Brain Storm (9 page)

She leaned closer to him. “Ever wonder where that ‘I’ you take for granted inside of you comes from?” she asked, pointing just behind the intense green of her eyes in their dusky hollows.

“Yeah,” he said, “sort of,” even though, at the moment, he was more interested in sending the ‘I’ inside of him off somewhere, so the other parts of him could lose control of themselves and go thither in response to her come-hithering. Was she wearing tinted contact lenses, or were her eyes really that green?

“I’ll show you what I do for a living,” she said. “And I’ll show you what I can do for your client. And you’ll get a free glimpse of the future of neurotechnology.”

Their wordless stare lasted too long without being the least bit uncomfortable.

“When are you going to see him?” she asked.

“After lunch,” said Watson, “I think, unless Arthur—”

“You’re probably a very good lawyer,” she said, mocking him with an overdone bat of her eyelashes, “but would I be out of line if I came right out and said you don’t know shit about criminal law?”

“I know
shit
about criminal law,” said Watson, “which means, as you said, I don’t know shit.”

“Good,” she said. “No ego problems. Let me tell you what I think. Arthur is going to let you blunder up this case quick. Because the sooner
you bonehead your way into the boneyard, the faster you’ll plead the guy and forget about it. But we don’t want that, do we?” She wagged a finger at him, a finger he suddenly wanted to touch, maybe even taste. “So, what you need to remember this afternoon is: Don’t let your client tell you what happened, yet.”

“Why?” asked Watson, puzzling over this apparent discrepancy between the criminal law and his witness interviews in civil cases, where he was always trying to dig up facts.

“Nothing gums up a criminal case worse than bad facts. In the meantime,” she said, opening her folio and handing him a typed form, “we need any and all medical records. Get his signature on here and tell him that if the government wants to ask him about ultimate issues he should tell them to call you.”

“Right,” said Watson, taking the form.

“The time sequences are especially important,” she added. “We don’t want him having any time at all, understand? Because if he has time, it may mean he either deliberates, or he stops and thinks about how much he hates deaf black people, follow me?”

“I think so,” said Watson, suddenly relieved at finding an ally who seemed to know something about defending the client instead of just getting rid of him. More important, he understood the part about not wanting too much time for deliberation. He wanted to go somewhere with her, before he had time to think about the consequences.

“You’re smiling, Mr. Watson,” she said. “If I had injected water tagged with a radioisotope like oxygen-15 into your antecubital vein and had you under my PET scanner, I could tell whether you are smiling because you are happy, or smiling because you are voluntarily moving your facial muscles.”

“Go on—really?” he asked.

“Ever wonder why photographers tell you to say ‘cheese’? When you execute a voluntary, unemotional smile, you are using portions of your motor cortex to get the job done. When the same facial muscles exhibit the so-called ‘true’ smile of an emotional situation, they are being controlled by a different part of your brain. According to electrophysiological recordings, pretend smiles generate different brain-wave patterns from real ones. The true smile is controlled by our limbic cortices,” she went on, uncrossing her pearl-nyloned legs, “sometimes called the ‘older’ or ‘lower’ parts of our brain.”

Watson felt a tingle in the older, lower parts of his brain.

“The same parts of your brain are responsible for the four F’s of neurobiology: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and … family matters.”

Another comfortable look.

“Is that a true smile you have going there, Mr. Watson?”

She pulled a card out of her pocket and added a home phone number with a pen from his desk. “Call me and tell me what happens.”

A
ccustomed to the efficiencies of computerized legal research, and unaccustomed to midday traffic patterns on one-way streets, Watson took a wrong turn in his Honda and noted again how much of lawyering outside the office seemed to consist of roaming around in search of the right building to appear in and then finding a place to park. He drove past what looked like a courthouse twice before he realized it was the Des Peres County jail. The concertina of razor wire around the top story should have tipped him off. Maybe all of his on-line legal know-how had been acquired at the expense of a corresponding measure of practical knowledge, like knowing the location of the courthouse, or thinking
jail
when he saw barbed wire around the top of a building. In the future, with the aid of two-way videoconferencing and a loaded multimedia PC, he would be able to appear at informal matters, file documents in court, and interview his clients without leaving the office, and this annoying waste of time spent grooming, buttoning cotton shirts, knotting silk ties, and transporting well-dressed flesh in real time through meat space could be avoided.

