'The ones you sent up to my hospital room with the Amnesty International card. One of the pink ladies saw you buy them.'
'She must have been mistaken.'
'I wanted to act nice toward you.'
'I need to look around back. If you don't want to give me your permission, I have to get a warrant.'
'Who lit your fuse today?'
'The law's impersonal sometimes.'
'You think I'm trying to get you in the sack?'
'Give it a break, Drew.'
'No, give me an honest answer. You think I'm all heated up for you, that I'm going to walk you into my bedroom and ruin your marriage? Do you think your old girlfriends are lining up to ruin your marriage?'
'Can I go in back?'
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.'
'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 hold 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.
'It happens all the time,' I said. 'People change their minds. If anyone tries to build a case against you, you keep an attorney at your side and you turn to stone. You think you can do that?'
'Yes.'
I wanted to put my arms around her shoulders. I wanted to press her against me and touch her hair.
'Will you be okay?' I asked.
'Yes, I believe I'll be fine.'
'Call Weldon.'
'I will.'
'Drew?'
'Yes.'
'Don't mess with Gouza anymore. You're too good a person to get involved with lowlife people.'
She kept closing and unclosing her good hand. Her knuckles were white and as tight against her skin as a row of nickels.
'You liked me, didn't you?' she said.
'What?'
'Before you went away to Vietnam. You liked me, didn't you?'
'A woman like you makes me wish I could be more than one person and have more than one life, Drew.'
I saw the sunlight bead in her eyes.
A few minutes earlier she had asked me whose side I was on. I felt I knew the answer now. The truth was that I served a vast, insensate legal authority that seemed determined to further impair the lives of the reckless and vulnerable while the long-ball hitters toasted each other safely at home plate.
That night the sheriff called me at home and told me that Joey Gouza was being moved from the hospital back to a jail cell. He also said that in light of the evidence I had found at Drew Sonnier's, the prosecutor's office would probably drop charges against Gouza in the morning.
When I got to the jail on East Main early the next morning, the sun was yellow and hazy through the moss- hung canopy of oak trees over the street, and the sidewalks were streaked with dew. I left my seersucker coat on when I went inside and stopped in the men's room. I took my.45 out of the holster, pulled the clip out of the magazine, ejected the round in the chamber, and slipped the pistol and the clip in the back of my belt under my coat. Then I unclipped the holster from my belt and dropped it in my coat pocket.
