Service Dress Blues (6 page)

“Oh, you know,” she said then. “Couples just get on each other's nerves sometimes, especially in winter. Some little irritation, you start snapping at each other, someone says the wrong thing and all of a sudden your ears are ringing and your cheek smarts.”

Kuchinski nodded. Looking discreetly at Lena, he worked his hands through a couple of furled flags, found the handle for the sliding door, and pulled the door open. This knocked two of the flags over. Their staffs made a muffled, hollow sound as they hit the floor. Hollow and not very loud. Lena didn't exactly jump out of her skin—and she was standing only ten feet off, not half-a-house away from the noise. He bent down to pick up the fallen colors.

“Anything broken in here?” he asked.

“Not that we found.”

“Anything missing?”

“Ole says no. He knows the room better than I do. I haven't missed anything from the rest of the house.”

Again Kuchinski nodded. He walked deliberately toward the middle of the room.

“You know,” he said, “there's a speech they teach lawyers to give to their clients in criminal cases. Real macho thing. Something along the lines of, ‘Lie to your wife, if you want to. Lie to your girlfriend and your boss and your parole officer. But don't lie to me, because right now I am the only friend you have.'”

Lena looked at him levelly for a couple of seconds, cool appraisal deepening her eyes.

“Boy, you are a real lawyer, aren't you?”

“What was the fight about?”

“Okay, you win,” Lena said after another two-second pause. “It was about Harald.”

“Your nephew at Annapolis?”

“Right. Ole was talking about how great that uniform would look in campaign photographs. I told him to just leave Harald out of the political stuff—that he had enough on his mind trying to survive plebe year without being shoe-horned into some photo-op as stage dressing. I got a little sharper than I maybe should have, I guess, and touched a nerve, so Ole got up to go away mad. I stood up and grabbed him to keep him from going. He took that the wrong way and pushed me back into my seat.”

“Pushed you or belted you?”

“I can see where it might have looked like a little clop across the chops to someone a few feet away. It wasn't all that big a deal. Believe me, I got much worse from my mother for lipping off when I was a kid.”

“Okay. I'll want to have someone take pictures of the living room and this room. Plus I'll need to get a detailed floor plan drawn up for the first floor.”

“I don't know about the floor plan, but one of Gary Carlsen's Laurels does professional photographic work for him. She might give us a rate—and pennies count.”

“I'll look into it. Will Ole be around this morning? I'd like to chat with him, too—face to face, and just the two of us.”

“He won't be around here this morning, but if you hustle back to Milwaukee you might be able to catch him there. He's down there talking with Carlsen and your buddy Rep.” She looked again at her watch. “I'll call him and tell him to hang around so he can buy you a late lunch, if you like.”

“Right,” Kuchinski said. “Pennies count.”

Chapter 7

Ole Lindstrom had just finished telling Gary Carlsen to “turn that damn thing off” when Lena's call came through. While Ole punched his cellphone and muttered into it, Carlsen obediently leaned back in his desk chair to silence a talk-radio host blaring from a boombox on the cabinet behind him. He gave Rep a good-natured, what-can-you-do? smile as silence replaced the yack.

“‘Know the enemy,'” Laurel Wolf said, shaking her head and wagging her finger as she slipped what looked like a world-class digital camera over her left shoulder on a wide, embroidered bandolier strap. She walked past Carlsen's work-area toward the door.

“Is ‘the enemy' me or the talk-jock?” Ole asked her.

“See ya,” Wolf said. “Back at one-thirty.”

“Isn't three hours a little long for a cigarette break?” Carlsen asked.

Wolf flipped off her boss while she tugged at the camera strap.

“That's right, you're the Laurel who
doesn't
smoke,” Carlsen said as he snapped his fingers theatrically. “I should know that by now. My bad.”

Wolf said something in a language Rep didn't recognize. She smiled while she said it. Sort of.

“Do you understand the Chenequa dialect?” Carlsen asked Rep.

“No, but I bet I can translate that.”

They were on the south half of the third floor of a long red brick building on Milwaukee's near south side. The building had been a rolling mill for eighty-five years and an eyesore for thirty-five. Now, tuck-pointed, re-glazed, and otherwise spruced up, it housed an odd-lot collection of twenty-something artisans who wanted ample room and low rent: silk-screeners, photographers, web-site designers, bookbinders, commercial artists, sound- and video-recording producers, and Gary Carlsen's public relations company, Future³ (pronounced “Future Cubed,” as Carlsen carefully explained).

Rep had mentally nicknamed the premises the Carlsen Archipelago. What Carlsen called “islands” dotted an open expanse of what had once been nineteenth-century shop-floor, with no enclosures between them. Carlsen's desk and computer table and a two-drawer, lateral file cabinet formed his “work island” under western light streaming placidly through an elegantly slanted skylight. Looming at random intervals on either side were “creative islands” where people could fuss with customized digital printers and lay glossy prints out on long tables or oversized easels; “teamwork islands,” defined by four conference tables arranged in a solid square, without chairs; “activity islands,” featuring DVD players and layout materials; “research islands,” with CD-Rom racks and file cabinets sporting very long, very thin drawers; and lesser work islands for lower ranking employees. Carlsen had explained that the island concept was “the latest thing from the coast.”

