Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “I remember reading something about that in the New York Times a couple of years ago,” Melissa said. Just chatting, putting on the same act Washington was. No hurry. Not impatient about where this was going.

  “Point is, even though thirty-eights aren’t all that common anymore, we’ve had two shootings within a few days involving connected people, one of them fatal, and they were both with thirty-eights.”

  “Like the one there that you found in Dreyfus’ studio,” Rep said.

  “Maybe. If this were a TV show we’d magically have a ballistics test done already and we’d know. Here in the real world, it’s gonna take a few days. But while I wouldn’t bet my pension on this weapon matching up with the Levitan ballistics and the bullet fired at you this afternoon, I might take a flyer with a week’s pay. I’ll tell you why.”

  “Okay,” Melissa said.

  “There were no recoverable fingerprints on this gun. Nor on the bullets loaded in it. Nor the shell casings for the two bullets fired from it. What does that tell you?”

  “Pelham Dreyfus wiped the gun and the cartridges clean,” Rep said. “Or someone did. Not something you’d do with a weapon you have for home protection or target shooting. That gun was almost certainly used to commit at least one crime.”

  “Bingo. Which is why I was so anxious to see you.”

  “Here I am,” Rep said.

  “After you got shot at this afternoon, you called nine-one-one at four-forty-four p.m. How long after the shot was fired did you make that call?”

  “Couple of minutes, max,” Rep said. “I found a pay phone maybe eighty feet away and made the call.”

  “It couldn’t have been longer, could it?” Washington asked innocently. “Like maybe forty-five minutes or an hour? You know, like maybe it took a few minutes to make sure you weren’t hurt, and see if there were bad guys still in the area, and then call your wife? You know how time can really run away from you without you realizing it.”

  “No way,” Rep said. “Two minutes at the outside.”

  “Here’s what’s bothering me, then. When we found out Dreyfus had skipped, we sent out the usual bulletins. A TSA officer at O’Hare Airport in Chicago thinks he saw someone who fits our description of Dreyfus clear security in Terminal Five around six p.m.”

  “Terminal Five is where most international flights take off.”

  “Right. Now, the i.d. could be wrong. TSA officers see thousands of people a day. This guy was an ex-MP, though, and he sounds pretty sure. If Dreyfus was clearing O’Hare security at six o’clock, he would’ve had a helluva time taking a potshot at you and your buddy ninety miles away only eighty minutes before. It wouldn’t violate the laws of physics, but it would violate the laws of dealing with rush hour traffic in two cities.”

  “No way that happened,” Melissa said, shaking her head.

  “Right,” Rep agreed. “And if Dreyfus wasn’t the one who shot at Ken and me, maybe whoever did planted the gun at Dreyfus’ studio to try to pin Levitan’s murder on Dreyfus.”

  “That’s one theory, all right. And before I drop it, someone is going to have to explain to me how Dreyfus could have been careful enough to get his computer files and his negative files and the deposition transcript we know he got and almost every other incriminating thing out of his apartment, but leave a murder weapon behind.”

  “Almost every other incriminating thing?” Melissa asked.

  “He left a long list of raunchy phone numbers, including some to places overseas. But he cleaned out almost everything else except the gun. We didn’t even find those copies of Soldier for Hire magazine that Ms. Pennyworth had noticed.”

  “If Levitan’s murderer trying to frame Dreyfus is just one theory,” Melissa said, “I’d like to hear the other ones.”

  “What I meant by that was, let’s do this in baby steps,” Washington said. “For example: where’s Ken Stewart right about now?”

  “God willing and weather permitting,” Rep said, “he’s getting ready to sleep in his own bed in Indianapolis.”

  “You mean even with having to wait around to report the shooting this afternoon you still got him to Mitchell in time for his flight?”

  “No, I got him to O’Hare in time for a commuter flight from there.”

  “You just dropped everything on the spur of the moment at the end of a long day and made a hundred-eighty-mile round trip to and from O’Hare for this guy?” Washington demanded. “He must be a friend in a million.”

