Brain Storm (23 page)

His eyes brightened. “Do you want the case?”

Her orange eyebrows almost crossed. “For no pay? Joey, we were just talking about money. Besides, when the accused hires a great criminal lawyer, people think, ‘Hey, he must
need
a great criminal lawyer.’ ”

She handed him a sweating Heineken, pushed the Gitanes at him again, and slid the skull over to his side of the desk. Her fingernails were painted black and spiculed with raised white spots. He noticed molded lettering forming a semicircle around the butane spout on the skull:
SMOKING GAVE ME CANCER
it said.

She exhaled luxuriously and noticed him looking at her nails, her T-shirt, her bruise-colored lipstick, her Heineken. “Didn’t get home last night,” she said, lifting her eyebrows at the memory of a story that was too long to tell. “Cops on horseback herded us out of Laclede’s Landing at three
A
.
M
. Mufugly and bent-over. I was maced. I’m a member of the bar, and I was maced while entertaining paying clients.

“Look at me,” she said, touching her fingertips to her shoulders, on either side of
FUCK ART
, “I’m five feet in heels. Do they need to mace me? This is what, Tiananmen Square? I am who, Rodney King on PCP? I’ve cross-examined half of those cops in court—that’s why they do it. Get me some white-collar perpetrators who play golf at Bellerive Country Club, wouldya?”

“I’m on my way back downtown,” he said. “Yesterday, I went to the brain place, and I have a neuro doctor looking for a mental defect.”

“That’s good,” she said bobbing her head. “I suspected a mental defect all along. That would explain why you went to a place like Stern, Pale. You have a mental defect. I knew it.”

“I wouldn’t point fingers at mental defects,” said Watson, “especially if I had black nail polish. Anyway, so then I went to see my client and he’s not there. He’s gone, I guess. Or not gone—he’s been ‘turned over to the Marshals Service,’ ” he said, mimicking the Microsoft Hearts player.

“They are moving him,” said Myrna. “Maybe into administrative confinement. Maybe for medical treatment. Maybe a different prison. Wait twenty-four hours, then they’ll tell you.” She fanned the back of her right hand, buffed the black nails on her T-shirt, and glanced at her watch. “Cultivate the forensic psycho-neuro babe, especially if, as you say, she’s free. But I’d be more worried about getting some standard, Ivy League headshrinkers and a good investigator. You got an investigator?”

“You mean, like a private detective?” said Watson, thinking,
How dramatic, how TV, how movie!
“You mean, Jack Nicholson?” he asked. “Jay Gittes in Chinatown?”

“Holy fuck,” she said. “This is the legal equivalent of ER. Legal triage.” She pulled a marker out of her pen cup and handed it to him. “Write H-E-L-P on your forehead, wouldya? You go off and draft up some fancy motions for Judge Stang on your computer about how people have a compelling, fundamental, constitutional right to commit hate crimes in their bedrooms, and I’ll get you an investigator. This ain’t moot court, Maynard. It’s a fucking trial. Judge Stang is the Emperor Nero, Mike Harper’s the lion, and you and your little bigot buddy are beef-tenderized Christians. You can borrow my investigator. The court will reimburse you for up to twenty hours at sixty dollars per under the local rules. It’s a Sixth Amendment thing. I’ll put him on the ambulance attendants and the neighbors. What about the CID boys first on the scene? Who were they?”

“CID?” asked Watson.

“Criminal Investigation Division,” said Myrna, barely suppressing exasperation. “It’s an army base in southern Missouri, right? Those guys see Jimmy Hoffa riding Halley’s Comet before they see a murder crime scene. My guess is a couple of nineteen-year-old MPs walked all over the place picking up bloody murder weapons and wiping their fingers on the gal’s lingerie before a staff sergeant got there.”

“OK,” said Watson. “CID. Anybody else?”

“Witnesses? Neighbors? EMTs? Coroners?”

