Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 31

"You can't smell it every day and not know. It's accepted in my profession that exposure to formalin is a chronic danger, and all of us fear being splashed," I explain, realizing how my story may sound to a special grand jury. Contrived. Unbelievable. Grotesquely bizarre.

"Have you ever gotten it in your eyes?" Berger asks me. "Ever splashed yourself with formalin?"

"No, thank G.o.d.

"So you dashed it in his face. Then what?"

"I ran out of the house. On my way, I grabbed my Clock pistol off the dining room table, where I'd left it earlier. I go outside, slip on the icy steps and fracture my arm." I hold up my cast.

"And what's he doing?"

"He came out after me." - "Instantly?"

"It seems like it."

Berger moves around to the back of the sofa and stands at the area of antique French oak flooring where formalin has eaten off the finish. She follows the lighter areas of hardwood. The formalin apparently splashed almost to the entrance of the kitchen. This is something I didn't realize until this moment. I only remember his shrieks, his howls of pain as he grabbed at his eyes. Berger stands in the doorway, staring in at my kitchen. I go to her, wondering what has caught her interest.

"I have to stray off subject and say I don't think I've ever seen a kitchen quite like this," she comments.

The kitchen is the heart of my house. Copper pots and pans shine like gold from racks around the huge Thirode stove that is central to the room and includes two grills, a hot water bath, a griddle, two hot plates, gas tops, a charbroiler and an oversized burner for the huge pots of soup I love to make. Appliances are stainless steel, including the Sub-Zero refrigerator and freezer. Racks of spices line the walls and there is a butcher block the size of a twin bed. The oak floor is bare, and there is an upright wine cooler in a corner and a small table by the window that offers a distant view of a rocky bend in the James River.

"Industrial," Berger mutters as she walks around a kitchen that, yes, I must admit, fills me with pride. "Someone who comes in here to work but loves the finer things in life. I've heard you're an amazing cook."

"I love to cook," I tell her. "It gets my mind off everything else."

"Where do you get your money?" she boldly asks.

"I'm smart with it," I reply coolly, never one to discuss money. "I've been lucky with investments over the years, very lucky."

"You're a smart businesswoman," Berger says.

"Try to be. And then when Benton died, he left his Hilton Head condo to me." I pause. "I sold it, couldn't stay there anymore." I pause again. "Got six-hundred-and-something thousand for it."

"I see. And what's this?" She points out the Milano Italian sandwich maker.

I explain.

"Well, when this is all over, you'll have to cook for me sometime," she says rather presumptuously. "And rumor has it that you cook Italian. Your specialty."

"Yes. Mostly Italian." There is no rumor involved. Berger knows more about me than I do. "Do you suppose he might have come in here and tried to wash his face in the sink?" she then asks.

"I don't have any idea. All I can tell you is I ran out and fell, and when I looked up he was staggering out the door after me. He came down the steps, still screaming, and dropped to the ground and started rubbing snow in his face."

"Trying to wash the formalin out of his eyes. It's rather oily, isn't it? Hard to wash out?"

"It wouldn't be easy," I reply. "You would want copious amounts of warm water."

"And you didn't offer that to him? Made no effort to help him?"

I look at Berger. "Come on," I say. "What the h.e.l.l would you have done?" Anger spikes. "I'm supposed to play doctor after the son of a b.i.t.c.h has just tried to beat my brains out?"

"It will be asked," Berger matter-of-factly answers me. "But no. I wouldn't have helped him, either, and that's off the record. So he's in your front yard."

"I left out that I hit the panic alarm when I was running out of the house," I remember.

"You grabbed the formalin. You grabbed your gun. You hit the panic alarm. You had pretty d.a.m.n good presence of mind, didn't you?" she comments. "Anyway, you and Chandonne are in your front yard. Lucy pulls up and you have to talk her out of shooting him point-blank in the head. ATF and all the troops show up. End of story."

"I wish it were the end of the story," I say.

"The chipping hammer," Berger gets back to that. "Now you figured out what the weapon was because you went to a hardware store and just looked around until you found something that might have made a pattern like the one on Bray's body?"

"I had more to go on than you might think," J reply. "I knew Bray was struck with something that had two different surfaces. One rather pointed, the other more square. Actual punched-out areas of her skull clearly showed the shape of what struck her, and then the pattern on the mattress that I knew was made when he set down something b.l.o.o.d.y Which most likely was the weapon. A hammer or pickax-type weapon of some sort, but unusual. You look around. You ask people."

"And then of course when he came to your house, he had this chipping hammer inside his coat or whatever and tried to use it on you." She says this dispa.s.sionately, objectively.

"Yes."

"So there were two chipping hammers at your house. The one you bought in the hardware store after Bray had already been murdered. And a second hammer, the one he brought with him."

