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“What’d you see at the scene besides Ms. Sonnier?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Did you see a hammer?”
He looked out the glass door at the rain falling on the bayou.
“No,” he answered. “I don’t think so. But it was getting dark.”
“What do you think they used to nail her hand down?”
“I don’t know. But whoever did it drove it all the way down to the skin. It was a son of a gun to pull out of the boards. I had to press her hand down flat while my partner worked the nail out with a pair of vise grips. She passed out while we were doing it, poor lady.”
“Did she look like she had fought with them? Was she bruised or scratched?”
“She could have been, I didn’t notice. I was thinking about getting that nail out of her hand.”
“Did she tell you anything?”
“She was in trauma. When something like that happens to them, it’s like they’ve been drug behind a car. Maybe you ought to talk with the city cops. They were up there a little while ago.”
“I will. Thanks for your time. Here’s my telephone number in case you think of anything later that might be important.”
“She’s a nice lady. She jogs by my house sometimes. She must have got messed up with a bad guy. Maybe they were both drunk when he did it to her. I’ve seen some bad stuff since I came to work here, but not one like this.”
“What do you mean drunk?”
“She must have puked up a fifth of gin and vermouth. There’s no mistaking the smell.”
I decided not to take a statement from Drew right then. Sometimes trial attorneys use the axiom “Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.” The same is not absolutely true for a police officer, but you do have to know some of the answers in advance in order to gauge the accuracy or truthfulness of the others.
I drove to the city police station and read the report written up by the investigating officer. It was one paragraph long, ungrammatical, full of misspellings, and described almost nothing about the crime scene or the crime itself except the nature of the injury to the victim and the fact that in the hospital she had identified her assailants as two white males of medium height and build and a third white male by the name of Joey Gouza, who had watched the assault from the driver’s window of his automobile.
The only evidence recovered or noted at the crime scene was the sixteen-penny nail.
Drew’s house was dark and the rain was slanting through the trees as I walked through her sideyard with a six-battery flashlight. I squatted down on the floor of the gazebo and shined the beam on the planks by the top of the steps. They were smeared with miniature horsetails of dried blood, and one was centered with a blond nail hole. I walked back into the rain and searched in the myrtle bushes around the gazebo. The light flicked across a pop bottle impacted with dirt, two broken bricks, and what looked like a shattered slat from an apple crate that lay propped against some myrtle branches at the base of the gazebo.
But there was no hammer.
I stooped into the wet bushes and examined the bricks by turning them over with my pocket knife and shining the light on all their surfaces. But I saw no chip marks or scratches that would indicate that either had been used to drive a nail into a hardwood surface.
I searched among the oak trees, in the flower beds, and over the lawn, and found no hammer there, either, not that I should, I told myself. But it was something else that I didn’t see that bothered me most. According to the report, she had told the city cops that Gouza had watched the assault from the window of his automobile. I returned to the gazebo’s steps and shined the flashlight back toward the house. The long driveway and garage were obscured from view by a hedge and two huge clumps of banana trees. If Gouza had had a direct line of vision from his car to the gazebo, he would have had to pull it around the garage and park it on the grass behind the house.
And there were no tire tracks on the lawn. But it had rained, I thought, and maybe the depressed blades of grass had sprung back into place.
What I did find, in the weeded area around a lime tree, was a wet handkerchief spotted with blood. I put it in a Ziploc bag, and I had no idea what it meant, if anything.
THE NEXT MORNING I sat by Drew’s hospital bed and put a half dozen mug shots facedown on the sheets next to her good hand. Her other hand, her left, was wrapped thickly with bandages and rested on top of a pillow. She wore no makeup, and her hair was unbrushed and her face still puffy with sleep.
“I thought you might wait until after breakfast,” she said. “Would you excuse me a minute?”
She went into the bath, then came back out a few minutes later, touching at her face with a towel and widening her eyes. She got back in the bed and pulled the sheet up to her stomach.
“Look at the pictures, Drew.”
She turned them over mechanically, one by one. Then she picked up one and dropped it in front of me.
“You have no doubt that’s the guy?” I asked.