“Wait,” said Watson. “Wait. Whitlow wanted me to talk to a neighbor. Hold it.” He pulled a folder out of his briefcase and finger-walked through manilas and sheets of paper printed from his laptop. “Lucy Martinez. Neighbor, two doors down. He wanted me to talk to her and find out about one of his friends getting his car out of the tow lot. Some guy named Buck?”

“Buck?” asked Myrna. She sounded concerned and then pretended she wasn’t. “What else do we know about Buck?”

“Some friend of his. They belong to a club.” He watched her tend to the ash on her cigarette. “Why?”

“No reason,” she said quickly. “Just sounded funny. I mean, why is a guy facing down the death penalty worrying about his car getting towed?”

“Well,” said Watson, “he doesn’t care about his car anymore, because this Buck fella apparently found some money.”

“Really,” she said.

“So maybe he’ll hire himself a lawyer. But, I don’t think he understands how much money would be involved.”

“And you have to act like a good lawyer until you’re off the case,” she said.

“Right,” said Watson. “So, what should I do?”

She handed him a pencil and a legal pad.

“You need facts. You need the FBI Form 302s. Those are field reports the FBI agents file after they interview witnesses. You need the MPs’ field reports. You need reports from coroners, medical examiners, rape trauma personnel, autopsies, ballistic reports. Make sure you get both the emergency room intake on Mary Whitlow and the rape trauma unit’s records. The ER docs usually think she was asking for it, or she wanted it, and the rape trauma gals think that any sex beyond hand-holding with a male is rape.

“Does the file presently contain any statements from the EMTs or ambulance attendants? Lesson one: Ambulance attendants are keen, dispassionate observers of victims, perpetrators, and crime scenes. The best and sometimes the first witnesses to arrive. Plus they are immune to the horror that obscures the vision of your average witness to mayhem, mutilation, and death. Nothing fazes them. Everybody else is throwing up, and the ambulance attendants are noticing things. ‘Hey, Billy Bob, look at that, his pants are off and his dick is over there under the washing machine. What’d she use to hack that off?’

“Who collected the evidence? Whose names are on the little labels and whose names are on the reports? Usually, four or five klutzes collect the evidence, and the smart guy who can keep his stories straight signs the reports. That way, instead of having four iffy witnesses for the government, they have one handsome college graduate who keeps his
stories straight and can do five trials a day without breathing hard. We want the iffy guys. Who cleaned up after the cops turned the crime scene back over to the base personnel? Housekeeping, janitors, environmental engineers? Whatever the army calls them, we want to talk to them.”

Watson scribbled furiously, pausing only for swigs of Heineken.

“You can have the investigator do most of it. But you’ll use up your pro bono allowance pretty quick.”

Two trills sounded on Myrna’s phone.

“But you need some good evidence to put shock collars on those fucking government lawyers. When they attack, you want to pull out stuff that makes them turn around three times and piss on themselves.” She glanced down at a caller ID readout and picked up.

“Hi, sweetheart. No, but Mommy will be home tonight. And I’ll bring some ice cream, too. I love you, too. Is Nana taking you to the playground? That’s a good girl. Mommy had to work last night, helping people with lots of problems. Well, actually, people who used to have lots of problems until I helped them, but now I still need to talk to them in case they ever have lots of problems again. You are a precious little angel from heaven. I love you too. Bye.”

She hung up the phone.

“My investigator normally gets eighty an hour and is worth every penny of it. His name is Dirt.”

“Dirt?”

“He brings me the dirt. He says I treat him like dirt, he’s cheaper than dirt, and so on and so forth. Dirt is good. A superior investigator. As I said, the court will cover sixty an hour up to I think, twenty hours,” Myrna said thoughtfully and then nodded. “I’ll make the rest up to him somehow.” She smiled. “And you? Maybe someday, you can make it up to me, huh?”

“That’s the other thing,” said Watson. “Now Whitlow says he might have some money, but he thinks he can use me as a free, appointed lawyer, while he spends the money on experts and investigators. I told him he can’t do that.”

