'It's your new suit. Wear it tomorrow.'
'I got a suit.'
'Yeah, you've got this one. Tomorrow, you sit erect in the chair. You don't chew gum, you don't grin at anything the prosecutor or a witness says. If you want to tell me something, you write it on a pad, you never whisper. You do nothing that makes the jury think you're a wiseass. There's nothing a jury hates worse than a wiseass. Are we connecting here?'
'Why don't you carve it on my chest?'
'You know how many defendants flush themselves down the commode because they think the court is an amusement park?'
'You're more strung out about this than I am.'
Because I know what you'll face if we lose, I thought. But I didn't say it.
He stood tall and barefoot at the drainboard, measuring vanilla extract into the shot glass. Outside the screen window, the windmill was silhouetted against a bank of yellow and purple clouds.
I watched him pour the vanilla extract into the cake bowl, his long fingers pinched lightly on the sides of the shot glass.
'Why you looking at me like that?' he asked.
'The first time I interviewed you at the jail, you told me you and Roseanne were "knocking back shots",' I said.
'Yeah, Beam, with a draft beer on the side.'
'But you were working with the band that night. You had on that blue-check shirt with the gold trumpets sewn on the shoulders, the shirt you bought to play in the band.'
'Yeah, like that Jamie Lake gal said.'
'Why'd you start doing boilermakers while you were working?'
'We were on the break. I just had two. My stomach must have been empty or something. I remember Roseanne was mad 'cause of something Bunny said. She wanted to get a six-pack and go down the road and drink it. I wouldn't have done it, but I was jackhammered by then.'
'Did she drink as much as you did?'
'Yeah, I guess.'
'But you passed out and she didn't.'
'I just ain't following you, Mr Holland.'
'Where was Darl Vanzandt when you decided to smash down a couple of boilermakers?'
'He was at the bar. Darl never gets far from the juice man when he's inside Shorty's… What's wrong?'
'I never saw it. I kept thinking about the autopsy report on Roseanne. I was thinking about the wrong person.'
'What per—'
'A hooker from San Antone told me Darl probably doped Roseanne with roofies. But he didn't. He doped you.'
Lucas set the shot glass down on the drainboard and looked at it numbly.
'They laced me with downers twice? I reckon that makes me pretty dumb, don't it?' he said.
'I'll pick you up in the morning,' I said.
'Mr Holland, Darl didn't have no reason to kill Roseanne.'
'He doesn't need one. He enjoys it.'