Puppet by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online Page A

bed.”
    “And what did she do?”
    “She followed me into the bedroom, screaming and pounding on my back. I warned her to leave me alone, but she was like a crazy woman.”
    “You didn’t demand oral sex?”
    “Are you kidding? The last thing I was gonna do was trust my dick in her mouth. Sorry, Your Honor,” Derek Clemens says over the muffled laughter of some of the jurors.
    “Perhaps you could be a little less colorful in your descriptions,” the judge says, although the bemused twinkle in his eyes tells Amanda he rather enjoyed the outburst.
    “And yet you did end up having sex with her,” Amanda reminds the witness.
    “Yeah.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “That was pretty much our pattern. One minute we’re trading punches, the next minute we’re naked and going at it like rabbits.”
    “Did you rip her dress?”
    He shakes his head. “Those seams rip every time you look at them. Caroline was always complaining about it.”
    “Did you force her to have sex?”
    “No way.”
    You need to come home, Amanda.
    What? No way.
    Amanda takes a deep breath. “How do you explain the bite marks, Mr. Clemens?”
    Derek Clemens has the good sense to look genuinely embarrassed. He too takes a deep breath, then turns to face the jury, tells his story directly to them. “After we finished having sex, Caroline started getting all upset again. She said I made her late, and now Jessica wouldn’t have time to cut her hair, and it was all my fault. I told her to shut up and let me get some sleep, and she starts pounding me again. I managed to get out of bed and get behind her, and I’m reaching around her for her hands, trying to keep them from swinging at me, when suddenly, she grabs my hair. My hair’s pretty long.” He shakes his ponytail from side to side by way of illustration. “And she gets a pretty good grip on it and starts tugging at it. I swear I thought she was gonna pull it right out of my head, and I’m yelling at her to let go. So, of course, what does she do? She pulls harder, that’s what. It hurt like hell, and I didn’t know how to get her to stop. So, I bit her. She still wouldn’t let go. So I bit her again. Harder the second time. That’s when she let go of my hair.”
    “You’re saying you bit her in self-defense?”
    “I just wanted her to stop pulling my hair,” he says plaintively.
    “And then what happened?”
    “Then she grabbed the phone and threw it at me. I caught it and threw it right back. It was a reflex action. I didn’t mean to hit her with it.”
    “Did you confine her in the apartment against her will?”
    “Hell, no. At that point, I was begging her to get the hell out.”
    “What did you mean when you threatened to ‘kill her ass’?”
    Derek Clemens shrugs. “It’s just an expression. If anybody was afraid for their ass, it was me.”
    “How tall are you, Mr. Clemens?”
    “Five feet eleven inches.”
    “And how much do you weigh?”
    “A hundred and sixty-five pounds.”
    “And you’re trying to tell us that even though you’re five inches taller and approximately forty pounds heavier than Caroline Fletcher,” Amanda continues, knowing if she doesn’t ask this question, the prosecutor will, “that you were the one afraid for your life?”
    “Hey,” Derek replies with a self-effacing smile. “It’s not the size of the
gun
that’s gonna kill you. It’s those nasty little bullets.”
    The jury is still chuckling as Amanda rests her case.
    “So, how long do you think the jury will be out?” Ellie Townshend is asking between nibbles on her Cobb salad. Ellie Townshend is Amanda’s closest friend, althoughthey rarely see each other more than once a month. Not even that, since Ellie and Michael got engaged.
    “Depends how smart they are,” Amanda answers, wondering if any of the jurors will be clever enough to realize that Derek’s story couldn’t possibly have gone down the way he described. All they’d have to do is reenact the