Brain Storm (40 page)

“We can’t have that,” she said. “You haven’t been there enough to know, but the n-word does not go over well in a federal courtroom. It’s like hearing somebody scream ‘Fuck you’ at the Pontiff during High
Mass under the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome. That’s why O.J.’s criminal defense lawyers were hot to get it in. It works wonders. And it still works, even after O.J. Two, O.J. Three, O.J. Four, O.J. Five, Lupine Three and Four. Whether it comes in and how often is a question of law. Evidentiary theory. Legal theory. That’s your job. Best for us would be for Mary Whitlow to say ‘nigger’ once or twice during her version, a version we promptly demolish on cross-examination. Your job is to keep the rest of it out, if you can.”

A
lone in his overbought house in Ladue, Watson’s dreamscapes were overrun by hooded white figures and exploding Hondas. Arthur and Judge Stang took turns inhabiting the same shrouded, authoritarian figure who scowled down from a pedestal mounted outside the gates of heaven, sometimes warning him, “This is a bad client,” other times quoting aloud from the Model Rules of Professional Responsibility: “The lawyer owes the client the duty of zealous representation.”

A faceless man wearing a Magritte bowler hat and a black topcoat followed him everywhere. And, of course, when Watson tried to report the stalking shadow to the police, no one could see him except Watson. “No, really, he was right there. Just now. You mean, you didn’t see him?”

When the figure finally caught up with him, a voice came from the shadowy veil under the brim where a face belonged. “You owe me. You have something that belongs to me. Remember, we made a deal?”

Watson fled in terror, jumped into his Honda, turned the key in the ignition, and blew up. Coming to in an underworld clip joint, he lifted his head out of a brass spittoon and crawled up a stool to the bar. A blowsy, congenial bartender whistled a chirpy rendition of Berlioz’s
Damnation of Faust
and sauntered down to ask him for his pleasure.

“You look like a single-malt man,” said the bartender, grabbing a bar rag and burnishing his drinker’s nose, a sunburst of exploded capillaries on a beezer glowing with the erubescence of a taillight. “How about a little conversation fluid? We age it forever down here. Royal Nepenthe, Highland Lethe, Ancient Acheron, Styx Single Cask. You name it.”

“Got any Old Tantalus?” Watson asked.

The barkeep filled a tall glass full of cracked ice and set it on the bar. He hoisted a regulation red-and-yellow gasoline can with a practiced hand and filled the glass with a super-unleaded, 93-octane, twenty-five-year-old single, sherry-oak-cask special, featuring detergent additives and engine scrubbers.

He peeled a splinter off of Watson’s dry bones and used it to pick his teeth.

“Nice to see you down this way,” he said with a bloody-toothed smile. “You’ll like it here. We got T1 trunk lines in the major metropolitan circles, and ISDN everywhere else. You’ll get your machine after the trial. And guess what? No wife. No kids. No visitors from Porlock. No forced conviviality, unless you’re in the mood for it. And you don’t have to waste half the day being nice to people. Plenty of time to be productive and single-mindedly pursue your career. Most guys make six figures in the shade down here,” he said, pushing the tall glass of iced gasoline at him. “Drink up. You’ll need it to get you through the trial.”

“Trial?” asked Watson.

“Yours,” said the bartender and let loose gales of hearty, Satanic laughter, pointing at Watson’s lap. “Your Honor, may it please the court to have admitted into the evidence of body, I mean, the body of evidence, Exhibit A: One loutish, headstrong penis, a barbarous cuntivore without a flyspeck of decency in him. The capscallion of all rapscallions. A scurvy, vermiform scug with a serpentine twinkle in his solitary eye. An orgulous Turk who strikes in the dark vaults of the flesh like a penile thunderbolt. A greedy cur seeking shadows, slick crevices, tuna fish, ecstasy, and sleep.…”

After two or three nightmares with similar themes, he woke up late for another appointment with Dr. Palmquist with about three hours of solid sleep under his scalp.

En route to the Gage Institute, it occurred to him that her telephone conversations of late had been decidedly less playful and more businesslike. Of course, the mouse brutality study was in full career, and according
to her last E-mail, the data was coming in from Minnesota, and still more studies of Whitlow’s troublesome brain were under way. Maybe Watson was jealous of the attention she was paying to Whitlow’s pathologies? What about Watson’s own primitive, moral superstitions—surely they were of clinical interest, at least?

