She gave me a nod of approval. “Much better,” she said. “Go on.”
“Whenever I think I’m overlooking something in a case, what I do is put the bones on my desk where I can see them. Every now and then I’ll stop whatever I’m doing—grading papers or reading a journal article or eating a sandwich—and look at the bones. I try to keep my mind as empty as I can make it, and just look, hoping something new will catch me by surprise. Present itself to me. Speak to me. It’s like I’m trying to sneak up on something I already know, somewhere deep down, but can’t quite get ahold of.”
“That’s a good skill to cultivate,” she said. “You’ll need it more and more as you get older and start to lose track of things—names and faces and where you left your reading glasses and why you walked into the living room.”
I had the feeling she was trying to stretch my story out, and I couldn’t blame her. “I’ve been looking at Jonah Jamison’s skull that way for a week now,” I resumed, “but it hasn’t been working. Nothing new. Today, having dragged myself to work at six A.M., I found myself getting mad whenever I glanced at that damn skull. Almost as if he were being deliberately uncooperative. Too watchful for me to sneak up on, or something.”
“Well, he died during wartime in a top secret city,” she said. “You can’t really blame him for being vigilant, can you?”
“But I did,” I said. “I finally got so irritated I picked up the skull and put it in the box and closed the lid.”
“I guess you showed him,” she said.
“And that’s when I saw it,” I said.
“Saw what?”
“His left arm.”
“His left arm? What about it?”
“It was strong.”
She frowned, studying on this. “He was young. He was a soldier. Of course he was strong.”
“What I mean,” I said, “is that his left arm was stronger than his right arm.”
“But how can you possibly know which arm was stronger? The muscle was long gone, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. But the muscle left its story behind on the bone.” She looked puzzled, so I tapped on the surface of the small pine table between us. “You see these two knots in this wood?” She nodded. “Two branches grew out of the tree trunk in those places, right?” She nodded. “Which of those two branches was bigger and stronger?” She tapped the knot closer to her, which was as big as the face on my watch—twice the diameter of the other knot. “The places where muscles fasten to bones are called muscle attachments; not a very imaginative name, but it’s easy for students to remember.” I flexed my left arm and made my bicep as big as I could, which wasn’t all that big. Then I pressed the tip of my right index finger against the inside of my elbow and wiggled the finger. “The tendon from the bicep muscle attaches to the bones of the forearm right here, so that when you tighten your bicep, it pulls your forearm up.” She set her glass down and copied what I was doing.
“Feels like twigs and thread,” she said. “Nobody would ever mistake this for a strong arm.”
“Well, maybe not,” I conceded. “But you’re right-handed, so the twigs and thread are a little thicker and stronger in your right arm than in your left. So the muscle attachments in your right arm are a little sturdier than in your left. Now, UT football players—or Arnold Schwarzennegger, or anybody else with really big biceps—will have big, sturdy muscle attachment points, like knobs or ridges, where the bone is reinforced to carry the load.”
“So just like a nation or a generation,” she said, “bone is tested and strengthened if you challenge it.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And what I realized today is that Jonah Jamison consistently—day in, day out, thirty years—challenged his left arm more than his right. That tells he was left-handed. So does the wristwatch, which he wore on his right wrist. His handedness: that’s how I can tell he was murdered.”
She dropped both hands in her lap and looked down at them. “Handedness,” she said. “What a small detail for a story to turn on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Crucial, but small. So small a man wouldn’t give it an instant’s thought if he were about to blow his brains out. He’d be preoccupied with bigger things—wondering how it came to this, wondering if he’ll feel the bullet, wondering if he really has enough courage or enough despair to pull the trigger. It would never occur to him to wonder which hand to hold the gun in. He’d automatically, instinctively pick it up in his preferred hand. If he were Jonah Jamison, he’d pick it up with his left hand and press it to his left temple. Not his right temple.”
“Yes, that has the ring of truth to it,” she said.