“Aggressive questioning by the court is often a positive sign.”
“Yeah, right. We’re lucky they didn’t reverse from the bench. I wonder how those California boys will like Milwaukee in February, because we could be right back in front of a jury in two months. I’ve gotta go listen to the dream-teamers spin me about taking this to the Supreme Court.”
Rep turned to Melissa but found that Clevenger had intercepted her.
“Professor Pennyworth, could I have a word with you?”
“Certainly.”
The two women moved toward the long, frosted glass and maple wall fronting the clerk’s domain. (Calling the sumptuous quarters of the Clerk of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit an “office” would be like calling San Simeon “a house.”) Melissa spotted Hoeckstra cruising down the hallway with damn-the-torpedoes body language. Mignon trailed her, making determined but unsuccessful efforts to catch her attention. Clevenger waited until Hoeckstra was well past before she spoke.
“Were you and your husband planning on going back to Milwaukee this afternoon?”
“No, we’re going to spend the weekend in Chicago. Professor Angstrom is at a symposium at Notre Dame on the Pius controversy, trying to stir up interest. I may run over to South Bend tomorrow to see how he’s doing.”
“Then I wonder if I could ask you a great favor. It looks like we’re going to lose this appeal and have to try Jimmy’s case again. I need to talk with you about something. Can I buy you a drink around two o’clock this afternoon?”
“Sure. We’re at the Hilton. Shall we meet in the bar there?”
“I’d prefer a place called Spirits of Chicago about two blocks away. For reasons I’ll explain, I want to avoid the Hilton until we’ve had our talk.”
“Spirits of Chicago. Got it. I’ll see you at two.”
“Thank you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
Clevenger scurried off. Melissa found her way back to Rep and told him about her request.
“I didn’t see how I could decently refuse,” she said apologetically.
“You couldn’t. If I’d spent half-a-million dollars on lawyers who were about to get me right back where I started, I’d probably want to talk to someone who didn’t have a law degree myself.”
“Take me to lunch and you can do exactly that.”
Chapter 17
“Nothing quite like a crisp sauterne in the afternoon, is there?” Clevenger asked at eight minutes after two.
“I’m a sauterne virgin, but it’s quite good,” Melissa said.
“Down to business. I’m meeting with Professor Angstrom this evening.”
“I thought he’d be in South Bend all weekend.”
“He’s driving over to Chicago just for the meeting. He has implied that he has information that could be extremely helpful to Jimmy. I need to know how reliable he is.”
Melissa took a deliberate sip before responding. Too bad Mignon isn’t here. He’d answer that question without mincing words.
“For me to give you an answer that will be of any use to you,” she said after this pause, “what I say would have to be completely confidential.”
“Understood. I won’t even tell Jimmy’s lawyers that you’re the source.”
“Very well, then. Let me put it this way. I don’t think Angstrom will tell you an out-and-out lie. But I wouldn’t rely on anything he said unless you can verify it independently. If you parse his statements they tend to be literally true. But they often create a false impression—especially if he has a personal interest in creating that impression.”
“Like money, for example.”
“Or professional score-settling or status. But mostly money, yes.”
Melissa then gave Clevenger an academic insider’s account of Angstrom’s Villa Terrace performance. She described the viciousness of the trap he’d laid for Mignon, and the unlovely combination of glee and gratuitous cruelty with which he’d sprung it. Imagining how she’d feel if her son were facing prison, Melissa couldn’t help being impressed by Clevenger’s focus and professional detachment as she scribbled notes and asked precise questions.
“Would you excuse me for a few minutes?” she asked then. “I need to discuss something with Jimmy’s lawyers before I take the next step.”
“Sure,” Melissa said.
Clevenger got up and walked, coatless, out onto the restaurant’s smoking plaza, overlooking the Chicago River. She paced back and forth before the window, smoking in a desultory way and chatting on a cell-phone. After four minutes she put out her cigarette and headed back inside.
“You’ve been very kind,” she said as she sat back down. “I hate to impose further, but I wonder if I might give you a little detailed background about my son. Knowing the whole story might make it easier for you to remember something about Angstrom that could prove critical.”
“Of course,” Melissa said. “The only other thing I’d be doing is grading papers in a hotel room while my husband returns phone calls and marks up a trademark license agreement.”
Over the next forty-five minutes they finished their wine, had another glass, and switched to tea. Clevenger was setting down a porcelain cup when for the first time she seemed close to losing the tight grip on her emotions.
“I understand how you could take ‘sex or swim’ two ways. But you’ve seen Jimmy. He can’t do hard-as-nails. He’s the kind of kid who gets drinks dumped in his lap on Brady Street if he comes on too strong.”
“But Hoeckstra didn’t slap his face. She jumped and swam for it.”
“That’s what I can’t figure out. Would you mind stopping up in my room back at the Hilton for a couple of minutes so I can show you something? That’s what I wanted to clear with Jimmy’s lawyers when I stepped outside.”
