Brain Storm (60 page)

Not just murder, either. She gets rid of her asshole husband, Jimmy “VD” Whitlow, and she gets to keep the briefcase full of counterfeit that Elvin had delivered and the briefcase full of real money that she gave in payment for the “lessons.” When the Order of the Eagles comes around, she says, “Jimmy hid them somewhere” or “The cops must have took them.”

Perfect plan, until Lucy had the car towed, with the briefcases in the trunk. Then Jimmy saw a way to fix her and pay his legal bills and get a nice separate cache of money for him and his bosom buddy, Buck, to strike out on their own.

By the time Watson got to Myrna’s place, everything made terrifying sense. He parked the Honda in the back lot, popped the trunk, stuffed all the money into the black leather briefcase, and stormed into her office.

He found her sitting behind her desk, holding her head in her hands—her freckled fingers splayed around flaming hair, grabbing at her skull through the skin, looking as if she were in the throes of the same catalepsy that had afflicted Watson fifteen minutes earlier in his car. She reached into her desk drawer without looking and fetched out her gun. She slid it across the table, covered her face again, and peeked at him through a hole in the mesh of her stubby fingers.

“Shoot me in the head,” she commanded. “It’s the only way. Do the Kevorkian. Just shoot me.”

“You talked to Dirt,” said Watson. “And now you know what Elvin’s priors were, is that it?”

“Yup,” she said, squinting her eyes and bowing her head. “Two aliases with multiple counts under each.” She put her head on the desk and covered the back of it with both hands. “Shoot me in the head, first.
Then I’ll tell you.” She thumped the desk with a fist. “Never mind, I can’t tell you. Just shoot me. Hurry! The pain of living is too great.”

Watson put the briefcase on her desk, popped the latches, and opened it.

“Remember how Elvin worked at Acrobat Printing and Graphics?” she moaned into her desk. “Some high-end printing joint, computer-generated graphics and reproduction? He’s an engraver? He did the printing work for the Eagle Scouts? Guess what his priors were for?”

“I know what his priors were for,” said Watson.

She lifted her head and looked at the open satchel. “How do you know? Did Dirt tell you?”

“Nope,” said Watson.

“That reptilian client of yours? He told you, didn’t he?” She kneaded her temples and sighed. “According to Dirt, old Elvin was the consummate artist. He trained with the best in Singapore. His hundred-dollar bills were so good, Treasury and the Secret Service decided not to bother taking them out of circulation. Elvin made a fortune doing hundreds for the militias under the name of Silas Washington up in Detroit. The Eagles went to him, even though he was black and even though he charged them double.” She grinned. “If you want the best, race don’t matter, I guess. Silas did five years up in Detroit on reduced charges. When he got out, he moved to St. Louis and became Elvin Brawley. He was long in the tooth, and the government issued the new hundred-dollar bills with the polymer security threads. He retired, but the Eagles found him again and talked him into earning a modest income doing twenties.”

“Any word from Buck?” Watson asked.

“Buck does not appear to be getting my messages, so I am going to send a guy over to see Buck and talk to him using an assistive listening device—it’s called a nail gun. Cocksucker! I’m gonna—” She put her hands on her chest. “No. I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna tell you anything. You’re a decent guy, Joey. I don’t want you to know what’s going to happen. The only thing you need to know is that every one of those twenties is going to be replaced with real twenties. Swear to God and his big brother. I promise.”

The phone rang and she ignored it.

“Try to help a guy in a jam, and you get fucked in both ears for your trouble. Shit!”

“Ms. Schweich,” said Tilly over the intercom. “There are two … Well,
the same two gentlemen who were here last week are back, and they would like to see you. They say it’s very important. I told them to call for an appointment. They took the phone from me, asked me for an outline, and called on your line to make an appointment. Just a few seconds ago.”

Myrna pushed the mute button. “It’s raining barbed wire and butchers’ knives around here!” She yanked open her drawer and frantically rifled through cartons of cigarettes and boxes of bullets. “Where’s my fucking—? Damn! My holster is at home!” She released the button. “Put ’em on.”

“Law offices,” she said. She fetched a cigarette and felt for her skull lighter. She fluttered her hand at the briefcase full of bundled money and made big eyes at Joe.

