Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 13

"Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, an a.s.sistant D.A. is on call should a homicide go down or the cops locate a defendant. In Manhattan, the cops can't arrest a defendant without the D.A.'s office giving them the go-ahead, as I've already explained. This is to ensure that everythingsearch warrants, for exampleare executed properly. It's common for the prosecutor, the a.s.sistant, to go to the crime scene, and in a situation where a defendant is arrested, if he's willing to be interviewed by the a.s.sistant, we jump all over it. Captain Marino," she says, giving him her cool attention, "you started out in NYPD, but that may have been before all this was implemented.

"Never heard of it before today," he mumbles, face still dangerously red.

"What about vertical prosecution?"

"Sounds like a s.e.x act," Marino replies.

Berger pretends she didn't hear that. "Morgenthau's idea," she says to me.

Robert Morgenthau has been the district attorney in Manhattan for nearly twenty-five years. He is a legend. It is obvious Berger loves working for him. Something stirs deep inside me. Envy? No, maybe wistfulness. I am tired. I experience a growing feeling of powerlessness. I have no one but Marino, who is anything but innovative or enlightened. Marino is not a legend and right now I don't love working with him or even want him around.

"The prosecutor has the case from intake on," Berger begins to explain vertical prosecution. "Then we don't have to fool with three or four people who have already interviewed our witnesses or the victim. If a case is mine, for example, I might literally start out at the crime scene and end up in court. A purity you absolutely can't argue with. If I'm lucky, I interrogate the defendant before he retains counselobviously, no defense attorney's going to agree to his client talking to me." She hits the play b.u.t.ton on the remote control. "Fortunately, I caught Chandonne before he got counsel. I interviewed him several times in the hospital beginning at the rather inhumane hour of three o'clock this morning."

To say I am shocked would be a gross trivialization of my reaction to what she has just revealed. It can't be possible that Jean-Baptiste Chandonne would talk to anyone.

"Clearly, you're a bit taken aback." Berger's comment to me seems rhetorical, as if she has some point to make.

"You might say that," I answer her.

"Maybe it hasn't really occurred to you that your a.s.sailant can walk, talk, chew gum, drink Pepsi? Maybe he doesn't seem fully human to you?" she suggests. "Maybe you think he really is a werewolf."

I never actually saw him when he spoke cogently on the other side of my front door. Police. Is everything all right inthere? After that, he was a monster. Yes, a monster. Yes, a monster coming after me with a black iron tool that looked like something from the Tower of London. Then he was grunting and screaming and sounded very much the way he looks, which is hideous, unearthly. A beast.

Berger smiles a bit wearily. "Now you're about to see our challenge, Dr. Scarpetta. Chandonne isn't crazy. He isn't supernatural. And we don't want jurors holding him to a different standard just because he has an unfortunate medical condition. But I also want them to see him now, before he's cleaned up and wearing a three-piece suit. I think the jurors need to fully appreciate the terror his victims felt, don't you?" Her eyes touch mine. "Might help them get the drift that no one in her right mind would have invited him into her home."

"Why? Is he saying he was invited in?" My mouth has gone dry.

"He's saying quite a lot of things," Berger replies.

"Biggest bunch of f.u.c.king bulls.h.i.t you ever heard," Marino says in disgust. "But then I knew that right off the bat. I go to his room late last night, right? Tell him Ms. Berger wants to interview him and so he asks me what she looks like. I don't say a word, play the a.s.shole along. I tell him, 'Well, let's just put it this way, John. A lotta guys have a real hard timeno pun intendedconcentrating when she's around, know what I mean?' "

John, I numbly think. Marino calls him John.

"Testing, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five," a voice sounds on the tape, and a cinder-block wall fills the screen. The camera begins to focus on a bare table and a chair. In the background a telephone rings.

