Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “You finding what you need?” Allbright asked, for the third time, through a screen door that led from the garage into the house.

  “Yeah, I’m just about to get out of your hair. Do you mind if I take a couple of these?”

  “Go ahead. I was gonna get rid of ’em anyway at the next Boy Scout paper drive. No use to anyone anymore.”

  Rep tucked a thirty-two-page pleading into the thin Roger Leopold file jacket under his left arm. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with Leopold, but it puzzled him and he wanted to examine it more systematically than he could here. The cover page said “Order of Proof” and referred to proof beyond a reasonable doubt and several statutes from Title 18 of the United States Code. That meant it dealt with a criminal case rather than a civil matter. Rep, though, had never heard of Hayes handling a criminal case. And even if he’d taken one on now and then, you tried criminal cases in court, not on paper. Correlating the evidence you had with each element of each offense was fine—that’s what an order of proof was. But that might take eight or ten pages. Why had Hayes cobbled together this daunting pamphlet with tabbed affidavits and annotated documents appended to it?

  His left arm encumbered, Rep tried to lift the last folder he wanted into the banker’s box one-handed. Mistake. It slipped from his grasp and scattered miscellaneous paper over the oil-stained floor. Cussing mildly at his misjudgment, Rep cleaned the mess up. The final handful of paper included a three-and-one-half by five-inch color photograph. It caught his eye and he took a closer look at it.

  Taken a long time ago, apparently. Two soldiers in khakis, three young women with Asian features, sitting at a lattice-work table in a sidewalk café.

  “Do you know who this is?” he asked Allbright, turning the picture around and holding it between his thumb and index finger.

  “Sure. That’s Lieutenant Timothy Hayes. His brother.”

  In his fatigue, Rep hadn’t asked the question as precisely as he should have. He had assumed that one of the soldiers in the picture was Tim Hayes—why else would it be in these files? He had intended to ask about the pretty young woman in between the two soldiers, leaning back in her chair, mouth open in an apparently carefree laugh, cigarette gripped insouciantly in her right hand a few inches from her cheek.

  The precise image, in other words, of Sue Key’s picture in Pretty Girls Smoking Cigarettes. Except that this picture had to have been taken years before Sue Key was born.

  Chapter 20

  “Hello, beloved,” Rep said over the phone shortly after four-thirty on Tuesday afternoon. “How are things going?”

  “I just spent twenty minutes with a graduate student, vetting the prospectus for his thesis before he shows it to his adviser. The title was Corporal Punishment in Charlotte Brontë. I’m afraid his interests might be misconstrued.”

  “Or even worse, construed correctly.”

  “I tried to be subtle,” Melissa sighed. “I told him that he’d have to hide a topic like that behind opaque and pretentious jargon. Something like Charlotte’s Kink: Sublimated Sexual ‘Deviance’ as Mimesis of Patriarchal Repression in Mid-Victorian Proto-Gothic Fiction.”

  “Did he get the message?”

  “On the contrary, he wrote my suggestion down word for word.”

  “Well, at least you’re one step closer to determining the precise moment when academic satire in America became impossible.”

  “So, what can I do for you? Or did you call just because you couldn’t wait to hear my delicately sculpted voice?”

  “I was wondering if you still had Washington’s card with his phone number. I’m in a ten-minute lull in the IP audit here, and I have some information for him.”

  “I do.” Melissa rummaged in her purse. “I’ll get it for you.”

  “Could you patch me through to him? You should hear this too.”

  “I’ll try,” Melissa said, “but be patient with me if I lose you. My degrees are in literature, not engineering.”

  This becoming modesty understated Melissa’s technological dexterity. Twenty seconds later the two of them were on the line with Washington. While Rep told him something about Roger Leopold and the Supreme Court, Melissa flicked through five-by-eight index cards.

  “Are you getting this, honey?” Rep asked. “Somehow I’m not sure I have your undivided attention.”

