Service Dress Blues (15 page)

“Do you really suspect Gephardt of
crime passionel
?” Rep asked his wife.

“I don't know about that. After her reaction just now, though, I'd bet my nineteenth century edition of Emily Dickinson's poems that Gephardt and Ole had an intimate relationship.”

“But doesn't that tend to put Lena's neck in the metaphorical noose?”

“Not if Ole and Gephardt were mixing business with pleasure and stumbled into a conflict of interest in their professional relationship,” Kuchinski said. “Look at this.”

He turned his program to the inside of the back page and showed it to Rep:

Twelve names followed. Two were large law firms, one was a utility, one was an insurance company, four were major Milwaukee manufacturers, and three were foundations. The top name, however, was the one that caught his attention:
THE TORCH BEARERS (CHENEQUA GAMING ENTERPRISES, INC.)
.

“Okay, I see the connection,” Rep said. “But I thought the gambling issue Ole was ginning up was mainly smoke and mirrors. Even if the Torch Bearers' donation is indirect influence peddling, how do we get from there to Ole scalped and wrapped in the flag?”

“According to Huey Long, before he got shot back in the 'thirties,” Kuchinski said, “an honest man is one who, once he's been bought, stays bought. An organization with important political interests can't afford to be blown off by politicians who've supped at its table and drunk from its cup, so to speak. You're supposed to stay bought.”

“So the one you're fitting the noose for is Laurel Wolf.”

“Or Veronica Gephardt. I'm not particular—as long as it isn't my client. This is just a start, though. We're gonna need something a lot more substantial than a comely blush and Melissa's intuition to get the cops interested in Gephardt.”

Rep was still digesting that observation when they caught up with the back of the crowd halfway down the hallway outside the auditorium. The rear guard consisted of a young couple, apparently friends and colleagues rather than spouses or lovers. The male's dress and grooming screamed “graduate assistant” from his slightly overlong, sort-of-but-not-really unkempt hair to his scuffed-but-not-dirty Clarks walking shoes. The woman was only a bit less stereotypical.

“I didn't even know Jane Austen
used
snuff,” the woman said.

“I have
got
to see
Get Smart!
again,” the guy said.

Chapter 19

Monday, February 9, 2009

“Professor Pennyworth, what you're asking for is absolutely out of the question.”

“I know that it's highly irregular,” Melissa stammered.

Robert Yi Li, general counsel for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, picked up a miniature Lady Justice paperweight from his desk and thumped it decisively on top of a pile of agreements authorizing the use of the black-on-yellow UWM Panther logo on hooded sweatshirts. He fingered a lapis lazuli fountain pen in the upper right-hand pocket of his charcoal gray pinstriped vest. He grinned incongruously, apparently in grudging admiration of Melissa's sheer
chutzpah
.

“No, professor, your request is not ‘highly irregular.' Asking me to sodomize the chancellor in front of your class to illustrate some obscure passage in an e.e. cummings poem would be ‘highly irregular.' What you're asking for is outrageous by several orders of magnitude beyond that.”

“I wouldn't ask if it weren't extremely important.”

“So I assume. But it would have to be a matter of life-and-death—as in someone bleeding from two veins who can't get a tourniquet without these data—before I could even consider it.”

How about, my husband is a potential witness against people with a penchant for really short haircuts, and I can't expect the police to get interested unless I have something beyond subjective impressions?

No, she decided, she wouldn't say that. She bit her lip. She couldn't remember feeling this nonplussed before an authority figure since the last time she'd gotten a detention, when she was fifteen years old.

“Let me try to explain,” she said.

“Save your breath. There is nothing you could possibly offer me that would get me to go along with you on this. You can't bribe me because I have all the money I want. You can't entice me with promises of sexual favors because infidelity is unthinkable to you, as that idiot physics professor found out last semester. And you can't threaten me with a false charge of sexual harassment because you have too much integrity. You just don't have any chips.”

Stress sometimes induced free association in Melissa, and so it did now.
Chips. Chipper. Chipper Jones. Atlanta Braves. Baseball.

