While waiting for the cops and the EMTs that afternoon, Bleifer had prayed. She would eventually get back to her interrupted penance, but before that she’d said a different prayer, for a man she didn’t know, to a God she doubted, in words taught her by a Church she mocked.
Now, not quite three years later, she looked at the confessional again, dark and unused as it had been that day. She wondered what it would be like if God ever talked to her. A deep, rumbling voice in the thunder? No, she didn’t think so, somehow. Maybe it was just a comfortable feeling, a growing sense of calm, a moment of clarity. Maybe that’s all it was, the serene conviction from somewhere that somehow she had the right answer.
Whatever. That’ll do.
***
“Il Gattopardo by Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa, as instructed,” Rep said as he returned to Melissa’s Curtin Hall office around one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. “The coed at the checkout desk was completely unimpressed.”
“You should have said ‘ciao.’” Melissa kept her eyes focused on her computer screen.
“I did. Got me nowhere. Apparently guys who read classic novels in foreign languages are a dime a dozen around here. Are you about ready to go?”
“I have one more thing to print off and then we can head home.”
Melissa slipped what looked like a very old academic monograph into a manila folder. It was folded over to its sixth page, where vivid yellow highlighting emphasized a footnote. After fussing with her computer for a few seconds she looked up at Rep.
“There’s a printer at the work station around the corner just down the hall from my door,” she said. “One of the shelves above it is labeled ‘second page letter bond.’ Could you stick about eight of those pages into the printer?”
“You must have me confused with a patent lawyer. They’re supposed to be good at mechanical stuff. But I’ll do my best.”
He managed the chore with only a paper cut or two to betray his inexperience. Then he yelled to Melissa that she could print. Ten seconds later the first page of bond rolled out of the printer. Except for an elaborate decoration at the top, it was blank. When he had all eight pages, he brought them to her. She put them into the folder with the monograph, then worked the folder, the book Rep had brought, and a paperback copy of The Leopard into a canvas carry-all.
“Is that the Vatican seal?” he asked.
“You got it. Papal tiara and crossed keys. All things are possible with God, according to Sister Carmelita at Saint Teresa’s Academy, and most of them are accessible through Google.”
“What was that thing you stuck into your briefcase just before I went to the printer?”
“An article by Professor Angstrom, very early in his career, about the emergence of proletarian consciousness in the Italian working class community in Milwaukee after the first World War. Did you know that Milwaukee’s Italian community had its own newspaper?”
“That datum had escaped my attention.”
“Printed in Italian, of course.”
“Well, it might have created the wrong impression if they’d printed it in Swedish.”
“Professor Angstrom quotes some excerpts in his article.”
“In the original?”
“In the original,” Melissa confirmed. “‘Translation by the author.’”
“That rascal. He was just kidding when he had Bleifert tell you he needed a translator.”
“Now we can go. Your only assigned task for the rest of the day will be to keep coffee coming.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Practicing penmanship.”
“Are you going to tell me what you’re up to, or is it better that I not know?”
“Qui tacet consentit.”
When they got back to the building that housed their condo, a guy at a desk in the lobby (who would have been called a concierge in New York but in Milwaukee was called a guy at a desk in the lobby) handed Melissa a brown paper envelope. She recognized Bleifert’s handwriting when she read her name and the words PRIVATE and CONFIDENTIAL.
She waited until they had closed the front door of their unit before she opened it. With Rep looking over her shoulder, it took her a full minute to absorb the single page of text inside:
JURIMETRICS—CLEVENGER/U.S. V. STIMULUS VI
Assume the following facts are true, in addition to everything else you have heard.
One: In the last five years, the prosecuting attorney in this case has brought eleven cases against companies that were represented by the defendant’s mother.
Two: Between three and four years ago, the prosecuting attorney considered charges against a company owned by the complaining witness—the woman who has accused the defendant of rape.
Three: Charges in that case were never brought.
What effect would these facts have on your deliberations?
“Isn’t that interesting?” Rep commented. “I guess Walt can stop browbeating his co-counsel out on the West Coast.”
He glanced at Melissa for confirmation. She was frowning as she pulled a flyer and a paperback book from the envelope.
“Those don’t look like they’re from Jurimetrics.”
“They aren’t. The book is Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith, by Chesteron. The flyer is about a Catholic retreat for women in a couple of months. Ms. Bleifert is calling my bluff.”
Chapter 27
The first Wednesday in January, 2008
Taylor Gates didn’t show up for the meeting in Li’s office. He had a good excuse: the email address Li had typed in for Gates was one Li made up, and it had baffled his server. He had ignored the server’s curt notification that the missive was undeliverable to that address.
Everyone else arrived punctually. As they arranged themselves around Li’s desk, Melissa figured that all they needed was Nero Wolf in a yellow leather chair.
“Good afternoon,” Li said. “Thank you for coming.”
