“Bruce calls that my ego wall.”
Rep glanced politely at the eight-by-ten and eleven-by-fourteen color photographs covering the Gulfstream’s port bulkhead: Stewart hammering a piton into rock on El Capitan; Stewart in a crash helmet behind the wheel of a Formula One race car; Stewart in dripping scuba gear on the stern of a cabin cruiser; Stewart on a snowboard catching air off a mogul; Stewart surfing into a curl off Malibu; Stewart hang-gliding; Stewart airborne on water skis; Stewart in chest-waders and knee-deep in rushing water, a fly rod describing an unmistakable casting arc over his head; Stewart rafting through boiling white rapids; Stewart sailboarding; a much younger Stewart in olive drab with an M-16 in his right hand, silver bars on his shoulders, and rice paddies behind him; Stewart with a Browning over-and-under double-barreled shotgun cradled in his left arm.
“‘Ego wall’ seems harsh.”
“He’s exactly wrong,” Stewart said. “It’s an insecurity wall. An insistent shout that I’m not just a member of the lucky sperm club.”
“Well, I’d say you’ve laid that to rest, whatever it is.”
“The phrase comes from Mathew Thomas McCann—the ‘Matt’ who came up during my encounter with Jeremy at the club last night. I opened my firm’s Indianapolis office when I was a fourth-year associate.”
“I’m surprised your firm needed an Indianapolis office,” Rep said.
“The management committee was surprised too. I forced the issue, and they wanted to hang onto me. Always was a pushy little sonofabitch. Anyway, I came home to Indy, set up shop, played golf and tennis at the country club, passed out business cards, and sat at my desk waiting for the phone to ring.”
“It must have rung quite a bit.”
“It rang all right. In two years I had a comfortable little white shoe practice going. I was at a firm retreat, getting patted on the head and offered early partnership, when I overheard the lucky sperm club line from Matt.”
“Envy is the defining sin of the mediocre,” Rep said.
“So it is. Notwithstanding which, he was absolutely right. My family has had real money since before the Civil War. I went to prep school with rich people, college with rich people, and law school with rich people. They didn’t call the lawyers whose dads had been truck drivers or shop stewards because they’d never met them or heard of them. They called me.”
“So you—what? Overcompensated?”
“As a means to an end. I decided to get clients who didn’t already have me on their Christmas card lists. I found comfortable, affluent residential streets in Indianapolis, with BMWs or Corollas in the driveways. I figured that in one or two houses on each block I’d find people with two million dollars in the bank instead of eighty thousand. They needed sophisticated estate plans and inter vivos trusts as much as the swells in the gated mansions—but they had no idea that they needed them. I went after those people—and I got them.”
“By mountain climbing and fly-fishing and duck hunting?”
“Bingo. They lapped it up. It’s skeet-shooting in that last picture, by the way, not duck hunting. Hunting was one part of the testosterone pool where I refused to swim. I still remember Joseph Wood Crutch’s line from the fifties: ‘Destroy something man made and they call you a vandal; destroy something God made and they call you a sportsman.’”
“Well, I hope Bruce gets his issues worked out,” Rep said.
“He will,” Stewart answered confidently. “He’s only twenty-four. Gael says he’s knocking the felt off his antlers—looking for his own way to show he’s not just a member of the lucky sperm club.”
I could take all the name-calling in the world if it went along with trappings like this. Rep settled back luxuriantly against a soft, leather headrest and idly swirled fresh orange juice in a real glass tumbler. No waiting in the security line at Reagan National Airport or Dulles. No taking his shoes off before the metal detector, or struggling to put them back on after it. He took out his Palm Pilot to check the name and telephone number of the guy he was supposed to call as early as he decently could.
“Wait a minute,” Rep said suddenly. No taking his shoes off. “I just thought of something about Vance Hayes.”
“What’s that?” Stewart asked, stabbing a paragraph on the sixth page of the Wall Street Journal with his index finger as he looked up.
“The police report on the recovery of Hayes’ body said he had a shoehorn in the right-hand pocket of his sport coat. I just figured out why.”
“I’ll bite. Why?”
“He was planning on flying somewhere. It’s a savvy traveler kind of thing. If you fly commercially and you’re wearing dress shoes, it’s smart to carry your own shoehorn along with you so you can put your shoes back on properly after you’ve cleared security.”
“I’m not very familiar with the airports in central Wisconsin,” Stewart said, “but I don’t know of any he’d have been going to at that time of night on a snowmobile and without any luggage.”
“You’ve got me there.”
“Senior moment, maybe. All the time he spent with his good friends Jack and Daniel had to have destroyed some brain cells. And the diabetes depressed him. His doctor said if he didn’t change his drinking habits he’d die, and he said, ‘Never drinking is a lot like being dead.’”
“I can see his point,” Rep said.
“Why did the Hayes file suddenly spring to mind, by the way? Are you still re-writing that eulogy that you’ve tormented yourself about so much?”
“Not exactly. It’s that odd series of coincidences I mentioned to you earlier. Instead of going quietly into the archives, my new client’s case keeps ramifying in unexpected ways.” Rep then brought Stewart up to date on developments since their phone call a couple of days before.
