“Almost. I’m kind of hoping that you’ll also offer to bring a couple of Sausage McMuffins with you.”
“That was dangerously close to flippant, dear.”
“Well, I just left the airspace of Virginia, the Cavalier State.”
“I’ll do it because I owe you for not chewing me out over Pelham Dreyfus,” she said. “But I want you to know that you’re not fooling anyone—and you’ll be getting yogurt instead of McSausages.”
Chapter 16
“Have you heard anything about Detective Washington getting a search warrant for Dreyfus’ studio, based on your adventure there?” Rep asked Melissa about ninety minutes later as she drove the Sable away from Timmerman Field, toward the sun and downtown Milwaukee.
“Walt says that they’re still trying to get a statement from the court reporter in Chicago to verify that Dreyfus sent her the notes stolen from Sue Key’s apartment. Without that, he doesn’t think there’s enough of a link to Levitan’s murder for a warrant. I’ve been wondering if I should talk directly to Detective Washington about it myself.”
“That’s a thought-provoking comment.” Rep shot an appraising look at his wife. “Why do you say that?”
Melissa found this question awkward. She generally bet against coincidence, and Kuchinski-coincidences were piling up at a dizzying pace. She didn’t feel comfortable sharing this opinion with Rep quite yet, though. It seemed harsh to imply that his best friend in Milwaukee—and the guy who’d rescued her from Dreyfus—might have his own unlovely agenda. She’d feel guilty about prevaricating, but she figured she could handle that.
“Well, it just doesn’t seem fair to dump so much of the burden on Walt in a case where he’s already done so much even though his real involvement is pretty tangential.”
“Done things like coming to the aid of a damsel in distress.”
“Things like that, yes,” Melissa said. “Although I think it’s ‘domina in distress’ if the rescuee no longer has her maidenhead.”
“That’s why your cumulative SATs beat mine by twelve points.”
“Only ten, dear.”
“Thank you.”
That was WAY too easy.
They had by now reached Capitol Drive, which would take them through what the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel bashfully calls “the near north side” of Milwaukee to the upper east side, where Rep could drop Melissa at UWM. The speed limit had dropped from forty-five to thirty and they had passed two Kentucky Fried Chickens and one Popeye’s before Rep spoke again.
“Suppose one of your colleagues was putting a conference together and he asked you who the leading Trollope scholar in the Midwest was. What would you say?”
“Harry Simpson at Washington University in St. Louis. Ask me a tough one.”
“Suppose this same colleague called an assistant professor in the English Department at, say, the University of Minnesota and asked the same question. What would that prof say?”
“Barring incompetence or professional jealousy I expect he’d say the same thing. It’s not a particularly close question.”
“Picking local counsel for an out-of-town case is like that,” Rep said. “You want someone who really knows all the judges and the clerks and the nooks and crannies of the system. So if I call one of my law school classmates in Milwaukee and ask for a recommendation, and Vance Hayes calls a completely different Milwaukee contact a few years later and asks for a recommendation, you wouldn’t be shocked to the soles of your shoes if they recommend the same guy.”
“Walt Kuchinski, for example.”
“Yes, Walt would be a highly pertinent example.”
“I take your point.”
“Right. It isn’t necessarily an unlikely and highly suspicious coincidence that Hayes and I independently stumbled over Walt. It doesn’t mean that Walt exploded into this case because he has his own secrets hidden somewhere in the murky depths of Hayes’ unsavory past.”
“I did mention that I got your point.”
“You did at that. Sorry.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Melissa said.
“Happens every once in awhile.”
“So when you said okay about ten minutes ago you realized that it was actually the coincidences that were bothering me—right?”
“Guilty,” Rep said. “They’ve been bothering me, too—and since your cumulative SATs were ten points higher than mine, you must have spotted the issue at least as soon as I did.”
“I don’t mean to be cross,” Melissa said as she smacked the dashboard in irritation, “but you could have just said that you’d seen through me. You didn’t have to trap me in a Socratic dialogue, like a law student who hadn’t thought the problem through.”
“No, I didn’t have to, exactly. It was entirely voluntary.”
Melissa double-parked outside Curtin Hall at UWM.
“One trip on a private jet and you’re verging on insufferable,” she said, raising a reproachful index finger. “Although perhaps I lost my temper a little quickly over it.”
“You piqued too soon, so to speak. To quote the smartest person I know, I just didn’t want you to think you were fooling anybody.”
“I had that one coming. See you sixish. Good luck with the prospective client.”
Chapter 17
“How did the client meeting go?” Melissa asked, her words on Rep’s cell phone muffled by the roar of traffic on I-43 South.
“I won ugly. The new general counsel and I didn’t click, but he figures he won’t get fired for listening to Gael Cunningham-Stewart. The engagement letter will go out first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Honey, that’s wonderful. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. How was your day?”
“Outstanding, actually,” Melissa said. “I had a student this afternoon who not only had tumbled to the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte lived at the same time as Jane Austen but wondered whether that curious fact might have had some impact on her writing.”
“Curiosity awakened. A pedagogical triumph.”
