Presumed Innocent Read Online Free PDF Page A

the stairs." Lip looks at his notebook. "Mrs. Krapotnik. Says maybe he looked familiar, but she doesn't think he lives there."
    "The Hair and Fiber guys went through first, right?" I ask. "When do we hear from them?" To these people falls the grotesque duty of vacuuming the corpse, picking over the crime scene with tweezers, in order to make microscopic examinations of any trace materials they discover. Often they can type hair, identify an offender's clothing.
    "That should be a week, ten days," Lip says. "They'll try to come up with somethin on the rope. Only other interesting thing they tell me is they got a lot of floor fluff. There a few hairs around, but not what you'd find if there was any kinda fight."
    "How about fingerprints?" I ask.
    "They dusted everything in the place."
    "Did they dust this glass table here?" I show Lip the picture.
    "Yeah."
    "Did they get latents?"
    "Yeah."
    "Report?"
    "Preliminary."
    "Whose prints?"
    "Carolyn Polhemus."
    "Super.
    "It ain't all bad," says Lip. He takes the picture from me and points. "See this bar here. See the glass?" One tall bar glass, standing undisturbed. "There latents on that. Three fingers. And the prints ain't the decedent's."
    "Do we have any idea whose prints they are?"
    "No. Identification says three weeks. They got all kinda backlogs." The police department identification division keeps a digit-by-digit record of every person who has ever been printed, classified by so-called points of comparison, the ridges and valleys on a fingertip to which numerical values are assigned. In the old days, they were unable to identify an unknown print unless the subject left behind latents of all ten fingers, so I.D. could search the existing catalogue. Now, in the computer era, the search can be done by machine. A laser mechanism reads the print and compares to every one in memory. The process takes only a few minutes, but the department, due to budgetary constraints, does not yet own all of the equipment and must borrow pieces from the state police for special cases. "I told them to rush it up, but they're giving me all that shit about Zilogs and onloading. A call from the P.A. would really help. Tell them to compare to every known in the county. Anybody. Any dirtball who's ever been printed."
    I make a note to myself.
    "We need MUDs, too," Lipranzer says, and points to the pad. Although it is not well known, the telephone company keeps a computerized record of all local calls made from most exchanges: Message Unit Detail sheets. I begin writing out the grand-jury subpoena
duces tecum
, a request for documents. "And ask them for MUDs on anybody she called in the last six months," says Lip.
    "They'll scream. You're probably talking about two hundred numbers."
    "Anybody she called three times. I'll get back to them with a list. But ask for it now, so I'm not runnin my ass around tryin to find you to do another subpoena."
    I nod. I'm thinking.
    "If you're going back six months," I tell him, "you're probably going to hit this number." I nod toward the phone on my desk.
    Lipranzer looks at me levelly and says, "I know."
    So he knows, I think. I take a minute with this, trying to figure how. People guess, I think. They gossip. Besides, Lip would notice things that anyone else would miss. I doubt that he approves. He is single, but he is no rover. There is a Polish woman a good ten years older than he, a widow with a grown kid, who cooks a meal and sleeps with Lipranzer two or three times a week. On the phone, he calls her Momma.
    "You know," I say, "as long as we're on the subject, Carolyn always locked her doors and windows." I tell him this with admirable evenness. "I mean, always. She was a little soft, but Carolyn was a grownup. She knew she lived in the city."
    Lipranzer's look focuses gradually and his eyes take on a metallic gleam. He has not lost the significance of what I'm telling him or, it seems, of the fact that I delayed.
    "So what do you figure?" he asks at last.