In the lobby, the guard recognized him and waved him past the kiosk. Watson was becoming a regular member of the staff.

He found her in the L of her worktables, her hand on a trackball, her face bathed in the vibrant colors of a high-definition monitor, with that peculiar blend of concentration and awe—the serious user in transports of computer-induced rapture, a form of worship that explains the time-honored industry practice of referring to program objects as “icons.”

“One minute,” she said, lifting a finger from the trackball. She clattered some more on the keyboard, then rose from her worktables and picked up a stack of files. “Let’s go down to the viewing room.”

She walked briskly ahead of him, talking as they made their way down a corridor and into a room with a spacious console and thirty-two-inch high-resolution monitors.

“First, old evidence. My assistant, Heather, has been rounding up the medicals on Mr. Whitlow,” she said, offering him a swivel chair next to hers.

“She found records?” asked Watson.

Rachel gave him a “You expected less?” look. “Heather’s also a graduate student in forensic medicine,” she said. “If a medical record exists, she finds it, and then she gets it. Medical Insurance Bureau, the life insurance databases, the medical information networks, anything … Name it, she gets it, whether by cajolery, by artifice, by dogged pursuit.”

“She found something good?” asked Watson.

“Take a seat,” said Rachel. “This is medical
Masterpiece Theater.
First, background. We found records of the initial seizure intakes down at Southwest Missouri State. Pretty ho-hum. Idiopathic seizure, followed by normal EEGs, nothing on the functional MRI scan, medication to control the seizures, seizure-free for a period of time. Can’t tell from the old records whether he’s a druggie or a boozer. He refused a urinalysis once when applying for a night-shift position as a computer maintenance technician. Couple bouts of some back trouble, blah, blah.”

“No other seizures, after the ones in college?” asked Watson.

“Probably not,” she said. “But it may not matter once you get a look at what else Heather came up with.”

“A mental defect or disease?” he said eagerly. “A hard one?”

“Easy, sport,” she said. “An HMO on South Grand had some recent records, and they had forwarded others to another HMO out in Festus, Missouri, because patient Whitlow changed jobs and insurance companies. When we faxed the release out there, they sent back records, current, right up to the week before the murder.”

“Really?” said Watson, his eyes widening.

“Really,” she said, “and like you, I thought—how perfect!—he sees a doctor a week before the murder to get his seizure medication adjusted, the med change results in untoward psychological repercussions.
Bam!
Impulsive behavior, in the form of a murder, happens. Neurochemical defect.”

“Something like that,” said Watson.

“Well,” she sighed. “Nothing like that. VD is more like it. Gram-stained smears positive for gonorrhea. And the next question out of the noble Mr. Whitlow’s mouth, one week before the murders, according to the nurse’s notes is—‘I ain’t gonna have to tell my wife about this, am I?’ ”

Watson recalled his interview with Whitlow and the prisoner’s irritable plea,
“I gotta piss again!… That’s some other medicine I’m needing.… It’s personal.”
And Whitlow’s phone message, the one Watson had listened to when he’d called into his office voice mail the day he’d met Rachel Palmquist:
“They said something about could they get the medical records from the doctor who prescribed the medicine for the infection … before I was in jail.… I don’t think they should have those because that is private shit. So can we just tell them no?”

“The piss infection,” said Watson. “He was taking meds for what he called a ‘piss infection.’ ”

“That’s one way to describe it,” she said. “All of which would be neither here nor there,” she added, “except for what Heather coyly refers to as a careless mistake in the transmission of medical records. The HMO in Festus sent not just James Whitlow’s records, but family medical.”

“Family?” asked Watson.

“That’s right,” she said. “Hers, his, little Charlie’s, the whole Whitlow clan. It’s what happens when you pay your medical records personnel minimum wage. It makes them careless and more susceptible to a skillful insinuation from someone like Heather that the authorization
and release is for family medical, rather than for an individual patient. It helps, especially when we are looking for genetic markers.”

She sorted clamped bundles of medical records. “So your client goes in on Monday complaining that he is,” she read from a page, “as he describes it, ‘pissing battery acid,’ and wondering if he has to tell his wife about a little bout of Cupid’s itch.” She put one set of papers aside and picked up another.

