Shoot the Lawyer Twice
Page 6
“Enough said, on your way.” Rep sighed theatrically to underline his self-sacrifice. “I’ll pass the time watching Victorian matrons get the vapors.”
“Thanks, honey. You’re a doll.”
“Oh, and if you run into Tereska Bleifert you can return this to her.” Rep handed Melissa the holy card. “She seems to have more than a scholarly interest in you and Mignon as well as Angstrom.”
Melissa slipped the card into her pocket, pecked Rep’s cheek, and hurried away. Rep turned back toward the plunging terrace and the lake vista. He had ribbed Melissa for form’s sake, but he actually contemplated the rest of the evening with contented pleasure. True, tedium would define the next hour. (Rep automatically added thirty-three-and-one-third percent to Melissa’s temporal estimates.) But the charming tinge of blush pink at the tops of Melissa’s ears corroborated the guilt she professed about leaving him in the lurch, which augured well for the post-Villa Terrace part of the evening. He didn’t know what penance she had in mind, but he was looking forward to it.
***
Melissa flashed her faculty i.d. card at a blinking red dot on a black screen, punched a code into a keypad, and then opened the door at the faculty entrance on Curtin Hall’s basement level. On the way over, she had tried Mignon’s home, office, and cell-phone numbers without success. More key-card stuff in the elevator, a ride to the eighth floor, and she found herself outside Mignon’s office—which was locked and dark. Raps on the door sharp enough to make her knuckles smart produced no response. She put her ear against the door but heard no tell-tale sounds from inside. This was shaping up as a fool’s errand.
She thought she heard a foot-shuffle down the hall. Whirling around in hopes of spotting a custodian who might be bluffed into letting her in, she saw nothing. She tried the door again, just for luck. Same result.
I am now officially out of ideas. She called Rep, whose Valentine’s present to her four years ago had been a promise to leave his phone off at social occasions, and began speaking after his voice-mail prompt’s beep.
“I might be a bit longer than I promised. I want to send Mignon the kind of confidential note you can’t just slip it under someone’s door. I’m going to email him from my office. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
She was waiting patiently for the elevator when she heard the scream.
High-pitched and panicky, the shriek had an echoing, metallic ring. Melissa hurried toward the stairwell around the corner from the elevators. It was well after eight o’clock at night, so she had to pull open a massive metal security door to reach the stairs. As she did so, a piercing whistle-screech assailed her ears. UWM gives its coeds police whistles to use in emergencies. Adreneline pumping now, Melissa rushed through the door.
She saw a broad, well-lighted stairway and nothing else. Another shriek sliced through the close, static air, coming from below and bouncing fiercely off unforgiving terrazzo and concrete. Suspecting that she wouldn’t be able to reopen the security door from the stair side at this time of night, she took her shoes off and wedged them between the closing door and the center-post. Then, wincing on unprotected feet, she pelted down the stairway.
Nothing on the seventh floor landing. Or the sixth. No more screams or whistles. Fifth floor landing. Nothing.
“What’s going on?” Melissa yelled. “Who was screaming?”
She continued going down. The screams had to have come from inside the stairwell. But she reached the bottom without finding a thing. No traumatized victim, no blood, no torn clothing or discarded handbag. She was now facing a basement security door with EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY—ALARM WILL SOUND posted above its zebra-striped latch. Whoever screamed apparently hadn’t exited through that door.
Triggering the alarm would presumably get a guard down here fast, but what could she tell him or her? That she’d heard screaming from someone who wasn’t there? She didn’t feel like adding her name to the unofficial list of hysterical female academics that the campus cops undoubtedly kept.
A bit winded, she climbed back up the stairs. At each landing she checked the door and found it locked. So how had the screamer gotten out of the stairwell? She finally made her weary way to the eighth floor.
And stared dumbly at the door. Closed tight. No sign of her shoes.
