Presumed Innocent Read Online Free PDF Page B

after a moment.
    "Sexy, yes. Very sexy. Torrents of blond hair, and almost no behind, and this very full bosom. And long red fingernails, too. I mean, definitely, deliberately, almost ironically sexy. You notice. That's the idea with Carolyn. You're supposed to notice. And I did. She's worked around our office for years. She was a probation officer before she went to law school. But that's all she was to me originally. You know: this very good-looking blonde with big tits. Every copper who came in would roll his eyes and make like he was jerking off. That's all.
    "Over time, people began to talk about her. Even while she was still in the branch courts. You know: high-powered. Capable. Then for a while she was dating this newsman on Channel 3. Chet whatever his name is. And she showed up a lot of places. Very active in the bar organizations. An officer for a while in the local NOW chapter. And shrewd. She asked to be assigned out to the Rape Section when it was considered a crappy place to work. All these impossible one-on-ones where you could never figure out if it was the victim or the defendant who was closer to the truth. Hard cases. Just to find the ones that deserved to be prosecuted, let alone to win them. And she did very well out there. Eventually Raymond put her in charge of all those trials. He liked to send her on those Sunday-morning public service TV programs. Show his concern on women's issues. And Carolyn liked to go and carry the banner. She enjoyed the limelight. But she was a good prosecutor. And damn tough. The defense lawyers used to complain that she had a complex, that she was trying to prove that she had balls. But the coppers loved her.
    "I'm not sure what I thought of her then. I suppose I thought she was just a little bit too much."
    Robinson looked at me.
    "Too much everything," I said. "You know. Too bold. Too self-impressed. Always running one gear too high. She didn't have the right sense of proportion."
    "And," said Robinson, proceeding to the obvious, "you fell in love with her."
    I went silent, still. When are words ever enough?
    "I fell in love with her," I said.
     
     
    Raymond felt she needed a partner and so she asked me. It was September of last year.
    "Could you have said no?" asked Robinson.
    "I suppose. The chief deputy isn't expected to try a lot of cases. I could have said no."
    "But?"
    But I said yes.
    Because, I told myself, the case was interesting. The case was strange. Darryl McGaffen was a banker. He worked for his brother, Joey, who was a gangster, a florid personality, a hotshot type who enjoyed being the target of every law enforcement agency in town. Joey used the bank, out in McCrary, to wash a river of dirty money, mostly mob dough. But that was Joey's action. Darryl kept his head down and the accounts straight. Darryl was as mild as Joey was flamboyant. An ordinary guy. He lived out west, near McCrary. He had a wife. And a somewhat tragic life. His first child, a little girl, had died at the age of three. I knew all about that, because Joey had once testified before the grand jury about his niece's fall from a second-floor terrace at his brother's home. Joey had explained, almost convincingly, that the girl's resulting skull fracture and immediate death were large in his mind and had obstructed his judgment when four mysterious fellows delivered to his bank certain bonds which, to Joey's great chagrin, turned out to be hot. Joey wrung his hands when he talked about the girl. He touched his silk pocket hankie to both his eyes.
    Darryl and his wife had another child, a boy named Wendell. When Wendell was five, his mother arrived with him at the West End Pavilion Hospital emergency room. The boy was unconscious and his mother was hysterical, for her child had taken a terrible fall, sustaining severe head injuries. The mother claimed that he had never been at the hospital before, but the emergency room physician — a young Indian woman, Dr. Narajee — had a memory of