She dropped the sheaf of Andrew Jacksons on the desk again and listened to the thud.
“It smells like April,” she sighed. “Memory and desire stirring dull debts with fresh cash. It’s so fulfilling in some elemental way. Words are inadequate. Imagine you are ravenously hungry, you are parched and hornier than a three-headed iguana, and one of your clients comes in and gives you a bacon-wrapped filet, butter-soaked lobster, chilled spring water, iced chardonnay, some goopy, resiny buds of Afghani pot, and oral sex—all at once.”
“What do I do with it?” asked Watson.
“Celebrate,” said Myrna. “Have a few beers. Fire up a W. C. Fields–size bomber and get functionally stupid. You’ve escaped from the Empire’s tractor beams, and your first day flying solo in the rebel sectors you pick up a client who pays in tax-free cash. You’re sitting so fat you need new clothes.”
“I don’t have to tell the court about the money?”
The Nikes fell off the open drawer as she doubled over in a smoky coughing fit.
“The money, the fact that it exists, the fact that it was offered, the pay arrangements, the discussion of medical experts and how to compensate them—are all privileged communications from your client and his lawyer. If the attorney or the client is dumb enough to share the privileged communication with a third party, like a judge, the privilege is destroyed. Do you want to rephrase your question, Counselor?”
“What do I do?” asked Watson.
“Take the money and enter your appearance with the court as retained counsel,” she said. “Let me put it another way: Stop being a paralegal, an amanuensis, a famulus and factotum, a water boy, utility knife, and all-purpose hand tool for some mugwump partner, and start being a lawyer. Somebody just parked a sledful of cash on your desk. They want to hire you. Do you want to work?”
Watson stood and paced, displaying behavior imprinted during his duckling days of following Arthur around. “I don’t have a job. No office. My shit is stacked in boxes in the back of the Honda. I lost my bonus and the firm-issued computer. I got a tin lizzie Pentium at home with a one-gig hard drive and a 14.4 modem in it. It barely runs Reader Rabbit for DOS, let alone Westlaw. What do I do? Crank up the kids’ printer and file dot-matrix memoranda in federal court?”
Myrna tapped a finger on her cigarette. “Give me three hundred bucks a month and you can have the spare room next door. Take three or four grand and go buy a fucking computer if it makes you feel better. Money has appeared. I could even help you. We could be partners,” she offered, and when he looked up quickly, “on a case-by-case basis, of course, meaning, on this case, for starters.”
“Really?” he asked. The first sign of reinforcements filled him with joy. “You’d help me?”
“Sure,” she said, “I charge by the hour. Three hundred in court. Two hundred out of court. And don’t forget Dirt,” she added, patting a folder on her desk. “He’s been busy. Doing great work, too.”
She watched him doing math in his head, then she touched the bundle of bills.
“I have a feeling more of this will show up soon,” she said. “On this side of the law, people don’t say things like … How did they put it?” She fingered the note from Buck’s lawyer, drew it over to her side of the desk, and read from it. “ ‘Cost is not the concern. Results are.’ That’s succinct. I like that.”
“So,” said Joe, “then you would try the case?”
“Too early to decide that,” she said. “You go draft up some quality motions and memos for Judge Stang, I’ll get ready for a fucking trial. But if anybody asks,” she warned, “you came to me, right? I am helping you because you asked me to.”
“OK,” said Joe, uncertainly. He parted his lips to ask who might ask about that and why it would be important.
“Partners on the Whitlow case?” she asked, holding up her half of a high five.
“Partners,” he said with a swat.
“OK. Listen up,” she said, handing him a yellow legal pad and a pencil. “Take notes.” Then she sat up and smiled big. “Stop being a lawyer, and start being a paralegal, an amanuensis, a famulus and factotum, a water boy, utility knife, and all-purpose hand tool for me, a mugwump partner.”
She puffed up her chest, made her neck disappear into the sweatshirt she was wearing by raising her shoulders up to her ears, lowered her voice, and held forth after the fashion of Rumpole of the Bailey or some other bewigged English barrister.
