Paradise A Novel TWENTY-ONEDELSA AND HARRIS PICKED UP A warrant at Thirty-sixth District Court that would allow them to enter Carl Fontana’s residence, then waited for Jackie to come out of a pretrial exam. In the car Jackie couldn’t get over the defense lawyer describing Ardis Nichols, the defendant, as this sweet guy who loved Snowflake, the hooker who lived upstairs and had died of blunt-force injuries, hit repeatedly with a piece of pipe.“You know why I didn’t believe Ardis?” Jackie said. “I’m talking to him in the basement where he lives. Has his TV, his medicine and shit on a little table by his bed, his clothes hanging from pipes. Ardis’s wearing a wife beater like Kid Rock. We’re talking, I notice a huge rat lying on the floor by the furnace. I say to Ardis, ‘Isn’t that a rat over there?’ He says no, it ain’t a rat. I say yes, it is, it’s a huge fuckin rat. He walks over and steps on the rat and you hear like air come out of it. See, what he might’ve meant was no, it wasn’t a live rat.
