Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “Translation,” Melissa said. “Her nomination would have been quietly withdrawn, and she would have continued in a prestigious job, earning six figures a year. More disappointment than tragedy, no?”

  “But she wanted to be a judge,” Stewart said with a kind of fervent wistfulness, as if this were an unanswerable rebuttal. “Wanted it with all her heart. God put her on this earth to be a federal judge. And so I wanted it for her, as fiercely as I’ve ever wanted anything.”

  Melissa remembered Rep’s description of the dinner he had shared with Ken and Gael Stewart in Washington: their comfortable banter, the total adoration for Gael that Rep had seen in Ken’s gaze. She recalled their passionate parting clinch in Oshkosh. And she remembered Gael’s bitter observations to Rep about how she’d had to claw her way by her fingernails into positions that lawyers with more glittering credentials expected as a matter of natural entitlement.

  You killed for love. A chivalric ideal from a medieval chanson of courtly romance. But instead of slaying dragons, you killed people—people who got in the way.

  “Why did Hayes pick Rep to give his eulogy?”

  “Oh, I did that,” Stewart said dismissively. “Hayes hadn’t even thought about dying, much less planned his funeral. I should’ve just done the eulogy myself, but I wouldn’t have had any excuse for not mentioning the case he’d gotten to the Supreme Court. I couldn’t possibly pretend not to have learned about it. I tabbed Rep precisely because of the grudge between them. I thought he’d go through the motions and then forget about it. I didn’t know about this ‘power of the past’ hang-up he had.”

  “So it was just cosmic bad luck that landed us in the middle of this.”

  “That existential wail applies to the whole thing. Pelham Dreyfus was a world-class dunderhead. Leopold used him as cat’s paw in a shakedown that Dreyfus thought was aimed at Hayes but in fact had targeted me. Two years later, Leopold decided to use him again, to try to leverage more cooperation out of Levitan. Dreyfus figured there was another payday in there somewhere—he just didn’t know where.”

  “So he tried to find out by stealing the deposition notes.”

  “Right. He didn’t have a prayer of figuring it out. All he managed to do was make Leopold think he had more information than he did.”

  “By that time, though, the Gael card was worthless. You had to pay off Leopold the first time around to keep him from cooperating with Hayes, because Hayes could have given the smear to opposition senators before the confirmation vote. You bought him off, got him out of the country—just as you recently did with Dreyfus—and hushed up the email by engineering a quick settlement of the lawsuit.”

  “No particular trick, that one. The precious idiot running Orlofsky Publications doesn’t know much, but he knows enough to do what I tell him.”

  “After Gael was confirmed, though,” Melissa said, “there was no way the MIA stuff was going to get her impeached. The smear would have kept her from getting on the bench, but it wasn’t going to get her thrown off.”

  “Exactly right,” Stewart said, as if this were just an amiable intellectual joust in a faculty lounge. “Because Levitan knew that, he asked himself why Leopold thought he could extort more money from me.”

  “That’s why Levitan contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Melissa said. “He wasn’t looking for some kind of political leverage on copyright legislation to use against Rep. He wanted to know if Vance Hayes had offered information about Gael to staff counsel.”

  “Right again. That could only mean that he thought Leopold’s extortion plans related to awkward questions about Hayes’ death.”

  “As they did,” Melissa guessed.

  “That was the Levitan/Leopold theory. The two of them decided that I had murdered Hayes.” Stewart paused and offered Melissa an intrigued and quizzical look. “Do you think I murdered Hayes, by the way?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Gentlemen are supposed to pretend to believe ladies who are lying through their teeth,” Stewart said, smiling gallantly, “but in your case I just can’t bring it off.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “No. He thought I was going to, but I didn’t.”

  “Then who did?”

  “No one. The police aren’t morons and they got it right. He died in an absurd accident. I mean, think about it. How could anyone arrange for him to ride a snowmobile onto a frozen lake and fall through the ice?”