As a rule, Melissa made an effort to avoid foul language, especially on campus. She did this both as a matter of personal taste and to avoid setting a bad example of verbal laziness for students too prone to it already. This occasion, however, seemed to call for an exception. She cut loose. Not with the usual stream of blasphemies and obscenities available nightly on HBO and Comedy Central. She was, after all, a Ph.D. in English. She began with a couple of ripe selections from Chaucer and then, warming up, plumbed the richest depths of the Anglo-Saxon canon. She included some oaths that Grendel’s mom had undoubtedly keened when she got the news about Beowulf, and then threw in a couple of Celtic variations that Boadicea must have screeched while the Romans were flogging her for insolence, just before her rebellion bathed Roman Britain in fire and blood.
***
Rep, around this time, was at the bottom of the terrace, gazing up at the villa. He could see Gates and Angstrom at the funicular on top of the hill, preparing to climb into the cab. He started to climb back up. In five minutes Melissa would have been gone an hour, and with serene confidence he expected her to appear on the patio at that moment. The funicular, heading down, passed Rep roughly twenty yards on his left when he was just short of halfway up the hill. He had made another five or six laborious strides when yells and oaths behind him seized his attention.
Even in the dark he could see gray mist, not thick enough to be smoke, pouring from the funicular’s open door. Gates, sprawled on the terrace after apparently diving from the cab, was scrambling to his feet and hustling back toward the still descending car.
Now about two-thirds of the way down, the funicular jolted to a stop. Rep headed for it. Gates got there first. Covering his nose and mouth with a handkerchief, Gates plunged through the choking mist and began pulling Angstrom from the funicular. Trying to hold his breath, Rep nevertheless caught a lungful of something that smelled like a cross between fertilizer and shoe polish as he reached Gates and Angstrom. His eyes watered without particularly stinging. He grabbed two handfuls of Angstrom’s jacket and, fighting against the uncertain footing, pulled with Gates until they had Angstrom clear of the funicular. With the help of a couple of other bystanders, they dragged him another thirty feet, well away from the mist. Angstrom coughed violently, then came to his hands and knees and panted.
“You okay, prof?” Gates asked.
“‘An inconvenience is merely an adventure improperly construed.’ Chesteron.”
Gates favored Rep with one of his lingering and meaningful gazes.
“Sort of puts a new light on that clipping, doesn’t it?” he demanded.
***
“No, I will not wait here,” Melissa said patiently (for her) to the guard at Curtin Hall’s main security desk. The alarm she had triggered by going through the basement security door was still clanging, so she had to raise her voice. “My shoes are missing, my stockings are ruined, and my feet are bruised. If campus security wants me, I’ll be in my office.”
“But there may still be an intruder in the building.”
“That’s possible, but I think—” The clanging suddenly stopped, and Melissa found herself shouting at someone two feet away. She lowered her voice. “But I think the chances of him hanging around after all this racket are pretty slim, whereas my chances of having feet that are cold and sore unless I get some shoes on are one-hundred percent.”
“At least let me go with you.”
Seeing no way she could decently refuse, Melissa adopted what Rep called her nun-drawing-to-an-inside-straight expression and demurred. She didn’t think an intruder had assaulted anyone in the stairwell. She thought something else was going on, and she had
a pretty good idea of what it was. For the moment, though, she didn’t plan on sharing it with anyone except Rep.
After an elevator ride to the second floor, she and the guard began the familiar trek down the central corridor toward her office. As they were hiking through the History Department, she noticed bright light spilling into an intersecting hallway.
“I think that’s Professor Angstrom’s office,” she said.
“Must be working late.”
“I saw him at Villa Terrace about an hour ago, and he wasn’t acting like someone who was planning on burning any midnight oil.”
They turned toward the light. Well before they got there, the guard pushed in front of her and put his hand on a canister of Mace on his belt. He reached the door a few seconds before Melissa’s smarting feet could get her there and squatted to examine the lock.
