Scott Turow - Presumed innocent

We laugh, both of us, knowing Nico. When he gets very excited you can see his scalp redden where the hair has thinned. His freckles seem to stand out more as well. After the laughter is done, we wait through a little hollow moment of silence.

"You know why I'm pissed, don't you?" I finally ask.

Lip shrugs and raises his beer.

"You thought I killed her," I say.

He's prepared for this and does not even flinch. He belches before he answers.

"Lady was bad news."

"Which makes it okay if I killed her?"

"Did you?" asks Lip.

That, of course, is what he's come to find out. If he just wanted to be a soul brother, he'd have taken the glass with him the last time he went fishing and dropped it in the Crown Falls, which rages so magnificently up there near Skageon. But it must be eating at him. That's why he's offered the glass, so I know that we're in it together.

"You think I did, don't you?"

He drinks his beer.

"It's possible."

"Screw off. You're gonna stick your neck out like that cause it's just a little possibility, like life on Mars?"

Lip looks straight at me, his eyes clear and gray.

"I'm not wearin a wire, you know."

"I wouldn't care if you were. I've been tried and acquitted. Double-jeopardy clause says that's all she wrote. I could publish my confession in the Trib tomorrow and nobody could try me again for murder. Only we both know, Lip-I take a slug of the beer I've opened for myself-"they never do admit it, do they?"

Lip looks across the kitchen toward something that isn't there.

"Forget it," he says.

"I'm not going to forget it. Just tell me what you think, okay? You think I cooled her. That's not just for the sporting life that a fifteen-year copper hikes the evidence in the biggest case in town. Right?"

"Right. It ain't just sportin life." My friend Dan Lipranzer looks at me.

"I think you killed her."

"How? I mean, you must have worked it out in your head."

He does not hesitate as long as I would have thought.

"I figure you cracked her in anger. The rest was just to make it look good. There wouldn't be much point in sayin you were sorry once she was dead."

"And why was I so pissed off?"

"I don't know. Who knows? She dumped you, right? For Raymond. That's enough to be pissed about."

Slowly, I remove the beer glass from Lipranzer's hand. I can see his apprehension when I do that. He is prepared for me to fling it. Instead, I put it on the kitchen table next to the one he brought, the one they found on Carolyn's bar, the one with my prints. They are identical. Then I go to the cabinet and take down the rest of the set, until there are a dozen glasses standing there in two rows, one sudsed with beer foam at the head on the left, one dusted with blue powder at the front of the line next to it. It is a rare moment, in which Lipranzer wears none of his hipped-up wise-guy look.

I run the water in the sink, washing down the ashes, then fill the basin with suds. I start talking while I do that.

"Imagine a woman, Lip, a strange woman, with a very precise mathematical mind. Very internal. To herself. Angry and depressed. Most of the time she is volcanically pissed. With life. With her husband. With the miserable, sad affair he had in which he gave away everything she wanted. She wanted to be his obsession and instead he's hung up on this manipulative slut, who anyone but he could see regarded him as sport. This woman, Lip, the wife, is sick in spirit and in the heart, and maybe in the head, if we're going to be laying all the cards out on the table.

"She's mixed up. She is seriously on the fence about this marriage. Some days she's sure she's going to leave him. Some days she wants to stay. Either way she has to do something. The whole thing's eating at her, destroying her. And either way, she has a wish, a wild secret hope that the woman he was sleeping with could end up dead. When the wife's rage is at a peak, she's ready to abandon her husband, head for open spaces. But there would be no satisfaction in that if the other woman is alive, because the husband, helpless slob that he is, will just go crawling back to her and end up with what his wife thinks he wants. The wife can get even only if the other woman is gone."

"But, of course, you always hurt the one you love. And in her down moods, she longs for everything they had, to find some way to bring them back to old times. But even in these moods, it seems that life would be better if the other woman were dead. With no choice, he will finally give up his obsession. Maybe then they can recycle things, build on the wreckage."

The sink by now is full of suds. The ninhydrin comes off the glass easily, although there is a sulfurous stink when it hits the water. Then I take down a towel and wipe the glass clean. When I am finished, I get a box and begin wrapping up the set. Lip helps. He separates the sheets of newsprint that the movers have provided, he is not talking yet.

"And so the idea is there. Day after day. All the wife thinks about is killing the other woman. Whether she is in the peak of rage or the dungeons of self-pity, there is that thrilling notion.

"And, of course, As the idea takes hold, there is another twist. The husband must know. When she is raging, when she's on the way out the door, it is a kind of delicious vengeance to think of him bereft and knowing just who left him in that condition. And in her softer moods, when the thought is of somehow saving this marriage, she wants him to appreciate this monumental act of commitment and devotion, her effort at finding the miracle cure. It will have no meaning to him if he thinks it's just an accident.

"So that becomes part of the compulsion. To kill. And to let him know that she has done it. How is that to be accomplished? It is a magnificent puzzle to a woman capable of the most intricate levels of complex thought.

Obviously she can't just tell him. For one thing, half the time she's planning to be gone. And, of course, on the basic level, there is a risk that-to put it mildly-her husband might not approve. He may go tattling. She has to take that option from him. And how best to do that? Fortunately, it is predictable that the husband will investigate this crime. The head of the Homicide Section has taken a powder. The acting head is a person no one trusts. And the husband is the P.A.'s favorite son. He will be the one collecting evidence, him and his pal, the all-star homicide dick Lipranzer. And as the husband proceeds, detail by detail, he will discover that the culprit for all the world appears to be him. He'll know of course that it was not. And he'll know who it was, because there is only one person in the world who has access to this glass, or to his seed. But he'll never convince anybody else of that. He will suffer in lonely silence when she leaves him. Or kiss her bloody hand with new devotion when she stays. In the act itself, there will be purification and discovery. With the other woman gone, she will be able to find just what it is she wants to do.

"But it must be a crime that the rest of the world can reasonably regard as unsolved, when hubby declares that to be the case. It must be a crime in which he alone will realize what has occurred. That's why she decides to make it look like a rape. And so the plan proceeds. Something that must be utilized is one of these glasses."

I show the tumbler I am wrapping to Lip. He is seated on one of the kitchen chairs now, listening with an open look that mediates between rough horror and a kind of wonder.

"It was a glass just like this one that her husband picked up and wept over, the night he told her of his affair. The self-centered sap sat there and devastated her with the truth and cried because their glasses were just like the other woman's. That will be the perfect calling card, the perfect way to tell him, You know who. He drinks a beer one night while he watches the ball game. She hides the glass away. Now she has his fingerprints.