From Potter's Field Read online

  'Did he smoke?' Wesley asked.

  'Yes, he did,'

  'Do you remember what?'

  'Yes, brown cigarettes. Nat Shermans,'

  'What about drinking?'

  'He like expensive Scotch and nice wine. Only he was' - he lifted his nose - 'snobbish. He think only the French make wine,' Eugenio laughed. 'So he usually got Chateau Carbonnieux or Chateau Olivier, and the vintage could be no earlier than 1989.'

  'He only got white wine?' I said.

  'No red, none. He would not touch red. I send him glass on the house once and he send it back,'

  Eugenio and Wesley exchanged cards and other information, then our maitre d' returned his attention to his party, which by now was going strong.

  'Kay,' Wesley said, 'can you think of any other explanation for what we've just learned?'

  'No,' I said. 'The description of the man sounds like Gault. Everything sounds like Gault. Why is he doing this to me?' My fear was turning to fury.

  Wesley's gaze was steady. 'Think. Is there anything else of late that you should tell me about? Weird phone calls, weird mail, hang ups?'

  'No weird phone calls or hang ups. I get some strange mail, but that's fairly routine in my business.'

  'Nothing else? What about your burglar alarm? Has that gone off more than usual?'

  I slowly shook my head. 'It's gone off a couple times this month, but there was no sign of anything out of order. And I really don't think Gault has been spending time in Richmond,'

  'You've got to be very careful,' he said almost irritably, as if I had not been careful.

  'I'm always very careful,' I said.

  6

  The next day, the city was at work again, and I took Marino to lunch at Tatou because I thought both of us needed an uplifting atmosphere before we went to Brooklyn Heights to meet Commander Penn.

  A young man was playing the harp, and most tables were occupied by attractive, well-dressed men and women who probably knew little about life beyond the publishing houses and high-rise businesses that consumed their days.

  I was struck by my sense of alienation. I felt lonely as I looked across the table at Marino's cheap tie and green corduroy jacket, at the nicotine stains on his broad furrowed nails. Although I was glad for his company, I could not share my deeper thoughts with him. He would not understand.

  'Looks to me like you could use a glass of wine with lunch, Doc,' Marino said, eyeing me closely. 'Go ahead. I'm driving.'

  'No, you're not. We're taking a taxi.'

  'Point is, you're not driving so you may as well relax.'

  'What you're really saying is that you'd like a glass of wine.'

  'Don't mind if I do,' he said as the waitress appeared. 'What you got by the glass that's worth drinking?' he asked her.

  She did a good job of not looking offended as she went through an impressive list that left Marino lost. I suggested he try a Beringer reserve cabernet that I knew was good, and then we ordered cups of lentil soup and spaghetti bolognese.

  "This dead lady's driving me crazy,' Marino said after the waitress was gone.

  I leaned closer to the table's edge and encouraged him to lower his voice.

  He leaned closer, too, adding, 'There's a reason he picked her.'

  'He probably picked her because she was there,' I said, pricked by anger. 'His victims are nothing to him.'

  'Yeah, well, I think there's more to it than that. And I'd also like to know what brought his ass here to New York City. You think he met up with her in the museum?'

  'He might have,' I said. 'Maybe we'll know more when we get there.'

  'Don't it cost money to go in there?'

  'If you look at the exhibits it does.'

  'She may have a lot of gold in her mouth, but it don't look to me like she had much money when she died.'

  'I would be surprised if she did. But she and Gault got in the museum somehow. They were seen leaving.'

  'So maybe he met her earlier, took her there and paid her way.'

  'I'm hoping it will be helpful when we look at what he was looking at,' I said.

  'I know what the squirrel was looking at. Sharks.'

  The food was wonderful, and it would have been easy to sit for hours. I was tired beyond explanation, as I sometimes got. My disposition was built upon many layers of pain and sadness that had started with my own when I was young. Then over the years, I had added. Every so often I got in moods that were dark, and I was in one now.

  I paid the check because when Marino and I were together, if I picked the restaurant, I picked up the bill. Marino really could not afford Tatou. He really could not afford New York. Looking at my MasterCard made me think of my American Express card, and my mood got worse.

  To get to the shark exhibit in the Museum of Natural History, we had to pay five dollars each and go up to the third floor. Marino climbed stairs more slowly than I and tried to disguise his labored breathing.

  'Damn, you would think they got an elevator in this joint,' he complained.

  'They do,' I said. 'But stairs are good for you. Today this may be the only exercise we get.'

  We entered the exhibit of reptiles and amphibians, passing a fourteen-foot American crocodile killed a hundred years ago in the Biscayne Bay. Marino couldn't help but linger at each display, and I got an eyeful of lizards, snakes, iguanas and Gila monsters.

  'Come on,' I whispered.

