John put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
“I cleaned the sink. It . . . I don’t know, cleaning . . . When I’m upset, I clean.”
When I’m upset, I add to the landfill in my apartment. And then I’m more upset because the apartment is squalid. I wondered if there were drugs that could turn you into a neat freak.
“Then I went to my closet; I needed to get some sweaters. It wasn’t this cold in Phoenix, of course, and I knew I’d freeze to death at John’s, he doesn’t pay for heat, and—”
“Do you have to go through every detail of every sweet minute of your life?” John asked, his moment of empathy passing.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You touched everything.”
“Is that bad?”
“If someone came in while Chad was asleep and planted the gun on him, it will be harder to find that someone’s traces, that’s all.”
“So you do believe he didn’t shoot that woman?” she said eagerly.
“Oh, Mona, why’d you have to go destroying evidence?” John said.
“How was I to know?” she defended herself hotly. “It’s not like you were doing—”
“Please.” I put my hands up traffic cop style. “Don’t argue, least not on my dime. It doesn’t help the investigation. And before you get too carried away blaming Mona for her glass of water, look at the mud and scratches the cops left behind. If someone else was here ahead of them, the police did a good job of wiping out all signs of them. Let me see the bedroom.”
Mona took me across the big room to her bedroom. Parting the blinds, I looked out at an enclosed courtyard, big enough for a bit of garden and some tables and chairs. The skeleton of a swing set rose out of the snow.
The building had been carved up in a way that created small alcoves in the bedroom. One held a desk, where Chad had left a partly eaten chicken dinner on top of a heap of bills and papers. While I inspected the bed, I heard Mona clucking over the bills under her breath.
Chad promised to pay the phone bill and the car insurance, but here are the envelopes not even opened! And Chad’s MasterCard . . . Who let him have a credit card when he didn’t have any income?
“And these holes in the wall!” she cried out so loudly that John came into to the room.
We both went to look at the wall. Three ovals that cut deep into the drywall made a little triangle over the desk. The paint had come away in a lip around each hole.
“They weren’t here before you left for Arizona?”
“My goodness, no. You notice a thing like that. Was he trying to put up a picture?”
“I think he was using your wall for target practice.”
“Shooting at a wall? Chad? But that’s just ridiculous!”
I took a letter opener from the desktop and dug around in the lath behind the drywall. I was able to recover one bullet, which I showed the Vishneskis. Both of them were shocked; Mona suggested in a feeble voice that one of Chad’s friends had come home drunk with him and shot at the wall.
“It’s possible, of course,” I agreed, but I thought about the way Chad had behaved when I’d seen him in Club Gouge. He was angry enough, and drunk enough, to do just about anything. A disheartening thought, if I was the lead member of the defense team.
John shouted, “So what if he shot up the wall? It doesn’t mean he shot that gal at the nightclub. Means he knew to take his anger out on a wall, not a person.”
I smiled and patted his arm. “Right you are. I’m going to finish searching in here. You go find me some clean garbage bags for things I want to show to my forensic lab.”
Vishneski left the room, relieved to get away from the empty beer cans, the moldy chicken dinner. Mona continued to hover behind me, talking worriedly under her breath.
The bed was unmade, of course. The cops had come in, guns drawn. Everyone knew Chad was big and angry, so they’d tossed the duvet aside, grabbed him as he lay there, cuffed him. Maybe it was then they realized he was unconscious, not asleep. And the Glock that had killed Nadia Guaman, where had it been? I sniffed tentatively at the pillow and detected a hint of sour vomit but not of gunpowder.
I didn’t think the cops had searched the room, but, even if they had, I would bet they’d overlooked something. I started with Chad’s Army duffel bag, which sat open on the far side of Mona’s bed. It was like a mountain spring, with clothes spilling out into a small stream that eddied around the bed and the floor. I photographed the bag and the room with my cell phone before touching anything.
“Why are you doing this?” Mona asked. “What good does it do to see Chad’s mess?”