Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  “They are so young.” Mignon’s expression approached Dickensian pathos. “To the extent unintended and even unreasonable offense was taken, I would suggest a dignified apology.”

  “Ms. Cecil doesn’t need to apologize; she just needs to read the assigned material.”

  “I, uh, meant that you might apologize to Ms. Cecil.”

  Thinking that she must have misheard him, Melissa stopped and stared at Mignon in unfeigned astonishment. Three seconds of scrutiny convinced her that she had understood him correctly.

  “I’m afraid that is out of the question.”

  “I am the Assistant Dean of the Office of Inclusiveness Concerns.”

  Which means your mouth is writing checks your job description can’t cash.

  “As any apology would be insincere, I couldn’t offer one without applying a lesbian rule. Have a pleasant day.”

  Melissa hustled up the next flight of stairs, confident that Mignon wouldn’t follow her even if he could—which, at the moment, looked like a shaky proposition. She approached the printer/copier room that informally demarcated the History sector of Curtin Hall’s Humanities and Social Studies Department from its English counterpart. Two plastic bins, one bright blue and the other bright green, sat on the floor outside the room. Although she couldn’t read them yet, she knew that a hand-lettered sign on the blue bin read WHITE PAPER while the sign on the green one read COLORED PAPER.

  Squatting in front of the green bin and hard at work with a felt tip pen was Tereska Bleifert, a soon-to-be sophomore who earned part of her tuition as a student aide in Humanities. Melissa had pulled to within five feet before Bleifert finally heard her footsteps and looked up, startled and flustered. Melissa glanced down. Bleifert had drawn an X through COLORED PAPER and inserted PAPER OF COLOR.

  “Busted.” Bleifert rose and sheepishly avoided Melissa’s gaze.

  “Convent school girls don’t snitch,” Melissa said, tapping her own chest.

  “So you’re not upset about my little, ah, gesture?”

  “The only thing I’m upset about is that I didn’t think of it first.”

  Melissa regarded Beleifert as a refreshingly old-school student—the kind of working class kid who belonged at this blue-collar, urban university. She often affected a casual cynicism that couldn’t mask her youthful delight at finding herself at last among people as interested in learning as she was. In a course last spring on The Romantic Breakthrough she had come across as widely if not deeply read, but without the jaded, been-there-done-that attitude of North Shore brats from toney prep schools who were here instead of UW-Madison because they’d loafed their way to easy Bs instead of bothering with AP classes.

  “I’m glad you ran into me, actually,” Bleifert said. “You’re like number five on a seven-item to-do list I have from Professor Angstrom, and since I missed lunch I’m kind of fiending for a Marb. Wait a minute, that came out a little lame, I guess.”

  “On the contrary, I can scarcely imagine a more flattering tribute than receiving priority over a cigarette break.”

  “Whatever. Let’s see.” Bleifert gravely consulted her PDA. “Oh, yeah. He was wondering if you might know any document examination experts who read Italian.”

  “Afraid not. My husband might. I’ll make a note to ask him. Wait a minute. Assistant Dean Mignon may qualify. Italian is one his languages, and doesn’t he teach Comparative Religious Studies? Ancient documents probably come up quite a bit in that field.”

  “If he ever taught, that’s what he’d teach,” Bleifert said, sounding more like the faculty lounge than the quad. “But he can’t get any students for his courses even though they’re easy A’s, and he hasn’t had a peer-reviewed publication in like, seven years. I don’t think he’ll make the short list.”

  A tingle of excitement tickled Melissa’s gut as she recognized a teachable moment. A full year’s experience on a university faculty apparently hadn’t completely destroyed her pedagogic instincts.

  “English Bards and Scots Reviewers,” she said.

  “Byron. ‘ I awoke to find myself famous.’”

  Through a closed door ten feet away Melissa heard her office phone ring.

  “Come have your Marlboro in my office while I take that call. The cigarette police can’t get you there. No ashtrays though, so be careful. I’m an accommodator but not a facilitator.”

