Service Dress Blues (8 page)

“Professor Pennyworth!” an urgent voice behind her called. “I have a sin offering!”

“Why don't you just say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys?” Melissa muttered as she turned around.

Then she saw the large, sleeved Starbucks cups the woman was carrying. Although she looked to be in her early to mid-forties, her chestnut hair bounced almost girlishly against the back of her neck as she hustled down the Curtin Hall corridor at something more than a trot but not quite a run.

“Latte or hot chocolate, your choice,” the woman said. “I'm Veronica Gephardt, in case you haven't guessed. I'm the one to blame for that shit detail that got dumped on you.” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper when she spoke the vulgarity, as if she were mildly ashamed about using it but feared that a prissier expression would seem stilted and out of place.

Melissa accepted the cup in the woman's left hand.
What's the point of Lean Cuisine if you can't drink hot chocolate before braving a winter's night walk to the parking lot?

“I sent you an email about the presentation you asked to have reviewed,” Melissa said. “I said that on first reading it appeared to be a competent piece of academic work that would readily stand comparison with many if not most presentations at academic symposiums.”

“I read that and I appreciate your prompt response. I'd like to drill down a bit into your assessment. Would you recommend the work for publication in a peer-reviewed journal in your field?”

“Before I could answer that question I'd have to spend at least a week analyzing the piece and reviewing the underlying research.” Melissa sipped rich cocoa and licked her upper lip. “So it seems like a moot point. I can't drop everything else, and I gather you couldn't wait a week for an answer even if I could. Besides, it's very unusual to evaluate symposium presentations against a criterion like that. Are you actually applying that standard to all the papers you're considering?”

“That's a provocative question,” Gephardt said, her tone suggesting a playful complicity. “Might we step into your office, professor?”

Melissa toyed with saying no. When she looked at Gephardt she saw the polished self-assurance of someone on weekly speaking terms with people who routinely write seven-figure checks—someone whose first job every year was to raise the money to pay her own salary, and who brought it off, year after year. Gephardt's manners so far had been impeccable, without a hint of presumption or condescension. Perhaps unfairly, though, Melissa thought she read something different in Gephardt's unblinking gray eyes and the firm set of her mouth: a sense that Gephardt's peers were the university chancellor; that tenured faculty were hired help, and mere assistant professors drones who did what they were told without asking provocative questions.

One of the iron rules of assistant professorship is to pick your fights carefully. So instead of saying no Melissa unlocked her door.

“Thank you,” Gephardt said as she followed Melissa in and found a seat. “The answer to your question is that we are
not
putting all the presentations through the peer-review wringer. If that suggests to you that I have an agenda, I do. I admire detached and dispassionate scholarship, but I don't aspire to it.”

“Each to her own taste,” Melissa said.

“Just so. As Kant said, approximately, the world needs carpenters as well as philosophers.”

“I didn't know Kant ever came that close to common sense. I'll skip any comment about hammering away at the point.”

“Good one,” Gephardt said, smiling wryly with apparently genuine warmth. “I'll take the hint and cut to the chase. Presenting meticulously documented facts in a carefully even-handed way can be meretricious. Domestic violence is a complex issue. As an empirical matter, women are indeed the physical aggressors roughly as often as men are in fights between couples. The fact remains that, on average, men do a lot more damage than women do whether they're hitting first or hitting back. Speaking in broad generalities, a man who's hit by a woman is irritated; a woman who's hit by a man is hospitalized—or sent to the morgue. I'm not over-dramatizing. Women die from domestic abuse literally every day in this country. I'm less worried about correcting gender stereotypes than I am about stopping the bleeding. That's my agenda.”

“And you have every right to it,” Melissa said. “Your organization is an advocacy group. You don't have to put on a studiously neutral, fair and balanced program, any more than the Catholic Church has to give atheists equal time at the pulpit on Sunday mornings.”

“We're in complete agreement.”

“But that doesn't mean you get cover from me. Tell the contributor that his submission doesn't meet the needs of your organization if you want to. I'll back you up from here to Sunday. But I won't say that a perfectly competent effort by one of my colleagues is substantively deficient when it's not.”

“And I wouldn't ask you to do anything like that,” Gephardt said. “I may not be a Ph.D, but I'm smart enough not to ask you to lie.”

“Thank you.”

“At the same time, though, I couldn't help noticing a damn-with-faint-praise tone in your carefully qualified comments about the proposed presentation. You said it ‘appears to be a competent piece of academic work.' Fine. But as a matter of literary analysis, do you actually agree with it?”