“To whom am I talking to?” she asked. “I mean, with whom am I speaking with? Never mind,” she said, “who the fuck are you?”

Watson shut the briefcase and turned around, searching the room for a place to hide it. He went to a likely-looking metal file cabinet and pulled open the lower drawer, where he found a twelve-pack of Heineken and some rolls of fax paper. The briefcase wouldn’t fit unless he took out the Heinekens, so he did.

“Look, I told you guys,” said Myrna. “Whether you are cops or not, we can’t be talking to you about client business. Suppose you were my clients? Would you want me talking to other people about your business? Another thing is my clients make appointments. Does this look like a Legal Aid Society soup kitchen, or what? You want to hire me? I charge by the hour.”

She rolled her head around using sarcastic body language in response to whatever she was hearing in the receiver.

“Five minutes. We got trials going on here. Settlement conferences. Come on back, but you get five minutes. Period.”

She picked up her gun and looked at it, then looked for a place on her body to put it. “Shit!”

There was a knock on the door.

She set the gun just so inside her drawer, closing it most of the way.

“Enter,” she said.

Alpha and Beta, again. Gray flannel and blue serge, respectively. Clean-shaven down to the creases of their dewlaps. White shirts, Egyptian cotton, medium starch. Savory types with tasteful ties. Same busy mirrored shades. Their gait seemed more deliberate this time; they
walked in and stood alongside each other, as if they were staking out turf to be occupied until they got what they wanted or their aftershave wore off, whichever came first.

“ ’Afternoon, ma’am,” said Alpha, and with a turned bow of his head, “Mr. Watson.”

Beta said nothing—chastened and perhaps disciplined for insubordination and talking out of turn during their last visit. Instead, he made do with a curt nod and contentedly waited for the negotiations to degenerate to his level of expertise: mayhem.

“Some of my clients pay me a healthy retainer for immediate access any time of the day or night,” said Myrna. “Everybody else makes an appointment.” She puffed her cigarette, then leaned a little toward the drawer and squinted at Alpha through smoke.

“Ma’am, we do not have the delivery. We also do not have a straight story about the delivery. What we do have is a lot of stuff that don’t quite add up.”

“Whatever the delivery is, I don’t know where it is,” she said. “And I lost the train of logic somewheres that makes us responsible for supposedly knowing about this shit. Because I represented Buck a few years back? That means I’m supposed to be a lifetime master of Buck trivia? Buck ain’t my client. The only client we got is Jimmy Whitlow, and that’s because I’m helping this guy,” she said with a shrug in Watson’s direction.

Joe smiled a tight one in Beta’s direction.

“And I see where the paper says that you are something called retained counsel now,” said Alpha to Joe. “That sounds like somebody is getting paid lawyer fees by somebody. Is Jimmy paying you?”

“I entered my appearance as retained counsel when I left my job at the big firm,” said Watson. “I wanted to work on Jimmy Whitlow’s case full-time.”

A solid year at Arthur’s elbow had taught him the art of stepping right around the standing question and providing an authoritative response that was on topic and beyond reproach, but which also came nowhere near an answer.

“And Jimmy ain’t paying you?” asked Alpha.

“If I discuss fees with a third party,” said Watson, “I will destroy the attorney-client privilege.” As if. His tone was meant to convince them that he would sooner desecrate the temple on Good Friday “Even cops
can’t break the attorney-client privilege. I’m sorry, but fee matters are privileged information.”

“Five minutes is coming up quick,” said Myrna.

Beta stirred and flexed under his blue serge. Alpha raised his voice for the first time.

“Ma’am, too many things are not making sense for us. And we ain’t leaving until they do.” He took one step toward Myrna in a manner calculated to suggest that, if necessary, he would soon be taking more and bigger steps.

“Somebody took the delivery, correct?” he said. “It’s got to be Jimmy, Mary Whitlow, Buck, or the cops.” He put up a finger for each one and showed them to her. “The only other person who could have taken it is dead. Now, the cops ain’t charged Jimmy Whitlow with …” Alpha faltered, as if trying to remember his lines, “with nothing else they could have charged him with if they had found the delivery. Mary ain’t hiding anywhere. She stayed put. Buck is the one who took off, which makes us figure he is our man. And now Jimmy is getting retained counsel and paying lawyer fees somehow? Mary Whitlow says that Buck and Jimmy must have planned this thing from the beginning. She says they set the … person of colored up for a rape. They were probably going to take the money and scoot, but then Jimmy got arrested and the car got towed.”

