Service Dress Blues (17 page)

Chapter 23

Friday, April 10, 2009

At seven forty-five
A.M.
on the tenth of April, Rep began driving toward Appleburg, Wisconsin. Not quite ninety minutes later he exited Highway 41 about twenty miles south of the city and turned into the parking lot of the Sawlog Motel. Judging from the number of cars and semis parked next door in the gravel lot of Naughty But Nice, the purveyor of “adult playthings” was already doing a brisk business.

In the motel office a man with scattered skeins of hair only slightly grayer than his face looked up from an adding machine—
not
a calculator but a mechanical, tape-fed old-school adding machine—to turn incurious eyes toward Rep.

“I'd like a room.”

Rep had expected an argument about check-in times, but the man just nodded and reached up to put a five-by-seven card on the narrow counter above his desk. Rep scratched data hastily into blanks on the card and slid it back with his American Express card on top. The man raised scraggly gray eyebrows at Rep's credit card.

“Usually pay cash,” he muttered apologetically. For well over a minute he fussed in unpracticed clumsiness with multi-carbon charge receipts and a slide-rolling card-printer. Still without standing up he fetched a key—a literal key: brass, on a silver ring attached to an elongated green plastic diamond with 107 printed on it in white—and handed it to Rep. “Sixty-five dollars. Fifteen back if you check out in less than three hours.”

“I'll take you up on that.” Rep accepted the key with a vaguely queasy feeling that he was joining Harald Lindstrom in the dubious-adventures-in-cheap-motels club. He slipped it into the side pocket of his suit coat. He wasn't wearing an overcoat. The temperature was in the mid-forties, and he had learned during his first spring in Wisconsin that after winter officially ends only wimps wear overcoats for anything north of thirty-nine.

On the way to his room he passed a round-faced woman with Hispanic features, dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt but identifiable as a maid by a white apron and cap. She smiled shyly at him from behind the service cart she was pushing, but didn't hint that she saw anything unusual about someone checking in before nine-thirty in the morning. Entering his room and shrugging off his suit coat, Rep was pleasantly surprised to find a touchtone phone instead of the black Bakelite 'fifties-era rotary phone he had half expected. He consulted the itinerary for his Annapolis trip, where he'd written the telephone numbers he'd need.

He punched Veronica Gephardt's number into the motel phone first. He waited patiently through four rings and her message prompt and then spoke at the beep.

“Hi, this is Rep Pennyworth, Professor Pennyworth's husband. I understand the police are still looking for Laurel Wolf in connection with Ole Lindstrom's murder, and I've just gotten some information that I think might be helpful to her. I need to talk to her before I can go to the police with it, though, and I don't know how to reach her. It's a long shot, but I thought you might have a tribal contact that could get through to her and have her give me a call. I'm on the road today. I'll be staying at the Loews Hotel in Annapolis tonight. If you come up with someone, I'd really appreciate it if you‘d have him call me there. Here's the number.” He read the Loews telephone number from the itinerary and broke the connection.

He called Randy Halftoe and left the same message. When he called Gary Carlsen he varied the script slightly, dropping the reference to “tribal contacts” and replacing it with a generic hope that Carlsen would find some way to get in touch with Wolf.

He broke the connection for the third time and, with the receiver held pensively in his left hand, stared at the phone for about five seconds. Call Lena too? No, he decided. He wasn't going to contact Lena behind Kuchinski's back, and there was no way Kuchinski would fall for this scam even if Rep were willing to try it on him. He hung the phone up.

The look on the elderly proprietor's face when Rep returned the key three minutes later combined surprise and perhaps a hint of respect.

“Quick work,” he commented.

“Practice makes perfect.”

***

“Perfect,” Robert Yi Li said to Melissa in her office at two-thirty that afternoon. “It looks exactly right.”

“Please don't rub it in.” Melissa made a half turn to get an idea of how the hem of her academic gown swirled.

“If you taught at Oxford you'd have to wear that during Michaelmas Term.”

