A Stained White Radiance (29 page)

“Yes.”

“Then do it. By the way, she was discharged from the hospital this morning, so she's back home now.”

“Okeydoke.”

“Dave, a little advice. Try to put the lid on your personal feelings about the Sonniers. They're grown-up people now.”

“All right, sheriff.”

“There're a couple of other things I need to tell you. While you were out the jailer called. It seems one trusty decided to snitch on another one. The night Joey Gouza went apeshit and vomited all over his cell, the trusty preparing the food got swacked on paregoric and accidentally knocked a box of ant poison off the shelf onto a table. It probably got in Gouza's food. Except the trusty didn't tell anybody about it. Instead he wiped off the table and served the trays like nothing had happened.”

“Gouza's convinced there's a hit on him.”

“That might be, but this time it looks like it was an accident.”

“Where's the trusty now?”

“They're moving him over to the parish jail. I'd hate to be that guy when Gouza finds out who fired up his ulcers.”

“There's no chance an AB guy was involved?”

“The guy who spilled the ant poison is a migrant farm worker in for DWI. . . . You almost look disappointed.”

“No, I just thought maybe the guys in the black hats were starting to cannibalize each other. Anyway, was there something else?”

“Yeah, I'm afraid there is.” He kept putting one hand on top of the other, which was always his habit when he didn't want to say something offensive to someone. Then he pressed his glasses more tightly against his eyes. “I got three phone calls, two from state legislators and one from
Bobby Earl's attorney. They say you're harassing Earl.”

“I don't read it that way.”

“They say you gave him a pretty bad time in a Baton Rouge restaurant.”

“I had five minutes' conversation with him. I didn't see anything that unusual in it, considering the fact that I think he's involved with a murder.”

“This is another thing that bothers me, Dave. We don't have any evidence that Earl is connected with Garrett's death. But you seem determined to tie Earl to it.”

“Should I leave him alone?” I looked him straight in the face.

“I didn't say that. I'm just asking you to look at your motivations.”

“I want—”

He saw the heat in my face. “What?” he asked.

“I want to turn the key on the people who killed Garrett. It's that simple, sheriff.”

“Sometimes we have an agenda we don't tell ourselves about. It's just human.”

“Maybe it's time somebody 'fronts a guy like Earl. Maybe he's gotten a free pass too long.”

“You're going to have to ease up, Dave, or it'll be out of my hands.”

“He's got that kind of juice?”

“No, he doesn't. But if you try to shave the dice, you'll give it to him. You got into it at his house, then you created a situation with him in a public place. I don't want a suit filed against this department, I don't want a couple of peckerwood
politicians telling me I've got a rogue cop on my hands. It's time to take your foot off the accelerator, Dave.”

My palms were ringing with anger.

“You think I'm being too hard on you?” he asked.

“You have to do what you think is right.”

“You're probably the best cop we ever had in this department. Don't walk out of here thinking my opinion is otherwise, Dave. But you've got a way of kicking it up into overdrive.”

“Then the bottom line is we're cutting Bobby Earl some slack.”

“You once told me the best pitch in baseball is a change of pace. Why not ease up on the batter and see what happens?”

“Ease up on the wrong guy and he'll drill a hole in your sternum with it.”

He turned his hands up on the blotter.

“I tried,” he said, and smiled.

When I left the room, the back of my neck felt as though someone had held a lighted match to it.

D
REW ANSWERED HER
door in a print sundress covered with yellow flowers. Her tan shoulders were spotted with freckles the size of pennies. Even though her left hand was swathed in bandages as thick as a boxing glove, she had put on eye shadow, lipstick, and dangling earrings set with scarlet stones, and she looked absolutely stunning as she stood with one plump hip pressed against the doorjamb.

I had called fifteen minutes earlier.

“I don't want to keep you if you're on your way out, Drew,” I said.

“No, it's fine. Let's sit on the porch. I fixed some tea with mint leaves in it.”

“I just need to look around back.”

“What for?”

“I might have missed something when I was out before.”

“I thought you might like some tea.”

“Thanks just the same.”

“I appreciated the flowers.”

“What flowers?”

“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.”

“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.

“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 feckless and vulnerable while the long-ball hitters toasted each other safely at home plate.

T
HAT 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.

I waited for the guard to open the barred door that gave onto the row of cells where Joey Gouza was housed.

“You want to check your weapon, Dave?” he asked.

“They've got it upfront.”

“Somebody said he might walk. Is that true?”

“Yep.”

“How the hell'd that happen?”

“Long story.”

“The sonofabitch is eating his soft-boiled eggs now. Can you beat that? Fucking soft-boiled eggs for a piece of shit like that.”

He opened the door, then walked with me down the corridor to Gouza's cell and turned the key in the lock.

“You sure you want inside with this guy?” he asked. “He won't shower. He thinks somebody's gonna shank him if he leaves his cell.”

“It's all right. I'll yell when I'm ready,” I said.

The guard closed the door behind me and went away. Gouza lay on his bunk in his jockey underwear. A band of dark hair grew in a line from his navel to his sternum. An empty bowl streaked with egg yolk and a wastebasket filled with torn and stained newspaper sat on the floor by his bunk. His face looked as pale as it had been in the hospital. His seemingly lidless black eyes studied me as I pulled up the single chair in the cell and sat on it.

“They're going to kick you loose,” I said.