Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  “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.”

  Judge Stang took another puff and swiveled in his chair, turning away from the lawyers and toward his view of downtown St. Louis and the Mississippi River. “You’re right, it is unbecoming.”

  “I thought you’d agree,” said Arthur modestly. “If nothing else, it creates the appearance of impropriety.”

  “It’s inconsistent with impartiality,” repeated the judge, waving smoke away from his face, “and it’s the appearance of impropriety, or however you put it.”

  “That’s right, Judge,” said Arthur. “It’s unduly harsh.”

  “The court is persuaded by the arguments of counsel. Upon reconsideration, I hereby order you to chew the lumber into sawdust. You’re probably the one who put the lad up to that spurious motion to withdraw.”

  Arthur set his briefcase down in lieu of sitting or pacing. “Notwithstanding the question of the court’s power to order such a thing,” said Arthur, “I must—”

  “I’ve got power, and you’ve got money,” said the judge, still turned away from the lawyers, as if he were entertaining call-in questions on talk radio. “I admit I don’t know the answer to your not withstood question, but I can settle it for you in two shakes.”

  He tapped the cigar on a stone ashtray the size of a dinner plate. “Ida? Send one of the girls in.”

  “Judge,” stammered Arthur, “th-this is really a peripheral matter. W-We didn’t come here to—”

  Watson winced, watching his superior, one of the most powerful partners in his firm, chastened into fawning obeisance by the absolute power of a federal district court judge. Arthur had stuttered, Watson realized in that amazed state in which one perceives another, heretofore unimagined dimension to human affairs. After watching his boss smoothly and seamlessly manage global conference telephone calls and client meetings, preside over internecine, intrafirm feuds among partners of differing ranks, quell the malpractice insurance crisis, manage in-house counsel from the firm’s number one client, play opposing counsel like Gameboys— Could it be that after all those dazzling, clutch performances, Arthur Mahoney was afraid of a mere judge?

  At the firm, the partners spoke dismissively of Judge Stang—a carbon-dated crackpot whom fate, or more likely good political fortune, had appointed to a lifelong career. Watson suddenly realized the obvious: No matter how many research memos, motions, discovery requests, posturings, settlement demands, and correspondence were created to obstruct and delay other parties in their quest for justice, litigators were ultimately at the total mercy of judges. The trace of apprehension Watson had detected in Arthur back at the office had now swelled into outright fear.

  “Good morning, Judge,” said one of Judge Stang’s clerks—the blonde—whom Watson recognized from the first day at informal matters when he had made his fateful motion seeking to withdraw from the case. She was friendly, fresh, bright, in a short suit and an ecru silk blouse, a burgundy scarf knotted and spread like a bow on a basket of fruit.

  The judge continued staring out his window, so the clerk made her way around the desk and stood alongside.

  “I think I asked you and the other girl to do some research on this lumber question that came up about a week ago in our little murder case, and whether it was something I was able to do or not.”

  “Yes, Judge,” she said cheerfully, “we carefully looked at the issue, exactly as you formulated it, and our answer is no.”

  “You see, Judge,” said Arthur politely. “It’s just not in keeping with the decorum of the …”

  “No?” interrupted the judge, beaming at his clerk. “That’s excellent. Fine work, indeed. No. That’s what I thought.”

  “No?” said Arthur, looking from the back of the judge’s head to the clerk with a puzzled expression.

  “That’s correct,” said the clerk. She opened a leather folio and peeled back three or four pages. “The precise issue as formulated by the judge was: Is it a felony criminal offense for a federal district court judge, pursuant to the court’s discretionary and local-rule-making authority, to discipline one of its officers by instructing him or her to chew a not unreasonable length of unsoiled, untreated, nontoxic lumber into sawdust? Our answer is: No, we could find no case law or statutory language that would suggest such an action could be considered a felony criminal offense under current law. The judge specifically instructed us not to look at the question of whether such an order was an abuse of the court’s discretion, beyond the disciplinary powers of the court, or subject to reversal on appeal.”

  Arthur hung his head and sighed.

  “So, I am correct in assuming that it is not a felony criminal offense if I order Mr. Mahoney here to chew a length of two-by-four into sawdust? Is it a high crime or misdemeanor?”

  “We searched the on-line services,” said the blonde pertly, “and there are no reported cases of a judge being charged with a felony or a misdemeanor for ordering a lawyer to chew a piece of wood into sawdust.”

  “There you have it,” said the judge, still looking out the window. “Follow instructions, and no one will have to know about your contempt of court or the ensuing penalty. If you want to challenge me on it, you’ll have to do so in open court—which is your right.” He tapped a ring of ash off the cigar. “It won’t be the first time I’ve watched a lawyer drown in the gulf of his own folly.”

  Arthur froze like a pointing hound and stared helplessly while the judge said, “Thank you, dear,” to his clerk and then surveyed his desktop in search of new business.

  “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” the clerk replied. “Judge, I might also mention that the Assistant United States Attorney in this case has filed the motion he spoke to you about yesterday. We thought perhaps you and the lawyers might care to discuss it before they leave. I believe the prosecution was seeking a physical and mental examination of the defendant pursuant to Rule Twelve
.”

  She leaned over the two dead minitower computers and handed the judge a document, then turned and held a copy out midway between Watson and Arthur. Watson took a step forward and extended his hand; Arthur cut him off and seized the document.

  “Just what the Hell is the Psychon Project anyway?” asked the judge. “They’ve run four or five of these stiffs up to Minnesota, and then they come back in here claiming the defendants are congenital racist, psychopathic hate killers who should be put away for life. It’s a new one on me. It used to be that a mental defect meant you were not guilty. Now, they’ve turned it upside down. Now if you’re brain-damaged or crazy, it just means you were probably crazy enough to kill somebody, and what’s more, crazy enough to do it again.”

  Watson froze and then looked over Arthur’s shoulder.

  “And as long as we are on the subject,” growled the judge, “I might as well tell you boys that I had a little ex parte with the U.S. Attorney on this case the other day. Whenever I do that, I make sure and keep things fair by having another little ex parte with the other side, and that way, when you put the two ex partes together, they make up what I call an ‘in wholé,’ and nobody can complain. Can they, Mr. Mahoney?”

  “Judge, we would have no complaint about anything that leads to a speedy resolution of this matter, so we can extricate my associate, Mr. Watson, from a case he is clearly not qualified to defend.”

  “I’ll worry about who’s qualified,” said the judge. “Mr. Watson, were you by any chance planning to assert a mental defect or disease, any medical or psychiatric condition as a defense in this action? Because if you are, we can transport this fellow to the federal hospital up there at Mayo’s and satisfy you and the prosecutor in one stroke. It’s the best way I know of to get free medical testing for an indigent client. Of course, the prosecutor has moved first and made sure that he’ll get to see everything too, and most of the doctors at these federal medical centers are government whores as you probably know. So you run the risk that the results may not be favorable to your client. There’s every chance that they’ll come back saying he knew exactly what he was doing and that he’s as sane as you and me.”