  'Look at the size of this thing,' Marino marveled before the twenty-three-foot reticulated python remains. 'Can you imagine stepping on that in the jungle?'

  Museums always made me cold no matter how much I loved them. I blamed the phenomenon on hard marble floors and high ceilings. But I hated snakes and their pit organs. I despised spitting cobras, frilled lizards and alligators with bared teeth. A guide was giving a tour to a group of young people who were enthralled before a showcase populated with Komodo reptiles of Indonesia and leatherback sea turtles who would never traverse sand or water again.

  'I beg of you, when you're at the beach and have plastic, shove it in the trash, because these fellows don't have Ph.D.'s,' the guide was saying with the passion of an evangelist. 'They think it's jellyfish...'

  'Marino, let's move on.' I tugged his sleeve.

  'You know, I haven't been to a museum since I was a kid. Wait a minute.' He looked surprised. That's not true. Well, I'll be damned. Doris took me here once. I thought this joint looked familiar.'

  Doris was his ex-wife.

  'I'd just signed on with the NYPD and she was pregnant with Rocky. I remember looking at stuffed monkeys and gorillas and telling her it was bad luck.

  I told her the kid was going to end up swinging through trees and eating bananas.'

  'I beg of you. Their numbers are dwindling and dwindling and dwindling!' The tour guide went on and on about the plight of sea turtles.

  'So maybe that's what the hell happened to him,' Marino continued. 'It was coming in this joint.'

  I had rarely heard him even allude to his only child. In fact, as well as I knew Marino, I knew nothing about his son.

  'I didn't know your son's name was Rocky,' I quietly said as we started walking again.

  'It's really Richard. When he was a kid we called him Ricky, which somehow turned into Rocky. Some people call him Rocco. He gets called a lot of things.'

  'Do you have much contact with him?'

  'There's a gift shop. Maybe I should get a shark key chain or something for Molly.'

  'We can do that.'

  He changed his mind. 'Maybe I'll just bring her some bagels.'

  I did not want to push him about his son, but the topic was within reach, and I believed their estrangement from each other was the root of many of Marino's problems.

  'Where is Rocky?' I cautiously asked.

  'An armpit of a town called Darien.'

  'Connecticut? And it's not an armpit of a town.'

  'This Darien's in Georgia.'

  'It surprises me I haven't known that befor
e now.'

  'He don't do anything you'd have any reason to know about.' Marino bent over, his face against glass as he stared at two small nurse sharks swimming along the bottom of a tank outside the exhibit.

  'They look like big catfish,' he said as the sharks stared with dead eyes, tails silently fanning water.

  We wandered into the exhibit and did not have to wait in line, for few visitors were here in the middle of this workday. We drifted past Kiribati warriors in suits of woven coconut husks, and Winslow Homer's painting of the Gulf Stream. Shark images had been painted on airplanes, and it was explained that sharks can detect odors from the length of a football field and electric charges as weak as one-millionth of a volt. They have as many as fifteen rows of backup teeth, are shaped the way they are to more efficiently torpedo through water.

  During a short film we were shown a great white battering a cage and lunging for a tuna on a rope. The narrator explained that sharks are legendary hunters of the deep, the perfect killing machine, the jaws of death, the master of the sea. They can smell one drop of blood in twenty-five gallons of water and feel the pressure waves of other animals passing by. They can outswim their prey, and no one is quite certain why some sharks attack humans.

  'Let's get out of here,' I said to Marino as the movie ended.

  I buttoned my coat and put on my gloves, imagining Gault watching monsters ripping flesh as blood spread darkly through water. I saw his cold stare and the twisted spirit behind his thin smile. In the most frightening reaches of my mind, I knew he smiled as he killed. He bared his cruelty in that strange smile I had seen on the several occasions I had been near him.

  I believed he had sat in this dark theater with the woman whose name we did not know, and she unwittingly had watched her own death on screen. She had watched her own blood spilled, her own flesh sliced. Gault had given her a preview of what he had in store for her. The exhibit had been his foreplay.

  We returned to the rotunda, where a barosaurus fossil was surrounded by schoolchildren. Her elongated neck bones rose to the lofty ceiling as she eternally tried to protect her baby from an attacking allosaurus. Voices carried, and the sounds of feet echoed off marble as I glanced around. People in uniforms were quiet behind their ticket counters as they guarded the entrances of exhibits from people who had not paid. I looked out glass front doors at dirty snow piled along the cold, crowded street.

  'She came in here to get warm,' I said to Marino.

  'What?' He was preoccupied with dinosaur bones.

  'Maybe she came in here to get out of the cold,' I said. 'You can stand here all day looking at these fossils. As long as you don't go into the exhibits, it doesn't cost you anything.'

  'So you're thinking this is where Gault met her for the first time?' He looked skeptical.

