Service Dress Blues (3 page)

“Lena needs a lawyer.”

“Yep.”

“I'll give them Walt's number and tell Walt they might be giving him a call.”

“How does a trademark lawyer end up being partners with a criminal lawyer?” Carlsen asked.

“Walt and I aren't partners. My partners are all back in Indianapolis. They said if I wanted to open an office in Milwaukee they'd want me to find some cheap space, and Walt had some.”

“If you had it goin' on in Indianapolis, why did you want to do an urban pioneer number in Milwaukee?” Carlsen asked. “No, wait, dumb question. Your bride got the gig at UWM and you wanted to back her up, right?”

“Got it in one.”

“You might share that little story with Lena if you get the chance. She'll like it—and if you want Ole's business it's not a bad idea to have Lena on your side. She goes upside his head every now and then, but anyone else who tries it better be ready to deal with Lena—and when that lady decides to bring it, you'd better have your A-game on.”

“Noted.”

“I know what you're thinking. You're thinking you've already got Ole's business. But Ole and Lena are political animals. Nothing is permanent. There are no guarantees. Everything is on the line every minute, and every question is a test.”

Rep unconsciously tapped the end of his red silk bow-tie and then smoothed the front of his royal blue shirt. He didn't do business casual, didn't really approve of it even though it had become endemic among lawyers under forty. He kept his charcoal hair cut barely long enough to part and comb across his head. He sometimes wore contacts but usually couldn't be bothered with them and often, like today, wore small, gold-rimmed glasses instead. He sensed that Carlsen had been trying to prod him into a little verbal joust, just for the exercise, but he hadn't risen to the bait. By now, avoiding conflict and confrontation was a habit as ingrained as the tie-touch he'd just done.

“I'm the one who checked you out, you know,” Carlsen said.

“I hope you liked what you found.”

“You know what I really loved? That trial-lawyer trading card thing you did. That was beautiful, dude.”

“I didn't come up with the idea. I just did the trademark and copyright work.”

“The idea goes nowhere without the intellectual property. Even I know that much. You got the licenses. How did you manage that? And how in the
world
did your client get people to pay ten bucks apiece for packs of fifty trading cards with trial lawyers instead of baseball players on them?”

“Same answer to both questions. Trial lawyers have very healthy egos. Tell one of them you're putting together a pack of America's greatest trial lawyers: Clarence Darrow, Max Steuer, Racehorse Haynes, Melvin Belli—and him. Does he want in? If so, just sign this piece of paper. And by the way, the cards are only ten bucks a pack if you place a minimum order of twelve—just in case you want to pass some out to your clients.”

“You kidding?” Carlsen squealed, smacking the steering wheel in elation. “They bit?”

“Eighty-thousand sets sold at last count.”

“I love that! I so love it! You got people to pay you for the privilege of giving you a license to use their name and likeness. That is prime stuff, man.”

“It's all in the small print.”

“You know what? You could be on the coast. I mean it. LA. You could be billing twenty-two-hundred hours a year at seven-hundred an hour. That's gotta be four times what you're making in Milwaukee.”

“Maybe.”
Certainly. Obviously
.

“Reason
I'm
still in Milwaukee,” Carlsen said, “is that you don't go to the coast to break in. D.C., same thing. You go there after you've already got the goods. You've got 'em, dude. And LA is a lot more exciting than Milwaukee.”

Rep felt the armor plating start to encase him, and he fought to keep from seeming chilly or unfriendly. He didn't remember it, but he knew that when he was fifteen months old three cops had come to the tract house where he lived and arrested his mother for felony murder. She was guilty. She hadn't pulled the trigger, but she'd driven the car the killer rode away in and for the law that was plenty. She'd gone to prison—the death penalty was on hiatus in the early 'seventies—and the official record said that she'd escaped. She had. He hadn't learned any of this until he was in college, he hadn't seen her again until his early thirties—and if the FBI happened to ask, he'd never seen her again, period, and had no idea she was out in LA, making a living off people who paid her to hit them and act out fantasies about childish punishments. Rep had decided sometime around his second year in law school, before he'd even confirmed that his mother was still alive and before he knew anything about the hairbrush-and-paddle stuff, that his mother's story was one-hundred percent of the excitement he needed for the rest of his life.

