Brain Storm (49 page)

Mary’s face locked up in a ghastly mask. Myrna came around her desk, turned hard at the corner, and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. She swept into the woman’s personal space so abruptly that Mary raised her hands. “You may
think
you been fucked in this life,” said Myrna, “until I get you on that witness stand, girl. Then you gonna get fucked so hard blood’s gonna come out your ears.”

“Myrna,” said Joe, stepping forward, as Mary covered her face again and sobbed.

Myrna walked back around her desk and started going through the same pile of papers she had been patting and trying to bait Joe with the day before. Myrna glanced once at him and winked. “Or maybe you’ve already told the cops all about the briefcases and militia business, in which case I’d be thinking about when the Order of the Eagles will find out about that. Either way, you are in no position to be feeling us up for an offer to tamper.”

Myrna’s eyes gunned through a blue haze of smoke. She waved a newspaper aloft, then stopped and grabbed another before she came back around the desk. She handed one to Joe and showed the other to Mary Whitlow, who made no effort to take it from her.

The masthead was writ large in a fancy headline font, like garnish for the Magna Carta:
EAGLE EYE PATRIOT NEWS
. If the headlines were any indication, it was a newspaper for racially minded folks,
STUDY PROVES BLACK IQS
30%
LOWER THAN WHITES
. A boxed column lower right:
BLACKS CAUSE
90%
OF VIOLENT CRIMES
.

Inside, things got worse,
RUNNING NIGGER TARGET POSTER SALE
, said the ad on page three,
GENETICISTS URGE RACIAL PURITY
, read one headline, with a boxed quote: “Mixed race marriages are destroying the social fabric of America.…”
WHITE FETUSES ABORTED AT SEVEN TIMES THE RATE OF BLACKS
, said another heading, followed by a caption, “Welfare State Breeding Criminals and Then Writing Them Government Checks.” On page four,
BABY KILLERS BOMBED!
followed by a piece on how to make sure you aim for the head of the clinic doctors, or use armor piercing bullets at a range of under five hundred feet.

“Top of page five,” said Myrna.

Watson’s brow bled sweat as he saw an editorial: “Tax Revolt, Not Another Dime of My Money for Raising Nigger Criminals,” complete with a byline and handle: Thor61, Whitlow’s virtual ID, if Harper was telling the truth.

“Now,” said Myrna, “if the government gets ahold of these, we will be fucked naked in Timbuktu. Back page,” she said to Joe.

He turned it over, where a box on the back contained publishing information:

“Our treasurer MW49? Thor’s wife? MW? We’ve both led such bad lives, Joey,” said Myrna, “we couldn’t be that lucky, could we? Couldn’t be her, could it?”

Mary’s nostrils flared with her breathing, but she stared at Myrna, with tears leaking at the corners of her eyes, and said nothing.

Watson suddenly realized he had not yet had the chance to tell Myrna about the his-and-her medical reports, and was glad he hadn’t. She’d be rubbing Mary’s face in gonorrhea by now if he had.

“He’s a lying racist shithead. She’s a lying racist shithead. Let’s pretend they both belong to the Order of the Eagles and neither is taking sign language lessons. Why is a black deaf guy coming to their house every now and again with a briefcase and staying for three minutes? Drugs? Who’s buying and who’s selling? And why would racists do business with African-Americans?”

“Elvin wouldn’t do business with nobody ’cept me,” said Mary. “Alone. The nursery monitor was Jimmy’s idea. Jimmy Whitlow’s wife
alone with a nigger? Not on planet Earth, unless he could hear what was happening from twenty yards away.”

“And what was going on?” asked Myrna.

Mary lifted her chin. “Personal shit.”

“I don’t know what this is all about,” said Myrna, “but it ain’t race, not mainly anyway Lots of hate flying around, but hatred because of race? Because of disability? We don’t see the n-word or anything about deafness until Mary starts talking to the FBI. My guess is that they have information about Whitlow and his buddies, maybe information about her, too. But they don’t have enough to bring a conspiracy charge and link it to a real militia crime. So, let’s say in the course of telling the FBI what really happened old MW slips and uses the n-word or says something about Elvin being deaf. Then what?”

