The judge continued talking, “ ‘And then,’ I told Doris, ‘Mr. Harper will tell me why. But before he does, my chambers will fall silent. Awe will break out everywhere like the calm before the rash, I mean like the balm before the storm, like the hush that will settle over all Creation before the Second Coming. And Doris said to me, ‘Oh, Whit, stop being so dramatic! Get to the point!’ And I said, ‘No, Doris. You don’t understand! Forty years I’ve waited for the kind of argument Mr. Harper is going to make to me. Forty years I’ve wandered in barren deserts of legal dust and sand, parched by duplicity and desiccating deception. Forty years I’ve waited for a messiah! I want to behold the promised land of the new jurisprudence! And Mr. Michael Harper is going to show it to me. He will be my Moses. I am distressed! Only Michael Harper can comfort me. And when death comes for me, Mr. Harper can nod his head wherever he is and say to himself, ‘I did right by Judge Stang.’ ”
Two more puffs on his cigar, and a longer interlude of silence.
Harper again drew a breath to speak.
“ ‘Then and only then,’ I said, ‘will Mr. Harper speak. And as he speaks, my heart will beat faster, my eyeballs will fall out of my head, because I will hear an argument from Mr. Michael Harper that will restore my faith in jurisprudence and renew my belief in the fundamental goodwill of mankind. In a single stroke this argument of his will unite social policy with the dignity of the human individual, and it will bring the high concerns of the Constitution together with the lowest municipal ordinance. This argument will be so ingenious, profound, and
aglow with particles of sweetness and light streaming forth from the beacon of Reason, that I will stagger out of my recliner and fall to my rickety knees. Sir William Blackstone, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Learned Hand will walk out of their graves and fall to their knees right next to me! I’ll bathe in the light of Mr. Harper’s stunning insight and marvel my fool head off that a lawyer and officer of my court is destined to take his place forever as one of history’s greatest jurisprudential scholars.”
He stopped, placed both of his gnarled hands on the arms of his chair and waited.
“I want to go home and tell Doris I was right. I want to sit down at my dinner table tonight and say, ‘It happened! I heard a legal argument that has justified the last forty years of my life.’ ”
Harper set his briefcase on the floor and put his hands over his ears.
“I’m offering a single count of manslaughter,” he said.
W
hen Watson left Judge Stang’s chambers, he was no longer a law school graduate with an appointed case. He was a Colossus bestride the Courthouse of the Future. He marched along the corridors of power, down gleaming hallways paneled in limestone and textured marble—a gladiator triumphant in the Coliseum for the New Millennium—the Thomas F. Eagleton United States Federal Courthouse. He didn’t see any other prosecutors—they were all probably cowering in little bureaucratic cubbyholes, lest the mighty Watson crush them under his heel.
Maybe I’ll give old Gerry a call and let him know how the settlement turned out
, he thought. If Myrna were here, she’d fetch him a wheelbarrow and help him hoist these two big fleshy cannonballs banging around between his legs. Major wood. Instrument of domination.
He entered an elevator and leaned against a cloth panel framed in cherry mullions, sharing his enlarging personal space with other lawyers, courthouse personnel, jurors, and the like—commoners who still had no idea who was standing in their midst. He had to stop himself from clearing his throat and announcing to the group, “Do you realize I just vanquished the government of the United States of America!? Took them to school! Facial humiliation. By myself!” He felt like the
young Bill Gates leaving one of those fateful meetings with IBM executive James Cannavino. Big Blue, eviscerated by a twenty-four-year-old college dropout and turbo geek. J. Random Hacker triumphant.
Kicked their ass! With authority. Eat flaming death, Government Warlords! I am CarnageMaster!
Best of all, it was not multimedia with MMX goggles and Active-X plug-ins. It was real. Blood, flesh, bone, and Real Money was looming somewhere on the horizon, he could smell it. His brain was thinking maybe it should insure itself with Lloyds of London.
In the main lobby, he began humming some giddy combination of the Emperor concerto and a tune from his high school days, “Take the Skinheads Bowling,” by Camper Van Beethoven. He took a right and headed for the shuttle elevators and the parking garage. He glanced up and saw the snack bar and newsstand concessions where he had paused that fateful day for “refreshments,” as Arthur had put it. His former boss now seemed a diminutive, mediocre sort of lawyer, lost in Watson’s new long shadow, and it seemed a fitting bookend moment to stop in for another Coke—hoist a beverage in honor of victory and in memory of bondage forsworn.
