Chapter 4: The Jacket

On Thursday I brought the photograph.

It was an eight-by-ten from the state's discovery, a navy work jacket laid flat on a white table with a ruler beside the right cuff.

I put it face down on the steel and kept my hand on it.

The dry-coughing guard stood at the glass, watching the clock.

Kostas Drakos sat with his hands flat, in the same orange jumpsuit.

"I'm going to show you something," I said. "It's a test. I want to see how you respond."

"You may show me what you like," he said.

"I'll be watching your face and your hands."

"They are not interesting hands."

"I'll decide that," I said.

I turned the photograph over.

He looked at it.

I had known many liars, and a liar looks at a thing like that in one of two ways.

He looks too long, or he looks away.

Kostas looked exactly as long as it took to see it, and then he looked at me.

"That is the coat," he said.

"Do you recognize it?" I asked.

"I recognize that I have been hearing about it for eleven months."

"Is it yours?"

"I wear a forty-four," he said. "It is not my size."

I had not told him the size.

My pen stopped over the page.

"How would you know it's not your size?" I asked.

"The lawyer has the report. Everyone in this city has the report."

It was a good answer, and it was probably true, and I wrote it down.

But I had stopped writing for a second, and he had seen it.

"Forty-two long," I said, as flatly as I could.

I said it to the photograph, not to him.

"That's the size on the collar tag. The sleeve runs a little long on a forty-two, so I took it to a tailor myself."