Brain Storm

by Richard Dooling

  “The MPs pack wifey off to the ER. She rides all the way to the ER, where she changes her story. She wasn’t being raped. Now we get the affair story. But watch this. We get three accounts. Version one: As the male ER nurse reports it to the MPs, ‘The patient stated that she was having an affair and was hiding it from her husband, who came home and killed her boyfriend.’ ”

  Myrna puffed twice. “See the n-word in there anywhere?” she asked, shaking her head. “Maybe the ER nurse was being delicate?”

  She flipped two pages. “Now, in the ER, the MP interviews her again, this time about what really happened. Now we get a more detailed version of the affair story. “The victim told Officer Nance, ‘I was with my boyfriend. I was getting ready to go down on him. His pants were unzipped. My husband came home and shot him. He made me call the police and tell them it was a rape.’ ”

  She looked up from her page. “Need I repeat?” she asked. “Nigger this? Deaf that? N-O. In fact,” said Myrna, licking her fingers and flipping pages, “we hear nothing about niggers until the FBI field officers get out there and talk to Mary, at which point the stuff reads like Mississippi Burning and we got niggers till Hell won’t have any more.

  “The FBI version is that she and the sign language instructor were practicing extreme sign language, I guess, when Daddy comes home early from work. Daddy talks hate talk.” Myrna theatrically lowered her voice, and posed like an actor reading from a script. “ ‘Looks like I’m gonna shoot me a deaf nigger, I need three signs or whatever. I need dead, I need deaf, I need nigger most of all.’ Bang! Shoots him, points the gun at the wife and says, ‘I ain’t gonna be backdoored by no nigger. You call the cops and tell them I found this piece-of-shit nigger raping you and I killed him.’ She does what she’s told and lies. Hate crime USA, right?”

  Myrna held out a half-inch ash on her cigarette and looked about the room in desperation. “Where’s my ashtray?”

  “Here,” said Watson, pushing another green bottle at her.

  “You’ve just been introduced to what the FBI calls ‘careful interviewing techniques’ designed to uncover any possible racial, ethnic, handicap, gender, or vulnerable victim characteristics that may have motivated a crime. To unsophisticated locals, the crime is a crime, but if you ask the right questions … lo and behold, out of the mists of human depravity, a hate crime appears. These guys know employment when they see it. The possibilities are endless. Hate could mean more business for them than crack cocaine. After all, hate is everywhere, and it’s free!”

  Myrna irritably dashed ashes into the green bottle. “Now, why does wifey ride all the way to the emergency room before she tells a male nurse what really happened?”

  “Why?” said Watson.

  “Did you look at the MP reports?” asked Myrna. “She’s in the back of the car for fifteen minutes during the drive to the emergency room, and the whole way, she ain’t talking. She says nothing.”

  “Maybe she was scared,” said Watson.

  “Maybe she was,” said Myrna. “Which would make me think she would want her racist, murdering husband arrested as soon as possible. If she keeps telling the rape story, he ain’t gonna get arrested, might even slip away the minute they let him out of their sight. If she tells the I-was-having-an-affair-and-he-killed-my-boyfriend story, he gets arrested like right now for murder.”

  “OK,” said Watson.

  “Maybe this is one of those hate marriages. He hates niggers. She hates him. He hates her. Racist husband comes home and finds her smiling at the ceiling over a black man’s shoulder. So, he pulls out his gun and shoots her paramour in the chest? I can see that part, I guess. Now, keep in mind we’re allegedly dealing with Mr. Hot Blood, Mr. Mental Defect, who shoots the black dude but suddenly regains control and does not shoot his wife who was in bed with a black? Ladies and gentlemen of the minimum wage, he did not kill his wife because he wants to get to know her better, now that she’s been sleeping with African-Americans. And he also carefully leaves a witness—one who hates him—behind to tell the story of how he called a deaf guy a nigger and shot him in the chest? Why not shoot her and say he couldn’t get a clear shot at the rape-mongering darky? Better, shoot her and then claim the gentleman of color and colorful leisure shot her before he could save her?”

  Watson scribbled furiously and tried to keep up with her.

  “I can smell her. Barney Bigot’s rape story is better, but if you ask me he’s also a person of odor. I digress, let’s smell them one at a time.

