the…the the the the…. Nuts.”
Determined steps shook the floorboards, and three seconds later Rep’s door opened. The head that burst through was male and thinly provided with gallant tufts of once blond and now graying hair.
“Counselor, what comes after ‘news from the noise’?”
“‘Rose from the poison ivy,’” Rep said.
“That’s it!
Here’s where we separate
the men from the boys,
the news from the noise,
the rose from the poison ivy.”
“The hearing went well, I take it?” Rep said.
“Motion granted in full. Costs to abide the event, but that’s the way it is in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court. No one’s rice bowl gets broken—not even insurance defense lawyers.”
The singer came all the way into the office and extended his hand to Key.
“I’m Walt Kuchinski,” he said, towering over the young woman who, at five-six, was only three inches shorter than Rep. “You’d be Sue Key, I’m guessing. Reppert here treating you right?”
Guessing?Rep thought. You referred her to me, remember?
Key confirmed her name and the high quality of Rep’s services, although as far as Rep could see he had so far accomplished roughly nothing.
“Well, he’s the man for this picture stuff you told me about on the phone. Anyone ever accuses me of knowing anything about intellectual property law, I’m gonna plead not guilty. ’Til I met Rep here I always thought IP lawyers were guys who wore bowties and drank Lite beer.”
“Please imagine a little circle-r registered trademark symbol after ‘Lite’ in that last sentence,” Rep said, adjusting his bowtie.
“But Reppert here can tell Leinenkugel from Miller Genuine Draft blindfolded, and he knows more obscure Broadway show tunes than any straight guy I’ve ever met. He’ll get it done for you.”
Exit Kuchinski, who waited until he’d closed the door behind him before he started singing, “Weeee are the CHAMPions, my friend.”
“Is he, like, your partner?” Key asked in a vaguely overwhelmed voice.
“More like my landlord,” Rep said. “I’m with a law firm in Indianapolis. It’s thinking about opening an office here in Milwaukee. Mr. Kuchinski has been kind enough to let me share office space with him while I look into it.”
This was wholly true, but not the whole truth. The whole truth was that Melissa Seton Pennyworth, Ph.D., she of the green-flecked brown eyes with the minxish glint and the dogmatic attitude about her husband’s sterling qualities, had secured a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (That is, not the Big Ten school in Madison but its blue-collar second cousin.) Rep had no intention of being separated from Melissa for long by farther than he could conveniently drive a Mercury Sable. So he had pitched the management committee on the marketing cachet of having a branch office in Milwaukee—as if they’d have a better shot at Chicago business if they could come at it from two sides at once. His partners, who on the whole weren’t stupid, had pointed out that this was perfectly insane. They didn’t want to lose him, though, so they’d gamely allowed him to come up and test the waters on the cheap, hoping that he’d get this nonsense out of his system and come back to Indianapolis before he’d spent too much money.
Rep knew by now that he shouldn’t even be thinking about taking Sue Key’s case. He had to show his partners that he could find Wisconsin clients who’d pay six figures a year for trademark and copyright work. The only way billings to Sue Key would reach six figures would be if you counted on both sides of the decimal.
“If we were to go forward with this,” he said to Key, “what would you want me to accomplish for you?”
“All I really want is for Cold Coast to admit that the picture is faked. And enough money to cover your fee, I guess.”
Opening her purse, she took out a cylinder of currency with a rubber band around it. She slipped off the rubber band and began painstakingly spreading money out on Rep’s desk: three hundred-dollar bills, four fifties, eight twenties, six tens and six fives.
“It’s seven hundred fifty dollars,” she said. “I know the retainer is usually a thousand, but I have most of the money I’ve saved tied up in six-month certificates of deposit. So I was kind of hoping you could sort of get started with just this.”
Rep, in his mid-thirties and with three years of partnership behind him, had yet to accept a retainer of less than five thousand dollars. As Key laid the money out, though, he saw callouses on her fingertips. He’d deposed a witness or two when he was so young that litigators could tell him what to do, and he had a rough idea of how many keystrokes it took for this young woman to generate the modest collection of bills in front of him.
