Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  Marino might be a crude, poorly educated man, but he wasn’t a sex offender. He wasn’t a bad human being. But how was Scarpetta supposed to know? He didn’t fix it the morning after, didn’t make even a feeble attempt at it when she appeared in the guest bedroom with dry toast and coffee. What did he do? He faked amnesia. He complained about the bourbon she kept in her bar, as if it was her fault for having something in her house that could cause such a wicked hangover and a blackout.

  He acknowledged nothing. Shame and panic had made him mute because he wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, and he wasn’t going to ask. Better if he figured it out on his own, and over weeks and months of investigating his own crime, he finally fit the pieces together. He couldn’t have gone but so far, because when he awakened the next morning, he was fully dressed, and the only body fluid detectable was his cold, stinking sweat.

  With clarity, he remembered only fragments: pushing her against the wall, hearing the ripping of fabric, feeling the softness of her skin, her voice saying he was hurting her, and she knew he didn’t want that. He clearly remembered she didn’t move, and now he understood it and wondered how her instincts could have been so right. He was completely out of control, and she was smart enough not to incite him further by fighting. He remembered nothing else, not even her breasts, except his vague recollection that he had been surprised by them but not unpleasantly. Rather, after decades of elaborate fantasies, they didn’t look quite the way he had envisioned them. But then, no woman’s did.

  It was a realization that came with maturity and had nothing to do with intuition or common sense. As a horny little boy whose only point of reference was the dirty magazines his father hid in the tool shed, Marino couldn’t possibly know what he eventually discovered. Breasts, like fingerprints, have their own individual characteristics that aren’t necessarily discernible through clothes. Every breast he’d ever been intimate with had its own unique size, shape, symmetry, slope, with the most obvious variable being the nipple, which really was what the timeless attraction was about. Marino, who considered himself a connoisseur, would be the first to say that big was better, but once he got beyond the ogling and fondling, it was all about what he put in his mouth.

  In the green field of the night-vision monocular, Scarpetta and Benton walked out of the park, onto the sidewalk. She had her hands in her pockets, wasn’t carrying anything, meaning she and Benton would be making at least one stop, most likely his office. He noticed they weren’t talking much, and then, as if they read Marino’s thoughts, they held hands and Benton leaned down and kissed her.

  When they reached the street, so close that he didn’t need light intensification to make out their faces, they were looking at each other as if they’d meant the kiss and that there would be more to come, Marino thought. They reached First Avenue and faded out of sight.

  Marino was about to abandon his safe haven of triple-stacked hydraulic lifts when he noticed another figure appear in the park, walking briskly. Then he saw yet another figure enter the park from the direction of the DNA building. In the bright green field of the night-vision monocular, Investigator Mike Morales and Dr. Lenora Lester sat next to each other on a bench.

  They said things Marino couldn’t hear, and she gave him a large envelope. Probably information about Terri Bridges’s autopsy. But it was a peculiar handoff, as if they were spies. He entertained the notion that the two of them were having an affair, and his stomach flopped as he imagined her grim, pinched face, imagined her birdlike body naked on a wad of sheets.

  That couldn’t be it.

  It was far more likely that Dr. Lester had called Morales as fast as she could so she could take credit for whatever Scarpetta had discovered in the morgue. And he would want the information before anybody else got it, including Marino and, most of all, Berger. That must mean Scarpetta had found out something important. Marino watched until Dr. Lester and Morales got up from the bench. He disappeared around a corner of the DNA building, and she headed in Marino’s direction, toward East 27th, walking her fast walk, her eyes on the BlackBerry in her bare hands.

  She hurried through the cold wind toward First Avenue, where she would probably catch a cab, then take the ferry back home to New Jersey. It appeared she was text-messaging someone.

  Museum Mile used to be Shrew’s favorite walk. She’d set out from her apartment with a bottle of water and a granola bar, and choose the Madison Avenue route so she could window-shop as anticipation built and accelerated her feet.

  The highlight was the Guggenheim, where she was thrilled by Clyfford Still, John Chamberlain, Robert Rauschenberg, and of course Picasso. The last exhibition she’d seen there was Jackson Pollock Paintings on Paper, and that had been two years ago this spring.

  What had happened?

  It wasn’t as if she had a time clock to punch, or a life, really. But after she’d gone to work for the Boss, little by little she’d stopped going to museums, to the theater, to the galleries, to newsstands or Barnes & Noble.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d tucked herself into the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized musicians in the park or been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.

  She’d become a bug in amber, trapped in lives she didn’t know or care about. Gossip. The tawdry, banal goings-on of people who had the heart and soul of paper dolls. Why did she care what Michael Jackson wore to court? What difference did it make to her or anyone else that Madonna had fallen off her horse?

  Instead of looking at art, Shrew had started looking into the toilet of life, taking delight in other people’s shit. She began to realize a number of truths as she thought about her dark ride home along the River Styx of Lexington Avenue in the black Cadillac sedan. The man in the cowboy hat had been nice to her, even patted her knee as she’d gotten out of his car, but he’d never given her his name, and common sense had warned her not to ask.

