“Miss Key, Mr. Pennyworth?” a gravelly baritone boomed from the doorway. “I’m Max Levitan. Welcome to Cold Coast Productions.”
Levitan looked to Rep like he was just under six feet tall, and he had to be sixty years old. He wore a blue poplin work shirt, a pair of khaki slacks, and a baseball cap—blue with a red bill and a plain block M on the front—that Rep didn’t recognize at first. After three or four seconds, it clicked. Braves. Not Atlanta. The Milwaukee Braves. A cap from some forty years in the past.
Levitan’s handshake wasn’t quite a bone-crusher, but Rep would still remember it when he went to bed that night. He felt odd lumps of scar tissue here and there, and at least one bone that he suspected had knit in a rough-and-ready way after a break.
They sat down. The moment Rep had been dreading approached. The great client let-down.
Melissa’s pop-culture jetsam and professorial deconstruction had produced a settlement of Sue Key’s claim. Rep needed only two business days to put a little lawyerly spin on the stuff, shine it up a bit, and make a deal. He thought he could have bluffed Cold Coast out of a bit more money, but clients get the last word on those decisions. When he’d told Key that Cold Coast’s offer included a personal, face-to-face apology from the CEO himself, her thrilled squeal had signaled the end of negotiations. Now she was about to hear a hollow, pro forma recitation of suit-speak that would never measure up to her stratospheric emotional expectations.
Levitan took off the Braves cap and cleared his throat.
“First of all, Miss Key, on behalf of Cold Coast Productions and myself personally, I want to express my deepest apology for this error in judgment.” His eyes held hers and his head leaned in her direction as his expression appealed for understanding. “It should not have happened, and it will not happen again. To you or to anybody else. I give you my promise on that. I have had an unambiguous discussion with the person who doctored that photograph, and believe you me, there is no room for any future misunderstanding on this point.”
“Thank you,” Key said, bowing her head and fiddling with the top button on her pink sweater.
“As chief executive officer of Cold Coast Productions, I accept personal responsibility for this foul-up,” Levitan continued. Rep sensed that he’d changed “screw-up” to “foul-up” at the last second to avoid offending Key. “I want to be sure the corrective measures we have taken meet with your complete satisfaction.”
Opening a maroon leather portfolio that he’d carried into the room, he took out a compact disk and an eleven-by-fourteen inch white envelope and handed them to Key.
“The disk contains the original picture and all of the alterations that were made. In the envelope you’ll find the print-proofs of the calendar page where your picture appears, and all the tear-sheets we could trace. I have no reason to believe that there are any more copies of that photograph anywhere in my company’s files.”
“Thank you,” Key said again, her voice now church-pew quiet.
Levitan now took out six sheets of bond, stapled in the upper left-hand corner, and a letter-sized envelope. He turned toward Rep.
“This is the agreement that you sent over, which I have signed,” he said, “including my written apology, and the certification that we have pulped all copies of the calendar that we could retrieve.”
“Good,” Rep said.
“And, of course, the check.”
“Right.” Five thousand dollars. Not exactly King of Torts money, but enough to cover the charges he’d booked plus a modest write-up, keep the bean-counters back in Indianapolis quiet, and bulk up Sue Key’s savings account. Rep got the precious documents securely in his mitts.
“I very much appreciate your coming by so that we could bring appropriate closure to this unfortunate situation,” Levitan said. “If you have half an hour or so, I’d be happy to show you around our facilities here.”
“That would be wonderful,” Key said, “but there’s a transcript I need to get out by tomorrow morning.”
“In that case,” he said, rising, “I hope that we meet again soon under happier circumstances. I’ll show you out.”
“The library in that conference room is very impressive,” Rep said when they were back on the metal steps. “It must have two hundred fifty volumes.”
“Three hundred five,” Levitan said.
“Are all of them by or about Winston Churchill?” Rep asked.
“Yes, but with a footnote. All but one are by or about Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British statesman. There’s one Civil War story in there by an American novelist who also happened to be named Winston Churchill. I bought it by mistake, and it was such a laugh I decided to keep it.”
“That’s pretty single-minded,” Rep said.
“Winston Churchill was the greatest man to live in the twentieth century,” Levitan said. “He was the last English-speaking politician who was remotely interesting for anything he did outside of politics. Once I really knew Churchill’s life, I couldn’t work up much interest in anybody else’s. Would you call that pathologically obsessive?”
“Not unless I were paid to,” Rep said.
“Now, there’s a guy I know has over a thousand books about Adolf Hitler. That’s obsession. I mean, Hitler lost.”
They had reached the bottom of the stairs. Rep noticed that, despite the speech, Levitan wasn’t panting. They went back across the shop floor fringe, drawing the same wary/disgusted glances from the men working there. Levitan propped the door open with his shoulder as Rep and Key stepped outside. Instead of going back inside immediately he just stood there, as if reluctant to give up the Edenic lake breeze gently ruffling tufts of steel wool colored hair that showed under the edge of his baseball cap.
“You’re new to Milwaukee, aren’t you?” he said to Rep.
“Been here less than two months.”
