Watson watched, unsure whether the resolute calm she displayed in arming herself inspired confidence or terror. It appeared that there was at least some chance that real bullets could soon be discharged with the attendant ambient audio of actual explosions.
“Jacket,” she said, pointing at the wall behind the door, where a black blazer hung on her coatrack. He threw it to her. It matched her baggy black pants and covered the weapon. She faced him and patted under her arm.
“Ready?” she asked him. He nodded. She put her arms down, comically splayed and wiggled her itchy fingers, then drew the weapon, her right hand instantly retrieving it from under her jacket. She crouched into a standard two-handed shooting stance, the gun pointed at the peephole of the door.
“The clip holds eighteen Equal Rights Amendments,” she said, tucking the weapon back into her holster.
Her phone emitted a single trill.
“Hi, Tilly. Two gentlemen? To see Joe? Do they have an appointment?” She held the phone away and smoothed her jacket over the bump of the holstered weapon. “Tell them we are preparing for a trial. They should make an appointment and leave their names.”
Myrna paused, fished out a cigarette, and lit it with the skull lighter.
She exhaled. “An emergency? Tell them my whole life is one big emergency, and five minutes is all they get. Send them to my place.”
She hung up, tugged down her sleeves, and patted the jacket again. She stood behind her desk, lifted a piece of paper, and pretended to be reading it.
Two knocks.
“Yeah,” she said. “Come hither.”
The door opened. Watson recognized the top halves of them from his rearview mirror. Two large men, still in shades, leaned in.
“Joseph Watson?” said the first one, aiming black lenses in his direction.
“Yeah,” said Joe. “Why?” He tried to sound tough and annoyed, a hard-bitten criminal lawyer who would never have worked at Stern, Pale, where visitors in suits and ties were greeted with “How can we help you?”
Would they reach for their weapons now? His only real-world referents for the physical specimens standing in the doorway came from Scorsese movies and video games—Greek SlaughterHouse and CarnageMaster. Multimedia violence and movie bloodshed were the closest he had ever come to physical danger. Every other threat he’d encountered in real, adult life had to do with purely psychological or intellectual threats, marital turbulence, academic performance, career-path obstructions.
The man’s nostrils flared slightly. Watson instinctively moved his hand in search of a trackball or a joystick, something to click on so he could fire his turbocharged lasers and blow big, jagged holes in their virtual flesh. “Eat flaming death, Droids! I am CarnageMaster!”
Galoot number one walked in, folded his hands in front of him, and waited for his partner to shut the door and come alongside with a black leather briefcase in tow. Even close up, they looked alike—not quite twins, but probably brothers in more than crime. It was hard to tell with no eyes to look at. Stocky two-hundred-pounders, both straining at the seams to move up a size into new dark-blue and black suits. Above the shades, their hair was slicked straight back with scented styling gel, and below them, mugs with double chins. Tastefully subdued ties were done up just so on cotton oxfords with clean and neatly buttoned cuffs and collars. They had the look of former college athletes who, after fifteen years of selling insurance and buying a thousand or so twelve-packs, had gone into law enforcement or found a suitable militia and were now ready to remind the world about patriotism and decency and fighting for what is right.
Their sunglasses were busy with reflections of the office, including occasional tiny postage-stamp images of Watson and Myrna, swelling and shrinking in the convexity of the black lenses, swirling like those thumbnail animated Java applets you see in Web sites.
“We need to talk about James Whitlow’s case,” said the same bruiser, the one on Watson’s right, who so far was the talking half and seemed to be carrying less fat and more muscle than the retiring mesomorph on the left, who, upon closer inspection, was also distinguished by a complexion that looked like a flesh-tone satellite photo of a lunar landscape. Introductions seemed unlikely, so Watson provisionally named the lead, talking male Alpha and the clone beast in tow Beta.
“If you gentlemen made an appointment, it’s not on our calendar,” said Myrna. “You are …?”
“Ma’am, we work for some friends of Jimmy Whitlow,” said Alpha, sounding almost polite, turning his head in Joe’s direction. “The friends he told you might be in a position to help pay his lawyer fees.”
