Putting Lipstick on a Pig Read online

  “Up to a point, Lady Zinc,” he murmured, alluding to the same satiric novel. “Look at this revolver. Does it remind you of any pop culture allusion you’ve committed recently?”

  “Opening of Superman on TV,” Melissa said as she examined it.

  “That’s right,” the weathered proprietor said as he strolled behind the counter toward the cash register. “Smith and Wesson thirty-eight caliber Police Positive. I remember watching The Adventures of Superman as an original series in black-and-white, on a Zenith console TV in our living room.”

  “That’s interesting,” Melissa murmured. “This doesn’t look quite the same as the gun I was looking at when I made that savvy comment.”

  “Smith and Wesson does make a number of different models,” the proprietor said, in the dry tone you might use to comment that Imelda Marcos had a number of different pairs of shoes.

  “Do they make one that looks like this one’s big brother, with a longer barrel and a lanyard ring?” Rep asked.

  The guy walked down to the far end of the counter, unlocked the back of the case, squatted, and took a dusty blue cardboard box from the bottom shelf. Bringing it back to Rep and Melissa, he removed the lid to reveal exactly what Rep had just described. The barrel was two inches longer, and a lanyard ring dangled from the bottom of the checkered grip.

  “Smith and Wesson thirty-eight caliber Model Ten,” he said. “Six-inch barrel, six-shot cylinder, double-action, center-fire.”

  “That’s it,” Rep said.

  The merchant lifted the gun, released the cylinder and spun it, peered down the barrel, snapped the cylinder back into place, and dry-fired the weapon once. This routine generally got juices flowing in American males.

  “Like to take a closer look at it?”

  “No, thanks. Just trying to satisfy my curiosity. I’ll be using something bigger than that to hunt deer.”

  “Deer?” the guy asked. “You leave your blaze orange in the car?”

  “Well, I have the cap,” Rep said defensively.

  “I would most strongly recommend more than that. Parka at least, if not overalls. There will be seven hundred thousand armed men and women in the north Wisconsin woods this weekend, and they won’t all be sober.”

  “A blaze orange parka isn’t required, is it?” Rep asked, as he sensed his sales resistance crumbling and Melissa’s bemused exasperation rising.

  “No, it’s not. But it’s like that Reader’s Digest story from the Vietnam days. Seems there was this real gung-ho second lieutenant going through advanced infantry training and doing okay, except he couldn’t hit a house with a thirty-eight. So he asks the sergeant who’s training him, ‘Will failure to qualify with the thirty-eight keep me from going to Vietnam?’ And the sergeant says, ‘No sir. But it might keep you from coming back.’”

  “Hmm,” Rep said eloquently.

  “One parka, coming up. What are you, about a thirty-six regular?”

  “Wait a minute,” Rep said, looking up. “I thought the standard sidearm in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War was the Colt forty-five automatic.”

  “That’s been the most common U.S. military sidearm for a long time, back to World War I if not before. But it wasn’t the only one we used in Vietnam. Smith and Wesson designed that Model Ten specifically for the military. Both army and marines in Vietnam used it. Guards handling prisoner transport on helicopters would wear it in a shoulder holster, where it would be secure in close quarters and readily accessible if needed.”

  “Vietnam, huh?” Rep glanced at Melissa, thinking about Nguyen, while she glanced back at him and thought about Kuchinski.

  “Yep. I’d say if you see a Model Ten more than thirty-five years old, it probably saw action in South Vietnam. I’ll go see about that parka.”

  Ten minutes later, Rep stood in Teal Peaks’ parking lot, gazing longingly at the Sable as it carried away Melissa and the jacket and shoes he had put on that morning. In their stead he wore his new hunting boots and a blaze orange parka and hat that could be seen from outer space. A glance at his watch confirmed that he had some time to kill before Kuchinski showed up.

