RCM
Melissa was trying to decide whether misuse of “traduced” was more alarming than the diction error lurking in “who are diverse” when she heard a knock.
“Do you have a minute, professor?” Mignon asked.
“It’s too late to say no.”
Mignon interpreted this as an invitation to sit down.
“I wanted to speak about your email concerning Professor Angstrom.”
“I thought you might be able to help him.”
“I might, but I’m afraid he’s not interested in my assistance.”
“That’s regrettable, but I’m not sure what I can do about it.”
“I was wondering whether you might be willing to tell Professor Angstrom that you could in fact arrange a translation and examination of the document, perhaps through some contact of your husband’s. I can find the funds to pay for it, if there’s a charge, as long as I can get a look at the thing myself. By functioning as a kind of honest broker, you would be doing a larger favor than you know not only for Angstrom but for the entire university.”
“‘Honest’ strikes me as an odd way to describe lying to a colleague.”
“Ordinarily, of course, I wouldn’t suggest such a course.”
“I should hope not.”
“But extraordinary concerns are involved here.”
“For example?” Melissa folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in her chair.
“I have spent almost two years trying to arrange a conference here on the role of Pope Pius the Twelfth in the Second World War.”
“That’s not exactly virgin territory, is it? It’s not my field, but I have the impression that a spate of books on the subject hit the market a few years ago, and many of them are now viewed professionally as overhyped. Could a symposium here contribute something new and interesting?”
“Well that’s just it, you see. You’ve put your finger right on it.”
“I’m glad I’ve accomplished something in the last five minutes.”
“One of Professor Angstrom’s remunerative sidelines is appraising books of claimed historical value. His appraisals are always generous and word gets around. Donors seek him out, pay his fee, give the books to some worthy recipient, take a large tax deduction, and hope the IRS has more important things to worry about.”
“All right.” Melissa’s temples began to pulse, and she wished that they were walking briskly across the quad right now instead of sitting in her office.
“Recently, Professor Angstrom provided such an appraisal for a set of nineteenth century Slavic hymnals supposedly given by the abbot of a monastery to an American officer to thank him for the consideration he and his men showed when they were billeted at the monastery in the closing weeks of the Second World War. The officer was from a prominent Milwaukee family, which held onto the hymnals as keepsakes. Now the family is going to donate the hymnals in the officer’s memory to Villa Terrace—the decorative arts museum where some of the Brontë panels will be held.”
“Including your panel?”
“Including mine, as it happens. The museum will officially thank the family the night of my panel.”
“Where does the pope come in?”
“Angstrom has been hinting that he found a potentially surprising document from the early ’forties stuck in the pages of one of the hymnals. He has implied that it’s a written order to the monastery to shelter Jews.”
“You’d hardly expect monks to use something like that as a bookmark.”
“The theory is that the abbot’s gift of the hymnals was a cover for getting rid of what might turn out to be a compromising document if fascists ended up running Czechoslovakia after the war—something that certainly wasn’t out of the question in early 1945.”
“Seems a bit thin.” Melissa put her forearms on her desk in an effort to make her posture seem less hostile. “In fact, the whole things sounds like a tease. I think Professor Angstrom may just be having fun with…people.”
“But if it is true, you see, it’s enormous.” Mignon’s voice vibrated with excitement. “It would be the only extant written order from the pope about helping the Jews.”
“I can see the potential historical importance.”
“It could be the centerpiece of a major symposium! Draw the top names in the field! Real star power! Heavy hitters!”
“Yes, that too, I suppose.”
Apparently sensing the irony in Melissa’s comment, Mignon came back down to earth. He gathered himself into the admixture of supplicant and bully peculiar to deanship.
“Will you, at least, consider it?”
“Yes, I will consider it,” she replied
Melissa took what comfort she could in the reflection that this was not, technically, a lie. She would consider lying to Angstrom, compromising her integrity, and letting herself be used as a pawn in a grubby little game of academic politics, all in the name of some higher scholarly purpose. But when she was through considering it, she knew what the answer would be.
If I’m going to have a guilty conscience, I’ll have a lot more fun getting it than this cheap little exercise would produce.
Chapter 7
The third Monday in September, 2007
“Start with this.”
A Marine officer in civilian clothes, Rep thought as the visitor handed him a synopsis of the next action/adventure novel moving down the Taylor Gates assembly line. Square-jawed. Direct gaze from no-nonsense eyes. Compactly muscular upper body. Erect posture. Exactly what you’d expect from the author of Kai Diamond’s adventures.
Except that the speaker handing Rep the document wasn’t Taylor Gates but his agent, Amy Lee. Gates himself, sitting beside her, was two inches taller than Rep but eighty pounds heavier. Flab flopped over the open collar on his shirt, and nothing about his upper arms suggested that he’d completed an obstacle course any time recently.
“‘Curia Code,’” Rep read aloud from the first page of the synopsis. “‘A thriller about papal politics in the very heart of the Vatican.’”
“Not a conspiracy to rig the election of the next pope.” Gates wagged his finger and shook his head to reinforce this pronouncement. “That’s been done. This story is a lot edgier.”
