The most useful course he’d taken in law school, by far, had been Antitrust. Not because he would ever practice in the area, but because he found his personal philosophy crystallized by a single casual comment from the professor who taught it. Monopolists didn’t bother to maximize profits the way economists said they should, the tweedy gentleman had explained, because stratospheric earnings weren’t what they really wanted: “The real reward of monopoly power isn’t excess profits but a quiet life.”
Epiphany! That, Rep decided, then and there on that sleepy Friday afternoon in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was also the true reward of analytic intelligence. From that moment he’d lived by this creed. Let the Arundels of the world bill over two thousand hours a year for half-a-million bucks; Rep would bill sixteen hundred for less than half that much, giving him eight more hours a week to enjoy Melissa’s playful eyes and gentle banter. Arundel and his peers could revel in macho fields like corporate transactions and litigation; Rep would find a serene niche in trademark and copyright, thank you very much. In law school Rep had been happy to let future trial lawyers take Introduction to Advocacy; Rep’s fancy had fallen to an imaginary class that would have been called Introduction to Adequacy.
The only exception to this rule was Rep’s pursuit of his special sexual interest, and that was what was intriguing about it. In no other sphere did he even consider putting security, comfort, and reassuring routine at risk for the sake of excitement. True enough, the risk introduced into his life by occasional visits to naughty magazine shops and postings to spanking sites on the net seemed pathetically minuscule. The remarkable thing, though, was that he allowed it any entrée at all into an existence that was otherwise sedulously arranged to avoid the unpleasant and the extraordinary.
And so, tucking his glasses into the breast pocket of his shirt, brushing his wispy, light brown hair off his forehead, he plunged dutifully into And Done to Others’ Harm.
Like many people who “don’t read” mysteries, Rep actually read three or four a year. He paged through them on airplanes or during vacations, expecting them to divert him without making much of an impression, and then not consciously remembering much about them after he’d flicked past the final page.
Either despite or because of this background, Rep found himself entirely unprepared for the sheer awfulness of And Done to Others’ Harm. After the epigraph, which disclosed that the title came from T. S. Eliot, things went downhill in a hurry. The writing itself (leaving aside the solecisms you’d expect from someone who thinks “identicality” is a word) wasn’t bad, just pedestrian. There were even lines, like the one about “all my vices are English,” that were pretty good—good enough that Rep couldn’t help wondering where Buchanan had found them. And the plot and characters seemed serviceable, although rather familiar and without a spark of anything special about them.
The real problem was deeper. As Rep slogged through page after dreary page, he gradually realized what it was. Instead of either passion or any notion that reading and writing this stuff might be fun, Buchanan wrote with a kind of desperate, labored urgency, a driving, compulsive need to get words on paper. As Oscar Wilde (Rep thought) had said about Henry James (he was pretty sure), Buchanan created prose as if writing were a painful duty—as if she’d desperately needed to write not this story but a story, any story. Reading And Done to Others’ Harm was like watching a defensive tackle dance ballet: it’s never pretty, and even when he brings off a pas de deux he looks grotesque rather than elegant.
Somewhere around page one-forty-three Rep looked up gratefully as he heard Melissa glide into the room. Her eyes didn’t seem completely glazed over, so the movie couldn’t be as bad as the book. When she spoke, in fact, Rep warily sensed an undercurrent of excitement in her voice.
“Does the main character in Charlotte Buchanan’s story have a down-to-earth, very practical sidekick/girlfriend who serves as a cheap vehicle for exposition every five or six chapters?” she asked.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Rep said, consulting a half-page of notes. “Named Victoria. She mentions her boyfriend’s name once, and it isn’t Albert. I was disappointed.”
“You won’t be surprised to learn that In Contemplation of Death features a character meeting that description as well.”
“You’re right, I’m not surprised. I think the Mystery Writers of America may have a by-law or something specifically requiring a character like that in every mystery/romance with a female protagonist.”
