Result: Instead of employing the firm of Smith & Wesson, I would have consulted Stern, Pale & Covin. Instead of sitting in the jaws of Hell looking at life in prison or death by lethal injection like you, I’d be barbecuing in the backyard with my kid in Texas. The little deaf guy would be attending the local oral school and learning to lip-read, the African-American would be in jail awaiting trial, the wife would be destitute and in agony. All would be right with the world.
That’s what I would do.
A
rthur’s flame phone message of the night before left him two choices: He could go in early, grovel for forgiveness, and have his arm twisted to make Whitlow take the plea, or he could sleep an hour longer, phone in on the way to see Whitlow, and avoid a face-to-face encounter. He chose the latter. He waited in the turn lane with a crush of Ladue commuters, looking at freshly groomed occupants in nice cars on their way to the office, fairly sure that he was the only commuter whose work was taking him into a secure conference room with a murderer.
How to tell Whitlow about the sucker plea offer from Harper? Suppose he advised him not to take it and the jury came back with death? The explanation might be a little strained. “James, buddy! Never in a million years did I think they’d do that! Myrna Schweich said no way would they send a white man to the chair for shooting a black in bed with his wife.”
Instead of Arthur, he got Arthur’s voice mail.
“Arthur, it’s Joe,” he said, as Watson maneuvered the Honda onto the inner beltline. “Got your message late last night. I … will talk to you this morning around ten-thirty, eleven, if it’s convenient, after I get back from Des Peres. As for Mr. Harper, he called me late yesterday afternoon”
—
Lie, it was early or mid
—“I tried to call you, but you were … on the phone, I guess.”
Bald mendacity!
“I’m seeing Mr. Whitlow this morning to recommend the government’s offer to him.”
Recommend rejection, that is, or had he misspoken?
“I will also recommend Dr. Palmquist and the neuropsychological testing, and then I will come straight to the office. I’ll keep the phone and the communicator with me, of course,”
even if I happen to let the batteries die.
Maybe he had simply made a mistake, Watson thought, the kind normal people are allowed to make, because they are not being paid an entry-level salary of a hundred grand a year to not make mistakes. So far, these lapses seemed to happen only when he was working for Arthur, perhaps because he was unconsciously rebelling.
“I know people in the U.S. Attorney’s office.”
The timbre of Arthur’s recollected voice tingled in the roots of his hair.
“I’m going to tell you this once. I want to know the instant anyone contacts you with an offer. Hear me?”
At the Des Peres County Correctional Center, the same overweight black woman sat at her computer inside the octagonal kiosk of steel screens; she had another sumptuous arrangement of cornrows beaded in new colors—burnt sienna, fuchsia, indigo, madras, and mauve—and a new game of Microsoft Hearts on the screen. New wallpaper on the screen of her virtual desktop, too—a Kente cloth background pattern with Africa outlined in the video-graphic equivalent of a watermark. She had an impeccable sense of design and color, which might explain her lack of feeling for a job that trapped her in such drab surroundings.
This time, she didn’t bother to look up. She played the last three hearts in her screen hand, and said, “Shit,” when software opponent Terri took the last heart trick with a nine over her seven. “Your mama makes housecalls with a mattress,” she muttered to the monitor.
Watson cleared his throat in an attempt to call attention to himself. She clicked out to the desktop and into her database.
“Name?” she said.
“Joseph Watson,” he said.
“Prisoner?” She tapped at the keyboard, leaned over, and puckered up to a straw smudged with lipstick and stuck into a can of Coke.
“James Whitlow.”
A burst of typing, then she stared blankly into her screen and rolled a wad of purple gum between her tongue and her gold-filled incisors.
“Ain’t here,” she said, retracting the gum and snapping it with her molars.
“Beg pardon?” said Watson. “James Whitlow. I sat in that room with him the day before yesterday. The prisoner’s name is James Whitlow. W-H-I-T-L-O-W.”
The gum reappeared, formed into a purple bladder by her tongue. He watched it slowly inflate—its surface speckled here and there with streaks and flakes of crumbling rose-colored lipstick—until it burst in a muffled explosion. Her mouth opened and, as she typed the name again on the keyboard, a muscular tongue emerged and rounded up the shreds of detonated gum from around her lips.