“Tool marks.” He pointed to long, angry scratches on the bolt and ugly gouges on the wood inside the face-plate.
Melissa pushed open the door and saw a thoroughly ransacked office. An obstacle course of scattered paper, flung books, and emptied files littered the floor from the doorway to the Power Point projector flush with the front of the desk. The drawers on the file cabinets hung open.
Amidst all this professorial flotsam and jetsam, one item leaped out. In the center of Angstrom’s desk, atop a mound of open books, lay a manila folder. Written in bold, felt-tip characters across its front was Pius XII. It was empty.
Chapter 13
The cops got to Villa Terrace eight minutes after Rep and Gates pulled Angstrom from the funicular. Boone Fletcher’s chocolate brown Honda Civic screeched to a stop eight feet beyond the squad car sixty seconds later. He loped toward Rep and Gates with what looked like a Dictaphone on steroids in his left hand, shoulder-length hair flying behind him as if it were still 1969. Cargo pants flapped loosely around his legs. His cardinal red sweatshirt depicted Bucky Badger, the University of Wisconsin-Madison mascot, in the apparent act of sodomizing a University of Minnesota Golden Gopher.
“The egghead just get drunk, or what?” he asked by way of introduction. “And what’s the deal with the smoke they were yapping about?”
“He’s not drunk,” Gates said. “He was perfectly sober when he got into the funicular with me. By the way, I’m—”
“Famous writer, I know. Guns, girls, and gelignite. Got it. Now what was the smoke all about?”
“We were halfway down the hill when this gray canister sailed into the cab through the window on the far side, spewing mist. Mist, not smoke.”
“Any idea what the mist was?”
“No, except it was thick and unpleasant.”
“More like Extacy or more like crystal meth?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Gates said coldly.
“I know, I’m just goofing on you.” Fletcher stepped back and took a more searching look at the funicular. “Kind of a funny place for a gas attack. Windows on three sides, slow moving, easy to escape.”
“It didn’t happen the way I’d write it in one of my stories.”
“Describe the canister.”
“About the size of a small bottle of Diet Coke. Sounded like metal when it hit the floor. It’s probably still in there.”
Fletcher gave Gates two raised eyebrows and a quick point with his index finger while he mouthed a slow and exaggerated, “Good point.” He had taken two steps toward the funicular when a voice barking behind him stopped the third step with his foot still six inches off the ground.
“Contaminate that crime scene, scribbler, and I’ll kick your butt from here to Walker’s Point.”
“Why, Stan,” Fletcher said, whirling around and spreading his arms in a theatrically welcoming gesture. “Sergeant Stanley Mittlestedt, everybody. Twenty-some years on the force and a service jacket cleaner than my permanent record at Saint Roberts grade school.”
As Fletcher strolled toward the policeman, Rep looked at his watch and frowned. He frowned through the message Melissa had left, and was still frowning four cell-phone rings later when he got her voice-mail prompt. He left a message more worried than it would have been twenty minutes before.
***
He had missed her by less than a minute. After thanking the earnest young campus cop for escorting her to her office, Melissa settled at her desk and pulled out her keyboard, in ostensible preparation for an indefinite period of work. She smiled at the cop’s appraising gaze as he lingered in the doorway, then waved to him. He finally took the hint and left.
Her email to Mignon took two minutes. She waited four more to give the cop time to make tracks. On the elevator back to the eighth floor, she switched her cell-phone to vibrate. She figured Rep might be calling, and she didn’t want a ring to give her away while she was lurking near Mignon’s office.
Forty feet of dark hallway still separated her from the office when her phone’s gyrations signaled Rep’s call. She retreated into the shadows, debating whether to answer long enough to whisper that she’d call back in ten minutes.
She was reaching for the phone when she sensed movement in the darkness at the end of the corridor. She froze. Rep would have to wait. Fortunately, eight years of marriage had given him plenty of practice. She peered fiercely into the blackness, wondering if she’d actually seen or heard anything at all.
