October 2005
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
“The thing is, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life,” Sue Key told Rep, adding after a minute’s pause, “You look skeptical.”
“I’m a lawyer. I woke up this morning looking skeptical.”
“Cross my heart,” the young woman said, a grin splitting her almond face as she gave the pie-crust curls of her black hair a little shake. “Not even the experimental puffs in eighth grade that everyone supposedly has to see what it’s like. I took a hit on a boyfriend’s cigar once to be a good sport, but never a cigarette. Even when I tried pot I used a little pipe thingy.”
Rep flipped back to the cover of the calendar that Key had brought him. Pretty Girls Smoking Cigarettes waltzed in friendly blue and white letters across the shiny, eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet. Full-page, four-color photographs above each page of dates inside delivered twelve months of posed variations on that theme. Comely ski bunnies contentedly sharing menthols in front of a snow-frosted chalet window for January 2004. Sultry, pouting debutantes in evening gowns smoking languidly on the terrace of some generic country club for April. A radiant bride beaming as she and her bridesmaids relaxed with filter-tips for June. Cute coeds puffing Ultra Light 100s amid their textbooks in a coffeehouse for September. All the way to smiling chums in Santa hats smoking under the mistletoe for December. People had apparently been willing to pay—what? Rep checked the back—nine-ninety-five for this.
He turned back to July. Three women who looked like they were in their early twenties sat at a weathered picnic table, implausibly ignoring a spectacular fireworks display bursting across the night sky behind them. Like most of the others, they shared the artless prettiness of youth, but with some un-model-like meat on their bones and makeup well short of perfect.
The blonde on the right side of the picture, a cigarette dangling insouciantly from the center of her lips, leaned across the table to offer a light to a chestnut-haired table-mate on the left side. Between them sat a woman whose jet black, piecrust-curled hair framed an almond-colored face with Asian features. Leaning back as she laughed at something, resting her right elbow on the table, she held a cigarette in her right hand, near her cheekbone.
“This certainly looks like you,” Rep said to Key.
“It is. The picture was taken in broad daylight in Cathedral Square. They must have put the background in later.”
“Do you know who took it?”
“I don’t know the photographer’s name.” She handed him a twice-folded sheet of photocopier paper. “The check came from a company called Cold Coast Productions. This guy just came over and said he was doing pictures of Milwaukee scenes and that if it was published we’d get twenty-five dollars each. He asked us to fill out what he called a release with our names and addresses and then sign it.”
“Did you?”
“Sure. It seemed like a lark. I mean I was thinking, like, Milwaukee Magazine or North Shore Lifestyle or something local like that.”
“Okay,” said Rep. “You knew the picture might be published, you gave written permission for it to be published, and you accepted payment for publication. What you didn’t know was that they’d alter the picture to make it look like you were smoking.”
“Exactly.”
“And you object to that?”
“Well, sort of, I guess. It kind of bothers me.”
“I can certainly understand it bothering you,” Rep said, trying to draw Key out without actually coaching her. “Smoking is stigmatized as a loser habit these days.”
“No, that isn’t quite it.” Another ingenuous smile. “I mean, I don’t think like, Lindsay Lohan and Katie Holmes are losers. Or Wanda and Sharon, the two other women in the picture. To me it’s just a personal preference type thing. But it’s sort of like the gay episode that time on Seinfeld, you know, the ‘not-that-there’s-any-problem-with-that’ one? I don’t have any problem with smoking, but I don’t happen to smoke. And then there’s my mother.”
“Ah. Childhood taboos.”
Wrong again.
“My mother came here from Vietnam before I was born,” Key said, shaking her head. “I visit her at home for tea almost every Sunday. She’s an assistant liturgical director—you know?”
Rep shook his head.
“Someone who helps organize the services at a Catholic church. Conservative Catholics call them ‘weapons of Mass destruction.’ Anyway, she always has a cigarette, and if she thought I smoked she’d expect me to have one with her. So she’d be hurt that I don’t.”
At this point a resonant if not melodic baritone penetrated the wall separating Rep’s office from the reception area:
“Will everyone here
Kindly step to the rear
And let a winner lead the way?
Here’s where we separate
the men from the boys,
the news from the noise,
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