“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.”
Twenty-eight minutes later—rounded up, that’s five-tenths of a non-billable hour—Rep looked with satisfaction at aqua floorboards on which he could have walked barefoot and at a neatly rolled brown paper bag with BROKEN GLASS written on it in black Magic Marker. The cardboard he’d duct-taped to the window frame looked amateurish, but he’d just dictated a letter confirming American Family’s promise that someone who knew what he was doing would be out forthwith to improve on that effort.
“This looks wonderful,” Key said, beaming, as she strode down the hallway from her bedroom, where she had been straightening up. “But you weren’t supposed to be doing any clean-up yourself.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rep said. “In one sense cleaning up is about ninety percent of what lawyers do. Anyway, I had to do something to occupy myself while I waited for American Family’s adjuster to call back.”
“You’re a peach,” Key said. She pecked him on the cheek. “Now we take care of your bill. I insist.”
“Good idea,” Rep said.
She led him past the flat’s cramped kitchen, back to her bedroom, which now looked ready for a Better Homes and Gardens photo op.
“Has anything turned up missing?” Rep asked.
“That’s a funny thing,” Key said. “Nothing valuable is gone, but he took one of my bricks.”
“You mean the notes for a deposition you covered?” Rep asked, recognizing the professional jargon. “How in the world can you be sure that one of those is gone?”
“You’re talking to Xu Ky’s daughter,” Key said. “If mom had been in charge of the Normandy invasion we would have captured St. Lo at H-Hour plus six. I got every one of those genes. I keep the notes for every deposition for two years, because once in a blue moon a lawyer squeaks about a supposed transcription error. I store them in chronological order. And between my Palm Pilot and my Daybook I can give you date, time, and office address for every gig I’ve had in the last thirty-six months.”
“I see,” said Rep, who now understood why the cleansers in the kitchen utility closet had been arranged alphabetically—Ajax next to Bon Ami, followed by Formula 409 and, finally, Mister Clean. “So which notes were stolen?”
“Guy named Roger Leopold,” she said. “Dep taken on November 10, 2003, in a case called Murphy Alpha Numerics v. Orlofsky Publications.”
Roger Leopold, as in “the Leopold order”? Rep wondered, thinking of Polly Allbright’s enigmatic allusion after Rep’s eulogy. He inhaled sharply as an invisible little fist punched his diaphragm.
“Can you dig up a copy of the transcript itself?” he asked.
“I can try. I’ll call the office about it this afternoon. If they don’t have one, Walt Kuchinski might. He was local counsel in the case.”
“Kuchinski?” Rep muttered. “That’s an interesting coincidence.”
“Not really. He gets a lot of local counsel stuff in Milwaukee because he knows every judge in five counties. You want coincidence, I can do better than that. The lawyer who actually took Leopold’s deposition was Vance Hayes.”
“You’re right,” Rep said, a bit weakly. “You win.”
“Now, you’ve done a great job for me, and everyone in the Milwaukee County Courthouse is going to hear about it, so I want you to give me your bill and we’ll settle up.”
“Right,” Rep said absently. “Thanks for reminding me.”