“Extra effort is always a plus, but revisiting Vance Hayes seems above and beyond, even for a new client,” Stewart said.
“I tend to obsess a bit over the past.”
“Excessively rigorous toilet training, or is there a less prosaic reason?”
Rep hesitated. He’d never told anyone but Melissa about this. In this warm, male-bonding milieu, though, especially after Stewart’s comments about his son and with the Gulfstream’s throbbing engines providing a soothing background drone, Rep felt a current of complicity running between himself and the older man.
“My mother was arrested for murder when I was fifteen months old,” Rep said then. “During Vietnam she’d hooked up with a loser who planned on selling weapons grade fulminate of mercury to anti-war radicals. It turned out to be a sting. The dissidents were really Oklahoma highway patrolmen.”
“Not a promising scenario.”
“No. Gunfight in a rural parking lot, followed by a tire-squealing getaway leaving a dead cop behind. Texas Rangers gunned the loser down a couple of days later. By then he’d abandoned Mom for her own good. She hitched a ride with Dad during her escape, came back to Indiana with him, and had me while she was hiding in plain sight for two years. Arrest, imprisonment, and escape after eight years. That’s where the record stops.”
“And you never saw her while she was in prison?”
“The entire time I was growing up, no one told me about her,” Rep said. “I mean not one single thing—not even her name. It was as if she’d just been erased from history, like one of those guys purged in the Soviet Union. I had no memory of her, no record of her except an old photograph.”
“My God. What a thing to grow up with.”
“I didn’t find out what had happened until I tracked it down myself while I was in college. Even then, I wasn’t even sure whether she’d really escaped or just been killed by a guard who covered it up.”
Rep stopped talking. If a Greek chorus had been present it would have been chanting, “And then? And then?” But the Gulfstream was short on Greek choruses, and Stewart was too savvy to ask such clumsy questions. If his mother had died, Rep would have said so. If he still didn’t know what had happened, he would have said that. Since he wasn’t saying, he must know. Which was why he’d just shut up. Friends don’t give friends guilty knowledge.
Neither of them spoke for several seconds. The silence began to hang a bit heavy, and Rep cast about for something innocuous to fill it.
“Speaking of coincidences, do you know what Hayes was working on only a couple of months before he died? Some collection-slash-commercial fraud case involving a defendant called Orlofsky Publications—which turns out to be a sister company of Cold Coast Productions. He took one deposition and the case settled the next day.”
“I’m not surprised,” Stewart snorted. “Ohio company, right?”
“Right.”
“I set up the spendthrift trust for the little twit who ended up as chief operating officer of that outfit. Sammy Baldwin. He’s a broken twig on the end of the shortest branch of the Baldwin family tree. They wouldn’t let him anywhere near the family business, so he clipped a few coupons and bought himself a job at Orlofsky. If his lawyer called and said Hayes looked mean during the dep and Sammy was next on the witness list, Sammy probably told him to settle up so he wouldn’t miss his flight to Gstaad.”
“Why don’t my clients ever get to sue companies like that?”
“Hayes was a good client,” Stewart said. “He paid his bills on time, and I wish he were still alive and paying them. As long as he had to die, though, I just wish he’d roast comfortably in hell instead of sneaking back to complicate lives here in the temporal realm.”
“Amen,” Rep said as he set the Palm Pilot down. “I think I’ll use the restroom.”
“Please,” Stewart joshed, “on a plane this expensive it’s the head.”
***
“The idea of having a female hard-boiled private eye is provocative,” Melissa said to the multiply-pierced, ringlet-haired young man across the desk from her, “but it isn’t strictly speaking new.”
“No sh— I mean, really?” the sophomore creative writing aspirant said, his eyes widening in disappointment. “Man. I’m thinking, like, man, Mike Hammer in drag, right? I’m like, no one has ever done that before, am I right?”
“N is for Not Exactly.” Melissa stole a glance to see if he’d caught the allusion. He hadn’t. “Sue Grafton. You might also want to check out Sara Paretsky. Those two will do for a start.”
The phone rang.
“Oh,” the student said.
“Why don’t you run this through the word processor again and see what happens?” she suggested gently as she answered the phone.
“Hello,” Rep said, shouting a bit to be heard over engine noise in the background. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, I’ve just finished a conference.” Melissa sketched a quick bye-bye wave in the student’s direction to emphasize the hint.
“I need a favor,” Rep said. “Could you look up the number of whatever the biggest cab company in Milwaukee is? I’m going to be landing in a private plane at a secondary airport called Timmerman Field in a little over an hour, and I don’t think there’ll be a cab-stand there.”
“Let’s see,” Melissa said. “This is the part where I say, ‘No darling, don’t be silly. I’ll just drop what I’m doing here at the university so that I can run out and pick you up myself.’ Right?”
“Almost. I’m kind of hoping that you’ll also offer to bring a couple of Sausage McMuffins with you.”
“That was dangerously close to flippant, dear.”
“Well, I just left the airspace of Virginia, the Cavalier State.”
“I’ll do it because I owe you for not chewing me out over Pelham Dreyfus,” she said. “But I want you to know that you’re not fooling anyone—and you’ll be getting yogurt instead of McSausages.”