“Take a fucking memo,” she said. “You need to talk to the wife,” she said. “Did you talk to your wifey person yet?”
“My wife?” asked Watson, understandably still preoccupied with his own domestic situation.
“His, not yours,” said Myrna. “Fuck me naked running through a briar patch. Nobody’s talked to the defendant’s wife yet? Maybe I should talk to her. Mary Whitlow is not just the linchpin, she’s the only pin. The only other person to leave the room alive.”
“They gave me her statements,” said Watson. “I thought it was like civil litigation, where you can’t talk to the other side’s witnesses unless you depose them with both lawyers present. But this morning, or last night I guess, she left me a message on my machine at work.”
“She called you?” Myrna asked, sitting up and peering intently into his eyes. “What did she say?”
“Something about how she and her murdering husband would both be dead, if he didn’t give back what he took. She kept talking about ‘they’ this and ‘they’ that were gonna kill them. She sounded drunk or on pills or something.”
“What else?” Myrna probed. “Did she say anything about Buck? Like, ‘Where is Buck?’ ”
Her familiar reference to Buck gave him pause. She kept talking, as if she had detected him noticing.
“I mean, you were saying all about how Whitlow was so wound up about this Buck fellow and getting his car back and all. So it occurred to me, maybe Mary knows this Buck guy and maybe she had something to say about him.”
“She said something like, ‘They don’t believe the story that Buck is spreadin’ around that I hid it somewheres.’ But I don’t know what it is, or what Buck has to do with it. And, no, she didn’t say where or who Buck is.”
“How about the crime scene? Been there?”
Watson gestured helplessly. “I guess I was just focusing on the motions in limine,” he explained, “and the constitutional issues, the mental defect. I kind of assumed he did it. I was just trying to get rid of the hate charges.”
“Noble aspiration,” she said. “But what did I tell you?” she demanded. “It doesn’t matter if he did it. Nothing matters …”
“Except making the government do their job and prove up their bullshit case,” said Watson.
“Exactly,” she said. “We don’t know where the sun rises, unless the government proves it to us with experts. I wasn’t there when the hearing-impaired African-American was date-raping the defendant’s lawfully wedded wife. I’m betting you weren’t there, but feel free to confide in me.” She tagged him with a nod of her head. “OK, we weren’t there. Now, Judge Stang more than likely didn’t do it. The jurors probably weren’t there—although anything’s possible. On the first day of trial, we know one fundamental human truth: that everyone is a liar. The MPs and the CID boys are liars. The feds are liars. The U.S. Attorney is a brazen-faced varlet with a forklift for a tongue. Your client would make Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights sound like Mother Teresa on the witness stand if he could never hear the word death again. We know what the government proves in court. Even that ain’t true, unless twelve Kmart checkout clerks say it’s so. Until that happens, Whitlow was in the bathroom telling rosary beads and heard about the murder after he finished the Five Glorious Mysteries.”
“But who is Buck’s lawyer?” asked Watson.
“Fuck Buck’s lawyer,” said Myrna. “The government and the bad guys are always wanting to know who’s paying whose lawyer and who’s representing whom. So in the criminal defense bar, we stick togethe
r, and we don’t tell them shit. Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell ya. And as long as Buck’s fucking lawyer pays cash retainers, we don’t care who he is.”
Watson took a deep breath. He wanted to feel liberated, drunk with joy at the prospect of being his own boss. Self-governance. “He could be a wise king ruling the spirited commonwealth of himself.” But instead, he felt naked and vulnerable, expelled from the mighty tribe that had nourished and protected him, brought him of age … and cast him out. Could he make a go of it on his own?