  “He is,” Rep said, after a reflective pause. “That’s exactly what he is.”

  Chapter 19

  The following Monday afternoon, in the twelfth-floor conference room of his firm’s Indianapolis headquarters, Rep briefed three young associates on the delights of the upcoming IP audit. Buried in the file cabinets of this new client and squirreled away in the hard drives of its computers, he explained, they would find little sacks of gold. With contagious fervor—at least he hoped it was contagious—he depicted the elation that awaited them when they stumbled over trademarks whose registrations would have to be renewed in twenty-three countries, royalty arrearages that could now be happily collected, and long-forgotten cross-licensing agreements screaming for synergistic exploitation.

  This would, he warned, seem a bit tedious at first. Rather tedious, in fact. Indeed, when you got right down to it, a dreary slog through a Serbonian bog. In the end though, he assured them, they would find their efforts amply rewarded—not, to be sure, in money, which would all go to Rep and his partners, but in the infinitely more precious coin of professional satisfaction. He promised to meet them at General Mitchell Field in Milwaukee Tuesday afternoon, whence they would drive to a very nice Ramada near the client’s exurban headquarters, away from the distractions of Milwaukee night life.

  He then went back to the well-appointed office that the firm still kept for him in Indianapolis. The official rationale for this redundant work-space was that Rep had to spend a day or two every two weeks here, touching base with longstanding clients. Less officially, the office symbolized the expectation that he would abandon the madcap Milwaukee adventure in less than a year and come back to Indianapolis for good.

  As he settled behind his desk this afternoon and listened to voice-mails, that unwelcome possibility seemed to recede. He had no trouble imagining the pleasant computations whirring through the heads of the partners who had made it a point to cross paths with him and greet him warmly. Three associates times eight hours per day times three days times an effective billing rate of maybe two hundred fifty dollars an hour—and that’s just for Phase One. Maybe this Milwaukee boondoggle could actually work.

  Thank you, Ken Stewart.

  “Hey, counselor,” Kuchinski’s voice said on the last voice-mail. “Just got a flash from a compadre down at the Safety Building. Ballistics did a quick and dirty check. It’s not the test they’ll use in court, but they’re pretty sure about the match. The bullet that killed Levitan and the one fired at you and Stewart both came from the gun they found in Dreyfus’ studio.”

  Rep was still thinking about that when the phone rang and he answered it.

  “I may need a copyright lawyer in the Midwest.” The voice was friendly but no-nonsense. “Someone recommended you.”

  Rep caught his breath. His mother knew that he’d call her Tuesday night. If she felt the need to call him—the riskiest thing she could possibly do—something major had to be behind it.

  “I see. What’s the nature of the problem?”

  “I got a report that someone is misappropriating my commercially valuable phone number,” Rep’s mother said.

  “Five-five-six-six-eight-five-four-nine-six-eight?” Rep asked, glancing at the caller i.d. box on his phone.

  “The numbers after the area code spell out ‘OTK-4YOU,’” the woman patiently explained. “‘OTK’ stands for ‘over-the-knee,’ which has a special significance for a certain market—you might call it my target a
udience.”

  “Right, right.” If I’d noticed THAT mnemonic aid, I wouldn’t have had to put the number in my Palm Pilot.

  “I just got a call from a Milwaukee police officer, who said he found the number in unsavory company.”

  “I can see why you’d be sensitive about that,” Rep said. “But first I’ll need to know who the adverse party is, so that I can check for conflicts.”

  “Roger Leopold.”

  “Definitely not a client. Is he in the same business you are?”

  “He was in a business related to mine for quite a while. One of his catalogues was called Cahiers du Sinema. With an S instead of a C. He also owned a gentlemen’s club in your neck of the woods called Hoosier Daddy.”

  “Got it. Would he have been interested in your number?”