A U-turn landed him in traffic three blocks deep. He was delighted when his car phone rang, but Arthur’s voice quickly dispelled the road-warrior glow.

“Remember what I told you about good and bad clients,” he said. “And before you go in there, think about this jailbird recounting every word you say in open court three years from now when he sues you and us for malpractice and ineffective assistance of counsel. The attorney-client privilege protects him, not you. Hear me? The less you say, the better.”

“I hear you, Arthur,” said Watson. “The less I say the better,” he added, knowing his sarcasm would be buried in cellular static.

“And start softening him up for a plea to life, because that’s what he’ll get, unless you go to trial, in which case he’ll get the death penalty.”

“I’ll see what kind of shape he’s in first, Arthur.”

“Don’t bother,” said Arthur. “I used to do this for a living. A whiff of the death penalty turns them into trapped animals. All they want is a claw hold, a crack of daylight, a glimmer of fond hope on the long walk to the chamber. Scare him. Tell him to count himself lucky if they’ll let him plead to life.”

Watson hung up and imagined his client sitting alone in a cell, a desperate human being, a victim of twisted fate and uncontrollable circumstances, not a friend in the world … except his court-appointed lawyer. Arthur had a point. But a federal district judge had issued a superseding order, calling Watson to a higher and lower duty. According to Arthur, Watson was romanticizing his client, hearing the siren song of the civil plaintiff and the criminal defendant—the downtrodden and dispossessed, desperately needing representation, lacking the means to pay for it. Maybe he’d seen one too many major motion pictures about Clarence Darrow and Gerry Spence. For some reason, in Hollywood’s estimation, a lawyer representing the venal interests of individuals was less despicable than another lawyer representing the venal interests of corporations or governments. Perhaps it was a question of magnitude—it was nobler to represent the lesser and feebler of two evils. A curious distinction. If, as a lawyer, you can see your way to represent venality and evil, wouldn’t it make sense to represent the
greater
, moneyed, and more powerful evil—and increase one’s chances for a success at trial?

He entered the prison with a burst of enthusiasm, as if he meant to announce to the prison officials and employees that it was his first day on the job as a criminal lawyer, and that he wanted to be the best criminal lawyer he could be in the shortest possible time. Joe Watson, movie lawyer, to the rescue. Then it occurred to him that they might not sympathize with his aspirations.

A rotund black woman in a uniform and a spectacular headdress of cornrows sat inside an octagon of painted steel screens. She stared intently into a screen where she was absorbed in a government-subsidized game of Microsoft Hearts, expertly shuffling and clicking her way to victory over her three software opponents, Anna, Lynda, and Terri—the virtual banes of employers nationwide, and another example of the profound impact of computer software on our nation’s productivity.

A guard lounged in a booth and buzzed people in and out, a green bulb flashed over a metal detector and an X-ray machine.

“Name?” asked the woman, her eyes tagging him once from a government-issued mask of bureaucratic insolence.

“Joseph Watson,” he said.

“Prisoner?” She tapped an antique keyboard through a filthy plastic spill-guard, not bothering to conceal her intense irritation at being forced to abort her attempt to shoot the moon.

A red bulb flashed somewhere behind the Plexiglas, and a loud buzz made him jump. An automatic door opened, and a uniformed man pushed a gurney bearing a sheet-draped human silhouette. A body? Joe smelled a waft of disinfectants, followed by the stench of urine.

“Prisoner?” she repeated.

“Whitlow,” he said. “James Whitlow. I’m his lawyer,” he added significantly, but it did nothing to dispel the woman’s conspicuous opinion that he was completely insignificant.

Watson signed a ledger and selected the cleanest of a half dozen vinyl chairs. He tried to brush it off, only to discover that the filth had long ago become part of the chair. No one asked him for ID or checked his name against any list to find out if he was indeed a lawyer.