  “And it was just a coincidence that it happened shortly before Gael’s confirmation hearings?”

  “Not at all. Hayes came to the resort to meet Leopold and have him sign an affidavit explaining the email and summarizing the Soldier for Hire smear. I found out about it, intercepted Leopold, and outbid Hayes. The Supreme Court had already agreed to hear the case, and Leopold knew that he wouldn’t have any trouble finding a competent lawyer to take it from there, just for the chance to appear in the Supreme Court. When Hayes arrived, he found a message from Leopold saying there’d been a change of plans and Leopold was headed to the Far East.”

  “Which Hayes didn’t take lying down,” Melissa said.

  “Hardly. The obvious way to get to East Asia from Wisconsin is to fly out of O’Hare in Chicago. Hayes bet that Leopold would take the non-obvious approach and fly out of Minneapolis. Hayes planned to drive through the night to Minneapolis, in the hope of intercepting Leopold at the airport there. If it turned out he’d bet wrong, he was prepared to fly to Hong Kong himself and try to meet Leopold when he eventually did come in.”

  “Zeal to make Captain Ahab blush,” Melissa said. “But how do you know what Hayes was thinking?”

  “He told me, while I was pleading with him not to ruin my wife.”

  “Pleading unsuccessfully, I take it.”

  “He was drunk, on power if not alcohol. He said that with or without a clinching affidavit from Leopold he was going to turn what he had over to a contact on the minority staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The only way I could save Gael’s reputation was to have her withdraw her name within twenty-four hours. Then he told me to get out of his room.”

  “But you didn’t kill him?” Melissa asked skeptically. “You just did an elegantly casual win-some-lose-some shrug and walked away?”

  “Of course not. Plan B was pretty desperate, but it wasn’t murder. I’d brought a bag of marbles along. I planned to drop them into his gas tank.”

  “What would that accomplish?”

  “It would make his gas gauge read artificially high and almost certainly clog up the tank as well. Hayes would be cruising along through northwest Wisconsin thinking he still had almost half a tank of gas or so, when all of a sudden his engine would stop. While Hayes was standing beside the interstate waiting for Triple-A, Leopold would be going on his merry way and I’d be grabbing all the documentation I could from Hayes’ room.”

  “Sounds brilliant,” Melissa said.

  “He moved much faster than I expected. I’d barely gotten his gas cap off when he came hustling across the parking lot at two a.m. in full mission-from-God mode. He spotted me, imputed homicidal intent, panicked, ran away, hopped the snowmobile, and took his last ride.”

  “That worked out very nicely for you, then, didn’t it?”

  “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”

  “Right. So who killed Levitan and took a shot at Rep?”

  “Leopold. Except he was taking a shot at me, not Rep. He thought I was cross about having to pay him off twice. He was right. He wanted to deter me from doing anything adventurous.”

  ***

  “Okay,” Kuchinski said as the Escalade lurched onto State Highway 16. “You wanna tell me what we’re in such a hurry about?”

  Rep explained his theory. This required four full minutes, and Kuchinski spent three-point-two of them looking at Rep with undisguised skepticism and a trace of alarm. Rep wondered for a moment if Kuchinski were going to turn the E
scalade around and head back to deer camp so that Rep could lie down with a cold compress on his brow.

  “You don’t look like you buy it,” Rep said.

  “I’ve heard more plausible stuff in Intake Court from guys wearing leg-irons. I think you’re crazier than hell. But we’re gonna play it safe. Sit tight, and this former crackmobile and I will get you there. We’ll be butt-sprung and cranky as a circuit judge on motion day, but we’ll get there.”

  ***

  “The reason you think I’m lying is that you love Rep enough to kill for him yourself if you had to,” Stewart told Melissa. “You assume I’ve done the same thing for Gael. I’ve read it in your eyes during this chat. You’ve decided that I’m a mortal threat to Rep—and if you had a gun right now you’d empty a clip into me in a heartbeat. You wouldn’t think twice about it.”