"Yes." I am stunned by what she has just indicated. "Good G.o.d," I mutter. "That's right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before." I am so confused by what has pa.s.sed, by the days, by all of it. "What am I thinking? The date on the receipt..." My voice fades. I remember paying cash in the hardware store. Five dollars, something like that. I don't have a receipt, I am fairly sure, and I feel the blood drain from my face. Berger has known all along what I have forgotten: that I didn't buy the hammer before Bray was beaten to death, but the day after. But I can't prove it. Unless the clerk who waited on me in the hardware store can produce the cash register tape and swear I am the one who bought the chipping hammer, there is no proof.

"And now one of them is gone. The chipping hammer you bought is gone," Berger is saying as my mind reels. I tell her I am not privy to what the police found.

"But you were there when they were searching your house. Were you not in your house while the police were?" she asks me.

"I showed them whatever they wanted to see. I answered their questions. I was there on Sat.u.r.day and left early that evening, but I can't say I saw everything they did or what they took, nor were they finished when I left. Frankly, I don't even know how long they were in my house or how many times." I am touched by anger as I explain all this, and Berger senses it. "Christ, I didn't have a chipping hammer when Bray was murdered. I've been confused because I bought it the day her body was found, not the day she died. She was murdered the night before, her body found the next day." I am rambling now.

"What exactly is a chipping hammer used for?" Berger next asks. "And by the way, hate to tell you, but no matter when you say you bought the chipping hammer, Kay, there remains the minor problem that the onethe only onefound at your house happened to have Bray's blood on it."

"They're used for masonry. There's a lot of slatework in this area. And stonework."

"So probably used by roofers? And the theory is that Chandonne found a chipping hammer at the house he had broken into. The place under construction where he was staying?" Berger is relentless.

"I believe that's the theory," I reply.

"Your house is made of stone and has a slate roof," she says. "Did you closely supervise when it was being built? Because you seem the sort who would. A perfectionist."

"You're foolish not to supervise if you're building.

"I'm just wondering if you might have ever seen a chipping hammer while your house was being buiit. Maybe at the construction site or in a workman's tool belt?"

"Not that I recall. But I can't be sure."

"And you never owned one prior to your shopping expedition at Pleasants Hardware on the night of December seventeenthexactly one week ago and almost twenty-four hours after Bray was murdered?"

"Not before that night. No. I never owned one before then, not that I am aware of," I tell her.

"What time was it when you bought the chipping hammer?" Berger asks as I hear the deep thunder of Marino's truck parking in front of my house.

"Sometime around seven. I don't know exactly. Maybe between six-thirty and seven, that Friday night, the night of December seventeenth," I reply. I am not thinking clearly now. Berger is wearing me down and I can't imagine how any lie could stand up to her long. The problem is knowing what is a lie, and what isn't, and I am not convinced she believes me.

"And you went home right after the hardware store?" she goes on. "Tell me what you did the rest of the night."

The doorbell rings. I glance at the Aiphone on the wall in the great room and see Marino's face looming on the video screen. Berger has just asked the question. She has just tested the alchemy that I am sure Righter will use to turn my life to s.h.i.t. She wants to know my alibi. She wants to know where I was at the exact time Bray was murdered on Thursday night. December sixteenth. "I'd just come in from Paris that morning," I reply. "Ran errands, got home around six P.M. Later that night, around ten, I drove to MCV to check on JoLucy's former girlfriend, the one who got in the shooting with her in Miami. I wanted to see if I could help out in that situation because the parents were interfering." My doorbell rings again. "And I wanted to know where Lucy was, and Jo told me Lucy was at a baf in Greenwich Village." 1 start walking toward the door. Berger is staring at me. "In New York. Lucy was in New York. I carne home and called her. She was drunk." Marmo rings the bell again and pounds on the door. "So to answer your question, Ms. Berger, I have no alibi for where I was between six and maybe ten-thirty Thursday night because I was either in my home or in my caralone, absolutely alone. No one saw me. No one talked to me. I have no witnesses to the fact that where I wasn 't between seven-thitty and ten-thirty was at Diane Bray's house beating her to death with a G.o.dd.a.m.n chipping hammer."

I open the door. I can feel Berger's eyes burning into my back. Marino looks as if he is about to fly apart. I can't tell if he is furious or scared to death. Maybe both. "What the h.e.l.l?" he asks, his eyes going from me to her. '"What the s.h.i.t's going on?"

"I'm sorry for making you stand out in the cold," I tell Marino. "Please come in."["_Toc37098931"]

CHAPTER 29.

MARINO TOOK SO LONG GETTING HERE BECAUSE he had stopped by the property room at headquarters. I had asked him to pick up the stainless-steel key I found in the pocket of Mitch Barbosa's running shorts. Marino tells Berger and me that he rooted around for quite some time inside that small room behind wire mesh where s.p.a.cesaver shelves are crowded with bar-coded bags, some of which hold items the police took from my house last Sat.u.r.day.