  Followed by Bleifert, Melissa entered her office and caught her phone before the end of the third ring. The caller was Cynthia Stratton, a Michigan classmate now teaching at one of the Loyola Universities dotting the country. Melissa tried to remember whether it was Baltimore, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

  “I just saw some galleys being circulated by GRAIL,” she said. “Your little Shrimp and Breach piece has made Stanley Conger cross. ‘Over-written, under-thought, and affectedly iconoclastic.’ Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. He’s breaking the first rule of academic writing: Never argue in public with anyone less important than you are.”

  “Now that I’ve buttered you up, I’ll tell you why I called. Are you familiar with the Brontë Society of North America?”

  “‘Brontë.’” Melissa said the word slowly and elaborately, as if it were an obscure Babylonian term for some type of armor worn by Gilgamesh.

  “BSNA is holding its General Convocation in Milwaukee this year. The theme is ‘Use and Abuse of Religion in Brontë Text and Subtext.”

  “You know, Cindy, it’s quite disgraceful but I have trouble keeping Charlotte and Emily straight.”

  “Um, ’Lissa? Hello? You wrote your master’s thesis on the tension between environmental determinism and deconstructionist theory in Wuthering Heights.”

  “Well, technically, that’s true.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Busted. I’m sorry, Cindy, but I simply don’t have time to gin up a conference presentation in the next few weeks.”

  “Good, because that would be a conflict of interest. I want you to read a paper I’ve written that I’ve just learned I won’t be able to give.”

  “That I can handle,” Melissa said with vast relief.

  “There are Power Points.”

  “I eat Power Points for breakfast. What’s your topic?”

  “‘Charlotte Brontë’s Anti-Catholicism: Victorian Conformity or Subliminal Obsession?’”

  “I pick subliminal obsession. It’s sexier.”

  “Just read the paper, professor. Now report to detention and write one-hundred times, ‘I must not fib to my friends.’”

  “You’re letting me off easy. Send me the paper as soon as you can.”

  She hung up and turned toward Bleifert, who was standing near the far corner with her eyes politely averted, thoughtfully blowing smoke toward the ceiling vent and flicking ash into the wastebasket. Bleifert glanced around.

  “Has Peel and Eat Shrimp and Material Breach sparked controversy?”

  “It has earned me a blast in the Graduate Review of Academic and Interdisciplinary Literature, from someone who should know better.”

  “Good for you. I’m still working on Byron.”

  “He became an overnight celebrity by savaging half the poets in two countries. Do you think anyone would read English Bards today if he’d just done riffs on Addison or Swift instead of using his own voice?”

  “I’m guessing no.”

  “If you want to lampoon a professor or a dean, including me, be my guest. Invective has a very respectable pedigree in English literature. But skewer us with your own sword. Don’t parrot something you heard from Professor Angstrom.”

  “Point taken.” Bleifert combined a becoming blush with a shy smile. “Thanks.”

  “Hey, I get paid to do this.”

  “You’re not like a lot of professors. On most things you’re skeptical about both sides but open to both. But on a few big things you can be downright dogmatic. You would have made a good Benedictine abbess.”

 
; “I don’t think agnostics are allowed to be abbesses, even these days.”

  “It’s none of my business, but ‘agnostic’ as in atheist-lite or as in you really don’t know?”

  “The latter. It isn’t any of your business, but why stop an interesting conversation on a technicality?”

  “The thing is, a good abbess is agnostic in just that sense. Not knowing is the essence of faith. Accepting the second law of thermodynamics isn’t a matter of faith. If you truly know something, it isn’t faith to believe it.”

  “A provocative thought.” Melissa noticed a fierce, intensely focused gleam in Bleifert’s eyes. It struck her as the kind of spark you might have seen in the eyes of a martyr on her way to the stake—or of a suicide bomber on his way to a crowded bus stop.

  “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” Bleifert said then, her tone suddenly conversational again, “but I couldn’t help hearing part of what you said during your phone call. It sounds like you and Dean Mignon will be on the same panel at the Brontë thing. That could get interesting.”

