Free False Witness by Dorothy Uhnak

experience and then planned to go into private practice. I considered that we were lucky to have him in the Squad: another best of the best.
    One of Wes’s finest qualities is his easy, Southern-soft manner of gathering information. He is a good listener and people tell him more than they intend. His background reports read like short stories: people take on flesh and style. He assured me he would feel at home in North Carolina.
    “I have the good sense,” he told me with a slow, wise smile, “not to arrive in Cullen in a long purple Cadillac. None of the folks, white nor black, would approve. I’m just passing through town and thought I’d look for a particular tombstone of an old granny I’d heard about all my life but never met. The old folks love to talk about long ago. They’ll know all about Sanderalee Dawson and her family.”
    We spot-checked the people who immediately came to mind as potential murderers/assailants: her ex-husband was now in Australia with some film company, shooting a documentary about aborigines. One or two of the men from her show, with whom she’d been seen occasionally, seemed set with verifiable alibis.
    Among the people who established themselves as a “waiting entourage” at the hospital, some difficulty developed when three self-proclaimed PLO honor guards became involved in a pushing-shoving argument with some of the network people. One of the honor guards pulled a gravity knife and behaved in a “menacing way.” Another displayed a .357 Magnum revolver casually stuck into his waistband. The police waded in. Everyone was disarmed. The weapon carriers were carted off to the precinct. Cries of favoritism and Zionist plot rent the air. Dr. Regg Morris—he of the Ph.D. in Education—showed up with a small army of civil libertarians, white and black, and they caused a small commotion of their own. Some heroes of the Jewish Defense League showed up unbidden and began to chant and wave placards outside the precinct. When asked to leave, they refused. Once taken into custody, face to face with the PLO warriors, the precinct turned into the Golan Heights. Reinforcements of both persuasions—aroused Arabs and indignant Jews—showed up in masses of angry bodies. From the TV news tapes, it was hard to tell who was doing what to whom, but everyone denounced the fascist police.
    My staff was systematically working its way through a seemingly endless list of Sanderalee Dawson’s acquaintances and was trying to reconstruct, on a minute-by-minute time table, her movements on the night of the attack from the moment she was brought home by the studio chauffeur until she was found by Timothy Doyle and the two uniformed police officers.
    While she had been seen publicly with any number of men, both black and white, most of the dinners, disco appearances, theater dates and parties were all, in one way or another, job related. Since the dissolution of her marriage with the Frenchman, Sanderalee was not known to have been involved in any personal way with a white man. Being seen publicly with a white man was one thing; privately, it seemed, it was a thing of the past.
    The only man she had been linked with for nearly a year was Dr. Regg Morris, and he was hardly white.
    We showed a few catalogues of running shoes to our only eyewitness (from the knees down), but Timothy Doyle absolutely, stolidly rejected every picture shown to him: No, no, no, none of them resembled the special, dark blue, oddly “different” running shoes of the man with Sanderalee Dawson that night. Bobby Jones was to meet with both a heart specialist who had a book out about running and an orthopedist who dealt with the whole new category of “runner’s problems” to see what sort of shoe he might come up with.
    Meanwhile we dealt with the confessors: those perpetual full-moon characters who have some deep-seated need to describe in lurid detail the gory things they’d done to whatever victim hit the headlines. Three of