“I read an interesting theory about military policy once,” Melissa said. “The author said that the best army in the world isn’t the American or the British or the Israeli, despite their outstanding battlefield performances. He said the best army is the Swiss—because it never has to fight.”
“You’re saying maybe Pignatano is such a good lawyer for Lawrence and Jackrabbit Press that he keeps them out of court.”
“Right. After all, don’t you keep a lot of your clients out of court?”
“Sure. But I’m a trademark and copyright lawyer. Pignatano is a trial lawyer, specializing in white collar crime and immigration. Trial lawyers get clients by defending them in court. If they impress their clients doing that, they can branch out into other things. But you wouldn’t consult Andy Pignatano in the first place unless you had a problem involving people with badges. And a problem like that should show up on a docket somewhere.”
“Is there any possibility he’s not actually their lawyer?” Melissa asked.
“Not after yesterday’s performance. He’s not a guy Lawrence talked to for the first time this week after a referral. He did something somewhere along the line to win John Paul Lawrence’s complete confidence.”
“Will that database you’re logged onto sort by lawyer? Maybe you should just bring up all the cases where Pignatano appeared for anyone.”
“I don’t have any better ideas,” Rep shrugged as he complied.
The screen filled with captions and case numbers. A bar at the bottom said that three more screens awaited him when he got through with this one. Hmm. He decided to cheat by looking at the J’s and the L’s first—a little screenscam that might make the chore less tedious. Melissa bent eagerly over his shoulder and avidly perused the data with him.
The J’s turned up nothing useful. Serves me right, Rep thought.
“Try the L’s,” Melissa said.
“You read my mind.”
“It’s a habit.”
He scrolled down impatiently to LAW.
“Looks like Emmett Lawrence had a problem with the Treasury Department back in ’ 99,” Melissa said.
“If it was the kind of problem I suspect it was,” Rep said, “he should be getting out just about now.”
“No John Pauls,” Melissa said, “and we’re all the way down to Lawton.”
Rep began scrolling back up, past Emmett Lawrence.
“Lawless?” Melissa read tentatively.
“Neat name in this context, but no help. Ditto Lawaski.”
“And now you’re at LAV and LAU.”
“Right,” Rep said distractedly, an instant before his index finger froze on the mouse. “Bingo. Melissa, my treasure, you are a genius.”
“That goes without saying,” she said. “But what have you found?”
“André Laurent versus United States Immigration and Naturalization Service,” Rep said. “‘Laurent,’ like Laurent Fabius, the French politician in a story Peter told me on the way to the encampment.”
“Of course,” Melissa said. “The French version of Lawrence.”
“Time to look for hard copy,” Rep said, madly scribbling the case number down.
Fifteen minutes later they had a thin and, at first glance, not terribly illuminating file. Although André Laurent had been in the United States for some four decades by 1987, according to a complaint signed by Andrew Pignatano, the INS had designs on deporting him, and was proceeding in a manner that Pignatano found arbitrary, capricious, and inconsistent with most of the Constitution and all of the Administrative Procedure Act.
“But he doesn’t say why they’re trying to deport him,” Melissa complained.
“Plead thin and win,” Rep acknowledged. “Don’t show your cards. Pro forma denial from the U.S. Attorney. Routine scheduling order. No discovery motions. No hearings, transcripts, or written decisions. Then the thing is dismissed as moot sixty-eight days after it was filed. Tantalizing but not terribly informative.”
“Is it important that this is called a ‘verified complaint’?” Melissa asked.
“Might be,” Rep said. “I hadn’t noticed that. That’s something you usually file only if you think you might be running into court right away and need to impress the judge fast.”
The verification form at the end of the complaint presented eye-glazing legal boilerplate: “I declare under penalty of perjury that the allegations set forth above are true and correct of my own knowledge, except for those made on information and belief, and as to them I believe them to be true.”
This would of course be signed “André Laurent.” Except that it wasn’t. It was signed “John Paul Lawrence.”
“So John Paul Lawrence is an immigrant from France who changed his name from ‘André Laurent?” Melissa speculated.
“Maybe,” Rep said. “But in 1947 he couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old, if that. What could someone that age have done that would interest the INS forty years later, even on a slow day?”
“So we need to beg Diane Klimchock for permission to use the library’s vast research resources some more,” Melissa said.
“I think we have to ask her to do the Googling herself, if she’s game,” Rep said. “After last night, the library might be a bit too hot for you and me, unless we want to spend the next six hours being grilled by cops.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“Talk about the big picture, while we wait for Linda and Klimchock. And I’d like to do the talking and waiting somewhere that isn’t in the shadows of the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department. You have any ideas?”
“Yes,” Melissa said, “even though the Kansas City Jazz Museum is out.”
Chapter 22
“That’s a magnificent piece, isn’t it?” Rep commented, nodding at a Qing dynasty painted porcelain vase whose elegant lines suggested a delicate lightness despite its size.
“Try to sound impressed instead of surprised,” Melissa said. “Kansas Citians are trained to take umbrage at easterners who come to the Nelson-Adkins Gallery expecting to see nothing but Thomas Hart Benton paintings and a few Remington cowboy sculptures.”