  “Once the cops get there, why does Mrs. W. wait so long before she tells them what really happened? Scared? Maybe. But what if she doesn’t want to have it out—her word against his—right there at the scene? With all that fresh evidence and plenty of handy storytelling props? What if there’s another story neither one of them wants told? There’s the rape story, there’s the discovered affair and the crime of passion story—what if there’s another story? A story her hotheaded husband might have hollered out at the top of his lungs if he saw her suddenly doubling back on him?”

  “Wow,” said Watson.

  “OK, but your boy is stinky-poo, too. His story is, he shows up at home just in time to kill a black who was getting ready to rape his wife. It happens, I guess. But where’s the gun come from? According to her, he kept the gun in his car. OK, so he comes in the house and sees or hears his wife being raped by a black man. So then what? He says, ‘I know, I’ll go back out to the car and get my gun so I can shoot this nigger. Maybe I’ll get back in time to kill him before he actually rapes my wife’?”

  She paced and shook out a third Gitane. “Even if the gun is hidden in the house, it’s still too neat. His wife is screaming for help, being assaulted by a black rapist, so you, a white racist, calmly pause to locate a weapon—which may or may not be loaded—somewhere else in the house? Then you walk in the room and shoot the interloper just as he’s taking down his pants? What is this, a fucking movie? Mr. Hot Blood would pick up a bedside lamp or a chair and beat the fucker senseless, then he’d go get the gun and shoot him in the head, not in the chest.

  “Back to the MP reports. The black William Blake is in bed with his trousers half off and big ugly hole in his chest. The bed is unmade and full of blood, but otherwise, the place looks like home sweet home.

  “Where’s the mess? Wifey is not torn up, beat up, dirty? She hasn’t been raped. No semen, no tissue trauma, no fiber or hair business on her. So, we know he’s got to be taking those pants off, not putting them back on. She’s wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt. First, let’s say he was raping her. All of her clothes are on. OK, so he chases her around the place without knocking anything over. He gets her down on the bed without hitting her or tearing off any of her clothes or ripping out her hair. And then what? He lets go of her and drops his trousers? What’s he gonna do, fuck a hole in her blue jeans? But before he can do that, he looks up and blammo, right in the chest? Maybe. Too movie for me. And again, no mess.

  “In my opinion,” she said, “we got two liars and a dead criminal. And I saved the best for last.” She flipped another a page. “What did I tell you? The ambulance attendant, Billy Ray Willard, went out with our hero, Dirt, for a couple of beers after doing a night shift. Guess what? Billy Ray saw the same nursery monitor we heard about in the MP’s report. Remember the nursery monitor?”

  “Uh,” said Watson. “Yeah. In the MP report. You said she was probably running a day care.”

  “Wrong!” she said. “I told you to find out about it. But you didn’t. You went off to read hate crime cases, instead. Well, Billy Ray has two kids of his own and a nursery monitor. And he thought it was kinda funny that the transmitter unit was in the living room. I mean, usually you put the transmitter in the kid’s room and the receiver in the kitchen or the backyard or whatever, right? So, Billy Ray thought there might be a baby unattended somewhere in the house, so he went and explored. No baby, and, no receiving unit. What good is half of a nursery monitor?”

  Wat
son shrugged.

  “Better question,” she said. “Where’s the other half?”

  She pulled two more Heinekens out from under her desk. “Last of the Heinies, Buckaroo.” She took a long swig, wiped her bluish lips with the back of her hand, and said, “Next week, I’ll dress up in my pink frock, put a bow in my hair, and pay Mary Whitlow a visit. See if I can find out what is missing that is going to get them both killed.”

  Watson accepted Heineken number two and looked over his notes, which were beginning to swim slightly under his gaze.

  “Hey,” she said, “when we finish all this heavy, Sherlock Holmes–type mental labor, maybe we should go see that room you’re renting next door? Best thing about it is a ventilation fan in the shitter, and I think I saw W. C. Fields in there needing some help with a big Rastafarian bomber of Jamaican tobacco. Maybe old W.C. will give us a hand moving your stuff in?”

