Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “I know the judicial selection process is intensely political, but I hope your substantive qualifications helped a bit. I have your book on Trademark Office procedure on my shelf. That has to be one more book than most politicians have written.”

  “That’s one more book than most politicians have read,” Ken said. “Bruce, that scapegrace offspring I mentioned earlier eventually got a job on a senatorial staff. His first assignment was to compile a list of books his boss could mention when reporters asked him if he’d read anything recently.”

  “I never heard about that,” Gael said. “What books did he suggest?”

  “He came up with a couple of really short ones: Better Luck Next Time, Sergei: Great Soviet Defense Attorneys; and Twice a Week in Summer: Case Studies in British Nymphomania. He claims the guy never caught on.”

  When the entrées arrived, Rep figured that the time had come to move from polite charm to actual marketing. Ken Stewart helpfully made the transition for him. He casually mentioned solid IP work Rep had done for clients Ken had referred to him, and asked Rep about some of his other cases. This drew intrigued nods from Gael, who asked Rep for the new business card that showed contact information for both the Indianapolis office and the improvised space in Milwaukee.

  Without warning, however, just about the time the three of them asked for coffee instead of dessert, Rep’s meeting turned from a pitch into a beauty contest—that is, two lawyers going after the same client at the same time. Effecting this metamorphosis was a sixtyish man in a tuxedo (like Ken) instead of a suit (like Rep). Booming “Ken—what a stroke of luck!” from across the room, he bounded toward the table with the kind of confidence that comes from not being told no very often.

  “I had no idea you were in D.C.,” he said to Ken as he reached the table. “I’ll steal a minute of your time to save a game of phone-tag tomorrow.”

  “Don’t be rude, Jeremy,” Ken said. “People will think you went to Harvard.”

  “I did go to Harvard,” Jeremy said in a puzzled voice. “Oh, that’s your point. Good one.”

  “Thank you.”

  “One word,” he said then, holding up his left index finger as visual reinforcement of the promise. “Matt Cavendish told me you have a line on a potential new IP client, and asked me to remind you that the firm has a very good IP department itself. I told him you knew that, of course—”

  “I know that we have an IP department.”

  “Now, Ken, Matt’s work is first rate. He knows the field thoroughly.”

  “In that case his work should speak for itself and he’ll need no marketing help from me.”

  Jeremy frowned. A glimmer of disappointment spoiled his heretofore sunny smile.

  “Are you still upset over that silly remark he made years ago about you being the, uh, the—whatever it was?”

  “‘The decaying remnant of the shopworn WASP ascendancy,’” Ken said. “No, I was never upset about that, although the acronym is fifty percent inaccurate in my case.”

  Ken paused and sipped coffee to see if the bafflement on Jeremy’s face would clear. It didn’t.

  “Scots-Irish, not Anglo-Saxon,” Ken explained then. “We beat Anglo-Saxons up on the playground.”

  “Well, then,” Jeremy said, “if Matt has been guilty of some other indiscretion—”

  “Trying to steal billing credit for a client I brought into the firm isn’t an indiscretion. It’s a capital offense.”

  Jeremy leaned forward in an effort to introduce a man-to-man element into the conversation.

  “Ken, I’m the managing partner of the second biggest office in the firm. I have the entire firm’s welfare to think about—not just the egos of two partners. What would you do in my position?”

  “I’d bother some partner who has less than a million a year in billings,” Ken said. “Have a pleasant evening. And by all means, give my best to Matt.”

  It took Jeremy a full second to realize that he’d just been told to go to hell. It didn’t take Rep that long to be very glad that he’d given the Hayes eulogy Stewart had asked for, and to make a mental note never to cross Stewart the longest day he lived.

  Half an hour later Rep and Ken were standing on the sidewalk outside the Yale Club, waiting for Gael to rejoin them and for a valet to bring Ken’s Lincoln Navigator around. They moved a few feet down Connecticut Avenue to distance themselves from a patron just out of the Blue Note Jazz Club whose inability to flag a cab was producing increasingly audible frustration.

