Brain Storm (12 page)

Whitlow offered him the other cigarette.

“No thanks,” Watson said with a wave.

“Go ahead,” said Whitlow. “I’m a Christian.”

“I noticed,” said Watson.

Whitlow took a puff. Watson inspected the purple heart attack on the dirty white arm while his client exhaled blue streams of smoke.

“The tattoo,” said Watson.

“Yeah,” said Whitlow, glancing down and flexing muscles under the inky flesh. “Only cost me forty bucks, because the guy was a buddy.”

Whitlow took another puff and turned his arm for a better view. His face suddenly went limp, and he glanced up at Watson. “Hey, this won’t … This don’t mean anything, does it? I mean …”

Watson took a big breath and eyed the computer’s battery gauge.

“I saw it hanging on the wall of a tattoo hut where I went to get some ink done ten years ago,” he stuttered, flushing in splotches and squirming in his chair. “I thought it was funny. It’s a goddamn joke!”

Watson mentally slipped into law exam mode: May the government compel the display of the defendant’s tattoo and enter it into evidence, or would that violate the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself?

“Am I fucked?” pleaded Whitlow. “I’m remembering something. I’m remembering that a girl I used to date gave me this tattoo once while I was asleep.”

Watson sighed.

“Look,” begged Whitlow, “it don’t say ‘
I
Hate Niggers,’ does it? Read it, lawyer! It says, ‘
Jesus
Hates Niggers.’ What if it said ‘Jesus Loves You’? It don’t mean
I
love you, does it?”

L
ess than twenty-four hours after meeting with his tattooed client, Watson was on cellular hold, waiting for Myrna Schweich—the only criminal lawyer he knew personally—who had taken another call. He had the receiver of his communicator pressed to his ear, trying to listen for her return while following Rachel Palmquist’s faxed page of directions as he hiked through the interlocking corridors and lobbies of the Ignatius medical-industrial complex, dodging swarms of patients in street clothes and striding lab personnel in white coats. He’d worked for Myrna the summer between first- and second-year law school, had done research and written an appellate brief for her—his only brush with the criminal law—before leaving for Stern, Pale and the big bucks, according to Sandra’s wishes. But he often looked back longingly at the path not taken. Two or three of his law school classmates had gone into criminal law. And when he saw them at lunch, or at happy hours, or parties, they seemed to be having all the fun—if wild stories were any indication. Watson and the rest of the studious, law review types from the top of the class were working at huge firms, reading ERISA regulations or summarizing the depositions of forty plaintiffs whose panic disorders were allegedly caused by inhaling fumes from CleanWhite’s
toilet bowl cleaners or from eating too much monosodium glutamate at Wu Fong’s.

He had called Myrna the day before, after Judge Stang had made it clear the Whitlow case was his and Arthur had made it equally clear that he wanted the case disposed of at the first opportunity. Myrna had already heard about his appointment. She had offered to look at the complaint and affidavit and the military police reports that Joe had received from the government’s lawyers, to maybe give him some pointers. He’d faxed them to her, and now he was calling for advice.

While waiting for her to come back on the line, he was reminded of her incongruous, near comic appearance—she was less than five feet tall, with orange hair, tiny freckled hands, and childlike features. She had big blue eyes that were always aimed up at him from at least a foot lower than what was usually called stature. If you didn’t know her,
diminutive
came to mind—until she opened her mouth. From four-eleven land, Myrna projected an aura of absolute authority. She picked up words like clubs and used them to beat the bloody shit out of men who were twice her size. She’d been trained in the trenches at the county public defender’s office for a few years and then had gone solo. Just before she’d put him on hold, he’d asked her the typical rookie criminal lawyer question: What if his client was guilty as charged?

Myrna came back on the line and resumed control where she’d left off. “It doesn’t matter if he’s guilty,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a racist. Nothing matters, except making the prosecution prove every single element of their bullshit case. Your job is to make the government do its job. Because if you don’t, then tomorrow we might as well move to Russia, where they can arrest anybody they want, including defense lawyers, and put them in jail.”

Myrna was a real lawyer, not a glorified businessperson. He had visited her office in Clayton several times to pick up research assignments. She had a .357 magnum loaded with Rhino hollowpoints in her right-hand desk drawer and a minirefrigerator stocked with Heinekens. She left the office every day at five o’clock sharp, and went home to her two little girls, who didn’t know much about what Mommy did for a living. Like almost everyone else, her husband was afraid of her. He worked nights as a cardiac pump tech out at Barnes Hospital and spent the rest of the time saying, “Yes, Myrna.”