“The application for copyright registration on Lena's song is filed,” Rep said. “Phase two is capturing your theme in the same kind of artistic expression the song gives to your hook.”

“I'll call Ms. Gephardt and tell her to get to work on a book,” Ole muttered.

“Worked for Obama,” Carlsen said.

“Not a book,” Rep said. “Pictures, images, music. If you rip off a political idea expressed verbally, you practically have to copy it word for word before a court will even pay attention. Your theme is that there's a new sheriff in town: bring an unsullied, energetic amateur in from outside the system to clean up the mess made by professional politicians. That's like having a murder mystery where the crime is solved by a private investigator whose cynical exterior masks an idealistic soul, working in uneasy collaboration with a gruff but grudgingly respectful police detective. It's a neat idea, but you can't copyright it. It doesn't belong to anyone. It's just part of the genre's furniture.”

“So in real world terms, what am I supposed to do?” Ole demanded. “Dig up an art student to ‘express' my ‘concept' in an abstract painting? Or gin up five-million dollars or so and make an art-house movie out of it?”

This question hung awkwardly in the air for five or six seconds. Rep could imagine a number of answers to it, but he didn't think that any of them would strike Ole as constructive. Carlsen, meanwhile, sat absolutely still, leaning back in his chair, eyes hooded, his rigid body somehow expressing not languor but inner excitement. Then, quite deliberately, he swiveled in his chair to face his keyboard. Ole scowled, but before his mouth opened Carlsen held up his right index finger in a gesture that said, “Just chill for a second.”

After tapping nimbly at the keys he mouse-clicked through screen images at a speed suggesting late-night channel surfing by a college student with attention-deficit disorder. He paused for a moment at a cartoon image showing a woman in Lincoln green, drawing the string on a bow and arrow. Shaking his head, he clicked past it as Rep noticed that it was an ad for Chesterfield cigarettes. A few more clicks and another pause, this time at an ad showing a woman at the wheel of a race car. Again he went on.

“Didn't they sell anything but cars and cigarettes in the 'fifties?” he muttered.

Another minute into the process he paused again. He looked contemplatively at the screen and then hit
PRINT
. The color sheet that he pulled from the muscular printer next to his computer was still warm when he laid it on the desk between Ole and Rep.

“Kinky sex,” Ole said. “Great.”

HELLLLO
, Rep thought.
I can't wait to see where this one's going.

“This sold a lot of Stafford Flour for General Mills in 1934,” Carlsen said.

It was a full-page ad, mostly print but drawing the eye first to a bright cartoon at the center-top of the page. The cartoon depicted a comically dismayed cowboy who had stretched his torso through an open kitchen window to steal a slice of freshly-baked cake from the counter. The cook had caught him in the act and taken him by surprise. She had pinned him to the sill by pulling the window sash down tight against his waist. Now, grinning with unbecoming delight, she was smacking his rear end with a long-handled scouring brush. The tag-line said that Stafford Flour made food so good a real man would risk his skin to taste cake made with it.

Carlsen's eyes snapped open as he sketched a quicksilver smile that Rep read as saying, “I'm way cooler than you but too polite to mention it.”

“So?” Ole asked.

“Comics,” Carlsen said.

Rep winced. After the smile it seemed a little anti-climactic, somehow.

“Comics,” Ole said.

Carlsen's arms spread wide and his face suddenly glowed with vibrant enthusiasm.

“Start with simple comic strip story-lines, circulated on-line. Aim it first at college students and cynical gen-exers. Generate a little buzz and watch it spread to alienated pink-collar twenty-somethings on cubicle farms in Dilbert-land—but make it funny enough to force attention from political reporters. Hook them with subliminal kinky sex just like General Mills did, and then hammer them with our theme snuck in between the lines. Link them to every blog we can think of. Link them to a web-site with all the policy-wonk stuff spelled out. Gephardt isn't some new dyke sheriff, she's Lara Croft with a school marm's ruler instead of a laser-gun and a big, maternal smile instead of a scowling pout. Non-threatening and reassuring, except to the bad guys. When we pass ten-thousand hits a day, we step it up.”

“'Step it up' to what?” Ole asked.

“
Live action
comic strips. Human beings instead of drawings, but
behaving
like cartoon characters. Like
Ironman
, except three minutes instead of two hours, because technically
Ironman
was a live action comic
book
.”

“Distributed how? Youtube?”

“Youtube, My Space, Facebook, Twitter,
et
bloody
cetera
. Count on the hook and the outside-the-box stuff to draw the attention of commercial networks and generate free media.”

“The two most beautiful words in the English language,” Ole said with an emphatic nod. “It could work. How do we get Gephardt to sign off on it?”