“Not guilty,” Rep replied with a hint of indignation. “I read the New York Times. I would have known that the Nelson-Adkins had a world class collection of Asian art even if Diane Klimchock hadn’t mentioned it twice in the first sixty seconds after you told her we’d be here this afternoon.”
“You’re right, it is lovely,” Melissa said. “If we have to be cooling our heels, I suppose this is a great place to do it. But I wish I could be with Linda instead, while she goes through her ordeal with Archer and the police.”
Rep glanced at his watch. Almost three-thirty.
“She shouldn’t be much more than another hour, if Archer’s estimate is right,” he said.
“Archer also estimated that the police would have found Peter by early this afternoon, but they apparently haven’t turned him up yet,” Melissa said.
“Yeah, and that surprises me. Nothing in this psycho-drama has been simple, though, so why should finding Peter be any different?”
Melissa stepped forward a couple of feet for a closer look at one of the brass hawks framing the vase. She gazed for a moment at the bird’s casually predatory expression.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m still convinced that the most important element in this puzzle has to be simple: the thing that triggered Peter’s sudden exit from the encampment.”
“Maybe,” Rep said. “Except that it if it wasn’t Linda’s tresses tied to a bolt, it’s probably something as simple as a hideously complex twist in a revenue bond proposal.”
“The underlying issue may be complicated, but the trigger has to be simplicity itself. Peter has just been doing heavy petting with the love of his life and thinks she’s hinting at pregnancy. The next thing he knows she’s in the bathroom tossing her cookies. Whatever he saw between her dash for the john and his
exit interview with you had to nail him right between the eyes, hit him like a thunderbolt. It had to be something that produced an instant epiphany, and convinced him that he had to do something right now.”
Melissa punctuated the remark with a fist-smack into her left palm emphatic enough to draw a startled glance from a guard in the corner of the hall. Melissa prudently led Rep from the Chinese Furniture Room to the Chinese Scholar’s Studio across the hall, where two Han dynasty chimera sculpted almost two-thousand years before awaited them.
“The thunderbolt must have related to the library expansion,” Rep said.
“Right. But it also had to have something to do with Jackrabbit Press, and probably with Linda. Peter isn’t an oaf, and he adores her. Whatever he saw had to be something that he could at least imagine hurting Linda somehow, even if only by association. Something that would make her or someone else think she was a horrible person instead of the faultless angel that he saw her as. Do you think I’m a faultless angel, by the way?”
“No, I’m pretty sure you have free will. And you ended your penultimate sentence with a preposition.”
“All right. ‘…the faultless angel he saw her as, asshole.’ ”
“You stole that line from Lou Piniella.”
“And I did it quite deliberately,” Melissa said.
“That makes you seem even wiser to me than you did a week ago—and I would have bet that wasn’t possible.”
“You’re really a dear when you’re not correcting my grammar.”
“If you’re right, the problem is pretty straightforward. All we have to do is figure out what the thunderbolt was.”
A third voice intervened before Melissa could respond, which was probably a good thing.
“That’s a splendid griffin, isn’t it?” the voice said, apparently referring to one of the chimera. “Or is it a dragon?”
Rep and Melissa glanced over their shoulders to see Klimchock, holding a large manilla envelope. She seemed to be sedulously avoiding eye contact, as if the three of them were about to execute a dead letter drop in 1968 Prague. “Any news on Peter yet?”
“None that’s reached us,” Rep said. “I hope that whatever you’ve learned is worth the drive.”
“Rather yes, I think,” Klimchock said. “Melissa’s last thought about the medal was spot on. During the Nazi occupation of France, Vichy created a decoration called the Francisco, for civilian government officials. You had to be tight with the wrong sort of people even to think about being put up for one.”
“No surprise after other things we learned,” Rep said, “but still ugly.”
“To continue. Lawrence turns out to have been born in Arles, France. The name on his baptismal certificate is J-E-A-N P-A-U-L L-A-U-R-E-N-T. In other words, the fruits of your courthouse search were juicy indeed. Admittedly, as you also pointed out, someone who’s sixty-five years old today would have been a bit young for collaborationist activity during World War II. But the same thing cannot necessarily be said about his father.”
“Named André, by any chance?” Rep asked.
“Yes. André was born in 1908. Degree from the Ēcole something-or-other, then into provincial posts in the civil service. Called back to the colors in the run-up to World War II. Served until demob following the debacle in ’ forty. Emigrated to this country with his family after the war. Somewhere in between the last two he won himself a Francisco.”
“It fits,” Melissa said.
“He seems to have had enough of a packet to start a printing business that eventually flourished under John Paul. Died in 1987 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“Which is why the lawsuit suddenly became moot,” Rep said.
“You’ve been busy,” Melissa said to Klimchock.
“As I said, Peter and the new wing are top of the list at the moment.”
“I think we’d better leave Chinese art and head for pre-Columbian,” Rep said.
“All right, I’ll bite,” Melissa said. “Why?”
“Because it’s between here and the coffee shop, and I need something caffeinated.”
“Right, then,” Klimchock said. “I’m away. Stay in touch.”