Melissa stifled a groan and mentally rebuked herself for her impatience. She hadn’t bargained for two hours of chick-chat, but she was talking to a woman who had nothing in her life but a demanding job and her only child. As serious as the sex-or-swim case was for Jimmy Clevenger, Melissa thought, it was a life-and-death matter for his mother. Bill paid and tip left, they bundled themselves against the cold and bustled out into the twilit chill, like knights leading a sortie from a besieged castle. The morning’s brave sun was now a distant memory as the gloaming enveloped them. The winter solstice approached. It would be pitch black by four-fifteen.
“What I want to show you is something Angstrom sent me.”
“A tease?”
“He called it ‘a sampler.’ I deliberately left it in my room this morning because I didn’t want a federal marshal to stumble over it while he was going through my briefcase at the security checkpoint.”
“I’ll be happy to come up.”
Clevenger’s room looked exactly like Rep and Melissa’s, except for the sturdy glass ashtrays on the desk and the bedside table. In less than three minutes, Melissa found herself seated in the room’s wing chair with a glass of ice and a bottle of Aqua Fina on the window sill beside her and a photocopy of a single page in her hands. It was on the letterhead of the United States Department of Justice, addressed to someone identified as the general counsel for Goettinger Corporation. It said that the United States had completed its inquiries into the matter in question and was closing its file without contemplation of further proceedings. Dated September 12, 2003, it was signed by Terence Finnegan.
“Do you know whether this is genuine?”
“Yes. I’ve seen the original. I billed Goettinger Corporation over sixty-thousand dollars to get that letter written.”
“So Angstrom is implying that he knows something else—something a bit more sinister.”
“That’s my read,” Clevenger said. “What I have to decide is whether I can trust him.”
“Well, as the Irish say, ‘God is good, but don’t dance in a small boat.’”
An authoritative rap sounded at the door. Melissa
automatically glanced at her watch. Ten after four. Clevenger opened the door to two men in suits and one in a blazer.
“Charlie Simmons, Hilton security,” the blazer said. “These two gentlemen are Chicago police detectives. They’d like to speak with you.”
“About what?”
“Harald Angstrom,” the taller of the two suits said. “He’s dead.”
“What? Dead? Forgive me, but that’s quite a shock. I was expecting to meet him later this evening.”
“We know.”
“I guess you’d better come in.”
They did. Melissa stayed where she was. She expected to be told to leave very soon, and under the circumstances she thought it prudent to wait for that instruction.
“How did he die?” Clevenger asked.
“Poison. Curare sprayed in his mouth.”
“Suicide?”
“Set up to look that way, but we don’t think so.”
“When did this happen?”
“Well,” the shorter suit said, “a little over three hours ago he was in South Bend, Indiana, which is at least seventy-five minutes from Chicago on a good day, not counting toll booths. That means he could have gotten here by two-thirty or so—say two-twenty if he really hustled and caught every light once he left the freeway. An anonymous citizen phoned in a tip about an hour ago about a body in a Prius, and the body turned out to be Angstrom. So we figure it happened between two-twenty and three-fifteen.”
“How can you pin-point the time he was in South Bend so precisely?” Clevenger asked. “I’m sorry, you’re here to ask me questions, not the other way around.”
“That question we don’t mind answering,” the taller suit said. “This is how we know. We found it on the front seat of the car, beside the body.”
Clevenger gingerly took a page in a glassine paper-protector. Melissa stepped forward to examine it discreetly over her shoulder. It was a print-out of an email:
CLEVENGER, VALERIE
__________________________________________
FROM: Valerie Clevenger [[email protected]]
SENT: Friday, December 14, 2007, 1:10 P.M.
TO: Angstrom, Harald S. [[email protected]]
SUBJECT: Meeting
Professor Angstrom,
Responding to your message, I will be happy to meet with you in Chicago at the time you suggested. I’m staying at the Hilton on Wacker. Show this message to the concierge and have me paged if you can’t reach me on the house phone.
Valerie Clevenger
__________________________________________
“One-ten in Chicago would be two-ten in South Bend,” the taller suit said, “but he’d pick up the hour difference traveling west. It’s after four here now, so that’s where the three hours comes from.”
“Got it,” Clevenger said.
The shorter suit glanced up at Melissa.
“And who might you be, ma’am?” he asked.
“I’m Melissa Seton Pennyworth,” she said. “And I might be a witness.”
***
Just about two hours later Melissa lay, fully clothed, over the covers on the bed in the hotel room she shared with Rep. He was no longer returning phone calls or marking up a trademark license agreement. He was looking thoughtfully toward the blank screen of a television.
“This does make the cheese more binding, doesn’t it?” he said.
“I screwed up,” Melissa said woodenly. “It wasn’t just academic shenanigans. My premise was wrong.”
“My premise, actually. If we’re going to berate ourselves all night, I want my share of credit for the screw-up.”
“Our premise. The point is that Angstrom wasn’t just pulling some Mean Girls-stunt on Mignon. He was doing something that led to murder.”
“That doesn’t mean anything would be different if you’d dropped a dime on Tereska Bleifert.”
“Maybe not. But now it’s clear she knows something important that she hasn’t told anybody so far. Whoever murdered Angstrom might have other targets in mind, and Bleifert’s information may help protect them.”