I have been in the property room before. I can picture it. Portable phones ring from inside those bags. Pagers go off as unwitting people keep trying to call a.s.sociates who are either locked up or dead. There are also locked refrigerators for the storage of Physical Evidence Recovery Kits and any other evidence that might be perishablesuch as the raw chicken I pounded with the chipping hammer.

"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 h.e.l.l 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n side are you on?" I say to him. "You believe this Righter bulls.h.i.t? 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. Chandonne'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 s.p.a.cesaver 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.

"The number written on it," I quietly tell Marino and Berger. "Two-thirty-three. That's my burglar alarm code."

"What?" Berger, for once, is almost speechless.

The three of us go into my great room. This time I perch on the cold hearth, like Cinderella. Berger and Marino avoid sitting on the ruined couch, but situate themselves near me, T H E L A S T F R E C I N C Tlooking at me, waiting for any possible explanation. There is but one. and I think it is rather obvious. "Police and G.o.d knows who else have been in and out of my house since Sat.u.r.day," 1 begin. "A drawer in the kitchen. In it are keys to everything. My house, my car, my office, file cabinets, whatever. So it's not like someone didn't have easy access to a spare key to my house, and you guys had my burglar alarm code, right?" I look at Marino. "I mean, you weren't leaving my house unarmed after you left it. And the alarm was on when we came in a little while ago."

"We need a list of everybody who's been inside this house," Berger grimly decides.

"I can tell you everybody I know about," Marino answers. "'But I haven't been here every time somebody else has. So I canl say I know who everybody is."

I sigh and lean my back against the fireplace. I start naming cops I saw with my own eyes, including Jay Talley. Including Marino. "And Righter's been in here," I add.

"As have I," Berger replies. "But I certainly didn't let myself in. I had no idea what your code is."

"Who let you in?" I ask.

Her answer is to look at Marino. It bothers me that Marino never told me he was Berger's tour guide. It is irrational for me to feel stung. After all, who better than Marino? Who do I trust more than him? Marino is visibly agitated. He gets up and strolls through the doorway leading into my kitchen. I hear him open the drawer where I keep the keys, then he opens the refrigerator.

"Well, I was with you when you found that key in Mitch Barbosa's pocket," Berger starts to think out loud. "You couldn't have put it there, couldn't have planted it." She is working this out. "Because you weren't at the scene. And you didn't touch the body unwitnessed. I mean, Marino and I were right there when you unzipped the pouch." She blows out in frustration. "And Marino?"

"He wouldn't," I cut her off with a weary wave of my hand. "No way. Sure, he had access, but no way. And based on his account of the crime scene, he never saw Barbosa's body. It was already being loaded into the ambulance when he pulled up on Mosby Court."

"So either one of the cops at the scene did it..."

"Or more likely," I finish her thought, "the key was placed in Barbosa's pocket when he was killed. At the crime scene. Not where he was dumped."

Marino walks in drinking a bottle of Spaten beer that Lucy must have bought. I don't remember buying it. Nothing about my house seems to belong to me anymore, and Anna's story comes to mind. I am beginning to understand the way she must have felt when n.a.z.is occupied her family home. 1 realize, suddenly, that people can be pushed beyond anger, beyond tears, beyond protest, beyond even grief. Fipally, you just sink into a dark mire of acceptance. What is, is. And what was, is past. "I can't live here anymore," I tell Berger and Marino.

"You got that right," Marino fires back in the aggressive, angry tone he seems to wear like his own skin these days.

"Look," I say to him, "don't bark at me anymore, Marino. We're all angry, frustrated, worn out. I don't understand what's happening, but it's clear someone connected to us is also involved in the murder of these two recent victims, these men who were tortured, and I guess whoever planted my key on Barbosa's body wants to either implicate me in those crimes, as well, or more likely, is sending me a warning."

"I think it's a warning," Marino says.

And where's Rocky these days? I almost ask him.

"Your dear son Rocky," Berger says it for me.

Marino takes a slug of beer and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He doesn't respond. Berger glances at her watch and looks up at us. "Well," she says, "Merry Christmas, I guess."["_Toc37098932"]

CHAPTER 30.

ANNA'S HOUSE ISDARK AND STILL WHEN ICOML IN at nearly three A.M. She has thoughtfully left on a light in the hallway and one in the kitchen near a crystal tumbler and the bottle of Glenmorangie, just in case I need a sedative. At this hour, I decline. A part of me wishes Anna were awake. I am halfway tempted to rattle around in hopes she will wander in and sit down with me. I have become oddly addicted to our sessions even if I am now supposed to wish they had never taken place. I make my way to the guest wing and start thinking about transference and wonder if I am experiencing this with Anna. Or maybe I just feel lonely and gloomy because it is Christmas and I am wide awake and frazzled in someone else's house after investigating violent death all day, including one I am accused of committing.