Brain Storm (3 page)

“Lesser included charge?” said Watson. “In this case the lesser included charge is first-degree murder. The U.S. Attorney is trying out the new federal sentencing guidelines for hate crimes.”

“What’s the old psycho thinking?” Arthur muttered—an apparent reference to Judge Stang. “There must be a conflict in the federal public defender’s office. And you came up on the wheel. You don’t have an iota of trial experience. You need to withdraw.”

“On what grounds?” asked Watson. “When was the last time Judge Stang let anyone out of an appointed case because of a lack of trial experience?”

“I thought you said this fellow went to Ignatius High?” Arthur said. “He was in your class, wasn’t he? It’s a potential conflict, at least. I think we owe it to Judge Stang to bring your relationship with this fellow to the court’s attention. At the very least, I would call it the appearance of impropriety.”

“What relationship?” argued Watson, his misgivings about trying
the case and his concerns about the effect it would have on his firm performance profile momentarily supplanted by his resentment at being ordered to get rid of it. “He wasn’t in my class. I barely remember the guy’s name. I wouldn’t know him if he spit in my face. What are the legal grounds for withdrawing? I need search terms to feed into the computer.”

“Computers are no good in gray areas,” said Arthur, “but of course you young associates don’t know that yet. The accused was almost a classmate, and as such he qualifies as a former acquaintance. Take a stab at a memorandum in support of a motion to withdraw, call it the appearance of impropriety, mention your complete lack of trial experience, indicate your dearth of expertise in criminal law. Let me worry about what to do if he denies the motion. File it on Monday at informal matters before Judge Stang. I’ll call and try to soften the ancient bully with some kind words. He and I were fellow travelers many years ago in the U.S. Attorney’s office. It may be a simple mistake, in which case we want to provide all the excuses he’ll need to assign it to another lawyer.”

“And if he doesn’t let me out?” said Watson. “I can’t plead a guy out on a murder charge. It sounds like plain-vanilla voluntary manslaughter. A classic case of provocation. You can’t plead a guy to life, or death, for that. He found his wife in bed with another man.”

“And murdered him,” said Arthur. “Not just murder. The hate business is very problematic. What was it he said? Before he shot the poor man?”

Watson ground his teeth and tasted acid. Arthur seemed to revel in the lurid details of this case while tirelessly working to dispose of it. This was the second time during their meeting that Arthur had asked him to repeat his client’s alleged statement upon finding his wife in bed with another man.

“Didn’t he say, ‘Looks like I’m gonna kill me a deaf nigger’?” said Arthur, with a look of happy revulsion on his face.

“That’s the wife’s version of the story,” said Watson.

“And she says that your esteemed client burst in on her and her sign language teacher, brandished a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, and threatened to kill both of them.”

Watson was on the verge of rebuttal on behalf of his brand-new client—Arthur seemed to be reliving his past as a prosecutor while enforcing his present as a partner concerned about the bottom line—but
the contemplation of a future without Stern, Pale & Covin paychecks and benefits gave him pause. Arthur pressed on, savoring the unsavory: “According to the wife, your new client pointed the gun at the man’s head and threatened him. And she screamed, ‘He’s deaf, he doesn’t know what you’re saying!’ Then the gun was pointed at her, wasn’t it? And your man said something to her about sign language, didn’t he?”

“The defendant hasn’t told us what happened yet,” said Watson. “You’re convicting him on the basis of some reporter’s reading of the police report.”

“It gets worse, doesn’t it?” said Arthur. “Because the defendant’s seven-year-old son is deaf. And after he killed the poor man, he forced his wife at gunpoint to call military security and report an attempted rape. He didn’t want her taking sign language lessons. He kept insisting the boy could lip-read and learn to talk. Cruelty itself against the specialness of the child, which builds into the federal bias-crime charges. This fellow has a malignant, displaced hatred of some kind, a short step from hating deafness to hating the deaf. And the poor wife, not knowing where to turn in her desperate attempts to learn the language of the deaf, falls in love with a deaf man who gets killed for his trouble.”

“Are you the prosecutor?” Watson exclaimed, stopping just shy of a shout and tempering what could have been an outburst with an ironic smile.