"He wants to know if she has a good body, and Ms. Berger, I hope you'll excuse me for making reference to it." Marino oozes sarcasm, still furious with her for reasons I don't yet fully understand. "But I'm just repeating what the piece of s.h.i.t said. And so I tell him, 'Geez, it wouldn't be right for me to comment, but like I said, the guys can't think straight when she's around. At least straight guys can't think straight.' " I know d.a.m.n well this is not what Marino said. In fact, I doubt Chandonne asked about Berger's appearance at all. More likely, the suggestion of her s.e.xy good looks came from Marino, to bait Chandonne into talking to her, and as I recall the crude comment Marino made about Berger when we were walking out to Lucy's car last night, I feel a rush of resentment, of anger. I am fed up with him and his machismo. I am sick of his male chauvinism and crudity.

"What the h.e.l.l is this?" I feel like hosing him off with cold water. "Do female body parts have to enter every G.o.dd.a.m.n conversation? Do you think it's possible, Marino, that you might focus on this case without obsessing over how big a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s are?"

'Testing, one, two, three, four, five," the cameraman's voice sounds again on tape. The telephone stops ringing. Feet shuffle. Voices murmur. "We're gonna sit you at this table and chair right here." I recognize Marino's voice on tape, and in the background someone knocks on a door.

"The point is, Chandonne talked." Berger is looking at me, palpating me with her eyes again, finding my weaknesses, my inflamed spots. "He talked to me quite a lot."

"For whatever that's worth." Marino angrily stares at the TV screen. So that's it. Marino might have helped induce Chandonne into talking to Berger, but the truth is, Marino wanted Chandonne to talk to him.

The camera is fixed and I see only what is directly in its view. Marino's big gut comes into the picture as he pulls out a wooden chair, and someone in a dark blue suit and deep red tie helps Marino steer Jean-Baptiste Chandonne into the chair. Chandonne wears short-sleeved blue hospital scrubs and long pale hair hangs from his arms in tangles of wavy, soft fur the color of pale honey. Hair splays over his v-necked collar and climbs up his neck in repulsive, long swirls. He sits and his head enters the frame, swathed in gauze from mid-forehead to the tip of his nose. Directly around the bandages, the flesh has been shaven and is as white as milk, as if it has never seen the sun.

"Can I have my Pepsi, please?" Chandonne asks. He wears no restraints, not even handcuffs.

"You want it topped off?" Marino says to him.

No answer. Berger moves past the camera and I note that she is wearing a chocolate brown suit with padded shoulders. She sits across from Chandonne. I see only the back of her head and shoulders.

"You want a refill, John?" Marino asks the man who tried to murder me.

"In a minute. Can I smoke?" Chandonne says.

His voice is soft and heavily French. He is polite and calm. I stare at the television screen, my concentration flickering. I experience electrical disturbances again, post-traumatic stress, my nerves jump like water hitting hot grease, and I am getting another bad headache. The dark blue-sleeved arm with the white cuff reaches into the picture, setting a drink and a pack of Camel cigarettes in front of Chandonne, and I recognize the blue-and-white tall paper cup as coming from the hospital cafeteria. A chair sc.r.a.pes back and the blue-sleeved arm lights a cigarette for Chandonne.

"Mr. Chandonne." Berger's voice sounds at ease and in charge, as if she talks to mutant serial killers every day. "I'm going to start with introducing myself. I'm Jaime Berger, a prosecutor with the New York County district attorney's office. In Manhattan."

Chandonne raises a hand to lightly touch his bandages. The backs of his fingers are covered with downy pale hair, almost albino, colorless hair. It is maybe half an inch long, as if until recently he shaved the backs of his hands. I have flashbacks of those hands coming after me. His fingernails are long and filthy and for the first time, I catch the contours of powerful muscles, not thick and bulging like men who obsessively work out in the gym, but ropey and hard, the physical habitat of one who, like a wild animal, uses his body to feed, to fight and flee, to survive. His strength seems to contradict our a.s.sumption that he has lived a rather sedentary and useless life, hiding inside his family's hotel particulier, as the elegant private houses on Ile Saint-Louis are called.