  “Don’t count your chickens yet,” Ken said to Rep, “but I think you’re in. You made the right noises at the right times. Five-to-one Gael is making a phone call from the cloak room.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it, Ken.”

  Gael came out and strolled in their direction. Rep noticed that she was re-stowing a cell phone in her purse.

  “Hey!” the jazz patron yelled, flapping his right arm as a cab whizzed by.

  “Not to show off,” Ken said, “but I can’t take this anymore.”

  Putting both pinkies into his mouth, he strode into the middle of Connecticut Avenue. A shrill, piercing screech blasted from his mouth. Two cabs going in opposite directions screeched to a halt a few feet from each other.

  “Thanks,” the patron blurted. Then, eyeing Ken’s tuxedo, he tendered two crisp dollars to him on his way to the nearer cab. With a smile and a mock forelock tug, Ken accepted the money.

  “Are you going to keep that?” Gael asked as the Navigator pulled up.

  “I’m not only going to keep it,” Ken said, “I’m going to include it on our tax return—or, as I like to call it, our opening offer to the government.”

  “I talked with Eddie Muser and he’d like to meet you,” Gael said to Rep as they climbed into the massive vehicle. “He tends to blow with the latest breeze, though. You might want to get in there as fast as you can.”

  “My flight tomorrow is at eleven and I pick up an hour flying west,” Rep said. “I’ll call him from the airport and see if I can set something up for late afternoon.”

  “I’ll go you one better than that,” Ken said. “I’m flying to Wisconsin on the Gulfstream at the crack of dawn to track down a client who’s up in Door County to fish. He has to sign some new trust instruments before his next quarterly estimated taxes are due. I’d back-date them but I’m already over my felony quota for this fiscal year. I can drop you off in Milwaukee on the way, and with any luck you can be chatting face to face with Mr. Muser before noon.”

  “What can I say?” Rep asked, grinning and shaking his head in wonder at his luck. “Let me know if there’s someone you need to have killed.”

  “Careful,” Ken said with a gentle laugh. “If Jeremy leans on me too hard, I might call that chit in someday.”

  Chapter 15

  “Bruce calls that my ego wall.”

  Rep glanced politely at the eight-by-ten and eleven-by-fourteen color photographs covering the Gulfstream’s port bulkhead: Stewart hammering a piton into rock on El Capitan; Stewart in a crash helmet behind the wheel of a Formula One race car; Stewart in dripping scuba gear on the stern of a cabin cruiser; Stewart on a snowboard catching air off a mogul; Stewart surfing into a curl off Malibu; Stewart hang-gliding; Stewart airborne on water skis; Stewart in chest-waders and knee-deep in rushing water, a fly rod describing an unmistakable casting arc over his head; Stewart rafting through boiling white rapids; Stewart sailboarding; a much younger Stewart in olive drab with an M-16 in his right hand, silver bars on his shoulders, and rice paddies behind him; Stewart with a Browning over-and-under double-barreled shotgun cradled in his left arm.

  “‘Ego wall’ seems harsh.”

  “He’s exactly wrong,” Stewart said. “It’s an insecurity wall. An insistent shout that I’m not just a member of the lucky sperm club.”

  “Well, I’d say you’ve laid that to rest, whatever it is.”

  “The phrase comes from
Mathew Thomas McCann—the ‘Matt’ who came up during my encounter with Jeremy at the club last night. I opened my firm’s Indianapolis office when I was a fourth-year associate.”

  “I’m surprised your firm needed an Indianapolis office,” Rep said.

  “The management committee was surprised too. I forced the issue, and they wanted to hang onto me. Always was a pushy little sonofabitch. Anyway, I came home to Indy, set up shop, played golf and tennis at the country club, passed out business cards, and sat at my desk waiting for the phone to ring.”

  “It must have rung quite a bit.”

  “It rang all right. In two years I had a comfortable little white shoe practice going. I was at a firm retreat, getting patted on the head and offered early partnership, when I overheard the lucky sperm club line from Matt.”

  “Envy is the defining sin of the mediocre,” Rep said.