  “My eyes are my most flattering feature,” Melissa said demurely, “but your assessment is what the deconstructionists call ‘a strong misreading.’”

  “You’re kidding either me or yourself. As we used to say in ’Nam, I’ve had people mad at me with guns in their hands. I know what someone looks like when they’re ready to kill.”

  The chilling ring of uncomfortable truth resonated in Melissa’s soul. Would she kill him in cold blood to protect Rep? At first, her brain dismissed the idea. She couldn’t imagine killing anyone. But Stewart was right: he had more experience with human depravity than she did. On this arcane issue, he might indeed know her better than she knew herself.

  “Let’s say you didn’t kill anyone. Why are we having this conversation?”

  “Because this gifted-amateur poking around you and Rep have been doing needs to stop. Your probing won’t help the police get Leopold, but it will threaten the reputation of the only woman I’ve ever loved. I’ve come here and told you things I’ve never told anyone else, including Gael, for one reason and one reason only: to get a clear understanding that all of us are through muck-raking in this particular midden.”

  “Uncover relevant information and then suppress it? Sam Spade would be disappointed in me.”

  “You aren’t married to Sam Spade.”

  “That sounds a bit like a threat.”

  “I couldn’t be more shocked if you confused the sorbet intermezzo for dessert at a Skull and Bones reunion dinner,” Stewart said, smiling with patrician charm at the self-parody. “I’m asking for something very important to me, but I’m asking solely on the basis of friendship and mutual esteem. You and Rep should know better than most people that if you search for the truth, every once in a while you’re going to find it—and then you have to decide what to do about it. Sometimes the best course is to forget it. Oedipus ignored that sensible advice from Tiresias, and look where it got him.”

  The chilly insinuation in Stewart’s last sentence sent a nauseating ripple surging through Melissa’s gut. She needed to see his cards.

  “As André Malraux used to say condescendingly to Louise de Vilmorin when she popped off,” Melissa said, “‘Approfondissez. Developez.’”

  “Rep told me about his mother,” Stewart said, his tone suggesting regret at having to mention such unpleasantness. “Accomplice to a cop-killing, escaped from prison and all that. But he left out the payoff. He didn’t say that she’d died or that he’d tried to track her down and couldn’t. Those would have been natural things to say if they were true, but he didn’t say them, so they aren’t. That means his mother is alive and a fugitive from justice; that Rep knows she’s alive and knows where she is; and that he’s almost certainly guilty of harboring or aiding and abetting. But there’s no point in Rep’s mom going to prison or Rep himself being disbarred, is there?”

  “Got it,” Melissa said. “You’re not threatening us, you’re blackmailing us. How ironic.”

  Did Stewart plant Mom’s number along with the other raunchy contact data in Dreyfus’ studio when he helped him clean it out and get out of town? Did he plant the gun that killed Levitan at the same time? Or did Leopold do that? Because whoever did that also killed Levitan. But how could Stewart have planted that gun in Dreyfus’ studio BEFORE that same gun was used to take a shot at Rep? He couldn’t have planted it afterward, because Rep was with him from the time the shot was fired until after the police had searched Dreyfus’ studio. Am I going too fast here?

  “I’m trying to make you understand,” Stewart said. “Let me go at it in a different way, kind of off the wall. The second gulf war isn’t very well thought of among academics, am I right?”

  “The debate does tend to be rather one-sided,” Melissa confirmed.

  “We waged war on a country that, admittedly, had a cruelly tyrannical government based on a hateful ideology and that had committed many atrocities, but that hadn’t attacked us.”

  “That’s the consensus view on Iraq,” Melissa said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, you’re still talking about Iraq. My last comment was about what the United States did to Nazi Germany in World War II.”

  “Cute,” Melissa said, shaking her head and smiling in admiration at the rhetorical coup. “But what’s the point?”