“Just getting the bad facts out where we can deal with them,” said Arthur.

“What about the good facts?” asked Watson. “Let’s say he’s a faithful husband with a seven-year-old son. He comes home from work in the middle of the day and finds his wife holding on to the headboard with another man on top of her. And the government comes along and says his motive was deafness or race?”

“The circumstances go to the murder charge,” said Arthur. “The remarks put him under the hate crime enhancements. Didn’t he say, ‘You want me to learn sign language? Teach me some sign language. I need to know three signs—dead, deaf, and nigger’?”

“I haven’t asked him what he said yet,” Watson replied. “I haven’t met him yet. So far, she has the luxury of doing all the talking, because she’s not in jail.”

“We’ll know more when we get the reports from the army’s Criminal Investigation Division,” said Arthur. “Because the defendant is a civilian,
the FBI will come in, too, under the Posse Comitatus Act. All we know now is that this case is trouble. And the client is a bad client.”

“How do we know that?” Watson asked, deciding at the last second not to suppress an argumentative tone.

Arthur sighed and assumed the demeanor of Fermat teaching the multiplication tables to an eight-year-old. “Good clients are friends of yours seeking assistance in conducting their affairs and businesses. You give good advice to good clients; it saves them money and trouble, and they gladly pay you.”

Arthur stabbed his desk with a forefinger, clearly ticked that Watson would even consider a trial instead of a suitable plea. “Bad clients are also seeking assistance. But when you give good advice to bad clients, they don’t pay you, and after you represent them for little or no fee, they sue you for your trouble. This fellow is a bad client. I know. I used to put his kind in jail.”

“The government doesn’t just want to put him in jail, they want to execute him. And you don’t stop being a good lawyer just because you’re stuck with a bad client, do you?”

“Of course not,” said Arthur. “But we—this firm—and you, in the interest of our professional integrity—and, yes, in the interest of our financial well-being—we do our best to avoid bad clients and cultivate good ones. You should be investing your time establishing relationships with our good clients. An appointed case is a nuisance to be summarily disposed of in the most expeditious fashion. If you have a different idea, then …”

The unthinkable met the unutterable. Stern, Pale was the best firm in town. Many lawyers and most corporate counsel knew that; the only question for corporate clients was whether they could afford the best. And the only question for Watson was whether he wanted to work at the best firm in town or at another, one that was not the best. Worse, how about going to a firm that was not the best, having left the best firm two weeks before semiannual bonuses were due?

He broke into a sweat just imagining the explanation:
Sandra, remember that job I had at Stern, Pale? The one I got because you put me through the last two years of law school, so I could study real hard and graduate in the top ten percent of my class? Well, San, guess what happened?

The look on Arthur’s face convinced him this scenario was possible if Watson chose, now or later, to put any real work into defending his hate criminal.

“You may have noticed that our firm doesn’t do criminal law,” said Arthur.

That wasn’t quite true. The firm represented white-collar criminals with money. Drug dealers, murderers, and rapists had to go elsewhere, whether they had money or not. Drug dealers, murderers, and rapists who happened to also be immediate family members of huge clients also went elsewhere, but their cases were quietly supervised by Stern, Pale lawyers whose names appeared nowhere on the pleadings.

“I know people in the U.S. Attorney’s office,” Arthur said. “I’m going to tell you this once: I want to know the instant anyone contacts you with an offer. Hear me? This case will not go to trial.”

“Wouldn’t the trial experience be good for me?” Watson implored, again not quite sure he wanted a murder trial but resenting Arthur’s interference in his appointed case.

“Withdraw,” Arthur commanded. “Failing that, plead him out.”

“Y
ou don’t know what to do?” asked Sandra through the door of the powder room, where she was getting ready for bed. “Arthur told you what to do. Get out of the case if you can. If you can’t get out of it, then get rid of it.”

Watson was propped against the headboard in his underwear, his state-of-the-art subnotebook computer supported by a pillow in his lap. He was scrolling through the memorandum in support of his motion to withdraw from the Whitlow case, which he was scheduled to present to Ivan the Terrible at informal matters in federal district court, 10:00
A
.
M
. tomorrow. Like most associates, he often worked at home, but not even he worked in bed … except in emergencies, which happened only once a week or so. Even then, he didn’t ordinarily bring files or his computer to bed—he simply thought very deeply about the matter at hand and made a billing entry the next morning to account for the time.

