Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “So where’s that get us?” Topolewski asked.

  “Reppert said most of the calendar shots looked like candids with generic backdrops digitized in, but one or two were probably pros. Who would you look for if you wanted a model who wouldn’t pout about smoking?”

  “Leaners,” Marcinski said.

  “Leaners,” Topolewski said.

  “Leaners,” Skupnievich said.

  “What’s a leaner?” Melissa asked.

  “A leaner,” Topolewski explained, in a tone suggesting that he was about to dissect the intricacies of the Rule Against Perpetuities, “is an attractive young woman who gets paid to spend time in bars trying to interest young men in brands of cigarettes that they otherwise wouldn’t have on the end of a stick.”

  “Buck Bradley’s,” Kuchinski said, jabbing an index finger at Marcinski. “Major Goolsby’s,” with a finger-jab at Skupnievich. “Judge Jason Downer’s,” pointing at Markowski. “And Topper, you cover Brady Street.”

  “Move to adjourn,” Topolewski said as he stood up.

  “Second,” Marcinski said.

  “Carries by acclamation,” Markowski said.

  Thirty seconds later Rep, Melissa, and Kuchinski were alone at the table.

  “What a remarkable group,” Melissa said.

  “We met at the armed forces induction center at 6th and Wisconsin on June 26, 1968,” Kuchinski said. “A few months after the Tet offensive in ’Nam, draft going full bore. Pious ladies passed out rosaries to us as we went in. We’re all standing there inside, maybe forty of us, waiting to take one step forward and go into the Army. Then a gunnery sergeant with red stripes on olive drab instead of green on khaki comes out and gives us a pitch about joining the Marines instead of being drafted into the Army. Halls of Montezuma, Sands of Iwo Jima, all that stuff.”

  “In the era of Da Nang and the DMZ?” Rep asked. “Good luck.”

  “No one moved a muscle,” Kuchinski said, nodding. “The gunny goes away. Five minutes later he comes back out with a list in his hand: ‘The following inductees have the honor of entering the United States Marine Corps: Kuchinski; Topolewski; Marcinski; Markowski; and Skupnievich.’ Ended up doing fourteen months in-country together.”

  “During one of the roughest parts of the war, too,” Rep said. “That would’ve been, what, late sixty-eight to early ’seventy by the time you got through basic and advanced infantry training? Had fragging started by then? Enlisted men killing their own officers if they were too aggressive?”

  “There was some of that. We had one blowhard in our unit who told everyone he was gonna take care of Captain Titleman before Titleman got us all killed winning himself a medal. One night in a pleasure house near Da Nang, this guy’s blowing off in the bar and Titleman walks in. Instant silence. Now, you have to understand, no one has a weapon. There is no stricter gun control on the planet than at a U.S. military base. Officers may be dumb, but they ain’t crazy. So Titleman walks in and he has this little Cong pistol, things that were about a dime a dozen and untraceable.”

  “What happened?” Melissa couldn’t help asking.

  “Titleman takes a nice, long, slow look around. Then he says in this cracker accent right out of William Faulkner, ‘I’ve heard some scuttlebutt about threats to my physical well being. I don’t wanna seem yellow, but I am partial to my physical well being, so I don’t fancy walking back to base alone in the dark. I need someone to watch my back.’ Then he takes out the Cong pistol, hands it to the blowhard, and says, ‘Private, you walk ten feet behind me back to base, make sure I don’t encounter any inconveniences.’ He turns around and walks out, unarmed, with this pistol-packing bad-ass wannabe right behind him. And that was the end of that talk. I’ve never seen guts like that in my life, before or since.”

  “You all came back and went to law school?” Melissa asked.

  “Not all. Skupnievich sells insurance. He probably makes more than the rest of us put together. Topolewski and Markowski started out as prosecutors after Marquette, and Marcinski just hung out his shingle. I wasted three years at a mega-firm before I got the sense to go out on my own.”

  “Corporate law just didn’t take?” Rep guessed.

  “It was a personality problem,” Kuchinski said. “I had a personality, and they had a problem with it. They were always going, ‘Don’t wear brown shoes with a blue suit. Don’t wear a short-sleeved shirt with a vest. Don’t run barefoot through the law library.’ I mean, it was eight o’clock at night. It wasn’t like there were any partners there.”

