Brain Storm (25 page)

The signature trill of an outside call sounded from somewhere in the metropolis of stacked documents on his desk. Watson extracted the receiver from the paper canyons. “Joseph Watson,” he said, eyeballing the system clock on his screen.

The Marshals Service. He got into it with a clerical type on the other
end. She sounded like the sister of the woman at the Des Peres County Correctional Center. “We may not provide information for twenty-four hours once the prisoner has been turned to the Marshals Service,” she said. Was he hearing pointing and clicking? Were Anna and Terri and the whole Microsoft Hearts gang at her place as well?

The other two buttons on his phone lit up. Outside calls. His information manager appeared on the screen with a double beep, identified the caller as Rachel Palmquist, MD, PhD, and presented her card file.

“I have another call,” said Watson. “Could you hold for just a moment.” He punched another button.

“Rachel?” he said in breathy anticipation.

“Not quite,” said Arthur. “Where are you?”

“I’ll be right there,” said Watson, “Really, I’m coming. I think Doctor Palmquist is waiting on my other line.” He felt his armpits turn into two small saunas as he pressed another blinking button.

“Rachel?” said Watson.

“Can’t talk long,” she said. “I thought we’d schedule a session comparing your response patterns with Cham’s. Also, in order to reduce signal-to-noise ratios, I need to be able to average a statistically significant number of … events, like the event we captured under the MEG. I’ll be blunt, I need more data. Let’s rig up another chair for you right next to his and fit you out with a headful of electrodes like his and a console with buttons and so on. And maybe a mate of your choice in the other chair. How about tomorrow afternoon? Saturday. Busy?”

Watson looked up and saw Arthur in his trench coat, frowning at him from his open door.

“Three o’clock,” said Watson. “We need to talk about Whitlow.”

“I know,” she said. “Now the prosecution wants him. We’ll talk tomorrow. Bye.”

“What?” he said, and heard her click sound in his ear.

The blinking light on the line to the Marshals Service went out.

“Let’s go,” said Arthur.

E
ntering chambers for the first time, a young lawyer may find the chatty relaxed atmosphere of a den or family room, complete with a set of stuffed chairs, an ottoman, a coffee table, and sometimes even coffee. More often, the lawyer finds an interior design favored by dictators, as exemplified by Mussolini, whose office was arranged so that a visitor walked across a cavernous, formal room and shrank like Alice in Wonderland, while approaching a huge desk on a riser with a stout, powerful person behind it and two hard-back chairs in front for squirming supplicants.

In chambers, judges become more like people—formal or informal, autocratic or friendly, morose or cheerful, Type A or Type B—with one important difference: No matter what their personality, they retain the same almost superhuman power over careers and clients. In chambers, the lawyers may feel they are having an after-dinner conversation with the judge about their case, or they may sustain the intense scrutiny one receives when applying for a salaried position or a large, unsecured loan. Most lawyers endure these tolerably stressful sessions, never wondering about the resonance of the expression “judge’s chambers.”

Visitors to Federal District Judge Whittaker J. Stang’s chambers, however,
formulated their own adrenaline-induced, overwrought notions about the origin of the terminology, because they were unceremoniously introduced to a lawyer’s chamber of horrors run by a quixotic despot who seemed to take infinite pleasure in administering random, exquisitely painful shocks of professional anxiety to the legal creatures who had been summoned into his domain. For lawyers, Judge Stang’s chambers were of the gas and torture variety.

Arthur and Watson cooled their heels in the outer office, listening to Judge Stang shout orders to his secretary concerning the optimum strength and temperature of the tea she was brewing in a kitchenette to the rear. The two lawyers had just settled in on a cracked leather sofa with a flaking finish and torn seams when the voice of justice boomed from within, bringing them to their feet, where they stood at attention, even though the judge couldn’t see them.

“Ida?” he yelled. “If those two-legged rodents from that big-firm outfit ever get here, MAKE THEM WAIT, you hear me? Nothing but a bunch of shallow, venal, overpaid shirkers. Big-firm hotshots. The associates make more than I do—for what? Legal research. Pah. And the money-bag partners use litigation for everything except dispute resolution: publicity, vanity, revenue. If I could personally execute a few of them with a sidearm, I’d feel so much better about myself and my work.”

Then there was silence, punctuated only by the crack of a match being struck, the hiss of sulfur burning, and the soft clink of the burnt stick falling into an ashtray, followed by the aroma of cigar smoke.