  “I’m multi-tasking, dear. Hayes was doing something pro bono. City trying to shut a naughty bookstore with a large Internet operation by using a civil nuisance action instead of a criminal obscenity charge. City’s position looked dicey because Internet regulation statutes kept getting struck down on First Amendment grounds, but in this case the City was winning anyway. Leopold needed a lawyer several cuts above the breed he usually engaged.”

  “Right,” Washington said, his voice crackling through static. “And Hayes saved Leopold’s bacon by taking his case and getting it all the way to the Supreme Court, where Leopold eventually came out on top. Which I agree is an interesting coincidence, but isn’t that what lawyers do?”

  “Pro bono means for free,” Rep said. “Hayes wouldn’t have represented his own mother pro bono. If he took a case for free, he was getting more than professional satisfaction out of it.”

  “Information, maybe,” Washington said.

  “Right. I’ll give you five to one that Hayes walked into that deposition in Milwaukee already knowing that Roger Leopold would say something that would make the case settle fast.”

  “Namely?” Washington pressed.

  “I don’t know. It has to be somewhere in the deposition transcript, but none of us can spot it.”

  “I’d like to ask Roger Leopold himself about it,” Washington said. “But the last anyone heard he was in Hong Kong and I’ve somehow misplaced my passport. I’ll come up with something, though. Thanks for the information.”

  “Sure,” Rep said.

  “And if you happen on any bright ideas about that letter from the Senate Judiciary Committee, feel free to give me a ring about them, too. Half our senators are busy running for president, and the staff apparently has more important things to do than return my phone calls.”

  “Will do,” Rep said, although he still couldn’t imagine what Levitan’s contact with that committee could have to do with him or Sue Key. “Melissa, I’ll call tonight.”

  “Counting the minutes,” Melissa said.

  She got up to make sure her office door was securely closed. Turned off half her overhead lights and flipped on a small, goose-neck desk lamp. Popped a Richard Eliot CD in the boombox perched precariously on the corner of her desk. Filled a plastic cup with water from a carafe she had replenished five minutes before the graduate student walked in. And got to work. Junior faculty don’t get tenure by making fun of academic jargon. They get it by publishing, and in the next three hours she wanted to move five serviceable pages closer to that goal. She zipped the cursor past her title—Peel-and-Eat Shrimp and Material Breach: Exploring the Sub-Textual Vitality of Commercial Rhetoric—and the two pages she had managed already.

  Twenty minutes later she had typed perhaps four hundred additional words, but her DELETE key had sent most of them to cyber-heaven. Another hour’s work produced three more paragraphs.

  Knuckles rapped at her door. She ignored the knock. A card taped to the door said clearly that she would next have office hours at 11:00 the following morning. She didn’t agree with colleagues who dismissed students as occupational hazards. But an assistant professor in the second month of her first tenure track position can’t afford too many unscheduled demands on her time if she’s going to commit high-concept literary criticism.

  A second knock sounded. She ignored that one too. Then a male voice, sounding considerably older than your average undergraduate, said, “Doctor Pennyworth? Please give me sixty seconds. It’s very important.”

  “‘Very important’ won’t do,” she muttered as she whipped from her chair and stalked to the
door. “It had better be life-and-death.”

  She cracked the door wide enough to see a heavy-set man a head taller than she was, in his late forties or early fifties and with thinning reddish-brown hair. He wore a scruffy, brown corduroy sport coat over the kind of madras plaid shirt you might see at the hardware store on Saturday afternoon on a guy who planned to stop for a Miller Genuine Draft on the way home.

  “You have ten seconds,” she said. “Make it good.”

  “Pelham Dreyfus is dead,” the man said.

  “Good enough,” Melissa gasped after a moment’s shock. She opened the door fully, retreated to her desk, and gestured toward the visitor’s chair.

  “My name is Charlie Dressing.” He handed her a card that listed an email address for something called spotlight.com. The card didn’t list Charles Dressing or any other name.

  “I thought Dreyfus was on the run. How do you know he’s dead?”

  “Security guards at O’Hare found his body in the trunk of his own car in one of the parking ramps.”

  “How did he die?” Melissa asked.

