Service Dress Blues (4 page)

“I'll get in touch with Walt on my way back to Milwaukee and tell him to expect your call.”

“Lemme ask you something,” Lena said. “Do a little polling. Do you think the government should discriminate on the basis of race in conferring economic privileges? I don't mean affirmative action. I mean should the government say, ‘Here's a way we'll let you make money, but only if you're the right color.”

“Is this a trick question? I'd say the answer is no. Is the government doing that?”

“Next time you're in Madison,” Ole said, leaning back in his chair, “ask for a license to open a casino. See what happens.”

“Casino gambling?” Rep asked. “You think you can make that a wedge issue?”

“It's all in how you spin it. You can't be in favor of expanding casino gambling, because then you get some of the Protestants mad at you. And you can't be in favor of restricting casino gambling, because then you get the rest of the Protestants and all of the Catholics mad at you.”

“Along with most of the atheists,” Lena said.

“But what you can do,” Ole went on, “is say that whatever the rules are, they ought to be the same for everybody. You shouldn't have one particular racial group—”

“Native Americans, for example,” Lena interjected.

“—allowed to make wampum hand over fist fleecing patsies while everybody else is shut out of the teepee.”

“Especially if they do it by pouring money into the Madison shakedown machine, otherwise known as the Wisconsin Legislature.”

“That's the hook you were talking about, I take it,” Rep said.

“It is.” Ole nodded his head in emphatic confirmation. “The key is getting out front on the issue and being pitch-perfect in the way you frame it. Then whichever position the other guy takes, he either makes somebody mad at him or everybody mad at him.”

The doorbell rang.

“I'll get it,” Ole said jovially to Lena as he levered himself up from his chair. “If it's your lawyer I'll call you.”

Lena laughed around a swig of beer and favored Ole's rump with an affectionate backhand as he walked past her.

“Is this Walt I'm gonna call any good?” Lena asked.

“He knows his way around a jury.”

“How long has he been at it?”

“He's been a trial lawyer for over thirty years, but he's technically been representing defendants for even longer than that. When he was in the Marines his buddies recognized his latent talents and they'd have him represent them in the informal disciplinary proceedings that they call ‘Captain's Masts' on board ship.”

“Did he now? Well, then, he might just do, I guess.”

A vigorous throat clearing announced Ole Lindstrom's reappearance in the doorway.

“Mr. Carlsen,” he announced with playful solemnity, “you have a caller. She's offering to give you a ride back to Milwaukee, if you can tear yourself away. Laurel something-or-other.”

“Laurel Wolf or Laurel Fox?”

“I'm not sure,” Ole teased. “I'll go ask her.”

“No!” Carlsen said as a look of sit-com panic flashed across his face. He leaped to his feet and sprinted for the door.

“Which one is it, really?” Lena asked after Carlsen had disappeared.

“The Native American, not the slut.”

“That would be Wolf.”

“Well we'd better get out to the living room and tell Gary that I'll take our lawyer back to wherever he parked his car in Appleburg so that Gary can accept the generous offer he's receiving.”

Without waiting for the others he set off on this mission. Rep and Lena followed him and reached the living room just as Carlsen, to his evident elation and vast relief, was getting the good news. Carlsen lifted a black-haired, sepia-skinned lass in wraparound sunglasses almost off her feet for a passionate kiss and then, with a quick wave to the Lindstroms and Rep, hurried off with her toward a Ford F150 pick-up truck parked at the curb.

“Lucky boy,” Ole said.

“Unlucky girl,” Lena said wistfully. “Old story, I guess.”

“I'll pull the truck down the driveway so you don't have to skate over too much ice to get to it,” Ole said.

He exited toward the dining room. Rep was about to step toward the front door when Lena brushed his arm. Puzzled, he looked over at her. She walked a few steps to a harpsichord—
not
a piano, he realized with some surprise, but a harpsichord with yellowed keys in distressed maple that looked like it was two-hundred years old—and idly fingered a photo album.

“You said your Walt friend used to be a Marine,” she said. “We have a sort of a military problem that may be a lot more important than that silly charge they're throwing at me.”

