Maybe Buchanan had been idiotic enough to leave fingerprints on the envelope or the note, or maybe she’d crack under police interrogation. But would the police even check Buchanan’s prints if Rep didn’t tip them off about his own suspicions? Fingering Buchanan wouldn’t exactly be a textbook example of savvy client relations. And even if the cops thought of Buchanan all by themselves, that would still open up the old Fortnum and Mason hairbrush can of worms, wouldn’t it?
Because the closest thing Rep had to evidence, when you got right down to it, was Buchanan’s effort to blackmail him. He couldn’t disclose that coherently without revealing the basis for the blackmail, which meant he would have to risk not only disbelief but exposure and ridicule. He’d blown his chance when he failed to walk away at the initial hint of a threat. Now he couldn’t tug at the first string on this explosive package without the whole thing blowing up in his face.
After thirty-eight seconds of uncomfortable reflection Rep went to the fourteenth floor lounge and buried the package in the back of the freezer. He salved his conscience slightly with the thought that he hadn’t yet actually destroyed the package, but he knew he was just delaying that inevitable step. This situation wasn’t going to get any clearer. If he didn’t have the guts to come clean now, he wasn’t going to find the necessary courage in three days or a week. He was suppressing evidence of a legal conflict of interest and, incidentally, a criminal act.
This was professionally unethical. It was legally wrong. And it was stupid, for the same reason that it was stupid for Cary Grant in North by Northwest to pull a knife out of a murdered diplomat’s back, hold it up in plain sight, and then stand there looking at it like a moron for six seconds in front of a roomful of witnesses. Except that Cary Grant at least had the excuse of acting impulsively, whereas Rep was acting deliberately and intentionally.
Wow, he thought as shambled back into his office. Unethical, illegal, and dumb. The hat trick.
***
That noon he got a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a half-pint of skim milk from a deli on Market Square and consumed them while sitting on the generous edge of the massive Civil War monument dominating that locale. It was on the third bite that, just for an instant, he thought he saw his mother walking up Commerce Street.
It wasn’t his mom, of course. His mother was—would have been?—fifty-two, and the data processor/keypuncher/file clerk striding back from lunch was in her early twenties. Rep’s subconscious hadn’t played this nasty little trick on his optic nerves for seven or eight years, and he couldn’t be sure what visual cues had triggered it. That raw-boned, first-generation-off-the-farm hardness in her expression, maybe. Or the slightly old-fashioned hairdo, vaguely evocative of Mary Tyler Moore being perky for Lou Grant. Or the aggressive, shove-it-if-you-don’t-like-it way she pulled on her cigarette and almost spat the smoke out, as if she couldn’t wait for the next throat-searing nicotine rush.
Rep was five the first time this had happened. Walking down Washington Avenue in Evansville on a Saturday afternoon, his sweaty paw securely clasped by his Aunt Rita, strolling past all the small town mom-and-pop stores that still had a few years to live before the death sentences decreed by malls and superstores would be executed. He’d seen a woman from behind, about thirty feet in front of them. Dark brown hair in a shag cut that was probably unfashionable by then even in Evansville.
“There she is!” Rep had shouted in a paroxysm of excited joy as he broke his aunt’s normally Houdini-proof grip. “There’s mommy!”
And he’d pelted down the sidewalk, yelling “Mommy!” at the top of his lungs, drawing stares from other pedestrians but, curiously, no reaction from the woman he was yelling at.
His aunt, even in high heels, had caught him just as he overtook the woman and rounded to look her in the face. He saw the woman’s startled glare just as his aunt grabbed his bicep and swung him off the ground. Before his feet hit pavement again he was already blubbering, not in anticipation of the physical punishment that he assumed would promptly sanction his insubordination, but in despair; for the woman’s face bore not the slightest resemblance to the features in the soft-focus, five-by-seven gold-framed print at the back of his father’s top dresser drawer.