“Well,” Melissa said, “that character in the movie is named Carolyn. But about an hour into the thing, one of the other characters slips and calls her Vicki instead. Apparently no one caught the continuity mistake.”
Rep closed In Contemplation of Death without marking his place and set it down next to the computer.
“Vicki,” he said.
“Right.”
“Short for Victoria.”
“Yes.”
“Bloody hell,” Rep muttered, although he seldom used off-color language in Melissa’s presence. “I’m going to have to write a longer memorandum.”
Chapter 3
Rep made a relatively rare weekend appearance at the office that Saturday morning, but not because Charlotte Buchanan’s plagiarism claim challenged his moderate work habits. He had actually finished his claim-assessment memo early Friday afternoon, although he had waited until 4:30 to send copies to Finneman and Arundel in order to minimize the risk that either of them would have read the thing by Saturday morning.
Even so, he hid out in the library when he came in instead of burying himself in his own office. He passed his time paging idly through the Journal of the Patent Office Society, which was the only law review he knew of that included jokes.
In principle the library ploy should have worked and in practice it did fine for awhile. After an hour or so, however, Rep found it prudent to journey to the men’s room. It was there that, by sheer bad luck, Arundel fell on him.
“Good morning,” he boomed in serendipitous triumph. “By the way, on Saturdays we have free donuts in the fourteenth floor lounge.”
“I had one with vanilla frosting,” Rep said mildly.
“I thought you might have forgotten in the time since you were last here on a Saturday. Anyway, I have your memo.”
“And you brought it in here with you, I see. I suppose that could be taken two different ways.”
“Thirteen pages,” Arundel said as he appraisingly snapped a fingernail against the document. “A real magnum opus—explaining, no doubt, that Ms. Buchanan’s claim is a crock. When you chat with her on Monday, just remember who she is and let her down gently, can you?”
Before responding Rep ostentatiously checked for legs under stall doors. (Firm policy forbade discussion of confidential client affairs in venues where unwelcome ears might be listening.) He knew that this implicit rebuke would irritate Arundel, and Rep took occupational pleasures where he found them.
“Actually,” he said after his reconnaissance, “when you get a chance to read the memo, you’ll find that her claim isn’t necessarily a crock. There’s a non-trivial chance that Point West Productions actually did steal our client’s story. The memo goes on, of course, to explain why this would be extremely hard to prove, and why our client would find the attempt distasteful and success only marginally more profitable than failure.” He punctuated this summary by zipping up on the last syllable.
“I’ll read your analysis with interest,” Arundel said, “even though you’ve spoiled the suspense. But if Charlotte Buchanan is anything like her old man, she won’t be particularly impressed with pessimistic palaver about litigation difficulties. If there’s a colorably legitimate claim there, someone’s going to get paid to try proving it, however futile that might be—and the someone might as well be us.”
“When I say hard to prove I’m not just talking about the rules of evidence,” Rep said as he soaped his hands under running tap water. “The movie bus
iness has its own rules. One thing the memo doesn’t spell out, for example, is the delicate matter of where Point West’s money comes from.”
“And where’s that?”
“I don’t know. But about ten percent of the financing for Hollywood pictures in general comes from the traditional mob. Another five percent or so comes from drug lords south of the border. If we come up with a case that’s really good enough to scare Point West’s money men, we might wish we hadn’t.”
“I see,” Arundel said soberly. Macho M&A jocks weren’t supposed to get muscular inside information like this from intellectual property lightweights. “Well, maybe you can talk Ms. Buchanan out of chasing her broken dream, but I’ll be betting the other way. I’ll have Mary Jane Masterson come see you so you can get her started on the grunt work—just in case.”
“Isn’t she the second-year associate who complained that it was sex discrimination for partners to keep using metaphors like ‘put it on the numbers’ that come from male-dominated sports?”
“Yeah,” Arundel admitted, “but that was just because she thought she was about to get fired, which she wasn’t, though she probably should’ve been. She was building a file in case she had to gin up a wrongful termination claim.”