Watson had met the girls once at Myrna’s office after he’d graduated.
Both were redheads, like their mom. “Are you going to be a lawyer for people with lots of problems, too?” they had asked him.

“No,” he’d said, “I’m going to be a lawyer for people with lots of money.”

Myrna’s voice nattering in the earpiece of his communicator brought him back to the present: “You gotta make the government do its job.”

“But what if they prove he’s a racist,” argued Watson, “and what if they prove he called the victim a, you know,” he said, jerking his head around and dodging a clutch of nurses on the skywalk, “and what if they prove he killed him. Then?”

“Then geese farts,” said Myrna. “If you find a guy in bed with your wife you’re gonna call him a nigger, a honky, an asshole, an ugly fuckhead, a rotten douche bag, a filthy cocksucker, and anything else you can think of before you kill him. That doesn’t mean you killed him
because
he’s a nigger, a honky, an asshole, an ugly fuckhead, a rotten douche bag, and a filthy cocksucker—does it?”

Watson spun around again, wondering if anybody else in the swarm of medical-center pedestrian traffic could hear Myrna’s legendary profanity.

“Suppose the victim sucked cocks,” said Myrna. “OK? He’s bisexual or homo, or whatever. He sucked cocks, and we can prove he sucked cocks. We put Joe Blow on the stand, and we ask him, ‘Did the victim suck cocks?’ And Joe says, ‘Yes, Your Honor, in fact he sucked my cock on several occasions.’ OK? Now, your guy calls the victim a cocksucker and shoots him. Does that mean he shot him
because
he’s a cocksucker? Does that come under hatred because of sexual orientation, or whatever? Only if you’re a prosecutor. Your guy shot the victim because the SOB was porking the old lady in the wedding bed! And if you let them tag him for anything else, you’re not a lawyer, you’re a dickless, glorified paralegal in silk stockings. Christ Jesus! My clients are all black, and I have to explain to a mostly white jury why they carjack decent people, shoot them, and take their money. You? You have to explain why a white guy might want to shoot a black guy who’s shtuping his wife in living color. Mother of Christ!”

“OK,” said Watson, gasping for breath, “never mind name-calling. What about the medical?”

“Check out the medical,” Myrna said patiently. “What’s to lose? But stop letting that old fart down there fuck with you. What’s his name? Mahoney? Baloney? Fuck Mahoney. Must I explain?”

“OK, OK,” said Watson, “What else?”

“I breezed through those field reports you faxed me in about eight minutes, before I ran out to a hearing. Coupla things, then I gotta go. If it’s a rape, where’s the mess? The MP reports make it sound like a Holiday Inn after the maid came. And—big question alert!—where was the gun? Did he have to go somewhere and get it? If so, is he thinking the whole time about how much he hates deaf niggers and how nothing would give him more pleasure than killing his wife’s special friend? Or was it right there loaded in the nightstand? If it’s an affair, why didn’t Mr. Hothead Racist kill her, too? Or at least beat her up real good? Then blame everything on the nigger? ABC. That’s what usually happens. You talked to this guy, didn’t you? Is he real dumb?”

“I can’t tell yet,” said Watson. “He’s either dumb, or smart enough to play dumb.”

“There’s a line in that second MP report,” she said. “What’s it say? Something about a nursery monitor? Hold it.” He heard her pawing through papers on the other end of the line. “Yeah, here we go: ‘Before leaving the premises with the suspect in custody, an operational nursery monitor was found in the living room of the quarters. Responding officers checked the premises for unattended children or infants. None present. Suspect states he has one seven-year-old son, who was visiting relatives.’ ”

Myrna coughed, then cursed her cigarette. “That sounds funny,” she said. “Find out about that. What’s a nursery monitor doing in a house where there’s a seven-year-old deaf kid who’s not home? Could be nothing. Could be something. Could be nothing more than a day care, or a white-trash intercom. But find out. Get your investigator on that and the affair. How long had she been doing the deaf black guy? Did it start before or after the sign language lessons? Did Barney Bigot know about it? If so, when? Any domestic abuse calls? Divorce actions? How much do they hate each other? Regular marital hate, or the killing kind? Et cetera.”

“OK,” said Watson.

“Listen, I gotta go. I gotta find a way to keep one of my clients in jail because five different gangbangers want to kill him. Call me later about the pretrial motions. You gotta find a way to keep all this ‘nigger this’ and ‘nigger that’ horseshit out of evidence. Call me. Bye.”

