Warner sat down, an old man and weary, impersonally accepting the impersonal courtesy when Hunter snapped a lighter for his cigarette. His fat hand waved aside the curling fantasy of smoke between him and his enemy. "Okay, T. J., I think you asked for it. Why couldn't you establish corpus delecti with Herb Chalmers? Could've, no sweat."
"Grab off a natural defense witness when I don't have to?"
"What makes you think I want Herb?"
Hunter chuckled and strolled to the window. "Just fishing."
Mann asked: "What's your view, T. J.?"
The back of Hunter's neck was calm. "Just among us girls, Welsh certainly goofed. Honest, I sweated blood trying to give her the rudiments of courtroom behavior. Seems it was mostly hooting down a rain-barrel."
Warner said: "They goofed the same way over Joan of Arc."
Hunter swung around and exclaimed: "After all, Cecil!"
"No comparison between the principals," Warner said, "except age and sex. You admire Joan? I don't, much. But there's an obvious parallel between twentieth- and fifteenth-century attitudes toward the accused maverick. Takes more than five hundred years for the human race to learn anything important." His slow voice was acquiring a snarl. "You know, T. J.—you know what the newspapers have been doing. Far as Welsh is concerned, I don't care a fractionated brass-bound tinker's fart whether she's held in contempt or not. I do care about keeping this thing from turning into a witchcraft trial. I'm not sitting peaceful on my fat ass, understand, while they turn my girl into a succubus."
Hunter said stiffly: "I think you could trust me to prevent any nonsense of that kind." Warner studied him, dark eyes searching and sad in their slightly yellowed and bloodshot fields of white. Hunter went on: "Your hypothetical was a dilly, by the way. The defense introduces testimony at this point? You want the State to pack up and go home?"