He looked at Myrna’s office chair—stuffed polyester on a plastic frame, with one knob under the seat for adjusting height. The chair he’d left behind at Stern, Pale was high-end, ergonomically designed, adjustable to the tune of three levers and two knobs, and it had buttery cordovan leather stuffed in all the right places, with adjustable pneumatic lumbar support. He was accustomed to free food, club memberships, Cardinal baseball and Blues hockey tickets, health and life insurance, a pension fund—anything to make him more comfortable in that ergonomically designed chair he sat in for sixty-five hours a week producing legal work product. It paid well, and it was clean work, no heavy lifting. Myrna, by contrast, looked like she spent maybe an hour or so a day in this ready-made chair—the rest of the time she was running around intimidating opposing counsel and bullying criminals into behaving themselves long enough for her to get them off and cash their checks.
“Well,” she said, “I don’t see too many choices. Either way, you’re stuck with the case. I suppose you could move to withdraw because you’ve been fired. You could pretend Judge Stang might care about that shit, but he won’t. So why not get paid for your trouble?”
“Judge Stang will never let me out,” said Watson. “I had a Jesuit Latin teacher who was just like him. Don’t bother looking it up—Judge Stang was a graduate of Ignatius High, class of 1943, he comes from a long line of intellectual taskmasters. Instead of translating Caesar’s Gallic Wars, I’ll be defending James Whitlow. It’s all writ in the seeds of time. I’ll bet he picked me because I went to Ignatius High and Ignatius University Law School. Piss on the law review article—he found out I was into intellectual bondage and discipline at the hands of religious authorities. Instead of homework, the court has ordered me to produce flawless memoranda. Instead of going to class, I will attend a pretrial motions conference, where I will know more about the law of my case than anyone else in the room. If I fail, I will be arraigned, bound naked, and lashed to the podium, where in proceedings open to the public, Judge Stang will skillfully interrogate me and display my profound ignorance to the legal community and any major media he lets in for the show.”
Myrna grinned and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You were in chambers,” she said. “You know the man. Your terror is palpable. You bear the trademark wounds of profound psychological Stang abuse. You’re a member of an elite. Correct. He will never let you out. And multiply that never by ten once you enter your appearance as retained counsel. After that, the case is yours, appeals and all. So, if I were you, I’d tell your client that Dr. Green’s fees are already way high.”
“You mean, now?” said Watson. “Dr. Green’s fees are too high now?”
Myrna upended a Heineken, managing to guzzle and nod at the same time. “Way high. Tell him you’ve been laid off, money is tight, and Dr. Green’s fees are too high.” She belched with unabashed exuberance and thumped the bundle of money. “I betcha another one of these will show up,” she said. “Enter your appearance. You handle pretrial and any appeals. If he goes to trial, I’ll corral twelve sheep in the jury box and put the dead, hearing-impaired African-American on trial for rape. Before it’s over, we’ll have Mike Harper barking like a trained seal in front of Judge Stang.”
“But why do these people want to hire me?” asked Watson.
Myrna stopped smiling. “That’s a tough one,” she said. “Maybe somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who works for Judge Stang. Maybe not.” She shrugged. “You have the writing credentials. It’s federal court, where all pretrial motions are submitted in writing only with supporting memoranda. No state court chicanery and oral bombast. You could make a lot of work and trouble for the U.S. Attorney by filing paper blizzards on the constitutional issues.”
She was right. He’d forgotten that all pretrial motions happen on paper in federal court. And if the arguments happened on paper, he was confident he would be the equal of any government lawyer.
“The first three, four weeks will be all researching and writing legal memos,” he said, thinking aloud. “That means I could beat up Harper real good before we even got to trial. That means, I could even kick your ass,” he said.
“Watch it, small one,” she said. “I’ll grant you the writing edge, but eventually we’d probably have a little something called a trial, where I think you’d be a soft-shell crab on my plate.”
“And after trial,” he said, egging her on. “After trial, then?”
“Then what?” she asked irritably.
“Then I could take you or Harper up on appeal where I could write an appellate brief that would embarrass either one of you.”
“Christ,” she said. “I’m creating a monster here. Don’t get adversarial with me, Bub. There’s no need for that. We can help each other. I won’t leave you alone out there,” she promised, dropping the butt of her Gitane into an empty Heineken bottle. She fetched more beers from the fridge, popped the tops with a Swiss Army knife, and handed him one.
