Putting Lipstick on a Pig

by Michael Bowen

  “Was Hayes still crusading as late as two years ago?”

  “I hadn’t heard from him about one of those cases since the mid-nineties. I figured the MIA thing had just run its course. When he called me about setting up Roger Leopold’s deposition, I didn’t flash on MIA scams at all. Figured the deposition was just about the lawsuit.”

  “But maybe the lawsuit was about the deposition.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Kuchinski said. “The more I ponder it, the likelier it seems that Hayes recruited a plaintiff and filed a claim just so he’d have an excuse for a little Q and A with Leopold under oath.”

  “Well, he made the most of it,” Rep said. “He stumbled over something in Leopold’s testimony that someone was willing to pay a lot of money to hush up. But none of us can figure out what it was.”

  “True.”

  “This is starting to fit together,” Rep said, panting now as much from excitement as exertion. “Gathering information about whatever MIA scam Leopold was involved with explains those trips Hayes took to the Far East a lot better than speculation about sexual tourism. He used the deposition to force the issue with someone who didn’t want that information floating around.”

  “The deposition also provided cover for Leopold,” Kuchinski said. “He could come across as a reluctant witness under thumb-screws instead of a venal informer. Although if he needed cover like that, why did he give Hayes the information in the first place?”

  “Because Hayes was saving Leopold’s bacon,” Rep, said. “He was defusing a legal claim that threatened to turn an Internet porn business Leopold had sold the mob into a pig in a poke. That’s what got Hayes to the Supreme Court. He was trading legal services for information.”

  “If all this is right,” Kuchinski said, “then Leopold looks like the bad guy all the way around. The quick settlement that Hayes got showed Leopold the value of information that Leopold himself had. When he ran a little short of ready cash in Hong Kong, he came back here to take a bite out of the apple for himself. Maybe Hayes got in the way, or maybe Leopold just took him out to cut down on the competition. When it got down to the short strokes, Levitan figured out that he could finger Leopold for Hayes’ murder, so Leopold killed him too. Then he took a shot at you with the same gun to try to frame Dreyfus for the Levitan murder and take him out of the picture at the same time.”

  “That was a pretty cheesy excuse for a frame.”

  “True,” Kuchinski said, “but it did scare Dreyfus off.”

  “You’re saying it was worth a shot, so to speak.”

  “You should save that one for Judges’ Night next year.”

  “Let me think the whole thing over and see if it parses,” Rep said. “In the meantime, are we anywhere near that trail you thought you remembered?”

  “Right up over that rise,” Kuchinski said, pointing slightly ahead.

  As rises go, Rep thought with dismay, that looks a lot like a hill. Eighty feet is a long way to haul dead weight up a sixty-five degree grade.

  “I know exactly what you’re thinking, and I’ve got you covered,” Kuchinski said. “We can tie my trophy up right here.”

  “You’re not thinking of taking the Escalade down that hill through eight inches of snow, are you?”

  “No one’s that crazy, not even me. But I’ve got it figured out.”

  “If it means we can stop dragging, I’ll cheerfully take your word for it.”

  The two of them looped the free end of the rope around a tree branch well off the ground and hoisted the deer high enough to thwart any timber wolves that couldn’t fly. Then, with the pale, late autumn sun high enough to hint that nine a.m. couldn’t be that far off, they began the trek back to deer camp.

  “You parsed our theory yet?” Kuchinski asked about fifteen minutes into this leg of the journey. “Think we’ve got it figured out?”

  “There are some loose ends we haven’t tied up yet,” Rep said, “but I can’t come up with any alternative that makes as much sense.”

  “What clinches it for me is that Leopold is the only one with a motive that anyone could take seriously. Except me, and you’ve cleared me.”

  “Let’s think that one through,” Rep said. “How about Nguyen? Family honor and all that?”

  “The only thing Vance Hayes did to Nguyen’s family was help it. Based on the Vietnamese ideas about honor that I bumped up against in-country, I’d say it’s whoever killed Hayes that better be worrying about Nguyen.”

  “Hard to argue with that,” Rep said.