“Guess who comes in to the same HMO on Friday—one week before the murder?” she asked, looking at him over her glasses.

“No,” he said.

“Yes. Mary Whitlow, complaining of irritation, burning on urination, and purulent discharge.”

Watson screwed up his face. “He told her?”

“He didn’t tell her,” she said, then read from the records. “ ‘When informed of her diagnosis, patient became angry and extremely upset. She accused the medical staff of misdiagnosis or of mixing up her lab samples with some other patient’s.’ ”

She flipped a page. “Here’s the part you’ll like. ‘Patient tearfully stated that she could not possibly have gonorrhea or any other sexually transmitted disease because she had been married for seven years and had never had sex with anyone except her husband.’ ”

“Ew,” said Watson.

She peered over her glasses and smiled. “Think about that one,” she said. “And then get busy finding me another French red for our next celebration.”

“Give me that!” said Watson, taking the HMO records and reading the notes for himself.

“From the looks of it,” continued Rachel, “they had to carefully connect dots and spell it out for her without mentioning her husband’s visit earlier in the week, which, of course, would be a breach of patient confidentiality.”

Watson read aloud from the notes, “ ‘Patient was informed that she could contract the disease from
any
infected sexual partner, including her husband. When she refused to believe the results, the physician on duty showed her the gram-stained slides so she could see for herself.’

“So Lucy Martinez was right—he
was
cheating on her.”

Rachel curled her lip and served him a look. “Yes, and men have also been known to wear pants. More important for you, a week before the
murder, we have her on record swearing up and down that she never slept with anyone but her husband. Seven days later, she tells the cops she was having an affair with Elvin.”

“Lethal,” said Watson. “Myrna will force-feed her on the witness stand.”

“Another loving couple bound for life by matrimonial vows,” said Rachel. “You got lucky, thanks to Heather, and I’ve got more good stuff to show you in his neurofunctional profile. The stuff came in the night before last from the federal medical center in Rochester. Took an hour and a half even on the T3 trunk line.”

She pulled out a keyboard tray and began summoning scanning images onto the monitors.

“First, the big find—we have a subarachnoid cyst. And the neurologists are recommending removal.”

A set of sixteen ghostly images of transverse brain sections appeared. She clicked on one of them and enlarged it to occupy the screen. “Right there,” she said, using her mouse pointer to indicate a pale, gray golf-ball shape nestled somewhere between the skull and the images of brain convolutions.

“It showed up first on the MRI, and then they did a PET to confirm that it was compromising blood flow to the frontal lobes.”

“A hard mental defect or disease?” asked Watson.

“Nice and hard,” she said, sounding faintly disappointed. “We won’t be breaking new ground with this one. We may not even get to it if Mary’s clinic visits come into evidence. Nothing less effective than a thoroughly discredited witness.

“The first image is MRI, very good for structural detail. You want to see the lesion? There it is. Now, here,” she said, clicking two glowing multicolored brain slices onto screens. “If you want to see the
effect
the lesion has on blood flow and metabolism, you use PET or fMRI. On the left you have Mr. Whitlow’s brain, on the right an image at the same level of a normal brain from another twenty-seven-year-old white male. The color blobs represent numerical values. We could assign any color to any number, but by convention the blues and purples represent low blood flow, ascending upward through the spectrum—blue, green, yellow, with orange, red, and pure white representing maximum blood flow.”

Watson looked at the colored slice of Whitlow’s brain, which was
mostly blue or purple in the frontal lobes, as contrasted with the normal brain on the right, which was mainly red, yellow, and white.

“That’s resting state,” she said. “The difference is even more pronounced in the presence of external aggression. Here are PET scans from the same normal control while the subject is watching this computerized video clip of a spitting cobra blown up and displayed in 3-D multimedia. It’s a standard image, so is the accompanying explanation. The researcher shows the subject a digitized, high-resolution color image of a black-necked spitting cobra, taking care to explain that it is capable of spraying venom over eight feet into the eyes of its victim, which sears the eyes into temporary and exquisitely painful blindness, while the snake moves in for a bite and injection of a neurotoxin that causes seizures, intermittent respiratory arrest, raging fever, and slow death.