  “Idle time” is a blasphemous phrase in the legal lexicon. Lawyers read or dictate or talk on the phone or type while they’re gulping down lunch, driving to and from work, waiting at airports, and on their way to the bathroom. Rep wasn’t that compulsive himself, but he wasn’t going to spend twenty minutes counting the cars on Main Street in New Berlin, Wisconsin. He dug the probate report out of his knapsack. He had reached the second page when he heard Kuchinski’s voice—or, more accurately, his bellow.

  “Hey, counselor! Get in before you draw fire!”

  This surprised Rep, for he’d kept half an eye on the road, looking for Kuchinski’s Riviera and not seeing it. Now he realized why. Kuchinski perched behind the wheel of a silver gray Cadillac Escalade SUV.

  Which is very interesting. Because this report says that Walter Kuchinski, Esq. received a payment of $100,000 from the Estate of Vance Hayes.

  ***

  Now that’s what I call a kiss.

  Melissa watched Gael Cunningham-Stewart’s right foot rise off the tarmac during her goodbye clinch with Ken Stewart. The two were standing in the shadow of Stewart’s Gulfstream jet on a landing strip at the Experimental Aircraft Association airfield in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Even from a discreet thirty yards away, Melissa could sense the passion in their embrace. After Gael had walked over to the Sable and greeted Melissa, she turned around and watched the Gulfstream taxi back down the strip and take off. She waved until it had disappeared in the piercingly sunlit sky.

  “All right,” she said then to Melissa as they climbed into the car, “I’m in your hands. I have directions from the client-owner, but I don’t know how much confidence I have in them.”

  “We’ll do the best we can with that and the driving instructions I printed out from Mapquest,” Melissa said. “If we start seeing mounties and roadside stands selling French fries with gravy, we’ll know we blew it.”

  “I’m traveling pretty light,” Gael said as Melissa pulled the car back onto Highway 41. “Should we stop somewhere before we get too far from civilization so that I can chip in for some Lean Cuisine or something?”

  “I have a cooler in the trunk full of yogurt, fresh fruit, vegetables, juice, a few salmon filets and a cooked roast.”

  “That should hold us for a while, all right,” Gael said. “I should mention one complication. I learned just before Ken and I left that an emergency motion is being heard by a panel of my court at noon on Monday. I’ll take part by phone from the federal courthouse in Madison, which means I’ll have to leave by nine-thirty in the morning or so. I feel terrible about imposing, but would it be a huge problem if I borrowed your car for the trip?”

  “Not at all.”

  Wisconsin has a large tourist industry and correspondingly good, toll-free highways. Even feeling their way through unfamiliar territory, it took Gael and Melissa only a little over two hours to reach the general vicinity of the alleged cabin. As they cruised along state highways and then for a few miles along Interstate Thirty-nine, they passed more than a dozen pickup trucks and SUVs with dead deer tied to their luggage racks or lying in their beds. Deer season was only eleven hours or so old, and lots of hunters apparently already had their kill. Melissa noticed that the repugnance she’d felt this morning when she saw the first carcass progressively diminished. She was getting used to it.

  “Well,” Melissa said as they turned onto the last numbered road mentioned by Mapquest, “we’re now pretty close to ‘Here Be Dragons’ territory. We’re going to have to rely on the owner’s directions from here on in.”

  “They say we should look for a left turn on County Road B,” Gael said, consulting a much-folded page in her lap. “Then it mentions an old logging road, and that’s where I begin to worry.”

  Melissa drove for just over a mile before she spotted a sign promising j
unction with B. She noticed two bulletholes in the sign, which for some hunters represented a less elusive target than deer. She turned left and started to wonder what an old logging road might look like.

  Eight-tenths of a mile later, she found out. A wooden sign at the top of a slight grade said OLD LOGGING ROAD LANE. The road was gravel rather than asphalt, but someone had cleared enough snow from it to permit the Sable to negotiate the path. They parked on the side of the road, at the bottom of the grade, about forty feet from the front door of the promised cabin.

  “Well done,” Gael said.

  “Lewis and Clark, that’s us.”

  It took them less than an hour to carry their things in and get set up. They had all the cold running water they wanted once they gassed up a generator in the back yard and turned on the pump. No telephone, but lights, refrigerator, and stove would work as long as the generator did. For heat they’d depend on a cord of firewood and kindling stacked beside the cabin.

