Shoot the Lawyer Twice

by Michael Bowen

  “I don’t think you did leave it to luck,” Melissa said. “I haven’t forgotten the cigarette break you took during our conversation at Spirits of Chicago. Did you go out on the terrace late on a frigid afternoon to call in an anonymous tip about a body in a Prius in the hotel parking ramp instead of to smoke a Dunhill? You made it a point to stay in my sight, you talked on a cell-phone, and you don’t seem all that fanatical about smoking.”

  “If I’d done that, the police could trace the nine-one-one call to my number.”

  “Not if you used a throwaway phone with prepaid minutes—which is what you accused Hoeckstra of doing to set up our meeting today.”

  “I didn’t set any meeting up,” Hoeckstra said indignantly to Clevenger. “You left a message for me.”

  All three of them paused for a moment as a police car with flashing red and blue lights pulled up and a cop jumped out. Ignoring the trio of women, he stepped toward the gurney.

  “Excuse me for bringing up a technicality,” Clevenger said as the cop squatted down next to Rep and began exchanging comments with the med-tech, “but exactly why am I supposed to have killed Angstrom? He claimed to have evidence that would have helped my son’s case. I wanted him alive, not dead.”

  “He did have that evidence,” Melissa said, “but you didn’t need to buy it from him. You already knew what it was and how to document it.”

  “What are you talking about now?” Hoeckstra demanded.

  “The research Professor Angstrom did for a corporate history of your family’s company had turned up something interesting,” Melissa told Hoeckstra. “Ms. Clevenger had gotten the company out of a legal scrape by talking Assistant United States Attorney Finnegan into recommending that charges not be pursued.”

  “That was just good lawyering,” Clevenger said.

  “That particular negotiation was part of a rather suggestive pattern. When your regulatory practice collapsed, you decided to re-invent yourself overnight as a credible white-collar crime specialist. You accomplished that by disclosing confidential information you had about some of your former clients to Finnegan. He got glossy prosecutions of high profile defendants; you got people who needed your services. In exchange, he gave you favorable deals for some of the targets who had the good sense to retain you. Outstanding results equal instant credibility.”

  “I told you so,” Fletcher muttered to Cyclops. “That’s the same kind of ‘business development’ that got Q in front of a jury this morning. She created the problems for her clients and then her clients hired her to fix them—just like Q did. Crime in the streets meets crime in the suites.”

  “But that would have been an incredible risk for Finnegan,” Clevenger scoffed. “I would have had something to hold over him for the rest of his life.”

  “You were facing a much greater risk than he was,” Melissa said. “Rep tells me that it’s not even clear Finnegan was doing anything wrong. The attorney-client privilege doesn’t keep cops from talking to whistle-blowers. Potential defendants turn state’s evidence all the time, and prosecutors make deals with them. If you or anyone else had disclosed your role, though, you would certainly have been disbarred. Your career would have been over.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hoeckstra said. “How would any of this legal insider stuff have helped her brat? It’s got nothing to do with whether he threatened to rape me. I don’t see how it could even have been admitted at trial.”

  “It might not have been,” Rep said. “But it could have been used to force Finnegan off the case. Once some prosecutor without his own political agenda was handling the case, any good defense lawyer could have made a decent deal to get rid of it.”

  “You knew it was potentially devastating evidence that could save your son,” Melissa said to Clevenger. “You described it conceptually to the defense team. That’s why they included it in the material they used with the mock jury. But when push came to shove, you weren’t willing to put your career in jeopardy even to save Jimmy. You would have let Jimmy go to prison to save your own skin.”

  “You’re missing something,” Clevenger said. “Something rather big. If I already had the evidence, why would Angstrom think he could sell it to me?”

  “He didn’t. What he thought he could sell to you was his silence about it—his agreement not to expose you. He tried to blackmail you with that threat before the first trial, but you wouldn’t bite. He had Tereska Bleifert plant the incriminating file in the press room during the trial. She thought she was doing it as a noble service to truth and justice, but Angstrom’s real reason was to show you that he meant business. Unfortunately for him, though, Rep stumbled over the file the reporters were supposed to find. He not only didn’t disclose it, he gave the documentation back to the company so that Angstrom didn’t have it any more.”