“W-H-I-T-L-O-W,” she said—in a special tone of voice meant just for him. Then she stared into the screen. “Ain’t here,” she said again, glancing up once with a look that gave him to understand that she had no intention of doing any more typing for him.
“My prisoner is not here,” said Watson. “OK, I guess that means he’s been, what? Transferred? Executed?”
The woman barely frowned and put on another look, this one letting him know that providing therapy for his mental illnesses was not part of her job description. She shifted her comfortable, government-fed girth in her chair and stared at him, patiently waiting for him to shut up and go away.
“I am the attorney representing Mr. James Whitlow, who is being held here on a murder charge. If my client is not here, I would like to know where he is, and then I would like to speak with him as soon as possible.”
The woman slowly shook her head and stared at him through the wire mesh, her eyes as placid as a grazing cow’s. Closer scrutiny revealed that she did appear to notice him, maybe even observe him with passing interest, as if his ability to get worked up over something like a prisoner’s whereabouts were a rare and fascinating personality disorder—nothing she intended to do anything about but an interesting quirk in the otherwise tedious spectacle of daily human depravity.
Watson had an almost irresistible urge to open her personality’s config.sys file, REM-out the line that was causing her intense indifference, and reboot her. But they were addressing each other across the insecure, organic network known as regular human interaction, so he did not have access to her system files. If only.
“My client, please,” he said, cycling into busy-wait mode, watching another purple bubble explode onto her lips.
She dandled the gum between her tongue and teeth a few more times
and regarded him with a look of vague mistrust. The purple wad took another trip or two around the inside of her mouth, whereupon she concluded that the recent turn of events might call for a syllable or two. She took a big breath and shifted her weight again, then said, “Reggie.”
On the other side of the wired Plexiglas barrier, a large, thick-necked man in a uniform lifted his pumpkin-size head out of a file cabinet and sauntered out into the octagonal cage.
“It’s a lawyer,” she said, eyeballing Watson, the manageable nuisance on the other side of the screen from her, “askin’ ’bout a prisoner who has been turned to the Marshals Service.”
“Can’t do that, sir,” the man said cheerfully. “Once they go to the U.S. Marshals Service, ain’t nobody can ask about them for twenty-four hours. That’s the rules. Call the Marshals Service if you want, but they’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Call the … Marshals Service,” Watson repeated vacantly. “You mean they took him somewhere?”
The woman hissed under her breath, then stuck out a tongue sheathed in purple and began inflating another bubble.
“OK,” said Watson looking helplessly from her to the smiling man in the uniform. “James Whitlow is not here, and the Marshals Service has taken him somewhere else?”
The woman shook her head in disbelief and returned to her screen, pointing and clicking to somewhere as far away as possible from Watson.
“That ain’t necessarily so,” said the man. “You see, he’s been turned over to the Marshals Service. Once that happens we don’t know nothing about him. He could be here with the marshals, he could be in California with the marshals, he could be in court with the marshals, or he could be on the moon with the marshals. Not to mention the marshals could have taken him somewhere and turned him over to someone else. What we’re saying is we can’t supply any information about him for twenty-four hours once he has been turned to the Marshals Service. That’s a rule.”
Watson looked from Ms. Microsoft Hearts to Reggie, who was still smiling sincerely, with a look that said, “Ain’t this a bullshit world we live in? But we all got rules to go by.”
Watson’s brain had been trained to attack bullshit rules, but first he needed to know the bullshit source and authority for the bullshit rule. Was this a prison bureau rule? A municipal ordinance? An administrative
guideline, a state statute, a federal regulation? Was this something that had been read into the U.S. Constitution by the Supreme Court? Probably a product of the doctrine of original intention. Clear as a glass nose on a plain face. The Founding Fathers didn’t want anyone asking about prisoners who had been turned to the Marshals Service.
If, as Myrna Schweich had opined, he needed to make the government do its job, he was so far failing miserably. He stared into the cage, then beyond the wired Plexiglas, into the bowels of the prison itself, and realized that criminal law should be denominated as a separate profession. What did the incarceration of violent human beings have to do with misleading statements in a stock prospectus? What did murder have to do with copyright and intellectual property analysis of Anthrax Avenger?
