“Now, why did you pound raw chicken with a chipping hammer?” Berger wants further clarification on this part of my rather odd story.
“To see if the injuries correlated to the ones on Bray’s body,” I reply.
“Well, the chicken’s still inside the evidence refrigerator,” Marino says. “Gotta say, you sure beat the hell out of it.”
“Describe in detail exactly what you did to the chicken,” Berger prods me, as if I am on the witness stand.
I face her and Marino inside my entrance hallway and explain that I placed raw chicken breasts on a cutting board and beat them with every side and edge of the chipping hammer to note the pattern of injuries. The wounds from both the blunt-bladed tip and the pointed tip were identical in configuration and measurement to those on Bray’s body, particularly to the punched-out areas in her cartilage and skull, which are excellent for retaining the shapeor tool markof whatever penetrated them. Then I spread out a white pillowcase, I explain, i rolled the coiled handle of the chipping hammer in barbecue sauce. What kind of barbecue sauce? Berger wants to know, of course.
I recall it was Smokey Pig barbecue sauce that I had thinned to the consistency of blood, and then I pressed the sauce-coated handle against the cloth to see what that transfer pattern looked like. I got the same striations that were left in blood on Bray’s mattress. The pillowcase with its barbecue sauce imprints, Marino says, were turned in to the DNA lab. I remark that this is a waste of time. We don’t test for tomatoes. I am not trying to be funny but am sufficiently frustrated to emit a spark of sarcasm. The only result the DNA lab will get from the pillowcase, I promise, is not human. Marino is pacing the floor.
I am screwed, he says, because the chipping hammer I bought and did all these tests with is gone. He couldn’t find it. He looked everywhere for it. It isn’t listed in the evidence computer. It clearly was never turned in to the evidence room, nor was it picked up by forensic technicians and receipted to the labs. It is gone. Gone. And I have no receipt. By now I am sure of this.
“I told you from my car phone that I had bought it,” I remind him.
“Yeah,” he says. He remembers my calling him from my car after I left Pleasants Hardware store, sometime between six-thirty and seven. I told him I believed a chipping hammer was what had been used on Bray. I said I had bought one. But, he points out, that doesn’t mean I didn’t buy such a tool after Bray’s murder to fabricate an alibi. “You know, to make it look like you didn’t own one or even know what she was killed with until after the fact.”
“Whose goddamn side are you on?” I say to him. “You believe this Righter bullshit? Jesus. I can’t take any more of this.”
“This isn’t about sides, Doc,” Marino grimly replies as Berger looks on.
We are back to there being only one hammer: the one with Bray’s blood on it found inside my house. Specifically, in my great room on the Persian rug, exactly seventeen and a half inches to the right of the Jarrah Wood coffee table. Chan-donne’s hammer, not my hammer, I keep saying as I imagine cheap brown paper bags with a voucher number and bar code that represent Scarpettame, behind wire mesh on Space-saver shelves.
I lean against the wall inside my entry hallway and feel lightheaded. It is as if I am having an out-of-body experience, looking down on myself after something terrible and final has happened. My undoing. My destruction. I am dead like other people whose brown paper bags end up in that evidence room. I am not dead, but maybe it is worse to be the accused. I hate even to suggest the next stage of my undoing. It is overkill. “Marino,” I say, “try the key in my door.”
He hesitates, frowning. Then he slips the clear plastic evidence bag out of the inner pocket of his old leather jacket with its balding fleece lining. Cold wind punches into the house as he opens the front door and slides the steel keyeasily slides itinto the lock, and clicks the lock, and the dead bolt slides open and shut.