Brain Storm (16 page)

In the lower right-hand corner, window four, his personal information manager was open, the cursor bar highlighting the entry for Dr. Rachel Palmquist. He saw his notes, which he’d entered after his first meeting in Arthur’s office:
Neuroscientist, potential expert witness, mentioned Sup. Ct. hate crime case of Wisconsin v. Mitchell, divorced, knows Arthur, major babe
 … with the dialogue box open and the software prompt: “
DIAL WORK NUMBER FOR THIS ENTRY
?”

The program waited patiently for him to click
YES
or
NO
. The stark options didn’t do justice to the complex moral and professional implications of calling the good doctor just because he wanted to see her, to hear her voice, to visit her for the second time in one day. He needed a
PERHAPS
or
IT DEPENDS
, or an Ethical Event Planner, which could display projected marital repercussions with a click of his pointing device.

“Are you ready to be faithful?”
he recalled his father asking him, when Joe had told him he wanted to marry Sandra.

His father was probably thinking about the revolving ensemble of nubile babes Watson had been parading around since high school.

“I think so,” Joe had said, vividly recalling how the question had caught him off-guard. He had assumed that fidelity would be a natural by-product of marriage, not something he had to be concerned about. But his father seemed worried about whether Watson was capable of it.

“Being faithful to your wife and your children is not optional,” his father had said. “It’s required. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life thinking about how you committed adultery. My advice would be to make damn sure you’re ready to be faithful to her. Otherwise you’ll end up divorced.”

Watson recalled his father’s chilly warning and recalled thinking at the time about how certain women seemed to produce gravitational fields or tractor beams, and how, once touched by their force fields, he fell into an orbit, where it was almost impossible to think about anything else. Dr. Palmquist was one of these celestial bodies—the first one he’d been alone with in a while. Probably best to stay away from her. But he couldn’t, could he? What if his client needed her? What if he was already in orbit?

Palmquist’s entry was linked to the Whitlow file, and a click took him to his notes from his first client interview, where the words
“Lucy Martinez”
and
“Fort Sheridan Base Towing & Vehicle Impound Lot”
scrolled by
and caught his eye.
Why not?
thought Watson. And who knows? Maybe it would lead to exculpating evidence. He called information and got the number.

A woman answered: “Vehicle Impound.”

“Yes,” said Watson. “I’m looking for a 1992 Ford Taurus. A gray one with no plates. I’m told it was towed seven or eight days ago from base housing at Fort Sheridan.”

“Hold on,” she said. “It’s in the system. A woman came for it yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh. Right. That would be my wife. I’m out of town,” Watson said, “and, um, I haven’t talked to her since yesterday. But she asked me to call and find out what we needed to do to get it back. If she already got it, then never mind.”

“She don’t have it yet,” said the woman, “it’s still here. It’s got no plates and an expired registration. Your wife was here saying she needed to get your briefcases out of the trunk because they had your credit cards and checkbook in them and she would need those to pay the towing charges and register the car, but she didn’t have the title papers. We can’t give her access to the vehicle unless she shows us title and proof of ownership. She said she was going back home to try and find them.”

“Oh,” said Watson. “I see. So she’s coming back for the car then?”

“She needs title and a photo ID,” said the woman. “Until that happens the vehicle has no owner, because it ain’t registered and has no plates. When we ran the Vehicle Identification Number through the computers we got an expired registration. Either you or her needs to come in with title papers, and then you will have to register the vehicle and get new plates before you can drive it off the lot.”

“I see,” said Watson. “So the vehicle is in the impound lot.”

“That’s right, sir,” said the woman.

“It’s not being held for any other reason?” asked Watson.

“Title and a photo ID,” said the woman, “and you will have to register it, pay any back taxes and licensing fees. Then, it’s yours.”

“Thank you,” said Watson, typing the information in his contact database in a window at lower left.

Watson hung up and stared at the phone.
“Your wife was here saying she needed to get your briefcases out of the trunk because they had your credit cards and checkbook in them”?
No time to wonder about that one, because, back in the upper right-hand corner on Westlaw, the Code Orange was
still in progress. He returned to the PIM and selected
YES
for a call to Dr. Palmquist, while his eyes strayed back over to window three, where Stacy was looking like Leda with a swan by the neck. The line was busy.

“Busy?” Nancy Slattery appeared at the door with a flashy striped envelope. “A courier left this at the front desk,” she said, setting the priority envelope on top of the stacked, cross-hatched, sliding piles of paper covering his desk. Then she handed him a diskette. “Survey of state handicap laws and transvestism,” she said. She glanced down at his monitor. “Taking a break?”

“Breaking my back with labor,” said Watson. Using his trackball pointing device, he began at upper right and proceeded counterclockwise to identify the client and matter occupying each window. “One, Gateway Steel, disability laws research. Two, Subliminal Solutions, intellectual property analysis for Anthrax Avenger. Three, People Against Nudity on the Internet and Cyberporn—PANIC—a nonprofit organization filing an amicus curiae brief with an appendix of downloaded graphical samples—it’s work, you see. And over here, window four, my appointed case, U.S. versus Whitlow.”

“True multitasking,” said Nancy.

“I have a program that keeps track of which window I’m in for how long, enabling me to accomplish continuous, interleaved billing.”

“Wired, not tired,” said Nancy as she moved toward the door. “I saw the
Post-Dispatch
piece,” she added, sticking her head out into the hallway and looking both ways, then leaning back into his office. “Don’t plead him out,” she said with a comradely smile. “And, uh, let me know if Stacy has a boyfriend I can bill some time to.”