Here he was trying to be a criminal lawyer, and he couldn’t even find his client. The game was too tough, and there were no Options or Customize or Settings or Properties menus to pull down and select a preferable state of affairs.
He implored Ms. Microsoft Hearts with a desperate look.
“Bye,” she said, without looking up from Terri’s two-of-clubs lead.
His shoulders sagged on the way back out to his Honda. Highway 40 was jammed—his car was stuck in traffic, his thoughts mired in ennui laced with anxiety. He called in to check voice mail and found a message from Myrna Schweich, defense lawyer and criminal-law big sister.
“How’s the town’s favorite hate criminal? Sorry to cut you off the other day. It was an emergency.
Was
an emergency, is right. I told my guy to stay in jail. He said my job was to get him out of jail, and he fired me. He hired another lawyer, who got him out of jail. Now? He’s dead. So, I have time. Mary Whitlow’s rape-slash-affair sounds funnier every time I read it. Call me.”
Watson tried her on the communicator and got a busy signal, which meant she had two lines going at once and her receptionist was on the third one. Harper’s phone call had put the fear of the federal government in him. He was scheduled to publicly bump heads with an Assistant United States Attorney—a seasoned pro who seemed to have both the facts and the law on his side. Meanwhile, his opponent’s employer—the federal government—had somehow made off with his client. His big-firm associate’s instincts told him to seek the advice of a
senior partner, but that would lead to Arthur, a guilty plea for Whitlow, and life in prison for both of them, though Watson’s would be the figurative prison of conscience.
So far, the only person on Watson’s side was a loopy, luscious brain scientist into monkey sex and neuro–hand jobs. His Honda crept forward in a continental drift of traffic until he was looking at the Clayton exit, the same one he used to take to get to … Myrna Schweich! Criminal-law big sister. She was right there! All he had to do was pull off and go see her. He was due at Arthur’s, but if he stayed on 40, it would take him an hour to get downtown anyway. Why not jump off for a consult, and take another route downtown?
Her office was in a plain, rectangular two-story in Clayton that housed dentists’ offices, small-time collection agencies, and a mishmash of solo practitioners who shared a pool of receptionists and secretaries. Watson said hi to Tilly, Myrna’s receptionist, who called Myrna and waved him on back to his sentimental haunt, the office where he had written his first appellate brief.
“Lawyers for hate criminals!” she said. “Joey, we miss you.”
Myrna Schweich tipped back in a swivel chair and tried to put her Nikes up on her desk, but her legs were too short, so she opened a lower desk drawer and propped them there instead. A lavender headband pulled her orange hair back and framed a faceful of freckles. She had a child-size mouth lipsticked in an Urban Decay hue somewhere between bruise violet and black bile. Black harem pants hung off of her legs, and her black T-shirt had white block letters above and below her breasts that said:
FUCK ART
,
LET
’
S DANCE
.
“So? You won’t work for me, because the wife wants the big bucks. Now you come crawling in here on your hands and knees for advice? How’s the money downtown? The money’s good, but it costs a lot, right? Didn’t I tell you?”
She had the criminal lawyer’s knack for reading the mind’s construction in the face; she already knew why he had come.
“Debt is my gestalt,” he said. “My worldview, my hierarchy of need, my reason to be. Making more money doesn’t help. It gets spent. I have a bonus coming up. Spent.”
“I know some great personal bankruptcy lawyers,” she said. “I think you need one of those financial psychologists.”
After she heard the blow-by-blow of Harper’s phone call, she took a pull on a mid-morning Heineken, then fished a cigarette loose from a
pack of Gitanes and pushed it across her desk at him. She picked up a small ceramic skull from her desktop and flicked a dial in the socket where the nose belonged. A tiny blue flame appeared at the apex of the skull. She touched it to her Gitane and puffed.
“It won’t comfort you to know this,” she said, “but I routinely kick Harper’s ass all over federal district court, and I could do so even if I was legless and strapped in a wheelchair.”