Read Online Cartwheel by Jennifer Dubois - Free Book Online Page A

with the seriousness of the crime, not the evidence against the accused. Do you have any other questions for me?”
    She did not, but Eduardo had a few for her. He spent the first twenty minutes asking for factual information he already knew—Lily Hayes’s full name, her date of birth, her reason for being in Buenos Aires. (“I thought it would be an interesting place to study abroad,” she’d said. “And has it been?” She’d laughed a harsh, unbecoming laugh.) These were the equivalent of lie tests on a psych battery or polygraph. He asked her to go through the day of the murder minute by minute, in order to catch deviations from the account she gave to police; he then asked her to repeat it four more times, in order to catch variations between accounts. Certain variations were suspicious, of course, but then so was no variation at all. Lily Hayes was chewing a strand of hair, he noted, which was intriguing. It was a strange, careless thing to do—it was vulgar, really, and he wasn’t sure he could remember seeing anybody over the age of about seven do it—and it was interesting to him that she felt comfortable engaging in such an activity in this, one of the most important formal conversations of her life. At the forty-five-minute mark, Eduardo began asking the real questions.
    “So,” he said. “I understand you felt that Katy was insipid.”
    At this, Lily looked green and appalled. “Where did you hear that?”
    Some prosecutors wouldn’t tell her, in order to make her wonder who among her friends might not be on her side. They’d want to make her understand that the days when she could expect answers were over; that avenues to comprehension were charities now, to be dispensed or withheld at their whim. These kinds of prosecutors would want to build up the breathy edginess of paranoia, that bewildered lost-in-the-woods-at-night disorientation that makes someone look for any sort of beacon or semaphore. Paranoia in a defendant was a great asset for a prosecutor, it was generally thought. But Eduardo did not like to withhold answers. Partly, it offended his sense of fair play.And partly, he disagreed with the strategy. He felt that giving defendants a false sense of marginal competence—a slight idea of where they stood in relation to the world—made them relax just enough to make a mistake, if there were any mistakes to be made (which, of course, he never assumed that there were).
    “An email you wrote,” he said.
    “I see.”
    “Do you remember who you wrote that email to?”
    “No.”
    “So it could have been any number of people, then?”
    Lily said nothing. Eduardo pretended to look at his notes. “When you said she was insipid,” said Eduardo, “did you mean she was ‘lacking in qualities that interest, stimulate, or challenge’?”
    “I mean—yes, I suppose so. Yeah.”
    “Was there anything in particular you found especially insipid about the victim?”
    There was really no need to refer to Katy as the “victim” just now—though it was how Eduardo would refer to her in court, of course, to remind the three judges (over and over and over) that the dead girl, in stark contrast to the living girl in front of them, was dead. But it was best to get in the habit early.
    “I don’t know,” said Lily.
    “Her reading tastes, perhaps? Her vocabulary?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Do you consider yourself a smart woman?” said Eduardo. This language, too, was intentional. In public, in the courts, Eduardo would refer to Katy as a “girl” and Lily as a “woman,” whenever he wasn’t referring to them as “victim” and “defendant,” even though Lily was, in fact, three and a half months younger than Katy had been when she died. This was, again, just good sense. You could subtly direct the judges toward the truth through small adornments and pressures and omissions; Eduardo would never deviate from the facts, of course, but there was nothing wrong with using words with slightly