Brain Storm (47 page)

“You told them I could be bought,” he said bitterly.

“Joey, you ain’t a hard guy to get to know. You sorta play the ingenue,
but I told them I didn’t know how hard you’d be working for old Whitlow if there was any indication that, let’s say, if there was evidence that he …”

“And now you’re going to tell me there
is
some evidence of that?”

“Mother of Christ, no!” she said. “I told you every idea I got about what happened.” She patted another manila folder and teased him with a look. “And I got some new ideas now, and some more good dirt from the Dirt-Meister. I guarantee you, between Dirt and me and you, we’ll figure out what the fuck happened.” Her eyes brightened. “Or you’ll kick so much butt in the court of appeals it won’t matter what really happened.”

“I don’t work for you,” said Watson. He pointed a rigid finger at her. “I quit.”

“Quit what?” she asked. “You can’t quit the case. You entered your appearance as retained counsel.”

“Because you told me to!” Watson shouted. “No, I quit you. I need to find another place to work.”

“Don’t do that,” she cried. “Aren’t ya even curious? I mean, what about Dirt? You gonna fire him, too? Your investigator? Without whom we would know next to nothing? You’d be cutting off your dick to spite your balls, or however it goes. You’d be cutting off the pros to spite your case.” She patted the manila again.

His eyes went from the manila to the briefcase Beta had left on Myrna’s desk. Hers followed. Watson walked over to it and reached out to pick it up.

“Uh-uh,” she said, reaching into her desk drawer and pulling out a box of latex gloves. She peeled off a left and a right and handed them to him.

“See, you need me. Even if I am—”

“You are a bitch,” said Watson.

She put one hand on her breast and sketched a theatrical flourish with the other, as if she were a heroine in a blood-and-thunder melodrama. She dabbed at the corner of her eye with the back of her wrist. “You deserve better.” Then she made Groucho eyebrows and added, “But you won’t find better, because I’m the best in town.”

“Best liar, maybe.” He put on the gloves and gently removed the keypad device from the briefcase. He recognized it from the
Post-Dispatch
photo of Elvin holding it up. The same letters
VTD
at upper left. “Voice Transcription Device.”

“A Tireless Advocate of Using Technology to Overcome Disabilities,” he recalled from the caption below the photo.

“That’s how they talked to each other,” said Watson.

Myrna blew a thin stream of smoke from the corner of her mouth and looked at the VTD. “Talk? You mean that TDD thing that goes over the phone lines?”

“No, not the TDD—the VTD,” said Watson. “Mary didn’t know sign language. Elvin was deaf. That is a Voice Transcription Device. It prints spoken words on a screen. If it was on during his last visit, then—”

They looked at each other.

“If it was on when he was … in the Whitlow house,” said Watson. “If it was left on, the battery’s dead. But it probably has an autosave feature that stores whatever is in memory before the battery dies. Just like a laptop.”

Watson extended a gloved finger toward the button on the device that said
POWER
.

“Don’t fuck with it,” she said. “We need to have a VTD party with witnesses. We call the company that made the thing and have them send out a local service or tech person. Get a notary public or a nun in here to watch. We get it dusted to see who all has touched it besides Elvin. Then we have lots of witnesses about the state of the device when it was powered back up.”

As usual, she was right, and he despised her for it.

“I gotta warn you,” she said. “Before you go powering that thing on and printing it, you better know that whatever you get becomes evidence. For better or worse, for richer or poorer. There’s every chance you’ll end up having to turn it over to the other side. All of it, no matter what it says. Might be something you want to ask your client about.
Before
you turn it on, or print it out.”

“I’ll ask him,” said Watson grimly.

She smiled at him. “Don’t hate me for being a lawyer, Joey I can’t help it.”

He gingerly tucked the VTD back into the briefcase, folded it shut but left the latches open, and left for his office, ignoring her as she crooned, “It’s really, really good. I can’t believe you don’t want to know what it is.”

He went into his office, resolving to call Sandra and surrender himself to her and the kids. He could go home and rejoice in the bosom of his family. No hate criminals or clients, no mendacious lawyers, no terrifying
judges or combative government lawyers, no insidiously polite militia goons (unless they decided to come to his house and kidnap the children!).

Inside, he found a multipage fax spindled on the tray of his machine. An Ignatius Medical Center transmittal sheet and an attached printed form with blanks filled in by handwriting. “Consent to Emergency Medical Treatment.” The message box on the fax cover sheet was from Rachel:

R
achel Palmquist didn’t have to wait long to find out what happened in court; neither did the rest of St. Louis. A headline in thirty-six-point type announced it first thing next morning:
HATE CHARGES DISMISSED IN MURDER OF DEAF MINORITY
. The
Post-Dispatch
recycled the original photo of Whitlow from the first day of his arrest, handcuffed and scowling with his best white-trash, vinegar puss, over the caption: “Technicalities May Free Accused Hate Killer.”

