From Potter's Field (19 page)

'It don't threaten me in the least. It's just unnatural.' He tossed the cigarette butt out the window, a tiny missile extinguished by the night. 'But hey, it's not that I don't understand it. It's a known fact that a lot of women go for each other because it's the best they can do.'

'I see,' I said. 'A known fact.' I paused. 'So tell me, would that be the case with Lucy and Janet?'

'That's why I recommend them getting help, because there's hope. They could get guys easy. Especially Janet could with the way she's built. If I wasn't so tied up, I'd have half a mind to ask her out.'

'Marino,' I said, and he was making me tired, 'leave them alone. You're just setting yourself up to be disliked and snubbed. You're setting yourself up to look like a damn fool. The Janets of the world are not going to date you.'

'Her loss. If she had the right experience, it might straighten her out. What women do with each other's not what I consider the real thing. They have no idea what they're missing.'

The thought that Marino might consider himself an expert on what women needed in bed was so absurd that I forgot to be annoyed. I laughed.

'I feel protective of Lucy, okay?' he went on. 'I sort of feel like an uncle, and see, the problem is she's never been around men. Her dad died. You're divorced. She's got no brothers and her mother is in and out of bed with goofballs.'

'That much is true,' I said. 'I wish Lucy could have had a positive male influence.'

'I guarantee if she had she wouldn't have turned out queer.'

'That's not a kind word,' I said. 'And we really don't know why people turn out the way they do.'

'Then you tell me.' He glanced my way. 'You explain what went wrong.'

'In the first place, I'm not going to say that anything went wrong. There may be a genetic component to one's sexual orientation. Maybe there isn't. But what's important is that it doesn't matter.'

'So you don't care.'

I thought about this for a minute. 'I care because it is a harder way to live,' I said.

'And that's it?' he said skeptically. 'You mean you wouldn't rather she was with a man?'

Again, I hesitated. 'I guess at this point, I just want her with good people.'

He got quiet as he drove. Then he said, 'I'm sorry about tonight. I know I was a jerk.'

'Thank you for apologizing,' I said.

'Well, the truth is, things aren't going so good for me personally right now. Molly and me were doing fine until about a week ago when Doris called.'

I wasn't terribly surprised. Old spouses and lovers have a way of resurfacing.

'Seems she found out about Molly because Rocky said something. Now all of a sudden she wants to come home. She wants to get back with me.'

When Doris had left, Marino was devastated. But at this stage in my life I somewhat cynically believed that fractured relationships could not be set and healed like bones. He lit another cigarette as a truck bore down on our rear and swung past. A vehicle rushed up behind us, its high beams in our eyes.

'Molly wasn't happy about it,' he went on with difficulty. 'Truth is, we hadn't been getting along so hot since and it's just as well we didn't spend Christmas together. I think she's started going out on me, too. This sergeant she met. Wouldn't you know. I introduced them at the FOP one night.'

'I'm very sorry.' I looked over at his face and thought he might cry. 'Do you still love Doris?' I gently asked.

'Hell, I don't know. I don't know nothing. Women may as well be from another planet. You know? It's just like tonight. Everything I do is wrong.'

'That's not true. You and I have been friends for years. You must be doing something right.'

'You're the only woman friend I got,' he said. 'But you're more like a guy.'

'Why, thank you.'

'I can talk to you like a guy. And you know what you're doing. You didn't get where you are because you're a woman. Goddam it' - he squinted into the rearview mirror, then adjusted it to diminish the glare - 'you got where you are in spite of your being one.'

He glanced again in the mirrors. I turned around. A car was practically touching our bumper, high beams blinding. We were going seventy miles an hour.

'That's weird,' I said. 'He has plenty of room to go around us.'

Traffic on 1-95 was light. There was no reason for anyone to tailgate, and I thought of the accident last fall when Lucy had flipped my Mercedes. Someone had been on her rear bumper, too. Fear ran along my nerves.

'Can you see what kind of car it is?' I asked.

'Looks like a Z. Maybe an old 280 Z, something like that.'

He reached inside his coat and slid a pistol from its holster. He placed the gun in his lap as he continued to watch the mirrors. I turned around again and saw a dark shape of a head that looked male. The driver was staring straight at us.

'All right,' Marino growled. "This is pissing me off.' He firmly tapped the brakes.

The car shot around us with a long, angry blare of the horn. It was a Porsche and the driver was black.

I said to Marino, 'You don't still have that Confederate flag bumper sticker on your truck, do you? The one that glows when headlights hit it?'

'Yeah, I do.' He returned the gun to its holster.

'Maybe you ought to consider removing it.'

The Porsche was tiny taillights far ahead. I thought of Chief Tucker threatening to send Marino to cultural diversity class. Marino could go the rest of his life and I wasn't sure it would cure him.

'Tomorrow's Thursday,' he said. 'I've got to go to First Precinct and see if anyone remembers that I still work for the city.'

'What's happening with Sheriff Santa?'

'He's scheduled for a preliminary hearing next week.'

'He's locked up, I presume,' I said.

'Nope. Out on bond. When do you start jury duty?'

'Monday.'

'Maybe you can get cut loose.'

'I can't ask for that,' I said. 'Somebody would make a big deal of it, and even if they didn't, it would be hypocritical. I'm supposed to care about justice.'

'Do you think I should see Doris?' We were in Richmond now, the downtown skyline in view.

