Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  Rep touched fingertips to his forehead, backed away, and began trudging through the copse toward the parking area where he’d left the Taurus. As he walked, he hoped fervently that the corporal of the guard responded soon.

  He told himself that he’d written the note in pencil and used stilted language and old-fashioned diction because he was playing along with the re-enactors, staying in role. It was interesting, though, how readily the words and style had come to him. He thought back to his chat with Melissa about how wearing period clothes and adopting period manners might subtly infuse period attitudes. Peter had been deeply involved in Civil War re-enactment for several years. Could the stern, Old Testament spirit and uncompromising sense of personal honor from that era have infiltrated gentle, self-deprecating Peter, converting him from a dreamy, idealistic logophile into a caricature cuckold, thirsty for vengeance?

  Rep was still trying to convince himself he didn’t buy it when, about five minutes into his trek, he heard a stampede coming at him through the woods. From the sound of snapping twigs, shredding leaves, and scattering rocks, Rep estimated that a platoon at least was charging in his direction. He hopped behind the biggest tree he could find, hoping that the approaching human tidal wave would roll past him without too much damage.

  He managed to hold his curiosity in check for three seconds or so before he peeked around the tree and gazed through the leafy, sunlit maze toward the sound of the thundering rush. Two seconds after that he caught his first glimpse of the racket’s source.

  It wasn’t a platoon.

  It wasn’t even a squad.

  It was Jedidiah Trevelyan. All by himself. Red-faced, pelting, careening, sweeping small animals heedlessly in his wake, pumping his arms, and (in an old Indiana phrase), sweating hard enough to make his own gravy.

  “Whoa, hoss,” Rep called when Trevelyan had pulled to within ten feet or so. “What’s up?”

  Trevelyan glared a bit wildly at Rep, then gradually lumbered to a stop. Behind the shelter of Rep’s tree, he bent over with his hands on his knees and panted laboriously. Rep gave him a minute or so before he spoke again.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeh, just gimme a sec yet,” Trevelyan said. “Whoof. I’m gettin’ too old to run that fast.”

  “What were you running from?”

  Trevelyan twisted his head enough to look appraisingly at Rep. He squinted, worked his mouth a couple of times as if he were trying to get comfortable with a wad of tobacco, looked back down, then straightened up.

  “Summa the boys were doin’ a patrol and ambush exercise,” he said. “I got in the middle of it without meanin’ to and they got a mite cross about it.”

  “They must be boys who play pretty rough,” Rep said.

  “True enough, brother,” Trevelyan said dismissively.

  Rep took out a handkerchief and handed it to Trevelyan, who began mopping his face and neck.

  “Much obliged,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Rep sat down a few feet away and leaned against a tree. Trevelyan sank to a sitting position himself while he continued to sponge sweat from his face.

  “You know,” Rep said after another minute or so, “there’s a legal concept called fraudulent nondisclosure. You don’t necessarily have to lie to cheat someone. Sometimes it’s enough if you don’t tell the whole truth.”

  “One more way for lawyers to pick our pockets, I am almighty sure of that,” Trevelyan spat.

  “We are not a selfless breed, and that’s a fact,” Rep admitted. “Now, I don’t happen to be a great believer in that theory. I think if grown-ups are going to make bargains, they should look out for themselves. Tell the truth, but don’t expect me to answer questions you haven’t asked.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Juries don’t always see it that way, though. I suspect that a lawyer who knows about fraudulent nondisclosure could drum up some business for himself around this encampment if he brought a little energy to it.”

  Trevelyan was sweating again, and this time not from heat or exertion.

  “What’s your point?” he demanded.

  “I’m not poking my nose into shifty business with Civil War collectibles,” Rep said. “I’m not saying you sold Lawrence his copy of General Order Number 11, or that there was something shady about how you came to have that document in the first place, or that Quinlan was in on it, or that any of that has anything to do with him getting his throat cut last night.”

  “That’s what you’re not saying,” Trevelyan said. “Gimme a hint ’ bout whatever it is you are saying.”