His accent was somewhere between Midwestern and Southern, maybe Cape Girardeau, Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, or at most, the boot heel, damn near Arkansas.
Joe opened his mouth even though he had no intention of saying anything. Myrna’s face morphed into a great big “Say what?”
“Don’t talk to these guys, Joe,” said Myrna. “Friends of Jimmy Whitlow? Lawyer fees? You guys come in here asking about alleged clients? To me that means you are either from outer space or else you are cops.”
Beta flinched and spoke for the first time. “We ain’t cops,” he said suddenly, as if this were too much slander for any man to bear. He twitched again, seeming to show conscientious restraint in not reaching for his weapon; then his vocal cords rumbled somewhere deep in his thick neck. Alpha turned his head slowly around, an apparent reminder to his associate about who was going to do the talking.
Myrna’s back talk made Watson nervous. He was wondering if she shouldn’t be polite and let old Beta vent a little, if it was a choice between that and him discharging bullets. The man’s acne may have occasioned an unhappy adolescence and chronic low self-esteem. Watson wanted to help Beta feel better about himself, manage his anger, talk about his feelings.
“You guys got wires on?” asked Myrna. “Christ, you might as well pull out those gold badges and use ’em for tiepins. Undercover from Hell to breakfast, Joe.”
“Lady,” said Alpha, “we ain’t cops. We work for some friends of Jimmy Whitlow. We can’t get to him anymore, because the feds took him to Minnesota.”
“Cops, robbers, meter readers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, good fathers, war veterans,” said Myrna. “I got no idea. I take it you ain’t showing IDs. You want to tell us something? We’ll listen and see does it make sense, but we don’t know anything about any friends of Jimmy Whitlow. And we don’t know sheep shit from Tootsie Rolls about anybody paying anybody’s lawyer fees.”
Alpha’s shoes creaked when he shifted his weight and rolled his shoulders like a gorilla, except that he was too swollen around the middle to be a primate; he and his brother were more like dark polar bears, but their thickness and ursine stolidity seemed to be animated by intelligences a rung above gorilloid.
“I’ll be brief,” Alpha said, as politely as a salesperson making a cold call. “Tell Jimmy Whitlow we are missing the delivery. And we need to know who took it. Him? Or her? Or somebody else? Because until we find that out, we ain’t paying one dollar for nobody’s lawyer fees.”
Myrna put one hand to her forehead and the other out in mock protest. “Whoa. Too much, too fast for me. Joe, get a pen and write this stuff down. A delivery of something, you say? And somebody paying lawyer fees?”
“I didn’t say that,” said Alpha. “I said nobody is going to pay a dollar until we get back what’s missing and find out who took it.”
Myrna froze and mulled that one over for all of second. “Oh,” she said, fetching her cigarette from the ashtray for a puff. “I thought you were trying to say somebody had paid up Jimmy Whitlow’s lawyer fees. We still owe Dr. Green a lot of money, and we just bought ourselves a pretrial appeal.” Her voice dropped as she artfully slipped the name into her sentence. Her manner was casual, but she glanced through smoke and watched Alpha’s response.
“I said,” Alpha repeated, flushing slightly, “we don’t pay one dollar of lawyer fees until we get a straight
story and both briefcases.” Then he bowed slightly and asked, “Who’s Dr. Green?” His manner was deferential, as if he would be the first to admit that he might not have the right to know.
Watson was beginning to understand that these were bad guys who had been to charm school, where they had been trained to present the best possible front at all times, the better to conceal malignant hatreds and ugly social agendas. If they could all go out for drinks and dinner, Watson would probably go home convinced that some synergistic mix of hatred and patriotism was the answer to our nation’s problems.
Myrna took a long look at what she could see of Alpha’s face, then she smacked herself in the head with her palm. “I am up-fucking big time,” she said. “Dr. Green is our expert in another case. Right, Joe? What is it, that prisoners’ rights case, ain’t it?