The brisk, blistering swats that he feared hadn’t come. Breaking sharply with Hoosier conventions to which she ordinarily conformed, his aunt had instead gathered Rep’s sobbing, shaking frame into her arms, patting his back, stroking the hot tears from his cheek with the backs of her fingers, kissing his hair, and murmuring words of comfort along with the now superfluous assurance that, “That lady isn’t your mommy, dear.”
It happened sporadically after that, sometimes twice in a month and until late in his teens never less than once a year. It would always be a woman he saw from a distance, from behind. Always a woman with some incidental feature that reminded him of the head and shoulders and face inside that small gold frame. Even at ten or twelve, though more discreetly by then, he would walk away from a taco or a slice of mall pizza or a discussion of Larry Bird’s prowess and follow women, get fifteen feet or so ahead of them, turn to look at their faces—and then feel his guts shrivel.
He had realized by then that the photo would scarcely help him know what his mother looked like now. Still, he clung to the black-and-white image because that was all he had. Visual memory apparently didn’t work very efficiently when you were fifteen months old. At least his hadn’t. Fifteen months was Rep’s age the last time he’d seen his mother, and his own memory didn’t provide the first particle of recollection about her.
Or of much else. He didn’t remember the men or the strange woman coming to their home in 1971. He remembered a vague, undefined sense of something missing, but he couldn’t recall when he’d first begun to feel it. He remembered understanding, at three or so, that he was living with his aunt, and that this was different from the way his playmates lived. He remembered his father telling him, in between endless sales trips in the black Buick Electra station wagon with the faux wood trim, that his mother had had to go away and he wasn’t sure when she’d be able to come back.
And he remembered not knowing. What had happened? Where had his mother gone? Why? No one would tell him. They finessed his questions, stonewalled him, played dumb, until he’d finally stopped asking. The only thing he’d known—and he’d known this only because of delicate calligraphy on the back of that picture—was that on at least one day in her life his mother had been in Enid, Oklahoma.
In his mid-teens he’d entertained the traumatizing hypothesis that his mother had left his father for someone else. This was logically plausible but psychologically unsatisfactory, and he’d not only rejected it but punched out a chess club teammate (one of the few smaller than Rep, fortunately) who had dared to suggest that the theory might be tenable. The best he could do by way of alternative was a fantasy involving a secret mission to South Vietnam, which he didn’t really believe but had gotten him through some rough nights. He had taken this fantasy to the point of seriously considering—at five-seven and one hundred forty-four pounds—enlisting in the Marine Corps.
He had enrolled at the University of Oklahoma instead, to the consternation of relatives (his father was dead by then) who insisted that he could certainly have won admission to Indiana or Purdue. He had gotten the only two C’s he received in his entire academic career during his second semester at OU, because that was when he did the leg-work required to find out what had happened to his mother (most of it, luckily enough for his grade point average, having happened in Oklahoma).
Eight months before her marriage to his father, twelve months before Rep was born, and two-plus years before the men and the strange woman had come to the door, Jeannine Starkey had driven a sky blue, 1962 Ford Falcon onto the dusty, beaten earth parking lot of a dry goods store about forty-five miles from Stillwater. A man named Luck Daniels had gotten out of the car and walked over to a Chevy pickup truck to talk with two men about selling them milita
ry grade fulminate of mercury, which he understood they planned to use to stop the war in Vietnam and end capitalist exploitation of third-world countries by blowing up the ROTC building at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Negotiations had not gone smoothly, mainly because the ersatz radicals in the pickup truck were plainclothes members of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. When the Falcon peeled off less than a minute later with Daniels barely back inside, one of the cops was dead and one was wounded. Three minutes after that every law enforcement officer in five states was on the lookout for a sky blue Ford Falcon.
When Texas Rangers spotted it the next day, Starkey was no longer inside. She had gotten as far as a stand of scrub pine near the Texas border where, after four uncomfortable hours in a rancid, improvised sleeping bag, she had awakened to find herself alone with the Falcon gone and a note next to her. The note said, “Tell im yure kidnap’d. Blame me. Sory. Luck.”
