Page 163 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

time employees who were able to carry on his affairs during the trial.
After it ended, he took a long weekend to visit friends and look into
prospects in San Francisco. Or so he said. At any rate, you spoke
with those friends, and he was at their place that night, nowhere near
his usual sleeping place.”
“You can see the details of that interview if you like, Lieutenant.
He told me he often sleeps with the window open. I advised him
against it, but I didn’t know then if he would take that warning
seriously.”
She hesitated, perhaps a millisecond. “Don’t be mysterious,
Duncan. Number eleven, Eva Reddy, is twenty-seven, five-foot three,
one hundred five pounds. She was not at home all weekend, either.
She wouldn’t tell us where, and you couldn’t trace her by any other
means.”
I kept my temper. “If we couldn’t trace her, neither could the
Simulians.” And if Labelle intended to beat me down on every minor
detail, we would be here a long time. “This is a woman who has a
history of alcoholism and poor choices in men. None of that could
be brought up during the jury selection, and both the defense and
prosecution had exhausted their peremptory challenges by the time
they got to her. As she had no previous acquaintance with Sherman
or any of his brothers or cousins, she was empaneled. It was an effort
for her to show up every day on time, and the judge admonished her
twice, finally threatening to charge her with contempt of court. That
kept little Eva on the straight and narrow for the rest of the trial.
When it ended she might well have gone on a bender with some old
boyfriend whom she would not want involved. She had left a light on
in her ground floor apartment, but we found no signs of forcible
entry. When the trial ended she went back to work at They Did
What!?, that sensationalist paper you can get at supermarket check-
outs, as a stringer for a show-business gossip columnist. I don’t think
Ms. Reddy has held a full-time job since she left college.”
Was Labelle listening? I could never count on her not listening, no
matter how I tried to bury some tiny nugget of importance in a
mound of monotonous trivia. She could switch part of her attention
away from people she was talking to without their becoming aware of
it. Not quite hypnosis, that phenomenon nevertheless bore a family
resemblance to the rabbit’s fascination with a cobra’s unblinking

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