  “I’m saying that wasn’t any patrol and ambush exercise you were running from. I’m saying you were running from the direction of Jackrabbit Press. I want to know why, and if I don’t get a straight answer I might start passing out business cards and seeing if the police want to say some of the things I’m not saying.”

  Trevelyan looked at Rep, and as Rep met the gaze he knew he’d crossed a line. Rep didn’t read wariness in Trevelyan’s eyes anymore but fear, deep and cold. And his expression suggested not jovial contempt but unadulterated hatred. Rep didn’t relax until Trevelyan started to talk.

  “First off,” Trevelyan said, “you’re barking up the wrong tree on that General Order Number 11 business. I don’t know where Lawrence bought his copy, but it wasn’t from me. Second, you’re right about why I was running. I make money off people who don’t know the value of things they have. That’s just the way it is. Those people are my natural prey. From the way you were talking, I thought this Lawrence fella might be in that category. The first rule is you have to know what you’re after before you open your mouth, so I was nosing around the outside of the house and silo and so forth.”

  “Did Lawrence spot you?”

  “Someone did. I heard some boys comin’ who sounded like they wasn’t happy, so I lit out. I swear to God one of ’ em took a shot at me. That wasn’t a first in my line of work, and my policy when it happens is to keep goin’, so that’s what I did. Now that’s the God’s honest truth, and you can believe it or don’t believe it, but I’m goin’ back to my store.”

  Tossing Rep’s handkerchief back to him, Trevelyan laboriously rose and waddled off, although he brought a bit more urgency to the task than waddle ordinarily connotes.

  Rep looked back in the direction the sutler had come from. Fear, common sense, and a gnawing desire to confirm an intuition warred in his psyche. Fear and common sense were on the same side, arguing passionately that the thing to do now was to find a more circuitous route back to the parking area. Gnawing desire won. Shaking his head at his own dubious judgment, he crept cautiously toward the edge of the copse, where Trevelyan had to have entered it.

  After he got there it took him a good ten minutes to find what he was after, and even then he almost walked past it without spotting it. Splinters of white wood gouged from under the bark of a sugar maple caught the corner of his eye, and on the double-take he realized he was seeing what he’d been looking for. A bullet—a very real bullet—had ripped into the tree. And from the freshness of the exposed splinter, it hadn’t happened too long before. About that much, at least, Trevelyan had been telling the truth.

  Rep couldn’t remember hearing a shot, but that meant nothing. Between the target range and drill demonstrations to impress tourists, musket and revolver shots had become just one more part of the background noise at the encampment for him. He’d gotten used to them, just as he’d gotten used to scores of men walking around armed to the teeth with real guns.

  It took him another twenty minutes to get back to his car. He decided to check the voice-mails on his cell phone before starting the drive back downtown.

  “This is Doctor Cerv,” the first one said. “I expect to have hard data within the time-frame we discussed. I have a preliminary reading already, however, and I thought I would share it with you orally before putting it in writing.” (Rep
winced, for coming from expert witnesses these words almost always presaged bad news.) “Findings on the uniform and the dresses you provided are entirely negative. The sword, however, shows substantial human blood residue. The visible blood was wiped away, but enough of it soaked into the metal to leave recoverable elements that put the issue beyond doubt. The blood on the blade is a perfect genetic match with the subject sample on the written report you gave me.”

  Chapter 16

  “Perfect genetic match?” Klimchock said. “This may be more challenging than I thought.”

  Melissa pursed her lips at this comment, for Rep had cut to the chase the moment she’d answered the phone and she hadn’t had a chance to tell her husband that their chat wasn’t, strictly speaking, altogether private.

  “Melissa, dearest, who was that exactly?”

  “That’s Diane Klimchock, beloved, Peter’s boss at the Jackson County Public Library. I’m in her office, and we’re talking on her speaker phone. You may recall you were quite keen when you called on your cell-phone a few minutes ago about having a land-line number where you could call me back before we got into the topic of genetics and Dr. Cerv’s conclusions.”

