Unforced Error (14 page)

“Oh, right,” Rep said. “Do you take American Express?”

Archer's eyes opened quite wide. For the first time that morning he seemed on the verge of laughter.

“I have been practicing criminal law twenty-seven years,” he said, “and that is the first time that anyone has ever asked me that question.”

Chapter 21

“Have you ever taken money or drugs for sex or had sex even one time with anyone who has?”

“No,” Linda answered mechanically. Melissa's throat clinched a bit as the young woman in the starched white uniform noted Linda's answer.

“Since 1977 have you traveled to sub-Saharan Africa or had sex even once with anyone who has?”

“Ah, no.”

This is a LOT worse than the confessional
, Melissa thought.
Adultery isn't for blood donors, at least if they're as scrupulous as Linda
.

“Do you understand that you can be HIV positive and feel fine?”

“Yes.”

“Are you donating blood for the purpose of being tested for AIDS?”

“No.”

“Do you understand the use of the bar-code?”

“Yes.”

“All right, then.” The young woman handed Linda the card she had been filling out and a piece of adhesive backing with two bar-code labels on it. One was marked USE MY BLOOD, the other DESTROY MY BLOOD. Then she ostentatiously turned her body away from Linda.

“All right,” Linda said a moment later, handing the card back with the USE MY BLOOD bar-code stuck on it and the other disposed of.

Cognitive dissonance
, Melissa thought as they got up to go to the couch where Linda's blood would be drawn. The cognitive dissonance assailing her now made the problem she'd mentioned to Linda at the beginning of this misadventure seem like a romp in the park. Trying to believe two contradictory things was hurting her head more than freshman term papers did.

Thing one: Peter didn't do it and neither did Linda.

“Which arm would you like to use?” a different, not so young woman in a starched, white uniform was asking Linda now.

“The left.”

“May we see both arms please?”
Just in case you're a needle-drug user
.

“Of course.”

But then
, Melissa thought,
there's Thing two: the bloody sword.
She had gone over the timing again and again, trying to imagine some way Quinlan could have gotten from the seduction
manqué
of Melissa at his DeLorean to the encampment Port-a-Potty and had his throat cut, with the murderer having time to get back to Jackrabbit Press and replace Peter's saber, all before Peter got downstairs and retrieved the weapon. The conclusion was always the same:
No way.
In honor of Klimchock, in fact, make that,
no bloody way
.

“Please make a fist and squeeze the ball. You'll feel a sting.”

A little gasp from Linda as the needle went in. The pain was slight, Melissa knew from her own experience, but she had the feeling that Linda was embracing it, welcoming the physical hurt as a token of atonement. Maybe that instant of pain and the tedium before and after it was why she'd insisted on keeping an appointment any sane person would have cancelled.

Melissa's cell-phone rang and she answered it.

“Hello, Nora,” Rep said, “this is Nick.”

“Developments?” Melissa asked.

“I've gone out on a limb. I called Pignatano and promised him that we could produce Linda at Jackrabbit Press for some in-depth Q and A with him and Lawrence. He's got us penciled in for mid-morning tomorrow. But that's only if you two buy into the concept after we've had a chance to talk. If you don't, I'll call him back and beg off.”

“Don't you like Archer?”

“I like Archer a lot,” Rep said. “But Pignatano doesn't know that. The Pignatano appointment is basically Archer's idea. At least I
think
it's his idea.”

“What exactly is the idea, and why does it involve seeing Pignatano?”

“The idea is to get us inside Jackrabbit Press, and chatting with Pignatano is the only way I can think of to do it.”

“In other words,” Melissa said after pausing for a moment, “after your very dogmatic lecture, we're going to play Nick and Nora after all?”

“Maybe not Nick and Nora. Maybe just Jerry and Susan North.”

“I don't think Jerry and Susan will work,” Melissa said. “All the real work in those stories is done by a couple of New York detectives, who tumble to the solution when Susan unwittingly blurts out a key insight in the second-last chapter. Until then all she does is stumble over corpses, and all Jerry does is mix martinis and occasionally light Susan's cigarettes. Given our rather moderate habits, that would leave you with too much idle time.”

“Nick and Nora then,” Rep said. “But I'll be counting on you for a searing insight even so—a witting one, if possible.”

“I'll do my best,” Melissa said. “You can pick us up in about an hour, after the donation is complete and Linda has had her juice and cookies. We'll talk things over and figure out what to do next.”

“What Linda's going to do next is sit down with Norm Archer and work on a statement for the police, and I'm counting on you to get her back to Archer's shop for that purpose. Because what I'm going to do next is learn anything I can about cases where Pignatano represented Lawrence or Jackrabbit Press. By an hour from now I should have made it to the records room of the federal courthouse here. I'm hoping you can meet me there.”

