A Stained White Radiance (24 page)

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.

T
HE
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.

“Why don't you tell me, Dave? Is that Joey Gouza or not?”

“It's Joey Gouza.”

“So arrest him.”

“Somebody else is taking care of that. Did the city cops show you mug shots last night?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know it was Gouza?”

“He was at a party Weldon gave in New Orleans.”

“When I mentioned his name once before, you seemed a little vague about it, Drew.”

“That's the man who smoked a cigarette while his two pieces of shit tried to crucify me.”

I picked up the photographs and put a rubber band around them. The grass outside the window was bright green, and the sunlight looked hot on the trees, which were still wet from last night's rain.

“Why do you think they did it?” I asked.

“Gouza said, ‘Tell your brother to pay his debts.' ”

“What's his voice sound like? Does he have an accent?”

“Why are you asking me things like this?”

“A prosecutor is going to ask you, his defense attorney is. Why do you object to me asking you?”

“He has an accent like any other New Orleans lowlife.”

“I see. That'd make sense, wouldn't it?”

“No, what you're really asking is something else. There's something wrong with his voice. He sounds like he has a strep throat. No, it's worse than that. He sounds like his vocal cords were burnt with acid.”

“Here are some other mug shots, Drew. See if any of these guys look like the two men who hurt you.”

She went through them one at a time, looking carefully at each one. Among the six mug shots were the faces of Jewel Fluck, Eddy Raintree, and Jack Gates. She shook her head.

“I've never seen any of these men,” she said. She touched the tops of my fingers as I gathered up the photographs from the sheet. “What happened to your thumb?”

“A man bit it the other night.”

“Maybe it's catching.”

“He used to be a bodyguard for Bobby Earl.”

“What did you do with him, put him in the dog pound?”

“No, I didn't get the chance, Drew. I had him cuffed by a railroad track when a guy named Jewel Fluck blew most of his face off with a shotgun. His name was Eddy Raintree. He was one of the guys I just showed you. Would you describe the two men who hurt you?”

“Do you know what victim rape is?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I'm a little bit used up right now. You said something before about me being a soldier. I'm not. I'm still shaking inside. I don't know if I'll ever stop. If you want to take me over the hurdles, you can. But I think you're acting like a shit.”

“The sheriff told me to come up here last night and take a statement. But I didn't. I figured the city cops had pretty well worn you out. Maybe you ought to consider who your real friends are, Drew.”

She turned her head on the pillow and looked
out the window. I could see a tear secrete brightly in the corner of her eye.

“I'll come back later,” I said.

She nodded, her head still turned toward the window. Her skin looked dull in the sunlight.

I paused before I went out the door.

“You're willing to testify against Gouza at a trial, Drew?”

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“You know they'll put Weldon on the stand, too, don't you?”

She twisted her head back toward me on the pillow. I saw that her projections about the future had not yet reached the last probability. She drank from a glass of water and pulled her knees up under the sheet. Her face had the divorced, empty look of a person who might have lived one way all her life only to awake one morning and discover that none of her experience counted, that she was cut loose and voiceless in a place where no other people lived.

On the way out of the hospital I stopped by the gift shop and sent a vase of flowers to her room. I signed the card “From your many friends in Amnesty International.”

T
HEY
BROUGHT
J
OEY
Gouza from New Orleans in leg and waist chains, got him arraigned that afternoon, and amidst a crowd of photographers, news reporters, and onlookers, who behaved like spectators at a cockfight, virtually trundled him from the courtroom to a city jail cell. Bail was set
by Judge James Lefleur, an ill-tempered right-wing coonass also known as Whiskey Jim.

When Gouza came out of the court, in pink shirt, cream slacks, and wide black tie with white polkadots, with cops holding him by both arms, he managed to get one hand loose, grab his phallus, and spit into the lens of a television camera.

I checked my .45 with a guard before he worked the levers that slid the barred door on a corridor that led past three holding cells and the drunk tank.

“I'd like to go inside with him,” I said.

“Then you'd better take a stun gun with you,” the guard said.

“What's he done?”

“Look for yourself, look at the floor. The sonofabitch.”

The corridor in front of one cell was splattered with spaghetti, coffee, and cobbler that had obviously been flung with the plastic tray and Styrofoam containers from the iron apron in the cell door.

I walked down the corridor and propped one arm against the bars of Joey Gouza's cell. Tieless and beltless now, he sat on a bunk that was suspended from wall chains; he smoked a cigarette methodically, his fingers pinched on the paper, his furious black eyes staring into the center of the gloom.

Then he saw me. “It's you.”

“What's happenin', Joey?”

“I should have figured your nose was in this someplace.”