  “Yes, I do remember that. That was because the subject was too sensitive for discussion over a cell phone.”

  “No worries, luv,” Klimchock said briskly. “I’m on your side, and I am discretion its very self.”

  “Diane pitched in as soon as I explained the situation,” Melissa interjected hastily, suspecting that it might be best for Rep to get Klimchock in small doses. “She’s helped me slog through all kinds of reference material about medals, and she’s come up with some other helpful information as well.”

  “For example,” Klimchock said, “I showed Melissa the minute that Peter left for me when he popped by the library during the small hours.”

  “Minute being a memorandum,” Melissa said.

  “I know, dear, I’ve read all the Smiley novels.”

  “Peter’s note was about the funding campaign for the new library wing,” Klimchock said. “We’ve had a role in mind for Peter, and the gist was that he thought he might not be the right bloke for that billet after all. It’s quite a bore because we were planning on sending his capsule bio and prepared testimony in with the dawn patrol today.”

  “Did he say why he’d gotten cold feet?” Rep asked, wondering whether Peter’s note would be Prosecution Exhibit 2 (after the saber) or only Exhibit 27 or so.

  “He said he was afraid that he might be an embarrassment to us, but he wanted to talk to me and would try to stop by later in the day.”

  “It took him forty-eight minutes to write that?” Rep asked.

  “Well,” Klimchock said, “it looks like he may have been rummaging through the files for something but, Peter being such a dear, he left everything neat as a pin, so we can’t tell what he was looking for. Also, he left a computer disk with a note saying ‘SAVE THIS,’ but I beavered away at it for forty-five minutes and it’s just half-a-dozen Civil War battlefield maps.”

  “Diane has left word with the security guard who was on duty to come in half-an-hour early, though,” Melissa added, “in case he can fill us in on anything else Peter might have been up to.”

  “That might help,” Rep conceded.

  “And speaking of Peter,” Melissa said, “he seems to be past the immediate crisis stage, although when I checked in with Linda about an hour ago he was still spending most of his time sleeping and wasn’t very coherent when he was awake. The doctor said there were traces of something called flunitrazepam in one of the cups left in the room where we found him.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” Rep said.

  “The doctor said it was basically valium times ten, according to Linda,” Melissa said. “It’s sold under the brand name Rohypnol in about sixty countries, although not in this one. At least not legally.”

  “Hmm,” Rep said. “How is Linda holding up?”

  “Pretty well, considering,” Melissa said. “Now that Peter’s out of danger, I think she’s happy to have a chance to step up and do something for him. Did you turn up anything more this afternoon, other than Trevelyan being shifty and suspicious and getting shot at?” Melissa asked.

  “Andy Pignatano is Lawrence’s lawyer,” Rep said. “And the receptionist at Jackrabbit Press is named Karin Henderson. With an ‘i’ instead of an ‘e’. I jumped on a couple of very small clues and leaped to the conclusion that she might have had a thing going with the late Mr. Quinlan herself. Maybe she has a jealous husband.”

  “So we hypothetically have one more alternative suspect?”

  “I’ll take as many as I can get,” Rep said. “General Order Number 11, which is about half the Trevelyan-did-it theory, didn’t work out. The document on Lawrence’s wall was signed by a General Rawlins instead of General Ewing, so it’s not the locally famous one.”

  “All right,” Melissa said, “we’ll add Henderson to the list of things we’ll be looking into while you’re driving back downtown.”

  “That’s my cell-phone,” Rep said, as a high-pitched ring sounded distantly over the speaker-phone in Klimchock’s office. “It’s probably Sergeant Pendleton, so I’m going to have to ring off and talk to him.”

  “What are you going to tell him?” Melissa asked.

  “That the Kansas City cops picked up my saber instead of Peter’s earlier today, and that they can get the one they want at Cerv’s lab. Then I’ll promise to tell Cerv to turn it over voluntarily, to save the hassle of getting a search warrant in another state.”