“Not entirely,” Melissa admitted. “When men are comically chastised in the examples he gives, it's because they've done something foolish or reckless—caused problems through some kind of idiotically thoughtless mischief. The implicit message is, ‘If you behave like a child, you'll be treated like one.' When the women are beaten, on the other hand, it's often because they've asserted themselves and have to be put in their place. Maureen O'Hara refuses to shrug off her husband's recreational sex with a dance-hall girl, so she's not only smacked but publicly humiliated. Elizabeth Allen dares to treat John Wayne as an equal in a business negotiation and gets spanked for it. The women aren't chastised for acting like children but for acting like adults.”

“And so the apparent equivalence that the presentation posits is superficial,” Gephardt prompted.

“Sure—
if
you buy my argument. But it's not a breach of academic standards to disagree with me.”

“Would you do me a favor?” Gephardt asked. “Would you mind putting what you just said into a presentation of your own? I'm not looking for original research. A rebuttal like the one you just gave me will do fine. The conference isn't until February, so you'd have a good six weeks to work it up. I know it's an imposition, but it would be a huge help.”

Melissa aimed a carefully guarded expression at Gephardt.
‘Imposition' doesn't even start to cover it. But I can't say no and you know it
.

“I'll be happy to,” Melissa said, lying through her teeth. “But when the contributor finds out he'll be facing custom-tailored rebuttal, he'll probably react by withdrawing his paper.”

“I fervently hope so,” Gephardt said. “That will simplify my life considerably.”

***

At just after eight o'clock that night, Laurel Wolf took a digital photograph she'd just run off on the printer next to her computer at work and brought it over to Carlsen. He turned his attention away from the
Battlestar Gallactica
trivia questions on his own computer screen and examined it.

“This will save you the trouble of waiting until I go to the john and trying to figure out which file I stored this in on my computer,” she said.

Carlsen ignored the attitude and studied the print. It showed Rep Pennyworth under bright lights on the porch of the Germania Building, accepting a carry-all from Randy Halftoe.

“He's even dumber than I thought he was,” Carlsen muttered.

“Are you gonna give him a call?”

“I suppose,” Carlsen sighed. He offered Wolf an expression making it clear that he felt much put upon by the inadequacies of the human race, but would soldier on anyway.

“Be brave,” she said mockingly. “Remember: Custer died for your sins.”

Chapter 9

Thursday, January 15, 2009

“How did your improvised lecture go?” Frank Seton asked Melissa.

She fell into step beside her brother and began walking with him down a broad corridor on the second floor of Samson Hall at the Naval Academy.

“‘Improvised' is a little strong, isn't it? It took a while to set this up, so I had almost a month to prepare it. And an undergraduate paper I wrote on
Persuasion
had three paragraphs on the prize award system in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. The hardest part was getting used to students answering questions by barking, ‘Ma'am, yes, ma'am!'”

“Technically, they don't have to address civilians that way.”

“I mentioned that to the first one who did it. He said, ‘Ma'am, yes, ma'am!' So I decided not to make waves, so to speak.”

They had gotten to within about ten feet of the end of the corridor. Midshipmen changing classes had been passing them at a brisk pace since they began their walk. With the corner approaching, though, Melissa reflexively braced herself. Before she took another step six plebes in her general vicinity broke into an all-out run, elbows pumping and knees churning. As they rounded the corner they yelled “
BEAT ARMY!
” in unison.

“That's called ‘chopping,'” Seton explained. “The plebes have to do it all year.”

“But the Army-Navy game was six weeks ago.”

“That was the Army-Navy
football
game. We'll be playing Army in basketball or fencing or baseball or something or other until almost the end of the academic year.”

Melissa bit her tongue as they headed down a staircase, but she sensed that her brother was reading her highly critical thoughts anyway.
These are some of the brightest kids America has. The average college boards for plebes entering the Naval Academy are well above UW-Madison, much less UWM. Why do we put them through this 1950's style fraternity hazing stuff?

They came out of Samson Hall into clammy gray chill. Melissa glanced at her watch: just after two
P.M.
Visions of driving on unfamiliar roads through the Maryland countryside brought a small frown as she wondered whether she'd make her flight home at seven-thirty that night.

“How long will it take us to get to wherever Gunnery Sergeant Mayer and his friend, Crystal, are?”

“Depends on how fast you can walk four-hundred yards or so. Gunny has her in the Drydock restaurant over at Dahlgren.”

“How did he manage that?”

“Crystal was worried that, regardless of what small bar or hotel restaurant we picked, her meeting might be spotted by someone who would tell the wrong people about it. Gunny pointed out that none of those inconvenient potential witnesses were likely to be at an eating establishment that you can only reach by showing proper i.d. to a Marine with a sidearm.”

They walked past a cannon with a bulbous breach.

“That's the Dahlgren Gun,” Seton explained. “Designed by the officer who had this building named after him as a result. Some people call it the gun that won the Civil War.”