  “I can’t imagine. He and I never did business with each other, and I heard that a couple of years ago he sold out and went into a different field. The people I talked to thought Leopold was offshore these days. Even so, the cops found that number with a search warrant after I started asking questions about Leopold, and I can’t help wondering if that’s just happenstance.”

  “Whom did he sell out to?” Rep asked.

  “Who do you usually sell out to in this business?”

  “And so he got out clean?”

  “He got out by the skin of his teeth. Had some legal problems right at the end. Local choir boys wanted to shut his Internet channel down, and you can’t survive these days doing just catalogue and retail. That made his buyers think maybe they should forget the whole thing. Problem was, Leopold had already spent a good chunk of the earnest money. And buyers like he had—let’s just say lawsuits aren’t their idea of conflict resolution. He managed to scrape through somehow, though.”

  “Sounds like a pretty bad dude,” Rep said.

  “That’s fair. Maybe a little too rough for a practice like yours, huh?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I just handled a problem a little like this for a client up in Milwaukee, involving someone named Pelham Dreyfus. He wasn’t any altar boy himself.”

  “Counselor,” Rep’s mother said, “mentioning Roger Leopold and Pelham Dreyfus in the same breath is like comparing Vlad the Impaler with a proctologist. I’m going to think about this and get back to you.”

  “Right. I’ll look forward to your call.”

  He frowned at the phone for several seconds after he hung up. Mom wasn’t mixed up with Leopold. Never had been. So far, so good. She had looked into Leopold as he’d asked her to do and dug up some useful data. Great. But what she’d found out had worried her, and she’d called to warn Rep. Okay, fair enough. That’s what moms are for, even if they work in a field where riding crops and leather paddles are a business expense.

  What bothered him, though, was that her number had been on the raunchy list found in Dreyfus’ studio and she had no explanation for that. Blaming Leopold was pure speculation, and calling it happenstance was way too convenient. So what did that leave? Whatever the answer, he could hardly go to Detective Washington with questions like these.

  Doubts unresolved and worries lingering, he returned the calls that needed a response yet this afternoon, launched himself from his chair, snatched his briefcase, and almost sprinted out of his office.

  “A taxi is waiting downstairs,” his secretary said as she handed a modest bundle to him. “Here are some faxes that came in this afternoon.”

  “Thanks.”

  Rep reached his gate twenty-five minutes before the originally scheduled boarding time, and discovered—naturally—that the flight was now running forty-five minutes late. Squirming uncomfortably into a chair in the departure lounge, he started reviewing the faxes his secretary had handed him on his way out the door. The first one was from Hayes’ former secretary.

  Hayes again. Just when Rep thought he had lifted himself and Melissa above the battle, Hayes’ clammy hand reached back from beyond the grave and pulled him right back into the middle of the fray. He desperately wanted to keep himself and Melissa off the casualty list without getting Mom a one-way ticket back to the Oklahoma Women’s Correctional Facility in the process. The most sensible way to do that was to do nothing—stand aside and let the cops carry the ball. Hayes, though, was the orphan link, the one that didn’t logically connect to anything. If Hayes’ death were connected to Levitan’s death and Dreyfus’ disappearance, helping Washington understand that connection was one thing no one but Rep was likely to do.

  Unbidden images from Hayes’ burial jostled their way rudely back into his memory, along with the nagging thought that something about it was somehow off. Again he saw the modest crowd, the cars spattered from fender to wheel well with muddy slush and road salt, the sparse mourners treading uncertainly over sodden cedar chips covering the pathway through the cemetery’s spongy sod. Again he smelled the damp wool odor of the overcoats, the acrid smoke from a couple of furtive cigarettes. Again he heard the sharp report as the wind whipped the flag draping the casket—

  Scattered applause pulled him from his reverie. He glanced up in surprise. A handful of soldiers in desert camouflage uniforms were walking through the concourse. Six or seven of them, Indiana National Guardsmen probably, coming home from Iraq. Waiting passengers clapped for them as they passed, and Rep joined in. The soldiers seemed embarrassed by the attention. They didn’t acknowledge the tribute, didn’t smile or nod. Just walked on, staring self-consciously straight ahead.