After a few minutes, a stooped grimalkin in a floral print dress, who looked as if she had been serving tea to Judge Stang since the Missouri Compromise, emerged from the kitchenette. The bent fingers of her left hand held a wavering saucer and cup, while her right clasped the handle of a four-footed cane. Her frail skull supported a swollen wreath of silver braids and ornate combs encrusted with verdigris. Watson recognized a scent and couldn’t place it, until his olfactory lobe did a neural network search, found a matching trace, and disinterred a memory from his nonage: his great-grandma bowing over stoppered bottles and powder puffs at her dressing table saying, “That’s lavender water, Joey.” So it was, and Ida probably had the last bottle of lavender water in the Western world.

“This way, boys,” she said, giving Arthur a second look. “Arty Mahoney?”
she croaked, pointing at him with a hoist of her cane, swags of mottled skin swaying from the bones of her arm, her eyes bright with memory.

“How nice to see you, Ida,” said Arthur graciously.

“You boys are lucky lawyers today,” she whispered hoarsely and winked. “The judge is in very high spirits. His psychiatrists have formally advised the Eighth Circuit’s Investigative Judicial Council that he is not legally insane and therefore is not an impediment to the effective administration of justice.”

“That’s always so good to hear,” said Arthur warmly.

“We’re all happy for him,” said Ida. “The doctors say it’s nothing but a few run-of-the-mill, garden-variety, full-blown, chronic, severe personality disorders. Nothing near what those cry-baby lawyers who complained about him would need to get the right honorable judge off the bench.”

“Thank God,” said Arthur.

“Do tell,” Ida concurred. “Our prayers were answered.”

She motioned for them to follow her into the inner sanctums, so they waddled in tiny penguin steps behind her as she planted her orthopedic cane and took two steps, planted again and took another step.…

“Judge Whittaker J. Stang,” she complained, as she at long last came alongside his desk, “you did not tell me that Arty Mahoney was coming to see us. Arty, why, we haven’t seen you since I don’t know when?”

Slumped in a high-backed red leather recliner and turned sideways behind a huge, battered wooden desk, Judge Stang looked smaller and thinner than when Watson last quaked in the shadow of judicial dominion at informal matters. The judge leaned back and puffed on a nine-inch Davidoff cigar, befogging the confines of a room in a building where smoking was prohibited by federal law.

Another scent touched off memories from Watson’s childhood. Wildroot. Grandpa Watson’s favorite hair tonic. He detected the telltale sheen on the judge’s gray wisps, the slicked and pasted strands across his baldness. The judge wore a clean, threadbare coat, a starched white shirt, and a burgundy tie with faded heraldic imagery. A pair of reading glasses sat on the tip of his nose, through which he perused the contents of the
River City News
—the hate crime edition.

Watson grew banjo eyes at the sight of the familiar headline.

“Maybe you don’t know when we last saw Mr. Mahoney,” Judge Stang grumbled, without looking up from his reading, “but I do. It was
that asinine antitrust litigation we all made ourselves sick on for nine months back in 1989, only to have counselor Mahoney roll over and play dead on the courthouse steps instead of finishing the goddamn trial. Pah!”

“Good morning, Judge,” said Arthur.

“Settle the case, try the case, I don’t care,” Judge Stang groused; the swivel mechanism of his ancient chair squealed as he turned in it. “But don’t reject a settlement offer and then take the very same offer after two years of discovery and ten days of trial in my courtroom!” The judge slammed his desk drawer closed in a fit of fresh anger, as if the incident had happened yesterday, instead of ten plus years ago.

“You did the same thing back when I was trying to teach you how to be a prosecutor. Remember that racketeering fiasco? Those Lebanese Mafia hoodlums got the best of you. Not once. Twice!”

“Judge,” sighed Arthur, “we’ve been over this before.”

“Not over,” snapped Judge Stang. “Under. We’ve been under it. Like a steaming turd from a jackass we were under it! Over it? Maybe you got over it.”

Arthur turned around several times looking for a chair to sit in, until he realized there weren’t any.

“Judge,” said Arthur, “we are here … Actually, Judge, are there chairs handy?”

“No chairs,” said Judge Stang. “Lawyers talk less when they’re forced to appear before me without a chair to sit in or a podium to hide behind. And whenever lawyers talk less, justice proceeds apace. State your business. And be brief.”