“Count on it,” Melissa said. “One hour.”

She put the cell-phone away and settled back in her molded fiberglass chair, wondering how to stumble over a searing insight. She glanced at Linda, who lay back with her eyes closed, a troubled expression marring her face. Looked at the clear, plastic tube leading from Linda's left arm, tracked the rich flow of blood that Linda's strong, young heart was pumping through it, followed the flow up the tube to the slowly-filling plastic bag at the top.

There Melissa's gaze stopped, and her world suddenly took on an exquisite clarity. Every speck of cognitive dissonance evaporated from her psyche. She had seen a Baggie-on-steroids like that before, with thick sides and seals that looked like they meant business. And the guy who'd shown it to her had been a marathon runner.

***

“Any luck?” Melissa whispered to Rep fifty-eight minutes later.

“Zilch,” Rep said, pushing back in discouragement from the carrel where a desk-top computer terminal blinked unhelpfully at him. “All I've established in more than three-hundred dollars worth of non-billable time spent pawing through index cards and doing mouse-clicks in the basements of two courthouses is that neither Jackrabbit Press nor John Paul Lawrence has ever been represented by Andy Pignatano or anyone else in either a civil or a criminal case in the Jackson County Circuit Court or the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri.”

“I read an interesting theory about military policy once,” Melissa said. “The author said that the best army in the world isn't the American or the British or the Israeli, despite their outstanding battlefield performances. He said the best army is the Swiss—because it never has to fight.”

“You're saying maybe Pignatano is such a good lawyer for Lawrence and Jackrabbit Press that he keeps them out of court.”

“Right. After all, don't you keep a lot of your clients out of court?”

“Sure. But I'm a trademark and copyright lawyer. Pignatano is a trial lawyer, specializing in white collar crime and immigration. Trial lawyers get clients by defending them in court. If they impress their clients doing that, they can branch out into other things. But you wouldn't consult Andy Pignatano in the first place unless you had a problem involving people with badges. And a problem like that should show up on a docket somewhere.”

“Is there any possibility he's not actually their lawyer?” Melissa asked.

“Not after yesterday's performance. He's not a guy Lawrence talked to for the first time this week after a referral. He did something somewhere along the line to win John Paul Lawrence's complete confidence.”

“Will that database you're logged onto sort by lawyer? Maybe you should just bring up all the cases where Pignatano appeared for anyone.”

“I don't have any better ideas,” Rep shrugged as he complied.

The screen filled with captions and case numbers. A bar at the bottom said that three more screens awaited him when he got through with this one. Hmm. He decided to cheat by looking at the J's and the L's first—a little screenscam that might make the chore less tedious. Melissa bent eagerly over his shoulder and avidly perused the data with him.

The J's turned up nothing useful.
Serves me right
, Rep thought.

“Try the L's,” Melissa said.

“You read my mind.”

“It's a habit.”

He scrolled down impatiently to LAW.

“Looks like Emmett Lawrence had a problem with the Treasury Department back in ' 99,” Melissa said.

“If it was the kind of problem I suspect it was,” Rep said, “he should be getting out just about now.”

“No John Pauls,” Melissa said, “and we're all the way down to Lawton.”

Rep began scrolling back up, past Emmett Lawrence.

“Lawless?” Melissa read tentatively.

“Neat name in this context, but no help. Ditto Lawaski.”

“And now you're at LAV and LAU.”

“Right,” Rep said distractedly, an instant before his index finger froze on the mouse. “Bingo. Melissa, my treasure, you are a genius.”

“That goes without saying,” she said. “But what have you found?”

“André Laurent versus United States Immigration and Naturalization Service,” Rep said. “‘Laurent,' like Laurent Fabius, the French politician in a story Peter told me on the way to the encampment.”

“Of course,” Melissa said. “The French version of Lawrence.”

“Time to look for hard copy,” Rep said, madly scribbling the case number down.

Fifteen minutes later they had a thin and, at first glance, not terribly illuminating file. Although André Laurent had been in the United States for some four decades by 1987, according to a complaint signed by Andrew Pignatano, the INS had designs on deporting him, and was proceeding in a manner that Pignatano found arbitrary, capricious, and inconsistent with most of the Constitution and all of the Administrative Procedure Act.

“But he doesn't say
why
they're trying to deport him,” Melissa complained.

“Plead thin and win,” Rep acknowledged. “Don't show your cards.
Pro forma
denial from the U.S. Attorney. Routine scheduling order. No discovery motions. No hearings, transcripts, or written decisions. Then the thing is dismissed as moot sixty-eight days after it was filed. Tantalizing but not terribly informative.”

