Brain Storm (32 page)

“How about the crime scene? Been there?”

Watson gestured helplessly. “I guess I was just focusing on the motions in limine,” he explained, “and the constitutional issues, the mental defect. I kind of assumed he did it. I was just trying to get rid of the hate charges.”

“Noble aspiration,” she said. “But what did I tell you?” she demanded. “It doesn’t matter if he did it. Nothing matters …”

“Except making the government do their job and prove up their bullshit case,” said Watson.

“Exactly,” she said. “We don’t know where the sun rises, unless the government proves it to us with experts. I wasn’t there when the hearing-impaired African-American was date-raping the defendant’s lawfully wedded wife. I’m betting you weren’t there, but feel free to confide in me.” She tagged him with a nod of her head. “OK, we weren’t there. Now, Judge Stang more than likely didn’t do it. The jurors probably weren’t there—although anything’s possible. On the first day of trial, we know one fundamental human truth: that everyone is a liar. The MPs and the CID boys are liars. The feds are liars. The U.S. Attorney is a brazen-faced varlet with a forklift for a tongue. Your client would make Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights sound like Mother Teresa on the witness stand if he could never hear the word
death
again. We know what the government proves in court. Even that ain’t true, unless twelve Kmart checkout clerks say it’s so. Until that happens, Whitlow was in the bathroom telling rosary beads and heard about the murder after he finished the Five Glorious Mysteries.”

“But who is Buck’s lawyer?” asked Watson.

“Fuck Buck’s lawyer,” said Myrna. “The government and the bad guys are always wanting to know who’s paying whose lawyer and who’s representing whom. So in the criminal defense bar, we stick together, and we don’t tell them shit. Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell ya. And as long as Buck’s fucking lawyer pays cash retainers, we don’t care who he is.”

Watson took a deep breath. He wanted to feel liberated, drunk with joy at the prospect of being his own boss. Self-governance. “He could be a wise king ruling the spirited commonwealth of himself.” But instead, he felt naked and vulnerable, expelled from the mighty tribe that had nourished and protected him, brought him of age … and cast him out. Could he make a go of it on his own?

He looked at Myrna’s office chair—stuffed polyester on a plastic frame, with one knob under the seat for adjusting height. The chair he’d left behind at Stern, Pale was high-end, ergonomically designed, adjustable to the tune of three levers and two knobs, and it had buttery cordovan leather stuffed in all the right places, with adjustable pneumatic lumbar support. He was accustomed to free food, club memberships, Cardinal baseball and Blues hockey tickets, health and life insurance, a pension fund—anything to make him more comfortable in that ergonomically designed chair he sat in for sixty-five hours a week producing legal work product. It paid well, and it was clean work, no heavy lifting. Myrna, by contrast, looked like she spent maybe an hour or so a day in this ready-made chair—the rest of the time she was running around intimidating opposing counsel and bullying criminals into behaving themselves long enough for her to get them off and cash their checks.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t see too many choices. Either way, you’re stuck with the case. I suppose you could move to withdraw because you’ve been fired. You could pretend Judge Stang might care about that shit, but he won’t. So why not get paid for your trouble?”

“Judge Stang will never let me out,” said Watson. “I had a Jesuit Latin teacher who was just like him. Don’t bother looking it up—Judge Stang was a graduate of Ignatius High, class of 1943, he comes from a long line of intellectual taskmasters. Instead of translating Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
, I’ll be defending James Whitlow. It’s all writ in the seeds of time. I’ll bet he picked me because I went to Ignatius High and Ignatius University Law School. Piss on the law review article—he found out I was into intellectual bondage and discipline at the hands of religious authorities. Instead of homework, the court has ordered me to produce flawless memoranda. Instead of going to class, I will attend a pretrial motions conference, where I will know more about the law of my case than anyone else in the room. If I fail, I will be arraigned, bound naked, and lashed to the podium, where in proceedings open to the public, Judge Stang will skillfully interrogate me and display my profound ignorance to the legal community and any major media he lets in for the show.”

Myrna grinned and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You were in chambers,” she said. “You know the man. Your terror is palpable. You bear the trademark wounds of profound psychological Stang abuse. You’re a member of an elite. Correct. He will never let you out. And multiply that
never
by ten once you enter your appearance as
retained counsel. After that, the case is yours, appeals and all. So, if I were you, I’d tell your client that Dr. Green’s fees are already way high.”