Watson read the article, experiencing a peculiar mixture of pride and despair, wondering where he would turn for help now that his mentor, his would-be mistress, and his wife had all betrayed him. If nothing else, he was charming all the important women in his life.

He’d tried unsuccessfully to call Whitlow at the federal medical center in Minnesota twice last night. This morning, by the time he made it through the phone menus and voice-mail mazes to a human being, Whitlow was already under the knife. It would be several days at least before his client would be able to answer questions about missing briefcases.

The news story included a thumbnail bio on Joseph Watson, “appointed by Federal District Judge Whittaker J. Stang to defend James Whitlow, an indigent, who had been charged under federal hate crime laws in the slaying of Elvin Brawley, a deaf poet and leader of the black
community.” Even Watson’s employment arrangements were front-page news: “Joseph Watson, a graduate of Ignatius Law School’s class of 2001, was appointed to the high-profile hate crime case while still an associate at the corporate law firm of Stern, Pale & Covin. Sources say that when the case began to take up almost all of Mr. Watson’s time, the young lawyer resigned to devote himself full-time to the defense of James Whitlow and to start his own practice.”

Resigned? No use chasing that one down. Arthur Mahoney would blame it on the reporter’s misunderstanding of Stern, Pale’s plain-vanilla, bias-free, noncommittal Notification of Employment Status change—the same one used to describe the departure of any lawyer from the firm. A confirming letter would arrive soon after containing the exact wording of the statement as issued by the firm and its management. And no use arguing with the gymnastic journalist who reported the dismissal of some but not all charges as “freeing” a hate criminal. Most of St. Louis would come away from the story with the impression that some rookie tyro lawyer named Watson had used lawyer tricks to grab some publicity and spring a homicidal racist from prison. Concerned Citizens would be out in force with cellular phones on the lookout for a white patriot waving an AR-15 semi, screaming racial epithets, and looking for children of color.

A sidebar displayed a chronology of Whitlow’s past, including a reprise of the water-tower swastika incident and a few tantalizing morsels from an “anonymous source in the U.S. Attorney’s office” about how investigators were pursuing the defendant’s “possible links to the white supremacist militia group known as the Order of the Eagles, a right-wing hate group, widely reputed to be responsible for the 1999 Washington, D.C., blast in which a car bomb killed two government officials and injured many pedestrians in front of the Department of Education.”

Pages two and three had more articles on hate crimes and how they were destroying the social fabric of the entire nation. More congressional hearings loomed on the political horizons, because it was an election year, and the escalating frequency of hate crimes was a volatile topic on the talk show circuit, in the papers, and on the public’s mind.

The biggest, most dramatic photo (shot from below) was of Frank Donahue, U.S. Attorney, his fist shaking, wrath contorting his face, as he railed against racism and hate crimes on the courthouse steps, over the caption “Hate Criminals Beware”:

To Watson’s dismay, Frank Donahue’s front-page tirade was a mere exchange of pleasantries in the sunny vestibules of the community’s collective consciousness compared to the toilets of psychic outrage waiting for him back on the op-ed page.

A local columnist lit into Watson under the heading: “How Does It Feel, Attorney Watson?” The article took the form of a series of rhetorical questions aimed at his missing sense of decency:

He skimmed over two letters to the editor on the opposite page, one from a proponent of the Violence Against Women Act, the other written by a spokesperson from Americans for a Hate-Free America. He stopped answering his phone after a journalist called to ask if he would have any compunctions about representing the Ku Klux Klan, assuming the fee was in line.

Sandra would read this newspaper, he thought. And, what? Weep? Curse his bones?
“Look, kids, Daddy’s picture is in the paper again. He’s really doing well representing racist murderers. And look where it says that he may get a chance to work for Lorenzo ‘Bloody Turk’ Garroti and the Mob. Wouldn’t that be something? Aren’t you proud?”
He felt another sudden, visceral urge to return to his days of being a nice, uncomplicated computerized legal research expert. Papa Joe Provider, Esq., Mr. Needle in the Haystack for the partners needing supporting case law. A lotus-eater staring blissfully into a screenful of sumptuous icons, lounging around, wired into his workstation, manipulating files, searching databases, cutting, pasting, storing, retrieving. Instead of being hanged in effigy on the front page of the
Post-Dispatch
, he could go back to creating motions and briefs, papers that disappeared into the great maw of nameless civil litigation and transported their author to wealth and oblivion.

And at the end of very long days, he could go home, where he would once again be revered for being sensible, even-tempered, steady. He and Sandra would grow old, beaming wise smiles at each other from opposite sides of the fireplace, quietly watching their Real Money double every seven years according to the Rule of Sevens. Instead of being
in
the
Post-Dispatch
, he could be peacefully reading it in a hot tub out in Ladue.
“Honey? Did you see where the long bond is up six ticks, today? We’re still fifteen per in the bond fund? Or did we shift into gold futures?”