  “I’ll bet if the guys running that firm had known about these buddies you have they’d have cut you some slack on the dress code,” said Melissa, who was blissfully unfamiliar with the mentalities at work in corporate law firms.

  “You might be onto something there.” Kuchinski saluted Melissa with a beer mug. “Our group may be a little rough around the edges, but if you need people who’ll jump into something with both feet you definitely want our business cards.”

  “That raises an interesting point,” Rep said. “For sheer strangeness, stealing notes of Roger Leopold’s deposition from Sue Key’s flat was off the charts. My idea of being galvanized into action was to track down the transcript and read it. But you made me feel like I was standing in cement. One good look at the file and you dropped everything, mobilized a SWAT team, and turned this little side-show into your top priority. That suggests more than casual curiosity.”

  “You got yourself a smart husband here, Doctor Pennyworth,” Kuchinski said.

  “He proved that the day he proposed.”

  Kuchinski fished a tin of small cigars and a lighter from his inside coat pocket. Opening the tin, he tendered it to Rep, who smilingly shook his head. Kuchinski swung the tin in Melissa’s direction.

  “Thanks, but I’d better say no,” Melissa said. “My experience with cigars is neither extensive nor discriminating, and I’m afraid the superb tobacco you’re offering would be wasted on my uneducated palate.”

  Kuchinski whistled quietly as he extracted a cigar for himself.

  “I’m in love, Reppert,” he said. “Don’t leave me alone with this woman.”

  “Point taken,” Rep said.

  Kuchinski bit off one end of the cigar, lit the stogie in leisurely fashion, and settled back contentedly.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “If you practice law you’re gonna see some weird things, but when Rep told me about the burglary the weirdness here seemed to be spinning out of control. The case where Vance Hayes used me as local counsel wasn’t the kind of thing you’d get on a plane for. Only way it made sense at all was for him to handle it locally on the cheap.”

  “But Hayes flew to Milwaukee to take Leopold’s deposition,” Rep pointed out. “And then the case settled in record time.”

  “Which made things more strange, not less,” Kuchinski said. “And Hayes taking his last bath in Lake Delton didn’t make me feel any better. But I couldn’t bill anybody for thinking about it, so I didn’t bother.”

  “Until Sue Key called you almost two years later out of a clear blue sky because Hayes bird-dogged you to her mother.”

  “Right,” Kuchinski said. “I dumped her nameless dog of a case on you and the next thing I know you’ve bluffed your way to a good result and our client has had her window broken.”

  “Conclusion,” Melissa offered. “Something’s going on.”

  “That’s the way it looks to me. I live here. People in the Courthouse and the Safety Building know me. Not all of them like me or trust me, but I’m a known quantity. That’s what turns the lights on in suite nine-oh-nine of the Germania Building every morning—well, every morning my hangover isn’t too bad. If something funny is going on and it has my fingerprints on it, I finally got it through my thick Polish skull that I’d better find out what it is.”

  The first three bars of Chopin’s “Valse Polonaise” punctuated this comment. Kuchinski took a cell phone
from a clip on his belt, raised his eyebrows in mute apology, and brought the phone to his ear. After listening for five seconds he mumbled, “Right.” He looked up at Rep and Melissa.

  “Live one at Buck Bradley’s,” he said.

  Chapter 8

  “She’s good,” Melissa said. “This is the first time since I was sixteen years old that I’ve wanted a cigarette.”

  The she in question stood winsomely at Buck Bradley’s polished oak bar, now and then rippling auburn curls coiffed to make her look about nineteen—though Melissa felt sure she’d never see twenty-five again. She sipped sparingly from something clear with a lime twist. Each time she took a drink she returned the tumbler to a spot beside a dark blue, flip-top cigarette pack.