/    /     /

Tunnels and skyways took him over, under, and across the Orthogenic Institute for Mental Dissonance, the Ignatius Home for Qualified Client Bodies, and the Outpatient Cybercash booths, until he wound up in the lobby of the building called the Gage Institute for Neurosciences. Access to the elevators was controlled by a security desk, where he gave his name to the guard. Dr. Palmquist’s offices were in a secured area, where he needed a badge or an escort with a badge, so he took a seat in a stuffed vinyl chair while the guard called up.

Watson opened his briefcase and retrieved the most recent issue of the
River City News.
It had come out the same day as the first
Post-Dispatch
story, but Watson had missed seeing it, until Rachel Palmquist put him onto it. He had snagged a copy from the firm’s library en route to see Whitlow. Front page again:
RIGHTS GROUPS DEMAND DEATH PENALTY FOR HATE KILLING
. Next to the photo of Mr. Hate, a picture of the Mrs. streaming tears. “My husband refused to accept our son’s deafness. And he hated people of color. That’s why he killed Elvin,” said the quote next to the photo.

A spokesman from the NAACP and another from Klanwatch recited the latest statistics: upward of seven thousand hate crimes per year in the United States, 62 percent of which were directed at African-Americans.

A spokeswoman from Women Against Domestic Violence said it was another brutal expression of male sexual jealousy in the ongoing campaign to oppress and subjugate women. “Usually women are the victims of the jealous male’s violence. Mary Whitlow was lucky, that’s all.”

Deaf activists explained how the killing was a violent example of the usual cultural chauvinism of the hearing world, which assaults deaf culture daily by abolishing deaf residential schools, promoting cochlear implants, and failing to teach deaf children American Sign Language, the true language of the American deaf. “He couldn’t kill deafness in his own son,” said one deaf activist by way of an interpreter, “so he killed a deaf man instead.”

Two paragraphs covered the Terril Williams incident. No mention of Terril’s record of criminal assault. No mention of the drugs in his system. Instead, he was described as an “All-American, African-American running back who had been savagely attacked by James Whitlow during Whitlow’s junior year at Ignatius High.”

According to the
News
, the swastika incident had occurred at Southwest
Missouri State after a drinking binge; the defendant had bet his fraternity brothers that he could scale the water tower at midnight. A former frat brother said that the swastika had been part of the dare, intended to prove that Whitlow had actually climbed the tower. Like the
Post-Dispatch
, the
News
played up Whitlow’s education at Ignatius High, a Jesuit prep school, after which he’d gone to computer technical school and then to work for a data processing company, until he was fired for computer sabotage.

Elevators opened and closed, an incessant paging system issued a stream of coded messages. He resolved to focus on Whitlow’s defense and not notice Rachel Palmquist’s wardrobe, her hair, her makeup. His new duty was to his client, not to his firm, not to a smart, witty, beautiful woman who was offering to teach him about criminal brains. He was here for one reason: to find out if her tests and her testimony about those tests could help him defend Mr. Jesus Hates Niggers.

She came out of an elevator at the opposite end of a lobby dwarfed by soaring white arches and sun-filled clerestories. All this true smiling would eventually lead to trouble, he thought, as they smiled at each other through the crowd and held the smile during her long walk across the lobby.

“Welcome to the Gage Institute for Neurosciences, Mr. Watson,” she said with her usual lilt of self-mockery.

“Nice place,” he said, rising from his vinyl chair and shaking her hand. “And look,” he said, showing her the headline, “I’m now a
River City News
reader.”

Maybe the new science of evolutionary psychology or some biology of beauty theory could explain just why he ignored his own resolution and studied her running shoes, her faded denims, a long white lab coat over a tight, black Lycra shirt, the shallow arc of pearls at the neck. Maybe it was all caused by pheromones, plumage, some as-yet-unidentified psychomagnetic brain wave of hers he was tuned into.
RADIATION SCIENCES
was stitched in red on the lab coat, just above the swell of the left breast—nice! “Swell,” as Wally Cleaver would say, even sweller than Watson remembered—and an ID badge with
R
.
PALMQUIST
, and below that
LEVEL
5
CLEARANCE
,
PSYCHON PROJECT
in bold black on an orange stripe. The makeup gone and no harm done; her hair indifferently bound, with stray wisps wreathing her smile. A pen stuck out of the tresses above her right ear. Her lips … had nothing to do with why
he was here. “Big place!” he added, following her easy, loose-limbed lope to the mirrored elevator banks, extending his neck slightly and homing in on a faint whiff of perfume.