  “That you can spin high-sounding abstractions any way you want to. What really matters in the end, though, are concrete facts. The concrete facts that happen to interest you and me are Rep’s and Gael’s secrets. They should both stay secret. Tiresias was right and Sam Spade was wrong. Oedipus was a good king, Rep’s a good lawyer, Gael’s a good judge. Why ruin them just because it was Mom in the sack all those years, or a girl-woman panicked in a gunfight, or a shyster drowned?”

  “Okay, I get it,” Melissa said with a trace of asperity. “Standing trial for murder would make you cranky, and being convicted could ruin your whole weekend. And if you’re unhappy, Rep and I are going to be unhappy.”

  “Take a cynical view if you like. Even if I had killed Hayes, what are the chances that the prosecuting attorney for Lickspittle County or wherever Lake Delton is would beat the lawyers I could afford to hire?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Slim to none. Exposure wouldn’t result in justice being done, even if I were guilty. But it would make you and Rep material witnesses. Discrediting material witnesses is part of every criminal lawyer’s job.”

  “That does lend a certain perspective to Sam Spade and justice for its own sake,” Melissa sighed, her shoulders slumping in resignation.

  “There’s a very straightforward way to put this together that avoids unpleasant consequences for everyone. Namely, Leopold did it.”

  “Leopold killed Hayes?”

  “Works for me,” Stewart said, “but the police will probably prefer, ‘Leopold killed Levitan, and who says anyone killed Hayes?’ Leopold will finger me, but as long as it’s just his word against mine I win the swearing contest.”

  “Why would Leopold kill Levitan?”

  “To reduce competition in the shakedown market and leave himself as the only one with salable information,” Stewart said. “The Levitan homicide will be cleared if a jury sees it that way and finds that Leopold killed him.”

  “Which, however, might not be the truth.”

  “Aren’t you academics always going on about how there is no ‘truth,’ that it’s all just perceptions conditioned by race, class, and gender?”

  “Many do take that view,” Melissa said. “Some of us, though, see a certain irony in treating the relativity of truth as an absolute.”

  “Even so, you’re not going to sacrifice your husband just to keep Roger Leopold out of prison.”

  “You’re right,” Melissa said with a defeated sigh. “Even if it means letting a scoundrel be convicted of the one crime he hasn’t committed. But I need to talk to Rep.”

  “I think you should. Don’t just talk to him, though. Guide him.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Do you know one of the big reasons I’ve sent Rep so much IP work over the years? Because I know he’s not going to steal
my clients’ other business for his own firm. He’s not cold blooded enough for the really predatory side of practicing law.”

  “And I am?”

  “Most definitely, Doctor Pennyworth. You can do what you have to do and wake up the next morning with your conscience under control.”

  “I guess we’ll find out for sure when I call Rep.”

  “Have him come here. We should talk to him together.”

  “Fine with me.” Melissa kept her tone flat, the voice of someone who hates herself for giving in. “The cabin is a dead zone for cell phones, but I can sometimes get a signal about two hundred yards up the road.”

  Melissa glanced at Stewart’s approving expression. It looked like she was better at lying through her teeth than he’d given her credit for being.

  She stood up and shuffled dispiritedly over to the pegs by the front door where the blaze orange coats hung. She pulled one on, glancing over her shoulder at Stewart, who had re-donned his white winter camouflage jacket and was crossing the room toward her computer.

  “I think I’ll erase and save over before I turn it off, in case someone wanders in while we’re out,” he said.

  “Whatever.”

  Melissa slumped against the door jamb, like a bored ingenue in a New Wave movie. She noticed that there was no car parked outside.

  Did Stewart really just want the genteel understanding he’d described, or was he looking for something a lot more permanent? How confident did she have to be that Stewart was going to kill her and Rep before she could justify a preemptive strike of her own? Stewart’s crack about the second gulf war echoed in her mind. How sure did you have to be about the risk of millions of Americans dying ghastly deaths before you went to war over it? Eighty percent? Sixty percent? She imagined President Bush grinning wickedly at her. Not so damned clear when you’re the one who has to make the decision, is it, professor?