“Yes, Judge,” said Arthur. “I—”

“Meat, pith, marrow,” interjected the judge, peering at them through wraiths of drifting blue cigar smoke. “Serve the blubber and bombast up to some other minion of the public weal.”

“Yes, Judge,” Arthur agreed.

Ida bowed over the worktable and rattled the cup on its saucer as she lowered it toward Judge Stang’s elbow.

“Don’t spill it!” he barked, which touched off intention tremors in the old woman’s limbs and heavy seas within the cup as she placed the clanking ensemble onto his desktop.

Arthur began, “Judge, we are here—”

“Gist without jibber jabber,” snapped the judge. “Concision the first order of business. Don’t squander the court’s patience puffing your
cheeks up on stately bombast and lofty fustian. Speak plainly! If you can’t do that, go on and take one of those talking time-and-temperature elevators upstairs to the Parthenon where the Eighth Circuit sits on their regal behinds listening to oral arguments. Take your prolix prattle and your supersophistical spew and sling it around up there for a while. You hear me?”

“Your Honor,” said Arthur firmly, “I—”

“Nothing long is ever pleasing,” observed the judge. “Brevity is the soul of wit, the sine qua non of lingerie, the judicious use of words that cover more ground than they occupy. My kingdom for less discourse. On with it, sir. Take the short, straight path. Once more into the speech.”

“I’m trying, Judge,” Arthur said tersely.

“Trying won’t do it, Counselor,” shouted the judge, a vein swelling in the hollow of his ancient temple. “You’re too old to practice law, it’s time to get it right.”

The two old gents went on fencing and fisticuffing with lawyerly effusions, while Watson took a look around Judge Stang’s brand-new sunny, modern, spacious chambers on the twenty-eighth floor of the Courthouse of the Future. It looked like a pod in an orbiting space station that had been incongruously stuffed with memorabilia and curiosa—circa New Deal—the court’s personal effects brought over intact from the old federal building. Next to the judge’s scarred wooden desk was a trendy, sweeping marble arc of a desk that came with the building and now served as storage space for two huge computer monitors that were dark and silent. Alongside were two unplugged minitower Ultra Pentium computers, which the judge used as bookends for a multivolume set of Wright, Miller, and Kane,
Federal Practice and Procedure
, bent and battered, in leather covers worn smooth and slick with oil from human hands. Disintegrating supplements, which had probably come in before the McCarthy Hearings, were crumbling into a dusty patina on the marble desktop. One of the minitowers’ CD-ROM disk trays was open, providing a nice fit for an extra canister of cigars.

The judge lifted the floral-embossed cup, blew once across the rim, dispatched the tea in a single gulp, then delicately sipped on his cigar.

Arthur saw his chance and filled the hiatus with a complete sentence. “Judge, we’re here on the matter of U.S. versus Whitlow, a federal murder case, in which you’ve appointed my first-year associate, Joseph Watson, here, to represent a hate criminal.”

Watson felt the lawyer’s instinct to speak up for his client, but he
knew a single word from him in Arthur’s attenuated state would result in instant termination and the ensuing Hell to pay at home. On the other hand (it occurred to him for just an instant), imagine the heroic tale he could tell to Rachel Palmquist? How he’d sacrificed his career to save their case? But even more than a desire to impress the good doctor, he was developing the advocate’s irrational, obsessive concern for his client, James Whitlow—the headstrong, wayward, strapping bigot, who didn’t know any better and needed looking after.

“That’s right,” said Judge Stang. “I appointed him, fully expecting to be impressed by his performance, which is so far lacking.” The judge turned a penetrating stare on Watson, smoke and wrath bloodying the whites of his eyes. “Where’s my chewed two-by-four sawdust, boy?”

Watson had put the wood in a file cabinet, never dreaming he would actually have to …

“Judge,” said Arthur with a feigned cough that landed somewhere between indulgence and impatience, “we are all well acquainted with the court’s redoubtable, often effective theatrics used to motivate lawyers in performing the court’s business, but I hope we are entitled to assume that this charade with the piece of wood was a symbolic gesture. I mean, seriously, Judge, you’re— Surely the court did not actually, er, I don’t mean to suggest … I’m asking the court to reconsider its treatment and not inflict such an indignity on a young lawyer, newly admitted to the practice. It’s inconsistent with Your Honor’s impartiality and unbecoming of the high standards of jurisprudence the lawyers of this district have come to expect from this court.”