“Sounds like a smart fella anyway,” she said. “I wouldn’t worry about him having money until somebody actually shows up with a cashier’s check. If that happens, take it from there.”

“Anything else, boss?” he asked.

“The wife,” she said.

Watson’s thoughts immediately went to the night before. Quasi-adultery. He had semi-betrayed his wife, the mother of their children. He was the male equivalent of a demi-vierge, a girl or woman who engages in lewdness and promiscuous petting but retains her virginity.

“Sandra wants me to get rid of the case,” he said. “She and Arthur could move in together. Then I guess they could be Mom and Dad and tell me what to do with even more authority.”

“Not
your
wife,” she said, smirking. “
His
wife. Your
client’s
wife.” She fetched another Gitane out of the pack and lit it with the Yorick’s skull cigarette lighter. She kicked her stubby legs back up onto the desk drawer, puffed on the Gitane, and ruminated.

“OK,” she said. “At the scene, wifey says she was being acquaintance-raped and her husband killed the aggressor. By the time she gets to the rape trauma unit, her story changes. Why? Because her husband threatened her and made her tell a lie at the scene? Maybe. But she also knows that if it’s a rape, they are going to be wanting samples of semen, hair, fibers, blood, looking for tissue trauma. Maybe she realizes they ain’t gonna find any semen or hair or fibers or tissue trauma on her, so she changes her story. Now it’s an affair, but they hadn’t done anything yet, they were just getting ready to do it when Barney Bigot arrived.”

“That’s not all,” said Watson. “Harper claims he’s sending me printouts from the victim’s TDD. It’s a keyboarding device deaf people use to type back and forth on the phone. In her last message to the victim, she said something like, ‘I just want us to be alone together,’ and that James would be away in Nevada.”

“No shit?” asked Myrna. “Looks like old James missed his plane to Nevada and ended up one-way death row.” She puffed again. “I don’t know,” she mused. “We’ve established one thing. Mary Whitlow knows how to lie. She’s done it at least once, and was good at it when she had to be. Let’s see what Dirt turns up for you.”

Back at the office, Watson dialed Arthur and got his secretary, Marcia. “Is he busy?” he asked, insinuating himself into her good graces with a conspiratorial whisper.

“Depends,” she said. “Do you want him to be busy?”

“Thanks,” said Watson. “You’re my witness. I called.”

More mail. He was encouraged to discover that not all the citizens of St. Louis thought he was a scumbag lawyer whose wits were livened up only by money and publicity. He had at least one fan:

The tiny comfort of having at least one patently demented supporter was dashed by letter number two. Must they arrive in pairs? Like animals entering the ruptured ark of the career he was trying to build?

He put in a call to the Marshals Service and left a message for a return call. He logged on, clicked an icon to dial up the firm’s Internet provider, and summoned two search engines, both of them at least five times more powerful than the firm-approved stuff the other lawyers used. They appeared as graphical renditions of robot spiders, with bellies containing double rows of blank slots for entering search terms. He named one spider Rachel and began entering text strings in the slots:
Rachel Palmquist, neuroscience, Psychon Project, Gage Institute, violence, criminal, brain, forensic, neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, scanning.
He programmed it for a search of the Web, the WELL, ECHO, Usenet, FidoNet, BITNET, even AOL and CompuServe. He told them to assimilate and acquire lesser search engines and in turn dispatch those engine-applets abroad on the Net to gather and winnow according to the same subordinate search-term equations. In a few minutes, the search engines would return with an achieved target number of hits. He named the other spider Hate, opened its belly of skeletal search slots and entered
hate speech, free speech, First Amendment, bias crime, penalty enhance!, case title (Wisconsin & Mitchell), federal death penalty.
He’d already scoured Westlaw with these terms and found a boatload of law review topics and cases, the usual heat and light of an exploding First Amendment issue. Now he needed to know the media perceptions of these issues, the political ramifications of laws he had not even known about a week ago.