‘Jeepers, lay off,’ Mr. Bissonette said mildly. There was distress on his bloodhound’s face.
‘I withdraw the question,’ Durgin said.
‘Which one?’ I asked.
He looked at me tiredly, as if to say he had to put up with assholes like me all the time and he was used to how we behaved. ‘How many cars went by from the time you picked the child up and carried her to safety to the time when you and the Devores parted company?’
I hated that ‘carried her to safety’ bit, but even as I formulated my answer, the old guy was muttering the question into his Stenomask. And it was in fact what I had done. There was no getting around it.
‘I told you, I don’t know for sure.’
‘Well, give me a guesstimate.’
Guesstimate. One of my all-time least favorite words. A Paul Harvey word. ‘There might have been three.’
‘Including Mary Devore herself?. Driving a — ‘ He consulted the paper he’d taken from the folder. ‘ — a 1982 Jeep Scout?’
I thought of Ki saying Mattie go fast and understood where Durgin was heading now. And there was nothing I could do about it.
‘Yes, it was her and it was a Scout. I don’t know what year.’
‘Was she driving below the posted speed limit, at the posted speed limit, or above the posted speed limit when she passed the place where you were standing with Kyra in your arms?’
She’d been doing at least fifty, but I told Durgin I couldn’t say for sure. He urged me to try — I know you are unfamiliar with the hangman’s knot, Mr. Noonan, but I’m sure you can make one if you really work at it — and I declined as politely as I could.
He picked up the paper again. ‘Mr. Noonan, would it surprise you to know that two witnesses —
Richard Brooks, Junior, the owner of Dick’s All-Purpose Garage, and Royce Merrill, a retired carpenter — claim that Mrs. Devore was doing well over thirty-five when she passed your location?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I was concerned with the little girl.’
‘Would it surprise you to know that Royce Merrill estimated her speed at sixty miles an hour?’
‘That’s ridiculous. When she hit the brakes she would have skidded sideways and landed upside down in the ditch.’
‘The skid-marks measured by Deputy Footman indicate a speed of at least fifty miles an hour,’
Durgin said. It wasn’t a question, but he looked at me almost roguishly, as if inviting me to struggle a little more and sink a little deeper into this nasty pit. I said nothing. Durgin folded his pudgy little hands and leaned over them toward me. The roguish look was gone.
‘Mr. Noonan, if you hadn’t carried Kyra Devore to the side of the road — if you hadn’t rescued her — mightn’t her own mother have run her over?’
Here was the really loaded question, and how should I answer it? Bissonette was certainly not flashing any helpful signals; he seemed to be trying to make meaningful eye-contact with the pretty assistant. I thought of the book Mattie was reading in tandem with ‘Bartleby’ — Silent Witness, by Richard North Patterson. Unlike the Grisham brand, Patterson’s lawyers almost always seemed to know what they were doing. Objection, Your honor, calls for speculation on the part of the witness.
I shrugged. ‘Sorry, counsellor, can’t say — left my crystal ball home.’
Again I saw the ugly flash in Durgin’s eyes. ‘Mr. Noonan, I can assure you that if you don’t answer that question here, you are apt to be called back from Malibu or Fire Island or wherever it is you’re going to write your next opus to answer it later on.’
I shrugged. ‘I’ve already told you I was concerned with the child. I can’t tell you how fast the mother was going, or how good Royce Merrill’s vision is, or if Deputy Footman even measured the right set of skid-marks. There’s a whole bunch of rubber on that part of the road, I can tell you.
Suppose she was going fifty? Even fifty-five, let’s say that. She’s twenty-one years old, Durgin. At the age of twenty-one, a person’s driving skills are at their peak. She probably would have swerved around the child, and easily.’
‘I think that’s quite enough.’
‘Why? Because you’re not getting what you wanted?’ Bissonette’s shoe clipped my ankle again, but I ignored it. ‘If you’re on Kyra’s side, why do you sound as though you’re on her grandfather’s?’