  “So it is. Notwithstanding which, he was absolutely right. My family has had real money since before the Civil War. I went to prep school with rich people, college with rich people, and law school with rich people. They didn’t call the lawyers whose dads had been truck drivers or shop stewards because they’d never met them or heard of them. They called me.”

  “So you—what? Overcompensated?”

  “As a means to an end. I decided to get clients who didn’t already have me on their Christmas card lists. I found comfortable, affluent residential streets in Indianapolis, with BMWs or Corollas in the driveways. I figured that in one or two houses on each block I’d find people with two million dollars in the bank instead of eighty thousand. They needed sophisticated estate plans and inter vivos trusts as much as the swells in the gated mansions—but they had no idea that they needed them. I went after those people—and I got them.”

  “By mountain climbing and fly-fishing and duck hunting?”

  “Bingo. They lapped it up. It’s skeet-shooting in that last picture, by the way, not duck hunting. Hunting was one part of the testosterone pool where I refused to swim. I still remember Joseph Wood Crutch’s line from the fifties: ‘Destroy something man made and they call you a vandal; destroy something God made and they call you a sportsman.’”

  “Well, I hope Bruce gets his issues worked out,” Rep said.

  “He will,” Stewart answered confidently. “He’s only twenty-four. Gael says he’s knocking the felt off his antlers—looking for his own way to show he’s not just a member of the lucky sperm club.”

  I could take all the name-calling in the world if it went along with trappings like this. Rep settled back luxuriantly against a soft, leather headrest and idly swirled fresh orange juice in a real glass tumbler. No waiting in the security line at Reagan National Airport or Dulles. No taking his shoes off before the metal detector, or struggling to put them back on after it. He took out his Palm Pilot to check the name and telephone number of the guy he was supposed to call as early as he decently could.

  “Wait a minute,” Rep said suddenly. No taking his shoes off. “I just thought of something about Vance Hayes.”

  “What’s that?” Stewart asked, stabbing a paragraph on the sixth page of the Wall Street Journal with his index finger as he looked up.

  “The police report on the recovery of Hayes’ body said he had a shoehorn in the right-hand pocket of his sport coat. I just figured out why.”

  “I’ll bite. Why?”

  “He was planning on flying somewhere. It’s a savvy traveler kind of thing. If you fly commercially and you’re wearing dress shoes, it’s smart to carry your own shoehorn along with you so you can put your shoes back on properly after you’ve cleared security.”

  “I’m not very familiar with the airports in central Wisconsin,” Stewart said, “but I don’t know of any he’d have been going to at that time of night on a snowmobile and without any luggage.”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “Senior moment, maybe. All the time he spent with his good friends Jack and Daniel had to have destroyed some brain cells. And the diabetes depressed him. His doctor said if he didn’t change his drinking habits he’d die, and he said, ‘Never drinking is a lot like being dead.’”

  “I can see his point,” Rep said.

  “Why did the Hayes file suddenly spring to mind, by the way? Are you still re-writing that eulogy that you’ve tormented yourself about so much?”

  “Not exactly. It’s that odd series of coincidences I mentioned to you earlier. Instead of going quietly into the archives, my new client’s case keeps ramifying in unexpected ways.” Rep then brought Stewart up to date on developments since their phone call a couple of days before.

  “Extra effort is always a plus, but revisiting Vance Hayes seems above and beyond, even for a new client,” Stewart said.

  “I tend to obsess a bit over the past.”

  “Excessively rigorous toilet training, or is there a less prosaic reason?”

  Rep hesitated. He’d never told anyone but Melissa about this. In this warm, male-bonding milieu, though, especially after Stewart’s comments about his son and with the Gulfstream’s throbbing engines providing a soothing background drone, Rep felt a current of complicity running between himself and the older man.

  “My mother was arrested for murder when I was fifteen months old,” Rep said then. “During Vietnam she’d hooked up with a loser who planned on selling weapons grade fulminate of mercury to anti-war radicals. It turned out to be a sting. The dissidents were really Oklahoma highway patrolmen.”

  “Not a promising scenario.”