  “I suppose we could confect a motive for Ken Stewart if we really wanted to,” Kuchinski said. “You told me he was the executor for Hayes’ estate. The trustee’s fee would be a nice piece of change every year for quite a while. What if Hayes got irascible and decided to change trustees?”

  “Now we’re just making stuff up,” Rep said dismissively. “In the first place, the trustee’s fee for a million-dollar asset base would be pocket change for Ken Stewart. He wouldn’t run a red light to hang onto it, much less commit a murder. And then there’s the detail that Ken has been as much in the crosshairs as I have. Whoever fired at me, Ken was about three feet away when it happened. And he’s had some kind of a stalker on his own grounds.”

  “So who else is there besides Leopold, then?”

  “I can’t think of anyone,” Rep said. “I’m just glad Melissa and I are up here while Leopold is back in Milwaukee, ducking Detective Washington.”

  Chapter 29

  Okay, Nancy Drew, Melissa’s superego warned in its usual English-nanny tone, put some pixels on that screen. Or the next time Rep drags you to a baseball game you’re not going to take anything to read, even between innings.

  It was nine-thirty-five. Gael was on her way to Madison and Melissa had the cabin to herself. Melissa usually composed at the keyboard, but this morning she had written the next six paragraphs out in longhand. She’d found over the weekend that the computer gluttonously consumed electricity. She’d had to refill the generator Sunday afternoon. She wasn’t sure how much more gasoline they had, and with Gael gone she couldn’t count on getting any more until late this afternoon. She was doing everything she could to conserve juice.

  Now, though, the time had come to incorporate her elegant script into digital text. Melissa focused on the first handwritten sentence: The failure of academic professionals to perceive substantively meaningful significations in commercial discourse that, by definition, must convey effective meaning to casual readers—because it would quickly disappear if it didn’t—casts far more doubt on the perception than on the discourse it disparages. She winced at the jargon, but jargon was the disguise her subversive message needed to infiltrate the bastions of group-think that she’d targeted. Eyes still fastened on the script, her fingers flew over the keys to record this unpolished gem of commentary.

  Then she looked at the screen to check what she had produced:

  .tge faukyre if acadenuc orifessuibaks ti oerceuve sybstabtuvekgt neabubgfhyk sugbufucabtuibs ub ainnercaak dusciyrse tgat bt efubutuib nyst cibvert effecutve neabubg ti casyak readers 00 dusciyrse ut wiykd qyucjkt dusaooear uf ut dudb;t 00 casts far nire diybt ib tge oerceotuibn tgab ib tge dusciyrse ut dusoaragfes,

  “I didn’t even know I knew Swedish,” she muttered.

  She realized what had happened. With her eyes away from the keyboard, she had mistakenly put the four fingers of her right hand one key to the left of the home keys they were supposed to cover: “academic” became “acaenuc,” while “significations” became “sugbufucatuibs” and so forth. Well, easily fixed. She moved the cursor back to the beginning and hit DELETE. Then she abruptly stopped. Her fingertips tingled and her gut fluttered.

  She had seen gibberish like this before. Bolting from her chair, Melissa scurried over to her carryall in search of the Leopold deposition transcript.

  ***

  Standing next to Kuchinski in back of the Escalad
e, Rep gazed at the dead buck awaiting them at the bottom of the hill.

  “You’ve gotten us to within eighty feet of the deer,” Rep said. “But that last eighty feet still looks to me like a good morning’s work all by itself.”

  “We’ll just see about that,” Kuchinski said.

  He opened the Escalade’s hatch, where Rep saw the bulky garage door opener and its long, narrow, U-shaped metal rail with a chain tracked around it that he had commented on when they set out this morning.

  “Can you plug this DC power cord in for me?”

  Rep obediently took the end of the cable, climbed into the hatch, and found the PTO aperture on the dashboard. After plugging it in he turned the key in the ignition to activate the battery. Rep got out of the Escalade and stamped back to the rear. He found Kuchinski threading one end of a rope through a steel ring attached to a clip-hook. Kuchinski then played out twenty feet of rope and attached the clip to the chain on the garage door opener.

  “Think I could get a patent on this?” he asked as he stepped back.