“So did you give her name to the police when they questioned you in Clevenger’s room?” Rep asked.
“No. Might as well give a rosary to an atheist. You should have seen Bleifert when Hoeckstra confronted her. If a couple of cops try a Mutt-and-Jeff routine on her all they’re going to get is a face-full of Polish attitude.”
“What are you going to do, then?”
“Talk to her myself.”
“Just because you can wrap me around your little finger doesn’t mean you’re magic,” Rep said. “Do you really think you can get her to tell you things she won’t tell the cops?”
“Yep.”
“How?”
“Gray lies.”
“Meaning what?”
Melissa told him what she had in mind.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Yep.”
Chapter 18
“Hi, Stan, this is Rep Pennyworth, ” Rep was saying ten minutes later to the voice-mail of Stanley Watkins, assistant general counsel of Medea Press. “This is a little off the wall, but it could be important. If Medea has gotten a pitch over the transom in the last three months or so for an action/adventure novel featuring an intrepid academic with a religious-historical document as the McGuffin, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a call.”
A knock sounded at the door while he was signing off.
“That’ll be Walt,” Melissa said as she went to answer it. Kuchinski had made it into the room and accepted a Miller Genuine Draft from the room bar by the time Rep finished leaving the same message on the voice-mail of another New York publishing contact—his fourth so far.
“That’s a little compulsive, isn’t it, boy? Still cranking out billable work after seven o’clock on Friday night?”
“If I find a way to bill this I’ll officially become the leading rainmaker in the American Bar Association. I’m just looking for food to feed the beast.”
“Boone Fletcher,” Melissa said in response to Kuchinski’s quizzical look.
“I heard about that. You can finally call yourself a real lawyer now. You’ve been threatened by a reporter.”
“I’m not sure I’d call it a threat,” Rep said. “More of an insinuation.”
“It was a threat,” Melissa said. “‘Play ball with me or see your name in boldface type under ugly headlines.’”
“I take it that wouldn’t go over particularly well with your partners back in Indianapolis.”
“It would not. The firm’s policy is that a partner’s name should only appear in the business section or before the words ‘declined to comment.’”
“So you’re thinking you might buy a little favor with Boone if you can show that Angstrom and Gates were incipient competitors?”
“It’s a fresh angle with a local twist. Besides, I haven’t come up with anything else yet. No cop would believe Gates killed a wannabe just to reduce the competition, but a reporter might.”
“I ’spose. Most reporters I know will believe anything but the truth.”
Rep and Melissa pulled on their coats and the three of them began their four-block trek to the Wabash Steak House.
“Threat, insinuation, or something else, it’s not a bad idea to accommodate the Boone-ster,” Kuchinski said. “It’d be nice to find out what that boy knows before he puts it in the paper if we’re going to try the sex-or-swim case again. And he won’t show us his unless we show him ours.”
“Wouldn’t it be pushing the outside of the envelope for him to give information to one side in a case he’s covering for his paper?” Melissa asked.
“If Boone Fletcher smells a Pulitzer Prize it won’t be question of pushing the outside of the envelope,” Kuchinski said. “He won’t even stay in the mailbox. What’s a McGuffin, by the way?”
“It’s something arbitrarily valuable that triggers the action in a story b
ecause people want to get their hands on it,” Melissa said.
“Like the letters of transit in Casablanca,” Rep added.
“Or this supposed papal order in Taylor Gates’ next story,” Kuchinski said. “Got it.”
“You know something?” Rep said. “I’m having trouble buying that. A buddy at Saint Philomena Press told me he turned down a mystery where the murder revolved around competition between two college football coaches to recruit a star defensive end. He said, ‘You don’t kill someone over a defensive end. A quarterback who can throw a tight spiral eighty yards against the wind and split the wide-out’s hands with it—maybe. But not a defensive end.’ That papal order strikes me as falling in the defensive end category of McGuffins.”
“I’m not so sure,” Kuchinski said. “You’re the pop-culture maven, professor. What do you think? If Gates could start a rumor that his next masterpiece is based on a genuine historic document that just came to light and has the History Channel all excited, would that jump-start sales?”
“It might. Say you were writing a mystery based on the O. J. Simpson murder case. You could make up an affidavit by some hit-man, written just before he dies, saying that he killed the two victims and framed Simpson because Simpson had backed out of a deal or something.”
“Sounds dime-a-dozen so far,” Rep said.
“Maybe. But say that when the book is about to come out the tabloids start running stories saying it’s based on fact. Say those stories talk about bomb threats to the publisher, suppressed FBI reports, and that type of thing.”
“Like the gas attack at Villa Terrace,” Rep said.
“Except not as lame.”
“I think the real-world tie-in makes all the difference,” Kuchinski said. “With a hook like that, something like the Simpson story would have a shot. Without it, that thing would bounce back faster than the trial court’s dismissal of the indictment in this case is going to.”
“The post-argument de-briefing didn’t change your mind?” Rep asked.
Shoot the Lawyer Twice Page 9