Terence's apartment that became an evening of Chopin and Bach. Music was an aspect of Mann's life unsuspected, discovered by Warner with the abruptness of an opened door. The lawyer vanished; the hands were "beyond technique"; the keyboard voice spoke with the authority of intense feeling governed by insight.

And Warner recalled another meeting with someone else, in an almost empty bar, a few days after the election that confirmed Terence Mann in office. Idle for the afternoon and in a cool beery mood, he had glanced down the damp mahogany and noticed a sagging red-veined blob, the face of Boss Timmy Flack of the Third Ward--who, in a way, was the politics of Winchester, the half-submerged and partly useful human force, neither honest nor demonstrably a crook, The Man You Went To See. Himself honored and ancient, professionally secure, in any case seldom giving a damn what others said of him or of the company he kept, Warner had moved down the bar and bought Timmy another drink before The Man could buy him one. "Hear tell we got a new judge."

"Uh-huh."

"Happy, Timmy? Civic virtue and so on?"

"Shit."

"If not happy, what are you going to do about it?"

"You needling me, Counselor?"

"Little bit."

"What the hell's anybody going to do, now he's in? The son of a bitch doesn't want anything!"

Which was certainly not true, but just as certainly true in Timmy's sense. And Cecil Warner understood that he now feared Terence Mann only because Terence's mind demanded demonstration when a demonstration of relative truth may be more arduous than any labors of the gods.

"Yes, she might have stumbled and fallen in. The State contends this is not probable. You will of course hear all the evidence that has led us to this conclusion. The State contends that Callista Blake followed Ann Doherty, searched her out, found her there helpless on the path, dragged her the rest of the way into the water. Perhaps even held her under, the way you might drown an unwanted kitten."

Chilled by the voice in spite of forty courtroom years, Warner saw Callista gazing down at her fingertips, frowning slightly as if bothered in the midst of concentration by an irrelevant uproar in another room.

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