Brain Storm (15 page)

Watson set the article aside and instantly noticed that the cross-hatched heaps of hate crime cases, statutes, and law review articles he’d left scattered all over his desk had been disturbed—snooped into?—then reconfigured. By …? His secretary never touched documents unless they were in the
IN
,
OUT
, or
FILING
baskets, which meant …

He’d recently completed a memo for Abulia Systems (one of Arthur’s clients) on a private employer’s near absolute right to search the workplace, including an employee’s desk—a virtual desktop made of software or a real one made of metal and wood. Never once, during its research or composition, had Watson thought about his own files being ransacked. Intracorporate espionage is perfectly legal, he had concluded in his summary to Abulia’s Human Resources Department, especially if the personnel manuals contain proper warnings, thereby removing any mistaken expectation of privacy. And only now did it occur to him that just about everybody else in Stern, Pale’s litigation department had at least one locked file drawer.

Surveying his desk for a moment through Arthur’s eyes, Watson saw stacks of work product bearing the client-matter name and numbers for U.S. v. Whitlow—paper evidence of excessive nonbillable hours scattered everywhere.

Line one trilled twice. Inside call.

He lifted the handset. “Joe Watson.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “you
are
in. Did you see my note?”

“I was on my way over to see you,” said Watson. “I was at the Gage Institute, talking to Dr. Palmquist about our prisoner. Until I got a Code Orange on my communicator.”

This was Watson’s way of letting King Arthur know that his trusty associate had been unable to complete his assigned mission, because some overweening junior baron had presumptuously summoned him back here to do rinky-dink Westlaw research. If bluntness had a place in the feudal hierarchy of big-firm politics (which it didn’t), Watson could have said, “Boss, some foul usurper has defied you by commandeering your protégé and right-hand man.”

“Sorry to bring you back,” Arthur said coolly.

Watson lost a lungful. “
You
brought me back?” he asked as respectfully as possible.

“Yes,” said Arthur, using the same crisp timbre, “Todd Boron has an urgent project, and I told him you had time.”

Todd Boron?
Watson thought.
Boron the moron?
Boron was the most junior partner he could think of, a legal robot, a paper-processing R2D2. He had made partner by billing 3,500 hours a year, every year, for nine years, which averages out to 67.3 billable hours per week, every week, which comes out to 11.2 billable hours per day—if you assume he took Sundays off for spiritual upgrades—and 9.6 billable hours per day, every day—if you assume he didn’t. That’s billable hours; it doesn’t count nonbillable hours, for things like recruiting interviews and lunches, timekeeping, firm luncheons, meetings, repairing a hangnail, client golf outings, pro bono work, continuing legal education, bending a few paper clips, taking a call from an old girlfriend or a buddy from law school, or logging on to “Ask the Contessa” at the altsex.org Web site.

At an average Stern, Pale associate billing rate of $200 per hour, Boron’s nine years of 3,500 hours amounted to over $6 million in firm revenue. He was a legendary figure capable of superhuman feats of mental drudgery, the first associate in Stern, Pale history who had made partner not by rainmaking or big verdicts, not by ingratiating himself with big clients or moving the family to open the Hong Kong office, but solely by dint of sheer Herculean labor. He had no personality, no clients of his own, no rapport with in-house counsel, no flair for firm politics, no pizzazz for wowing or lulling summer associates into the firm, nary an extralegal thought or sexual peccadillo to distract him. He was Mr. Grind, a highly compensated drudge, a dumping and transfer station for massive, menial legal projects—the kind of stultifying toil normally reserved for paralegals. But if the client was oblivious or obtuse enough,
or, more likely, smug and flush enough to insist that all of their legal problems were too special or complex for lowly paralegals, then attorneys were called in to do essentially the same work at twice the rate. For these “special” clients with massive legal projects, Boron and any unprotected associate hirelings were locked up in off-site warehouses with computer terminals and boxes of documents, or sent to the library and ordered to compile summaries of the Bureau of Weights and Measures regulations for all fifty states.