“I'm guessing that none of those people are in the Army.”

“Not likely,” Seton admitted, chuckling as he pushed through tall doors heavy with brass and varnished maple and headed downstairs to the basement. Seton stopped at the doorway of what looked at first glance like a typical college rathskeller and pointed to a booth against the far wall of the dim interior. A man in late middle age and a woman who would have gotten carded at most Milwaukee bars sat sharing a pizza. The young woman wore large sunglasses even in the subdued basement lighting.

“There they are,” Seton said. “I'll wait just outside the door here. I left your buddy, Kuchinski, in the main hall upstairs when I came over to pick you up after your lecture. If you get to a point where you think you've got Crystal loosened up enough to handle him, give me a wave and I'll fetch him.”

“Got it. Frank, thank you very much. I really appreciate this.”

Mayer spotted Melissa before she was halfway across the room. He hopped out of the booth and with considerable ceremony introduced himself to Melissa and gestured her into a seat opposite Crystal, who offered Melissa a damp handshake and said “Hi” in a small voice. Crystal seemed petite but not frail to Melissa, reserved and defensive but not timid. Her lustrous hair was varying shades of blond, going from almost straw colored on the sides to white-gold where she had parted it on top, as if sunlight and the tanning booth variety had bleached it unevenly during hour after hour of basking and tanning.

“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me,” Melissa said. “I guess you know why I'm here.”

“You want to help that boy that got his bell rung and it turns out he's a mid. I think that's real sweet and I
admire
you for doin' that. I want you to know that.”

Crystal spoke with an accent that becomes familiar in areas where lots of soldiers and retired soldiers live: a sort of country-southern, not quite one or the other; the kind of thing you might get if McDonalds melded deep Georgia and west Texas into a semi-homogenous dialect that it thought would sell all over the country.

“Thank you,” Melissa said. “I'm hoping you know something about the woman who met with him.”

“I really don't. Not all that much, anyway. You see, Speedbump—he's the guy who takes care of me and some other girls? You know?”

“I get your drift,” Melissa said, nodding.

“Well, anyway, Speedbump isn't one of those guys with real bad tempers, but he doesn't like disrespect. He's not the kind who'll come down on a girl just because she has a slow night, but he won't have his girls talking back to him. You know? And I respect that. You know?”

“Sure.” Melissa cringed inside and wondered if it showed in her expression.

It did.

“You look like I just said a bad word in church,” Crystal said, an amused lilt coloring her voice.

“I don't want you to have the wrong impression about Speedy Tarrant,” Mayer said, “which is what Speedbump's mama calls him. He's not one of these wire coat-hanger types you see in the movies. Besides, he knows about a little game I sometimes play called ‘gunny roulette.' Speedbump is not gonna mess with Crystal.”

“I'm sorry. I'm out of my depth here. I guess I'm one of those ivory-tower professors who come off like sissies when people talk about stuff like this.”

“You're a professor?” Delight brightened Crystal's voice. “What are you a professor of?”

“English.”

“Really?” Crystal pulled her sunglasses off and leaned farther toward Melissa. She had so much make-up on her eyelids that layered flecks were clearly visible.

“Really and truly,” Melissa confirmed.

“Look, could you help me with something?”

“I'll try.”

“I'm taking this course? At Baltimore County Community College? In, like, literature?”

“That's great,” Melissa said.

“Crystal here wants to be a paralegal,” Mayer drawled.

“Right,” Crystal said. “Because lawyers make, like, a
lot
of money. I don't mean I won't marry for love. I will, I truly, truly will. But it's common sense you're gonna fall in love with someone you spend a lot of time with, so I figure when I've finally got some skills I might as well spend my working time with guys who do real well financially. You know?”

“Makes sense to me,” Melissa said.

“BCCC is making Crystal clear up some gaps from high school before they'll enroll her in paralegal training,” Mayer said.

“And in this one course, the teacher gave us a list of topics we could write about. And I couldn't even
pronounce
most of them, so I just picked one about the steeplechase metaphor in
Anna Care-ah-
KNEE
-na.
And I'm like, I can't find that in
Monarch Notes
and I don't even know what he's talking about.”

It took Melissa less than a second to make two decisions. First, she wasn't going to correct Crystal's pronunciation of
Anna Karenina
. And second, she wasn't going to quibble about helping Crystal cheat on her homework.

“You read about Colonel Vronsky in
Monarch Notes
, right?”

“Right.” Crystal nodded earnestly. “He's, like, her boyfriend, and they're doin' it.”

“Right. Vronsky is a cavalry officer. One of his favorite horses is a mare that he rides in a jumping exhibition in his unit of the Russian Army.”