  “I don’t know. Who killed him? Don’t know. How was he killed? Don’t know. Who was the last person to see him alive? Don’t know. What—”

  “I get it,” Melissa said. “You’ve told me everything you know.”

  “Beyond the fact that he’s dead, I’m mayonnaise in a closed refrigerator, stuffing inside a turkey, a bandage applied to a wound on a moonless night—”

  “Capice,” Melissa sighed. “You’re Dressing in the dark. Very droll.”

  “I do my best.” Dressing sketched a what-can-you-do? smile. “It’s all I have so far, but I thought you’d want to know it right away.”

  “You were absolutely right about that,” Melissa said. She noticed that Dressing’s eyes casually but systematically surveyed her office, checked out the detritus on her desk, scanned the pile of index cards and photocopies next to her computer. “So the next question is, why are you doing me this favor?”

  “Because I want some information that you can help me with.”

  “Namely?”

  “Namely, what you found in Dreyfus’ place that led to all this fuss.”

  “Assuming that I found anything, why would I tell you?”

  “It would be a very classy way of saying ‘thank you,’ for starters.”

  Melissa examined Dressing’s card for a long moment. Then she rested her forearms on her desk and looked levelly at him.

  “Whom are you with, Mr. Dressing?”

  “I’m by myself. Spotlight is me.”

  “I take it you’re a private investigator.”

  “Oh, no ma’am,” Dressing said with mock earnestness worthy of Eddie Haskel. “Under the second sub-paragraph of sub-section one-a of section four-forty-point-twenty-six of the Wisconsin Statutes, a private investigator must hold a permit issued by the Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing. I don’t have such a permit, so it follows that I’m not a private investigator. I’m what you might call a freelance paralegal.”

  Dressing stood up and took a leisurely stroll around the exiguous space between Melissa’s desk and the back wall of her office. Placing his hands on the back of his hips, he stretched luxuriantly. As if he owned the place, and could do whatever he wanted to there. Melissa wouldn’t have called anything he did threatening, but a latent sense of menace radiated from him.

  “How did you find out about Dreyfus being dead?” she asked him.

  “Using freelance paralegal skills.” Turning back to face her, he flashed a quit-wasting-my-time smile. “Telephone, police-band radio, friend on the force who likes to watch the Bucks from a luxury suite at the Bradley Center. That kind of thing.”

  “Who’s paying you to deploy those skills in this matter?” she pressed.

  “The same guy who’s paying me to keep my mouth shut about things like that. Look, we’re on the same side, okay? We both want to find out the same thing. It makes sense for us to work together. I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours. How about it?”

  His tone had become a bit more insistent. His words just barely qualified as a request. He leaned forward, resting one fist on the edge of her desk and smiled cajolingly. Melissa instinctively pushed her chair back as a cold, wet tickle of fear stirred in her belly.

  “Does Detective Washington know you’re here?”

  “It’s not his day to watch me,” Dressing said. “And I think you can forget him anyway. If the stiff at O’Hare is in fact Pelham Dreyfus, then as far as he’s concerned this case is over. Dreyfus gets tagged with the Levitan murder as well as the pot-shot at your husband, then dies of lead poisoning or whatever himself. Mob hit will probably be Washington’s theory, and who cares if it holds water ’cause it clears two cases and there’ll never be a trial.”

  “I give him more credit than that.”

  “Well, I’ve been in Milwaukee a lot longer than you have. You don’t get to be a lieutenant here without knowing when to stop thinking.”

  “How do you know how long I’ve been in Milwaukee?”

  Dressing swatted the question dismissively away as he straightened up.

  “Listen,” he said. “Three days ago a twelve year old girl was shot in her front yard about thirty blocks from downtown. She wasn’t a blackmailer, she wasn’t trying to hustle anyone—she was just in the wrong zip code when some drug dealer who couldn’t shoot straight tried to take out a competitor. The shooter hasn’t been arrested yet. That’s the kind of case the City of Milwaukee needs Detective Washington on. If he can close the Levitan file with a murderer who’s already conveniently dead, that’s what he’s going to do. Now, how about a little quid pro quo?”