“Am I supposed to find that reassuring?”
“Yes. See, she’s already shot the sex discrimination arrow at somebody else. Besides, who’d believe you use sports metaphors? So even if her job insecurity resurfaces she can’t bellyache about you unless she can work herself into some protected class other than women. What’s she going to do—turn herself black?”
“I’ll look forward to your comments on the memo,” Rep said. “My personal opinion is that I hit it right across the seams.”
***
“The only difference between Oklahoma and Afghanistan is that Rodgers and Hammerstein never wrote a musical about Afghanistan,” Louise Krieg was telling Melissa rather dreamily in Krieg’s faculty office about the time Rep and Arundel walked out of the sixteenth-floor men’s room at their firm. “My only tenure-track offers were from Oklahoma State and Reed University here in Indianapolis, so that’s why I’m in Indiana. Want a hit?”
“Why not?” Melissa said. She accepted the deftly rolled joint from Krieg, sucked marijuana smoke into her lungs, held it for a five-count, then expelled it and handed the weed back.
“Does Reppert know you smoke marijuana?” Krieg asked.
“Yeah. I don’t rub his nose in it, but he knows.”
“But he doesn’t want to share it with you.”
“Not a Rep kind of thing,” Melissa said. “Not that he’s judgmental about my little naughty habit. He knows when I say I’m coming to see you on a Saturday that after we finish talking about my dissertation on Dorothy L. Sayers and your deconstructionist theory that Lord Peter Wimsey was really gay, we’re going to take some tokes. He always claims he has to go to the office anyway, so I won’t feel guilty about leaving him alone.”
“Well, that’s not too anal, I guess.”
“I think it’s kind of sweet, actually.”
“Of course,” Krieg added hastily. “I mean, I know Reppert is truly wonderful, once you get to know him.” (Melissa recognized this as a faint-praise dismissal of someone Krieg regarded as a stiff in a suit.) “I have to admit, though, there are times when I really wonder how you two got together in the first place. You’re almost from different planets.”
“We met when he was still in law school and I was working off a student-aid grant by putting in twelve hours a week with the library’s tech support department at Michigan. He was helping one of the professors develop a PowerPoint presentation, and it was turning into a very frustrating project.”
“That certainly sounds promising,” Krieg said with high-pitched irony behind a fragrant cloud.
“So on the seventeenth or eighteenth revision of the screens, I tried to lighten things up a little. I smiled winsomely at him and sort of half-sang, ‘Four weeks, you rehearse and rehearse.’ And he came back instantly with, ‘Three weeks, and it couldn’t be worse.’”
“Everyone has seen Kiss Me, Kate, though. And that’s from the opening number.”
“That occurred to me,” Melissa said. “I even tested that theory a bit. I kind of chanted, ‘And so I became, as befitted my delicate birth—’. And he warbled right back at me, ‘—the most casual bride of the murdering scum of the earth.’ No telling what key he was in, but he got the lyric right.”
“That’s impressive,” Krieg admitted. “There are a lot of people who’ve never seen Pippin.”
“Technically, that was from Man of La Mancha,” Melissa said. “Anyway, I clinched it. As long as we’d taken the game that far, I tried, ‘This is a guy that is gonna go further than anyone ever susPECTed.’ He answered, ‘Yesterday morning I wrote him a note that I’m sorry he wasn’t eLECTed.’ And there are a whole lot of people who’ve never even heard of Fiorello, much less seen it.”
“Your point. So because Reppert had an encyclopedic knowledge of American musical comedy you figured he was good in bed?”
“No, I figured he was gay. Which happened to appeal to me right then: a male friend I could go out with and talk to intelligently about things that didn’t include Michigan’s chances of beating Wisconsin, but who wouldn’t be fishing a greasy condom out of his wallet as we walked back to my room.”
“You mean this entire romance was a misunderstanding?”