  “Not exactly roughing it, are we?” Gael said.

  “I’m already connecting with Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Melissa said. “I may have the urge to fetch something at any moment.”

  “We’re going to get along just fine.”

  “I’ll call Rep just to let him know we arrived.”

  She punched his number into her cell phone and pushed SEND. Nothing happened. She looked at the screen: NO SERVICE.

  Oops. I hadn’t thought of that.

  Chapter 26

  Rep knew from teenage experience that Hunting—with a capital H—means a lot more than tracking and shooting game. It involves, for example, drinking beer, including for breakfast; playing cards; telling jokes that would never find voice in the presence of women, people wearing ties, or other spoilsports; making pictures in the snow while performing biological functions; and driving on frontage roads to waysides to purchase more beer.

  Even so, Rep had assumed that at some point in this excursion they would do some actual hunter stuff—get up before dawn, load rifles, fan out in search of deer, stuff like that. As the light paled toward evening on Sunday, though, he began to entertain doubts. Logs had gone from the woodpile to the fire, fliptops had popped, hamburgers had sizzled on messkit frypans, and tales about electoral campaigns in Milwaukee and women with talented lips in Vegas and Saigon had made the rounds. But no one so far had done anything that would threaten the life or serenity of any quadrupeds.

  Rep had spent the drive up with Kuchinski trying to think of some polite way to raise awkward questions. Questions like: What’s with the sixty-thousand-dollar car all of a sudden? You know, the one that fits in with that brand-new, top-line rifle Splinters was drooling over. Do they have anything to do with Vance Hayes’ six-figure bequest that you hadn’t mentioned?

  The right words, though, hadn’t come. Rep had mentioned that the Cadillac Escalade looked like quite a step up from the Riviera, and Kuchinski had shrugged that off with a casual, “Yeah, sometimes things just work out.” Rep couldn’t figure out how to push things beyond that without making their conversation sound like a cross-examination.

  His encounter with Simeon David, the prospective client, had likewise gone pretty much nowhere. Rep liked baseball and David liked hockey. Rep read Forbes and David skimmed Business Week. David was livid about his lawyers’ recommending an eighty-thousand-dollar customer confusion survey, but Rep said he’d have recommended the same thing. The best approach to trademark litigation was never to have to do any. Once you were in a case, though, you had to do whatever it took to win. That was where things stood when the poker game started Sunday night. By eleven Rep had netted out forty dollars down and said he was calling it a night.

  “Good idea,” Kuchinski said as Rep unrolled his sleeping bag and arranged his backpack to serve as a pillow. “The weekend woodsmen will be back in Milwaukee tomorrow morning instead of cluttering up the forest, so we real hunters can go out and promote survival of the fittest.”

  Kuchinski woke him up before first light Monday morning. Rep had a what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? feeling as he rolled up his sleeping bag, but he couldn’t figure out why. When he got back from relieving himself, Kuchinski offered him a deer camp breakfast: instant coffee and pastry from the wayside.

  “The others are all out already?”

  “Except for Splinters,” Kuchinski said, nodding at a sleeping bag almost invisible in the dim light, even though it was only twelve feet away.

  They pulled themselves into blaze orange parkas and caps. Checked to make sure their deer tags showed through plastic pockets on the parkas’ backs. Checked the safeties on their rifles. And headed out.

  Well, almost out.

  “You got any jerky?” Kuchinski asked three strides past the door.

  “Nope. Didn’t even think about it.”

  “Better take some along in case we end up chasing an eight-pointer through lunch.”

  He walked over to his Escalade and opened the back. As Kuchinski stuffed Baggies full of ambiguous brown food sticks into his parka pocket, Rep noticed a large, bulky apparatus that had apparently been buried under other gear when Rep stowed his backpack there Saturday morning.

  “Semper paratus and all that,” he said, “but is that a garage door opener? Why did you bring it up here?”