  An extra little hair flick suggested that the woman sensed scrutiny. She picked up the pack with her right hand and drew a cigarette from it with the first two fingers of her left. She did this with the luxuriant languor of someone who wasn’t feeding a habit but anticipating a sophisticated, multi-textured pleasure so intense that she wanted to savor every morsel of the experience. Shifted the cigarette to her right hand. Rested her right arm on the bar, holding the unlit cigarette prominently, while with her left hand she rummaged in leisurely fashion through her purse. Searching for a lighter, presumably, but this inference would remain forever unverified. A young male with straw-colored hair in a surfer cut shuffled up to her and bashfully offered a light.

  She accepted, with a smile that outshone his by a megawatt or so. She raised the cigarette to her mouth, bowed her head slightly as she bent with hooded eyes toward the flame from his Ronson, and used her left hand to steady his right until between them they’d managed to ignite the tobacco. Still brushing his Ronson-hand with her left, she pulled the cigarette from her mouth in a sweeping motion of her right arm. She turned her head away from the guy long enough to blow a ladylike ribbon of smoke politely over her right shoulder, then immediately swiveled back to offer him a high-beam thank-you. As she did this she rested her right elbow on the bar, managing to draw attention simultaneously to the cigarette and her ample breasts.

  Kuchinski signaled unobtrusively to a waitress. Rep watched the conversation at the bar tread water for ninety seconds or so. The surfer agreed to try a cigarette from the leaner’s pack. He liked it, or at least pretended to. She fished a mini-pack from her purse and gave it to him. He seemed to realize that he’d been had, but he took the sample pack, smiled gamely, and went back to tell his buddies about the new brand in town.

  “What’s up, Walt?” the waitress asked.

  “Same again for everyone here,” Kuchinski said, “and tell Christina Ricci over there that if she’ll come talk to my friends when she’s ready for a break I’ll buy her a real drink.”

  “She’s ready about now, I’m guessing,” the waitress said.

  “Better get your butt over there then, hey?”

  “When was the last time you had beer spilled in your lap, cowboy?”

  “When was the last time you ate breakfast standing up?” Kuchinski asked just as jovially, but Melissa thought she saw a momentary glimmer of real fear in the waitress’ eyes as she scurried to relay Kuchinski’s message. Two minutes later the leaner strolled over to their table.

  “Debbie Cantwell,” she said, tossing mini-packs to each of them.

  “You’re pitching to the wrong demographic here,” Kuchinski told her.

  “I could tell that from the bar. If my supervisor walks in, though, you’re gonna have to fake it or this will be a short conversation.”

  “What’re you drinking?” Kuchinski asked.

  “Pinch, since you’re paying,” Cantwell said, sitting down. “It’s already on the way. What’s on your mind?”

  “We’re looking for a photographer,” Kuchinski said. “Guy who’s into women smoking, or at least makes pictures for people who are.”

  “Oh, God,” Cantwell said, pressing the heels of her hands to her temples. “You have no idea the memories that brings back.”

  “I wouldn’t think a photo shoot could be that bad,” Rep said.

  “Mine was a video,” Cantwell said. “They had me sit at a cocktail table in an evening gown and smoke. They had these extra-long cigarettes, and I had to light a new one anytime the one I was smoking burned down too far. By the time I got through I was a walking surgeon general’s report. Splitting headache, raw throat, sick to my stomach—I swore I’d never smoke again.”

  “You’ve sure gotten over that,” Kuchinski said.

  “Only when I’m getting paid. Or drinking. Or sometimes after a rich meal. Or, you know, when—”

  “Right, got it,” Kuchinski said. “Who was the cat doing the video?”

  “That was actually some flatlander, believe it or not.”

  “Chicagoan,” Kuchinski explained, noticing Rep’s baffled expression.

  “A Chicago studio had to come to Milwaukee to find pretty girls smoking cigarettes?” Rep asked incredulously.

  “They were going for a certain look,” Cantwell explained. “Fresh scrubbed, girl-next-door, nonthreatening—you know, Erin from Happy Days being naughty instead of Madonna relaxing after a three-way.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t take a gig like that on spec,” Kuchinski said. “How did they get your name?”

  Plunging her hand into her purse, Cantwell pulled out a Palm Pilot whose stylus and thumb-wheel she began energetically using. After well over a minute she paused, frowned thoughtfully, then gestured for a pen.