  She’d walked right into evil tonight. First Marilyn Monroe, then the worm, then the basement. Maybe God had just administered spiritual electroshock therapy of sorts, by showing her the truth about the heartless way she lived, and she looked around her rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment, and possibly for the first time since her husband was no longer in it, she saw what it really looked like, and that it hadn’t changed.

  The corduroy sofa and matching chair were unpretentious and comforting, and the worn nappy texture brought her husband back to the living room. She saw him sitting in the recliner, reading the Times, chewing on the butt of a cigar until it was slimy, and she smelled the smoke that used to saturate every molecule of their lives. She smelled it now as if she’d never brought in professional cleaners.

  For several seasons, she couldn’t muster up the courage to clear out his clothes and tuck away items she couldn’t bear to look at or part with.

  How often had she lectured him not to cross the street just because the white man on the traffic signal assured him it was fine?

  How was that any less stupid than standing on the sidewalk because the red hand forbade him to walk, even though the cross-street was barricaded, not a car in sight?

  In the end, he’d been beckoned to by the white man instead of listening to Shrew, and one day she had a husband she was constantly nagging about cigars and not picking up after himself, and the next day and the ones after that she had nothing but his odors and his clutter, and the memory of the last words they’d exchanged on his way out the door.

  How we doing for coffee cream? As he put on his silly wool deerstalker’s cap.

  She’d bought it for him in London several decades back, and he’d never figured out she didn’t really mean for him to wear it.

  I don’t know how we’re doing for coffee cream, since you’re the only one who drinks coffee with cream in it. That was what she’d said.

  The last words of hers in his ears.

  The words of a shrew who had come to live with them that same cruel month of April, when they’d o
utsourced her job to someone in India and the two of them were knee-to-knee inside their small place, day after day, and worried sick about money. Because he was an accountant, and he had done the math.

  She’d scripted their last moment together on this earth, revised it every way imaginable, wondering if there was something she could have done or mentioned that might have altered fate. If she’d said she loved him and would he like his favorite lamb chops and a baked sweet potato for dinner, and had she bought a potted hyacinth for the coffee table, might his mind have been on one or the other or all of it instead of whatever it was on when he didn’t look both ways?

  Was he irritable and distracted because of her shrewish remark about the coffee cream?

  What if she’d sweetly reminded him to be careful, would that have saved him and her and them?

  She fixed her attention on the flat-screen TV and imagined him smoking his cigar, watching the news with that skeptical look on his face, a face she saw every time she closed her eyes or saw something in the corner of them—a shadow or laundry piled on a chair or she didn’t have her glasses on. And she would see him before he was gone. And she would remember he was gone.

  He would look at her fancy TV and say, Dearest, why the TV? Who needs a TV like that? It probably wasn’t even made in America. We can’t afford a TV like that.

  He would not approve. Oh, Lord, not of anything she’d done and gotten since he’d been gone.

  The recliner was empty, and the worn spot made by him caused her to feel such despair as more memories rushed back at her:

  Reporting him missing.

  Feeling as if she were living a scene in a hundred movies as she clutched the phone and begged the police to believe her.

  Believe me. Please believe me.

  She told the oh-so-politic female police officer that her husband didn’t go to bars or wander off. He wasn’t having a little memory problem or a little affair. He always came right back like a Boy Scout, and if he’d gotten “adventurous” and “ornery,” he would have called Shrew.

  And simply told me to fuck off, that he’d be home when he got around to it, just like he’d done last time he’d gotten goddamn adventurous and ornery, Shrew had said to the politic police officer, who’d sounded like she was chewing gum.

  Nobody was in a panic except Shrew.

  Nobody cared.

  The detective, yet someone else in the landmass of the NYPD, who finally called with the news was regretful.

  Ma’am, I’m very sorry to inform you . . . At around four p.m. I responded to a scene. . . .

  The policeman was polite but quite busy and said he was sorry several times, but didn’t offer to escort her to the morgue the way a well-behaved nephew might escort his stricken aunt to a wake or a church.

  The morgue? Where?

  Near Bellevue.

  Which Bellevue?

  Ma’am, there’s only one Bellevue.

  There most certainly isn’t. There’s the old one. And then there’s the new one. What Bellevue is the morgue near?

  She could go there at eight a.m. and identify the body, and she was given the address, lest she confuse the location of one Bellevue with the other, and she was given the name of the medical examiner:

  Dr. Lenora Lester, LL.B., M.D.

  Such an unfriendly, unpleasant woman for all her education, and how unfeeling she was when she hurried Shrew into that little room and drew back the drape.

  His eyes were closed, and he was covered up to his chin with a papery blue sheet.

  No sign of any injury, not a scratch, not a bruise, and for an instant Shrew hadn’t believed anything had happened.

  There’s nothing broken. What happened? What really happened? He can’t be dead. There’s nothing wrong with him. He looks fine. Just pale. He’s so pale, and I’ll be the first to agree he doesn’t look well. But he can’t be dead.