“Of the first order,” Melissa said, adding casually, “I did have a chat with Detective Washington. They’re talking to a judge about a warrant.”
“Just in case Walt was putting the wrong spin on things.”
“That’s one way to put it. Upset?”
“Nope. I married a clever girl and I knew what I was getting into. I should still make it by six, even with a stop at the office. I just crossed the Milwaukee County line.”
“’Til then, beloved.”
Rep disconnected and put the phone in the cup-holder. He sighed with contented relief. Pros are on the job. God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world. Practicing law was a lot more fun than playing cops-and-robbers with Kuchinski, and he suspected it was a lot healthier as well.
That’s when his phone beeped.
“Reppert,” MacKenzie Stewart’s voice said after Rep answered, “I feel like a perfect ninny.”
“Where are you?”
“At a strip mall coffee shop about a quarter-mile from the east gate to Timmerman Field. I had to caffeinate myself and walk off some frustration before my head exploded.”
“What happened?”
“My hideously expensive airplane got temperamental on the return trip from Door County, to start with,” Stewart said. “I decided not to risk flying all the way back to Indianapolis, so I had the pilot land here to look things over. We seem to have thrown a rod.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s quite bad, and it gets worse. My pilot thought he had a line on a replacement part somewhere in a place called Waukesha. He just called to say it’s the wrong part. My Gulfstream will be stuck here for a couple of days.”
“So you’ll be flying commercial back to Indianapolis?”
“I will if I can get to Milwaukee’s main airport within the next hour or so. Unfortunately, Veterans Taxi has promised me a cab
within ten minutes three times in the last half-hour and hasn’t delivered. I’m losing confidence in it.”
“Tell you what, I’ll bet I can get there in fifteen minutes,” Rep said. “And if I don’t get too mixed up on the freeways, I should be able to get you to General Mitchell Field with a few minutes to spare.”
“I hate to ask, but I would deeply appreciate it.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s the least I can do.”
“If you sense on your way over here that anything funny is going on, by the way,” Stewart said, “don’t take any chances. Just give me a call on my cell phone and I’ll make other arrangements. Staying overnight in Milwaukee wouldn’t be any tragedy, if it came to that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I hate to sound melodramatic, but the Gulfstream is too reliable to just throw a rod all of a sudden. We both know that Vance Hayes wasn’t any boy scout. Coming on top of the adventures that have befallen you and your lovely wife, I can’t help wondering whether he was mixed up with bad people who are afraid that we’re somehow about to kick over the wrong rock.”
“Well, I, for one, have stopped kicking,” Rep said. “But between now and the time I drop you at Billy Mitchell Field, I expect cops with radar guns will be a greater threat to me than thugs from Vance Hayes’ past.”
Milwaukee’s rush hour lasts about twenty minutes. At least on the west side, it’s easy even for a newcomer to find his way around. Rep didn’t have any trouble getting back to Timmerman Field and thence to the strip mall Stewart had described. He saw Stewart standing on the parking lot next to a FedEx drop box. He was speaking into what Rep assumed was a Dictaphone in his right hand while he waved his left arm at Rep. At his feet was a trial bag—not a subtly elegant briefcase like IP lawyers carry, but one of those massive, boxy, trial lawyer things that look like anvil salesmen’s sample cases.
The parking lot would have been about the right size if everyone in America drove Mini Coopers. As it was, Rep pulled his Sable as close to the storefronts as he could to make sure he cleared PVC pipes that jutted from the bed of a Dakota pickup truck angle-parked on the street side of the lot.
“You made good time,” Stewart said as he approached.
“No bad guys on the way,” Rep said. He turned the engine off and got out so that he could open the trunk for Stewart’s trial bag.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he turned toward the back of the car, Rep glimpsed Stewart’s smile twist suddenly into a shocked grimace.
“Reppert, look out!” Stewart shouted, dropping his trial bag and pointing emphatically with his right arm.
Before Rep could jerk his head very far in that direction, his surroundings pinwheeled kaleidoscopically around him as Stewart’s body thudded into his and slammed him into unforgiving concrete.
“What the hell?” he demanded, in eloquent incoherence.
“Stay down!” Stewart ordered. “We just got shot at!”
Stewart, sprawled on top of Rep, rolled onto the parking lot, shifted his weight to his hips, and hoisted his torso for a cautious look around.
“I don’t see him,” he said. “He must have driven off.” Stewart climbed laboriously to his feet and began brushing off his Marks and Spencer tweeds.
“What happened?”
“I saw a muzzle flash from a reddish sedan speeding by.”
“That’s incredible,” Rep said, abrasions smarting under his clothes as he stood up. He remembered Kuchinski thinking that a maroon sedan had followed him and Melissa on their escape from Dreyfus’ studio.
“Believe it,” Stewart said. He pointed to the driver’s side front window on the Sable, now starred with spidery cracks radiating from an ugly impact point near the middle. “I have a feeling I’m not going to make my flight.”
“I guess the next thing to do is call the police.” Rep reached for the Sable’s door handle so that he could retrieve his cell phone.
“You might want to use the pay phone around the corner, so you don’t disturb the car before the police look it over.”
“Right, absolutely right,” Rep muttered distractedly.