None of this, however, could he say to Carlsen. So he said something else.

“Let me ask you something. Suppose someone offered to sell you six-hundred extra waking hours every year. No catches, no deal with the devil, no drugs, no side-effects. Just fifty hours of discretionary time every month that you wouldn't otherwise have. How much would you pay for that?”

Carlsen looked at Rep, then turned his gaze back to the windshield and scanned the highway for fifteen thoughtful seconds.

“Heavy question, dude. I guess I'd pay a lot.”

“So would I,” Rep said. “I don't know how much. But I know it's more than I could net every year in LA.”

Chapter 4

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

“How about a Bud?” Ole Lindstrom called roughly five seconds after Carlsen brought Rep through the Lindstrom's back door and into their kitchen.

Rep almost said, “You bet, thanks.” His lips were actually forming the first syllable and he was a nanosecond away from reaching for the water-beaded can of Budweiser that Lindstrom pulled from a harvest gold refrigerator and held out to him. Then a glimpse of black and gold cans of Miller Genuine Draft in the refrigerator reminded him of Carlsen's every-question-is-a-test admonition. He nimbly switched verbal gears.

“Uh, sure, if that's what you're drinking. But personally, I'd rather have a beer.”

“Looks like you found one of the smart ones,” Lindstrom said to Carlsen, grinning with unalloyed delight at Rep's rejection of the non-Wisconsin brew. “Dig out some MGDs to bring back to the club room with us.”

While Carlsen foraged for the beer, Rep followed Lindstrom out of the kitchen through a cozy dining room and a slightly more capacious living room to an L-shaped hallway. The hall led to what had probably been called a rec room when the house was last listed for sale about forty years before. Rep didn't need the
GAYLORD NELSON DEMOCRATIC CLUB OF SYLVANUS COUNTY
sign over the door to tell him that Lindstrom's use for the room had nothing to do with recreation.

Carlsen was right about the pictures. Black-and-white eight-by-tens in cheap, black drugstore frames dotted all four walls, sharing the space with laminated newspaper headlines, handwritten letters on White House stationery, and a couple of autographed
Time
and
Newsweek
covers. The suits and haircuts on most of the men in the photos—they were almost all men—evoked the late 'fifties to the mid-'seventies. Some of the faces were mysteries to Rep, and he had to squint to make out signatures like “Bill Proxmire” and “Pat Lucey” beneath the friendly inscriptions. Just as Carlsen had predicted, though, Rep had no trouble recognizing many of them: Robert F. Kennedy, smiling and determined as he shook Lindstrom's hand over the scrawled words, “Thanks for the help with Wisconsin, Ole (Alaska too)!” John Kennedy's trademark charismatic grin highlighting the inscription, “Ole—we owe Wisconsin to you!” Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, all featuring messages that started with Lindstrom's first name.

Three televisions flickered along the near wall to Rep's left as they walked in, stashed on shelves above the wooden drawers and storage cabinets. One tuned to CNN, one to Fox News, and one to MS/NBC, they flashed their images and crawls in muted silence. In front of the intersecting wall, running down from a computer work station wedged into the far corner, sat two long folding tables placed end to end and crowded with computer printouts and bulging manila file folders. Lindstrom circled behind the tables and sank into a non-descript, brown tweed desk chair that might have been picked up cheap when a retiring small town lawyer sold off his office furniture.

A six-by-eight foot American flag spread across the wall behind Lindstrom. With its top almost brushing the quarter-round molding at the ceiling, it hung more than halfway to the floor. Raised calligraphy on a card beside the flag attested that it had flown over the United States Capitol on January 3, 1959. “Thanks Ole! Bill Egan” looped in triumphant letters across the card.

Hustling into the room behind them, Carlsen put a Miller Genuine Draft in front of Lindstrom and tossed another to Rep. He kept one for himself and plunked a spare next to a bulky Excel spreadsheet printed out on oversized paper. While he expertly popped the top on his can with one hand, Lindstrom gingerly fingered the substantial bandage still dominating the crown of his head with the other, brushing spiky bristles around it where hair cut by the surgeon last Saturday night had just begun to grow back. With a flick of the beer hand he invited Rep to sit in a Naughahyde armchair on the other side of the tables.