Watson had written a succinct, compelling memo about how an inexperienced first-year associate could easily
lose
a death-penalty case, creating crabbed constitutional bugbears, not to mention loss of life, which could, in turn, engender ten years of postconviction litigation on the issue of ineffective assistance of counsel. The memo appealed directly
to Judge Stang’s renowned hatred for being reversed on appeal and getting the case sent back to his crowded docket.

Arthur had reviewed the memo, crossed out half of Watson’s carefully crafted sentences, and stuffed the paragraphs with rambling, deniable assertions about how the defendant was Watson’s “acquaintance” at Ignatius High and how the appointment would create at the very least “the appearance of impropriety.” The old meddler had also added three pages of grandiloquence belaboring the obvious, namely, that the district court (Judge Stang) had near absolute authority to exercise its sound discretion in interpreting its own local rules, and had finished with a barely disguised insinuation that a talented young associate of Watson’s caliber, working in a firm of Stern, Pale & Covin’s stature, should not be ordered to sully his reputation and the firm’s good name by defending common felons.

“You have no decision to make,” said Sandra brightly, opening the door. “Just do what Arthur told you to do.”

She came into the bedroom, still steamy from her shower and looking distinctly unmomlike, a shimmery, green-apple teddy clinging to curves that were still brave, free, and in high relief despite two pregnancies. Kids? In bed asleep. She slithered her way across the sheets and cuddled up next to him and the computer, her bowed head nuzzling him somewhere between his chest and his waist, spreading frothy, wet black curls across his torso and the keyboard. The scent of conditioner wafted aloft and further distracted him.

Her warm, damp hand prowled under the sheets and settled on his thigh. He watched the cursor arrow skid around the screen as he fingered the sponge-tipped TrackPoint III device embedded in the keyboard, right about where his navel would be but for the subnotebook. She kissed one of his ribs, then moved down a rib or two, where he could feel her breathing against his skin.

“I mean, you can’t expect them to pay you a six-figure starting salary,” she murmured into a roll of his baby fat, “so you can turn around and squander three months defending some racist murderer for no pay.”

He pushed the nib of the TrackPoint again, and one of those forbidden thoughts blossomed on the screen of his imagination, as he realized that if Sandra went any lower, into even more erogenous sectors, he could—if he were vile, lewd, carnal—call up that multimedia clip he’d downloaded from the Sultan’s Seraglio of Sin Web site—the MMX video
of Tanya going down on Sophia in high res, 3-D, 65,000 colors (it was work-related, honest!)—and he could mute the audio and watch it, while Sandra … Vile. Lewd. Carnal.

Or he could argue with her. His first duty was to his client, not to his employer; and a federal district court judge had ordered him to defend a human being accused of a capital crime. Arthur was free to give him advice, but it was Watson’s case and Watson’s client. How would it look if Judge Stang denied his motion to withdraw, and then a week later an ignoble Watson was back in court with a client he had talked into taking a shitty government deal?

Her lotiony hand moved slightly higher on his thigh, her head moved imperceptibly lower. He activated the laptop’s pause/resume feature.

“Obey King Arthur,” she said. “We have two small children. Do we need to worry about losing your paychecks? Or, I could go back to the accounting firm, I guess.”

Shorthand. She was dangling a carrot and waving a big stick. If he agreed to take Arthur’s advice and put aside this whimsy about jumping off partnership track and grandstanding in some murder case, she would be happy and affectionate. Otherwise, she would make more noises about going back to work, and they would have an argument about how they had agreed to keep the children out of day care by having one full-time parent stay home. Either way, he wouldn’t be playing with what she called his “second penis” (the subnotebook), and if they argued, she wouldn’t be playing with the first one.

“I’ll probably end up taking Arthur’s advice,” he said, sliding his fingers around a plump, well-formed, satin-covered breast, suddenly willing to say or do just about anything to keep her hand and head in convergence.