“You mean, now?” said Watson. “Dr. Green’s fees are too high now?”

Myrna upended a Heineken, managing to guzzle and nod at the same time. “Way high. Tell him you’ve been laid off, money is tight, and Dr. Green’s fees are too high.” She belched with unabashed exuberance and thumped the bundle of money. “I betcha another one of these will show up,” she said. “Enter your appearance. You handle pretrial and any appeals. If he goes to trial, I’ll corral twelve sheep in the jury box and put the dead, hearing-impaired African-American on trial for rape. Before it’s over, we’ll have Mike Harper barking like a trained seal in front of Judge Stang.”

“But why do these people want to hire me?” asked Watson.

Myrna stopped smiling. “That’s a tough one,” she said. “Maybe somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who works for Judge Stang. Maybe not.” She shrugged. “You have the writing credentials. It’s federal court, where all pretrial motions are submitted in writing only with supporting memoranda. No state court chicanery and oral bombast. You could make a lot of work and trouble for the U.S. Attorney by filing paper blizzards on the constitutional issues.”

She was right. He’d forgotten that all pretrial motions happen on paper in federal court. And if the arguments happened on paper, he was confident he would be the equal of any government lawyer.

“The first three, four weeks will be all researching and writing legal memos,” he said, thinking aloud. “That means I could beat up Harper real good before we even got to trial. That means, I could even kick your ass,” he said.

“Watch it, small one,” she said. “I’ll grant you the writing edge, but eventually we’d probably have a little something called a trial, where I think you’d be a soft-shell crab on my plate.”

“And after trial,” he said, egging her on. “After trial, then?”

“Then what?” she asked irritably.

“Then I could take you or Harper up on appeal where I could write an appellate brief that would embarrass either one of you.”

“Christ,” she said. “I’m creating a monster here. Don’t get adversarial with me, Bub. There’s no need for that. We can help each other. I won’t leave you alone out there,” she promised, dropping the butt of her Gitane into an empty Heineken bottle. She fetched more beers from the fridge, popped the tops with a Swiss Army knife, and handed him one.

“So if you’re in for the long haul,” she said, reaching for the short stack of manilas she’d patted affectionately at least twice, “I have tons of good news from the dirty side of the world.”

“Your investigator?”

“
Our
investigator. Dirt. We hired him—what? Forty-eight hours ago? He’s already bringing it in on a silver platter, and the wife is stinking up the place.”

“Mary Whitlow?” asked Watson, finally subduing the Sandra reflex.

“Mrs. Whitlow reeks,” said Myrna. “Everything I hear about her has that certain odor. The liar aroma. Feculence. Listen to this. Where are my notes?” She grabbed a pad out of her briefcase and flipped pages, then flipped open one of the manilas.

“Here we go. First, the dead black dude. He’s her sign language instructor, right? She’s been taking sign language lessons for almost a year, because she wants to talk to her son, little seven-year-old Charlie Whitlow … Guess what? The deaf kid spends nine months of the year in the residential school up in Fulton, Missouri. He comes home for the summers and stays with grandma, because, according to neighbor Hilda Pence, ‘The home situation is not good.’ According to three different neighbors and two of the kid’s teachers, Mary Whitlow doesn’t know
any
sign language.”

Memories tingled and attempted to surface. Whitlow had told him that Mary didn’t know sign language:
“I seen in the paper where she’s supposedly the queen of sign language now.”

“That’s what Whitlow told me,” said Watson. “But if she doesn’t know sign language, and she’s not learning sign language …” A half-formed thought was aborted by Myrna’s chatter.

“Stinky, stinky, stinky,” said Myrna. “And the dead usually smell worse than anybody. The deceased black sign language instructor is a deaf poet—a black William Blake, right? A Johnny Appleseed of Technology for the Disabled. He lives in Webster Groves. It ain’t silver-spoon Ladue, but it ain’t North St. Louis, either. Home, above average. Assessed value, a hundred and fifty grand. Maybe he got a deal on it. But listen to this. His ma holds a note on a Gulf Shores condo to the tune of four hundred grand, and guess who was making cash payments on the note? The deaf poet, who was doing very well at something and trying to hide it. Just what, we don’t know yet, but something tells me it ain’t cattle futures.