Rep looked at the album. On the cover, slipped in between the blue binding and the plastic sheathing over it, was a four-by-six print. It showed the breast of a dress white uniform tunic with a nametag embossed white on black over the left pocket. The name-tag read
LINDSTROM
12.

“That's our nephew, Harald,” she said quietly. “Closest thing we have to a son. He's a midshipman at the Naval Academy. Class of 2012.”

“Congratulations.”

“Ole and I called in every chit we had to help him, but he really made it on his own. He's real smart, and he's tough enough, I guess. He wants to be a Marine officer.”

“Has he gotten himself in some kind of scrape?”

“Looks like it.”

Most of the flint-hard, go-ahead-just-try-to-hurt-me tone had vanished from her voice, replaced by an aching hint of vulnerability. Rep, who had been wondering a few minutes ago whether he should write a condolence card to the Wisconsin Republican Party on the imminent loss of its testicles, now felt a surge of sympathy for her.

“What kind of trouble?”

“Not sure. Something last weekend. I don't know the whole story, but it wasn't just the usual drunken whoring or anything like that. Whatever it was, it caused a big stink. It could get him thrown out, I guess. Do you think your Walt could be any help with that?”

“I don't know. He'll tell you one way or the other, though, and he'll give it to you straight. And maybe there's something I can do.”

“I thought you said this kind of thing wasn't your line.”

“It isn't. But my wife's brother, Frank, is a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. He just finished a tour teaching at Annapolis. He's been rotated to another assignment now, but he may be able to pick up some useful information and give you at least some general advice about what to do next.”

“Well I'll tell you what,” Lena said, so fiercely that Rep had to resist an urge to back up. “If you and your friends can get our nephew out of this mess with a whole skin, I'll gladly do four or five years for conking Ole. I'm seventy-two years old and I've been to jail. More than once. I could do five years without changing my socks.”

Rep believed her.

Chapter 5

Melissa Seton Pennyworth's fingers hesitated over the keyboard of her desktop computer in the modest Curtin Hall office provided to her by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She sternly instructed her ego to repress the mischief that sparked her green-flecked brown eyes. She knew that her penchant for flippancy in bureaucratic communications, which was chancy enough for a junior faculty member when directed at assistant deans, could be downright reckless in emails to people with real authority—like UWM's general counsel, Robert Yi Li.

She took a deep breath. Then she began sketching a tentative response to Li's most recent email which (like every email he sent) was flagged
IMPORTANT
and had arrived with an irritating
beep!
when it reached her computer. Editing mentally as she typed, she made a determined effort to root out any hint of freshness or spontaneity in her writing and replace it with the plodding stodginess that would be called for by the Stylebook for Interdepartmental Memoranda if such a thing existed:

She read the piece through. She frowned. Parts of it seemed to lack the stultifying dullness that the occasion demanded. Each time she toyed with changing a phrase, though, a bit of sparkle seemed perversely to insinuate itself into the message somewhere else. She adjusted the collar of the yellow blouse she was wearing over a black turtleneck sweater and under a black v-neck sweater. (She had grown up in Kansas City, and not even four undergraduate years at the University of Michigan had prepared for Milwaukee winters.) No further inspiration reached her. The Muse of Serviceable Prose was apparently taking the afternoon off.

It would have to do. Shrugging, she hit
SEND
. She consoled herself with the thought that at least she had completed the most annoying task she would have to confront for the rest of the day.

Then her husband called.

“Where are you?” she asked, hearing the whine of tires over pavement as she answered the phone.

“Headed south on Highway Forty-one. Driving past the naughty book store this side of Fond du Lac. Maintaining speed and ignoring the exit.”

“How did things go in Loki? Did you get the copyright case?”

“Not only that, I might have gotten an attempted murder case for Walt.”

“Attempted murder? Who tried to kill whom?”

“Wife allegedly brained husband with skillet and he ended up in the hospital for a three-day nap. He allegedly clocked her one first but that was a good deal earlier, so the skillet-conking wasn't exactly in the heat of battle.”

“That would have been a pretty standard premise for a TV sit-com episode in the 'fifties,” Melissa said.

“It's a felony in Wisconsin.”

“I'm guessing alcohol was involved.”

“Safe bet. Do you know Veronica Gephardt, by the way?”