Ten minutes later, a guard brought James Whitlow through a steel door into a conference room windowed in painted steel and chicken-wired Plexiglas. The defendant’s stature fell something short of his crimes—well under six feet, with the same physique Watson recalled him having in high school, the sort of frame young bucks achieve with a fat-free diet of caffeine, nicotine, and hard liquor. His pasty skin appeared to be shrink-wrapped around muscles and tendons, which looked pegged and drawn taut at the joints. His granny glasses were clean, his mustache brushy but neatly trimmed. In his orange jumpsuit, he had the look of a sanitation worker or an auto mechanic ready to put
in a day’s work, if somebody would only get the cuffs off of his hands and feet.

Watson sat across from his client at a scarred table with an ashtray and a buttonless, dial-less phone between them.

The guard gave Whitlow two cigarettes and handed Watson a small box with two matches in it.

“Pick up the phone when you’re done,” he said, and turned to leave.

“What if I got to piss?” Whitlow asked suddenly, stopping him at the door.

“I just took you to piss,” said the guard. “You wanna piss again?”

“Not now,” said Whitlow, “but before we get done here, I might have to.” He squirmed and tugged at himself under the table. “I told you it’s an infection. They took me down to Sick Call and now they want to make me wait until the test comes back before they give me back my medicine.”

The guard stared through the Plexiglas, waiting for Whitlow to quit talking, then he looked back at him and said, “If you need to piss, pick up the phone,” then left.

“Joe Watson,” said Watson, putting his right hand out over the table. Whitlow extended his manacled wrists, and Watson said, “Oh.”

They managed a shake in spite of the hardware, Watson’s tender keyboard pinkies snagging on the prisoner’s scaly calluses. The cracks and creases of his skin were paint-speckled and patinated with chalk or white dust, prompting Watson to recall reading that he had worked for a painting and drywall outfit, because he had been laid off at the packinghouse, after he was fired from a night job as a computer technician, after he was thrown out of Southwest Community Technical College when he was a freshman for having painted the swastika. His client was a manual laborer who had fallen off a carousel of part-time jobs into prison. Maybe going to law school hadn’t been such a bad idea after all.

Watson pulled his firm-issued computer out of his briefcase, set it on the table between them, booted up, and opened a new file.

“That government lawyer kept asking did I have money to hire me a lawyer,” said Whitlow abruptly, talking fast and coughing to camouflage the quavers in his voice. “I told him I got no money. So he says I got to take my chances with an appointed lawyer. Then he came back next day and said I was lucky because I got appointed a lawyer at the biggest firm in town. Said you wrote an article about this hate bullshit.”

“The judge appointed me to be your lawyer,” said Watson, “but—”

“And I got lucky,” Whitlow interrupted, “because I got one from the best firm in town, is what they told me.”

Watson suddenly realized that his client was almost motionlessly hyperventilating; only the rapid constrictions of the rib cage and the faint rushes of air hunger gave him away. The knuckles of his cuffed, clenched fists seemed ready to burst through the skin. Watson missed being able to read the lettering of a purple tattoo on the left forearm, which blurred and flashed out of sight when Whitlow took his elbows off the table. He smelled urine again and wondered if it had soaked into the stones of the place, or if his client had—

He stifled a swell of pity—a sentiment he’d never experienced in civil litigation, where money was the most valuable thing at stake and the misfortunes were usually corporate ones. Arthur’s instructions were to give the client the facts—namely, that Watson had never handled a criminal case before, that he had never even watched a jury trial, that he had been appointed by the court to handle a murder case in which the government was seeking the death penalty under the new federal sentencing guidelines for hate crimes. He was to use all of his persuasive powers to present the facts, which would lead even the most obtuse defendant to conclude that pitting a bright, young legal researcher like Watson against a seasoned federal prosecutor in a murder trial was like putting Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the ring with Iron Mike Tyson. Once the defendant was suitably terrified, he would make some phone calls and muster up money from family and friends and hire a criminal lawyer.

“You’re a good lawyer, aren’t ya?”