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of trouble?”
    â€œNot sure. Something last weekend. I don’t know the whole story, but it wasn’t just the usual drunken whoring or anything like that. Whatever it was, it caused a big stink. It could get him thrown out, I guess. Do you think your Walt could be any help with that?”
    â€œI don’t know. He’ll tell you one way or the other, though, and he’ll give it to you straight. And maybe there’s something I can do.”
    â€œI thought you said this kind of thing wasn’t your line.”
    â€œIt isn’t. But my wife’s brother, Frank, is a lieutenant-commander in the Navy. He just finished a tour teaching at Annapolis. He’s been rotated to another assignment now, but he may be able to pick up some useful information and give you at least some general advice about what to do next.”
    â€œWell I’ll tell you what,” Lena said, so fiercely that Rep had to resist an urge to back up. “If you and your friends can get our nephew out of this mess with a whole skin, I’ll gladly do four or five years for conking Ole. I’m seventy-two years old and I’ve been to jail. More than once. I could do five years without changing my socks.”
    Rep believed her.

Chapter 5
    Melissa Seton Pennyworth’s fingers hesitated over the keyboard of her desktop computer in the modest Curtin Hall office provided to her by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She sternly instructed her ego to repress the mischief that sparked her green-flecked brown eyes. She knew that her penchant for flippancy in bureaucratic communications, which was chancy enough for a junior faculty member when directed at assistant deans, could be downright reckless in emails to people with real authority—like UWM’s general counsel, Robert Yi Li.
    She took a deep breath. Then she began sketching a tentative response to Li’s most recent email which (like every email he sent) was flagged IMPORTANT and had arrived with an irritating
beep!
when it reached her computer. Editing mentally as she typed, she made a determined effort to root out any hint of freshness or spontaneity in her writing and replace it with the plodding stodginess that would be called for by the Stylebook for Interdepartmental Memoranda if such a thing existed:
    Dear Mr. Li,
    I fully appreciate the honor of representing UWM at the “Ask the Professor” promotion planned by the Milwaukee Brewers baseball club for this spring. I assure you that, notwithstanding the qualms suggested by your note, I have neither aesthetic nor ideological objections to standing in cap and gown on top of the Brewers dugout in front of an anticipated crowd of forty-thousand people or so, to answer baseball trivia questions in competition with professors from Marquette University, Alverno College, and the Milwaukee School of Engineering. I recognize the institutional interest in demonstrating a commitment to and interest in all facets of community life—and in particular in showing that we’re not “just a bunch of ivory-tower stiffs,” as you elegantly phrased it, but on the contrary (to borrow your eloquence again) “can kick back and chill with the best of the eighteen- to twenty-six year old male demographic.”
    With deep regret, however, I must decline the honor. I am sure you do our colleagues an unintended injustice when you suggest that I am the only junior faculty member at UWM “who can tell a drag bunt from a cut-off man.” While we all have heavy workloads, moreover, I fear that my schedule of second-semester classes and administrative committee responsibilities, in combination with an article that I have committed to complete before June, leave me without sufficient time to give the Brewers project the attention that it undoubtedly deserves.
    MSP
    She read the piece through. She frowned. Parts of it seemed to lack the stultifying dullness that the occasion demanded. Each time