  “I’ll just be reading a colleague’s paper.”

  “Even so.”

  “Anything else, or did you just want to finish your cigarette?”

  “One more thing, actually. You said your husband is a lawyer. If I had a question about that big trial that’s coming up—the one they call the sex-or-swim case—do you think it would be okay if I asked him? I don’t mean just idle curiosity, I mean something important.”

  “I’m not sure, but the quick way to find out is to ask him. If he can’t talk about it he won’t be shy about telling you. Here, let me give you his card.”

  “Thanks.” Bleifert accepted the proffered card, put her cigarette out against the inside of Melissa’s wastebasket, and re-shouldered her bulging, puce backpack. “You really have been very thoughtful. I appreciate it.”

  “You’re quite welcome.” Melissa smiled, both surprised and inwardly warmed by the almost stunningly retro good manners.

  As soon as Bleifert had gone Melissa typed a quick email to Mignon, suggesting that he give Angstrom a call about examining an Italian document. A nanosecond after she’d hit SEND, though, she felt misgivings—a bit like the feeling she had when she played gin rummy with her dad and realized an instant too late that he’d somehow suckered her into dumping the very card he needed.

  Chapter 5

  The Third Wednesday of August, 2007

  “What’s a ‘work made for hire?’” Harald Angstrom asked Rep.

  “It’s a creative effort produced by someone employed for the purpose by someone else, instead of working on his own. Hallmark Cards verses or advertising jingles, for example. The employer has the copyright and creative control. It’s a good term for creative parties to keep out of their contracts.”

  “In my case, unfortunately, it’s already there.”

  “Is the contract with the university?”

  “It’s with Goettinger Corporation.” Angstrom brushed disgustedly at invisible specks on his blue denim work shirt. “A corporate history to commemorate the company’s centennial in 2009.”

  “And someone at Goettinger doesn’t like what you’ve written?”

  “Well, they probably wouldn’t like it if I’d written anything, but so far I haven’t.”

  “Clio is a fickle muse.”

  “Nothing so pretentious as that. Ninety percent of writing history is gathering and organizing data. The key-punching itself goes quite fast. I just haven’t quite gotten to that part yet.”

  “Have you missed any interim deadlines?”

  “Strictly speaking I’ve missed every interim deadline. But one generally does in what some of my nastier colleagues call the history-whore business. Besides, Tim Goettinger keeled over in a confessional at Saint Josephat’s more than two years ago and they haven’t gotten around to naming an alternative contact yet. So I have a technical excuse.”

  “They’re getting a bit restive, though, are they?”

  “They want to cancel the whole project.”

  “Without paying you?”

  “On the contrary, they’ll let me keep the advance and they’ll throw in the progress payment that would be due when I submitted the first draft. Fifty-thousand altogether just to tear up the contract.”

  “I’ll try to phrase this next question as delicately as I can,” Rep said, thinking of clients who didn’t know what a progress payment was and would count themselves very lucky indeed to clear fifty-thousand for a completed work. “Why didn’t you say ‘yes’ before their mouths were closed?”

  “Because I want to write the book.”

  “I see.”

  “I haven’t been entirely idle. I’ve gotten into the archives and found a rather provocative little story. This wouldn’t be just a handsomely bound corporate valentine. It could turn into a passably decent work of local history.”

  “But only if you have creative control.”

  “Right.”

  Rep shrugged.

  “If it’s that important to you, no law says you have to take Goettinger’s money. Treat their proposal as an anticipatory breach, return the advance, and write whatever you want. The advance part might be a hardship, but—”

  “It would be an impossibility. Long since spent. I’m a fifty-seven-year old divorced professor still making monthly payments on half-a-duplex in Shorewood. Nothing about my Marxism is more sincere than my net worth. Put my IRA, my modest equity, and my 1999 Neon together and I couldn’t come up with ten-thousand dollars, much less twenty-five.”

  “That sheds a different light on Goettinger’s offer. To be cold-bloodedly realistic about it, why don’t you take the money and run?”

