Curtis? Adrienne Cope. I’m really sorry about this morning, but… there was an emergency, a sort of a… female thing and, well… everything’s back to normal, now. I’ll reschedule the depo as soon as I get in. And I’ll try to reach you later. Bye!
Then she called Bill Fellowes who, to her surprise, was unaware of the morning’s fiasco. “I just got in myself,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Remember that divorce case you worked on when you were interning with Nelson?”
He thought about it for a moment, then said, “No.”
“I think it was a divorce case. The guy worked for the SEC—”
“Oh, you mean the Brewster case!”
“Right!”
“That was a lot more than ‘a divorce case.’ But, what about it?”
“You had an expert witness—a shrink or something. Knew a lot about memory.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well,” Adrienne said, “I was wondering if I could get his name—”
“Ray Shaw!” Fellowes boomed. “Neuropsychiatrist to the stars!”
“You know where I could find him?”
“Last I looked—Columbia Medical School.”
“And he’s good?” she asked. “On memory?”
“Bulletproof. He wrote the Encarta entry.”
She laughed. “Okay, but… is he in court a lot?”
It was Fellowes’s turn to chuckle. “You mean, is he a professional witness?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I think Brewster was his first time out. And he only testified then because he went to school with the guy.”
“So he’s the real deal,” Adrienne said.
“Absolutely. Hang on. I’ll get you his numbers.”
She did and he did, and then she thanked him and they said good-bye. Canned laughter rose and fell just past the door. What would she say to Shaw? And what did she expect from him?
I’m with this man, Doctor, who thinks he’s a psychologist—but he’s not. He was treating my sister when she committed suicide and, since then, someone’s been trying to kill me—or maybe us, I’m not sure. Anyway, he isn’t who he thinks he is—that person’s dead, too—and I was hoping you could help him recover his memory—so we can figure out what’s going on—and maybe I can get my life back together.
Hmmmnn. Maybe not. He gets that call, and the first call he makes is to Bellevue. There’s a madwoman on the phone…
She turned to a new page in the pad, and wrote Shaw at the very top. Then she tapped her pen against the page a few times, and added: Lawyer—Fellowes—Brewster case
She sighed. If she knew a little more about the Brewster business, that would be good. It wouldn’t seem as if she were coming out of left field. The easy thing to do would be to look it up on Nexis.
Nikki’s laptop was in the car. All she needed to access the Web site—which archived the full text of more than five thousand newspapers and journals, going back twenty years—was the law firm’s user-ID and password. Which she knew by heart. Everyone did. The user-ID was 1SLOUGH1, the same as Curtis’s license plate. And the password was torts—one of the boss man’s little jokes.
Leaving the kitchen to get the laptop, she passed through the living room, where Duran was lying on the couch. She paused to see what he was watching. Jenny Jones. “You watch this stuff a lot?”
He thought about it for a moment, and shrugged. “I guess.”
He was completely affectless, as if he’d been tranquilized to the point of sleep. It was weird. Weird enough to make her think of Gertrude Stein’s remark about America (or was it just Berkeley?), saying there was no there, there. That’s the way Duran was in front of the TV. There wasn’t any him, in him.
Removing her sister’s laptop from its pink carrying case, she set it down on the kitchen counter and waited for the machine to boot up. The first thing she’d do was send the McEligot memo to Bette and Slough, attaching it to an e-mail—that way, at least they’d know she hadn’t been slacking.
Searching in the carrying case for the external modem, she found a pack of Orbit gum, two pink hair clips and a little bottle of pills. Although the bottle resembled the kind you’d get from CVS or Rite-Aid, there wasn’t any refill number or physician’s name. All it said was:
And under that, in Nikki’s bold hand: Placebo 1. What? She opened the bottle. The pills inside—she spilled them into her open palm—were capsules, filled with a dusky brown powder. They bore no pharmaceutical imprints or identifying marks. What were they? Vitamins? Maybe. But it didn’t look like a vitamin bottle. It looked like a medicine bottle. And Placebo 1? Was that supposed to be a joke?
She put the bottle on the counter, thinking she’d ask Duran later. But first: Nexis.
She found the modem in the carrying case, hooked it up and rebooted. Then she logged on to Nexis-Lexis, using her firm’s password and ID. The Web was slow, and it took her half an hour to download the stories she was looking for: a New York Times profile of Doctor Shaw, a handful of articles about memory, and a couple of shorter pieces about the Brewster divorce.
Shaw was fifty-seven years old, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School, Brooklyn College, and Yale Medical School, where he’d studied neurobiology and psychiatry. A photograph showed a genial man with unruly eyebrows, wearing a turtleneck sweater under a tweed sports jacket. According to the profile, Shaw was “the dean of research biologists” at Columbia University’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, as well as a popular lecturer in the medical school’s Department of Psychiatry. A frequent contributor to The New England Journal of Medicine, he’d written as well for general interest magazines like Harper’s and the Atlantic.
All his articles were available from Nexis, and she downloaded them to a floppy. That done, she spent an hour reading about explicit and implicit memory, cognitive displacement, hypnosis, and the role of the hippocampus in long- and short-term memory.
None of it stuck.
So she turned her attention to the Brewster case, which was discussed at length in an old issue of The American Lawyer.
Shaw was a witness for the defense. At issue was Mrs. Brewster’s “assisted” recollection of her husband’s allegedly violent behavior, behavior that was otherwise undocumented.
Under questioning by Socrates Nelson, Shaw undertook to explain the relationship between learning and memory. According to the neurobiologist, memories were dynamic, rather than static, and had a physiological basis. In other words, they changed, and the changes took place on a physical and cellular level.
“If this didn’t happen,” he told the court, “we couldn’t learn.” By way of example, Shaw discussed the complex task of learning to hit a baseball. This task involved at least three different kinds of memory—motor memory, visual memory, sequential memory—each of which took place in a different part of the brain.
Most people never got very good at hitting a baseball. But even the most limited competence at the task required repeated trials, efforts in which the most recent attempt was compared to its predecessor. This was what physical learning was all about—the refinement of technique by feedback. And what made it possible was the fact that each attempt to hit the ball changed the neurological framework of the memory itself. When the novice finally made contact, the relevant neurons encoded the information as a successful attempt. Whereupon, the encrypted data became a kind of template for all future at-bats.
“It’s just common sense, really. Memories are transformed by new experiences. We understand this on a gut level,” Shaw testified, “but what we may not understand is that the same mechanism which allows us to learn—that is to say, which allows us to modify memory—makes it possible for us to remember the past in a defective manner.