It took fifteen seconds to get through to someone on nine-one-one, and forty more for the dispatcher to satisfy herself that no one was bleeding or suffocating, which put this call low on her priority list. Rep needed another three minutes to find fifty cents in his pocket, dial Melissa’s number, and tell her not to worry but he probably wouldn’t be there by six after all and she might want to take a cab home. When he got back to the car Stewart was striding back from the direction of the FedEx drop-box.
“Hell of a note,” Stewart said, smiling mordantly. “To quote Justice Holmes, ‘What a loss to American jurisprudence if it had gotten us both.’”
A squad car got there nine minutes later, and a second three minutes after that. By the time the second arrived the first cop had verified that Rep and Stewart weren’t hurt and was getting their account of what had happened.
“Forgive the cliché,” Stewart said, “but it happened so fast. We were getting ready to stow my trial bag and get in the car, and all of sudden I saw a bright flash from the window of a car going by about two hundred feet away. We hit the deck, and by the time we got up the car was nowhere in sight.”
“Car,” the cop said. “Make, model, color, license?”
“Reddish,” Stewart said. “I think it was Japanese, but I couldn’t pin it down any farther than that. I don’t have a clue about the license plate.”
“How about you?” the cop asked, turning toward Rep.
“I didn’t see a thing,” Rep said, shaking his head. “It completely blindsided me.”
The second cop had been examining Rep’s Sable. Now he came over, cradling a lump of dark metal in the palm of his hand.
“What do you think of this?” he asked his colleague.
“Thirty-eight,” the first cop said without hesitation.
“Three fifty-seven maybe?” the second cop asked.
“Nah, too big. Even from two hundred feet off, a three fifty-seven with any powder grain count at all would have blown the whole window out.” He looked back at Stewart. “You sure that was a muzzle flash you saw?”
“I saw plenty of muzzle flashes in Vietnam,” Stewart said. “I know what muzzle flashes look like, and that was a muzzle flash.”
“Hey, this thing came out of a gun all right,” the second cop said. “You can see the striations just with the naked eye.”
“Oh, well, we’ll just skip ballistics then,” the first cop said. Smiling at Rep and Stewart, he cocked his head toward his colleague. “Polish cowboy.” He turned back to the other cop. “I know it came out of a gun. How else would it have gotten here? What I was thinking was maybe it came from a gun a lot farther off. We have drive-bys now and then in Milwaukee, but usually on the near north side, not way out here—and these two don’t look like guys in the middle of a turf war to me. I’m wondering if some Nimrod was out there plinking and really blew one.”
“I’ll leave that to you,” Stewart said. “Anything else from us?”
“Guess not,” the first cop said. “We’ll do a standard area check. You two can be on your way and wait for a call from the guys with gold shields.”
“Great,” Rep said numbly. “Oh, you might want to let Detective Latrobe Washington know about this right away. He’ll be interested.”
As understatements go, this one turned out to be world-class.
Chapter 18
“Where are you right now, honey?” Melissa asked Rep over his cell phone just before nine that night.
“I’m headed north on I-94, just passing the Allen Bradley clock. I should be home in ten minutes.”
“That’s good, because Detective Washington is here and is quite keen about talking to you. They finally got a warrant for Dreyfus’ studio.”
“And how is Mr. Dreyfus?” Rep asked, his pulse quickening.
“Ab
sent. He seems to have decamped hurriedly not too long before their visit. They did, however, find a handgun which I gather Detective Washington is anxious to show you.”
“What kind of handgun?”
“I’m a bit hopeless in that area, I’m afraid,” Melissa said. “It reminds me of the ‘Faster Than a Speeding Bullet!’ gun they used to fire at the beginning of the old Superman TV show in the fifties. A professor in a Post-War American Popular Culture course I took used it as an example of masculine modes of iconic discourse.”
“You mean you got college credit for watching television?”
“Well, there was a paper.”
Rep found his wife and Washington sitting over coffee cups in the apartment’s dining area at a sturdy wooden table brought from Indianapolis that Rep and Melissa were now provisionally using as an all-purpose work space. A steel-blue revolver with a brown, cross-hatched grip lay in a Baggie between them.
“You’re right,” Rep said, “it does look a lot like the Superman gun. Although the barrel on this one seems a bit longer, and I don’t remember a lanyard ring.”
“This is a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight caliber revolver,” Washington said. “When I was a kid, thirty-eights were the universal handgun in almost every cop show and gangster movie that came along.”
“That rings a bell,” Rep confirmed.
“Those shows were realistic, too,” Washington said, in a let’s-be-friends tone. Like they were shooting the bull in Rep’s den before the Packer game. “Thirty-eights were the standard urban police handgun for a long time. Smith and Wesson even had a higher-powered cartridge that it called ‘Thirty-eight Police Positive.’ Two -hundred-thirty grains of powder instead of one-eighty, or something like that.”
“You’re using the past tense a lot,” Melissa said.
“Thirty-eights have been out of style for quite a while. Most cops under forty these days are gonna pack a Glock automatic or a Browning nine millimeter parabellum.”
Putting Lipstick on a Pig Page 10