“What do you know about politics?” he asked then. “I don't mean policy-wonk stuff. I mean street-level, curbstone, retail politics?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. I won't have to flush a lot of nonsense out of your head before we get down to business.”

As a token of getting down to business, Rep pulled out a legal pad and balanced it on the triangle formed when he rested his left ankle on his right knee. After a sip from his beer he focused on Lindstrom.

“Did you compose the lyrics for that song that you want to copyright?” he asked.

“No, Lena did. Except for ‘plutocrat's decree.' That was my contribution. Everything else came from her. The copyright should be in her name.”

“Getting a formal copyright registered shouldn't be a problem in itself,” Rep said. “Unless someone else has already copyrighted something very similar. I can run that down in a hurry.”

“How?” Carlsen asked.

“By doing lawyer stuff,” Lindstrom said impatiently. “That's what we're paying him for. Here's what I want to know. Let's say we get the copyright and then someone in, say, Kansas City starts running our little ditty to support some reactionary troglodyte's campaign. What do you do about that?”

“Gary said you'd want to move fast, so we'd have templates of all the pleadings ready to go ahead of time. Five minutes after you get the information to me, I call a law school classmate in Kansas City and PDF the basic pleadings to him. He plugs in the details about the infringing conduct and heads off to the Clerk of Federal Court's office with a briefcase full of paper and a check for the filing fee. Best case, we're in court asking for a temporary restraining order before the next news cycle.”

“‘News cycle.' You
have
been talking to Gary, haven't you?”

“Guilty as charged. Fair warning, though. This kind of rapid-deployment stuff means spending a lot of money to get ready for something that might never happen. Is the risk of infringement really that great?”

“Only if the song works. If it doesn't catch on, no one will bother to rip it off. But if our tune is all over Youtube getting a thousand hits an hour within two days after we roll it out, every two-bit political hack from coast to coast will know it. Think about those lyrics for a minute. Change ‘plutocrat's' to ‘bureaucrat's' and ‘say' to ‘pray' and you convert Lena's stirring paean to progressive values into a reactionary anthem. If it generates the kind of buzz I'm hoping for in Wisconsin, the bad guys will have it on the air in three days in Ohio, Missouri, or Colorado. Voters don't like whining, but they don't like stealing more. You get a temporary restraining order against them the first time they try it and there won't be a second time.”

Rep settled back in his chair and took a deep breath. He pushed his wire-rims a couple of millimeters back up his nose. He glanced at the only words he'd scrawled so far on his legal pad: “Copyright/ Lena.” Then he looked back up at Lindstrom.

“This is about more than the song, isn't it?”

“You betcha, counselor.” Lindstrom took a long pull from his MGD and smacked the can back on the table with a tinny thump. “You said you know nothing about politics. Well, there's only one thing you really have to know to be an expert.”

“I'm listening,” Rep said, smiling gamely and spreading his arms to invite instruction.

“Most elections aren't won, they're lost. The other side screws up and you're standing there as the only alternative. You take office by default. Nixon in 'sixty-eight, Carter in 'seventy-six, Clinton in 'ninety-two, Bush-one in 'eighty-eight and Bush-two in 'oh-four. But every once in awhile, if the stars line up just right and everything works perfectly, you actually
win
an election. FDR in 'thirty-two, Reagan in 'eighty. When that happens, you don't just take
office
, you take
power
.”

“On the way up Gary called that a transformative election or a paradigm shift,” Rep said.

“I call it kicking Republican butt.” Lindstrom abruptly rocked forward, planted his right elbow on the table, and put the ball of his thumb against the first two fingertips on his right hand in what Rep called a ‘this
will
be on the test' gesture when Melissa did it. “I want to take an absolute political neophyte and steal a statewide office away from the Republicans in a purple state. I want to put a package together that will do that. Because if I pull that little trick off, I won't be a political fossil anymore. All I'll have to do is sit right here and wait for that phone to start ringing. I'll have a chance to play in the major leagues again. I'll be headed back to the show. That's what this is about.”

“Got it,” Rep said.

“I already have the package put together. Candidate, message, theme, hook. I've run the numbers, county by county. I've got the sound-bites. Gary has the web-site ready to go live. I've got the story-boards for the first round of TV commercials.”

