'I'm sure Melissa would agree,' I said. 'But I need to hear about it again.'
'You work for Cone, Oakes?' Hunt said.
'Yes.'
'And you or they or both seem to think that the murderer was wrongly convicted?'
'They would like to be assured that he wasn't,' I said.
'He wasn't,' Hunt said.
I looked at his wife.
'You as sure as your husband?' I said.
'Oh,' Glenda said, 'yes.'
She had on an expensive, oversized waffle weave cobalt sweat shirt over silvery tights. Her twenty-two-year- old body seemed restless under the clothing, as if her natural state was naked, and clothes were a grudging accommodation to propriety.
'What did you see?' I said.
Glenda smiled and sipped some wine and looked at her husband.
'Glenda and I were walking back from a movie,' he said.
'Actually I was hoping to hear from your wife,' I said.
'I'll do the talking,' Hunt said firmly. 'We both saw the same thing. We were coming back from a movie, walking maybe twenty-five yards behind Melissa along Main Street near the campus front entrance. And a ear came along the street, driving slowly, and pulled in beside her and a black guy jumped out and dragged her in and sped away.'
'Where'd he speed away to?'
'Into the campus.'
'Just where I'd go,' I said. 'If I were kidnapping a coed.'
'I started toward her to see if I could help, but I was too late and I didn't know. I thought it might have been a lover's quarrel, you know. Lot of the girls dated black guys, and it would look like because he was black…'
'Sure,' I said. 'What kind of car?'
'Big car, pink. Maybe an old Cadillac.'
'Just the thing for sneaking around Pemberton,' I said. 'How'd he grab her?'
'Excuse me'?'
'He grabbed her and dragged her into the car. What part of her did he grab?'
'I, it was dark, you know, I think he had her by the hair.'
'That how you remember it, Mrs. McMartin?'
'Yes,' she said.
There was a faintly dreamy quality about her, as if she were always a little disengaged, thinking of her body.
'She scream?'
'Yes.'
'What'd she scream?'
'She just screamed, you know, eeek. A scream.'
I nodded.
'You knew Melissa well?' I said.
'Oh, certainly,' Hunt said. 'She and Glenda were very close friends.'
'She was my sorority daughter,' Glenda said. 'She was like a younger sister.'
Hunt looked slightly annoyed, as if he wasn't used to being interrupted.
'When Glenda and I began dating,' he said, 'I got to know her well, too.'
'So you saw a black man in an old pink car pull up, grab a female friend of yours by the hair and drag her screaming into his car and speed away.'
'Yes.'
'And you didn't call the cops.'
'I didn't want to be one of those country-club liberals who thinks all blacks are hoodlums. I guess I made a mistake.'
'I guess,' I said. 'Where'd you grow up?'
'Here, in Andover.'
'Go to the Academy?'
