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his salary, his taste. All of her energy was channeled into listening to him.
He felt glad to be able to talk freely to someone he not only trusted in the
ways of the law, but someone who might be able to grasp and understand what he
could not.
Pistol clung to him, a matted lump of gray fur, scrawny but not starved,
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purring ferociously. The old cat had forgotten to be sullen and full of rebuke
and had leapt at-j him the moment he crawled out of her car. Only after be \
32O
had licked Sam's face had the cat allowed Nina to hold him. She looked at them
now, man and cat, and said solemnly, "See, he always liked you best."
"Tomcats cling together."
"No they don't. They walk by themselves. You're both pussycats. Make me
another cup of that disgusting stale tea and get me a sheet of paper and a
pen. Let's see what we have."
He moved to refill her cup, still carrying the cat draped on his shoulder.
"This time dust the cup out."
When he passed the window over the sink, he felt rather than saw the eyes
outside watching them. He knew Rhodes, the manager, and probably half of the
park were out there beyond in the cold dark, staring from darkened mobile
homes so that they wouldn't be seen. He suspected that Rhodes was plotting at
this very moment how to break his lease. Killers in the park certainly were
even less desirable than sick old men who didn't mow their grass or haul their
garbage. Sam raised his right hand, the middle finger extended and waved it
toward Rhodes's triple-wide. He pulled another beer from the refrigeratorùonly
his second; it didn't taste as good as he'd imagined.
"So what do you think? We gonna blow them out of the courtroom and leave it a
disaster area?"
She grimaced and ran her hand through her hair, revealing her pale, high
forehead, unfreckled like the rest of her skin was. "We might only make them a
little nervous with what we have here. There's nothing that will make the
Prosecutor foul his trousers."
"She said she saw the bear attack Danny."
"So..."
"She couldn't have. She was in the tree. She admits that. I *s in the same
tree. You can't see from there to where she says the struggle happened, to
where I found Danny. The toil turns back on itself there; there's no
visibility at all ironj where she wasùall you can see is rock wall." Then why
would she say that?" Nina, it's obvious. She had something going with
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Demich right here in Natchitat. She coaxes and pleads with Danny to go off
someplace where her lover boy can fake a death. Then she covers for him."
"From what you've told me about herùand your perceptions were always
reasonable, even when you weren'tùI can't see her participating in that kind
of treachery. She doesn't sound devious. She sounds like a rather simple,
naive, dependent woman."
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"I thought she was."
She lit another cigarette. "Suppose she didn't know Demich before . . ."
"Then she wouldn't have been so willing to kill me to save him, would she? She
wouldn't have been rolling around in the grass naked with him when I found
them. Even sluts have loyalty, and she wasn't a slut. She loved Danny. Shit,
Nina, I used to envy him she loved him so much."
"Did you now?"
"Not herùjust the situation. Why would any woman change partners so easily? I
saw her. She was nuts about Demich."
"What? Say that again."
"She was nuts about Demich."
"Again."
"Come on, Nina. All right. She was nuts about Demich."
She stood up and paced, hampered by the confines of the narrow trailer.
"That's all we have, Sam. A mind."
"A mind?"
"You've been concentrating on physical evidence. That's what you do best, and
God knows, we need all of it we can get our hands on. You know where I think
our real evidence is? It's locked up in a mind that's not working the way it
should. I think what we need is inside her head. She may not even know it's
there . .."
"I must have made your tea too strong. Look, she's lyinº> so I guess that
means that she holds the key to why 1' happened. If you want to get fancy and
say it's inside her head, that's fine with me."
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She stopped walking and pulled the hassock up so close to him that her knees
touched his.
"Let me tell you a story. We had a case. I went to court with it. The victim
was a hitchhikerùseventeen, maybe eighteen, kind of a plain, stubby little
girl. A runaway. Nobody wanted her. Mother took off with stepdaddy number
four. Father was supposed to be in California; so she figures she'll hitch a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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