“TV is key,” Carlsen interjected. “That's where political consultants make their real money. The campaign manager gets a cut of the media buy.”

“When lawyers do something like that they call it a conflict of interest,” Rep said.

“That's where three extra years in school gets you,” Carlsen said, grinning.

“The catch is the candidate,” Lindstrom said. “Veronica Gephardt is my girl, but I haven't closed the deal with her yet.”

“And even though you have the material for an irresistible pitch,” Rep said, “there's a risk that she won't have the stomach to make a run for elective office.”

“There's a risk that bothers me a lot more than that. Most Wisconsin politicians think I'm a relic from the age when men wore fedoras to work. The worry gnawing at my gut is that somewhere along the line someone will whisper to the candidate, ‘What do you need Ole for? Why not just take these dandy ideas and let some glossy, digital-savvy kid run your campaign?'”

“So you need to have the whole package protected: hook, theme, concept, storyboards, soundbites and so forth.”

“Right.”

Rep kept his expression carefully neutral. In his mind's eye, though, he saw a federal judge glaring down at him from the bench.
You ever heard of the First Amendment, counsel? Or did you cut class the day they covered that in law school?

“It's tricky but it might be doable,” he said after a thoughtful pause. “An idea for a novel or a movie is one thing. A political idea is, well, a political idea. That's what the First Amendment is all about. The trick will be to find a way to frame your concept not just as the ideas themselves but as particular, unique, and creative expressions of those ideas. How much of the package can you give me to take back to Milwaukee with me and review?”

“Enough.”

Reaching toward the floor, Lindstrom leaned so far over to this right that Rep feared the chair was going to tip over sideways. He picked up a thick, black vinyl binder bristling with multi-colored plastic tabs, laboriously righted himself, and tossed it on the table. Rep leaned forward to retrieve the tome. He flicked through it briefly.

“I can't promise to get back to you by the next news cycle on this,” he said, “but I think I can have some ideas for you by the middle of next week or so. Will that work?”

“It'll have to work,” Lindstrom said, shrugging. “Now, we also have a little criminal case going for us up here. Did Gary tell you about that?”

“Yes. The police seem to think that Lena conked you on the head.”

“Right. That kind of thing in your line at all?”

“No. I went into copyright and trademark law because I wasn't sure I could handle the excitement of trusts and estates. Criminal law isn't my cup of tea. But the best criminal lawyer I've ever seen in action is Walt Kuchinski, and his office is about forty feet from mine.”

Rep took out one of his cards and wrote Kuchinski's name and number on the back. He leaned forward to hand the card to Lindstrom.

“Maybe I'll give him a call,” Lindstrom said.

“Maybe
I'll
give him a call, since the idea is for him to be
my
lawyer,” a female voice said sharply from near the doorway.

Rep twisted around in his chair to see Lena Lindstrom striding in, carrying a platter laden with oatmeal-raisin cookies. She was wearing a mustard yellow chamois shirt and faded blue jeans, softened a bit by a candy-apple red apron with something embroidered on its breast in elaborate white script. Carlsen reached for the platter as she approached the gray folding chair where he'd perched, but with a curt, “Guests first,” she jerked it away from him and offered it to Rep.

Murmuring his thanks he took two cookies that were still warm. He noticed hand-painted rosemaling designs in vivid red, blue, and gold decorating the platter's edge. He found this reassuring. Like the apron, it was the kind of homey touch you wouldn't stumble over if you were advising, say, Karl Rove.

She set the platter on the front edge of the farther work table, where Ole and Carlsen could both reach it. Then she picked up the fourth beer, opened it, and parked herself on the corner of the same table. This allowed Rep to read the script embroidered on her apron:

WHEN IN DOUBT

GO NEGATIVE

Great
, Rep thought.
I'm not counseling Karl Rove, I'm advising Lucretia Borgia.

“You're right, of course, that you should call the lawyer,” Ole said. “When I said I'd call him I was referring to myself as your surrogate.”

“Right,” Lena said. “You and Bill Clinton ought to be competing for surrogate of the year.” She accompanied this with an almost but not quite winsome giggle that sent Miller Genuine Draft dribbling from the corner of her lips down her chin.