There was an informal nationwide moratorium on death sentences in 1971 because the United States Supreme Court was getting ready to make the death penalty briefly unconstitutional. Luck Daniels was a cop-killer, though, so that was pretty much a technicality. The Rangers had fired sixteen shots at him and thirteen had hit him, partly because of superior marksmanship and partly because they’d pumped the last four into the dying man’s belly from three feet away.
Daniels’ bullet-riddled demise wasn’t the end of it by a long chalk, though. Not with a dead trooper and Starkey’s fingerprints all over the Falcon’s steering wheel and dashboard. Not to mention the note, which the precious idiot had left intact in the scrub pine when she’d hiked off in search of a ride to hitch.
She’d gotten her ride from a thirty-two year old traveling cleanser salesman named Thomas Reppert Pennyworth, who was very happy because he’d just been promoted to a territory in northern Kentucky near Indiana, where he had family. Whatever worldliness he possessed after more than ten years on the road had proven unequal to Starkey’s animal sexuality. It had taken Oklahoma two years and three months, but they’d tracked down Jeannine Pennyworth (as by then she was), convicted her of murder, and (Oklahoma being somewhat delicate about running twenty thousand volts through women even if the Supreme Court would have let it) sentenced her to life in prison.
And so Rep knew. Knowing, he understood the evasions and the stonewalling. He imputed to motives of noble self-sacrifice the passage of nearly two decades without so much as a pencil scratch from Jeannine to the boy she’d carried in her womb for nine months and then nursed for twelve and nurtured until the knock on her door.
Still, he’d had to find her. Had to see her real face, hear her actual voice. Had to bar forever those fraudulent teases from his pitiless subconscious. He had burrowed even deeper into the public records of the State of Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections, tracing in laconic, bureaucratic entries the course his mother’s life had followed from the moment she’d left an Oklahoma City courtroom in handcuffs and leg-irons.
She had gone to the Women’s Penitentiary in Norman. She had, over nine years, apparently done her best to violate every prison regulation she could, earning administrative punishment for everything from smoking without permission to insubordination to brawling. When not in disciplinary detention she had worked as a field hand, a laundress, and a highway maintenance crewmember. She had, somehow, sat still for enough classes (or maybe just been inherently smart enough) to earn her GED. She had applied for parole after seven years, which was denied after a parole board deliberation that had lasted about twelve seconds.
Then, after nine years of hard time, she had escaped. Walked away from a work detail and never been seen again by any Oklahoma civil servant conscientious enough to write it down.
Escaped? Rep had almost bleated when he’d found the entry. A cop killer (as far as the law was concerned)? A criminal not savvy enough to destroy the most incriminating piece of evidence against her walks off a work detail and disappears without a trace?
It could happen, he supposed. One of the things criminals learn in prison is how to be better criminals. No America’s Most Wanted in the first years of the eighties. Not many computers. In her early thirties, even after almost a decade in the slammer, maybe she’d still had enough sexual charisma to seduce a recent parolee or a guard or a dumb farm boy into risking his (or her) life for a thrill or two.
But Rep knew that there was another possibility. It happened, brother, oh you better believe it happened. Look up Cummins Prison Farm in the Readers Guide to Periodic Literature if you don’t believe it. Not from the twenties or the thirties, either, but the early sixties. Lip off once too often to the wrong guard. Catch that lead-weighted baton a little too hard or a few times too many in the wrong place. Die from internal bleeding or from having your brain turned to jelly and go into a quickly dug grave in one of the fields those field hands hoed, with Escaped covering the whole thing in the official records.
And so he still didn’t know. Not for sure. He understood, all right. Understood why he was the way he was, why he shunned drama and embraced dull, normal, regular, predictable, unthreatening routine. Understood why he’d spent most of his conscious life seeking the approval of aunts, teachers, den mothers, girl friends, Melissa, and most other females, especially if they were older than he was. He understood, but he didn’t know, and understanding made not knowing worse.
