A second persona leapt abruptly from the first, angry and physical. He moved toward me. “Now hear me well, Shaw, because I’ll say this just once: if you make these insinuations anywhere else—anywhere at all—I’ll sue you for slander and take your law license in the bargain.”

My hand was throbbing. “Go ahead. Then you can tell me in open court where you were the night Lydia Cantwell was murdered.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything.”

“Not now. But you keep forgetting the police. You do know they found semen traces on Lydia’s body?”

“So?”

“So when the lab men take semen smears, they comb the woman’s pubic hair. The man leaves his own hair, you see. After that they just keep clipping hairs off suspects until they get a match. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it except wait for them to clip some of yours.”

Mooring straightened as if struggling for control. Then he inhaled, glanced at his watch, and said, “Get out, Shaw. I’m late.”

His tone was again even. For a moment we stood facing each other. Then I turned and left.

On the way out I passed Joanne Mooring, hunched over the counter with a blender full of daiquiris. She didn’t look up. I walked to the car and drove home with one hand.

Fourteen

FOURTEEN

I was sitting at the kitchen counter with my hand in a bucket of ice water when Kris Ann arrived from teaching. She smoothed back a damp tendril of hair, glancing quickly around, and saw me.

She started. “Adam, what happened?”

I raised the swollen hand. “I fought with Jason Cantwell.”

She turned white. “Here?”

“No. I went to his apartment.”

She stared at me in silence. Then she took my hand, turning it gently from side to side. “I think you’d better see a doctor.”

“I’m going to.”

She rested my hand on the counter. “How did it happen?”

I told her, beginning with Jason’s girl and finishing with the fight. She listened without speaking or moving. Then she went to the kitchen table and sat staring out the window, quite still. In an undertone, she asked, “What else did Jason say to you?”

“That’s all, Krissy. It was enough.”

She turned to me, questioning. Finally, she said, “You should never have gone there,” and lapsed into quiet, unapproachable.

It was strange. Alone at the counter, I began missing her, even though she was four feet away—missing some better times we’d had: staying up in school to smoke dope and smile at old movies, perhaps sitting outdoors at a Paris café inventing lives for passersby, or talking in the beach house late at night with the windows open and heavy gulf air smelling of salt.