“We generate the buzz
first
, and get the theme out there
first
. Not flogging any candidate. Pure civic concern about discrimination or corruption or whatever we're worried about this week. Once we've got the brand,
then
we hook the saleswoman.”

“I like this boy,” Ole said to Rep.

He beamed as he spoke the words. He suddenly looked like a dad whose son had been named valedictorian and made the Olympic track team on the same day. His cranky sniping and impatient dismissals of Carlsen's comments faded in the nimbus of unambiguous esteem for the younger man. Carlsen basked contentedly in the glow of his mentor's approval.

“I'll leave the political tactics to you,” Rep said. “Legally, though, if you get me ten or twelve comics panels or a handful of storyboards, I'll get you a c with a circle around it.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Carlsen said, taking a quick glance at the digital clock in the lower right-hand corner of his computer screen. “Let's hit the bricks with it.”

Carlsen turned the boombox back on as Ole and Rep got up to leave. They made their fifteen-second walk to the door to the accompaniment of the talk-jock wrapping up a chat with a caller who apparently agreed with every word he said. The last thing Rep heard as he opened the door to the hallway was the radio voice saying, “Great call. Now, here's a question I'd like your input on around the corner when we start a new segment after the break: Is racial discrimination by the government somehow
not
discrimination if the goodies the government is passing out are gambling licenses?”

“Now how do you suppose he managed
that
?” Ole asked, looking with twinkling eyes at Rep.

***

Kuchinski urged his Cadillac Escalade steadily south toward Milwaukee, glancing with anxious misgivings every ninety seconds or so at the dog-eared, white manila folder on the passenger seat. The folder held the police file on the Lindstrom investigation. He'd only taken a cursory look at it so far, but what bothered him was the way he'd gotten it. Usually you have to negotiate fiercely over disclosure of the investigative file in a criminal case. Not this time. He'd walked in to hand the assistant DA his written request, and the bored prosecutor had pulled the file off his credenza, tossed it on his desk, and said, “Tell Lois outside to copy whatever you want. Fifty cents a page.”

In other words, the ADA didn't think there was a scrap of information in the file that would be the slightest help to the defense. He thought he had Lena Lindstrom cold. Kuchinski was thinking that he might have to pull something out of left field to win this case.

For forty-five miles he resisted the temptation to call Melissa. She was his link to Frank Seton. Frank was his link to Harald Lindstrom at the Naval Academy. The Ole/Lena slugfest had started with a fight over Harald—and in Kuchinski's eyes that meant the kid was now prominently standing right up against the left field wall. Trial lawyers aren't known for outstanding manners, but Kuchinski was a pragmatist. Make yourself a nuisance with people who do you favors, and pretty soon they stop returning your calls.

He made it to Allenton before his resistance collapsed and his itching fingers reached for his cell phone, nestled in the cup-holder in front of the car radio. He was just about to grab it when six bars of the theme from
Perry Mason
chimed tinnily from it.

“Kuchinski.”

“Melissa. My department chair just dropped something on my desk that I think you might want to see. My last class today ends at ten to four. If you get a chance to stop by a little after that, I'll be happy to show it to you.”

“I'll make time. What is it?”

“A proposed presentation for a symposium on domestic violence that Veronica Gephardt's organization is sponsoring. The title of the presentation is
The Banalization of Spousal Battery in American Popular Culture, 1930 to 1980
. Ms. Gephardt apparently isn't altogether comfortable with it, so she asked the university's English Department to vet it. I'm the designated pop culture deconstructionist and stuff flows downhill, so I'm sitting here with it.”

“‘Spousal battery/popular culture.' You mean like Ralph Kramden saying ‘to the moon, Alice' in every episode of
The Honeymooners
and Ricky turning Lucy over his knee in
I Love Lucy
and John Wayne swatting Maureen O'Hara in
McLintock
?”

“Good examples, but it goes way beyond that. It shows up in comic books and paperbacks and even print advertising for mainstream products.”

“The golden age of wife beating,” Kuchinski commented.

“That's the thing. At least in popular fiction, it went both ways. That's one of the problems Gephardt has with it. Some of the examples in this presentation get in the way of the doctrine that men have a monopoly on spouse abuse. Edward Everett Horton's wife gives him a shiner in
Top Hat
because she thinks he's been flirting with another woman. Lois Lane throws dishes and rolling pins at Superman in their fantasy marriage. What made me think of you is a running gag in a 'fifties sit-com called
The People's Choice
. Every time the second banana causes a problem with some kind of kitschy shenanigans, his wife bangs him on the head with a skillet. This is invariably accompanied by a comical ‘
CLANG!
' sound effect and titters from the laugh track.”

“I'll bet if I listen closely enough I'll also hear ‘lack of intent' in the background. You're saying that a couple the Lindstroms' age could easily have the idea that a husbandly or wifely smack now and then isn't all that big a deal.”

“I have no idea what a jury will think,” Melissa said, “but I thought you might want to take a look at it.”