He took a fountain pen cased in rich lapis lazuli from the upper right-hand pocket of his vest. He didn’t uncap the pen, as he apparently had no intention of writing anything. Melissa suspected that he just wanted a prop.
“Being a lawyer,” Li continued, “I will begin by telling you what you already know but in language sufficiently arcane to justify nineteen years of formal education. Someone ransacked Professor Angstrom’s office last fall, something over two months before his murder. One or more documents of potential scholarly, historical, and/or legal significance are missing. The perpetrator of the break-in presumably took it or them. While we have no direct evidence linking the break-in to Professor Angstrom’s murder, it’s hard to believe that the two incidents are unrelated. If an outsider committed the break-in, he or she managed to get into Curtin Hall without being noticed at the guard station for the only public entrance. This suggests that the perpetrator was either an insider himself or working with one.”
“You’re right,” Mignon growled, as if Li were a graduate student whose term paper cited only secondary sources. “Nothing new so far.”
“The new element is that Professor Pennyworth may have recovered the stolen document.”
“How did you bring that about, professor?” Mignon asked, looking pointedly at Melissa. “And does it by any chance have anything to do with our missing invitee?”
“On my instructions—” Li began.
“I wasn’t asking you, counselor.”
“I am nevertheless answering you, dean,” Li said with an I’m-a-lawyer-and-you’re-not edge to his voice. “I have instructed Professor Pennyworth not to disclose either how she got her hands on the document or from whom she obtained it, pending administrative decisions about sharing this information with law enforcement authorities. Certain legal privileges that the university may choose to invoke in the future could be compromised by disclosure of such information outside of what the law inelegantly calls UWM’s ‘control group.’”
“What’s our ‘contr
ol group?’” Mignon demanded.
“All you need to know for the moment is that you aren’t in it.”
“May we at least see the recovered document?”
“Certainly,” Melissa said.
She took a manila file folder from the canvas tote at her feet. From the folder she removed a yellowed, brittle sheet of bond, covered with fussy, back-sloping longhand and encased in a glassine paper protector. She took three strides across the room to hand it to Mignon.
Handling it fastidiously with his fingertips, he laid the document delicately in his lap while he fumbled with half-moon spectacles. Hockestra and Bleifert both got out of their chairs and huddled near Mignon’s right shoulder to examine the document. As Mignon’s eyes scanned the page, his lips moved silently in the challenging throes of sight-translation.
“Addressed to an OAR monastery in Breslau, Czechoslovakia,” Mignon said then. “I’m not sure what ‘OAR’ means.”
“Order of Augustinian Recollect,” Bleifert said.
“Dated third June 1943. ‘ With burning heart we hear of myriads persecuted and indeed in peril of their very lives because of their race alone. While of course remembering them in our prayers, the extreme character of the situation requires that we go yet further. It is our fervent wish that the arms of the Church be opened to them, with all practical aid and spiritual comfort we can provide.’ My word. This is a real find.”
“‘It is our fervent wish’ is the Vatican equivalent of ‘Now hear this,’” Bleifert said. “‘Because of their race alone’ makes this is the first documentary evidence of a direct order from the pope himself to help Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.”
“If it’s genuine,” Mignon said as Hoeckstra shrugged and returned to her chair. “Have you had this looked at by a document examination expert?”
“No.”
“It seems to me that that is the next order of business.”
“No,” Li said, “the next order of business, as in before anyone leaves this room, is to make sure we know everything there is to know about whether the provenance of this document could reflect negatively on the integrity of this university.”
Melissa retrieved the document and, as she was walking back to her chair, offered it to Li. He shook his head and sketched a dismissive gesture with his left hand, suggesting that busy lawyers operating in the temporal realm didn’t have time for spiritual mumbo-jumbo.
Melissa laid the page and its plastic holder on the left rear corner of Li’s desk. This chanced to be immediately beneath the ocular lens of his telescope, which sloped up at a forty-five degree angle toward his tall window—as if inviting heaven itself to scrutinize the document. If anyone noticed that she had laid it on top of the one-hundred-eight millimeter lens cap for the telescope’s objective lens, they kept that observation to themselves.
“‘Provenance,’” Hoeckstra asked. “Do you mean who took the thing?”
“I mean where it came from and how it got from there to here,” Li said. “Including every step of the way from Breslau to this office.”
“Well,” Mignon said, “we have oblique evidence about some of that, in the form of comments by Professor Angstrom before his death.”
“I’m all ears,” Li said.
Mignon repeated the account he had previously provided to Melissa. He hadn’t quite finished when he stopped abruptly and, eyes widening, rose from his chair and pointed at the document.
“Fire!” he yelped. “That thing is burning!”
A wisp of white smoke was in fact rising from the center of the plastic protecting the document. A small, brown-edged hole appeared in the paper.
Mignon and Bleifert leaped toward the precious page. They were still two yards away when Li deftly sloshed a dollop of Evian water over the hot spot and then whisked the document to the center of his desk.
“Amazing how many problems you can solve with dihydrogen oxide,” he said cheerfully. “No real harm done.”