  “Let’s just say the objective and subjective conditions of proletarian consciousness have converged.” Angstrom’s blue eyes glinted under bushy gray eyebrows. His coffin-plate smile suggested that there was only one cold-blooded realist in the room, and it wasn’t Rep. “No doubt I can be bought. But not for fifty-thousand dollars.”

  “An important piece of self-knowledge.”

  “When I got my first tenure-track position almost thirty years ago, I was on cloud nine. Actually getting tenure ten years later brought transports of elation. I could be a scholar! I could teach and write!”

  “But then reality intruded?”

  “Reality kicked the door down and walked off with everything that wasn’t nailed down. I started noticing students who’d gotten Cs from me driving BMWs on Downer Avenue, and waltzing into Midwest Airlines’ pricey Best Care Club at the airport while I waited out flight delays at the gate with howling three-year olds and sales reps talking on cell-phone head sets.”

  “In other words, you didn’t have much money.”

  “I had hardly any money at all. I don’t mean I had to vacation in Wisconsin Dells instead of Acupulco. I mean I found myself sweating winter gas bills. We scholars don’t do badly at the beginning but we hit the ceiling way too soon. So I’ve moonlighted a bit: appraisals of book collections, a couple of those vanity press institutional valentines, and some other things here and there to keep me in suede elbow patches.”

  “I get the picture.” Rep paused for a moment as he tried to come up with the right lawyerly spin. “You feel that if you abandoned the Goettinger project for fifty-thousand dollars you’d be selling out.”

  Angstrom’s soup-strainer moustache hid a smile even thinner than the last one.

  “I sold out a long time ago, counselor. Now we’re just negotiating.”

  “Negotiating can be an expensive hobby. What’s the maximum you could get under the contract?”

  “Two-hundred-fifty-thousand, unless Goettinger’s bullying induces hysterical quadriplegia and we throw a little mental and emotional distress into the mix.”

  “Contract law doesn’t work that way, and hysterical quadriplegia would be way past my choke point even if it did.”

  “I’ve stumbled over the
last squeamish lawyer in America. So a contingent fee is out of the question?”

  “Yes. To take litigation on spec my partners back in Indianapolis would insist on a six-figure upside for the firm and a slam-dunk on liability.”

  “That’s the problem with capitalism. It’s never really ruthless when you need it to be. Any ideas?”

  “One. We can tell Goettinger that you’re going to proceed with research among its customers, competitors, and present and former employees, and then pursue independent publication. You will hold them responsible for any loss in the benefit of your bargain.”

  “What will that accomplish?”

  “If we’re very, very lucky,” Rep said, “it will get you sued.”

  “For breach of contract?”

  “For everything under the sun, including things covered by your homeowner’s insurance policy. Then your insurer will end up paying my bills.”

  “Suppose the insurer denies coverage?”

  “That one we’d take on spec. When good lawyers die they spend eternity in heaven suing insurance companies.”

  “You’d take that case on the come even though your fees might not reach the magic six-figure level?”

  “We’d see to it that they did.”

  “You’re not so squeamish after all. How fast can you write the letter?”

  Chapter 6

  Three hours later Melissa reviewed with a mixture of dismay and bemusement a memorandum that Mignon had just circulated:

  From: Professor René C. Mignon, Assistant Dean/Office of Inclusiveness Affairs

  To: Academic/Administrative Personnel

  Re: Vandalism/Protest

  Date: August 15, 2007

  It has come to the attention of the University Office of Inclusiveness Affairs that, last week, a notice on a Curtin Hall repository reading “Colored Paper” was traduced to read “Paper of Color.” If this was someone’s idea of a joke, this Office does not think it was very funny. On the contrary, it was racist, hateful, and a violation of the core principles for which this university stands. If, on the other hand, one or more members of the University Community who are diverse found the sign offensive and altered it to protest insufficient sensitivity to minority concerns and an inadequate commitment to inclusiveness, then on behalf of the entire University Community this Office sincerely apologizes.