“This is a blue-collar town with blue-collar memories. Those guys in there used to be heroes. They’re not anymore, but it’s not their fault. They held up their end of the deal. They didn’t turn the mightiest industrial machine on Earth into the rust belt. That was done by guys in suits.”
Levitan stepped back inside and with metallic finality the door snapped shut behind him.
“Where’s your car?” Rep asked his client.
“I took the bus over.”
“Can I give you a ride back to your office?”
“Actually, could you take me to my flat over on College? I do most of my proofing and corrections there.”
“How do I get there?” Rep asked as they slid into his Sable.
“Start by going west on KK.” She caught Rep’s blank look and grinned. “That’s right, you just said you haven’t been here long. KK is Kinnikinnick. Just turn left at the stop sign and we’ll take it from there.”
The trip took almost fifteen minutes, as they rolled past bungalows with life-size statutes of the Blessed Virgin in front, squat, six-unit apartment buildings, and postcard-sized lawns being worked by septuagenarians sweating through white tee-shirts and placidly puffing fat cigars. It seemed shorter to Rep because Key spent most of the quarter-hour telling him what a fabulous lawyer he was and how thrilled she felt and how if she ever had to put a legal dream-team together, he’d definitely be the captain.
She finally directed him to the curb in front of an upper/lower duplex whose covered-porch design screamed pre-World War II. It was trim and neat, though, with its wood frame freshly painted and a pale yellow stone foundation that Rep would remember when he later heard the term “Cream City Brick.”
He didn’t have long to savor these reveries. Before he had the ignition off, the unmistakably stentorian roar of a Harley Sportster motorcycle split the languid air. The cycle had just rounded the corner ahead of them. It growled down the block, skimmed elegantly across the street, and squealed to a stop fender to fender with Rep’s Sable. The helmetless rider shook longish, coal-black hair away from his face,
disclosing Asian features and almond-colored skin. Frowning in puzzled concentration, he stared through Rep’s windshield for several seconds before his dark eyes flashed with recognition.
“Sis,” the biker yelled then, “we got a problem.”
Safe bet, Rep thought; for strapped to the storage compartment lid behind the bike’s saddle he saw a calf-brown scabbard with a rifle butt sticking out of it.
Chapter 5
“Your apartment alarm went off,” the biker panted as he pulled out the rifle. “Home-Protex couldn’t reach you and called me.”
“Why isn’t it still going?” Key asked.
“They turn it off after ten minutes. It’s taken me at least twice that to get over here.”
“Skip the cannon,” she told him. “I heard a siren.”
“The siren was a toy on my Harley,” the biker said, pulling a clip from the calf-pocket on his cargo pants and snapping it into the weapon. “Trying to scare them off. We won’t see cops before lunch. You two stay here.”
“I don’t think so,” Key responded jovially, falling into step behind the biker. “I can’t lose face in front of my lawyer.”
“Hasn’t the alarm company called the police?” Rep asked Key.
“The police won’t come until someone actually sees broken glass or something,” Key explained. “They say less than five percent of home alarms come from actual break-ins. The only point of having one is to scare off juvies and maybe alert a neighbor.”
“That’s your brother with the rifle?”
“Half-brother. His name is Duong Van Nguyen. He goes by Don, but pronounce it carefully. Some guys think it’s funny to call him ‘Dong’ but I don’t know anyone who’s done it more than once.”
Nguyen by now had scampered up a stairway at the side of the duplex and reached the entrance to the upper unit. The screen door that Rep and Key could see from the bottom of the stairs looked intact, but the wooden door behind it gaped open and the glass in its upper half was shattered. As they hustled up the steps to follow Nguyen into the flat, Rep saw what looked like blood smears on the door frame.
“The bad guy is long gone,” Nguyen called to them a minute later after he’d rattled through the upper floor with his rifle at port arms. “He made a mess, but I’m not sure he took anything.”
The first room Key and Rep reached looked to Rep like the circle of hell a particularly vengeful deity obsessed with insider trading might have reserved for Martha Stewart. Hide-a-Bed, unhidden and unmade. Several days’ worth of unsorted mail towering precariously atop a pinewood chest of drawers. X-Box Game Cube beside a tiny TV, Gateway laptop sitting open on the bed, multiple copies of Sports Illustrated and Maxim competing for floor space with empty pizza cartons, crushed beer cans, and sweat socks. A guy lived here.
“Your room?” Rep asked Nguyen, who shook his head.
“A slacker named Travis uses that one,” Key said over her shoulder as she hurried down the hall. “I sublet it to him for half the rent.”
As soon as she reached the doorway of the second room her piercingly indignant shriek split the flat.
“The mess the burglar made?” Rep asked Nguyen.
“Yeah.”
Fearing the worst, Rep hustled to his client’s side. Surprise and relief came as he spotted her stenographic recording machine and a Mac computer in a hot pink, translucent case sitting unmolested on Key’s desk. When his gaze dropped, though, he saw what had provoked the shriek.
