Neither Donnelly nor the DA had arrived yet, and except for the bailiff and a few early court watchers, Cully and Eva were alone.
“We’ll be late starting this morning,” Eva told Cully. “I upset the judge by being right. He can’t stand other people being right this early in the morning, so he’ll probably need time to soothe his ego.”
“I don’t care if he’s late. I’m not going anywhere.” Cully smiled, a rather grave, sweet smile that made him look very young. “Are you going anywhere?”
“Not for a while. I’m taking my vacation at Christmas. I’m not sure yet where I want to go.”
“My islands are very beautiful at Christmas. I would like to be home for the holidays.”
“With your wife and kids?”
“She’s not my wife. We never got married. Maybe they’re not my kids either, but I support them all, so they treat me like a King... That’s a joke. Get it?”
“I got it.”
“Why don’t you ever smile? I thought it was a pretty good joke.”
“Tell me about your house.”
“Not much to tell. Not much of a house. Small, crowded, not too clean when you compare it with a ship. My brother-in-law lives with us. He’s a bum, but he’s a good dancer, and Louise likes to go dancing. Me, I can’t dance unless I’m drunk. Maybe I can’t dance then either, but I do it. I’ll do practically anything when I’m drunk.” He paused for a moment. “If I ever murder anybody, it’ll probably be my brother-in-law. I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“You mustn’t talk like that,” Eva said. “People might overhear and get the wrong impression.”
“Why should they? My brother-in-law has nothing to do with the woman I took on board as cook.”
“Are you still sticking to that story?”
“It’s true.”
“It doesn’t sound true.”
“I can’t change what happened.”
“Mr. King, you must learn how to present yourself as an innocent person. An innocent person doesn’t talk about the possibility of murdering his brother-in-law.”
“All right, I won’t talk about it. I’ll still think about it, though.”
“Listen. What I mean is, you can’t just go around telling the truth. You’ve got to make it sound truer than truth.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No.”
“I think maybe your are.”
“No. I’m trying to help you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Cully lapsed into a puzzled silence. He sat with his hands on the table, rolling a pencil between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand back and forth along the palm of his left hand. Against the lighter skin of his palm the calluses stood out like pebbles on a beach.
Eva liked these hands, which were so different from Donnelly’s, always too carefully manicured, and from the judge’s, gnarled by arthritis, and the bailiff’s, with their pale, puffy fingers, one of them nearly strangled by his wedding band. Cully’s were lean, strong hands you could depend on to get things done, to provide and protect.
She looked down at her own hands, small and thin, and she had a sudden, very disturbing impulse to put one of them in Cully’s and let it lie there.
For nearly a minute her breath caught in her throat, then had to race to make up for lost oxygen. She wondered what was the matter with her and whether she should talk to somebody sensible like Mildred. After years of trial work Mildred had a sixth sense about the guilt or innocence of a defendant. She would know whether or not this man was a murderer.
“I like your dress,” Cully said.
“Why?”
“It’s a great dress. It fits you great.”
“I hate it,” Eva said, “I hate it. I’m never going to wear it again.”
Bill Gunther came in swinging his battered old briefcase. He looked as though he had spent the night in a clothes dryer that had twisted his suit, torn a button off his shirt and tumbled his hair. Actually he’d been on the road from Bakersfield since midnight, caught in a dense tule fog which had slowed traffic almost to a standstill. His steel-rimmed spectacles seemed to have brought along a sample of tule fog, and Gunther’s attempts to wipe the lenses clean with his sleeve had been futile.
He pulled a tie out of the pocket of his coat and put it on. Then he ran his hands through his hair, using his fingers like the teeth of a comb. He had needed a haircut at the beginning of the trial, and he still did. The total impression he made was that of a man who had more important and profound things to think about than clothes and grooming.
“It is customary,” Eva said, “to dress at home.”
“I wasn’t at home.”
“I bet you weren’t.”
“In fact, I haven’t been home for so long I’ve forgotten my address. You don’t happen to have it lying around someplace, do you?”
“No. Try phoning your mother.”
“I’m fresh out of mothers.”
He put his briefcase on the table. It gave off a faint but identifiable odor of used underwear and dirty socks, so he transferred it to the floor. Then he turned to Cully.
“How’d things go yesterday?”
“Not so good, I think. Maybe even bad.”
“How bad?”
“That doctor made it sound like I strangled her and punched her in the ribs. It didn’t happen that way.”
“If it didn’t happen that way, they can’t prove it did.”
“Maybe they can if Dr. Woodbridge keeps using words nobody else can understand.”
“Wait’ll Donnelly gets to him. Woodbridge will be using four-letter words like H-E-L-P.”
“You like this man Donnelly?”
“He’s the boss. He pays my rent, buys my beer, so sure I like him.”
“But you’re not his real friend?”
“I don’t even know where he lives.”
“My, my, your memory is feeble this morning, Mr. Gunther,” Eva said. “You can’t remember where you live and you can’t remember where your buddy lives. Did you have a bad night?”
“The worst.”
“You dropped a bundle at your bookie’s.”
“Oh, butt out, Foster. I’m discussing evidence with our client.”
“Then try lowering your voice. Some of these court watchers have twenty-twenty hearing.”
The district attorney came in with his chief investigator, Deputy Bernstein, followed a minute later by Donnelly.
Donnelly looked perfectly groomed as always. His gray silk and wool suit matched the gloss and color of his hair. With it he wore a white shirt, a Harvard tie and a Phi Beta Kappa key. The key was legitimately his, but he was not a graduate of Harvard. Urged by his New England family to go west and stay there, he came to California and enrolled at UC Berkeley. Here, in the less restrictive atmosphere and more equable climate, he flourished.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Donnelly said. “Did you sleep in your clothes, Mr. Gunther?”
“I didn’t sleep in anything.”
“Really? You must tell me about it later. Much later.”
Gunther shrugged, picked up his briefcase and went to his customary seat inside the well but at the railing, away from the counselors’ table.
Donnelly unpacked the papers he had brought, legal pads filled with the letters, numerals and squiggles that passed for writing and a copy of the local morning newspaper with an account of yesterday’s proceedings. It was a fairly accurate report, and Donnelly gave it to Cully to read.
As he read, Cully’s face was impassive, but his hands trembled slightly. “They make it sound like I’m guilty.”
“Tomorrow’s will be better,” Donnelly said. “I think the jury’s getting saturated with medical terms.”
“Why do you think that?”
“They haven’t been taking as many notes as they did previously. They’re ready for simpler language. So am I.”