“Does the first character to appear get hacked to death by Swiss Guards?”
“Too clichéd. He’s poisoned by curare secreted on the inside of his condom.”
“No need to tell me more, especially since you’d probably have to kill me if you did.”
Gates, however, couldn’t help himself. Ignorning Lee’s frown, he leaned forward, almost trembling with delight.
“A plot to fix the canonization of a saint. Not some martyr from the Dark Ages. A twentieth-century figure—and a very controversial one. The marketing strategy comes from The Hunt for Red October. We want to get the idea out that the story is based on events that are actually happening—and we have a line on that, too.”
“It’s an atomic bomb,” Lee said.
Saint Robert Oppenheimer? Rep managed to stifle these unconstructive words before they passed his lips.
“It sounds very promising.”
“Oh, it’s promising all right.” Gates’ voice-box seemed to be equipped with an automatically functioning italics key.
“Religious thrillers have been very hot ever since Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code,” Lee explained. “It’s becoming a very crowded field.”
“We’re positioning Kai for counter-programming,” Gates said. “Thirty-two percent of the people who buy at least one mystery or thriller a month are practicing Catholics, mostly over forty-five. They tend to be more conservative than other segments of the genre demographic. They go to church more often, vote Republican, own guns, and buy American.”
“Which means there’s a huge potential market for someone who can come off as the anti-Dan Brown,” Lee said. “A religious thriller that’s pro-God instead of anti-Ca
tholic. We won’t be Pepsi to his Coke but Gatorade to his Hawaiian Punch.”
“Prius Hybrid to his Oldsmobile Eight-eight,” Gates interjected.
“Nicorette to his Winstons,” Rep murmured.
“Exactly.” The Gates italics button functioned with its customary efficiency.
It occurred to Rep that Dan Brown might have found this assessment less than fair and balanced. But Dan Brown wasn’t proposing to hire him, so he kept his mouth shut. The resulting silence didn’t last long enough to be uncomfortable, for Lee immediately filled it.
“We’ve got the inside track because of Mission Creep, the story I sent you last month. But there are lots of thriller wannabes out there trying to mine this vein and looking for buzz.”
“Capitalism can be a bitch.” Rep glanced from Lee to Gates and back again. “What do you need from me?”
“Look at this.”
Lee worried an oversized, oxblood leather legal pad holder out of an undersized, oxblood leather envelope briefcase. Then, with a deliberate solemnity that verged on liturgical, she opened the holder, eased a printed page from the flap inside, and handed it to Rep.
Rep looked down at a photocopy of a spring, 2005 article apparently taken from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and printed off the internet:
Local Industrialist Dies at St. Josephats
Milwaukee industrialist and business leader Timothy Goettinger died of an apparent heart attack at St. Josephat’s Basilica yesterday afternoon, while confessions were being heard. Responding to an unidentified 911 caller, EMTs found Mr. Goettinger’s body inside one of the confessionals. One bystander said that she was drawn to the confessional, which was not in use, when she noticed a mist seeping from underneath the door.
EMT Fred Norman said that Goettinger was already dead when the response team arrived, approximately seven minutes after the 911 call. He said that the misting substance was apparently carbon monoxide from an industrial cylinder found near the body. Norman said that carbon monoxide poisoning was not the cause of death, but declined to speculate about whether the gas played any role in what happened.
Goettinger was president and CEO of Goettinger Corp., a machine tool manufacturer that has had its headquarters on Milwaukee’s south side since 1909. The company was in the news recently as a result of a federal investigation into alleged improper payments to foreign officials in connection with the sale of CNC lathes. No charges were ever brought.
Goettinger is survived by his daughter, Carolyn Goettinger Hoeckstra, 25, and his son, Henry “Hank” Goettinger, 22. Goettinger was 58.
“Carbon monoxide in church?” Rep asked after he’d finished reading the piece. “I’ve only been in Milwaukee since last year, but even so I’m surprised I haven’t heard about something as off-the-wall as this.”
“You haven’t heard about it because it didn’t happen.” Lee twitched impatient fingers at Rep, who obediently returned the clipping. “At least not the way it’s recounted here. Someone went to a lot of trouble using Printshop or something to set this local story up in Journal Sentinel typeface and font, insert stuff about lethal gas that echoes Mission Creep, and send it anonymously to Taylor last month.”
“A pretty elaborate hoax,” Rep said.
“Or a pretty clumsy threat.” Gates accompanied this assessment with a Meaningful Look that evoked ’sixties-era private eyes.
“Who would want to threaten you?”
“Someone who’d like to be first on the anti-Da Vinci Code bandwagon and therefore wants me to jump off.”
“Possible. But a matter for cops rather than lawyers, no?”
“Whoever did this obviously had access to the Mission Creep storyline,” Lee said.
“Apparently.”
“Which means we have a leak.”
“That would follow.”
“And a very strong possibility that the leaker is working with someone in or near Milwaukee, because who else would have noticed this story?”
“Fair enough.” Rep hoped that Lee was approaching an answer to this question. She was.