The same blind cashier was settled on a stool behind the counter, his fingertips skimming another Braille manuscript, his long white cane against the wall.
“Afternoon,” said samurai Watson, selecting a twenty-ounce Coke and setting it on the counter. “Coke,” he said. “A big one.”
Once that bonus comes around
, he thought,
I should maybe pick up a hundred shares of Coke.
He could check with R.J. about that, make him proud that his working fool son-in-law was looking to invest some seed money.
The blind man punched buttons on the register keypad.
Watson hoisted his wallet—swollen with twenty-dollar bills from Buck and his lawyer. He pulled out a nice, new starchy one and handed it to the blind cashier, who took it, rubbed it with his fingertips, and paused.
“I’ll take some cashews, too,” said Watson, snagging a tubular bag near the register and plopping it on the counter.
The blind registrar frowned and rubbed the bill again, while Watson looked over the magazine racks—
Esquire, Glamour, People, George
—all plastered with glossy photos of busty women in slinky dishabille. Babes built for comfort, with billowy bosoms on willowy frames. Elegant enchantresses and spellbinding voluptuaries. Watson heard a beep, but
paid no attention because he was soaking up high-tone female flesh by the eyeful.
Ain’t it funny how the men’s magazines and the women’s magazines
both
have half-naked babes prominently displayed on the covers?
Call your sociology professor. Probably
means
something. Not that he cared what it meant. He only knew that most of these bedizened silk foxes probably wanted to mate with the kind of guy who got paid hourly wads of cash for stepping on the necks of federal prosecutors. “Alpha! We want you!” they seemed to be saying, displaying cleavages, pursing and pouting their parted red lips, cooching, all but presenting with lordosis. Then the magazine puzzle solved itself in one of those flashes to the new brain that his client was so fond of describing. The men want to
mate
with those alluring babes, and the women want to
be
those alluring babes. Heck of a deal. See Henry Adams,
The Virgin & the Dynamo.
See also Marcel Duchamp,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
“Sir,” said the blind man, a troubled look on his face.
“Yeah,” said CarnageMaster Watson.
The warrior thirsts! What mundane complications could possibly obstruct the slaking of said thirst?
“The machine is indicating that your bill is … defective,” the man said politely. “Do you have another one?”
Watson took the bill back. It wasn’t wrinkled, or old, or dirty, or torn, like the bills you can’t get change machines to take. It was a perfectly good twenty-dollar bill. Rather than press the issue with a blind guy, he figured it would be easier just to fetch out another, and he did. He had plenty, for once—dozens right there in his billfold, not to mention ripstop envelopes with plenty more out in the back of the car.
“Here’s another one,” said Watson, placing the bill in the man’s hand. Then his eyes went foraging again among the glossy boobular magazine covers. He didn’t even hear the machine beep again, probably because the male visual cortex was orange or hot pink with activity, and auditory was cool blue or purple.
“Sir,” said the cashier.
“Yeah,” said Watson, tearing his optic nerves from a curvaceous straw-blond vixen on the cover of
Esquire.
The man was handing back the second bill, as Watson thought,
That fucking machine needs service, man. If it wasn’t such a pain in the ass I might buy a few of these magazines.
“Sir,” said the cashier politely, “the machine is signaling that neither
of these bills is genuine, and I can tell you that they don’t feel genuine either. On the second floor, upstairs here in this building, there are Secret Service currency experts. They are part of the Treasury Department, along with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They handle currency matters. If you take these up there …”
Watson looked down at the wad of twenties from Buck’s lawyer that was fattening his billfold and went into system hang.
THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL ACTION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN. PLEASE CLOSE THIS SESSION AND REBOOT YOUR MACHINE.
“It happens from time to time,” the man explained in a kind voice. “These counterfeit bills get loose in circulation. The Secret Service will want to know about them. Just go down the hallway there to your right, and back up to the second floor.”
Watson’s mouth was still open. His fingertips rubbed the bills in his wallet.