“He worked at Acrobat Printing, some high-end computer graphics
and copying joint. And guess who else worked there? Mary Whitlow. OK, according to his paycheck deposits, he was making like thirty-five grand at Acrobat. He volunteered at the Center for Deaf Awareness and Technology for the Deaf and sold Voice Transcription Devices, those gadgets that display spoken words, but that was for nonprofit, right? He sold his own computer-generated artistically engraved poetry pamphlets. Good enough. Let’s go mad-cow and figure he made ten grand selling those. Where’d the rest of the cash come from? No money on his folks’ side. He was divorced, paid alimony and child support on two kids by a previous marriage. And, he had a record. For what, we don’t know yet. Dirt will find out.”

Watson imagined Mary Whitlow and the black William Blake sitting in her house.
If she didn’t know sign language then how would they—?

Myrna shook cigarette number two out of its sky-blue Gitane packaging and again interrupted his thoughts. “Let’s do some event reconstruction. Wifey supposedly sends her black boyfriend a message on a— What’s it called? T-what?”

“TDD,” said Watson. “It’s how deaf people type back and forth on the phone.”

“OK, she sends a love letter on the TDD,” said Myrna, “telling her boyfriend that her husband will be out of town and she can’t wait to see him. Day of the murder, she calls MP headquarters at Fort Fuckup and says her husband just shot a man who was trying to rape her. When the MPs arrive on the scene, she fills out the story a little and so does Barney Bigot. She’s having one of those sign language lessons that don’t seem to do any good, and her instructor gets frisky on her, chases her into the bedroom, and tries to rape her. Her husband just happens to be walking in the door, hears her cries for help, gets his gun, and shoots the black, deaf guy before he can rape her. OK, the teenage MPs take that all down, call it in to headquarters, and get told to transport her to the emergency room, where a rape trauma team is coming in to see her.

“The MPs pack wifey off to the ER. She rides all the way to the ER, where she changes her story. She wasn’t being raped. Now we get the affair story. But watch this. We get three accounts. Version one: As the male ER nurse reports it to the MPs, ‘The patient stated that she was having an affair and was hiding it from her husband, who came home and killed her boyfriend.’ ”

Myrna puffed twice. “See the n-word in there anywhere?” she asked, shaking her head. “Maybe the ER nurse was being delicate?”

She flipped two pages. “Now, in the ER, the MP interviews her again, this time about what
really
happened. Now we get a more detailed version of the affair story. “The victim told Officer Nance, ‘I was with my boyfriend. I was getting ready to go down on him. His pants were unzipped. My husband came home and shot him. He made me call the police and tell them it was a rape.’ ”

She looked up from her page. “Need I repeat?” she asked. “Nigger this? Deaf that? N-O. In fact,” said Myrna, licking her fingers and flipping pages, “we hear nothing about niggers until the FBI field officers get out there and talk to Mary, at which point the stuff reads like
Mississippi Burning
and we got niggers till Hell won’t have any more.

“The FBI version is that she and the sign language instructor were practicing extreme sign language, I guess, when Daddy comes home early from work. Daddy talks hate talk.” Myrna theatrically lowered her voice, and posed like an actor reading from a script. “ ‘Looks like I’m gonna shoot me a deaf nigger, I need three signs or whatever. I need dead, I need deaf, I need nigger most of all.’
Bang!
Shoots him, points the gun at the wife and says, ‘I ain’t gonna be backdoored by no nigger. You call the cops and tell them I found this piece-of-shit nigger raping you and I killed him.’ She does what she’s told and lies. Hate crime USA, right?”

Myrna held out a half-inch ash on her cigarette and looked about the room in desperation. “Where’s my ashtray?”

“Here,” said Watson, pushing another green bottle at her.

“You’ve just been introduced to what the FBI calls ‘careful interviewing techniques’ designed to uncover any possible racial, ethnic, handicap, gender, or vulnerable victim characteristics that may have motivated a crime. To unsophisticated locals, the crime is a crime, but if you ask the right questions … lo and behold, out of the mists of human depravity, a hate crime appears. These guys know employment when they see it. The possibilities are endless. Hate could mean more business for them than crack cocaine. After all, hate is everywhere, and it’s free!”