  Resisting the impulse to push her chair back again, Melissa found the plastic cup and took a generous sip from it. She put it down. She forced herself to look up and meet Dressing’s gaze.

  “Watch out for the high hopper on your way out,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Dressing said, “you lost me on that one.”

  “Charlie Dressen,” Melissa explained in the icy tone she generally saved for students who’d bought their term papers over the Internet, “managed the Milwaukee Braves during the 1960s. ‘Watch out for the high hopper’ was his way of calling a squeeze play.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dressing said. “There aren’t many thirty-year-old women who know that.”

  “Thirty-three,” Melissa said. “There aren’t many who like instrumental jazz, either, and there’s only one who’s spent hours talking old-school baseball with Rep Pennyworth. Your name isn’t Charlie Dressing, you won’t tell me whom you’re working with or for or why, I don’t have any reason to believe a word you’ve said, and I have a paper to write. Get lost.”

  “I’ve heard that your husband says you’re brilliant,” he said. “Well, let me tell you something: you’re not as smart as he thinks you are.”

  “No one in the world is as smart as Rep thinks I am. Now beat it before I call security.”

  “I’m on my way,” the guy said. “But keep the card. You’ve got a dog in this fight whether you like it or not.”

  He left before Melissa could have come back with a clever riposte even if she’d thought of one, which she hadn’t. She drained the cup, refilled it, drank half of it down, and dabbed sweat from her forehead and the corners of her mouth. With a conscious effort of will, she turned back to the computer and the arcana of deconstructive language theory.

  Fake-name’s intrusion had shaken her up. She had typed three more doomed sentences before she focused on the probability that she wasn’t the only person this dime-store cowboy planned on hustling for information about what Pelham Dreyfus had known. She dug up Sue Key’s business number, dialed it, and did her best to leave a voice-mail that would sound urgent but not hysterical. If Key had a home phone it wasn’t listed, so the first message was the best Melissa could do.

  Then she got back to her paper. For the next f
orty-five minutes she dissected academic commentary that snidely dismissed “peel-and-eat shrimp” as mindless ad-babble and “material breach” as pompous jargon. People in the real world, she explained, found it quite useful to know that they didn’t have to cook packaged shrimp before eating them—that all they had to do to the seafood was peel it. And when one found oneself construing, say, a contract (or, perhaps, a UN resolution), one might be well advised to distinguish between material breaches and technical or insubstantial ones before starting a lawsuit—or a war.

  Her phone rang. Thinking it might be Key calling back, she answered it.

  “Hi, this is Holly, one of the library assistants at Alverno College?” the caller said, adopting the contemporary habit of turning her statement into a question by inflecting her voice at the end. “You called about the Bourroughs monograph?”

  “Yes,” Melissa said. “I couldn’t get it on-line.”

  “We have a copy, but it isn’t scanned. I can mail you a photocopy, or if you’re in a hurry for it I could just leave a copy at the desk for you here.”

  “I’d really like to pick it up tonight,” Melissa said, knowing that she had to make as much progress as she could while Rep was out of town. “I’m new to the area. Can you give me directions to Alverno?”

  “If you haven’t driven on the south side yet,” the librarian said, “frankly, I’d take a cab? It’s kind of a different world down here.”

  “Good idea,” Melissa said, beginning the SAVE-LOG OFF process with her right hand even as she hung up with her left.

  Taxis don’t just cruise Milwaukee’s streets as they do Chicago’s or New York’s. As Melissa hustled out of Curtin Hall she figured her best bet was to drive down to the cab stand at the Pfister Hotel on the east side of downtown and take a taxi from there. When she crossed Hartford, though, still a good block from her parking lot, she saw a blue Veterans Taxi just dropping off a fare on Downer Avenue. Her shrill whistle and arm-snap got the attention of the driver, who reached her by driving up Downer.

  Up Downer, Melissa thought. God not only exists, He or She has a sense of humor. The driver winced when he heard her ask for Alverno College.