“Yes sir, I was driving it.”
That was just a cock-eyed story I was going to take back later on, when we got in a place where it really meant something, which this inquest didn’t. I figured if I told a bum story first, and then turned around and told another story, it would sound like the second story was really true, where if I had a pat story right from the beginning, it would sound like what it was, pat. I was doing this one different from the first time. I meant to look bad, right from the start. But if I wasn’t driving the car, it didn’t make any difference how bad I looked, they couldn’t do anything to me. What I was afraid of was that perfect murder stuff that we cracked up on last time. Just one little thing, and we were sunk. But here, if I looked bad, there could be quite a few things and still I wouldn’t look much worse. The worse I looked on account of being drunk, the less the whole thing would look like a murder.
The cops looked at each other, and the coroner studied me like he thought I was crazy. They had already heard it all, how I was pulled out from under the back seat.
“You’re sure of that? That you were driving?”
“Absolutely sure.”
“You had been drinking?”
“No sir.”
“You heard the results of the tests that were given you?”
“I don’t know nothing about the tests. All I know is I didn’t have no drink.”
He turned to Cora. She said she would tell what she could.