“You're wrong. I'm not a player. It looks like it's between you and other people this time.”

“What people? What the fuck is going on, man?”

“You should have stayed out of Iberia Parish.”

“Are you out of your mind? You think I got an interest in some shithole that counts the mosquitoes in the population? You tell me what the fuck is going on.” His voice rasped and broke wetly in his throat. He breathed deeply to regain his momentum. “Look, I don't sit still while people ream me. You got that, Jack? You tell me what the fucking game is.”

“I don't think there is one, Joey. I just think you paddled too far up shit creek this time. That's the way it breaks sometime.”

“The way it breaks? What do you got, yesterday's ice cream for brains? That judge, I've never seen him before and he's got a hard-on for me before they unlock me off the chain. He called me a wild animal, in front of all them people. Bail, one-point-seven-million dollars! That's a hundred and seventy thousand large for a bondsman. You telling me these people ain't trying to run a hook through my balls? Those two guys who busted me, they stuck guns in my face in my own restaurant. You've got a real problem here, some people that's totally out of control.”

“You've got good lawyers. They'll get your bail reduced.”

He flipped his cigarette in a shower of sparks off the wall and kneaded his hands together. His long neck and shoulders were webbed with veins.

“What are you down here for, to toss peanut
shells at the monkeys?” he said. “Go tell that screw there's no toilet paper in here.”

“I thought you might want to talk to me.”

He rose from the bunk, breathing hard through his nose, and came toward me.

“That broad's lying,” he said.

“She's been pretty convincing.”

His eyes looked hard into mine and narrowed.

“You know it's a ream. I see it in your face, man,” he said. “You offering me something?”

“Somebody did it to her. I don't think it was anybody around here. Everybody I talk to thinks you're the number-one candidate, Joey. I think they've got the right person in the cell.”

His hand shot out of the bars, knotting my shirt in his fist. His breath was rife with jailhouse funk. My collar button popped loose on the floor.

“I ain't going down on a phony beef. You tell that broad that,” he said. “You tell her brother to get her off my back.”

I tore his hand loose.

“You understand me, man?” he said. “I don't roll over. You push me, I'll leave your hair on the wallpaper.”

“Tell that to everybody at your trial, Joey. It makes good courtroom theater.”

He hit the bars with the heel of his fist. His face was livid, popping with cartilage.

“You're twisting me, man. What's your stake? What's your fucking stake?” he said.

“Why did those guys creep Weldon Sonnier's house?”

He paced back and forth, his nostrils dilating.

“I'll print it out for you in big letters,” he said. “I'm a businessman, I don't creep houses, I don't drive out to some hole in the road to stoke up a bunch of small-town jackoffs. They're the kind who send you to the electric chair and then go back to watering their plants. Look, you were a New Orleans cop. You know how it gets done. Somebody keeps getting in your face and don't listen to reason, you tell another guy about it, then you forget it. You don't even want to know who does it. If you're a sick guy, with a real bone on for somebody, you get Polaroids, then you burn them.

“That's how it works. You don't drive into some broad's backyard and nail her to a gazebo. You don't end up in a hick court with Elmer Fudd dropping a one-point-seven-million-dollar bond on your head. The point is, when people got dog food between their ears they're dangerous, and I don't fuck with them. Is it starting to clear up for you now?”

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and hunted in his shirt pockets for a match.

“Gimme a light,” he said.

“How'd you get involved with Bobby Earl?” I said.

He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and shook it at me.

“You quit trying to jerk my chain, man,” he said. “You want to know how I got this voice? A swinging dick tried to make me his punk when I was a seventeen-year-old fish. I caught him in the
shower with a string knife. Except he was a made guy, and I didn't know the rules about made guys back then, and his friends hung me up in my cell with a coat hanger. They crushed my voice box. But I didn't roll over then, man, and I don't roll over now.

“Explain to the broad I'm a three-time loser. If I go down on the bitch, I got nothing to lose. That means I can cop to anything they want and take Sonnier with me. I'll make sure he gets heavy time, and I'll be inside with him when he does it. Let her think about that.”

“You're a hard man, Joey.”

“Tell that screw down there to get me processed or send up some toilet paper.”

He scratched at the inside of his nostril with his thumbnail and blew air through his nasal passages. He had already lost interest in my presence, but a dark light remained in his face, as though he were breathing bad air, and his heated eyes, the nests of veins in his neck, his unwashed smell, the soft scud of his loafers on the cement, his jug head in silhouette against the cell window, made me think of the circus creatures who pawed the dark while they watched the denouement of Eddy Raintree from their cages.

L
ATER,
I
CALLED
Weldon at his office and was told that he was with a drilling crew at the old Sonnier farm.