While Justice Sleeps(3)
Abruptly, the anxiety sharpened, its razor claws slicing through reason in his suddenly clouded thoughts. Wynn jerked upright and hissed into the empty room, “You want to kill me, don’t you? Silence me?” He punched the air with an angry, shaking fist. “I know what you’ve done. How you’ve lied to us! Soon enough, I’ll prove it, and even your guard dogs won’t be able to save you!”
“Justice Wynn? Who are you talking to?” At the doorway to the study, his nurse appeared and frowned at the outburst. “Are you on the phone?”
The clouds receded, and he snarled, “I am conversing with Nature, woman. Smartest companion I am likely to encounter in this house.”
Unconvinced, his nurse, Jamie Lewis, crossed the threshold. She plastered on a smile. “It’s time for your medication and for bed, Justice. You need your rest. You had a long day today, and I don’t want you too tuckered to go to work tomorrow. Busy week.”
Wynn slapped the arm of the Chesterfield chair with a satisfying crack. “I’m not a goddamned child, Nurse Lewis. I don’t need to be coaxed into bed like a whelp in diapers. I sit on the bench of the United States Supreme Court.”
“Yes, you do.” Jamie edged closer, her crepe-soled shoes silent on the hardwood. Only her pale yellow skirt made a whisper of sound as she closed the distance between them. With the dulcet smile that she knew would irritate, she cooed, “You’re a fine lawyer, Justice Wynn. God knows, I’ve met enough of them, thanks to Thomas.” She gave a false laugh. “Perhaps I should have married a doctor, not a salesman.”
“A doctor? Scoundrels!” This time, the smack of his hand echoed for an instant. “Damned charlatans…refusing to do an honest day’s labor. Off golfing and finding diseases that were never lost.”
“Doctors are important, Justice. As important as lawyers, I’d wager. They’re keeping you here, aren’t they?”
“There’s no comparison,” he barked. “Jurisprudence is one of the last pure métiers of Western creation, like the blues or bid whist. I find modern physicians only slightly more capable than leeches and witches’ cauldrons. Eight years of training, and still they only barely practice at their craft!”
“Don’t lawyers practice the law?”
“When we stumble, no one dies.” His hand trembled as he flipped defiantly through the musty pages of Faust and knew he had lied. “Doctors are nothing but cranks and convicts roaming the earth, telling lies to the healthy. Gathering corpses for their experiments.”
Bushy eyebrows, twin shocks of alabaster against bronzed skin, lifted and lowered in rage. “But then, that’s not much better than this new crop of lawyers roaming the Court. A generation laid to waste by the putrescence of their own thoughts. Not an incisive mind among them. Computer-addled miscreants who’d rather be told the answer than investigate. Can barely find one smart enough to fetch my coffee.”
“I thought you liked Mr. Brewer and Ms. Keene,” Jamie reminded him, standing at his elbow. His rant slid into a cough, and soon would warble off into mutterings. To urge the sequence along, she poked: “Just yesterday, you told me Ms. Keene was a bright young scholar worth watching.”
“I said no such thing!” He levered himself into a fighting stance and spat, “Don’t tell me I’ve said things I didn’t say. Especially about persons whom you are ill-equipped to hold small talk with, let alone discuss their relative cerebral merit, Nurse Lewis.” He sneered her title and clutched her arm, desperately afraid that he had indeed paid the glowing compliment about one of his clerks.
Too often, these days, he could not remember his own words from moment to moment. Or from afternoon to night.
Wynn glanced up to find the nurse watching him, checking him for signs of dementia or the coming of death. Had he finished his sentence? How long had he been silent? “Stop staring at me!” he snapped and tightened his hold on her muscular arm.
Jamie obliged and looked away before he could see her worry. His lapses were coming more frequently now. One day, the lapse would freeze in time. She’d seen it once before. Boursin’s syndrome was the name of the disease, and she could read its trek in Justice Wynn’s panicked eyes. Gently, she probed, “What were we discussing, Justice?”
“Why? So you can report me to the president or whatever goon sent you to spy on me?” He snorted derisively. “Did I go too far at the graduation? Have they told you to kill me?”
The nurse blanched. “Sir?”
“Of course you’re spying on me,” he told her gruffly. “I may be paranoid and dying, but I am not stupid.”
“You believe I would kill you?”
“Nothing so bold and direct. You simply write down your observations and pass them along, in violation of medical privilege, building their case against me.”
“Sir—”
“I assume they make you report on my impending demise on a regular basis. Probably have you reading my papers at night, snapping photos so they know what I’m doing. Would love to have you tape me, but their surveillance can’t get inside. That interloper in the White House is afraid I’m going to crush his dreams, and they sent you to keep tabs on me. My speech today must have him cursing my name.”