A baleful little smile touched Durgin’s lips. The kind that says Okay, smart guy, you want to play? He pulled the tape-recorder a little closer to him. ‘Since you have mentioned Kyra’s grandfather, Mr. Maxwell Devore of Palm Springs, let’s talk about him a little, shall we?’
‘It’s your show.’
‘Have you ever spoken with Maxwell Devore?’
‘Yes.’
‘In person or on the phone?’
‘Phone.’ I thought about adding that he had somehow gotten hold of my unlisted number, then remembered that Mattie had, too, and decided to keep my mouth shut on that subject.
‘When was this?’
‘Last Saturday night. The night of the Fourth. He called while I was watching the fireworks.’
‘And was the subject of your conversation that morning’s little adventure?’ As he asked, Durgin reached into his pocket and brought out a cassette tape. There was an ostentatious quality to this gesture; in that moment he looked like a parlor magician showing you both sides of a silk handkerchief. And he was bluffing. I couldn’t be sure of that . . . and yet I was. Devore had taped our conversation, all right — that underhum really had been too loud, and on some level I’d been aware of that fact even while I was talking to him — and I thought it really was on the cassette Durgin was now slotting into the cassette player . . . but it was a bluff.
‘I don’t recall,’ I said.
Durgin’s hand froze in the act of snapping the cassette’s transparent loading panel shut. He looked at me with frank disbelief . . . and something else. I thought the something else was surprised anger.
‘You don’t recall? Come now, Mr. Noonan. Surely writers train themselves to recall conversations, and this one was only a week ago. Tell me what you talked about.’
‘I really can’t say,’ I told him in a stolid, colorless voice. For a moment Durgin looked almost panicky. Then his features smoothed. One polished fingernail slipped back and forth over keys marked REW, FF, PLAY, and REC. ‘How did Mr. Devore begin the conversation?’ he asked.
‘He said hello,’ I said mildly, and there was a short muffled sound from behind the Stenomask. It could have been the old guy clearing his throat; it could have been a suppressed laugh.
Spots of color were blooming in Durgin’s cheeks. ‘After hello? What then?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘Did he ask you about that morning?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘Didn’t you tell him that Mary Devore and her daughter were together, Mr. Noonan? That they were together picking flowers? Isn’t that what you told this worried grandfather when he inquired about the incident which was the talk of the township that Fourth of July?’
‘Oh boy,’ Bissonette said. He raised one hand over the table, then touched the palm with the fingers of the other, making a ref’s T. ‘Time out.’
Durgin looked at him. The flush in his cheeks was more pronounced now, and his lips had pulled back enough to show the tips of small, neatly capped teeth. ‘What do you want?’ he almost snarled, as if Bissonette had just dropped by to tell him about the Mormon Way or perhaps the Rosicrucians.
‘I want you to stop leading this guy, and I want that whole thing about picking flowers stricken from the record,’ Bissonette said.
‘Why?’
Durgin snapped. ‘Because you’re trying to get stuff on the record that this witness won’t say. If you want to break here for awhile so we can make a conference call to Judge Rancourt, get his opinion — ‘
‘I withdraw the question,’ Durgin said. He looked at me with a kind of helpless, surly rage. ‘Mr.
Noonan, do you want to help me do my job?’
‘I want to help Kyra Devore if I can,’ I said.
‘Very well.’ He nodded as if no distinction had been made. ‘Then please tell me what you and Maxwell Devore talked about.’
‘I can’t recall.’ I caught his eyes and held them. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘you can refresh my recollection.’
There was a moment of silence, like that which sometimes strikes a high-stakes poker game just after the last of the bets have been made and just before the players show their hands. Even the old fighter-pilot was quiet, his eyes unblinking above the mask. Then Durgin pushed the cassette player
aside with the heel of his hand (the set of his mouth said he felt about it just then as I often felt about the telephone) and went back to the morning of July Fourth. He never asked about my dinner with Mattie and Ki on Tuesday night, and never returned to my telephone conversation with Devore — the one where I had said all those awkward and easily disprovable things.