Take statements; collect evidence; put it into nice little plastic baggies with dainty little white labels you put your initials on. Make arrests and tidy up. So that then when this particular crime comes up to be replayed in court, you will be a cop, okay? Have to get all of this straight.
"It's kind of confusing until everybody finally gets their parts assigned. By now there's quite a few more people've come to join those of us who attended the shooting. It's becoming sort of a weird party-atmosphere now. People're all milling around all over the place, shoving each other, uttering warlike cries "Get outta the way; I tole you to move' so as you can imagine this takes a while. Have to make absolutely sure everybody's happy, no one's nose is out of joint, before we can get to work on this. "Now, now, Billy, play nice. Can't have any pouting. I promise if you do real good as a policeman this time, you can be a witness in the next one, okay Billy?"
"The strange thing is that if no woman'd come flying through the air through the swinging doors backwards with a pistol in her hand, I don't think any one of us in that room who heard the noise when the gun went off would've been able to say: "Well, that was a shot that I just heard. Someone just shot a gun off." It didn't sound like what we think of as a gunshot.
"I was thinking about that," Merrion said. "After the EMTs'd come and the doors're open now, I could see them out there in the foyer, attending to the victim. I recognize him from the jacket he had on. It was like a short white Eisenhower jacket, had his name on it in red over the pocket, "Ellie." Like the one John Casey made me wear at Valley Ford, I was a kid. He was this Ellsworth Ryan guy I just met, the way my office. Talked to him maybe two-three minutes, no more'n that. I think at this point I am practically the only guy in the courthouse who has met him at all, and knows who he is. Except for his loving wife Sheila, of course, his devoted wife, Sheila, who's just finished shootin' at him. That is what made him really mad at her, made him pick her up off her feet and fling her like a shot put bass-ackwards through the doors.
"He is one strong dude, this guy. Just been shot in the right side of his tummy, it looks like, and he can still do something like that. Pick up a hundred-and-fifty, hundred-and-sixty-pound woman and pitch her about nine-ten feet through a pair ah swingin' doors. Of course the reason that he could was that he was strong and he was not disabled. It was a popgun twenny-two, not a grown-up gun like a forty-five or a nine millimeter, lot of stopping power. One them hits you, I don't care how strong you are, you would not feel like picking anybody up and flinging them through the air. You'd be feeling like somebody threw a bowling ball into your guts at couple hundred miles an hour."
"And then also there was the fact that the slug didn't actually hit his stomach. What it hit was his call-book, and that took the impact, or a lot of it at least. Cops told me later when emergency room people got his shirt entirely off him, they confirmed what the EMTs'd told them to expect: the bullet never penetrated. Never broke the skin. Just an enormous bruise, I guess, so he's a lucky bastard, too, addition to being a strong one."
The waiter reappeared soundlessly with a bottle of red wine, already opened, and two more glasses. He set the glasses down and poured the wine. Hilliard said "Thank you." The waiter nodded. Then he drifted away.
"I don't like it when they bring the bottle already open," Merrion said. "I always suspect it isn't a fresh bottle; that they're refilling old Cotes du Rhone bottles over and over out in the kitchen from a vat of cheap jug-wine from Outer Mongolia, someplace like that.
Wine made from yak fat; there's a tank of the stuff in the basement."
"I doubt it," Hilliard said. "I think in this case the explanation is the waiter's too feeble to get the cork out at the table, so he has some muscular pot-walloper out back use the corkscrew for him." '1 think I saw the guy in a movie once," Merrion said, 'a small supporting part. I forget the name of it. Boris Karloff was the star."
"Now this would be your victim," Hilliard said, 'or is it our waiter we're still talking about?"
"Could be either one, I suppose," Merrion said. "Except I don't think Karloff was also in the movie where I might've seen the victim. In that one I think the star was Peter Boyle.
"Anyway, today he was being an appliance repairman: refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, and when he came into the courthouse he forgot to leave his call-book in his truck. Good thing for him. It's one of those thick black leather ledger-things they make out of punched forms, two hard covers and a couple of || steel bolts. He carries it hooked over his belt, back cover inside his pants.
"His adoring wife, Sheila, thinks when he keeps those appointments he meets lots of horny young housewives that he's bangin' all the time.
