The Invitation(13)

After a thoughtful moment Colby replies, “Sir, I can see nothing in this guy’s background that would call into question his veracity. That’s my intuition, but I could be wrong.”

“Garrett’s friend, who was with ̓em that night the bridge collapsed…”

“Mike Tanner.”

“He corroborates Garrett’s account?”

“Yes, Sir, in every detail. He lives now in Atlanta. Married, three children, high school math teacher, he’s an assistant Deacon at his church. He’s had no contact with Garrett since college.”

“Is he aware of what Garrett is saying about the President?”

“No Sir, he isn’t.”

Turning his attention to Mr. Pennington, Director Slaughter continues.

“OK, Sid. You’re going to walk us through this.”

“I’ll do my best, Sir.”

“You’re a psychologist.”

“I’m a psychologist by trade, but my specialty is physiognomy.”

“You read facial expressions.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Some people think physiognomy is a pseudoscience, that it’s unreliable. What do you say to that?”

“When people use face reading to infer underlying personality traits, which are psychologically far more complex, then it can be unreliable, but if your aim is to determine a person’s current emotional state, face reading can be very accurate. All individuals use the same muscle groups to express what their feeling. We use what’s known as a facial action coding system to provide a highly accurate predictor of a person’s emotional state. We all recognize a smile as being a friendly gesture, and a frown as a sign of distress. Nonverbal body and facial cues are very revealing. There are exceptions. Poker players make it a practice of controlling their expressions, but most normal people tend to reveal their emotions in their faces.”

“So you think it’s reliable.”

“Absolutely, Emotions are fairly easy to read, because their usually expressed in body language, but a particular emotional response, and how deep that response is varies greatly from person to person.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we know what emotion a person is experiencing, but not always why. In the case of Mr. Myers we can, I believe, accurately read the range of emotions he experiences when he was reading these plays.”

Reaching for the Shakespeare collection Mr. Slaughter says, “So this is what he was reading. Wow, what’s this thing weigh?”

“Almost ten pounds, Sir. Over fifteen hundred pages,” says Tim Colby.

“He read the whole thing in how long?” Frank Slaughter asks.

“Total reading time was a little under two hours and thirty-eight minutes.”

“How fast is he reading”?

“It varies from between two hundred and three hundred words a second.”

“Could you repeat that, please?”

“Sir, he averaged between two and three hundred words per second.”

“Are you serious? What’s normal?”

“For you and I, much less of course, but a good speed reader can read about twenty or twenty five words a second.”

“So, he’s reading ten times faster than a speed reader.”

“That’s correct, but it’s also what he’s reading. Shakespeare uses phrases that often have double meanings. His use of irony and paradox is uncanny. You can read a play twenty or thirty times and still pick up details you missed,” Mr. Pennington says.

“I may be revealing my ignorance here, but why is that?” Mr. Slaughter asks.

“It’s because the language he uses is rich and highly condensed. It’s just hard to comprehend it quickly.”

“Hmm, okay. Sid, you can start whenever you’re ready.”

As the television is turned on, a palpable sense of expectation comes over the three men. Mr. Pennington then begins his presentation.

“Okay, what you’re first going to see is the empty chair that will soon be occupied by Ken Myers. Nine minutes pass before he eventually sits down.”

“So Garrett must have known that Myers was likely to sit there some time in the course of the evening, correct?” Mr. Slaughter asks.

“When we interviewed Mr. Garrett, he said Myers had such regular habits that he was sure the recording would capture his image.” Tim Colby says, as Mr. Pennington continues.

“What I wanted to show you was this. You see the window in the background?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“We can see it’s still daylight when the recording starts, which was about eight p.m. When the recording is halfway through about an hour later, it’s dark outside. We can see the glare from car headlights, and the corresponding shadows from objects just outside the window.”