Joe nodded.
“Ai, yi, yi,” said Myrna. “So many cases. Sorry, boys, I get them mixed up.”
“You are one of them free appointment lawyers, right?” Alpha asked, turning suddenly in Joe’s direction. “Jimmy ain’t paying you, is he? Buck ain’t giving you money, is he?”
Watson glanced at Myrna. “The court appointed me to represent James Whitlow,” said Joe.
“What about you?” said Alpha, wheeling his mirror shades in Myrna’s direction. “I guess we pretty well know you don’t work for nothing.”
Myrna blew a ribbon of smoke in Alpha’s direction. “Joe’s a buddy. He used to work for me. I’m helping him out. Giving him some advice. That OK with you?”
Alpha set his jaw and said, “We got word that Jimmy needed money for investigators and experts and such. We can’t help Jimmy Whitlow with lawyer fees until we find out what happened to the delivery.”
“Happened?” asked Myrna.
The two visored heads turned together again.
“When Jimmy was in Des Peres County,” said Alpha, “we asked him what happened to the briefcases, and he told us his wife put them in the trunk of his car after the … person died, and before the cops came.”
“No shit?” said Myrna.
“Jimmy said she said she put them in the trunk of the car,” inserted Beta, who was apparently eager to display his alertness to the nuances of hearsay. “He didn’t actually see her put them in the car. He was in the house. He didn’t see what she done with them.”
Alpha’s shoes creaked again when he turned to look at Beta, using body language meant to convince his junior partner that his next interruption would be his last.
“Jimmy claims he told her to put the briefcases in the trunk,” said Alpha by way of clarification. “So then we went to Miss Mary. And we said, ‘Where’s the briefcases?’ And she said, ‘Jimmy put them in the trunk of the car.’ ”
“Pretty easy so far,” said Myrna. “Sounds like the briefcases are in the trunk of the car.”
“Were in the trunk, maybe,” said Alpha. “The car got towed and Miss Mary had to go get it out. So we offered to follow her when she went to fetch it. She ran into some trouble there because it weren’t registered and she had to dig around back at the house to find the title. Next day, we followed her back out to get the car and sort of helped her look in the trunk, where we found one empty briefcase.”
Beta flourished the black leather briefcase, popped the locks on it, and splayed it open on Myrna’s desk.
“Empty,” he said. “Nothing in it but a fucking calculator.”
Watson saw a device with a liquid crystal display and a keypad protruding from the flap in the divider. It was no calculator, but it looked familiar. He’d seen it before, or maybe a picture of it. A news photo?
“So we got how many missing briefcases?” asked Myrna. “Two? Three? Joe, are you getting this down? We gonna have to send a message from these gentlemen to Jimmy Whitlow.”
Joe grabbed a legal pad and mumbled, “He says she says she put them in the trunk of the car. Three briefcases.”
“I never said it was three briefcases,” said Alpha. “It’s two briefcases.” He turned and looked at his companion. “Well, really I guess we are talking about one briefcase. That there is the other one, which we found in the trunk of the car, but there ain’t nothing in it. Which means somebody put everything into one briefcase and took it out of the car, or maybe never even put it in the car.”
“Stop right there,” said Myrna. “What car?”
The heads turned together.
“We got Jimmy’s car,” said Alpha. “We got one briefcase. But there ain’t nothing in it. All of it is missing, and we want it back.”
“Got that, Joe?” asked Myrna. “They want all of it back.”
Alpha bristled, apparently reviewing the conversation so far and concluding he’d said too much.
“Tell Jimmy Whitlow, no lawyer money until we get it back with a straight story about what happened. If not, he better be damn sure he don’t know where it is.”
“You bet,” said Myrna. “And we will tell Jimmy Whitlow everything you told us to tell him. Is there a number he can call?”
Alpha stared, too dumb to tell whether Myrna was being smart with him. “He knows how to reach us,” he said.
Watson cleared his throat and carefully acknowledged Beta with a deferential glance before addressing Alpha. “If the cops had the car towed, maybe they took whatever was in the briefcases. Is that possible?”
