Free Without Prejudice by Andrew Rosenheim Page B

I remember, the jury was mainly white, too. That’s not racist; that’s the facts.’
    ‘I didn’t mean you,’ she said quietly. He tried to calm down, since when he got worked up, Anna’s tactic was to take no notice anyway.
    She added, ‘Though you do sound rather cynical.’
    ‘You’re saying I’m cynical?’ It was her politics that always imputed bad faith to any kind of authority.
    She ignored this. ‘What was the evidence against him?’
    ‘Mainly the testimony of the nurse. She said her assailant had been wearing a blazer with a badge on it. Duval worked as a security guard at the same hospital, and that’s the uniform they wore. She IDed him from a bunch of photographs they showed her. When she was well enough to attend a line-up at the police station, she picked him out right away. And there was blood, too.’
    ‘Whose blood?’
    ‘His. It was found on the girl. This was pre-DNA, but it matched his blood group.’
    ‘Why would he have been bleeding?’
    ‘I don’t know. It’s so long ago I can’t remember. Maybe she scratched him.’
    ‘Or it was somebody else’s blood.’ She put a finger to her lips, musing. ‘So it hinged mainly on her identification. I don’t like those cases – people so often get it wrong. I’m surprised the jury could be so certain.’
    ‘You might not say that if you’d heard the girl testify. It was horrifying. You felt her life had been destroyed. Correction: you knew her life had been destroyed. By the time she got off the stand, you wanted to see the guy who’d done that to her put away for ever. And that’s what happened. I’d call twenty-four years near enough to for ever.’
    Before they went upstairs he rang his sister Lily on the West Coast – she was usually home by six. He could picture her in the large, spick-and-span kitchen of her ranch house in Palo Alto, with running shoes on, just back from a 10K run around the local meandering hills.
    She was the most successful of the three Danziger children – at least in financial terms. She had gone west to Stanford after high school, and never moved back, building a career as a senior executive in a succession of Silicon Valley firms. During the Dot Com boom she had managed to cash in her options in a start-up company that had briefly enjoyed a paper value of two billion dollars.
    Lily had persuaded their father and stepmother to move to neighbouring Cupertino five years before, when the cold Chicago winters were proving increasingly isolating for their father in particular. Although he had died two years later, Robert’s father’s final days had been happy ones – he’d rejoiced in the company of male residents who, like him, were veterans of World War II. Mike had said it was like living with a hundred Eddie Edeveks, and their father’s last months weren’t spent talking about the literature he’d taught for all his working life, but swapping stories about Basic Training.
    Lily had looked after him very well (no one could question her diligence) and still saw their stepmother almost every day. Robert supposed this caring attention gave Lily the closest thing she had to family life, for she had never married, and if she had wanted children she had never said so. There had been a line of live-in boyfriends, but each time Robert learned to ask after Lance or Edward or Fred, someone new would turn out to be installed. Robert had last been to California three years before for his father’s funeral. His own relationship with Lily, never close, seemed epitomised by the fact that he had stayed in a motel.
    He said, ‘I saw Duval today. I gather he rang you.’
    ‘Frankly, at first I didn’t even remember him.’
    ‘How could you forget Duval?’
    ‘His last name isn’t the same as Vanetta’s.’
    ‘I suppose so.’ Vanetta had never meant as much to Lily anyway. ‘You might have warned me.’
    ‘Why? Don’t worry: I didn’t give him your address. He just wanted your number. I thought