“I think it's only sub-fusc instead of the full cap and gown, and I think it's only the first day of the term. Oh, well, whatever. I feel like an idiot, but a promise is a promise.”

“Absolutely right. I trust that you've prepared diligently for the event.”

Through hooded eyes Melissa shot a sidelong glare at the university's general counsel.

“You be the judge,” she said. “The lead-off batter in the top half of the first inning singles, the second batter triples, the third doubles, the clean up hitter singles, the number five hitter triples, and the number-six hitter makes the first out on a pop-up to second. No men score in the inning. How is this possible?”

Li puzzled over the query for a few seconds, looking steadily and with undisguised suspicion at Melissa.

“It's not possible,” he said finally. “It's a trick question.”

“It's entirely possible,” Melissa said as she removed her cap and hood and began unfastening her gown, “if the game was played in the All American Girls Baseball League back in the 'forties.”

Instead of sputtering in indignation, Li grinned with delighted surprise.

“I'll have to pull that one on Assistant Dean Mignon in the Office of Inclusiveness Affairs. If he blows it, he'll be too embarrassed to send out any memos on sensitivity to diversity concerns for at least three weeks.”

***

At three-fifty
P.M.
, Rep landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and started on the odyssey that would eventually bring him into contact with a rental car. He wasn't looking forward to the drive that awaited him. Annapolis, Maryland was laid out not quite four-hundred years ago for the kind of horsepower that comes on four feet rather than four wheels. And if while creeping along its narrow, crowded streets you get State Circle and Church Circle mixed up, you can find yourself face to face with Chesapeake Bay without the slightest idea of how you got there.

But he couldn't rely on cabs. He thought he might be in a hurry when he left.

***

At four-thirty
P.M.
, the company duty officer for Sixth Company, Second Battalion, First Regiment at the United States Naval Academy looked over the twenty-seven plebes in the company who were standing at attention in front of him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have sea trials in a little over six weeks. Are we ready for sea trials?”

“Sir, no sir!” they shouted in unison.

“That is correct, plebes, we are
not
ready for sea trials. And I would not be counting on Friday night liberty until we are.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Tonight, however, will be an exception. Because all fish-eaters are directed to report to the Catholic chaplain at nineteen-hundred. He apparently wants to chew you out for not saying enough rosaries or some goddamn thing. So there will be no sea trials preparation for any plebe in sixth company this evening. Is that clear?”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Even you, Henderson?” The CDO strode over to a tall, rangy plebe, moving closer and closer until their noses were just short of touching.

“Sir, yes sir!”

“You understand that, even though you do eat fish, you are not a ‘fish-eater' for purposes of this directive because ‘fish-eater' is a jovially slang term for Roman Catholics and you are a Baptist—right, Henderson?”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“Very good.” The CDO returned to his original position. “Dismissed!”

***

At ten to five Rep checked into his room at the Loews Annapolis Hotel. His heart rate ratcheted up a couple of notches when he saw the red light on the room phone blinking. Leaving his TravelPro at the door, he hustled over to the phone to retrieve the message.

Messages—plural—as it turned out. A digitized voice apparently provided by the twin sister of the woman who vocalized the GPS on Kuchinski's Escalade informed him that two people had called him.

“Veronica Gephardt, returning your call,” the first recording said crisply. “I'm not sure what ‘tribal contacts' you think I have, but I certainly don't know anyone who could locate a fugitive. Please do
not
call me again.”

Not the first girl I've heard that from
, Rep thought with a mental shrug.
But why did she bother to call?
Without deleting that message he pushed the one-button to play the second. The sultry voice advised him that it had come in “at four-thirty
P.M.
from an unknown number.”

“This is Joseph Yellowfeather,” a gravelly voice that sounded as if it had a lot of years on it said. “You don't know me. I am Laurel Wolf's uncle. I am calling at three-thirty local time. I will call again on the hour and then on the half-hour if I don't reach you. That's white people's time, not Indian time.” Rep heard an ironic chuckle at the racial stereotype before the recording stopped.