“You could say that,” Melissa agreed. (The joint had gone back and forth a couple more times by now, and while Melissa wasn’t baked she had reached that mellow stage where you agree about anything except the existence of God.) “On our first date I found out that he was totally fascinated by me. And on our fourth date I found out he wasn’t gay.”
The little ping in the back of her head scarcely registered with her at the moment, but it signaled that Melissa would reproach herself for that crack tomorrow morning. That would sharpen her usual pot hangover—a vague feeling of sheepish disgust at succumbing once again to this juvenile habit she should have gotten past years ago. She didn’t think smoking marijuana was morally wrong, the way using heroin would’ve been. And she didn’t think it was unspeakably stupid, like smoking cigarettes. It was just so, so—inappropriate. For her.
It was fine for Krieg, Melissa thought. The campus area apartment where Krieg entertained casual lovers of both sexes smelled of brown rice and incense. Hundreds of paperbacks and hardcovers in three languages filled blocks-and-boards bookcases along its walls. Krieg wrote articles about things like deconstructing the vagina, taught gender-and classes (“Gender and the Male Honor Construct in Victorian Literature” was the current term’s offering), and in her spare time she got large checks from corporations for giving weekend seminars on diversity adaptation strategies. For Krieg marijuana was an integral part of a lifestyle as authentically bohemian as you could get in Indianapolis.
Melissa, though, didn’t eat brown rice unless gravy from her roast beef slopped onto Uncle Ben’s Converted. For her pot was a kind of nostalgic denial, like middle-aged CPAs dressing in tie-dyed t-shirts and cargo pants to go hear the Grateful Dead. For a few hours once every five or six weeks, she could pretend she wasn’t thirty-two with a house and a mortgage, looking into a church to join when she and Rep finally had kids, married to a partner (a very junior partner, admittedly) in an establishment law firm where casual Fridays mean you don’t wear a vest, a little ticked despite herself about how much they paid in taxes. She could halfway kid herself that she was really still a student at heart, twenty in her soul, with an untamed spirit and a universe of possibilities before her.
“Is Reppert working on something with Tavistock, by the way?” Krieg asked. “I was over there yesterday afternoon planning a seminar I’m doing for them and I thought I heard his name mentioned.”
“Is Tavistock really worrying about diversity adaptation?” Melissa asked, in order to evade Krieg’s que
stion. Melissa was feeling pretty good, but she wasn’t mellow enough to let slip any professional confidences that Rep shared with her.
“A little different angle,” Krieg explained. “Three years ago they decided to outsource their whole video presentation and AV department. ‘We’re in the chemical business, not the film business.’ That kind of brilliant executive thinking. They had me in to facilitate adaptation-to-change strategies. It was the latest thing for forward-looking corporate thinkers. Now they’ve decided to bring some of the audiovisual stuff back in-house.”
“So they need some more adaptation-to-change facilitation, except in the opposite direction?” Melissa asked.
“Bingo.”
“And they say women are slaves to fashion.”
“Hey, don’t turn your nose up at it,” Krieg admonished Melissa. “It keeps me in primo grass.”
***
“Do you need a legal pad?” Rep asked Mary Jane Masterson about forty-five minutes later.
“No,” she answered, flourishing her own. “I came here prepared to practice law.”
“Good. Then here’s a list of the three writers who got script credits for In Contemplation of Death. Copy it down. What I need you to find out is who their agents are and what other projects they’ve worked on in the last five years. Also whether they’ve been sued for plagiarism or had a Guild arbitration on any issue.”
“No RICO research?” Masterson asked.
“Uh, no,” Rep said, somewhat flustered by the off-the-wall query. “This is a copyright case. We’re a long way from worrying about claims under the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act.”
“It’s just that Chip Arundel is very knowledgeable in this area,” Masterson said. “He told me that about fifteen percent of movie financing comes from the mafia, and another ten percent from the Medellin cartel. He thought RICO might be one area you’d have me working on ”
“Facts first,” Rep said, “theories later.”
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