A Handy Death by Robert L. Fish Read Free Book Online Page A

the waiter wanted to bring her a Shirley Temple or Coca-Cola with her meal.”
    Sharon laughed. “I had some time!” She wrinkled her nose. “Unfortunately, they never ask any more.…”
    â€œNobody asked him for identification. If you’d seen him, you’d know why. I never actually saw him myself, but I’ve got his statistics here, and they’re impressive. He was a big kid, and I imagine he’s a big man now,” Steve said.
    â€œOkay,” Ross said, and looked at his watch. “Let’s get on.”
    â€œRight. In any event, Dupaul had a drink at the hotel bar and then went out on the town. He stopped at a place called Marco’s on Lexington near Eighty-fifth and had a couple of drinks there. The bartender says he was talking to some character and then wandered out. The bartender also said it was a good thing he did, because in his state he wouldn’t have served him any more. Then, about twenty minutes to a half hour later, according to the timetable established, he was in a spot called the Mountain Top—it’s actually in a basement—on Fifty-fourth between Seventh and Eighth.”
    â€œQuite a distance,” Ross commented, and frowned. “Odd.”
    â€œPlenty of time to get there, especially in a cab.”
    â€œI don’t mean that. Usually, when a person goes out on a binge, or even a simple, everyday pub crawl, he sticks to bars that are fairly close to one another. He doesn’t jump around. He doesn’t take cabs. There are certainly enough bars around Eighty-sixth and Lexington to satisfy the most demanding thirst.” He frowned and looked up from the pencil he had been twiddling. “Did Billy Dupaul claim to have any particular reason for going over to this Mountain Top Bar?”
    â€œThere’s nothing about it in the transcript.”
    â€œSharon, make a note of that. All right, Steve, what happened next?”
    Steve Sadler shuffled some papers together, straightened his glasses, and shook his head.
    â€œI’m going to have to give you two different stories now, Hank: the one told by Dupaul on the stand and the one told by Neeley. What I’ll be giving you now will really be the summation of many transcripts of testimony, together with the conclusions drawn from this testimony—not conclusions on my part, but on the part of the prosecution on the one hand, and of the defense on the other. And, as I said before, it will give you two completely different stories told by the two men.”
    â€œAnd the jury believed Neeley’s story.” It was less a question on Ross’s part than a statement.
    â€œI’m not so sure,” Steve said. “What I mean is that I think if I’d been on that jury, I would have had to find the boy guilty no matter whose story I believed. It’s a question of credibility. I know that old Mr. Hogan was blamed for poor defense by a lot of people after the trial, but they must have been people who got their information from the newspapers, people who didn’t really follow the trial at firsthand very closely. On the weight of the evidence …” His voice trailed off.
    â€œWell,” Ross said in a reasonable tone of voice, “let’s assume we’re the jury here in this room. Let us hear the two versions.”
    â€œRight,” Steve said. “Well, first, here’s the Dupaul version. Actually, of course, Neeley testified first, since he was a prosecution witness, but I’ll give it to you in this order.
    â€œIn this Mountain Top Bar, Dupaul said he sat down at the bar and found himself sitting next to a woman. He said she was pretty old; his exact words were ‘middle-aged, in the neighborhood of thirty or thirty-five’ but remember, at the time he had just turned nineteen. He said she was very good-looking and very sexy. He said they got talking and she told him her name was Mrs. Neeley, but he could call