melissa’s office after an apologetic knock. “First, I wanted to thank you for the data about the surveillance system. More important, I got a telephone message last night that I felt I should share with you. We’ve served a subpoena for the tapes, and I think this call is clearly a reaction to it.”

  “‘Politics as Metaphor and Metaphor as Politics in Trollope’ can wait for a few minutes.” Melissa looked up from a sheaf of typescript. “Please sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  Unholstering her cell phone, Clevenger punched numbers and prompts and laid the instrument on Melissa’s desk. After a couple of seconds of white-noise blur, a crackly voice that sounded like it had bounced off four satellites started speaking.

  “Hoeckstra. I want to talk, and I think you’ll be interested in what I have to say. Face to face. Has to be someplace no one would ever expect to see either of us, so unless you have a better idea let’s make it St. Josephat’s Basilica. Where my dad bought it, in case you’ve forgotten. Do not bring your horny little brat. I don’t know if they have a noon mass on weekdays, but if they do it should be cleared out by one. I’ll be there at five after tomorrow. Pew nearest the confessional. Call back if you’re not going to show. And if you do call back, note that the area code is nine-two-oh, not four-one-four.”