Reasonable Doubts Read Online Free PDF

I thought.
    But a shiver went through me, the kind you feel when you’re sixteen and the prettiest girl in the class suddenly, amazingly, stops and talks to you in the school corridor.
    Natsu asked me to call her as soon as I’d read the papers and had decided what to do.
    She left, and it occurred to me that she hadn’t said a word about having come to court and watched me at work. I wondered why, and couldn’t find an answer.
    A slight scent of amber lingered in the air. With that hint of something more pungent that I couldn’t quite identify.

5
    A few minutes before nine, Maria Teresa came in and asked me if I still needed anything, as she was about to leave. I asked her to order me a pizza and a beer before she left. She looked at me with an expression that said it’s Friday evening, do you think it’s right to stay in the office eating a disgusting pizza, drinking a disgusting beer and working?
    I looked back at her, with an expression that said yes, I do think it’s right, especially as I don’t have anything better to do. Anyway I don’t want to do anything better.
    To be honest, I don’t even want to think about it.
    She looked as if she was about to say something, but thought better of it. She would order the pizza, she said, and she’d see me on Monday morning.
    I ate the pizza, drank the beer, cleared up the desk, put the latest Leonard Cohen album, Dear Heather , on the CD player and settled down to look through the papers Signora Natsu Kawabata had brought in.
    Kawabata - like the writer, I thought. What was the title of that story? House of the Sleeping Beauties , wasn’t it? Yasunari Kawabata. A lovely, sad story. I ought to reread it, I thought. Maybe Natsu was related to the Kawabata who’d won the Nobel Prize. She could even be his granddaughter.
    What a brilliant thought, I told myself. Absolutely brilliant. Like a Japanese person meeting a Signor Rossi and
thinking, “Ah, his name’s Rossi, I wonder if he’s related to the motorcyclist.”
    I think it’s best if I read the file.
    It didn’t take long. The story was pretty much the way Paolicelli had told it. The arrest and custody records mentioned a routine check by the customs police in the harbour area, using dogs trained to sniff out drugs. I thought the same thing I’d thought the day before, when Paolicelli had told me his story. The customs police had probably had a tip-off. On the blank sheet of paper I’d placed next to the file I jotted down: Why the check? Then I told myself it was a question that was likely to remain unanswered, and I went on.
    With the records were Paolicelli’s statements.
    They were headed Transcript of statements made by the accused of his own free will . Of his own free will, of course. The transcript was very short and, after a few preliminaries, the gist of it was in this sentence:
    “I acknowledge that the quantity of forty kilos of cocaine was discovered in my car. Regarding this, I freely declare that the drugs belong to myself alone and that my wife Natsu Kawabata, whose full particulars have been noted in other documents, has no connection whatsoever with this illegal transportation, which is the sole responsibility of the undersigned. I placed the narcotics in the car without my wife’s knowledge. I have no intention of naming the persons from whom I acquired the aforementioned quantity of narcotics, nor those to whom I was supposed to deliver them. I have nothing to add.”
    Read, confirmed and signed.
    On my sheet of notes, I jotted down: Usability of statements?
    That meant that there were serious doubts about the
validity and usability of these statements, which had been made without a lawyer being present. It wasn’t much to go on, but considering the situation I couldn’t afford to overlook anything.
    I went quickly on to the report of the customs police, which mostly reiterated what was in the arrest and custody records. Then the transcript of Paolicelli’s interrogation by the