Adding insult to the ignominy of working for Boron, yet another Arthur memo arrived advising Watson that the management committee had appointed Arthur as the firm’s public relations officer on the Whitlow matter. All outside calls for Watson were to be routed to Arthur’s administrative assistant, who was to supply the standard formulation Watson had read in the
Post-Dispatch.
If contacted by the press, Watson’s instructions were to say only that he was unable to comment on the case at this time.

But that hadn’t stopped the mail. The citizenry had strong feelings about lawyers, especially lawyers who could sit at the defense table with a hate killer. The mail had started trickling in the day after the newspaper ran the first story about his appointment. Some handwritten, some typed, most anonymous, even a couple of E-mails.

The first letter came in a blue envelope, typed on matching blue watermarked bond, no handwriting anywhere:

The second came inside a hand-addressed envelope, but the letter had been typed on lined notebook paper.

He tried Rachel again. Busy. He reread his fan mail with a twinge of anxiety. Concerned Citizen’s prose gave off the odor of a threat—oblique, to be sure, but ardent nevertheless. Was the writer suggesting that he would
show
Watson’s kids how Elvin Brawley’s kids felt? Perhaps help Watson shuffle off his mortal coil, so God could damn his soul to Hell for all eternity? He decided the letter was mostly cathartic anger,
not a threat, which allowed him to resume thinking about Dr. Palmquist again.

If he went back to the Gage Institute he would be late getting home. Very late. Which meant he should sample storm conditions on the home front, perhaps issue a warning; then, later, decide whether to actually go to the institute. He called Sandra at home. She answered, but her voice was promptly drowned out by barking dogs and screaming children.

“Uh, San?”

“Just a minute,” she hissed, “the dogs are chewing holes in the kids’ new clothes.”

Watson held the phone away while his wife screamed at the kids and swatted the dogs with a rolled-up newspaper. Then she screamed at the dogs and swatted the kids with a rolled-up newspaper. He could hear his son, Benjy, yelling over the racket.

She came back on the line, only to be drowned out by the dogs again.

“San, put the dogs outside,” he pleaded.

“You’re the one who wanted a dog,” she said.

“I bought Lilith, one dog,” he said. “You bought Hannibal. Not me.”

“Because no one played with Lilith,” she said. “Everyone just ignored her.” Pause. Long enough for them both to think:
the same way everyone ignores me.
“You can’t buy an animal and ignore it. Now, I feed them. I walk them. I groom them. I worm them. I get the kennel arrangements when we go to the Ozarks.”

More barking and screaming.

“San, a bunch of stuff has come up.”

“You mean, stuff that doesn’t usually come up?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve got that appointed case now, and …”

“You mean, the hate killer?”

“San, he’s not a hate killer. Not the way you think.”

“Did he kill that deaf, black poet? The computer artist?”

Watson paused. “Probably.”

“OK,” she said. “He’s a killer. Now, does he hate black people?”

“Uh,” said Watson.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “He’s a hate killer. Just a minute. Lilith bit Hannibal.”

He held the phone away, until he heard her voice surface again out of bedlam.

“I think I understand,” she said. “You would rather stay down there late working for a hate killer for no pay instead of coming home to eat
dinner with your family. Sheila’s preschool teacher is concerned about her self-esteem. She asked me if the home environment included a strong father figure.”

“San …”

“So what has come up?”

“I—I’m going to be late. That’s why I called.”

“Late?” she said. She dropped the phone on the countertop and screamed some more at the dogs and kids. He heard air whistle by the mouthpiece when she picked it up again. “Late? I thought you said something had come up? And by that I thought you meant something
different
had come up. Late isn’t different. Late is the
same
.”

“San, I …”

“I have to go. Your son is being attacked by your dog. Good-bye.”

She hung up. His gaze fell again on STACY.JPG. Did Stacy yell at her significant other when he worked late? No, Stacy would probably be eternally grateful if he worked late trying to excel at his chosen career so he could bring home plenty of bucks for bigger implants and more interesting computer peripherals. And if things got dull, Stacy could check out the Orkin Man’s computer peripherals.

All of his problems would be solved if he had more time and more money.

He tore the flap of the courier envelope. His PIM announced an external call with two short beeps and opened a window in the foreground, wiping out his view of Stacy’s implants. A dialogue box followed, advising him that the caller’s number did not match any entry in his contact database, so it was not Sandra calling back. He picked up the phone. The only other person he’d given the new number to was …

“Attorney Watson?” said the voice of James Whitlow.

Watson paused. “James?” he said uncertainly, unable to decide what to call his client on such split-second notice, knowing only that a reciprocal “Client Whitlow” would be ludicrous.

“They said you maybe was coming over again early tomorrow morning, and I was wondering about some things.”

“I had planned on tomorrow morning,” said Watson. “What’s up?”

“Well, sir. My health is in big trouble here. I was talking to some of the other prisoners about the living conditions. Like the food, which is making us all sick. Also when it gets hot, they won’t let you take off your shirt, and when it gets cold they won’t give you an extra blanket. I’ve got criminally insane cellmates and they scream all night. Anyway,
some of the other prisoners’ lawyers got them special diets and extra blankets, and I was wondering if I could get me a special diet, like maybe a little meat that don’t give you ptomaine and the trots. Right now I’m getting what the prisoners call fuck-you meat. You ask the help what kind of meat it is and they say, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

“A special diet?” asked Watson, writing “special diet” on a stray legal pad.

“Yeah. That buddy of mine named Buck. Remember Buck? One of those friends of mine that I told you about. When Buck was in prison, we … or, I mean, he got himself a lawyer and sued the warden saying Buck had a constitutional right not to eat preservatives, because he was allergic to them, and so Buck got meat and you could see that it was chicken or beef, instead of the fuck-you, which is kind of like squares of runny yellow soybean loaf with shiny green scales on it.”