  CHAPTER 17

  He stood outside Myrna’s place with a redoubtable buzz on, trying to remember which key would get him back into his Honda, because his keyless entry wouldn’t work, or maybe he was pushing the wrong button. Lock? Unlock? Am I pointing it in the right direction?

  He stashed the money from Buck’s lawyer in the trunk of his Honda. Two choices: go home and tell Sandra how he had been fired and lost his bonus because he ignored his boss’s advice and became obsessed with the defense of a murderer; or go to the Gage Institute and tell his secret goddess of brain science how he had sacrificed an annual salary of a hundred and five grand, plus bonuses, just so he could preserve their professional alliance and zealously defend their client. Let’s see.

  He’d carried all of his boxes inside and stacked them in what he was trying to think of as his office—a hundred-square-foot box with a single sash window opening onto a view of an alley and a swath of high-tension power lines. He had forgotten a dead-file box in the passenger’s seat. It was open and overflowing with accoutrements from his dismantled desktop: a gargoyle pen cup; paperweights commemorating indentured servitude to the law journal; a trackball; a framed photo of his wife and kids, which he retrieved and examined through the fog left by Myrna’s recreational substances.

  The photo was of Sandra, smiling, stooping behind Sheila and Benjy, gathering them in her arms during an outing at the zoo. Summer foliage dappled shadows on their carefree and happy faces—faces as distant as stars whose light was just now arriving, bringing images of events from long ago and far away. Back in those days, Papa was downtown being a working fool of a lawyer, shrewdly discerning important similarities between CarnageMaster and Greek SlaughterHouse, similarities that would eventually materialize into patent, copyright, and trademark infringement claims and defenses, claims and defenses that would protect the profits of Subliminal Solutions Multimedia, Anomie Enterprises, and Abulia Systems and create fees for Stern, Pale and pay tuition into Sheila’s and Benjy’s college funds and the elusive goal of seed money.

  And these days? These days Papa was busy defending a murderer and trampling on domestic bliss, blinded by science, and risking everything for the chance to make the two-backed beast with the Venus of neuroscience and easy virtue.

  Remorse for infidelity is such a cliché it is almost impossible to feel it. The brain probably contrives to deny such sentiments because it doesn’t want to admit it isn’t capable of something more original. Here he was, feeling an obligatory compunction for even contemplating infidelity—while savoring fond memories of Aphrodite, M.D., and her magic, neuroscientific manual labor.

  Until about a week ago, Watson was pretty sure that sexual attraction was touched off by various hormones and enzymes, glandular secretions operating on other glands, and so on down the nervous system line. Not anymore. Fleeting animal magnetism this wasn’t. Only humans save up the erotic cravings of a thousand frustrated nights and focus them on a single being. Did Cham feel the same tingle in his ganglions, the changes in blood pH caused by testosterone or prostaglandins?

  Watson was something more than Cham—and he would look into believing that someday, when he could set aside some time for self-delusion—but for now, he thought it best to call home and buy time, while he tended to the many subcompartments of his fragmenting self.

  He reached for his communicator, then stopped: No car phone. He was solo, adrift in radio silence, cut off from the human race. He could go places, he suddenly realized, and no one would have any way of reaching him. Stern, Pale code signals were probably passing through the atmosphere all around him, and he was deaf to their Orange cries for Westlaw help. Blissful liberation.

  He found a pay phone, marveling that Southwestern Bell still made them, then rifled the Honda’s ashtray for the necessary coins.

  “San?” he said, into a filthy, gum-encrusted mouthpiece, affecting the urgency of a routine, something’s-come-up call. The plate-glass panes were smeared with spit and gum on the inside, salt and street slop on the outside. He choked on fumes from the catalytic converters of passing cars.

  “I called Mom and Dad this afternoon,” she said. “They agree that I need to get the children out of the house.”

  Anxiety became panic. He hadn’t even told her anything yet, and she was already moving the kids out. THE SYSTEM IS UNSTABLE AT THIS TIME.

  “What happened?” he pleaded, which, in BeastMaster language, translated as: “Which of the creatures I let off the leash now and then has been found out?”