Both men stiffened, and their faces blanked in the throes of radical new ideas.
“Uh,” said Alpha, “we don’t know for sure, but we don’t think it was the cops who had the car towed.”
“Why?” jeered Myrna. “Because they didn’t send you a fucking letter? If the cops took it, they are probably looking for the guys who are looking for whatever is missing. Or maybe they are asking Mary Whitlow about what they found in the trunk of her car. And maybe she is telling them that you are looking for what they got out of the trunk of the car. Anything is possible.”
“What about Buck?” asked Alpha. “Have you talked to Buck?”
“Buck?” said Myrna. “Who’s Buck?”
Alpha looked at Beta, then bore down on Myrna. “Lady, I said we ain’t cops. So cut the crap. Mary Whitlow claims that Buck talked to Jimmy about all of this. And that means we want to talk to Buck. But it seems that Buck is suddenly out of town. So, if Buck calls you, you tell him to call us.”
“Buck,” said Myrna flatly.
Alpha fixed his gaze on Myrna. “Buck ain’t paying you, is he?”
“Nobody pays me,” said Myrna. “As soon as they do, I’m gonna get myself a real office instead of this shithole.”
“We figure he might call you because you got him out of trouble last time,” said Alpha.
Myrna shrugged and glanced at Joe. “Whatever you say, gentlemen. If anybody named Buck calls we will tell him two big guys are looking for him.”
Alpha motioned toward the door and let Beta go first. Then he grabbed the doorknob, turned, and said, “And if we don’t hear from Jimmy and Buck real soon, we will come back here.”
The door shut. Myrna heaved a big sigh through pursed lips and puffed cheeks. They both tiptoed to the door and listened to the men grunting to each other and leaving through the back door.
“Fuck me a new asshole,” she whispered.
Watson was shaking all over and wondering where he could find some alcohol, like right away. Then, he would need a phone to call Sandra and tell her she had been right. Yes, honey! Darling! You were right! I have endangered myself, my career, my home, my children. I am going back to Stern, Pale on my hands and knees. I temporarily lost my mind. Synaptic brownout. I was not myself. I was beside myself, watching myself. Somebody else was moving my entire body.
“Militia, right?” hissed Watson.
“Maybe patriots would be a better word,” she said, “since, according to Harper, your client is one of them.”
“Who’s paying us if they aren’t?” asked Watson. “And you,” he said, anger getting the better of fear. “You’re Buck’s lawyer.
You sent me that letter.”
Myrna looked away and mumbled something, then marched over and grabbed the Gitanes from her desktop.
She looked at him hard, wrinkled her nose, and took a deep breath.
“Joey, sit down,” she said, as she walked around to the other side of her desk. “We need to talk a little.”
Her tone suggested they had more than a little to talk about, and he didn’t like the partneresque maneuver of retreating to the control side of a desk.
“I told you how the criminal bar sticks together when the prosecutors and the press and the IRS come around wanting to examine our billing records and seeking privileged information about who is paying who. Well …”
“Well what?” asked Watson. “I’m not a prosecutor or the IRS.”
“Buck sorta called me after Jimmy Whitlow got arrested. You were still down at Stern, Pale.”
“Buck called you?”
“Yeah,” said Myrna, “because this friend of his had been arrested for killing a black. Money might be available, but it would be the kind of money the government couldn’t know about. I couldn’t take the case, because then the government might try to hook Jimmy up with Buck and the paintball warriors, because awhile ago I represented Buck on a little weapons charge, which only happened because Buck ended up in a building that had some rocket-propelled grenades and a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile in it. God as my witness, they weren’t his. He didn’t even know they were there! Anyway the government floated some conspiracy shit, trying to say Buck was one of these Eagle Warriors or whatever. And me and the other lawyers got them off. Case closed.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” asked Watson.
“I didn’t know!” she said. “Buck said it was just a regular fuckup. Crime of passion. No militia business. Cash money. But we needed to be careful because …”
Brain Storm Page 36