Senior partners with big cases loved him, because they could take him down to the loading dock and say, “Todd, in four hours, two semitrailer trucks are going to pull up at this dock with nine tons of documents produced in our client’s litigation with Aileron Ballistics Corp. Those documents must be scanned by optical character readers, summarized, indexed, and they must be retrievable by author, recipient, witness, subject matter, and keyword before the first of the month.”

Whereupon Boron would say, “The first of the month? Why, that gives us twelve—wait, thirteen days? Cakewalk with cherry pies and duck soup. Fish in a barrel of gravy.” But between these performances he was shunned and pitied like an off-duty circus freak.

The quality of mercy was strained and no rain in sight for the first-year associates who were locked up in document warehouses with Boron. A diet of Mountain Dew, Jolt, No-Doze, Snickers, and espresso. Keyboard-induced carpal tunnel syndrome and radiation sickness from computer monitors. The firm provided family law services free of charge when the spouses of Boron’s minions filed for divorce and custody of the children. The one suicide on Boron’s watch had been covered up and blamed on “personal problems.”

Why was Arthur allowing Watson to be summoned back to the office to work for the likes of Todd Boron?

“From the looks of things, you seem to have plenty of time on your hands for nonpaying clients,” said Arthur, “and Todd has a Code Orange for a real client, so I told him you were available.”

From the looks of things? The old ferret wasn’t even going to pretend he had not been in Watson’s office sifting documents.

“It’s right up your alley,” said Arthur. “More handicap discrimination. Pick up Nancy Slattery and meet Todd and the client up in the main conference room on twenty-four.”

/    /     /

At the briefing, Boron presented the facts of the Code Orange. The client was Gateway Steel, and the plaintiff was a male steelworker named Mikey, who wore fishnet nylons, a merry widow corset, a chiffon bustier, and Magenta’s wig from a
Rocky Horror
dress-up kit out to the line on a Friday morning, and was summarily terminated. Mikey promptly hired a lawyer and sued for reinstatement, back pay, and punitive damages, claiming that Gateway had fired him because he was a transvestite, a handicap allegedly protected under the terms of the Illinois Human Rights Act. The litigation department was in eleventh-hour settlement negotiations on the night before Gateway’s summary judgment motion.

Seated at Todd’s right hand was Spike McGinnis, the line supervisor who had done the firing, a short, stout authoritarian with a bench-presser’s physique, who interpreted any attempt at resolving the dispute short of trial as a direct challenge to his authority. He needed only a bearskin admiral’s hat with a white-and-amaranth cockade and a lapel to tuck his right hand under to round out his Napoleon complex.

When Boron introduced Nancy as the department’s expert on state and federal handicap laws, Watson could tell that Spike felt the firm was shortchanging him by pawning a female lawyer off on him in his hour of need. His attitude was not lost on Nancy, who dealt with assholes for a living, two of whom were sitting across the table from her. She listened intently to Boron’s and Spike’s descriptions of Mikey’s escapades, nodding and asking for additional details. What kind of hose did he have on? Was Magenta’s wig artificial? When they got to the bustier and the corset and the termination, Nancy flatly declared: “That’s completely inappropriate.”

“You mean, it’s not covered under the Illinois Human Rights Act?” asked Boron. “You mean the firing was inappropriate?”

“I didn’t say that,” she said. “I’m saying it’s completely inappropriate to wear
both
a corset and a bustier. One or the other, fine. But both? He’s not a transvestite, he’s a fashion victim.”

Spike took the position that if Gateway wanted to settle the case they would have hired an East St. Louis firm with offices next door to the ambulance service for eighty bucks an hour, but instead he had come to Stern, Pale and paid three times as much, which in his considered opinion entitled him to some legal authority for the proposition that he was right and Mikey was wrong. Nancy took the position that Gateway had
paid its money for an accurate appraisal of Gateway’s legal position, good or bad, and if Spike didn’t like it …

Three hours later, Watson was hunched over his monitor. Outside, rush hour was beginning, and Boron’s Code Orange was still in progress.
“Transvest! /s discriminat! or handicap! or disab! but not transsex!”
Watson tapped the search query at the command prompt on Westlaw, sat back, and waited for more relevant case law on the subject of transvestism as a handicap to appear in window one, the upper right-hand corner of his twenty-eight-inch monitor, which was now a patchwork of open windows and dialogue boxes, all of them relating to different client matters.