By the time he heard Steve Finneman’s voice, Rep had finished his sandwich but he hadn’t tasted a bite of it.
“This is an unusual culinary choice for you, isn’t it, Rep?” Finneman asked as he sat down next to him. “I thought you usually ate someplace where it’s air conditioned and you can get four different kinds of cheese with a six-dollar hamburger while you read the New York Review of Books.”
“Variety, I guess,” Rep said. “Wanted some sunshine, I suppose.”
Finneman was pushing seventy, and had bristly hairs in his ears and coke-bottle horn-rimmed glasses and veined hands and a mottled, well-seamed face to prove it. He was six-two and still carried enough bulk to remind Rep that he’d played tackle way back when for a school in one of those states where in fall you can see nothing but wheat from your tractor’s hood ornament to the horizon. Like the Japanese emperor under the shoguns, Finneman’s absolute authority over the firm depended on his never, or almost never, using it. The two main things Rep knew about him were that he’d won the only case the firm had ever gotten to the United States Supreme Court, and he regarded similes as the essential form of legal argument.
“How’s the plagiarism claim for Taylor Buchanan’s girl going?”
“Okay so far. Still pretty preliminary. Gathering facts.”
“Every case is different, of course,” Finneman mused, “but I generally like to have my facts pretty much gathered before I write a demand letter. Chip seems to think you’ve written one in this case.”
“It’s more a first-shot-across-the-bow letter,” Rep said. “Trying to open a dialogue. I sent him a copy. You too.”
“I can’t wait to read it. Charlotte was in the office late this morning to see one of the tax guys, and she was high as a kite, talking about how great that letter was.”
“I’m glad she’s pleased, but there’s a long way to go.”
“I thought there might be. Getting a client high as a kite when there’s still a long way to go can turn into a problem later on.”
“I take your point,” Rep said respectfully.
“Taylor said something about a trip you took with the girl to New York this week,” Finneman said.
“We both went to New York on the same day and had a meeting there,” Rep said, not sure why he should be defending himself after apparently satisfying the client. “We didn’t go together.”
“Well now, I’d call that a distinction worth noting. Here’s the thing, though. Chip isn’t the firm’s most secure lawyer, if you know what I mean. These M and A guys are like that. If we litigators lose a case, that j
ust means we make some more money appealing the judgment. But if those transactional boys have one or two deals they’ve been counting on crater, all of a sudden they’ve lost a client and eight hundred billable hours overnight.”
“Ah,” Rep said with vast relief as the light dawned. “I should’ve told Chip about the trip to New York before I took it. I’ll fill him in up front from now on.”
“I’m glad you thought of that, Rep,” Finneman said.
“There are some aspects of this case that might get a little delicate, depending on how things develop,” Rep said.
“Another good reason to have Chip in the loop.”
“There may be some things Chip won’t be able to help me with, and would rather not know.”
“I can see that,” Finneman said in a familiar, almost sleepy voice that told Rep he’d grasped the essential subtext of Rep’s comment. “In some cases you have issues come up that are kind of like this Civil War monument we’re sitting on. The reason some of those gents are carved in stone behind us is that they locked up the pro-slavery members of the Indiana Legislature before they could vote the wrong way. If the Union had lost, they’d have been carved in the flesh.”
“Words to live by,” Rep said.
***
Rep got back to his office a bit late, so he was surprised when the cheerful, recorded voice told him that there was only one message waiting on his voice-mail. He played it, hoping he’d hear from the inside counsel at Cremona Pizza.
“This is Aaron Eastman,” the message said instead. “I got your letter. First of all, thanks for not leaving a horse’s head in my bed. Second, I’m in the Midwest tomorrow scouting locations and props for my next movie. If you’re serious enough about this claim to blow off the whole day on practically no notice, meet me at the Air National Guard sector of the Indianapolis Airport at six-thirty in the morning.”
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