  “Why don’t you just license Rube Goldberg’s?”

  Kuchinski pointed a remote control at the garage door opener. He pressed the trigger bar. With a gear-grinding groan the opener sputtered to life. Its chain began to move around the U-shaped rail. It pulled the clip, which pulled the ring, which pulled the rope, dragging about nine feet of it into the Escalade’s hatch before the cycle stopped. Cackling like a schoolboy with a contraband copy of Hustler, Kuchinski stretched into the hatch, unclipped the hook, and reattached it to the apex of the chain.

  “It works!” he yelled. “It’ll be tedious, but the Treasury Department was a little short on factory-option winches when I bought this baby. Okay, let’s go down and get started on the hard part.”

  After extracting his paintball gun from a well in the hatch, Kuchinski turned and began leading Rep down the hill. Rep took the rope, playing it out behind him as he went. They still had twenty feet to go when Rep spotted two raccoons circling curiously beneath the deer’s carcass. Kuchinski raised the paintball gun and splatted the haunches of the nearer one. The startled animal scampered away, followed quickly by his chum.

  Kuchinski cut the buck down from the tree. Rep knotted the last six feet of the rope in a looping figure eight around the buck’s ankles. Kuchinski checked the knot and nodded his satisfaction.

  “Okay,” he said. “One of us has to hike back up and do that number with the remote control. The other has to stay down here and nudge this noble corpse over or around any obstacles that pop up. Your option.”

  The obvious choice was back up the hill. Rep, though, had a premonition that the garage door opener, with its one-half horsepower motor, might need a lot of help in actually pulling the deer. A garage door weighs forty to fifty pounds, and this deer probably had four times that heft. He hated the idea of Kuchinski’s delight with his contraption turning to disappointment when the engine started and the deer didn’t budge.

  “I’ll stay down here,” Rep said.

  “Suit yourself.”

  As soon as Kuchinski was over the crest of the rise, Rep squatted and braced himself behind the buck’s body. When he saw the rope pull taut, he lifted and pushed. With that bit of help and an extra little thrust here and there, Kuchinski’s jury-rigged contraption actually managed to move the body eight or nine feet up the hill.

  Rep had a ten-second break while Kuchinski presumably unclipped the hook and reattached it to the top of the chain. Then he repeated his earlier contribution and was rewarded with another eight feet of progress. Boring, but less effort than hauling the deer manually and, of course—and this was the real point—they were Using Tools.

  The only mishap came on the fourth round of tugs. Just as Rep and the improvised winch got the deer in motion, an icicle two feet long, shaped like a crude club and just as hard, fell from a tree branch and smashed Rep’s left shoulder. Wincing at the sharp and unexpected pain, Rep looked accusingly at the now partially splintered cudgel.

  I’m lucky to get off with just a bruise. If that thing had hit my cap instead of this padded parka, it could have done some real damage.

  Finally, after nine fits of heaving and pushing and watching, Rep was able to follow the buck’s corpse triumphantly over the crest of the hill. He saw Kuchinski standing there, grinning broadly, holding the remote control as if he were dictating a seven-figure settlement agreement into it.

  Rep stopped, right there, staring straight ahead.

  “All right,” Kuchinski said. “Next step is to heave this baby to the roof and tie him down. Then we’re on our way.”

  Rep didn’t move a muscle. He wasn’t seeing Kuchinski and the Escalade. In a furious collage the sharp pain of the plummeting ice-club smashing his shoulder, the pictures in the Lake Delton bar and grill, the sounds of the flatlanders jokes there, that first breath-catching sight of Lake Delton’s immense reach, and his glimpse just now of Kuchinski holding the remote control like a Dictaphone flashed at the speed of remembered light through his brain.

  “What in hell’s the matter with you, boy?” Kuchinski demanded.

  “I’ve been bribed!” Rep yelled.

  ***

  This is like grading freshman term papers. It isn’t hard, it’s just tedious.