  “No. Gunfight in a rural parking lot, followed by a tire-squealing getaway leaving a dead cop behind. Texas Rangers gunned the loser down a couple of days later. By then he’d abandoned Mom for her own good. She hitched a ride with Dad during her escape, came back to Indiana with him, and had me while she was hiding in plain sight for two years. Arrest, imprisonment, and escape after eight years. That’s where the record stops.”

  “And you never saw her while she was in prison?”

  “The entire time I was growing up, no one told me about her,” Rep said. “I mean not one single thing—not even her name. It was as if she’d just been erased from history, like one of those guys purged in the Soviet Union. I had no memory of her, no record of her except an old photograph.”

  “My God. What a thing to grow up with.”

  “I didn’t find out what had happened until I tracked it down myself while I was in college. Even then, I wasn’t even sure whether she’d really escaped or just been killed by a guard who covered it up.”

  Rep stopped talking. If a Greek chorus had been present it would have been chanting, “And then? And then?” But the Gulfstream was short on Greek choruses, and Stewart was too savvy to ask such clumsy questions. If his mother had died, Rep would have said so. If he still didn’t know what had happened, he would have said that. Since he wasn’t saying, he must know. Which was why he’d just shut up. Friends don’t give friends guilty knowledge.

  Neither of them spoke for several seconds. The silence began to hang a bit heavy, and Rep cast about for something innocuous to fill it.

  “Speaking of coincidences, do you know what Hayes was working on only a couple of months before he died? Some collection-slash-commercial fraud case involving a defendant called Orlofsky Publications—which turns out to be a sister company of Cold Coast Productions. He took one deposition and the case settled the next day.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Stewart snorted. “Ohio company, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I set up the spendthrift trust for the little twit who ended up as chief operating officer of that outfit. Sammy Baldwin. He’s a broken twig on the end of the shortest branch of the Baldwin family tree. They wouldn’t let him anywhere near the family business, so he clipped a few coupons and bought himself a job at Orlofsky. If his lawyer called and said Hayes looked mean during the dep and Sammy was next on the witness list, Sammy probably told him to settle up
so he wouldn’t miss his flight to Gstaad.”

  “Why don’t my clients ever get to sue companies like that?”

  “Hayes was a good client,” Stewart said. “He paid his bills on time, and I wish he were still alive and paying them. As long as he had to die, though, I just wish he’d roast comfortably in hell instead of sneaking back to complicate lives here in the temporal realm.”

  “Amen,” Rep said as he set the Palm Pilot down. “I think I’ll use the restroom.”

  “Please,” Stewart joshed, “on a plane this expensive it’s the head.”

  ***

  “The idea of having a female hard-boiled private eye is provocative,” Melissa said to the multiply-pierced, ringlet-haired young man across the desk from her, “but it isn’t strictly speaking new.”

  “No sh— I mean, really?” the sophomore creative writing aspirant said, his eyes widening in disappointment. “Man. I’m thinking, like, man, Mike Hammer in drag, right? I’m like, no one has ever done that before, am I right?”

  “N is for Not Exactly.” Melissa stole a glance to see if he’d caught the allusion. He hadn’t. “Sue Grafton. You might also want to check out Sara Paretsky. Those two will do for a start.”

  The phone rang.

  “Oh,” the student said.

  “Why don’t you run this through the word processor again and see what happens?” she suggested gently as she answered the phone.

  “Hello,” Rep said, shouting a bit to be heard over engine noise in the background. “Is this a bad time?”

  “No, I’ve just finished a conference.” Melissa sketched a quick bye-bye wave in the student’s direction to emphasize the hint.

  “I need a favor,” Rep said. “Could you look up the number of whatever the biggest cab company in Milwaukee is? I’m going to be landing in a private plane at a secondary airport called Timmerman Field in a little over an hour, and I don’t think there’ll be a cab-stand there.”

  “Let’s see,” Melissa said. “This is the part where I say, ‘No darling, don’t be silly. I’ll just drop what I’m doing here at the university so that I can run out and pick you up myself.’ Right?”