He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It novel · Chapter 12 of 32
Chapter 12: The Roof
The detective came to us this time.
He sat on Ike's visitor chair at eight the next morning with his tie still loose and watched Nettie's tablet with his arms unfolded.
He watched the white Audi. He watched the phone come up.
Then he watched a man with a pry bar walk straight to a shelf he'd never seen before.
"Send me all of it," he said finally.
"It's two dollars a month," Nettie told him. "You can get your own."
He looked at her. Then he looked at Ike.
"She's going to be a problem someday."
"She's a problem now," Ike said, with enormous pride.
They picked up the investigator at his house in Mechanicsville that afternoon.
He had the recorder in his garage under a tarp. He hadn't even wiped it.
Darla called me from the magistrate's office at four.
"He won't say a word, sugar. Not who sent him, not why. He asked for a lawyer and sat there like a stump."
"Which lawyer?"
"Not the firm. That's the beautiful part." I heard her gum crack. "The firm put out a statement an hour ago. He was 'an independent contractor acting entirely outside the scope of his engagement.'"
"They threw him away."
"Like a wet napkin."
Ike got a call, too. The state board was "reviewing the complaint in light of new information."
He still couldn't write bonds.
But he hung up and stretched until his back cracked.
That night, after Nettie went to bed, he knocked on my door with two beers.
"Roof," he said.
"There's a roof?"
"There's always a roof."
We climbed the fire escape past my window, then the last iron ladder to the top.
The roof was tar and gravel and an old lawn chair with half its straps gone.
The whole city was spread out around it.
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