“Like jumping over water and hedges and fences and things? That's ‘steeplechase?'”

“Yes. When Vronsky is taking the mare over one of the jumps something goes wrong. The mare falls and breaks her leg, and Vronsky has to kill her himself, with his own service revolver.”

“Oh, God, that's so terrible!” Crystal wailed. “That poor horse!”

“Right. Well, that's the steeplechase metaphor. Because—”

“I get it! The horse is, like, Anna. And Vronsky ‘riding' her is them doin' it, even though she's married and all her friends will think she's, like, a slut because she's sleeping around. And then she's gonna end up dead, isn't she?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it! He knocks her up, doesn't he?”

“Yes.”

“I knew it! I
hate
it when guys do that and then don't take responsibility. I can't
tell
you how much of a help this all is. I was sittin' there, staring at my computer screen with fu— uh, with
nothing
and now I'm gonna get a A.”

“Glad to help.”

“Your turn to be helpful,” Mayer told Crystal with an elbow nudge.

“Uh, right. Okay. Like I said, it's not much. Like, maybe, a couple of weeks before Champ and me tripped over that mid in his birthday suit, there was a story going around among the girls about a special gig that would pay a little more. Now, usually, that means you're gonna have to do something creepy? Which I don't like to do? But the story was this wouldn't be that way.”

“Did you ask Speedbump what it was?”

“Well, we didn't really get that far. I talked to Speedbump about the story, and he just chuckled like a guy whose AIDS test just came back negative and said, ‘Baby girl, they want someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed, so I don't think this is your gig.' And I'm like, I don't understand. 'Cause I have blond hair and blue eyes? But I didn't ask any questions because I didn't want to disrespect him. I just said, you know, ‘Okay, Speedbump, whatever you say goes, you know that.'”

“I wouldn't get too upset about it, darlin',” Mayer said, putting an almost brotherly comforting arm around Crystal's shoulder. “I think Speedbump was just trying to say in his own tactful way that the talents called for by this particular job weren't in your skill-set.”

“Anyway, it lands up that Speedbump didn't take the job at all.”

“Which is interesting,” Mayer said. “Speedbump's line of work being what it is, his gag reflex isn't what you'd call overly sensitive. There aren't too many things I can think of that he wouldn't do for the right price. But bein' that he lives here and all, one thing he for damn sure wouldn't get his fingerprints on is walkin' off with a military i.d. and a uniform.”

“Which suggests that what happened to Midshipman Lindstrom is a good candidate for the job Crystal heard about—and that backs up Lindstrom's story.”

“
HOO-RAW,
” Mayer said, while Crystal seemed to shrink into the corner of the booth.

Melissa closed her eyes for a few seconds so that she could concentrate. She took a deep breath, and when she let it out the exhalation was louder than she'd intended.

“What are the chances that I could talk to Speedbump?” she asked Mayer.

“Those would be slim and none,” Mayer said. “Speedbump ain't no genius, but he's not certifiable, either. Far as he's concerned, talking to you is the next thing to talking to cops, and no way he's talking to cops, whether they're FBI, NCIS, or some other initials.”

“I'm betting I can't smoke in here,” Crystal said. “Am I right about that?”

“The Chief of Naval Operations can't smoke in here, darlin', and he outranks you.”

Without thinking about what she was doing, Melissa reached out and squeezed Crystal's right hand.

“Don't worry,” she said. “No matter what happens, your name stays out of it. It took a lot of guts for you to tell me what you know, and I'm not going to give Speedbump any reason to…be disappointed in you.”

“Oh, Speedbump isn't the one I'm worried about,” Crystal said, eyes widening and lips bowing into a surprised oval. “It's the other girls. You see, it's like we're our own little Las Vegas. You know? That's the way we think of it. ‘What happens here stays here.' You know?”

“Yes,” Melissa said. “I know.”

A black rivulet started down the outside of Crystal's right nostril as her eyes teared up. When she spoke she shook her head quickly back and forth and her voice choked.

“If they thought I'd washed some dirty laundry outside the family, I wouldn't have a friend left in the whole world. 'Cept Champ.”

“Like Anna Karenina,” Melissa murmured. “Well, they won't hear it from me. Good luck on your paper. Gunny, thanks for your help.”

“Professor, thanks for caring about a mid. And remember, there's generally more than one way to skin a cat.”

On that note, Melissa scooted out of the booth and rejoined her brother.

“I didn't see a signal,” he said as he led her toward the stairs.

“I didn't make one.”

“You learn anything?”

“I learned that I walked in here like an arrogant
bourgeoise
with a head full of clichés that would make a romance writer blush, and as a result I almost blew the whole thing. But I lucked out and got something. It's not everything I came for but it's worth the price of admission.” She told him what she'd picked up.