"You've already met Captain Marino," Berger says to Chandonne. "Also present is Officer Escudero from my officehe's the cameraman. And Special Agent Jay Talley with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."

I feel Berger's eyes touch me. I avoid looking. I refrain from interrupting to ask, Why? Why was Jay there? It streaks through my mind that she is exactly the sort of woman he would be attracted tointensely. I slip a tissue out of a jacket pocket and blot cold sweat off my brow.

"You know this is being videotaped, don't you, and you have no objection to that," Berger is saying on tape.

"Yes." Chandonne takes a drag on the cigarette and picks a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue.

"Sir, I'm going to ask you some questions about the death of Susan Pless on December fifth, nineteen-ninety-seven."

Chandonne has no reaction. He reaches for his Pepsi, finding the straw with his pink, uneven lips as Berger goes on to give him the victim's address in New York's Upper East Side. She tells him that before they can go any further, she wants to advise him of his rights, even though he has already been advised of them G.o.d knows how many times. Chandonne listens. Maybe it is my imagination, but he seems to be enjoying himself. He does not seem in pain or the least bit intimidated. He is quiet and courteous, his hairy, awful hands resting on top of the table or touching his bandages, as if to remind us of what wewhat Idid to him.

"Anything you say can be used against you in court," Berger goes on. "Do you understand? And it would be helpful if you would say yes or no instead of nodding."

"I understand." He cooperates almost sweetly.

"You have a right to consult a lawyer now before any questioning or to have a lawyer present during any questioning. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"And if you don't have a lawyer or can't afford one, a lawyer will be provided to you free of charge. Do you understand?"

At this, Chandonne reaches for his Pepsi again. Berger relentlessly goes on making sure that he and all the world know this process is legal and fair and that Chandonne is completely informed and is talking to her of his own volition, freely, without any pressure of any sort. "Now that you have been advised of your rights," she concludes her forceful, self-a.s.sured opening, "are you going to tell the truth about what happened?"

"I always tell the truth," Chandonne replies softly.

"And you've been read these rights in front of Officer Escudero, Captain Marino and Special Agent Talley, and you understood these rights?"

"Yes."

"Why don't you just tell me in your own words what happened to Susan Pless?" Berger says.

"She was very nice," Chandonne replies, to my amazement. "I am still made sick by it."

"Yeah, I just bet you are," Marino sardonically mutters inside my conference room.

Berger instantly hits the pause b.u.t.ton. "Captain," she fires at him, "no editorializing. Please."

Marino's sullenness is like a poisonous vapor. Berger points the remote control and on tape she is asking Chandonne how he and Susan Pless met. He replies that they met in a restaurant called Lumi on 70th Street, between Third and Lexington.

"You were what? Eating there, working there?" Berger pushes ahead.

"Eating there by myself. She walked in, also by herself. I had a very nice bottle of Italian wine. A nineteen-ninety-three Ma.s.solino Barolo. She was very beautiful."

Barolo is my favorite Italian wine. The bottle he mentions is pricey. Chandonne goes on to tell his story. He was eating antipasto"Crostini di polenta con funghi trifolati e olio tart-ufato" he says in perfect Italianwhen he noticed a stunning African-American woman enter the restaurant alone. The maitre d' treated her as if she was important and a regular customer, and seated her at a corner table. "She was well-dressed," Chandonne says. "She obviously was not a prost.i.tute." He asked the maitre d' to see if she would like to come to his table and join him, and she was very easy.

"What do you mean, very easy?' Berger inquires.

Chandonne gives a slight shrug and reaches for his Pepsi again. He takes his time sucking on the straw. "I think I would like another." He holds up the cup and the dark blue-sleeved armJay Talley's armtakes it from him. Chandonne blindly feels for the pack of cigarettes, his hairy hand groping over the top of the table.

"What do you mean when you say Susan was very easy?" Berger asks again.

"She needed no coaxing to join me. She came over to my table and sat. And we had a very nice conversation."

I don't recognize his voice.