Bingo.

“Mr. Li,” she said in the most shamelessly winsome voice she could manage, “have you found anyone yet to represent UWM at the Milwaukee Brewers promotion?”

From all appearances, Li couldn't have been any more shocked if she'd flashed a breast at him. He snapped back in his chair, eyes wide and mouth gaping.

“Professor, that is the most cynically opportunistic bargaining ploy I've ever heard—and I went to Harvard Law School.”

“Well, one does what one must.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am, Mr. Li. Deeply ashamed indeed. I can scarcely imagine that such depravity lurks in my heart. But there it is.”

Li rocked forward now to a more normal sitting position. He reached for the pen again and this time pulled it out and uncapped it. He picked up a note pad near the front of the desk. He put it in front of him. He began writing on the pad, deliberately and in a rather elegant hand. As he wrote he spoke to Melissa while keeping his eyes fixed on the page.

“Within twenty-four hours, I will find out for you the total dollar amount of funding provided to the Wisconsin Policy Project over the last year by tribal gaming interests. Ditto the portion of total funding represented by tribal money. We will not, however, write that promise down here, as it's probably a felony and could get us both fired even if it isn't. We'll limit the written part of this contract to
your
promise.”

Picking the pad up with his left hand, he tendered it to Melissa. With some trepidation she took it and read what Li had drafted:

“This is admirably concise and free of jargon,” she said as she signed the document and returned it to him.

“Harvard Law students are taught to strive for pithiness and avoid technical language.”

He checked her signature before tearing the signed sheet off the pad, folding it carefully, and putting it in his lower right-hand vest pocket.

“Thank you,” Melissa said then, shaking the hand that he rose to offer.

He looked at her warily over the handshake, as if concerned about her next move.

“Couldn't you have just said no to the silly ass from the Physics Department?” he asked, almost plaintively. “Did you
have
to spill coffee in his lap?”

“It wasn't all that hot. I'll look forward to your call.”

Chapter 20

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

“Tribal $ to WPP FY08 = 140k = .3 of total $ funding,” Rep typed twenty-two hours and thirty-seven minutes later. He did this with his telephone receiver wedged between cheek and shoulder so that he could listen to a lawyer whose client wanted a trademark license from one of Rep's clients.

“Actually,” Rep said while repeatedly clicking
IGNORE ALL
on the Spell-Check box, “vertical minimum price-fixing agreements are
not
per se violations of the Sherman Act these days. Things have changed since 1919.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Entirely.” Rep verified Kuchinski's name on the
TO
line and clicked
CONFIDENTIAL
from a drop-down box.

“What about the
Colgate
doctrine?”

“Overruled.” Rep hit
SEND
.

“That's outrageous.”

“I completely agree. But the Supreme Court didn't consult me when it decided the
Leegin
case a couple of years back. Bottom line, minimum price points are a deal-breaker for us. My guy doesn't want to see his logo in Wal-Mart.”

“What was the name of that case?”

“
Leegin
.”

“I'll take a look at it and get back to you.”

“I'll wait to hear.”

Rep hung up. Eight seconds of vigorous massage had just about restored normal feeling to his left ear when the phone rang again. Rep brought the receiver to his right ear. He heard Kuchinski's voice.

“Thanks for the dope,” he said.

“Thank Melissa. She dug it up. I just translated it into legal-speak and passed it on.”

“Thirty percent of total funding is a big number. Gephardt was in a bet-your-job situation.”

“I smell motive.”

“So do I. I've got a call coming in from the lawyer for Mercantile Bank. Stay tuned.”

Kuchinski pushed a button that ended his call to Rep and connected him to Ronald LaPlace, Esq. Ronald LaPlace, Esq. was not happy.

“Don't tell me you're not behind this stunt. I know you are.”

“Depends on which stunt you're talking about,” Kuchinski said.