PRESS CONTROL-ALT-DELETE TO END THIS TASK AND REBOOT YOUR SYSTEM. YOU WILL LOSE ANY UNSAVED INFORMATION IN ALL ACTIVE PROGRAMS.
He needed a Vulcan Nerve Pinch, a three-fingered keyboard salute and warm boot.
Abort? Retry? Fail?
“Son of a …” he began.
“Don’t worry,” the man said. “They usually replace them with genuine currency, but first you have to fill out the proper forms, explaining where you got the bad ones, so they can try to trace them and find the counterfeiters. In my opinion, you got counterfeit there, but it’s good quality product. Very good paper. It feels very close to genuine texture, just a little too slippery or oily. You could talk me into taking them. Fortunately, the machine never makes a mistake. Not since I’ve been here. Fifteen? Sixteen years. If Bessie were here, she could tell you.”
“Thanks,” said Watson. “I’m really sorry about that.” He put the Coke back in the cooler and the nuts back in the box. “I’ll just head on up and turn these two rascals over to the proper authorities.”
“Second floor,” said the man. “They’re professionals. They’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah,” said Watson. “Thanks again.”
Once in the hallway, he glanced over his shoulder with a criminal’s furtive terror, wondering if the guy would call the marshals at the security checkpoint just to be sure.
Counterfeit!
He felt his warlord’s ballocks shrivel into cowardly cullions. Charges unspooled before his eyes in the
bulleted, numbered paragraphs of an indictment with his and Myrna’s names captioned at the top: counterfeiting, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, tampering, possession of a controlled substance, and of course,
conspiracy to commit hate crimes
, by participating in the illegal actions of a criminal enterprise.… The babes back in the magazine rack were probably thinking,
Gross me out! A criminal!
He heaved a big sigh when his Honda cleared the tollbooth at the ramp up from the underground parking. Then he pulled over on the side of the street and yanked out the
United States Sentencing Commission Guidelines
and frantically looked up “Offenses Involving Counterfeit Bearer Obligations of the United States Government.” Base offense of nine, which meant he could get anywhere from six months to five years. At the next stoplight, he massaged the skin around his skull and tried to knead this crisis gently into his brain.
Memory served up Whitlow’s quavering voice from the first interview:
“If I could just get to my car somehow, or if Buck could get to my car. I know I could get some money.”
No shit, Jimmy! Elvin probably brought a load of counterfeit, and Mary had real money to pay for it. The VTD printout of Mary’s voice scrolled by on his internal monitor, “
The lessons are too expense if
[expensive?],” and Elvin typing back:
“I DON’T MAKE MORE LESSON BUT THIS LESSON YOU STILL WANT? FOUR FOR ONE? THE SAME AS ALWAYS?”
Four counterfeit twenties for one genuine? Acrobat Printing & Graphics. Elvin Brawley, the “locally prominent artist, an engraver, a craftsman, a black William Blake.”
Myrna’s voice recollected:
“We still don’t know what his priors were, because Dirt’s source in the Bureau is on vacation. We should get it well before trial, but in the meantime, we don’t know shit about him except he was deaf and into engraving and printing and computer graphics.”
What about Harper? Even Harper had said it, hadn’t he?
“You don’t want to cut your baby teeth workin’ for these jackals. They run guns, fraud schemes, money laundries
, counterfeit
rings. They got silos in southern Missouri full of explosives.”
Mary Whitlow’s TDD printouts:
“Ready for lesson 12. I have the payment.”
Or,
“Elvin, please come for another sign language lesson. I will have the money.”
Or how about his esteemed client:
“He weren’t no fuckin’ sign language instructor, lawyer. I told you that.”
They probably had code words for everything, in case federal agents or the Criminal Investigation Division were listening. Automatic
weapons and grenade launchers were probably referred to as parsnips and kumquats, and how about a couple of those heat-seeking, shoulder-launched, surface-to-air summer squash, while we’re at it? But nobody wants to get paid in counterfeit, so neither Buck nor Jimmy told their lawyers about that. What was in the briefcases, Buck? Hate literature? I’ll bite. Sounds plausible. Mary was just wanting her half of the hate literature back, I get it!
Myrna’s voice again emerging from an archived dot-wav audio file:
“According to Buck, this was just a regular drop-off, until Mary Whitlow set Jimmy up for murder.”