“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.”
THEY BROUGHT JOEY 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.