“I'm talking about every slacker with a video camera or a picture-phone skulking around inside Mercantile Bank taking pictures of goofs coming into the bank in Santa hats and Christmas sweaters like it's early December instead of the second week in February. When our guards politely suggest that they take a hike they start whining about the First Amendment and the guards have to explain that it doesn't apply to banks. It has gotten very annoying.”

“Nothing to do with me. The offer I put out is only for a picture that already exists and that was taken on the first Saturday in December, 2008.”

“And because nobody has any of those just lying around, you've got a bunch of people trying to fake pictures to sell to you—as you damn well know.”

“Don't worry your pretty little head about
that
, Ron. I appreciate your concern, but they're not gonna sneak a fraudulent photograph past Walt Kuchinski.”

“I am
not
worried about you,” LaPlace said, the exasperation in his tone unmistakable. “I'm worried about my client, whose customers and employees are getting freaked out by this low-rent street theater.”

“Well, Ron, I wanna be helpful. I really do. Tell you what. Get me that tape I asked for and I'll cancel the offer.”

“Suppose I threaten to sue you
and
file a complaint with the Board of Attorneys' Professional Responsibility instead?”

“You'll get your butt kicked and it won't solve your client's problem. If you get me the tape, you won't get your butt kicked and you will solve your client's problem. Your call.”

He hung up.

***

Instead of staying tuned to the Lindstrom case, Rep kept his mind firmly on trademark licenses until mid-afternoon. He had work to do for clients who, unlike Ole Lindstrom, were still able to pay for it. A little after two-thirty, he shifted his gaze from the screenful of print on the computer centered on his credenza to the hard copy of a draft license agreement folded over next to his computer. His client had scrawled “
METRIC!
” in the margin of the hard copy next to the best-efforts clause. The annotation did not refer to liters or centimeters. It meant that the client wanted an objective, numerical sales quota, not a vague aspiration to try hard.

Rep viewed “metric” as a mindless MBA buzz-word, but he could see his client's point. If the licensee was just going to sit there waiting for the phone to ring, then why bother with the hassle and cost of administering a license agreement? On the other hand, all Rep's client was providing was a world famous name. The real financial risk was on the licensee, who actually had a product and would surely be out there hustling to cover his own costs and maybe make a shekel or two himself. No one else had a product this good, so why risk scaring this guy off?

But “
METRIC!
” still sat there, staring at him. A bit irritably, he pulled a legal pad onto his lap, picked up a pencil, and started scribbling something with a number in it that wouldn't come across as too intimidating. After about five minutes—one-tenth of a billable hour, rounded up—he thought he had some language that might work. He tossed his pencil over his shoulder and got ready to plug his draft into the text.

He had just gotten his fingers on the keyboard when a dull thud behind him broke his concentration. Startled, he swiveled around. The far end of the bloody bookshelf had fallen. Improbably, his pencil had hit one of the DVDs, tipping it over along with the three next to it. That minor shift in weight—a matter of ounces—had apparently been enough to knock the sagging shelf off its brackets.

More curious than aggravated, Rep bounced from his chair and walked over to the bookcase. Squatting, he pulled the DVDs and tapes off the shelf. He lifted the fallen end. He had to pull two volumes of
Nims on Copyright
off of the shelf below the fallen one in order to find the two small shelf brackets.

Both were intact. Each had a tiny peg at one end that fit into the hole in the bookshelf and a flat piece at the other end to support the shelf. Rep frowned. At least one of the brackets had to be broken, right? Otherwise, why had the shelf fallen?

He went from the squat to his knees, bent his torso sideways, and peered at the bracket holes. On the near one, he saw a tiny speck of white wood at the bottom of the circle that the hole formed. A minute amount of the finished wood had been worn away to reveal the raw pine underneath. That sent him to the far hole. More white—two or three times as much as on the first hole. He probed the far hole with the spike on the cap of his Bic pen. He thought he could feel a tiny, v-shaped depression at the bottom. Now that he knew what to look for, he put his head as close as he could and examined the hole. No question about it: the depression was there, only millimeters deep but unmistakable, running from the outer rim of the hole to about halfway into it.

