In her living room I fixed a shaker of martinis and slopped it all over my shirt sleeve. Then, realizing that the heat of my body would speed up evaporation, I took the shirt off and draped it over a chair. We sat together on the studio couch, watching the shirt, waiting. The sleeve reached the degree of near-dryness in forty-five minutes. Don’s shirt could have been a little more or a little less absorbent than mine, but only to the extent of lengthening or shortening the process by, say, fifteen minutes either way. I had touched Don’s shirt at four-thirty. That meant the shots must have been fired sometime between three-thirty and four. By three-thirty, Chuck had been in The Red Bear for an hour. “Well,” said Eve, “that proves it, doesn’t it?” “Yes,” I said. For a moment we both stood looking at the shirt. Lying on the chair with the damp sleeve slopping over the arm, it had a spookily human quality, as if at any moment the sleeve might move.