A quicksilver splash of light answered the question. Two seconds worth of brightness burst out of the stairwell as the security door opened. She saw someone dart through the doorway. It looked like a woman, but she wouldn’t have given better than two-to-one odds on that.
No point in running after whoever it was. With a head start of at least twenty-five seconds, the fugitive could easily reach the exit before Melissa got a glimpse of her or him. She caught her breath, let her pulse rate drift back toward two digits, and resumed her trek toward Mignon’s office.
She once again found the door tightly locked. Squatting, she peered at the area around the knob in the faint light from her cell-phone’s screen, looking for scratches and gouges like those she seen at Angstrom’s office.
The bolt snapped and door opened. She managed to stand all the way up by the time Mignon said, “Good evening, professor.”
“Good evening, dean.” Her words sounded sheepish to her. She felt a bit like she’d been caught trying to sneak a Coors into the junior prom.
“I received your email a few minutes ago. Thank you for your kind words and your offer of support on the document front.”
He enunciated the words with the elaborate precision of someone not altogether sure of his tongue, and she could smell something a lot stronger than merlot on his breath.
“I’ll be happy to do what I can. Unfortunately, it looks like the document may have been pilfered from Professor Angstrom’s office.”
“How very odd. Perhaps we should defer further discussion until Monday. I’m a bit tired right now.”
“Of course. The reason I came by, though, was to see whether the same person who broke into Professor Angstrom’s office also burgled yours.”
“I don’t think so. I expect I would have noticed.”
I don’t think so either. Melissa glanced unconsciously at the lock-plate. But someone tried.
***
Roughly forty-five minutes after they’d gotten back to their condo, by Rep’s estimate, Melissa rested her wrists on his shoulders and with infinite finesse began to scratch the top of his back with her fingernails. The gentle stimulus sent waves of contentment coursing through him.
Geisha and client? Rep willed himself to relax, letting his knees sink into the seven-knot Oriental rug on their living room floor.
“Reppert, dearest?”
Definitely not geisha and client.
“Yes, beloved?”
“I have a question about privilege.”
Strict attorney and fibbing witness? Haven’t done that one in a while.
“I’m good at privilege. Ask away.”
“Absolutely privileged. In the eyes of the law, you and I are a single entity. ‘Two souls in one body,’ as the older cases put it.”
“That’s kind of sweet,” Melissa sighed. “Almost poetic.”
“Well, the same poets who came up with that used to hang twelve-year olds for stealing six shillings, so let’s get to the prosaic part of this problem.”
“Oh dear. Mood killer?”
“No, this mood is a survivor. But for the moment let’s focus on whatever is bothering you.”
“Correct as usual, King Friday. Get our robes and I’ll put coffee on.”
Rep managed his part of the assignment, tripping only twice on shoes and clothing strewn over the carpet. In minutes they were demurely draped in flannel robes, holding steaming cups of coffee, and two sentences into an all-business conversation.
“Okay,” Rep said, beginning sentence-three, “why didn’t you tell the police that Bleifert was the one who tried to break into Mignon’s office?”
“I said ‘might well have been the one.’”
“Who’s the lawyer here? I’ll handle the pettifogging.”
“I’m not nit-picking. I saw the Power Point equipment in Angstrom’s office. The most logical explanation is that Bleifert returned it, which probably means she had a key that he gave her for the purpose.”
“If she had a key for that office she wouldn’t have broken into it.”
“Precisely.” Melissa sipped coffee, then blew across the top of her cup.
“We may have a second entrant, who also tried the Mignon break-in. Or my premise is wrong and she wasn’t the one who returned the Power Point equipment and is therefore possibly responsible for both the actual break-in and the attempted one.”
“Fine. It could have been Bleifert who lured you into the stairwell so she could try her luck with Mignon’s office, or it could have been someone else. The evidence is inconclusive. Sounds like a dandy little job for the police.”