“I’m a lawyer,” said Myrna. “Do you know what that means?”

Alpha looked at her and froze up trying to process an unexpected question.

“That means everybody, including you, is a liar,” said Myrna. “We don’t know if it happened the way you said it happened, or the way Mary said it happened, or the way Buck says it happened. Our job is to get Jimmy Whitlow off of his bullshit hate crime charge. Briefcases were not included in his defense, which means we don’t know shit about them, because it ain’t our business.”

Alpha took another ominous step toward Myrna. “It’s your business now,” he said. “You just assume it’s your business. Because we are making it your business. We are assuming you know where it is and we want it back. Along with any money that either you or him are getting paid by Buck or Jimmy Whitlow.”

Myrna exhaled and glanced once at the drawer.

“Boys,” she said. “We can’t help you find the delivery—”

“Ma’am, you are not listening to me,” said Alpha, carefully enunciating his words, struggling to be a professional and explore every possible peaceful solution to his problems before resorting to carnage and human suffering. “I said we will be
assuming
that you know.”

“I think I can help,” said Watson, when he saw Myrna edging closer to her drawer. He stepped somewhere between Alpha and the front of Myrna’s desk. He looked at Myrna. “I need the impound lot inventory sheet,” he said to her.

She looked at him. “Uh,” she said uncertainly, “I’m not sure we have something going by that name. Would that be something we would even want to have?”

“Give it to him,” said Alpha. “What is it?”

Myrna tore herself away from the crack in her drawer and went wading half-heartedly through a raft of manilas on the cart next to her desk, lingering over a red jacket file, wondering what her chances would be of just not being able to find the inventory sheet.

“The keys were in the car when it was towed,” said Watson. “No apparent owner because it had no plates and the registration was expired. So at base towing, they inventoried the contents of the vehicle.”

Myrna slowly pulled a sheet of paper from the file, then paused and scanned it once more, double-checking for entries that might get her shot in the face.

“Look at the bottom, where it says ‘Vehicle trunk,’ ” said Watson, passing the sheet to Alpha, while Beta leaned over for a peek.

“ ‘Vehicle trunk,’ ” said Alpha, reading from the sheet, “ ‘one car jack, one tire iron, two oil rags, one rubber jug of windshield wiper fluid, one spare tire, a box of tools containing one socket … two locked briefcases.’ ”

“Two,” said Watson. “In the trunk of the car while it was locked up in the tow lot,” he said.

“OK,” said Alpha, in a decidedly unimpressed tone, “that does nothing but tell us that nobody took the delivery or the payment
before
the car got towed,” said Alpha. “And we was with Mary when she got the car, opened the trunk, and found
one
empty briefcase with a calculator in it. So all we know now is that somebody got to that car and took both the payment and the delivery” said Alpha. “Which wouldn’t be that hard, because it ain’t nothing but a fenced-in cornfield. And as we go along, it looks like maybe Buck managed to get to that car. Or maybe
you
or your investigator got to the car, because you got this from somewheres,
right?” he said, snapping the sheet of paper. “Which means you had somebody out there looking for the car and the delivery, right?” he said, his tone momentarily acquiring menace as he followed his suspicions to Watson’s door.

He heard Myrna take a breath, as her fears about turning over the inventory sheet were confirmed, namely that it might prompt a question like “I thought you didn’t know shit about the delivery? Where the fuck did you get this?”

“Early in any lawsuit,” said Watson, “the two sides exchange documents. They give each other anything that is evidence or might be evidence. It’s called discovery.”

Another Arthurian stratagem. Did Watson say that
this particular
document was produced in the course of trial discovery? No way. He’d merely explained the
concept
of discovery at a suggestive and opportune time.

Alpha looked down at the paper suspiciously as if he wanted to take it to a lab and have it analyzed.

“You’re right,” said Watson. “Any number of people could have gotten to the car in the impound lot. Somebody who worked there, the cops, the FBI, me, you, Buck. I’m sure Mary Whitlow could have managed it if she had to, or she could have gotten somebody to do it for her.”