The 13th Juror Read Online Free PDF Page B

well-limned.
    "I passed a man," she said, eyes still closed.  "An older guy, maybe black or Mexican, dark anyway."
    "I read about him."  Hardy sat forward now.  "I don't think he's going to fly."
    "What do you mean?"  I did see somebody.  I think it was, I mean it could have been the person…"
    Hardy was shaking his head.  She reached a hand across the table to him.  "No, no.  No, listen.  It was the week after Christmas, no traffic, no one around, and here's this man walking up the street, he's wearing this heavy trenchcoat, looking like he's checking house numbers.  I almost stop and ask can I help him but I didn't want to be late so I keep going by."  She stopped talking, staring at Hardy.  "It really could have been him , the one…  I mean, somebody had to do it…"
    "Did you notice if this man had a gun?"
    "No, I'd have—"
    "Do you have any idea why somebody who didn't know Larry personally would want to kill him?  Or your son?"
    Her eyes stared into the space between them.  "If you find a yes to any questions like these, Jennifer, then we can usefully talk about him again, but I'm afraid he isn't going to do us any good right now."
    "But it might—"
    "When it does ," Hardy said, "then we'll look at it.  Okay?  I promise."
    Hardy reminded himself that he wasn't here to upset her.  He had felt, though, he should tell her they were going capital.  It was still going to be essentially Freeman's case but it wouldn't hurt to collect more impressions of Jennifer.  "Let's go on to anything else about that morning, anybody else who might have seen you."
    "But that man, he might have been…"
    Hardy patted her hand, held it down on the table.  "Let's move on, okay?"
    She pulled her hand away.  "You've got to believe me, I didn't do this.  If it was that man…"
    " If it was that man," he said.  "There could have been somebody, all right, he might even have shot Larry, but he also might be anybody — a neighbor, a tourist, a guy just taking a walk."
    She glared at him.  "He had his hands in his pockets, both hands.  He might have been holding a gun."
    Hardy almost said, Forgetting, of course, that your husband was killed with your own gun.  He slowed himself down.  "Let's stop.  Look, we're not here to argue.  We'll come back to the man later.  For now we've got to leave him, he's not going to help us unless he lives near you and we can find him.  Now I'm trying to find something to hang your defense on, and he's just not it."
    Her face went all the way down to the table, within the circle of her arms.  Her body was shaking as she rolled her forehead back and forth.
    "Did you do anything unusual at all on your run?  Anything you might already have told the police?  Or forgotten to tell them?"
    She stopped the rocking.  As though struggling with its weight, she raised her head, sighing again.  "They didn't ask any questions like this," she said.  "I didn't think…  I mean, I didn't know they thought I was a suspect.  They misled me, they never asked any of this."
    Hardy said quietly, "I'm asking now, all right?  Let's try to get something."
    Jennifer nodded, then recalled that she had stopped at the automatic teller at her bank on Haight Street.  Which seemed odd to Hardy.  "You left to go running and happened to have your ATM card with you?"
    "What's so strange about that?"  And she explained that most of her running outfits had Velcro pockets and as a matter of course she grabbed her house key and her change wallet — in which she kept her ATM card — whenever she left the house.  She told Hardy that on that morning she had walked down her block, passed the man in the trenchcoat, started running for a couple of blocks, then stopped for cash — "It was the Monday after Christmas, we hadn't been to the bank for three days."
    At least it was someplace to start.

    *     *     *     *     *

    In some ways Hardy's involvement with Jennifer Witt was easier to explain