Unbidden, the creative side of his brain started to generate some respectable arguments. Hey, this is a new office, looking for business. Court reporters know lawyers, and lawyers refer cases.
“Where did you get Mr. Kuchinski’s name when you were looking for a lawyer?”
“Actually,” Key said, digging yet again in her purse, “I got it from my mother. I mentioned to her after I got the calendar that I thought I might want to talk to a lawyer about something, and she dug out this letter for me.”
Dated December 3, 2003, the letter was addressed to Ms. Xu Ky:
Dear Ms. Ky:
I have had occasion several times in the past to provide you with legal services on matters of concern to you. I do not know how much longer I will be able to do this. Accordingly, I thought it prudent to advise you of an alternative source of counsel in the event you found it impossible to reach me. I suggest that you call Walter Kuchinski, Esq., in Milwaukee, describe the problem (whatever it may be), and ask him to recommend an attorney to handle it.
Sincerely,
Vance Hayes
Chapter 3
When Pelham Dreyfus saw the Valkyrie pulling her turquoise Bic out at three minutes past four he figured the highlight of his day was coming up. The blond coed, pausing with a clutch of classmates on the south side of Wisconsin Avenue, bowed her head and cupped her left hand around the tip of a Marlboro to light it. When she took the cigarette from her mouth and blew a plume of smoke over her shoulder, she had an I’m-eighteen-and-I’m-gonna-live-forever grin on her face that it would’ve taken Dreyfus eighty shots to coax out of a professional model. Three hundred miles from Mom and Dad, just released from the last class on Friday in her freshman year at Marquette University, looking at a weekend in a city teeming with males who’d buy her a six-pack if she winked at them, her world at this moment was perfect.
Five-ten if she was an inch, lithe as a ballet dancer, and the only fat on her body exactly where it belonged. Young, cute, and real. Something you couldn’t get from pros. Dreyfus caught it all at three digital frames per second from sixty feet away. With the ten-power optical zoom on his Sony DSC F828 digital camera he could have counted her nose hairs if he’d wanted to. He shook his head in silent wonder. Until he came to Milwaukee, he didn’t even know God made blond Catholics.
If he really hustled he could make it out to Kopps Custard in Glendale for something younger and therefore even more appealing to the pathetic losers who religiously checked prettygirlssmoking.com each day. Sophomore and junior coeds from Dominican and Nicolet High Schools would be smoking on the stone benches outside, showing boys the new trick they’d learned over the summer. Those could be mega-hits—something delicious about the shatteringly naïve poses, girl-women affecting blasé sophistication with Newports in one hand and chocolate malts in the other.
But he didn’t have the nerve. The stiffs on the North Shore paid taxes with both hands. Cops in Glendale and Whitefish Bay didn’t have much to worry about, and they’d be delighted to worry about Dreyfus if he gave them half a chance. Only one prior, but one was all it took if she was sixteen and you were twenty-three when it happened.
How did I
come to this? he wondered in a flash of poignant self-pity. He should be on the coast right now, this very minute, shooting publicity stills for some R-rated feature. Or at Sundance, hustling indie producers on the way up and dodging groupies on the way down. Instead he was parked here at 16th and Wisconsin in Laverne-and-Shirley-land trying to pick up fresh web-site bait for guys so twisted they couldn’t get off on regular, all-American porn.
***
“At the risk of reinforcing gender stereotypes,” Melissa said to Rep about two hours later, “does this make my fanny look too big?”
“Why don’t you take that skirt off so I can make a fully informed judgment?”
“And make us late?”
“I’m just trying to avoid objectification of the female form.”
“I know exactly what you’re trying to do, tiger,” Melissa said, pivoting athletically to plant a kiss on his ear, “but it’s going to have to wait until we get back from this junior faculty wine and cheese reception. Faculty don’t get any more junior than I am, so being late would be impolitic.”
“We can’t have that,” Rep said. “It doesn’t start until seven o’clock, though, and we’re about ten minutes away. You’ll have to spend another half-hour getting dressed to avoid being unfashionably early.”
“As wound up as I am right now I could spend half-an-hour just picking out earrings.”