  Letter by tiresome letter, one tentative keystroke after another, the gibberish in the Leopold transcript resolved itself into recognizable words. As Melissa performed this mechanical chore, she tried to sort out what had to have happened that August day when the email was created. She imagined Levitan at a computer docking station in a cubicle in Ohio where he was visiting Cold Coast’s parent company. She imagined him typing in the address and the subject of the email and about to start the text. Suddenly the power goes out. This is late on a summer afternoon, but maybe he’s in an interior cubicle, cut off from natural light.

  Startled, he looks around, takes his fingers off the keyboard. He’s not sure what’s just happened. Then, because for some reason he deems his message both critical and urgent, he puts his fingers back on the keyboard and resumes typing, in the dark, his four right fingers each one key off. The building has no electrical power but the computer’s battery keeps the machine on and dutifully records each keystroke.

  Wait a minute. If the battery was still providing power, why wouldn’t the screen be lit? Why wouldn’t he see that he was typing nonsense? Perhaps because the sudden cutoff of regular power had shocked the laptop into “sleeper” mode, drastically dimming the screen. Or maybe he’d just been too frantic or confused to notice. Anyway, he finishes the message. He hits SEND. If he’d had the cursor poised over that command at the start, which wouldn’t be unusual, and if his email program didn’t have automatic spell-check, he could have found the mouse in the dark and done that. Then he’d joined the probably half-panicked evacuation of his building.

  With all electrical connections to the network cut off, though, how did the computer send the message? Were Wi-Fi connections available back then? Maybe. Even if they weren’t, suppose the computer didn’t send the message right away. Wouldn’t it have done so when the power came back on? And here, she realized, was the key. Suppose the computer never sent the message at all. Suppose he’d never hit SEND at all. The message would still have been stored on the hard drive; still have been recorded in the email tapes used by the network the docking station was plugged into; and with enough technical know-how, retrievable from either.

  She had finished decoding the message. She looked at the translation on her screen. She read it with such intense focus, such chilling absorption, that she didn’t notice the man quietly enter the room and come to within about ten feet of her. She almost jumped out of her skin when she heard his voice.

  “So,” he said, “now you know.”

  Chapter 30

  “Define ‘know,’” Melissa told the intruder as she swiveled around in her chair to face him. “Because most of it I’d still have t
o guess. And, oh dear, where are my manners? Please take off your coat and find a seat.”

  “You do affected nonchalance very well,” Ken Stewart said.

  He shrugged off his parka. The coat and its hood were white, splashed with gray, black, and pale green camouflage shadings. Melissa tried for an expression as casual as her manner, but the pneumatic drill hammering in her chest made that a challenge. She felt color draining from her face. And this was with Stewart perching pleasantly on the arm of the couch, a good six feet from her. Not crowding, ostentatiously non-threatening. The anti-Leopold.

  “You know what that bloody email said. And now that you do, I don’t think you’ll have much trouble with the rest.”

  “‘Play the Gael card if you want, but leave me out of it. And never ask me for anything again,’” Melissa quoted. “‘Gael’ has to be your Gael. I’m guessing that early in her legal career she worked as counsel for WE’RE GOING HOME, INC., the company that produced Soldier for Hire magazine and ran MIA investigation scams. Leopold pressured Levitan into providing him with documentation of her involvement. He got free legal work from Hayes by dangling that information in front of him. If Gael’s name shows up in the masthead of early issues of Soldier for Hire, that probably explains why pages disappeared from the copies that I brought here.”

  “Not her name, just the parent company that employed her. Before it took her sensible advice to put several layers of corporate insulation between itself and the MIA stuff.”

  “But the company name alone would be enough to trace back to Gael’s connection through her resumé if the wrong person got the right hints. And that might have blocked Senate confirmation of her judicial appointment.”

  “Would have, not might have,” Stewart said. “If she’d done something silly, like smoking pot in her late twenties, we might have been able to finesse it.” There’s hope for me yet, Melissa thought. “But the MIA stuff would have killed her. The opposition would have jumped all over it, played the patriotism card, wrapped itself in the flag, struck those self-righteous poses politicians are so good at. They wouldn’t really have cared about those families and the cynical exploitation of their grief. They’d just have used the pretext for a cheap hit on the president, with Gael as collateral damage.”