  “And so I therefore supposedly killed Angstrom?” Clevenger asked.

  “Yes. With the outcome on the appeal of Jimmy’s case looking shaky, you suggested that Angstrom combine business with pleasure and come to Chicago for a roll in the hay with you and some wheeling and dealing over compromising information that he still had in his head, even if he couldn’t document it.”

  “And then I somehow persuaded him to swallow curare?”

  “Right, by putting it in a spray bottle with breath freshener and telling the old satyr to use it in preparation for the amorous adventure you promised him.”

  “In a cheap paperback novel your guesswork about a corrupt bargain with Finnegan would make me blurt out a tearful confession, if it were true,” Clevenger said. “But it’s not true, I’m not confessing, and your speculation proves nothing.”

  “It’s not entirely guesswork. Everything I just said is in an offer of proof that was handed to Terry Finnegan two weeks ago. He hasn’t thrown it back in anyone’s face yet—and if it were nonsense I think he would have. Testimony from him could prove every word I just said.”

  For just a moment, the color in Clevenger’s face turned a shade paler and her features showed the unpleasant surprise Melissa imagined seeing on Jane Austen’s face when a deuce of trumps covered an ace during whist. She quickly recovered and when she spoke her tone was dismissive.

  “Well, this is all very interesting, but the bottom line is that it’s perfectly asinine. I said it isn’t true, and I’ll stick with that. You may have an outline for a retro Thin Man movie but you don’t have evidence and you aren’t going to gin any up by trying a lame bluff on Finnegan.”

  “Rule four-oh-four-b,” Rep said to Clevenger.

  “Four-zero-four,” Hoeckstra said to Rep.

  “Please do shut up,” Melissa said to Hoeckstra.

  “What?” Clevenger said to Rep.

  “Modus operandi,” Rep said. “Plan and preparation. One of the exceptions to the rule against introducing evidence of prior bad acts of the defendant in a criminal case.”

  “Interesting academic point,” Clevenger said, “but unless you actually have the evidence in the first place, that’s all it is. Save it for a law review article. Now, if anyone needs me, I’ll be at my office, practicing law.”

  She turned away and began cutting through the crowd on the way to her car. She nodded politely at the cop on her way.

  “As long as we’re throwing Latin around,” Melissa called, reaching into her purse, “there’s something you might want to watch, just for chain of custody purposes. Officer?”

  Clevenger turned around with a puzzled expression. The officer, equally baffled, stood up and swiveled toward Melissa. Melissa took a small bottle of Chloraseptic analgesic throat spray from her purse. She handled it carefully, holding it on the top and bottom with the tips of her thumb and index finger. This time Clevenger’s face paled by much more than a shade. Her lips fell open. White puffs of breath came rapidly until she was almost panting.

  “I’d like you to verify that I’m handing this spray bottle that I just took from my purse to an officer of the Milwaukee Polic
e Department,” Melissa said. “You’re welcome to examine my purse to confirm that there aren’t any other spray bottles in there if you like.”

  “What’s that supposed to prove?” Hoeckstra asked.

  “Nothing, if Ms. Clevenger is telling the truth.” Melissa dropped the bottle into the officer’s palm. “But if the contents of that bottle turn out to be laced with poison, it might suggest that when she knocked my purse on the church floor a few minutes ago and picked it up, she substituted poisoned spray for the stuff I’ve been ostentatiously using in her presence.”

  “What does she have against you?” Hoeckstra demanded. “I mean, aside from your obnoxiously superior attitude?”

  “If I had to speculate, I’d guess that Taylor Gates told her that I thought the same person who murdered Angstrom was also responsible for the death of Timothy Goettinger. That started her worrying that if I kept on poking my nose into things I might stumble onto something she’d find inconvenient.”

