A hideous case of mistaken identity? Was this intended for a different, shameless Beauchamp? He is halfway across the room to summon Doris when he stops, feeling foolish. Junk mail. It floods the computer-driven society. This is the brave new world.
That evening, he watches the news hour on Hubbell Meyerson’s wall-mounted, flat-screen television. The trial’s coverage leans to the lurid, quoting Arthur’s lines: “floating bordello,” “the cozy arrangement” between hooker and cop. Viewers may get the false impression Arthur came out unscathed.
Lotis phones to say Dr. Sidhoo has actually found a trace of an unknown third person in the semen sample, and will try to build a DNA profile. Ruth Delvechio? Someone else with whom Eve may have been intimate? Or Adeline Angella? The tissues Brian pocketed during her crying jag will provide a control sample.
Arthur has only a scant knowledge of microbiology, and can’t imagine how an analyst might find a sprinkling of vaginal cells in a bit of swab. But he supposes there may be tens of thousands of the little beasties there. Lotis has assured him an expert can build a profile from the most minute specimens.
“Hey, according to the news, you shot out the lights today.”
Not.
25
Exhaustion imprisons Arthur in his bed until half past seven-he’s rising later each day, adjusting to the rhythm of the city. He squints at the pen drawings, a man’s head buried between a woman’s splayed legs, then rolls awkwardly from bed.
Bagels, tea, and morning paper. He refuses to read about his disaster in Court 67. Gwendolyn is buried in the middle pages, six more arrests. Trial dates for the protestors are clogging the court calendars. The authorities are fast running out of leg bracelets for their electric monitoring program. Something is going to have to give.
As spied upon last week through powerful binoculars, Margaret looked thin, wasted, ragged. His badgering note about her physical and emotional health, her state of comfort and cleanliness, got this airmail response: Arthur, you must stop worrying about me. I’m better off than hundreds of millions of women on this planet. She’s keeping in shape, she’s equipped, harnessed, she’s been in the canopy, it’s exhilarating.
He’s too late for his morning safari to Lord Stanley’s park, but has time to stride briskly to the Law Courts through the dense checkerboard of the West End. The day of summer solstice blooms warm under filaments of fading mist, a day when he ought to be picking asparagus, not enduring the bitter harvest of the courtroom.
A news camera follows him up the courthouse steps. He smiles, waves, assumes a guise of confidence.
Before court sits, Buddy, his manifest of witnesses already in disarray, announces another schedule change. “The pathologist asked if I’d move her ahead. Not, I said, I have some heavy-hitters due up. But it turns out she’s got a trial conflict. So I guess we’ll have to get to the good folks from Kansas when we get to them.”
This procrastination argues something has gone askew. Yesterday these good folks were costing a freaking fortune, now they’ll bide their time.
Dr. Rosa Sanchez has added grey to her hair since Arthur last met her. A senior forensic pathologist, competent and casual, she lacks the stiff mannerism of many professional witnesses. She’s helpful to juries, translating medical jargon into recognizable English.
Buddy Svabo rushes her through the autopsy, as if finding it morbid or tasteless, then asks her opinion on the cause of death.
“Asphyxia due to occlusion of the trachea. In simple terms, her airway was blocked and she expired for lack of oxygen.”
The indicia included heart congestion and cyanosis: blue discolouring of the lips, which were also marked by slight contusions. Not severe enough to be caused by a blow to the mouth, nor bearing any relation to the chipped front tooth. Both wrists had minor abrasions, as if pressure had been applied. No other soft tissue injury other than light bruising around the lower abdomen.
“Given that her blood alcohol reading was.04 at the time of death and that she’d been consuming wine, what conclusions do you draw?”
“That reading would be consistent with her having had three or four glasses of wine within the previous two hours.”
“But on top of that, we have…” Buddy struggles with a word from her report. “Flunitrazepam…I’ll use the trade name, Rohypnol. Tell us about that.”
This potent sedative, she explains, is on the banned list here but used in Europe and in Latin America, most often as a sleeping pill, but occasionally as an anaesthetic. Its use as a date-rape drug is widely known. It may cause impaired judgment and motor skills, short-term memory loss, blackouts, and even coma. “The intensity of effect depends on dosage, elapsed time after ingestion, and varies with the individual.”
“Okay, given that this drug was found in Dr. Winters’s bloodstream, what can you tell us about how much she ingested?”
“That’s a hard one. Flunitrazepam metabolizes rapidly. We don’t know when she ingested it.”
“Okay, let’s say Mr. Stubb here-he’s about Dr. Winters’s height-let’s say he popped a couple of…what are they, a milligram each?”
“They come in one or two milligrams.”
“Will he black out if he takes, say, more than three milligrams?” Perhaps concerned that Buddy will pull out a packet of rochies and employ him as lab rat, Ears drops a half-chewed pencil and becomes comalike himself, a smiling upright cadaver.
Dr. Sanchez studies Ears for a moment. “Yes, he might. But the deceased may have been semi-conscious and putting up at least token resistance. The abrasions to the wrists and chipped tooth suggest that.”
“Excuse me.” Buddy huddles with his coach, Jasper Flynn, who sends in a new play. “Okay, the light bruising around the lower abdomen. Could she have received a blow to the stomach?”
“It is possible.”
“A blow that could have incapacitated her?” Buddy boldly demonstrates, a low, sweeping uppercut.
“At least temporarily.”
“Especially when her senses were already dulled by this powerful drug?”
“Yes.”
“And she could have been gasping, out of breath?”
“The resulting trauma could have been that severe, it is difficult to say.”
“And the bruising to the wrists, is that consistent with an assailant seizing and gripping them tightly?”
“Possibly but not likely. The bruising was solely on the interior aspect of her wrists, near her palms.”
“Well, let’s say she’s on her back, and he’s straddling her, kneeling on her wrists, and she’s struggling to free herself.” Buddy illustrates with another visual graphic, turning again to his junior counsel with an apelike posture, knees bent. Ears makes himself small, fearing he will be called upon to play the role of Eve Winters. “And her horrible nightmare ends when he stuffs the panties down her throat.”
Making objection to these dramatics would only signal Arthur’s concern and give this theory added stress. Martin Samples is awed by Buddy’s shtick, a coup de theatre transcending anything seen on film. However clownish and gruesome, the mime will indelibly remain with the jury: a credible reason why Winters, already woozy with Rohypnol, was unable to resist, to push or scratch or flail or kick. It explains the lack of defensive wounds, of fingernail scrapings, of blood stains, of hair pulled out by the roots.
Could Adeline Angella have delivered such an incapacitating blow to the solar plexus? A picture of this uptight, tidy woman performing with such violence refuses to take on definition. The chipped tooth bothers Arthur. It’s as if she had bitten not a finger but something hard, metallic.