“No harm?” Mignon wailed. “You may have just ruined a historic treasure. This is a catastrophe!”
“It may not be irreparably damaged,” Bleifert said. “Perhaps we should begin with a prayer.”
“Jesus Christ!” Mignon snapped in exasperated fury.
“Well, that’s a start,” Melissa sighed.
Mignon’s eyes widened again as he looked more closely at Li’s desk.
“You left the lens cap off your telescope, you blithering imbecile.”
“Good heavens, so I did,” Li said. “That was careless of me.”
“That’s what set it on fire. It was like holding a magnifying glass directly over it. The telescope focused the sun’s rays onto the paper. How could you be such an idiot?”
“Please be seated,” Li said calmly.
“And I suggest that you save your imprecations for a better occasion,” Melissa said. “That document wasn’t stolen from Angstrom’s office.”
Mignon and Bleifert gaped at her as they retreated to their seats. Hoeckstra looked up in mild surprise.
“Then where did it come from?” Mignon demanded.
“From Professor Pennyworth’s fertile imagination,” Li said.
“It’s a forgery I concocted over the weekend,” Melissa explained. “I cobbled it together with words and phrases that I took from a classic Italian novel called The Leopard. Not quite as convincing as the Donation of Constantine, but good enough for our limited purposes.”
“And what might those be?” Mignon asked.
“To prove conclusively that neither you nor Ms. Bleifert stole the missing document from Angstrom’s office,” Li said. “Which we have now done.”
“You mean you actually suspected one of us?” Mignon asked.
“Certainly not. I suspected both of you. If I hadn’t suspected two people who were at the scene on the night of the crime and had both access to the office and a motive to commit the theft, Harvard Law School would have confiscated my copy of Wigmore on Evidence.”
“That is an outrageous imputation of someone with an unblemished academic record going back almost thirty years.”
“Lawyers are paid to be pessimists,” Li shrugged.
“And misanthropic cynics with no confidence in the integrity of their professional colleagues?”
“Yeah, that too. But that’s a topic for another day. It’s enough for the moment to know that Professor Pennyworth has nixed the possibility that either of you did it. If either of you had taken the document, you would have known that the page Professor Pennyworth displayed this afternoon wasn’t it. Hence, you wouldn’t have reacted as you did.”
“That strikes me as highly qualitative and non-rigorous,” Mignon said.
“Oh come off it, dean,” Melissa said. “Neither of you could have been faking it. You couldn’t feign a leer in a strip club, and when it comes to guilelessness Ms. Bleifert makes Candide look like Machiavelli.”
“In short,” Li said. “don’t worry, be happy. Your manifest ignorance acquits you.”
“So we still don’t know where the original of the real papal order is?”
“There is no real papal order,” Melissa said. “At least Professor Angstrom never had one. There wasn’t any papal document of any kind in the hymnal that he appraised, much less a written order that only a very foolhardy pontiff would have sent through Nazi-occupied territory where it would have meant a concentration camp—or worse—for anyone caught carrying it. His whole story about finding it was a fabrication.”
“How can you be so sure of that?” Bleifert asked.
“If the pope had given a written order in 1943 to the abbot of a monastery in Czechoslovakia,” Melissa said, “it wouldn’t have been written in Italian. It would have been written in Latin. If I were twenty years older I would have realized that immediately instead of having to have my nose rubbed in it three or four times by Latin-spouting lawyers.”
“Maybe,” Mignon said. “But someone
broke into Angstrom’s office and stole something. Whoever did it must at least have thought it was valuable.”
“No one broke into Angstrom’s office,” Melissa said. “He staged the forced entry and the ransacking before he left for the Brontë event, knowing that Tereska would discover it when she returned the Power Point equipment.”
“Why would he have done that?” Bleifert asked.
“To avoid having to produce the original of the document. He had shown a photocopy to Taylor Gates and invented a story to make it seem real. Gates bit because he saw the marketing potential of a tie-in between a new thriller and headlines about a real-world controversy over a document like the one at the heart of his story. He paid Angstrom off by lending him the muscle and prestige of his own agent for a novel that Angstrom wanted to place. I’m guessing, however, that when Gates came to Milwaukee for the sex-or-swim trial he started pressing for a look at the original.”
“Which Angstrom didn’t have,” Li said.
“The break-in gave him an excuse for not being able to produce it.”
“But what about the gas thing at Villa Terrace?” Bleifert asked. “He and Gates were both attacked. Who did that?”
“That was a publicity stunt staged by Gates, in connivance with Angstrom. It fit in with a claim of death-threats that Gates was trying to use my husband to corroborate. The point was to generate attention that would ratchet up his sales.”
“Then what it comes down to,” Bleifert said, her voice a little harder now, “is that Professor Angstrom was selling fairy dust to someone he regarded as an intellectual lightweight but who had a lot more money than he did.”
Shoot the Lawyer Twice Page 15