  Dr. Lester was a stuffed dove under glass and her mouth didn’t move as she explained, very briefly, that he was a textbook pedestrian fatality.

  Hit from behind while upright.

  Thrown over the hood of the taxi.

  Struck the back of his head on the windshield.

  He had massive fractures of the cervical vertebrae, the doctor’s stiff white face had said.

  The severity of the impact had fractured both of his lower extremities, the stiff white face had said.

  Extremities.

  Her beloved’s legs that wore socks and shoes, and on this cruel April afternoon, corduroy slacks almost the same tawny brown as his recliner and the couch. Slacks that she had picked out for him at Saks.

  The stiff white face said in that small room: He looks pretty good because his most profoundly mutilating injuries are to the lower extremities.

  Which were covered—the lower extremities, his lower extremities—by the papery blue sheet.

  Shrew left the morgue, and she left her mailing address, and later she wrote the check and got a copy of Dr. Lester’s final report after it had been pended for about five months, awaiting toxicology. The official autopsy results were still sealed inside their official envelope, in a bottom drawer of her desk, under a box of her husband’s favorite cigars that she’d sealed in a freezer bag because she didn’t want to smell them, yet she couldn’t bring herself to toss them out.

  She put another glass of bourbon next to the computer and sat down, working later than usual and not wanting to go to bed anytime soon or ever again. It occurred to her that all had been bearable until she’d opened that Marilyn Monroe photograph earlier today.

  She thought of a punishing God as she envisioned the man with the mutton-chop sideburns and flashy jewelry, and his offer of a free dachshund or a shih tzu or a springer spaniel puppy, and then the ride home. He was trying to silence her through the bribery of a kindness that hinted what it would be like if he weren’t inclined to be kind at all. She’d caught him red-handed, and they both knew it, and he wanted her to feel friendly toward him. For their own good.

  She went on the Internet and searched until she found a story that had run in the Times just three weeks ago, the very same week that the Boss had written such nice things about Tell-Tail Hearts’s main pet shop on Lexington Avenue. The article was accompanied by a photograph of the white-haired man with the big sideburns and dissipated face.

  His name was Jake Loudin.

  This past October, he had been charged with eight counts of animal cruelty after one of the pet shops he owned in the Bronx was raided, but several weeks ago, in early December, he’d gotten off scot-free:

  CHARGES AGAINST PUPPY MILL KING DROPPED

  The New York County District Attorney’s office has dropped eight counts of aggravated animal cruelty against a Missouri businessman who animal-rights activists call “The Puppy Pol Pot,” comparing Jake Loudin to the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for the slaughter of millions of Cambodians.

  Loudin could have received up to sixteen years in prison had he been convicted and given the maximum sentence for all eight felony counts. “But there just wasn’t a way to prove the eight deceased animals discovered in the pet store’s freezer were alive when placed there,” said Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger, whose recently formed animal-cruelty task force raided the shop last October. She added that the judge didn’t feel the police had supplied sufficient evidence to prove a lack of justification for the euthanization of these same eight companion animals, all of them puppies ranging from three to six months in age.

  Berger said it is commonly known that some pet shops “eliminate” dogs, cats, and other pets if they can’t sell them, or if for some reason they become a commercial liability.

  “A sick puppy, or one that’s three or four months old, loses its ‘doggie in the window’ appeal,” she said. “And far too many of these stores are notoriously negligent in supplying medical care or even the most basic necessities such as warm, clean cages and sufficient water and food. One of the reasons I started this task force is because the pe
ople of New York have had enough, and I am making it my mission to bury some of these offenders under the jailhouse.” . . .

  It was the second time tonight Shrew called 911.

  Only she was drunker and more unraveled now.

  “Murderers,” she said to the operator, repeating the Lexington address. “The little ones being locked in there—”

  “Ma’am?”

  “He forced me into his car after the event, and my heart was under my feet. . . . He had a red sullen face and a frosty silence.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’ve tried to put him in jail before, for the same thing! Hitler! Yes, Pol Pot! But he got away. Tell Ms. Berger. Please. Right away. Please.”

  “Ma’am? Would you like an officer to respond to your residence?”

  “Someone from Ms. Berger’s dog squad, please. Oh, please. I’m not crazy. I promise I’m not. I took a picture of him and the freezer with my cell phone.”

  She hadn’t.

  “They were moving!” she cried. “They were still moving!”

  23

  The dark blue Impala was waiting at the hospital’s entrance when Benton and Scarpetta walked out into the night.

  She recognized the fleece-lined leather jacket, then realized it was Marino who was wearing it. The trunk popped open, and he took the crime scene case from Benton and started talking about coffees he’d picked up for them, that the two coffees were in the backseat.

  That was how he said hello after all this time, after all that had happened.

  “I stopped at Starbucks,” he was saying, shutting the trunk. “Two Ventis,” which he didn’t pronounce correctly. “And some of those sweeteners in the yellow wrapper.”