“Who started the conversation?”
“She did. She said hello or hi, the usual thing.”
“Was she wearing any makeup?”
“How do you tell a thing like that? All I know is she looked pretty good. I heard later she was forty, but she seemed much younger. Maybe it was makeup; maybe it was the dim lights in the bar, maybe the margaritas. Women look a lot better after you’ve had a few drinks. She wasn’t exactly sober herself, so maybe I looked better to her, too. Maybe she didn’t even realize I was black.”
A guard stopped at the barred window of the door and peered into the room. Cully waved at him, and the guard waved back. The brief exchange seemed to bolster Cully’s self-confidence.
“I don’t need all that stuff like booze and dim lights,” he said. “Women are just naturally attracted to me.”
“Remember what I told you this morning, Cully. Humble, humble.”
“Why should I pretend women don’t like me? I say nice things to them, I do nice things. Why shouldn’t they like me?... Do they like you?”
Donnelly thought of his last conversation with Zan. He didn’t say nice things or do nice things, and she hadn’t liked him for years. “No.”
“You’re married, though. You must have looked good to one of them once.”
“Yes.”
He remembered the night in the back of the Rolls-Royce. It was dark so he couldn’t see Zan, but she felt all soft and round, and her skin was cool in the summer night and smelled of flowers. They weren’t those picked fresh from a garden but dead ones sprayed with preservatives to make them look alive.
“You’re not a bad-looking guy for your age,” Cully added.
“Thank you.”
“I bet there’s plenty of women who’d—”
“I’m not the subject of this conversation,” Donnelly said brusquely. “You are, you and Mrs. Pherson. So go on with the story. She came into the bar and sat down beside you and started talking. Then what?”
“I asked her if she wanted a drink.”
“And?”
“She sort of hesitated, putting on an act of being the kind of woman who didn’t drink. I wasn’t fooled, especially when she ordered a double martini.”
“How did she drink it?”
“What do you mean, how?”
“Fast, slow, medium?”
“It must have been fast because she ordered another pretty quick.”
“Who paid for that one?”
“She did.”
“Did she have it put on her hotel bill?”
“No. She paid cash. I figured her husband — she was wearing a wedding ring — had a habit of going over the bills, and she didn’t want any bar tab showing up.”
“How did the conversation get around to cooking?”
“I can’t recall exactly, but I think she asked about good French restaurants in the vicinity. She said she liked French cuisine and did a lot of it at home. Right away I thought of Mr. Belasco because he likes French cooking best. On the spur of the moment I just asked her if she ever cooked professionally, and I told her about the Bewitched and the big race coming up and our needing a cook for it. She said, ‘Where are you racing to?’ and I said, ‘Honolulu.’ Then she seemed real interested. The word ‘Honolulu’ is kind of exciting to people who’ve never been there.”
“How do you know she’d never been there?”
“She told me. She said she and her mother had planned to go but her mother got sick and they never made it. I said, ‘Well, then, why not sign on as cook for the race? The pay’s no good but the trip’s great.’ She said she would, just like that.”
“Right away?”
“Right away.”
“Without even thinking about it?”
“Maybe she thinks fast. Or maybe” — Cully attempted to look modest — “maybe she had other things in mind besides cooking. I explained that the Bewitched was set to leave in the morning before dawn, and it might be easier for her to come aboard that night... You know.”
“I know,” Donnelly said. “Did she know?”
“She knew. She went up to her room, put on a coat and came down again. I waited in the lobby. I saw her standing at the desk talking to a man behind the counter. Then a few minutes later she came across the lobby, carrying her handbag and a green leather case. She was beginning to look better and better to me. I hadn’t had a woman since Panama.”
“Mazatlán.”
“A long time anyway. We went out, got in a taxi and drove to the slip where the Bewitched was tied up.”
“The green case, did you offer to carry it for her?”
“What do you think I am? Of course I did. But she wouldn’t let me. The way she hung on to that thing I guessed something valuable was in it. Actually I didn’t think much about it at all. I mean, I was getting pumped up, not having a woman since—”
“Mazatlán.”
“Mazatlán. Right.”
“And incidentally, watch your language in front of the jury. You were not getting pumped up, you were becoming intrigued.”
“Becoming intrigued. Hey, man, that doesn’t sound like me?”
“I don’t particularly want you to sound like you. I want you to sound like an innocent man, a gentleman, caught in a cruel web of circumstances.”
“Becoming intrigued. Is that what a gentleman would say?”
“No.”
“Then why me?”
“Because you’re on trial for murder. And every word you utter and every action you take, down to the merest twitch of an eyebrow, are going to be fed into the computer each of the jurors carries in his head.”
Cully rubbed his eyes as if he were trying to erase images he didn’t want to see. “That computer business, it kind of scares me.”
“The green case Mrs. Pherson was carrying, what do you think it weighed?”
“I told you, she wouldn’t let me touch it.”
“So you can’t estimate its weight or tell whether the contents made any kind of jangling noise, jewelry, for instance.”
“She handled it real careful, gentle almost. It made me suspect there might be drugs inside.”
“You thought she might be smuggling drugs?”
“Nearly every week you hear of respectable people being caught smuggling drugs.”
“From Bakersfield?”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“It’s a place where they grow oil, not coco leaves or opium poppies. Oh, yes, and cotton. They grow cotton. So they can have the Boll Weevil Barbecue.”
Cully looked puzzled but didn’t ask any questions. He regarded Donnelly with awe and with gratitude, and even this far into the trial he still didn’t understand why Donnelly had offered to defend him without charge. Cully wasn’t used to feeling either awe or gratitude, and the new role made him nervous.
Donnelly said, “The prosecution has witnesses to testify that Mrs. Pherson left the house carrying a green leather jewel case. But because something is a jewel case doesn’t necessarily mean it contains jewels. The probability, however, is that it did.”
“Well, I didn’t know that. I swear on the Bible I didn’t know.”
“I believe you,” Donnelly said, and for the moment he did. In a different light, a different room, he might change his mind. But right now Cully sounded and looked completely sincere, with just the right touch of reproach that anyone could ever doubt him. If the jury could see and hear him now, he would stand a good chance of walking out a free man. So much depended on his demeanor in court, and there was no way Donnelly could control that. He could advise, certainly, but he couldn’t be sure the advice would or could be taken. Cully wasn’t accustomed to controls. At sea he was the boss, he made the rules; on land it was hard for him to accept other people’s.