“Afraid not. Should I?”

“She's head of a study center affiliated with UWM. My new client would like to turn her into a politician—and I have a sneaking suspicion that he's going to ask you to help him do it.”

“Let me just check my job description,” Melissa said thoughtfully. “Let's see, that would be under ‘H.' ‘Hackwork comma Academic.' Yes, that's there. ‘Hackwork comma Bureaucratic.' Yep, that too. Hmm. Nope. ‘Hackwork comma Political' isn't here. So unless he wants her to run for Provost or Chancellor it doesn't look like I can help.”

“I'll take that as a maybe. By the way, am I going to get Melissatude for the rest of the day, or was that a one-shot deal?”

“Sorry, honey. Sarcasm is a fault that I should try harder to overcome. I just finished a note to a big shot in non-academic administration and I guess I hadn't quite gotten all the bitchiness out of my system.”

“The Lindstroms also have an issue that your brother Frank might help us with,” Rep said then. He described what he called the “drunken-plebe mess.”

“I have more sympathy with that one.”

“I thought you might. Wasn't Frank your favorite sibling growing up?”

“He was my most useful sibling, which may be the same thing. He's the one who told me that boys don't really think smoking is sexy, no matter what they say. More important, he taught me how to take a punch—and then he taught me how to throw one.”

“Both useful skills, with an important place in any self-respecting liberal arts curriculum. I've already called Walt about both issues, and unless I miss my guess the Lindstroms will be in touch with him before the day is out.”

“I'll send Frank an email this afternoon.”

“Thanks. I should be back by the usual time.”

Melissa hung up and turned back to her keyboard. She had just turned fifteen on the I-Day not quite twenty years ago when she and her parents came with Frank for his induction into the United States Naval Academy. From the time she was two or three she remembered looking up to him in near adoration, even when she was furious with him, thinking of him as almost superhuman. On that I-Day, though, he'd had a deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes and a nervous quiver in his limbs that left her shaken. He had stepped onto the Naval Academy grounds looking at eleven months of being a plebe—one of eleven-hundred-plus first-year midshipman whom three-thousand upper-classmen would treat as the lowest form of human life. Eleven months of screaming stripers, of rounding every indoor corner on a run, never sitting down outside, calisthenics at five
A.M.
, white-glove inspections, hazing, push-ups on any pretext or no pretext, dress parades, midnight watches, sleep deprivation, all on top of a grueling class schedule. And she remembered the gleam in his eye and the strut in his step in May of the following year, when he officially stopped being a plebe and became a Midshipman Third Class.

She had a soft spot for plebes.

She took considerably more time composing her email to Lieutenant Commander Francis X. Seton than she had on the missive to Robert Yi Li.

***

“The attempted murder rap is a trial lawyer's dream,” Walt Kuchinski told Rep not quite three hours later as they were walking through the chilly evening to a parking ramp where the Germania Building reserved spaces for its tenants. “The cops caught Lena with the blood literally dripping from her hands. Well, not literally. But holding the murder weapon and standing over the body, which is close enough. And I think I might get her off. She could actually walk.”

“By pointing to an unknown intruder who didn't take anything or leave any fingerprints?”

“Don't sound so skeptical. Lena tells me their driveway is lousy with partial bootmarks. Who knows whose they are or how long they've been there?”

“If Lena heard a sound in the club room while she was coming in the back door, though, the intruder would have had to go out a rear window into the back yard or side yard. Otherwise Lena would have run smack into him.”

“Or smack into her. Let's not eliminate half the human race from the universe of potential suspects. We'll want as many as we can get to accompany us on our search for reasonable doubt.”

“Good point.”

“You're onto something, though. I'll have to take a careful look around the property when I pop up to Loki for a little face-to-face with my client.”

Kuchinski towered over Rep. Of course, he towered over most people who didn't dribble for a living. He was also wider than Rep. Considerably. Once straw-colored, his thinning hair now tended toward off-white, and his face and belly showed evidence of thousands of six
P.M.
beer calls and scores of nights in bars celebrating verdicts, or commiserating about them, or telling stories about them. But after three decades-plus of trial work,
joie de guerre
still gleamed in his eye when he thought about facing a jury again.