“Is it important that this is called a ‘verified complaint'?” Melissa asked.

“Might be,” Rep said. “I hadn't noticed that. That's something you usually file only if you think you might be running into court right away and need to impress the judge fast.”

The verification form at the end of the complaint presented eye-glazing legal boilerplate: “I declare under penalty of perjury that the allegations set forth above are true and correct of my own knowledge, except for those made on information and belief, and as to them I believe them to be true.”

This would of course be signed “André Laurent.” Except that it wasn't. It was signed “John Paul Lawrence.”

“So John Paul Lawrence is an immigrant from France who changed his name from ‘André Laurent?” Melissa speculated.

“Maybe,” Rep said. “But in 1947 he couldn't have been more than ten or twelve years old, if that. What could someone that age have done that would interest the INS forty years later, even on a slow day?”

“So we need to beg Diane Klimchock for permission to use the library's vast research resources some more,” Melissa said.

“I think we have to ask her to do the Googling herself, if she's game,” Rep said. “After last night, the library might be a bit too hot for you and me, unless we want to spend the next six hours being grilled by cops.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“Talk about the big picture, while we wait for Linda and Klimchock. And I'd like to do the talking and waiting somewhere that isn't in the shadows of the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department. You have any ideas?”

“Yes,” Melissa said, “even though the Kansas City Jazz Museum is out.”

Chapter 22

“That's a magnificent piece, isn't it?” Rep commented, nodding at a Qing dynasty painted porcelain vase whose elegant lines suggested a delicate lightness despite its size.

“Try to sound impressed instead of surprised,” Melissa said. “Kansas Citians are trained to take umbrage at easterners who come to the Nelson-Adkins Gallery expecting to see nothing but Thomas Hart Benton paintings and a few Remington cowboy sculptures.”

“Not guilty,” Rep replied with a hint of indignation. “I read the
New York Times.
I would have known that the Nelson-Adkins had a world class collection of Asian art even if Diane Klimchock hadn't mentioned it twice in the first sixty seconds after you told her we'd be here this afternoon.”

“You're right, it is lovely,” Melissa said. “If we have to be cooling our heels, I suppose this is a great place to do it. But I wish I could be with Linda instead, while she goes through her ordeal with Archer and the police.”

Rep glanced at his watch. Almost three-thirty.

“She shouldn't be much more than another hour, if Archer's estimate is right,” he said.

“Archer also estimated that the police would have found Peter by early this afternoon, but they apparently haven't turned him up yet,” Melissa said.

“Yeah, and that surprises me. Nothing in this psycho-drama has been simple, though, so why should finding Peter be any different?”

Melissa stepped forward a couple of feet for a closer look at one of the brass hawks framing the vase. She gazed for a moment at the bird's casually predatory expression.

“Actually,” she said, “I'm still convinced that the most important element in this puzzle has to be simple: the thing that triggered Peter's sudden exit from the encampment.”

“Maybe,” Rep said. “Except that it if it wasn't Linda's tresses tied to a bolt, it's probably something as simple as a hideously complex twist in a revenue bond proposal.”

“The underlying issue may be complicated, but the trigger has to be simplicity itself. Peter has just been doing heavy petting with the love of his life and thinks she's hinting at pregnancy. The next thing he knows she's in the bathroom tossing her cookies. Whatever he saw between her dash for the john and his exit interview with you had to nail him right between the eyes, hit him like a thunderbolt. It had to be something that produced an instant epiphany, and convinced him that he had to do something
right now
.”

Melissa punctuated the remark with a fist-smack into her left palm emphatic enough to draw a startled glance from a guard in the corner of the hall. Melissa prudently led Rep from the Chinese Furniture Room to the Chinese Scholar's Studio across the hall, where two Han dynasty chimera sculpted almost two-thousand years before awaited them.

“The thunderbolt must have related to the library expansion,” Rep said.

“Right. But it also had to have something to do with Jackrabbit Press, and probably with Linda. Peter isn't an oaf, and he adores her. Whatever he saw had to be something that he could at least imagine hurting Linda somehow, even if only by association. Something that would make her or someone else think she was a horrible person instead of the faultless angel that he saw her as. Do you think I'm a faultless angel, by the way?”

“No, I'm pretty sure you have free will. And you ended your penultimate sentence with a preposition.”

“All right. ‘…the faultless angel he saw her as, asshole.' ”

“You stole that line from Lou Piniella.”

“And I did it quite deliberately,” Melissa said.

“That makes you seem even wiser to me than you did a week ago—and I would have bet that wasn't possible.”

“You're really a dear when you're not correcting my grammar.”