Twenty minutes later, Rep pushed a glass of Diet Coke across the glass top of a wrought iron table, thoughtfully stuffed sheets back into the envelope, and looked into Melissa’s eyes without seeing them.
“Conclusions?” Melissa asked.
“John Paul Lawrence knows more about making money than I do. Beyond that, it’s a lot of guesswork. What all those guesses have in common, though, is Jackrabbit Press.”
“How about the Civil War battles on the disk Peter left at the library?” Melissa asked. “Have you come up with a theory about why anyone would have that particular set on one disk?”
“No. Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor were the beginning of the attrition phase of the Civil War, grinding Lee’s army down by force of numbers. Jubal Early’s Valley campaign is famous because Lincoln personally observed some of the fighting, and the future Justice Holmes was wounded. But the only reason I’ve ever heard anybody even mention the Battle of Cedar Creek is Sheridan’s dramatic ride from Winchester to save the day.”
“Really?” Melissa said. “That was Sheridan’s Ride?”
“Well, yeah,” Rep said. “But how do you know about it?”
“Sheridan’s Ride is a poem by Thomas Buchanan Read,” Melissa said. “Wildly popular in the post-Civil War years. ‘ The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar/Telling the battle was on once more/And Sheridan twenty miles away.’ I can just see roomfuls of schoolgirls memorizing it while Dorothea Dix frowned over them.”
“I think you’re onto something,” Rep said.
“You’d better explain what it is, then.”
“The Battle of Cedar Creek wasn’t terribly important militarily, but that poem’s celebration of the dramatic ride could be used to create interest in it anyway. Cedar Creek could be the scene of a major re-enactment, on the scale of much more famous battles. If nobody is planning a re-enactment right now, it wouldn’t take much public relations effort to gin one up.”
A game-face look steadily replaced the expression of simple intellectual curiosity on Melissa’s face. She caught her husband’s eyes and held them.
“We’re going to have to do it, aren’t we?” she said. “Go out to Jackrabbit Press?” It wasn’t really a question and Rep didn’t really have to nod to confirm his answer but he did, just as Melissa’s cell phone rang.
“That was Linda,” she said after a thirty-second chat. “The police are through with her. She can sleep in her own bed tonight. Still no sign of Peter. She wants to meet us at her house.”
“Good,” Rep said. “Because we have a lot to do before tomorrow morning. Starting with pinning down the date for the Battle of Cedar Creek.”
Chapter 23
The sprawling reception room at Jackrabbit Press showed no traces Friday morning of the Civil War setting from Tuesday night. Framed covers of period romances supplemented historical prints and paintings on the walls. A Chesterfield sofa and mate’s chairs in matching maroon leather defined a waiting area around a low maple table holding The New York Times, The Kansas City Star, and a month’s worth of People.
Lawrence and Pignatano greeted Rep, Melissa, and Linda around nine-thirty at Henderson’s desk. Henderson smiled briefly at Rep. If Jackrabbit Press had any other employees on site that day, Rep saw no evidence of them. Lawrence pressed Linda’s right hand with paternal warmth.
“I know that our loss is your loss as well,” he said. (It occurred to Rep that this perhaps wasn’t the most tactful phraseology under the circumstances.) “Thomas always said that you were the most talented editor he worked with, and I know how highly you thought of him. At the moment, though, you and Peter have things far more important than manuscripts and production schedules to worry about. If you think legal advice would be helpful, Mr. Pignatano is here to assist in any
way he can.”
“That’s very generous, Mr. Lawrence. I’ve been wandering around in a daze since Tuesday night. I don’t know where to turn.”
“Then let’s go to the conference room and talk it through, shall we?”
“This will sound silly, but could we talk in the editorial office instead? That’s where I worked with Tommy, and I’d feel more comfortable.”
“I understand perfectly,” Lawrence said, his smile silky and tender at the same time. “Regrettably, however, the police have asked us to stay out of that office for a few more days, in case they want to check it further.”
“Mmm, sure,” Linda said, nodding. “Conference room, then.”
Nice try, but no cigar, Rep thought. Time for Plan B.
His right hand in the side pocket of his sport coat, Rep pressed the SEND button on his cell-phone. He had punched Melissa’s number into the phone just before they entered the building. Six seconds later (for the satellite apparently had other things to do that morning), after they had moved several strides past Henderson’s desk, Melissa’s phone beeped. She answered the phone while Rep pressed the speaker on his phone as hard as he could against the inside lining of his jacket pocket.
“I can’t talk now, I’m about to go into a meeting,” Melissa said impatiently. Then a note of urgent alarm crept into her voice. “What, Sheila? Is it about Mom? Just a minute.”
Lowering the phone, she looked at the others with an expression combining anxiety with contrition.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You all go ahead. I’ve got to take this.”
Without waiting for reaction, she turned away from them and walked back toward the reception area. She returned the phone to her ear and, head lowered, whispered urgently into it. She continued this pantomime for about two minutes, slumping into one of the mate’s chairs, rocking gently back and forth, taking measured breaths as if to calm herself. Then she put the phone down and held it with both hands in her lap as she looked straight ahead.
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