  “Peter, dearest, are you entirely sure that’s wise?” Melissa asked.

  “That depends on whether Peter is innocent or guilty. “If he’s guilty—”

  “Tommy rot,” Klimchock snorted impatiently. “Our Peter is most certainly not guilty.”

  “If he were guilty,” Rep corrected himself, sighing, “telling Pendleton would be a calculated tactical gamble. If he’s innocent, then telling Pendleton is a piece of such elementary good lawyering that not doing it would be close to malpractice. See you soon.”

  “Right, then,” Klimchock said briskly to Melissa as she punched off the speaker phone, “what do we have to occupy ourselves until your skeptical husband shows up?”

  “Karin Henderson and Rohypnol, I suppose,” Melissa said. “Which I think I can track down. You’ve been very helpful, but I know you must have tons of work to do in your regular job.”

  “Peter is a valued employee, and the library expansion has topped my to-do list for two years,” Klimchock said. “This is my job. Besides, we also have to check out this General Rawlins, who signed an order important enough for Lawrence to have framed a copy of it.”

  “But Rep said it’s the wrong order.”

  “Nonsense. I’m not throwing away a perfectly good alternative suspect just because the wrong general signed an order. But it does look like long odds, so we’ll save that for dessert. To start, I’ll do Karin Henderson with an ‘i’, and you do this glorified sleeping draught.”

  “Right,” Melissa said, partly because it made good sense, and partly because she was quite terrified of saying anything else.

  By the time Melissa began mouse-clicks on the Ready Reference computer that Klimchock had made available to her, Rep had told Pendleton about the sabers, and was hearing Pendleton’s initial reaction.

  “That’s very useful information there, counselor,” Pendleton said. “I would’ve said right useful, but Civil War dialect doesn’t seem to go with a cell phone, somehow.”

  “Glad to help,” Rep said.

  “And I’m real glad I heard this from you before the Metro Squad heard it from Doctor Cerv. Puts a much more pleasant light on things.”

  “It’s like the old story about the farm hand looking for work. The farmer asked him what his qualifications were, and he said he slept well on stormy nights. The farmer understood and hired him.”

  �
�Well, I understand too. I’m guessin’ that you wouldn’t have volunteered this unless that stuff was all clean as a whistle—”

  “I have complete confidence in my client,” Rep said.

  “—although I guess that, even so, I’ll mention to one of those Metro Squad boys that if they’re not too busy eating donuts they might hot-foot it over to Cerv’s office first thing tomorrow morning so the crime lab can at least do its preliminary thing sometime before sundown.”

  “I’ll leave a message for Cerv as soon as you hang up, so they shouldn’t have any problem.”

  “Much obliged. As long as you’re being so public-spirited and everything, you wouldn’t have any idea where Mr. or Mrs. Damon is at the moment, would you? The police can’t seem to meet up with either of them.”

  “That sounds like a question for someone admitted to the practice of law in the State of Missouri,” Rep said, “and one of my many limitations is that I personally am not. I understand they’re meeting with a lawyer tomorrow, though, and while I don’t know how things are done here, I’d expect them to be making formal statements not too long after that.”

  “A statement that a lawyer has been over is generally about as useful as teats on a boar,” Pendleton said, “but you never can tell. Thanks again.”

  ***

  “Hello,” Melissa said, about a quarter-hour later.

  “Something juicy?” Klimchock asked, without looking up.

  “Rohypnol is very bad stuff. It causes memory impairment along with low blood pressure, drowsiness and what this entry bashfully calls ‘gastrointestinal disturbance.’ But it’s also called ‘the date-rape drug.’ ”

  “I thought gamma hydroxybutyrate was the date-rape drug,” Klimchock said. “I looked it up before my last blind date, because a girl can’t be too careful these days.”

  “GHB is also considered a date-rape drug, according to this,” Melissa said. “But Rohypnol is becoming more popular because it’s legally available in sixty countries, easy to smuggle in, and undetectable if dissolved in a drink.”

  “Well done, Melissa!” Klimchock said.