“Then I get arrested for hating niggers,” said Mary, challenging her with
another
look.

“Nah,” Myrna said. “If they get on your bad side, they lose the only witness who can put an Order of the Eagler away for life? No. I think it goes this way, ‘Nigger?’ asks the field officer. ‘Who used that word? Surely you didn’t use that word, did you, Mrs. Whitlow?’ ” Myrna said, glaring at Mary Whitlow. “ ‘Why, that kind of word makes us wonder if this was a hate crime. Yes, that’s right. Extra penalties, big ones for a hate crime, but only for criminals who have committed some other separate crime, like shooting a black man or a disabled person. So you were saying? Who said nigger? Was it the bastard dickhead who said it? Think back. Did he say it at any other time just before the crime was committed, or maybe while the crime was being committed? Because if he did, that would be serious, indeed. Did he say anything about Mr. Brawley’s disability?’ ”

“Fuck you, lady,” said Mary.

“I’m getting warm,” said Myrna, “don’t you think, Joey? I gotta talk to my receptionist about an appointment I got waiting. Can you two hold on a sec? Unless Mary Whitlow has somewhere to go?”

Myrna nodded hard at Joe, motioning him into the hallway. Once outside her door, she said, “In case you’ve never done this before, it’s called Mutt and Jeff, OK? You go back in there and tell her I’m a ruthless, crazy bitch from Hell and there is no telling what I will do. I might call Harper on her. I might hand over the Eagle Eye newspapers to the government. I might get her charged with tampering or blackmail. Nice touch trying to stop me going after her. Brilliant. You got real instincts.
Try and get her to confide in you. Tell her you can help her figure out what to do. She’s sweating. She’s got the Eagles after her and the government. She is trapped and terrified. Use her fear.”

She pushed him back through the door into her office and closed it.

Mary Whitlow craned her fat neck around.

“Ms. Schweich has a client she needs to speak with momentarily,” said Watson, taking the chair opposite Mary and putting his hands on his knees.

“Yeah,” said Mary, “maybe she’ll fall and break her neck on the way.”

Joe watched her fingers shake as she lit another cigarette.

“I … guess … you don’t know what to do now,” said Joe. “If I can help …?”

“Fuck you,” said Mary.

“I was appointed to be your husband’s lawyer,” said Joe. “I’m just trying to help him. If you have a message for him that you think will help him. Or maybe help you—”

“You fuck around?” she asked suddenly.

His mouth opened and he looked at her white face, now rigid with hatred. He wasn’t sure if he’d heard her right, or if his own obsessions were leaking out again and infecting the world. She puffed and regarded him with a fixed, squinted gaze, pointing with her cigarette at the wedding band on his left hand. “I said, do you fuck around?”

“What?” he asked, feeling blood rushing under the skin of his face.

“I thought so,” she said. “They all do. And after they fuck around on you. They lie about it.”

“Ms. Schweich wanted me to ask you about—”

“You Catholic?” She glanced at him again. “You went to that Jesuit high school with Jimmy—ain’t that what the paper said? Jimmy made me turn Catholic, too. Said I had to or he weren’t gonna marry me. Then he went on and on about how adultery is a mortal sin, right up there with murder,” she said, tamping her ashes in midair and watching them fall to the floor. “Fucker.”

The medical reports Palmquist had given him scrolled by in his imagination as if on a ticker at the bottom of the screen called consciousness:
“Patient stated she could not possibly have … a sexually transmitted disease, because she had never had sex with anyone except her husband.”

“Jimmy told me that if I ever fucked around on him, he would shoot me in the head and blame it on a nigger.”

“And according to your statements, you did fuck around, didn’t
you?” asked Watson, deciding the best policy was to try and meet her at her level. But having mustered the courage to look her in the eye and confront her with her own story, he knew instantly that he could never go where she was. She gave him a killing look—a hockey mask from a horror movie. He could hear air being sucked into her nostrils. Her black eyes shone with fevered loathing. Maybe Othello looked like this the night he strangled Desdemona. Black vengeance come from hollow Hell, her bosom full of aspics’ tongues, a big toad-woman living upon the vapors of dungeons. But
Othello
wasn’t real, he reminded himself. No, it was like a verbal video game for hip literary types. A cartoon of emotions fossilized in print. And Othello had only a purloined hankie for hard evidence—imagine if Desdemona had given him a dose? Mary Whitlow was sporting the real item.