“So if you’re in for the long haul,” she said, reaching for the short stack of manilas she’d patted affectionately at least twice, “I have tons of good news from the dirty side of the world.”
“Your investigator?”
“Our investigator. Dirt. We hired him—what? Forty-eight hours ago? He’s already bringing it in on a silver platter, and the wife is stinking up the place.”
“Mary Whitlow?” asked Watson, finally subduing the Sandra reflex.
“Mrs. Whitlow reeks,” said Myrna. “Everything I hear about her has that certain odor. The liar aroma. Feculence. Listen to this. Where are my notes?” She grabbed a pad out of her briefcase and flipped pages, then flipped open one of the manilas.
“Here we go. First, the dead black dude. He’s her sign language instructor, right? She’s been taking sign language lessons for almost a year, because she wants to talk to her son, little seven-year-old Charlie Whitlow … Guess what? The deaf kid spends nine months of the year in the residential school up in Fulton, Missouri. He comes home for the summers and stays with grandma, because, according to neighbor Hilda Pence, ‘The home situation is not good.’ According to three different neighbors and two of the kid’s teachers, Mary Whitlow doesn’t know any sign language.”
Memories tingled and attempted to surface. Whitlow had told him that Mary didn’t know sign language: “I seen in the paper where she’s supposedly the queen of sign language now.”
“That’s what Whitlow told me,” said Watson. “But if she doesn’t know sign language, and she’s not learning sign language …” A half-formed thought was aborted by Myrna’s chatter.
“Stinky, stinky, stinky,” said Myrna. “And the dead usually smell worse than anybody. The deceased black sign language instructor is a deaf poet—a black William Blake, right? A Johnny Appleseed of Technology for the Disabled. He lives in Webster Groves. It ain’t silver-spoon Ladue, but it ain’t North St. Louis, either. Home, above average. Assessed value, a hundred and fifty grand. Maybe he got a deal on it. But listen to this. His ma holds a note on a Gulf Shores condo to the tune of four hundred grand, and guess who was making cash payments on the note? The deaf poet, who was doing very well at something and trying to hide it. Just what, we don’t know yet, but something tells me it ain’t cattle futures.
“He worked at Acrobat Printing, some high-end computer graphics and copying joint. And guess who else worked there? Mary Whitlow. OK, according to his paycheck deposits, he was making like thirty-five grand at Ac
robat. He volunteered at the Center for Deaf Awareness and Technology for the Deaf and sold Voice Transcription Devices, those gadgets that display spoken words, but that was for nonprofit, right? He sold his own computer-generated artistically engraved poetry pamphlets. Good enough. Let’s go mad-cow and figure he made ten grand selling those. Where’d the rest of the cash come from? No money on his folks’ side. He was divorced, paid alimony and child support on two kids by a previous marriage. And, he had a record. For what, we don’t know yet. Dirt will find out.”
Watson imagined Mary Whitlow and the black William Blake sitting in her house. If she didn’t know sign language then how would they—?
Myrna shook cigarette number two out of its sky-blue Gitane packaging and again interrupted his thoughts. “Let’s do some event reconstruction. Wifey supposedly sends her black boyfriend a message on a— What’s it called? T-what?”
“TDD,” said Watson. “It’s how deaf people type back and forth on the phone.”
“OK, she sends a love letter on the TDD,” said Myrna, “telling her boyfriend that her husband will be out of town and she can’t wait to see him. Day of the murder, she calls MP headquarters at Fort Fuckup and says her husband just shot a man who was trying to rape her. When the MPs arrive on the scene, she fills out the story a little and so does Barney Bigot. She’s having one of those sign language lessons that don’t seem to do any good, and her instructor gets frisky on her, chases her into the bedroom, and tries to rape her. Her husband just happens to be walking in the door, hears her cries for help, gets his gun, and shoots the black, deaf guy before he can rape her. OK, the teenage MPs take that all down, call it in to headquarters, and get told to transport her to the emergency room, where a rape trauma team is coming in to see her.
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