  “I was in the laundry room, so I didn’t hear the phone ring.” Her voice shook, as if she was only now gaining enough self-control to talk. “I came into the kitchen, and the kids were talking on the phone.” Her sobbing was causing distortion on the line. “So I said, ‘Who is that? Sheila, honey, who are you talking to?’ ”

  A woman! he thought. He was late! FATAL UNRECOVERABLE ERROR!!! PERMANENT CORRUPTION IN THE OPERATING SYSTEM KERNEL. He had told Rachel he would be there at three! He frantically pulled his sleeve back from his watch. It was four-thirty! She probably called the firm. And then she … He could almost hear Sheila’s tiny, pure voice, “It’s a friend of Daddy’s, Mom. She has pictures of his brain squirting magnetism. A lady wants to talk to Papa.” Worst fears swooped in like ravens filling gnarled limbs in the blasted heath of his conscience. He was consumed by shame, choking on self-loathing, drowning in self-abasement … But hold on, just what did she have on him?

  “Your daughter was talking to a murderer on our phone. A hate killer! Exchanging pleasantries with a convict. He asked Sheila if she was in kindergarten.”

  “Oh, God,” sighed Watson, trying not to sound relieved. “You mean, Whitlow? This is only Whitlow?”

  “Only?” she cried. “Your child was talking to a racist murderer on the phone! HE WAS TALKING TO HER! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  “No one else called?” he asked, unable to believe his good fortune. Adultery, betrayal, brain sex, unemployment, failure as father and provider—those hadn’t even come up. So far, he was headed only for a guilty plea and a suspended sentence for consorting with a murderer.

  “San, I’m sorry,” he said, stepping into his socially responsible role of protecting the rights of the wrongfully accused—well, OK, at least partly wrongfully accused. “I didn’t give him the phone number. He must have called information. I voted for not listing it, remember? You listed it, which means Better Chemical Lawns, James Whitlow, and Saddam Hussein can get it whenever they get the urge to chat.”

  “When I listed it,” she hissed, “my husband was a corporate attorney. I don’t want to be married to a criminal lawyer. I don’t like criminals or their lawyers! Sheila said that he kept telling her what a nice little girl she was. For all I know this animal is not only a killer but a child molester, too!”

  “San, he’s in jail looking at a life sentence. I think we’re safe.”

  “Unless you get him off!”

  He suddenly saw himself appearing before Judge Stang at informal matters. Motion to Withdraw due to Loss of Consortium. See attached affidavit of Sandra Co
nnally Watson (paragraph 7) in which she states: “I cannot touch a person who has been in the same room with a murderer.”

  “I took the phone away from Sheila,” she continued, “and this … convict tells me that he can’t reach you at the firm because the switchboard says you don’t work there anymore. He gives me the number for something called the CIU—the Criminally Insane Unit—at a federal medical center in Minnesota and says he needs to talk to you.”

  “Oh,” he said. “He left a number? What is it?”

  “Call the switchboard,” she said. “I was not about to encourage him by taking a message. The man is a murderer! Did you get fired?”

  “Arthur stabbed me in the back with a piece of software because of my appointed case,” he said. “Don’t worry. I may be able to sue the firm for damages. They can’t fire me for obeying a federal district court judge. I was framed. I was set up.”

  “Since when can you sue them? When you were defending corporate employers you always told me that at-will employees have three rights: the right to get fired, the right to stay fired, and the right to have their wrongful termination cases thrown out of court. Don’t worry? We have no money. You have no job. Don’t worry? Three years of law school gone!”

  “I got the bonus,” he lied. The prevarication was sudden, effortless, popped out before he had time to stop it. One of those automatic parallel processes he’d been learning about. “The bonus will hold us for a while,” he said. “And I picked up a paying client through Myrna Schweich. Remember Myrna Schweich? I did research for her in law school.”

  “That punk-rock criminal lawyer?”

  “She’s not— She’s a very well-respected attorney.”

  “When I saw her, she had a cropped Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, body piercings, and purple lipstick.”

  “She’s … That’s her act. Trappings for her clients.”

  “I DON’T LIKE CRIMINAL LAWYERS!” A full-throated hue and cry, her tongue a lash on his back. He had a sudden hankering to meet some dwarves up in the Catskills for a few fingers of grog and a game of ninepin, followed by a nice twenty-year nap.