"What did you talk about?" Berger asks him.

Chandonne touches his bandages again and I am imagining this hideous man with his long body hair, sitting in a public place, eating fine food and drinking fine wine and picking up women. It weirdly darts through my thoughts that Chandonne might have suspected Berger would show me this videotape. Is the Italian food and wine something he mentions for my benefit? Is he taunting me? What does he know about me? Nothing, I answer myself. There is no reason he would know anything about me. Now he is telling Berger that he and Susan Pless discussed politics and music over dinner. When Berger asks him if he was aware of what Pless did for a living, he answers that she told him she worked for a television station.

"I said to her, 'So you're famous,' and she laughed," Chandonne says.

"Had you ever seen her on television?" Berger asks him.

"I don't watch much television." He slowly blows out smoke. "Now, of course, I don't watch anything. I can't see."

"Just answer the question, sir. I didn't ask how much television you watch but if you had ever seen Susan Pless on television."

I strain to recognize his voice as fear tickles over my flesh and my hands begin to shake. His voice is completely unfamiliar. It sounds nothing like the voice outside my door. Police. Ma 'am, -we've gotten a call about a suspicious person on your property.

"I don't remember seeing her on television," Chandonne replies.

"What happened next?" Berger asks him.

"We ate. We drank the wine, and I asked her if she would like to go somewhere and have a little champagne."

"Somewhere? Where were you staying?"

"In the Barbizon Hotel, but not under my real name. I had just gotten in from Paris and was only in New York a few days."

"What was the name you signed in under?"

"I don't remember."

"How did you pay?"

"Cash."

"And you'd come to New York for what reason?"

"I was very frightened."

Inside my conference room, Marino shifts in his chair and blows out in disgust. He editorializes again. "Hold on to your hats, folks. Here comes the good part."

"Frightened?" Berger's voice sounds on the tape. "What were you frightened of?"

"These people who are after me. Your government. That's what this whole thing is about." Chandonne touches his bandages again, this time with one hand, then with the one holding the Camel cigarette. Smokes curls around his head. "Because they are using mehave been using meto get to my family. Because of untrue rumors about my family ..."

"Hold on. Hold on a minute," Berger interrupts.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Marino angrily shaking his head. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his swollen gut. "You get what you ask for," he mutters, and I can only a.s.sume he means that Berger should never have interviewed Chandonne. It was a mistake. The tape is going to hurt more than it will help.

"Captain, please," the real Berger in this room says to Marino in a tone that means business, while her voice on tape asks Chandonne, "Sir, who is using you?"

"FBI, Interpol. Maybe even CIA. I don't know exactly."

"Yeah," Marino sarcastically pipes up from the table. "He don't mention ATF 'cause no one's ever heard of ATF. It's not even in spellcheck."

His hatred for Talley in addition to what is happening to Lucy's career has metastasized into Marino's hating all of ATF. Berger says nothing this time. She ignores him. On tape she confronts Chandonne, her no-nonsense nature marching forth, "Sir, I need you to understand how important it is for you to tell the truth now. Do you understand how important it is that you are absolutely truthful with me?"

"I tell the truth," he softly, earnestly says. "I know it sounds unbelievable. It seems incredible, but it all has to do with my powerful family. Everyone in France knows of them. They have lived for hundreds of years on Ile Saint-Louis and it's rumored they are connected with organized crime, like the Mafia, which isn't true at all. This is where the confusion comes. I've never lived with them."

"You're part of this powerful family, though. Their son?"

"Yes."

"Do you have brothers and sisters?"

"I had a brother. Thomas."

"Had?"

"He's dead. You know that. He's why I'm here."

"I would like to get back to that. But let's talk about your family in Paris. Are you telling me you don't live with your family and have never lived with them?"

"Never."

"Why is that? Why have you never lived with your fam-ily?"

"They've never wanted me. When I was very young they paid a childless couple to take care of me so no one would know."

"Know what?"

"That I am Monsieur Thierry Chandonne's son.