Pretty exciting stuff for a Boron assignment—and Watson counted himself lucky—but not exciting enough to keep him from reading the
Post-Dispatch
article three more times between searches. Arthur had put him to work for the likes of Boron when the case of a lifetime was unfolding on the front page of the
Post-Dispatch.
(For the first time, he dared to consider the delicious scandal, the trajectory of his career, if he actually managed a defendant’s verdict. Far-fetched, yes. Possible? Of course.) Instead of researching hate crimes, calling Dr. Palmquist, getting on the Web to find out more about forensic neuroscience, he was on-line trying to find a court opinion that might suggest that transvestism is not a handicap protected under the Illinois Human Rights Act.

Unlike the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, which explicitly excluded from its coverage the more controversial mental disorders (kleptomania, pyromania) and sexual disorders (pedophilia, transvestism, transsexualism), the state handicap laws often had no such exclusions. When these popular, well-intentioned laws were passed, many of the people with conventional disabilities—blindness, deafness, paraplegia, mental retardation—were either already happily working, or they were at home avoiding any W-2 income, which might disrupt their Social Security, food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid payments. But nothing feeds the legal imagination like new laws with undefined terms, and soon, under the expanded coverage of state and federal handicap laws, just about any “disability” was good for a lawsuit seeking “reasonable accommodation.” Pandemic outbreaks of heretofore unheard-of, undiscovered, undreamed-of physical or mental impairments that “substantially limit one or more major life activities” claimed
victims nationwide, and lawsuits poured in from hypochondriacs, people with bad backs, phobics, transvestites, transsexuals, junkies, alcoholics, narcoleptics, insomniacs, women who believed they had a man trapped inside of them, men who believed they had a woman trapped inside, sufferers of something called “chronic lateness syndrome,” the obese, people with low or high metabolic rates, bulimics, neurasthenics laid low by the rigors of indolence, distressed citizens with irritable bowels and spastic colons. Later, no less crippling for their strangeness, came disorders such as Prominent Facial Birthmark syndrome and excused absenteeism for “experiencers” and alien abductees raped in outer space.

Watson proceeded to spend several billable hours on-line, scouring legal databases for any opinion containing
transvest
and
discrim
or
disab
—but not
transsex
—in the same sentence. He scanned case summaries on the screen and found even more of them that were not going his way. He was dreading another phone call from Boron and Spike; they were upstairs in a conference room gorging on catered food … waiting. He was finding administrative opinions in other jurisdictions declaring that a male transvestite’s desire to wear women’s clothing is a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities”—magic words, which meant that employers were obligated to reasonably accommodate the predilections of transvestites by allowing them to cross-dress in the workplace. Watson would have to tell Todd and Spike that Gateway might be better off letting Mikey return to work as Magenta because of potential liability under the Illinois Human Rights Act—sort of like telling the Ancient Order of Hibernians that an injunction had been issued giving Boy George and a shaved transsexual called the Leather Tinkerbell of Castro Street the right to march in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

His eyes strayed from the Gateway window of his monitor over to the upper left-hand corner, window two, where a helicopter gunship equipped with air-launched Cruise missiles was poised to fire at a Level Four Minotaur on the Planet Anthrax. In the lower left-hand corner, window three, was a downloaded graphic from On-Line NetErotica called STACY.JPG, featuring a snake-hipped Stacy with implants the size of cantaloupes; she was lounging in a nest of feather boas and dreamily dandling a computer joystick with one hand, while the other was busy somewhere down at the convergence of her legs. The graphic image invited the viewer to attend at the moment just before Mother
Necessity gave birth again and Stacy invented a new application for the featured peripheral.