“If you're right, the problem is pretty straightforward. All we have to do is figure out what the thunderbolt was.”

A third voice intervened before Melissa could respond, which was probably a good thing.

“That's a splendid griffin, isn't it?” the voice said, apparently referring to one of the chimera. “Or is it a dragon?”

Rep and Melissa glanced over their shoulders to see Klimchock, holding a large manilla envelope. She seemed to be sedulously avoiding eye contact, as if the three of them were about to execute a dead letter drop in 1968 Prague. “Any news on Peter yet?”

“None that's reached us,” Rep said. “I hope that whatever you've learned is worth the drive.”

“Rather yes, I think,” Klimchock said. “Melissa's last thought about the medal was spot on. During the Nazi occupation of France, Vichy created a decoration called the Francisco, for civilian government officials. You had to be tight with the wrong sort of people even to think about being put up for one.”

“No surprise after other things we learned,” Rep said, “but still ugly.”

“To continue. Lawrence turns out to have been born in Arles, France. The name on his baptismal certificate is J-E-A-N P-A-U-L L-A-U-R-E-N-T. In other words, the fruits of your courthouse search were juicy indeed. Admittedly, as you also pointed out, someone who's sixty-five years old today would have been a bit young for collaborationist activity during World War II. But the same thing cannot necessarily be said about his father.”

“Named André, by any chance?” Rep asked.

“Yes. André was born in 1908. Degree from the
Ēcole
something-or-other, then into provincial posts in the civil service. Called back to the colors in the run-up to World War II. Served until demob following the debacle in ' forty. Emigrated to this country with his family after the war. Somewhere in between the last two he won himself a Francisco.”

“It fits,” Melissa said.

“He seems to have had enough of a packet to start a printing business that eventually flourished under John Paul. Died in 1987 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Which is why the lawsuit suddenly became moot,” Rep said.

“You've been busy,” Melissa said to Klimchock.

“As I said, Peter and the new wing are top of the list at the moment.”

“I think we'd better leave Chinese art and head for pre-Columbian,” Rep said.

“All right, I'll bite,” Melissa said. “Why?”

“Because it's between here and the coffee shop, and I need something caffeinated.”

“Right, then,” Klimchock said. “I'm away. Stay in touch.”

Twenty minutes later, Rep pushed a glass of Diet Coke across the glass top of a wrought iron table, thoughtfully stuffed sheets back into the envelope, and looked into Melissa's eyes without seeing them.

“Conclusions?” Melissa asked.

“John Paul Lawrence knows more about making money than I do. Beyond that, it's a lot of guesswork. What all those guesses have in common, though, is Jackrabbit Press.”

“How about the Civil War battles on the disk Peter left at the library?” Melissa asked. “Have you come up with a theory about why anyone would have that particular set on one disk?”

“No. Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor were the beginning of the attrition phase of the Civil War, grinding Lee's army down by force of numbers. Jubal Early's Valley campaign is famous because Lincoln personally observed some of the fighting, and the future Justice Holmes was wounded. But the only reason I've ever heard anybody even mention the Battle of Cedar Creek is Sheridan's dramatic ride from Winchester to save the day.”

“Really?” Melissa said. “That was
Sheridan's Ride
?”

“Well, yeah,” Rep said. “But how do you know about it?”

“
Sheridan's Ride
is a poem by Thomas Buchanan Read,” Melissa said. “Wildly popular in the post-Civil War years. ‘ The terrible grumble, and rumble, and roar/Telling the battle was on once more/And Sheridan twenty miles away.' I can just see roomfuls of schoolgirls memorizing it while Dorothea Dix frowned over them.”

“I think you're onto something,” Rep said.

“You'd better explain what it is, then.”

“The Battle of Cedar Creek wasn't terribly important militarily, but that poem's celebration of the dramatic ride could be used to create interest in it anyway. Cedar Creek could be the scene of a major re-enactment, on the scale of much more famous battles. If nobody is planning a re-enactment right now, it wouldn't take much public relations effort to gin one up.”

A game-face look steadily replaced the expression of simple intellectual curiosity on Melissa's face. She caught her husband's eyes and held them.

“We're going to have to do it, aren't we?” she said. “Go out to Jackrabbit Press?” It wasn't really a question and Rep didn't really have to nod to confirm his answer but he did, just as Melissa's cell phone rang.

“That was Linda,” she said after a thirty-second chat. “The police are through with her. She can sleep in her own bed tonight. Still no sign of Peter. She wants to meet us at her house.”

“Good,” Rep said. “Because we have a lot to do before tomorrow morning. Starting with pinning down the date for the Battle of Cedar Creek.”