He looked at his watch. Four-fifty-six. Yellowfeather's next call was due in four minutes. Rep took off his coat, undid his bow tie, and unbuttoned the collar button on his shirt. He retrieved his itinerary from one of the coat's inside pockets and opened it on the bed near the phone. He lifted his Travelpro to the bed, unzipped it, and began unpacking. He had gotten his socks put away when the phone rang. Pulse racing, he answered it.

“I don't know where Laurel is,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “But I may be able to communicate with her. In a sense—a sense that you may not understand, but that has its own truth.”

“Okay.”

The caller sighed—the eternal sigh of the enlightened at the uninitiated who always mistake their uninformed skepticism for wisdom.

“I have had a dream. If that sounds like savage superstition to you, that is something I cannot help.”

“I said okay. My wife is the smartest human being I know, and every Sunday she prays for faith to believe things that make dream-seeing seem like laboratory science. As long as I talk to Laurel Wolf, I don't care how it happens.”

“But you're a lawyer. If you find out where she is, you would have to tell the police.”

“Yes, I would. For that matter, I'd have to tell them if I were a plumber. I assume she won't tell me where she is if she doesn't want the police to know.”

“Calls can be traced. Even from mobile phones.”

“So I've heard, but I don't know how to do it and I won't be tracing any.”

“You're asking me to take your word for it.”

“I don't have any choice,” Rep said. “If you want an affidavit signed by the pope and notarized by the chief rabbi of New York, I'm out of luck.”

Seconds of silence crawled by. Rep resisted the temptation to ask Yellowfeather if he were still there.

“How long are you going to be at this number?” Yellowfeather finally asked.

Rep glanced at his watch and then put his left index finger carefully just below the sixth line of handwriting on his itinerary, where he had scrawled “Federal House Bar & Grille” during a conversation with Frank.

“I have to leave for an appointment in about ninety minutes. That will tie me up for an hour or so, maybe two. Then I'm going to a bar and grill called the Federal House to get a bite to eat. I should be back in the room by ten-thirty or eleven my time.”

“‘Federal Club'?”

“Federal House. ‘Federal House Bar and Grille.' It's a place down by the docks that a friend recommended. He said that anyone in downtown Annapolis could tell me how to find it.”

“You taking a client there or something?”

“No, my client meeting is tomorrow.”

“All right. I'll see what I can do.”

***

Around five-thirty central time—six-thirty in Annapolis—Melissa found her way into a small room deep within the bowels of Miller Park, garishly lit with flickering fluorescent beams that did their best to brighten walls of finished cinderblocks painted blue and gold. A blasée and effortlessly pretty blonde in gray sweat shorts and top and purple leg-warmers took a Miller Genuine Draft from a mini-refrigerator and tossed it across the room to a similarly clad and equally attractive colleague. Neither of them had seen nineteen yet, much less twenty-one.

“Want me to nuke a brat for you, as long as I'm over here?” the first asked.

“Not before I dance.”

A perky brunette in slacks and a blazer with the Milwaukee Brewers script M monogrammed on its breast pocket carefully did not notice this evidence of under-age drinking. She turned a very big smile toward Melissa.

“Okay!” she said. “Everybody's here! Do you all know each other?”

“Professor Pennyworth, good to see you again.” Tom Koehler, whom Melissa remembered from Ole's memorial service, stepped forward and shook her hand warmly. “Do you know Glen Watkins from Marquette and Denise Quaid from Alverno College?”

“We've never met,” Melissa admitted, shaking hands in turn with the other two academics.

“You
do
know each other!” the brunette in the blazer squealed. “Okay! First, thank you all for coming! We think this will be a great promotion!”

A smattering of murmured “you're welcomes” responded, but her verbal momentum carried her through them without a pause.

“Okay, this is, like,
really
simple, but listen carefully. We'll put you on in the middle of the first, second, and third innings. One question each inning. The questions will appear on the message board behind the center-field fence and will be announced over the p.a. system. They'll all be multiple choice except the tie-breaker. A, B, and C. You'll each have three paddles, one with each letter. You just hold up the paddle with the letter for your answer. And that's all there is to it! Any questions?”