She drew a deep puff from her Kent and blew it at Watson, then clenched her teeth and said, “Jimmy never did say what would happen if he fucked around on me.” Her eyes glinted. She took another puff and rolled the cigarette in her fingers, dyed black and orange from print and tobacco. “I guess he knows now.”

W
atson quietly neglected to invite Myrna to the Voice Transcription Device party. Instead he had the machine dusted for prints at a private lab the next day. Then he called VTech Industries, the local distributor, and arranged an appointment with John Crowell, the senior VTech service representative. By phone, Crowell explained that the VTD operated at maximum accuracy only if it contained the speaker’s vocal profile—a list of approximately one hundred sounds spoken aloud and stored in the machine’s memory—which in the best of cases enabled the program to recognize and transcribe an individual’s voice into printed words. With the profile in place, transcription accuracy ranged between 80 and 90 percent, with frequent errors, especially for homonyms (
to, two, too; some, sum
). Without the profile—for example, when the speaker was a casual acquaintance or infrequent visitor—transcription was a hit-and-miss affair, averaging 40 to 60 percent accuracy.

Crowell explained that voice recognition technology still suffered from the same inexactness and inaccuracies that had bedeviled the computer industry’s quest for handwriting transcription and pen-based computers. VoiceType technology had been developed by IBM back in the mid-1990s, and by 1996 had begun showing up in operating systems
such as OS/2 Warp 4. VoiceType dictation was the first office application, followed a few years later by handheld VTDs—assistive devices for the deaf—intended to display reasonably accurate transcriptions of spoken communications on the liquid crystal screen of the VTD. Most of the devices also contained a keypad, so the deaf person could then quickly type a response on the screen and show it to a hearing person. Or even play it for them, using the device’s voice synthesis features. But so far, according to Crowell, practice lagged behind promise: Errors were still frequent and egregious.

When Watson told his would-be expert that he needed someone who could testify about the device and whatever was stored in its memory, Crowell was cautionary. Using a VTD to prove what someone said or didn’t say in any given session was probably not possible. But, he added, if Elvin Brawley was using the device to type messages to whomever he had been talking to in any given session, the machine’s memory should contain an accurate record of what he had typed. Trying to prove what Mary Whitlow said or didn’t say would be a different matter.

Watson drove out Highway 40 to an office park in Chesterfield, where he met Crowell, a tall, stoop-shouldered, fifty-ish technician with a jeweler’s loupe mounted on the frames of his bifocals. Crowell showed Watson into a workshop lined with folding tables and stacked with gutted electronic equipment, disemboweled chassis sprouting spangled, multicolored wires, unmoored circuit boards leaning in cross-hatched heaps.

“Have you used one of these before?” Crowell asked, sitting at a circular table under a hooded row of fluorescent worklights and showing Watson a chair next to him.

“No,” said Watson.

“Let’s play with another one before we boot yours up,” he said. He rose from the table and fetched another VTD, setting it between them. “It’s an 880,” he said, “same model as your victim’s machine.” He pivoted the device and pointed the LCD panel at Watson. “Microphone,” he said, pointing at two tiny slits in the corner of the cover.

Crowell pushed a button and powered on the device. “
READY
” flashed on the LCD. Then Crowell pushed another button, and the message “
BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION
,
LISTENING
 …” appeared on the screen. Crowell began speaking in a clear, distinct voice, with a slight pause between each word.

“When I put it in transcription mode, it attempts to translate every vocalization it receives into printed words. Period. Punctuation is absent unless the speaker provides it by saying period, comma, and so on.”

Watson watched as Crowell’s words, or rather, something like Crowell’s words appeared on the LCD screen:
“When I pudding transcription mode it contempt too translate aviary vocalization it release into print words. Punch your station is absent unless the speaking provides it by saying., and so on”