  “I’ve narrowed it down to three,” she said, as Kuchinski handed her an efficient-looking Parker. “One of these guys called me for a clothes-on calendar shoot with a smoking theme that I couldn’t do. I gave him a couple of referrals that worked out, so he tipped the video to me to say thanks.”

  Rep offered her a business card to write on, but she waved it off in favor of a cocktail napkin.

  “This may be a yuppie bar, but it’s still a bar, and I’m old school.”

  She passed the napkin to Kuchinski and, in almost the same motion, downed the rest of the scotch in one impressive swallow.

  “Thanks for the drink,” she said, rising. “Back to work.”

  “Well,” Kuchinski said as with painstaking concentration he studied her return to the bar, “we’ve got ourselves a start.”

  Chapter 9

  When the first tool-using homo sapiens finished sharpening the flint on his first spear and went out with his buddies to find a woolly mammoth to bring home for dinner, Melissa thought with some asperity as the Germania Building’s elevator carried her creakingly upward, his mate undoubtedly had to come running out of the cave after him grunting, “Honey, you forgot something!”

  “Hi,” she panted to Kristina Mueller as she reached the reception area for Kuchinski’s office. “Is my husband here?”

  “No,” the receptionist said. “He and the world’s greatest trial lawyer are out playing Paul Drake.”

  “Nuts,” Melissa said. “He has to drive to Wausau this afternoon to meet with a potential client tomorrow. The only shirt he packed has French cuffs, and he forgot his cufflinks.”

  “There’s the elevator,” Mueller said, cocking her ear toward the door. “Five to three that’s the two of them returning now.”

  Rep and Kuchinski strolled in a mere three minutes later.

  “These might come in handy,” Melissa said, handing a palm-sized velveteen box to her husband.

  “Oops,” Rep said.

  “Productive morning?” Melissa asked then, in the exaggeratedly patient, men-will-be-boys tone that wives learn early in successful marriages.

  “In an addition-by-subtraction sense,” Rep said, handing her his notes from last night’s napkin with two names and addresses crossed out.

  “How did you eliminate these two?”

  “Well,” Kuchinski said, “one is sixty-five years old and works in a wheelchair. The other weighs about three hundred fi
fty pounds. I can’t see either of them burglarizing Sue Key’s flat.”

  “Suppose one of the guys you saw had been twenty-four and in peak physical condition?” Melissa asked. “What would that have proven?”

  “Nothing,” Rep admitted. “It would have focused follow-up inquiries.”

  “Which I hope you’ll be entrusting to professionals,” Melissa said.

  “Pros like facts, and right now we don’t have many,” Kuchinski said. “Before we can delegate chores to anyone we need to come up with a couple.”

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t be flippant,” Melissa said, turning toward Rep. “The Sable is parked at a meter outside. Would you like me to just take a cab back to the apartment so that you can get on your way?”

  “That would actually be quite wonderful, if you really don’t mind. This morning’s little excursion took longer than I expected, and I’d like to reach Wausau before it gets too dark.”

  The phone rang. Mueller answered it and almost immediately handed it to Kuchinski. After a quick and agitated phone conversation he spun around and headed for the door.

  “Judge Pastor’s court, maybe for twenty minutes and maybe for the rest of the day,” he said to Mueller. “Some outta-town lawyer is trying to ambush my only corporate client with an ex parte restraining order motion, and Judge Pastor apparently needs some help kicking his butt.”

  “Wait,” Rep called. “My bag is still in your trunk.”

  After a quick kiss he hustled after Kuchinski. They had disappeared before Melissa noticed that she was still holding the note he’d shown her.

  “The great thing about being male in America,” Mueller said, shaking her head, “is that you never really have to grow up.”

  “Mmm,” Melissa said ambiguously.

  Two minutes before, she had been squirming to get on her way. Now, though, she lingered in the reception area, gazing thoughtfully at the door. Rep definitely had his boyish side. He could sit playing chess against the computer until fifteen minutes before it was time to leave for a party, then jump up, shave at the same time he was knotting his tie, and not see anything wrong with it. He could sink to the couch at eleven p.m. when True Grit or McClintock! was starting on TCM, knowing that he had to be up at seven the next morning, swearing that he was just going to watch the opening scenes, and then crawl into bed at one-thirty.