Presumed Innocent Read Online Free PDF

"Somebody walked around there openin the windows?"
    "Could be."
    "So they'd make it look like a break-in? Somebody she let in in the first place?"
    "Doesn't that make sense? You're the one who's telling me there's a glass on the bar. She was entertaining. I wouldn't bet the ranch on the bad guy being some crazed parolee."
    Lip stares at his cigarette. Looking through the doorway, I see that Eugenia, my secretary, has returned. There are voices now in the hallway as people filter back in from the graveside. I detect a lot of the anxious laughter of release.
    "Not necessarily," he says finally. "Not with Carolyn Polhemus. She was a funny lady." He looks at me hard again.
    "You mean, you think she'd open the door to some bum she sent to jail?"
    "I think with Carolyn there's no tellin. Suppose she bumped into one of these characters in a bar. Or some guy called her up and said, Let's have a pop. You think there's no chance she'd say yes? We're talkin Carolyn now."
    I can see where Lip is going. Lady P.A., Prosecutor of Perverts, Fucks Defendant and Lives Out Forbidden Fantasy. Lip has got her number pretty well. Carolyn Polhemus would not have minded at all the idea that some guy had dwelled with the thought of her for years. But somehow, with this discussion a seasick misery begins to ebb through me.
    "You didn't like her much, did you, Lip?"
    "Not much." We look at each other. Then Lipranzer reaches over and chucks me on the knee. "At least we know one thing," he says. "She had piss-poor taste in men."
    That is his exit line. He tucks his Camels into his windbreaker and is gone. I call out to Eugenia to please hold anything else. With a moment's privacy I am now ready to examine the photographs. For a minute, after I begin sorting through them, my attention is mostly on myself. How well will I manage this? I urge myself to maintain professional composure.
    But that, of course, begins to give way. It is like the network of crazing that sometimes seeps through glass in the wake of an impact. There is excitement at first, slow-entering and reluctant, but more than a little. In the top photographs the heavy glass of the table is canted over, compressing her shoulder, so that you might almost make the comparison to a laboratory slide. But soon it is removed. And here is Carolyn's spectacularly lithe body in a pose which, for all the agony there must have been, seems, initially, supple and athletic. Her legs are trim and graceful; her breasts are high and large. Even in death, she retains her erotic bearing. But, I slowly recognize, other experiences must influence this response. Because what is actually here is horrible. There are bruises on her face and neck, mulberry patches. A rope runs from her ankles to her knees, her waist, her wrists; then it is jerked tight around her neck, where the rim of the burn is visible. She is drawn back in an ugly tormented bow and her face is ghastly; her eyes, with the hyperthyroid look of the attempted strangulation, are enormous and protruding and her mouth is fixed in a silent scream. I watch, I study. Her look holds the same wild, disbelieving, desperate thing that so frightens me when I find the courage to let my glance fix on the wide black eye of a landed fish dying on a pier. I take it in now in the same reverential, awestruck, uncomprehending way. And then, worst of all, when all the dirt is scraped off the treasure box there is rising within, unhindered by shame, or even fear, a bubble of something light enough that I must eventually recognize it as satisfaction, and no lecture to myself about the baseness of my nature can quite discourage me. Carolyn Polhemus, that tower of grace and fortitude, lies here in my line of sight with a look she never had in life. I see it finally now. She wants my pity. She needs my help.
     
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    When it was all over, I went to see a psychiatrist. His name was Robinson.
    "I would say she's the most exciting woman I've known," I told him.
    "Sexy?" he asked