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She put her good hand on her hip. Her chest swelled with her breathing.
“What do you think you’ll find that no one else did?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Whose side are you on, Dave? Why do you have to spend so much time and effort on me and Weldon? Do you have any doubt at all that an animal like Joey Gouza belongs in jail? Of all the people in the parish, why are you the only one who keeps turning the screws on us? Have you asked yourself that?”
“Should I go after the warrant?”
“No,” she said quietly. “Look anywhere you want to. . . . You’re a strange man. You understand principle, but I wonder how well you understand pain in other people.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say.”
“Too bad.”
“No, you’re not going to get away with that, Drew. If you and Weldon weren’t my friends, both of you would have been in jail a long time ago for obstruction of justice.”
“I guess we’re very fortunate to have a friend such as you. I’m going to shut the door now. I really wish you had had some tea. I was looking forward to it.”
“Listen, Drew—”
She closed the door softly in my face, then I heard her turn the bolt in the lock.
I went back to my truck, took a screwdriver and three big Ziploc bags off the seat, and walked through the side yard to the gazebo. The latticework was thick with bugle and grapevine, and the myrtle bushes planted around the base were in full purple flower. I knelt down in the moist dirt and probed through the bushes until I found the two pieces of brick I had seen previously. I dropped them both in a plastic bag, then found the broken slat from an apple crate and picked it up carefully by the edges. There was a split from the top down to a nail hole in the center of the slat. I turned it over between my fingers. Even in the deep shade I could see a dark smear around the hole on the opposite side. I slipped
the slat into another bag and worked my way back out of the myrtle bushes onto the grass.
I glanced behind me and saw her face at a window. Then it disappeared behind a curtain.
Each of the steps on the gazebo had been carpentered with a two-inch gap between the horizontal and perpendicular boards. I tried looking through the openings into the darkness below the gazebo but could see nothing. I used the screwdriver to unfasten a section of latticework at the bottom of the gazebo and lifted it out with my fingers. It was moist and cool inside and smelled of standing water and pack-rat nests. I reached underneath the steps and touched the cold metal head of a ball-peen hammer.
I wondered if she had tried to remove it before I had arrived. I worked it out from under the steps with the screwdriver and carefully fitted it into the third plastic bag, then walked up to the screened-in porch on the side of the house.
When she didn’t answer, I banged louder with the side of my fist against the wall.
“What is it?” she said, jerking open the door, her face pinched with both anger and defeat.
I let her take a hard look at the two broken bricks, the split apple-box slat, and the ball-peen hammer.
“I’m going to tell you a speculation or two, Drew, but I don’t want you to say anything unless you’re willing to have it used against you later. Do you understand that?”
Her mouth was a tight line, and I could see her pulse beating in her neck.
“Do you understand me, Drew? I don’t want you to say anything to me unless you’re completely aware of the jeopardy it might put you in. Are we perfectly understood on that?”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice almost broke in her throat.
“You punched the nail through the slat, and you laid the slat across the two bricks. Then you put your hand under the nail and drove it all the way through into the step. The pain must have been terrible, but before you passed out, you splintered the slat away from the nail and shoved it and the bricks into the myrtle bushes. Then you pushed the hammer through the gap in the step.”
Her eyes were filming.
“Your prints are probably all over the bricks and the slat, but that won’t mean anything in itself,” I said. “But I have a feeling there won’t be any prints on the hammer except yours. That one might be hard to explain, particularly if there are blood traces on the hammer and we know for sure it’s the one that was used to drive the nail into the gazebo floor.”
She was breathing hard now, her throat was aflame with color, and her eye shadow had started to run. She licked her lips and started to speak.
“This time listen to me for a minute,” I said. “I’m going to take this stuff down to the prosecutor’s office and they can make of it what they want. In the meantime I recommend you drop the charges against Joey Gouza. Do it without comment or explanation.”
She nodded her head. Her eyes were glistening, and she kept shutting them to clear the tears out of the lashes.
