“I left out that I hit the panic alarm when I was running out of the house,” I remember.
“You grabbed the formalin. You grabbed your gun. You hit the panic alarm. You had pretty damn good presence of mind, didn’t you?” she comments. “Anyway, you and Chandonne are in your front yard. Lucy pulls up and you have to talk her out of shooting him point-blank in the head. ATF and all the troops show up. End of story.”
“I wish it were the end of the story,” I say.
“The chipping hammer,” Berger gets back to that. “Now you figured out what the weapon was because you went to a hardware store and just looked around until you found something that might have made a pattern like the one on Bray’s body?”
“I had more to go on than you might think,” J reply. “I knew Bray was struck with something that had two different surfaces. One rather pointed, the other more square. Actual punched-out areas of her skull clearly showed the shape of what struck her, and then the pattern on the mattress that I knew was made when he set down something bloody Which most likely was the weapon. A hammer or pickax-type weapon of some sort, but unusual. You look around. You ask people.”
“And then of course when he came to your house, he had this chipping hammer inside his coat or whatever and tried to use it on you.” She says this dispassionately, objectively.
“Yes.”
“So there were two chipping hammers at your house. The one you bought in the hardware store after Bray had already been murdered. And a second hammer, the one he brought with him.”
“Yes.” I am stunned by what she has just indicated. “Good God,” I mutter. “That’s right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before.” I am so confused by what has passed, by the days, by all of it. “What am I thinking? The date on the receipt…” My voice fades. I remember paying cash in the hardware store. Five dollars, something like that. I don’t have a receipt, I am fairly sure, and I feel the blood drain from my face. Berger has known all along what I have forgotten: that I didn’t buy the hammer before Bray was beaten to death, but the day after. But I can’t prove it. Unless the clerk who waited on me in the hardware store can produce the cash register tape and swear I am the one who bought the chipping hammer, there is no proof.
“And now one of them is gone. The chipping hammer you bought is gone,” Berger is saying as my mind reels. I tell her I am not privy to what the police found.
“But you were there when they were searching your house. Were you not in your house while the police were?” she asks me.
“I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Saturday and left early that evening, but I can’t say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don’t even know how long they were in my house or how many times.” I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. “Christ, I didn’t have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I’ve been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day.” I am rambling now.
“What exactly is a chipping hammer used for?” Berger next asks. “And by the way, hate to tell you, but no matter when you say you bought the chipping hammer, Kay, there remains the minor problem that the onethe only onefound at your house happened to have Bray’s blood on it.”
“They’re used for masonry. There’s a lot of slatework in this area. And stonework.”
“So probably used by roofers? And the theory is that Chandonne found a chipping hammer at the house he had broken into. The place under construction where he was staying?” Berger is relentless.