“For what it's worth, based on an hour or so with them,” Rep said, “Lena and Ole both have sharp tongues and hard-boiled attitudes, but I think they really do love each other. I don't think it's one of those things where they just stay together out of habit or inertia. I think they've really been in love for almost fifty years.”

“Did you just say ‘them?'” Kuchinski asked, his voice rising in astonishment. “You mean Lena was with Ole when you talked to him?”

“Most of the time, yeah.”

“So they didn't tack a no-contact order onto Lena's bail requirements?”

“If they did, someone apparently forgot to tell Lena.”

“I've heard they run a pretty loose ship up there in Sylvanus County, but that doesn't sound like any attempted murder charge I ever heard of,” Kuchinski said, pulling out his cell-phone and punching the speed-dial button that would get him to his secretary's voice-mail. “Excuse me for a second. I've gotta leave word for the Polish Della Street to check CCAP as soon as she gets her computer turned on and pull the actual charge against Lena off the net.”

Rep waited while Kuchinski left the message.

“I hope you're right about Ole and Lena being love-birds,” Kuchinski said then, “and you very well could be. But that doesn't mean she didn't knock him into the middle of next week.”

“I know.”

“The hardest punches I ever took came from my first wife—and I spent two years in the Marines. She loved the hell out of me, at least until the last few months before she moved out. But that didn't keep her from cracking a plate over my head once when we mixed it up. And I didn't even hit her first. I hit her
back
, you understand, which I know means I'll never be president of the Thoughtful and Sensitive Males Club, but I didn't provoke her the way they're saying Ole did Lena. It's bad enough to smack your wife in the kitchen. When you hit a woman in public, in front of her friends and neighbors, you really do something to her. You better be sleeping with one eye open for awhile after you pull that.”

“I'll make it a point to avoid that,” Rep said as they reached the parking ramp and prepared to part company. “Do you think you'll be able to do anything for their plebe? Or did Lena talk to you about that?”

“That one is not a trial lawyer's dream. More like a trial lawyer's nightmare. I'll need some help on that.”

“Well, if I'm reading Melissa right, you might get some.”

***

“The kid is in serious trouble,” Frank Seton told Melissa around nine that evening. “I checked with a couple of buddies who are still at the Academy. He could be expelled.”

“For drinking and wenching?”

“No. If we expelled midshipmen for that, the fleet would become seriously undermanned.”

“Then what's the problem?”

“Problems, plural. Two. First, he managed to get himself relieved of his uniform and his military i.d. in the course of his little escapade. That caused a mini-uproar because it was the night before the Army-Navy game and the people in charge of security had to wonder if whoever took the stuff was thinking about taking a shot at the President during the game. The retired gunnery sergeant who found him and probably saved the kid's life was on that right from the get-go. Led to a lot of headaches that nobody needed.”

“But that wasn't the kid's fault,” Melissa protested.

“It sure wasn't the fault of the four-thousand midshipmen who
didn't
get their uniforms and i.d.'s stolen that night. But that's just background. The big issue is what looks like an honor code violation.”

“Meaning he lied?”

“Meaning that the story he's told so far is the equivalent of ‘the dog ate my homework.'”

“For crying out loud, Frank, he's an eighteen-year-old kid and from what Rep told me he's been through a life-threatening trauma.”

“The honor code is non-negotiable, sis. The country is at war. You can handle a professor's lies in a footnote, but an officer's get sent home in a government-issue metal box wrapped in the flag.”

Melissa fiercely bit her lip. She picked up a small rubber ball with her right hand and squeezed it tightly. Noticing this, Rep prepared to duck in case Melissa threw the ball against the nearest wall and he had to avoid the ricochet.

“Sorry,” Frank said after the brief pause that ensued during Melissa's anger-management exercises. “That probably came off as sententious. But that's the way the folks at the Academy will look at it.”

“So, bottom line, he needs a lawyer for sure, right?”

“He can consult a legal advisor at the Academy, but I think he should definitely get his own counsel. I'd say the main thing he needs, though, is someone who can crawl around down there and find out what really happened to him—and hope that maybe it bears some resemblance to what he's said.”