“In the synopsis of Curia Code that I gave you at the beginning of this meeting, we don’t identify Taylor as the author and we don’t call the protagonist Kai Diamond. We’d like you to shop the synopsis around to a list of editors that I’ll give you. Pitch it as the work of one of your clients, whom you won’t identify until there’s a strong expression of interest.”
“What will that accomplish?”
“There will be…reactions,” Gates rumbled.
“Which will tell us what we need to know.”
Rep considered the pair in front of him, who each seemed serenely unaware that their proposed assignment raised more ethical issues than a professional responsibility symposium for lawyers in New Jersey.
“I’m not a literary agent. I’m a lawyer.”
“A lawyer is just an agent with malpractice insurance.”
Rep had to smile. Lee had him there.
He listened with respectful but distracted attention while she talked about paying his standard hourly rate and hinted about “more conventional legal work down the road.” He wasn’t tempted. A client who’ll ask his lawyer to lie will lie to his lawyer. Besides, this was out of the question. That was easy. The more challenging part would come when Lee finally ran out of steam, which she seemed on the verge of doing.
“So. Can we do this?”
“Never ask a lawyer what you can or can’t do. Ask him how to do what you want to do.”
“Okay,” Gates rasped, “how can we smoke the leaker out?”
“I don’t know. I’ll try to come up with something that won’t land you in court or me in front of a bar disciplinary committee. I’d like to meet with you again in a couple of weeks or so.”
“Easily done,” Lee said. “We’ll be at the Pfister Hotel. We decided to come in a little early for the Brontë thing and we’ll be staying there.”
“I’m surprised you were able to get rooms downtown. We have a big trial starting soon that the media are calling the sex-or-swim case. I thought reporters had soaked up every room south of Sheboygan for the duration.”
“It’s all in knowing how to ask.” Gates’ voice made Rep think of condoms and curare.
Chapter 8
The first Thursday in October, 2007
Rep figured he’d never see anything more dramatic in a courtroom than the jury returning its verdict in the sex-or-swim case. If the world had ended three minutes later, he would have been right.
He and Angstrom watched the show from seats just behind the bar, next to Goettinger Corporation’s lawyers. As Rep had hoped, his letter had baited the company into suing Angstrom. Word that the sex-or-swim jury finally had a verdict interrupted a humdrum scheduling conference in Angstrom’s case, so they were able to grab choice seats before the reporters and other spectators rushed in to hear the verdict read.
From no more than eight feet away he saw thousand-dollar suit coats strain against shoulders as Clevenger and his lawyers tensed. After taking the verdict form back from a poker-faced judge, the clerk pulled a sleek, black tube close to her mouth.
“United States v. Clevenger, case number 07-CR-103. On the charge of willfully boarding a vessel on the high seas for the purpose of committing depredation thereon contrary to the law of nations, in violation of section sixteen-fifty-one of title eighteen of the United States Code, we the jury find the defendant, James Taylor Clevenger, guilty as charged in the indictment.”
Forty seconds, half-a-dozen gavel raps, and the brusque eviction of a woman whispering into a Razr smaller than her COURT TV press tag silenced the post-verdict uproar. While the busted reporter exited, Rep heard Walt Kuchinski’s urgent baritone sweep over the courtroom. Kuchinski was only local counsel for Clevenger and his three best suits put together hadn’t cost a thousand dollars, but the dream-team superstars brought in from both coasts as lead counsel seemed stunned into paralyz
ed silence by the verdict.
“Your honor, I ask that the jury be polled by name.”
The judge handed a stapled jury list to the clerk, who squared her shoulders as she turned toward the jury. When she spoke, a sharply challenging tone replaced the carefully neutral timbre of her verdict reading.
“Robert Ferguson: Is this your verdict?”
“Yes it is.”
“Marilyn Ebelard: Is this your verdict?”
“Yes.”
Rep’s eyes swiveled to the fifth juror in the first row. He was a twenty-something male with hair the color of old straw. His scared-rabbit eyes blinked through wire-rims too big for his face. He seemed to cringe with each lash-like repetition of the question.
“Elizabeth Pitowski: Is this your verdict?”
“It is.”
“Brian Cochrane: Is this your verdict?”
“Yep.”
Rep’s fingernails bit into his palms as he leaned forward.
“Grady Schoenfeld: Is this your verdict?”
The young man’s mouth twisted wordlessly for seven painful seconds.
“Grady Schoenfeld,” the clerk barked, “is this—”
“I just don’t know!” Schoenfeld pounded a frustrated fist on his thigh. “I said I thought he probably did it, but I’m just not sure.”
Another eruption. Gavel raps beat a staccato tattoo from the bench. All the lawyers at both tables were now standing and yammering.
“That’ll do,” the judge said. “Counsel, sit down and shut up. Bailiff, escort Mr. Schoenfeld to my chambers and show the rest of the jurors to the jury room. Everyone else, stand up while the jury goes out, then either sit down or leave—but don’t make a peep while you’re doing it, or you won’t see the inside of this courtroom again.”
Shoot the Lawyer Twice Page 3