In a cartoon, a light bulb would have come on over his head. Overloading the shelf had forced the peg half of the rear shelf bracket against the bottom of the bracket hole, eating into the soft wood. Eventually, the bracket was just resting
in
the hole instead of being held
by
the hole. The pressure of the excess weight had finally forced it out. That put more weight on the front bracket, pulling it out as well and causing the shelf to fall. Even the minor vibration and slight change in pressure produced by the tap of the falling DVDs was enough to knock it out.

Lost in thought, he walked on automatic pilot back to his chair. The more thoroughly he thought this incident through, the more interesting the implications seemed. Before going back to the license agreement he was drafting, he called Kuchinski, who answered on the first ring.

“What's up?”

“I think you should set up a videotaped demonstration in the Lindstrom's club room.”

“That might take some time and effort. What do you have in mind?”

Rep told him. Kuchinski whistled thoughtfully.

“That's worth some time and effort, all right,” he said.

***

Ronald LaPlace, Esq., caved at four-thirty-two. Kuchinski downloaded the digital transmission of the surveillance tape at four-forty-five. At six-ten, Rep and Melissa were watching it with him.

Melissa, who had approached the exercise with considerable excitement, found the procession of grainy, gray images anti-climactic. Mercantile Bank's surveillance cameras focused on the tellers' windows and the ATM machines, where robbery attempts were most likely. What happened in the hallway outside the tellers' area was a sideshow, glimpsed only incidentally by one camera's lens. At irregular intervals one or two figures would flit by at the far right edge of the frame. In most cases she couldn't even tell what race or sex the figure was, much less pretend to identify a face.

“That's as good as it's gonna get, I'm afraid,” Kuchinski muttered. “This isn't
Law and Order
. I can't push some buttons and get three freeze-frame enlargements that end in a close-up of Ole Lindstrom's face.”

“Or Lena's,” Rep said. “Or Gephardt's, or Carlsen's. Or, I suppose, Halftoe's or Laurel Wolf's.”

“Wait!” Melissa said. “Stop the tape and back up!”

“What did you see?” Kuchinski asked as he obeyed her instruction.

“A uniform.” She pointed at the skittering screen. “Right there! Stop it and run it forward.”

Kuchinski did so. For six seconds they saw what looked like a man in a Naval officer's service dress blues—navy blue double-breasted coat and slacks, white shirt, navy blue tie, black-visored white hat—walking past the teller area. He carried an attaché case in his right hand. The tape began with a three-quarter frontal view of the man, diminishing to profile and then disappearing. His face—possibly even her face, Rep thought—was deeply shadowed under the visor and scarcely visible.

“I'm not even sure whether that's a man or a woman,” Rep said.

“Neither am I,” Melissa said. “All I can say for certain is that whoever it is, he—or she—is an imposter. The uniform is a disguise.”

“Why do you say that?” Rep asked.

“He's carrying the attaché case in his right hand.”

“Maybe he's left-handed. He carries the thing in his off-hand so that he can use the favored hand to open doors. That's what I do.”

“That's what I do too,” Melissa said, “but we aren't soldiers. Frank told me that midshipmen are all trained to carry bags in their left hands, whether they're right-handed or left-handed, so they can salute with their right hands if they meet a superior officer.”

“So whoever is in that picture isn't a random officer who happened to be visiting Mercantile Bank in Milwaukee the day after Harald Lindstrom got mugged,” Rep said.

“Nope,” Kuchinski agreed. “But at least we can stop saying ‘he or she.' That has to be a man.”

“I know you're setting me up, but I'll oblige,” Rep said. “Why?”

“Because I can't see a woman trying to pass herself off as ‘Harald Lindstrom.' And the reason Lindstrom got mugged was to steal his uniform and i.d. and pretend to be him.”

“Don't bet anything you couldn't stand to lose on that,” Melissa said. “The military i.d. would just say ‘H. Lindstrom,' and the photograph might well be none too sharp. I'd stick with ‘he or she' for the moment.”