  'I don't know if it was the first time,' I said.

  Brick smokestacks were quiet, and beyond guardrails of the Queens Expressway were bleak edifices of concrete and steel. Our taxi passed depressing apartments, and stores selling smoked and cured fish, marble and tile. Coils of razor wire topped chain-link fences, and trash was on roadsides and caught in trees as we headed into Brooklyn Heights, to the Transit Authority on Jay Street.

  An officer in navy blue uniform pants and commando sweater escorted us to the second floor, where we were shown to the three-star command executive office of Frances Penn. She had been thoughtful enough to have coffee and Christmas cookies waiting for us at the small table where we were to confer about one of the most gruesome homicides in Central Park's history.

  'Good afternoon,' she said, firmly shaking our hands. 'Please have a seat. And we did take the calories out of the cookies. We always do that. Captain, do you take cream and sugar?'

  'Yeah.'

  She smiled a little. 'I guess that means both. Dr. Scarpetta, I have a feeling you drink your coffee black.'

  'I do,' I said, regarding her with growing curiosity.

  'And you probably don't eat cookies.'

  'I probably won't.' I removed my overcoat and took a chair.

  Commander Penn was dressed in a dark blue skirt suit with pewter buttons and a high-collared white silk blouse. She needed no uniform to look imposing, yet she was neither severe nor cold. I would not have called her bearing militaristic, but dignified, and I thought I detected anxiety in her hazel eyes.

  'It appears Mr. Gault may have met the victim in the museum versus the two of them having met prior to that,' she began.

  'It's interesting you would say that,' I said. 'We were just at the museum.'

  'According to one of the security guards, a woman fitting the victim's description was seen loitering in the rotunda area. At some point she was observed talking with a man who bought two tickets for the exhibits. In fact, they were observed by several museum employees because of their odd appearance.'

  'What is your theory as to why she was inside the museum?' I asked.

  'It was the impression of those who remember her that she was a homeless person. My guess is she went in to get warm.'

  'Don't they run street people out?' said Marino.

  'If they can.' She paused. 'Certainly if they're causing a disturbance.'

  'Which she wasn't, I assume,' I said.

  Commander Penn reached for her coffee. 'Apparently she was quiet and unobtrusive. She seemed to be interested in the dinosaur bones, walking round and around them.'

  'Did she speak to anyone?' I asked.

  'She did ask where the ladies' room was.'

  'That would suggest to me she'd never been there before,' I said. 'Did she have an accent?'

  'If she did, no one remembers.'

  'Then it is unlikely she is foreign,' I said.

  'Any description on her clothing?' Marino asked.

  'A coat - maybe brown or black, short. An Atlanta Braves baseball cap, maybe navy or black. Possibly she was wearing jeans and boots. That's as much as anyone seems to remember.'

  We were silent, lost in thought.

  I cleared my throat. 'Then what?' I said.

  'Then she was spotted talking with a man, and the description of his clothing is interesting. He's remembered as having worn a rather dramatic overcoat. It was black, cut like a long trench coat - the sort you associate with what the Gestapo wore during World War Two. Museum personnel also believe he had on boots.'

  I thought of the unusual footwear impressions at the scene, and of the black leather coat mentioned by Eugenio at Scaletta.

  The two of them were spotted in several other areas of the museum, and they did go into the shark exhibit,' Commander Penn went on. 'In fact, the man bought a number of books in the gift shop.'

  'You know what kind of books?' Marino asked.

  'Books on sharks, including one containing graphic photographs of people who have been attacked by sharks.'

  'Did he pay cash for the books?' I asked.

  'I'm afraid so.'

  'Then he leaves the museum and gets a summons in the subway station,' Marino said.

  She nodded. 'I'm sure you're interested in the identification he produced.'

  'Yo, lay it on.'

  'The name on his driver's license was Frank Benelli, Italian male thirty-three years old from Verona.'

  'Verona?' I asked. 'That's interesting, my ancestors are from there.'

  Marino and the commander looked briefly at me.

  'You saying this squirrel spoke with an Italian accent?' Marino asked.

  'The officer recalled that his English was broken. He had a heavy Italian accent, and I'm assuming Gault does not?' Commander Penn said.

  'Gault was born in Albany, Georgia,' I said. 'So no, he does not have an Italian accent, but that doesn't mean he didn't imitate one.'

  I explained to her what Wesley and I had discovered last night at Scaletta.

  'Has your niece confirmed that your charge card is stolen?' she asked.

  'I have not been able to get hold of Lucy yet.'

  She pinched off a small piece of a cook
ie and slipped it between her lips, then said, 'The officer who wrote the summons grew up in an Italian family here in New York, Dr. Scarpetta. He thought the man's accent seemed authentic. Gault must be very good.'