“Are you too wound up for an off-the-wall question?”
“Actually,” Melissa said, “an off-the-wall question would probably help.”
“Would it bother you if someone faked a picture to show you smoking a cigarette?”
“You did say off-the-wall, didn’t you?” Melissa flipped with practiced skill through a dozen earrings. “I guess it would depend. If someone caught me in a pose suggesting Virginia Woolf and then air-brushed in a cigarette for verisimilitude, I wouldn’t mind that. Especially if it’s the Hollywood version of Virginia Woolf, where she looks like Nicole Kidman.”
“On the other hand,” Rep prompted.
“On the other hand, if some smart-alec on the UWM Postused digital magic to make me look like I’m smoking in candid shots of tonight’s event, that would lead to a short and unpleasant conversation.”
“Because smoking just isn’t done by junior faculty at events like that these days?”
“No, that’s not really it.” Melissa gave it a few moments’ thought. She took one pair of earrings off, put the other on, and nodded slightly. “It’s more that I just don’t want someone else defining me.”
“And you feel smoking habits are defining?”
“Absolutely,” Melissa said. “When I was a teenager in the eighties, smoking was just a hint to boys that you might be a bit fast, without committing yourself to anything. For an adult today, though, my gut feeling is that it makes a very definite statement about yourself.”
“I have the same gut feeling, but I’ll need some footnotes if I’m going to do any good for my Sue Key.” He told her about the case.
“You mean there’s actually a market for calendars that just show women smoking, with all their clothes on and nothing naughty happening?” Melissa asked when he’d finished.
“Calendars, DVDs, videotapes, web sites. For twenty-nine-ninety-five you can buy a two-hour DVD of fifties and sixties cigarette commercials. For every guy who finds smoking repulsive, apparently there’s one who finds it sultry and alluring.”
“Maybe I should have tried harder to like it when I was sixteen,” Melissa said. “Would you find it off-putting if I smoked cigarettes? Or would you find me sultry and alluring?”
“I wouldn’t find you off-putting if you chewed tobacco, beloved. And nothing on earth could make you sultrier or more alluring than you already are.”
“Wow. Was that ever a good answer.”
“I need an answer that good for Cold Coast Productions. I’ve gotten their attention, but their basic position is that unless Sue Key is an OB/gyn or a member of a Southern Baptist church choir, it’s no-harm/no-foul.”
“Time to call in the litigators?”
“I can’t afford to put any litigator in the firm on this case,” Rep said, “including the kid we hired last week. But we’d better get going.”
As they walked from the bedroom to the front door of the generic, single-bedroom, Maryland Avenue apartment that represented their first Milwaukee residence, Melissa glanced at the improvised card-table furnishings and half-open cardboard boxes that cluttered the living room/dining area. Rep had left a comfortable house in Indianapolis and a partner’s office at an established firm to try wildcat lawyering in a new city. He was doing this for her, doing it so that she could take a shot at a solid academic position instead of becoming one of the credentialed serfs who haul their Ph.D.s from one second-rate fill-in lectureship to another, without time for serious research or any shot at tenure.
If Sue Key’s case was Rep’s problem, then it was her problem too.
***
When Pelham Dreyfus checked the new hits on prettygirlssmoking.com, he saw that the Valkyrie had come through already. Six hundred fifteen more visitors just since seven o’clock. Each of them would have seen pop-up ads for calendars and DVDs and photosets, and if experience were any guide at least eight percent of them would buy something. And any of the six hundred fifteen email addresses that weren’t repeaters would go on lists that he could sell to other E-tailers for fifteen cents a hundred. The real money, though, lay in the credit card numbers he’d collect. Send the card-holders bogus emails supposedly coming from Ebay or their banks, fishing for their security codes and SSNs. Two or three out of every hundred would bite. Dreyfus would check them over to guard against cop-stings and then out-source the identity theft to someone he could trust to share the proceeds equitably.
Hey, he thought with a shrug, it’s a living.
***
“I actually learned something at this thing tonight,” Melissa said to Rep as he showed her back into the apartment around ten-fifteen that night. “One of my colleagues is emailing me a presentation of his that might help Sue Key.”