  “Murdered my father?” Hoeckstra shrieked.

  “Angstrom wasn’t the first person to threaten Clevenger with disclosure,” Melissa said. “Timothy Goettinger was obsessively investigating his company’s unprecedented involvement with the criminal justice system. He didn’t blame Clevenger for it, or suspect that she was implicated in any wrongdoing, but his investigation threatened to bring out her cozy arrangement with Finnegan. He was old school, a man of integrity and rigid principles. Whatever he found, he was going to go public with it.”

  “That sounds like dad, all right,” Hoeckstra said. “But how do you know those details? Is that guesswork too?”

  “No. There had to be documentation of at least that much. Otherwise, the file Rep gave back to the company wouldn’t have been scary enough to force a six-figure settlement.”

  “Tim Goettinger wasn’t poisoned,” Clevenger said. “He died of a heart condition diagnosed years before at Columbia by one of the top cardiac specialists in the country.”

  “A condition that was being effectively controlled by medication, but that would cause a marked physical deterioration if someone substituted placebos for the pills he was supposed to be taking—like poison being substituted for my throat spray.”

  “Which his mistress could have done,” Hoeckstra said, her voice eerily quiet now instead of angry or hysterical.

  “I wasn’t his mistress, I was his lover,” Clevenger spat. “I cried my eyes out when he died. And I certainly didn’t kill him.”

  “I don’t think you were trying to kill him,” Melissa said. “You just wanted to send him to the doctor, who’d send him to the hospital, thinking that his heart condition was getting worse. You figured that would distract him from his investigation into your adventures with Finnegan. But hearts are unpredictable, and when Angstrom lured him to an unused confessional at Saint Josephat’s to pick up a file he thought was compromising enough to produce a payoff, Goettinger’s heart gave out.”

  “And I just happened to be there.”

  “You had to follow him around as his condition deteriorated, because when he collapsed you’d need to retrieve the placebos left in his medicine bottle and replace them with the real medication that you’d been secreting.”

  “That all sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”

  “Just ask Rep. I replaced the medication in several of our Contac cold capsules with sugar. It took some effort, but I got it done.”

  “You apparently did,” Rep said. “I have a whole new understanding of the term ‘placebo effect.’”

  “Well,” Clevenger said, “I didn’t do anything of the kind.”

  “Yes you did.”

  The flat assertion came from the edge of the crowd, and everyone’s head turned to see Bleifert, who had been milling unnoticed in the group for several minutes. She fumbled nervously with a St. Joseph’s Missal—a prayer book slightly smaller than a brick and just as hard, with all the readings for the entire three-year cycle of Sunday and weekday masses. She took a deep breath and continued.

  “Professor Pennyworth asked me to come here today. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone else I was here. It would be up to me to decide whether to come forward.”

  “Tell us what you saw, young lady,” the cop rumbled.

  “When I saw Ms. Clevenger come out of the confessional this afternoon, it was like déjà vu. I had seen it before—the day Mr. Goettinger died. Except that time she brought a file out with her. Seeing her this afternoon makes me certain she was the one I saw that day.”

  Clevenger paused, looking without apparent concern from Bleifert to Hoeckstra to Melissa. She seemed completely composed.

  “I’ve had enough nonsense for one afternoon,” she said. Again she turned away.

  “You sonofabitch!” Hoeckstra yelled, with a fine disregard for gender-neutral language. Her right hand reached for her parka pocket.

  “Gun!” Rep yelled.

  For a potentially fatal moment, with Rep’s vicious wound vivid in her mind, Melissa found herself frozen by fear. By the time she could summon the will to leap forward, Hoeckstra was raising the gun and Melissa was sure she’d be too late. The cop was rushing forward, yelling “No! No! No!” but he was still ten feet away.

  Hoeckstra had nearly leveled the Luger when a maroon blur whizzed through the air. Bleifert’s missal smacked the right side of Hoeckstra’s face. With a startled yelp Hoeckstra staggered backward. Her right hand jerked up and the Luger fired harmlessly into the air. Before she could regain her balance the cop had her in a hammerlock and the Luger lay in the snow, under his foot.