Reams of narrow stenographic paper, each piece two inches wide and six inches long, joined end to end in yards-long, awkward, snaking strips, littered the floor from the bed to the opposite wall. Testimony from what looked like a dozen hearings and depositions, recorded in the arcane purple symbols of the court reporter’s trade, strewed the carpet with forensic litter. On the far side of the room Rep saw a six-foot-high green metal cabinet with its doors flung open. The top two shelves were empty, but the two below them held steno paper just like that strewn over the floor, except that these were stacked in neat, rectangular blocks, boldly dated in felt-tip at their ends and with the names of witnesses on their top sheets.
Key snapped open her cell phone.
“Don’t bother,” Nguyen said. “I don’t see anything missing. He must have set off the alarm when he came in, looked in the cabinet for jewels or something, and then lost his nerve and split.”
Key impatiently shook her head and strode down the hall with the phone pressed to her ear.
After he saw the guy’s room, Rep wondered, why would he turn his nose up at easy snatch-and-run stuff and hit Key’s room instead? And after he did that, why would he ignore clearly valuable swag and loot a cabinet full of paper?
“You don’t look like you buy my brilliant theory either,” Nguyen said.
“I’m less interested in why he left than in why he came,” Rep said.
“I don’t think it was a stack of funny-looking paper.”
“Hard sell, all right,” Rep agreed.
“If Sue wants cops she can have cops. Back to work for me.” Nguyen popped the clip from his rifle and opened the bolt. “My buds tell me that doing this makes it legal to carry this baby around. They right about that?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea.”
“I thought Sue said you were a lawyer.”
“Ask me a question about palming off under the Lanham Act. Is that an M-16, by the way?”
“M-14. I wouldn’t have an M-16 if you gave it to me.”
A uniformed police officer, at least eight years younger than Rep’s thirty-four, reached the flat within two minutes after Nguyen roared away. He asked world-weary questions, filled out a one-page form in neat block letters, and gave Key a copy.
“Can you think of anything the perp could have been looking for?”
“Nope,” Key said. “Nothing in there but paper and ink.”
“Do you think anyone—say, someone you know, maybe—could have gotten the idea that there might be medications or…something in there?”
“Like pot?” Key asked, a bemused lilt lifting her voice as she deciphered the bashful circumlocution.
“Well, yeah,” the cop said. “Like pot.”
“No way. My bong’s in the shop.” She waited half-a-beat to watch his eyebrows go up before adding, “Just kidding about the bong.”
A delicious nanosecond of tension intervened before the cop grinned. He walked back toward the outside door, with Rep and Key in his wake.
“Did you have a motion detector on the glass?” he asked.
“The landlord was too cheap to spring for that system,” Key said. “We just got the basic contact thingy on the door.”
The cop gestured at the apparent bloodstains on the doorframe.
“One theory might be that he got in without triggering the alarm by breaking the glass and climbing through,” the cop said. “Then when he tried to leave the same way he got careless and cut himself. That honked him off, so he impatiently jerked the door open and set the alarm off.”
“That’s why you asked me about the pot,” Key said. “Because if the alarm wasn’t wailing while he was going through the flat, there’d be no reason for him to leave before he found whatever he was looking for.”
“If something does turn up missing,” the cop said, “call the number on the form. Unless the guy comes back and trips on his shoelaces, there’s probably not much we can do.”
“Right,” Key said. “Thanks.”
Key, frowning and deflated, took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and expelled air from her lungs in a long, weary exhalation. With the brutal violation of her home, her morning of triumph had spiraled downward into ashen anticlimax.
“Okay,” she said in a stiff-upper-lip voice. “Let’s get your bill settled up so I can get to work on this dump.”
Rep knew that this was exactly what he should do. He wasn’t a workaholic like many of his colleagues, but he was a partner
in a corporate law firm. Ergo, having no more billable time in prospect on Sue Key’s modest case, he should wrap things up with Key as fast as he decently could and head back to the office to log some time for some other client.
But he hesitated. He hesitated partly because he didn’t want the morning to end on a sour note. Intellectual property lawyers don’t get to be heroes very often, and he’d kind of enjoyed it.
Beyond ego trips, though, the shards of broken glass on the aqua floorboards gave him pause. For no reason he could have articulated, they made him think of shattered ice over still, deep, and suddenly fatal water. Of Vance Hayes plunging to an ugly death a few weeks after writing a letter to Sue Key’s mother touting a lawyer named Walter Kuchinski—who happened to be one of maybe half-a-dozen people who knew for certain that Sue Key wouldn’t be typing up a transcript at her flat this morning. He didn’t know what light another forty minutes with Key could shed on that Byzantine spider web of weird coincidence, but he didn’t feel comfortable just turning his back on it.
“You have renter’s insurance?” Rep asked.
“Sure,” Key said. “American Family. Like everyone else in Milwaukee.”
“Tell you what. While you start cleaning up, why don’t I chat with someone at American Family about whether they know a glazier who can beat a one-hundred thirty-five-dollar estimate on fixing the glass in your door. Then we’ll worry about my bill.”
“But I don’t have any estimate yet,” Key protested.
“Sure you do. For a hundred-thirty-five I’d do it myself.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal, counselor,” she said, the delighted squeal back in her voice. “I’ve heard of full-service lawyers, but this is over the top.”
Putting Lipstick on a Pig Page 3