Twelve minutes later Rep and Melissa leaned over Melissa’s laptop, looking at Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields in a scene from an early seventies movie called Smokey and the Bandit. “You smoke much?” Reynolds asked Fields. “I just started,” she answered as she puffed haplessly on a Marlboro.
“I get it,” Rep said. “Burt Reynolds as the Bandit is driving his super stock Trans-Am like a lunatic, and Sally Fields as the love interest is saying his maniacal driving is making her so nervous that she’s taken up smoking on the spur of the moment to calm herself down. Not a bad little joke, but I’m not sure how it helps Sue Key.”
“Subtext, munchkin mine. The nervous wreck isn’t Sally Fields, it’s Sally Fields’ character. On the screen, though, we’re seeing Sally Fields herself, not just her character.”
“Right,” Rep said. “Ten on a scale of ten. But so what?”
“Sally Fields spent the sixties on television, playing squeaky-clean, cute-as-a-button, all-American teenagers in shows called Gidget and The Flying Nun. In Smokey and the Bandit she didn’t smoke just to set up a lame joke. It was a way of saying, ‘I’m not a kid anymore.’ Same thing with Melissa Gilbert when she moved on to adult roles.”
“Melissa Gilbert smokes?” Rep demanded in anguished distress. “That sweet thing from Little House on the Prairie?”
“Sad but true.”
“My last illusion is gone.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Okay,” Rep said thoughtfully. “And so when Meg Ryan sort of halfway smoked in Proof of Life, looking like she could just barely stand it, she didn’t do it just because her character was on edge about her husband being kidnapped. She was saying that, even after all those chick-flicks she starred in, she was nobody’s sweetheart anymore.”
“Very good,” Melissa said. “Not quite be Ph.D. material, but you’ve defi
nitely qualified for the senior honors seminar.”
“In other words, we have solid empirical evidence to back up your intuition. Cigarettes have become character-defining. Smoking puts you in certain categories—not necessarily bad categories, but not categories you should be in against your will, either. Thank you, Doctor Pennyworth.”
“Do I get to be an expert witness?”
“That depends. Let’s get to the bedroom and discuss your qualifications.”
Chapter 4
Nothing Rep had seen in walking through Cold Coast Productions’ south Milwaukee facility prepared him for the conference room. Rep and Sue Key had entered the down-at-the-heels, red-brick building through a heavy metal door with mustard-colored paint chipping off of it. They had walked behind a crew-cut guy in a short-sleeved white shirt across a bleakly lit shop floor where an ancient web press commanded the attention of five older men—men whose faces immediately told Rep that he was on the wrong side of one of those us/them lines that guys in suits can’t cross. Through another metal door, this one with a frosted glass window, up five flights of echoing metal stairs, through one more metal door, like the first two except for a pebbled steel surface and a fresher paint job. Past a warren of empty cubicles, over threadbare industrial gray carpeting to the conference room’s double doors—wood, finally.
“In there,” the guy said. “I’ll let Mr. Levitan know you’re here.”
Past the doorway lay a different world, as if the rust-belt exterior were a reverse Potemkin Village. Rich odors of wax and old leather replaced the lubricant and burned metal smells permeating the floor below. Three tiers of bookshelves lined two of the walls. A polished mahogany table and leather chairs sat on parquet flooring.
The spine of a book a yard or so from Rep’s face said The Story of the Malakand Field Force, by Winston Churchill. Next book: The River War, by Winston Churchill. Hmm. His eyes ranged one shelf over. World Crisis in four volumes, by Winston Churchill. Marlborough, His Life and Times, by Winston Churchill. The Second World War in six volumes, by Winston Churchill. History of the English Speaking Peoples in four volumes, by Winston Churchill. The Last Lion, by William Manchester, about Winston Churchill. Pelham’s biography of Winston Churchill. Severance’s biography of Winston Churchill. The eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill by Martin Gilbert and Randolph Churchill. Churchill on the Home Front, 1900-1955, by Paul Addison. The Young Churchill, by Celia Sandys. Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Second World War, by Warren Kimball.
Putting Lipstick on a Pig Page 2