My Gal Sunday Read Free Page B

“You know, I recently got talked into putting an electronic setup on the drapes in all the other rooms, something that would let me close them either by a timer or by a mere click of the control. I never thought I’d need that in here, though. I know almost nothing about cooking, and Arabella wasn’t exactly the Betty Crocker type herself.”
    He paused and shook his head. “Oh, well. It doesn’t matter now. And besides, I never did like the damn things. In fact, the drapes in the library still don’t work right. Every time you click to either open or close them, you get this loud cracking noise, almost like somebody firing a gun. Oddly appropriate, wouldn’t you say? I mean, since there really was a gun fired in there less than forty-eight hours ago. You’ve heard about events casting their shadows before them? Well . . .”
    He turned away for a moment, the room silent except for the sounds of Sunday getting the omelet ready for the pan. Then Shipman moved to the kitchen table and sat across from Henry. He was reminded almost immediately of the times they had faced each other across the desk in the Oval Office. He looked up, catching the younger man’s eye. “You know, Mr. President, I —”
    “Tommy, knock it off. It’s me. Henry.”
    “All right, Henry. I was just thinking that we are both lawyers, and —”
    “And so is Sunday,” Henry reminded him. “Don’t forget. She did her time as a public defender before she ran for office.”
    Shipman smiled wanly. “Then I suggest that she’s our resident expert.” He turned toward her. “Sunday, did you ever have to launch a defense where your client had been dead drunk at the time the crime was committed, in the course of which he not only shot his . . . ah . . . friend, three times, but left her sprawled out on the floor to bleed to death while he staggered upstairs to sleep it off?.”
    Without turning from the stove, she responded. “Maybe not quite those circumstances, but I did defend a number of people who had been so high on drugs at the time that they didn’t even remember committing the crime. Typically, though, there were witnesses who offered sworn testimony against them. It was tough.”
    “So they were found guilty, of course?” Shipman asked.
    Sunday paused and looked at him, smiling ruefully. “They had the book thrown at them,” she admitted.
    “Exactly. My attorney, Len Hart, is a good and capable fellow who wants me to plead guilty by reason of insanity — temporary, of course. But as I see it, my only course is to plea bargain in the hope that in exchange for a guilty plea, the state will not seek the death penalty.”
    Henry and Sunday now both were watching their friend as he talked, staring straight ahead. “You understand,” Shipman continued, “ that I took the life of a young woman who ought to have enjoyed fifty years more on this planet. If I go to prison, I probably won’t last more than five or ten years. The confinement, however long it lasts, may help to expiate this awful guilt before I am called to meet my Maker.”
    All three of them remained silent as Sunday finished preparing the meal — tossing a salad, then pouring beaten eggs into a heated skillet, adding chopped tomatoes, scallions, and ham, folding the ends of the bubbling eggs into flaps, and finally flipping the omelet over. The toast popped up as she slid the first omelet onto a heated plate and placed it in front of Shipman. “Eat,” she commanded.
    Twenty minutes later, when Tom Shipman pushed the last bit of salad onto a crust of toast and stared at the empty plate in front of him, he observed, “It is an embarrassment of riches, Henry, that with a French chef already employed in your kitchen, you are also blessed with a wife who is a culinary master.”
    “Thank you, kind sir,” Sunday said briskly, “the truth is, whatever talents I have in the kitchen began during the time I put in as a short-order cook when I was working my way through