  Rep was only thirty-four, but three of the soldiers seemed impossibly young to him. Barely out of high school. A couple of years before they could have been Junior ROTC cadets like the—

  Like the honor guard at Vance Hayes’ burial. Except that Vance Hayes had never worn a uniform. He’d never served in the military. He didn’t have a right to an honor guard or a flag-draped coffin. THAT’S what was wrong—the thing that had been bothering him, the anomaly that he couldn’t quite put his finger on because he just hadn’t cared enough to think it through carefully.

  Rep fumbled feverishly with the fax pile.

  “This is the Leopold order I mentioned,” a handwritten scrawl on the cover page said, just above Polly Allbright’s signature. “Your secretary called a while back to be sure she had the complete file because she said you’d asked for it. This wasn’t in it, so I thought I’d send it along.”

  He flipped over to the second page. At first he couldn’t believe what he saw. Literally could not believe it.

  The document was dated December 2, 2003. The heading read, “In the Supreme Court of the United States.” A legal caption identified the City of Cincinnati, Ohio as the plaintiff-respondent and Roger Leopold as the defendant-petitioner. In other words, Cincinnati had sued Leopold and so far Leopold had lost. Then came twenty words worth of polite, understated prose: “The Court issued the following order in your case today: The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted.”

  Granted!

  Rep didn’t bother reading the stuff about briefing schedules that followed. He double-checked the document’s date. No mistake. The very month he died, Vance Hayes had learned that he would be arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court. For ninety-nine percent of the lawyers in the United States—certainly including Hayes—that would be the highlight of their careers by several orders of magnitude. The legal equivalent of playing in the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Masters, and the NCAA Final Four rolled into one. A once in a lifetime opportunity.

  Rep dropped the magic piece of paper to his lap and stared in front of him. On one topic he no longer entertained the slightest doubt. He knew. Knew. Adult onset diabetes or not, there was no way Vance Hayes had consciously or subconsciously thrown his life away in some manic, death-defying stunt a few months before he’d be pleading Roger Leopold’s case to the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court.

  Rep vaulted from his seat and began hustling back toward the security checkpoint. He pulled out his cell
phone on the run, found Ken Stewart’s office number on his phone’s menu and hit SEND.

  “Ken, Rep,” he said after the voice-mail prompt. “Two things. First, I think Vance Hayes was murdered, which means one or both of us may be in more danger than we realize. Second, if you have the name and number of the guy in charge of arrangements for Hayes’ burial, that’ll save me having to track it down. There’s something I need to ask him.”

  He hit END and took a deep breath. Now he could call his secretary for later flight times. And call Melissa to tell her he’d be very late. And call the telephone number on the cover sheet of the fax he’d just read, hoping against hope that he’d reach Polly Allbright.

  ***

  Still a bit down about Rep’s call saying he’d be late, Melissa finished emailing a colleague at the Bowling Green University Center for the Study of American Popular Culture. Her email asked whether, stashed among the demo disks of one-hit wonder garage bands and the copy-edited manuscripts of first novels by authors who never had second novels, the Center might have some early back issues of a very niche-market magazine called Soldier for Hire. If so, would the colleague mind Xeroxing a representative issue from each year and sending the copies to Melissa with a modest (she hoped) bill?

  She was about to log off the Internet and go back to her paper when, impulsively, she decided to check one more thing. With a trio of clicks she Googled August 14, 2003, the date of the garbled email identified in Leopold’s deposition. Twenty-eight seconds and four mouse-clicks later she was looking at a picture of thousands of New Yorkers straggling on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge, deprived of subways and buses by a massive power failure that had blacked out the eastern third of the United States. Amid elections, hurricanes, wars, and rumors of wars in the two busy years since then, she had largely forgotten about that little headline.

  ***

  Eighty-seven minutes after Melissa began Googling, Rep started putting Redwell folders neatly back into banker’s boxes in Polly Allbright’s garage.