  “Never can tell what you’re gonna need in deer camp,” Kuchinski said, pointing a milky flashlight beam toward the path in front of them. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait a minute,” Rep said. “I forgot my flashlight.”

  He hustled back inside to fetch it from his backpack. As he opened the flap and saw the disordered jumble inside, he froze for a second. He suddenly understood the off-kilter feeling he’d had when Kuchinski woke him up. Someone had rummaged through the backpack while he was sleeping on it. The contents weren’t they way he’d left them, and one of the things that seemed out of place was the Vance Hayes bequest list.

  ***

  The last time I was up at dawn, it was because I was working on a dissertation and hadn’t gotten to bed the night before. Melissa cradled a steaming mug of pan-boiled coffee clumsily through thick mittens as she walked along the back of the cabin, gazing at the frozen lake that lay a hundred gently sloping feet to the west. She had found two blaze orange field jackets in a closet and slipped into one of them. Just in case.

  Even if I only get half an hour of this view while I’m up here, it’s worth the price of admission.

  The dawn light showed orange-pink on the horizon but reflected with a gentle, blue-tinged whiteness from the ice that covered the lake. A pier jutted out over the crystal surface. A sailboat perhaps twelve feet long, mastless and tarpaulin covered, hung from a pulley a few feet above the dock’s end, buttoned up tightly against winter but by its very presence promising spring.

  Melissa crunched gingerly through snow that, this far north, came well over her ankle and was already crusted over. It took her almost a minute to cover the modest distance. Is this what Lake Delton had looked like when Vance Hayes had ventured madly onto it? She recalled Kuchinski talking about the first hard freeze up here only in October—a little over a month ago. From the shoreline, though, once she reached it, the ice looked hard and thick enough to support a tank.

  Setting her coffee down on the land end of the pier she walked to the other end, lay on her belly, and looked straight down over the edge at ice fifteen or twenty feet from shore. Everything she saw suggested a rock-solid surface several inches thick. No visual clues to the eddies or currents that might well be swirling just a couple of inches below the surface. Perhaps as solid as it looked, and perhaps pure silver treachery.

  A cheerfully piercing yell from the back door broke Melissa’s reverie.

  “Come and get it! Breakfast is served!”

  Melissa pulled herself to her feet and waved to show that she’d heard the summons. Retrieving her coffee cup, she leaped a bit too confidently from the dock. Her right foot slipped out from under
her, her right knee hit the frosty ground hard, and she plunged past mid-thigh into snow.

  “Nuts,” she said, for she didn’t believe in wasting more robust cuss words with impeccable Anglo-Saxon credentials on trivia like this.

  Praying that the mug hadn’t broken, she looked down the slope and toward the dock, where it had to have fallen. She found it jauntily intact, half buried in a mound of conveniently cushioning snow. As she recovered it, though, she saw something else. She duck-walked toward the dock to get a closer look at a bulky shape buried deep in the shadows beneath it. She came close enough to make out skids and the lettering SKI-DOO on one side.

  “What were you investigating down there?” Gael asked when Melissa had mushed her way back to the cabin.

  “A snowmobile stashed under the dock. It seems odd.”

  “It sure does. The owners don’t use the cabin in winter, or they wouldn’t disconnect the phone. Why would they have a snowmobile here?”

  “And if they did, why would they just stash it under the dock like that, without any protection? Look at how careful they are with the boat.”

  “Maybe they let a neighbor who’s into winter sports keep it there,” Gael suggested. “Anyway, are you all right?”

  “Fine. These jeans will dry out in ten minutes. What’s for breakfast?”

  “Nothing special. Yogurt and fruit and orange juice.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” Melissa said.

  The mysterious snowmobile seemed much more than a hundred feet away.

  Chapter 27

  “When are you gonna get around to bracing me about the hundred thousand bucks?” Kuchinski asked.

  The question, with its let’s-pick-a-fight timbre, startled Rep. It came after forty-five minutes of tramping that had taken them two miles-plus northwest of their camp, and roughly doubled the syllables exchanged between the two of them since sunrise.