  “What was that?” Clevenger demanded.

  “The missile was a missal,” Melissa said. “You were saved by a homonym.”

  “Why did you do that, you kraut-bitch?” Hoeckstra yelled at Bleifert as she writhed in the cop’s arms. “She’s not worth saving.”

  “I’m not a kraut-bitch, I’m a polack-bitch,” Bleifert said. “And if your aim is as bad as your theology, she wasn’t in much danger anyway.”

  “Hold it,” the cop barked over Hoeckstra’s shoulder at Clevenger, who was still moving steadily away, “you toddle on back. You four ladies and I are going down to the Safety Building to chat with guys in suits.”

  As unobtrusively as he could, which wasn’t very, Cyclops replaced the long telephoto lens on his camera with a much shorter one that Rep guessed was about eighty-five millimeters. He raised it and bracketed the lens on the converging women.

  “Skip the professor,” Fletcher told him. “Shoot the lawyer twice.”

  Chapter 35

  The Third Tuesday in March, 2008

  “Terry feels strongly about this prosecution,” Maria Sanchez said.

  “Should I be talking to Terry or should I be talking to you?” Kuchinski asked, feigning grumpiness.

  “I’m lead counsel now. Terry has recused himself to avoid any appearance of impropriety.”

  “Well I think that’s just not fair. If Terry’s gonna stick you with a dead horse in a bathtub for a case and then not let you run it yourself, he at least oughta come into court and take the beating with you.”

  “I’m running the case. And it’s the same case that pulled eleven jurors last time around.”

  “Fortunately for our side, you need twelve.” Kuchinski took a large manila envelope from his brief case and worried the flap up. “And it’s not the same case. We’ll have some evidence this time that first jury didn’t see.”

  “Don’t bother. My complaining witness took a shot at the defendant’s mother. I know. I saw it in the paper. Since mom might be facing murder charges in two states before long, I kind of like our side of that one.”

  Kuchinkski’s eyes glinted as a mordant smile split his lips. He pulled out three eight-by-tens and splayed them across Sanchez’s desk. He pointed at the top-center of the first one, where Hoeckstra’s forearm was driving into Rep.

  “You didn’t see this set of glossies in the paper.
I particularly like this one. See the way she has her knees bent just right, so she can explode up and out through her legs and hips? If the Packers could get their guards to block like that they might have a running game next season.”

  “So she’s a strong woman. Juries like that.”

  “Point is, she’s too strong to be scared of my client, who’s your basic lover-not-a-fighter type.”

  “I can’t blow off an attempted rape because the victim beat up a lawyer.”

  “What I’m thinking,” Kuchinski said musingly, “is misdemeanor disorderly conduct, no ‘sex offender’ tag on his forehead, no prison time, unsupervised probation, and four-hundred hours of community service.”

  “No way he’s getting off with three months of emptying bedpans,” Sanchez snapped. “That pampered punk—”

  Her phone rang. She glanced at the caller’s number, raised her eyebrows apologetically, mouthed “I have to take this,” and picked up the receiver. Ten seconds later she looked like she’d drawn to a busted flush and was trying to hide it. Thirty seconds after that, with the silence broken only by a “yes” or “got it” or “right” now and then, she looked like she’d taken a gut punch after a Tex-Mex buffet. She hung up and as she turned her face back to Kuchinski she seemed to be trying to come up with the right words to say something.

  “Clevenger cashed in her chips, didn’t she?” Kuchinski asked, reading the younger lawyer like a West Digest headnote.

  “Waded into Lake Michigan with her pockets full of Smartbelle walking weights. Her body washed up on the beach a little over an hour ago. If the tide had been going out instead of in she might not have been found for weeks.”

  “She probably didn’t leave that to chance.”

  “Probably not.” Sanchez’s voice was weary and dull.

  “I’m guessing there’s a note mentioning this prosecution.”