I looked over at his profile, his thinning hair, big ears and face, and the way his huge hands made the steering wheel disappear. He could not remember his life before his wife. Their relationship had long ago left the froth and fire of sex and moved into an orbit of safe but boring stability. I believed they had parted because they were afraid of growing old.

'I think you should see her,' I said to him. 'So I should go up to New Jersey.' 'No,' I said. 'Doris is the one who left. She should come here.'

11

Windsor Farms was dark when we turned into it from Gary Street, and Marino did not want me entering my house alone. He pulled into my brick driveway and stared ahead at the shut garage door illuminated by his headlights.

'Do you have the opener?' he asked.

'It's in my car.'

'A lot of friggin' good that does when your car's inside the garage with the door shut.'

'If you would drop me off in front as I requested I could unlock my front door,' I said.

'Nope. You're not walking down that long sidewalk anymore, Doc.' He was very authoritative, and I knew when he got this way there was no point in arguing.

I handed him my keys. 'Then you go on in through the front and open the garage door. I'll wait right here.'

He opened his door. 'I got a shotgun between the seats.'

He reached down to show me a black Benelli twelve-gauge with an eight-round magazine extension. It occurred to me that Benelli, a manufacturer of fine Italian shotguns, was also the name on Gault's false driver's license.

'The safety's right there.' Marino showed me. 'All you do is push it in, pump it and fire.'

'Is there a riot about to happen that I've not been told about?'

He got out of the truck and locked the doors.

I cranked open the window. 'It might help if you knew my burglar alarm code,' I said.

'Already do.' He started walking across frosted grass. 'Your DOB.'

'How did you know that?' I demanded.

'You're predictable,' I heard him say before disappearing around a hedge.

Several minutes later the garage door began to lift and a light went on inside, illuminating yard and garden tools neatly arranged on walls, a bicycle I rarely rode, and my car. I could not see my new Mercedes without thinking of the one Lucy had wrecked.

My former 500E was sleek and fast with an engine partially designed by Porsche. Now I just wanted something big. I had a black S500 that probably would hold its own with a cement truck or a tractor trailer. Marino stood near my car, looking at me as if he wished I would hurry up. I honked the horn to remind him I was locked inside his truck.

'Why do people keep trying to lock me inside their vehicles?' I said as he let me out. 'A taxi this morning, now you.'

'Because it's not safe when you're loose. I want to look around your house before I leave,' he said.

'It's not necessary.'

'I'm not asking. I'm telling you I'm going to look,' he said.

'All right. Help yourself.'

He followed me inside, and I went straight to the living room and turned on the gas fire. Next I opened the front door and brought in the mail and several newspapers that one of my neighbors had forgotten I to pick up. To anybody watching my gracious brick house, it would have been obvious that I was gone over Christmas.

I glanced around as I returned to the living room, looking for anything even slightly out of order. I wondered if anyone had thought about breaking in. I wondered what eyes had turned this way, what dark thoughts had enveloped this place where I lived.

My neighborhood was one of the wealthiest in Richmond, and certainly there had been problems before, mostly with gypsies who tended to walk in during the day when people were home. I was not as worried about them, for I never left doors unlocked, and the alarm was activated constantly. It was an entirely different breed of criminal I feared, and he was not as interested in what I owned as in who and what I was. I kept many guns in the house in places where I could get to them easily.

I seated myself on the couch, the shadow from flames moving on oil paintings on the walls. My furniture was contemporary European, and during the day the house was filled with light. As I sorted mail, I came across a pink envelope similar to several I had seen before. It was note size and not a good grade of paper, the stationery the sort one might buy in a drugstore. The postmark this time was Charlottesville, December 23. I slit it open with a scalpel. The note, like the others, was handwritten in black fountain ink.

Dear Dr. Scarpetta,

I hope you have a very special Christmas!

CAIN

I carefully set the letter on my coffee table.

'Marino?' I called out.

Gault had written the note before he had murdered Jane. But the mail was slow. I was just getting it now.

'Marino!' I got up.

I heard his feet moving loudly and quickly on stairs. He rushed into the living room, gun in hand.

'What?' he said, breathing hard as he looked around. 'Are you all right?'

I pointed to the note. His eyes fell to the pink envelope and matching paper.

'Who's it from?'

'Look,' I said.

He sat beside me, then got right back up. 'I'm going to set the alarm first.'

'Good idea.'

He came back and sat down again. 'Let me have a couple pens. Thanks.'

He used the pens to keep the notepaper unfolded so he could read without jeopardizing any fingerprints I hadn't already destroyed. When he was finished, he studied the handwriting and postmark on the envelope.

'Is this the first time you've gotten one of these?' he asked.

'No.'

He looked accusingly at me. 'And you didn't say nothing?'

'It's not the first note, but it's the first one signed

cain; I said.

'What have the rest of them been signed?'

'There's only been two others on this pink stationery, and they weren't signed.'

'Do you have them?'

'No. I didn't think they were important. The postmarks were Richmond, the notes kooky but not alarming. I frequently get peculiar mail.'

'Sent to your house?'

'Generally to the office. My home address isn't listed.'

'Shit, Doc!' Marino got up and started pacing. 'Didn't it disturb you when you got notes delivered to your home address when it's not listed?'

'The location of my home certainly isn't a secret. You know how often we've asked the media not to film or photograph it, and they do it anyway.'

'Tell me what the other notes said.'

'Like this one, they were short. One asked me how I was and if I was still working too hard. It seems to me the other was more along the lines of missing me.'