The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 44

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"Let's get back to the night you say you met Susan Pless," Berger says to him on the tape. "In Lumi. That's on the corner of Seventieth and Lexington?"

"Yes, yes."

"You were saying you had dinner together and then you asked her if she would like to drink champagne with you somewhere. Sir, are you aware that the description of the gentleman Susan met and dined with that night doesn't fit yours in the least?"

"I have no way to know."

"But you must be aware that you have a serious medical condition that causes you to look very different from other people, and it's hard to imagine, therefore, that you could be confused with someone who absolutely doesn't have your condition. Hypertrichosis. Isn't that what you have?"

I catch the barely perceptible flicker of Chandonne blinking behind the dark glasses. Berger has touched a nerve. The muscles in his face tense. He begins flexing his fingers again.

"Is that the name of your medical condition? Or do you know what it's called?" Berger says to him.

"I know what it is," Chandonne replies in a tone that is tighter.

"And you have lived with it all your life?"

He stares at her.

"Please answer the question, sir."

"Of course. That is a stupid question. What do you think? You come down with it like a cold?"

"My point is, you don't look like other people, and therefore I'm having a hard time imagining you might be mistaken for a man described as clean-cut and handsome with no facial hair." She pauses. She is picking at him. She wants him to lose control. "Someone well groomed in an expensive suit." Another pause. "Didn't you just finish telling me you've virtually lived like a homeless person? How could that man in Lumi have been you, sir?"

"I had on a black suit, a shirt and tie." Hate. Chandonne's true nature has begun to shine through his mantle of dark deceit like a distant cold star. I expect him to dive over the table any moment and crush Berger's throat or bash her head against the wall before Marino or anyone else can stop him. I have almost quit breathing. I remind myself that Berger is alive and well, sitting at the table with me inside my conference room. It is Thursday night. In four hours, it will have been exactly five days since Chandonne kicked his way into my house and tried to beat me to death with a chipping hammer.

"I have gone through periods where my condition isn't as bad as it is now." Chandonne has steadied himself. His politeness returns. "Stress makes it worse. I've been under so much stress. Because of them."

"And who is them?'"The American agents who've set me up. When I began to realize what was happening, that they were setting me up to look like a murderer, I became a fugitive. My health deteriorated to the worst it has ever been, and the worse I got, the more I had to hide. I haven't always looked like this." His dark glasses point slightly away from the camera as he stares at Berger. "When I met Susan, 1 was nothing like this. I could shave. I could get odd jobs and manage and even look good. And I had clothes and money sometimes because my brother would help me."

Berger stops the tape and says to me, "Possible the bit about stress could be true?"

"Stress tends to make everything worse," I reply. "But this man has never looked good. I don't care what he says."

"You're talking about Thomas," Berger's voice resumes on the videotape. "Thomas would give you clothes, money, maybe other things?"

"Yes."

"You say you were wearing a black suit in Lumi that night. Did Thomas give you the suit?"

"Yes. He liked very fine clothes. We were about the same size."

"And you dined with Susan. Then what? What happened when you were finished eating? You paid the check?"

"Of course. I'm a gentleman."

"How much was the bill?"

"Two hundred and twenty-one dollars, not including the gratuity."

Berger corroborates what he says as she stares straight ahead at the TV screen, "And that's exactly what the bill was. The man paid in cash and left two twenty-dollar bills on the table."

I quiz Berger closely on how much about the restaurant, the bill, the tip was publicly disclosed. "Was any of this ever in the news?" I ask her.

"No. So if it wasn't him, how the hell did he know what the damn bill was?" Frustration seeps into her voice.

On the videotape she asks Chandonne about the tip. He claims he left forty dollars. 'Two twenties, I believe" he says. "And then what? You left the restaurant?" "We decided to have a drink at her apartment," he says.

CHANDONNE GOES INTO GREAT DETAIL AT THIS point. He claims he left Lumi with Susan Pless. It was very cold, but they decided to walk because her apartment was only a few blocks from the restaurant. He describes the moon and the clouds in sensitive, almost poetic detail. The sky was streaked with great swipes of bluish-white chalk and the moon was partially obscured and full. A full moon has always excited him sexually, he says, because it reminds him of a pregnant belly, of buttocks, of breasts. Gusts of wind kicked up around tall apartment buildings and at one point, he took off his scarf and put it around Susan to keep her warm. He claims to have been wearing a long, dark cashmere coat, and I remember the chief medical examiner of France, Dr. Ruth Stvan, telling me about her encounter with the man we believe was Chandonne.

I visited Dr. Stvan at the Institut Medico-Legal not even two weeks ago because Interpol asked me to review the Paris cases with her, and during our conversation she recounted to me a night when a man came to her home, feigning car trouble. He asked to use her phone, and she recalled he was wearing a long dark coat and seemed very much a gentleman. But Dr. Stvan said something else when I was with her. It was her recollection that the man had a strange, most unpleasant body odor. He smelled like a dirty, wet animal. And he made her uneasy, very uneasy. She sensed evil. All the same, she might have let him in or, more likely, he would have forced his way in except for one miraculous happenstance.

Dr. Stvan's husband is a chef at a famous Paris restaurant called Le Dome. He happened to be home sick that night and called out from another room, wanting to know who was at the door. The stranger in the dark coat fled. The next day a note was delivered to Dr. Stvan. It was written in block printing on a bit of bloody, torn brown paper and signed Le Loup-Garou. I have yet to really face my denial of what should have been obvious. Dr. Stvan autopsied Chandonne's French victims and then he went after her. I autopsied his American victims and didn't take serious measures to prevent him from coming after me. A great common denominator underlies this denial, and it is this: People tend to believe that bad things happen only to others.

"Can you describe what the doorman looked like?" Berger asks Chandonne on the videotape.

"A thin mustache. In a uniform," Chandonne says. "She called him Juan."

"Wait a minute," I speak up.

Berger stops the tape again.

"Did he have a body odor?" I ask her. "When you sat in the room with him early this morning." I indicate the television. "When you interviewed him, did he have…"

"No kidding," she interrupts. "Smelled like a filthy dog. Kind of a strange mix of wet fur and bad body odor. It was all I could do not to gag. I guess the hospital didn't give him a bath."

It is a misconception that people are automatically bathed in the hospital. Usually, only the injuries are scrubbed unless the person is a long-term patient. "When Susan's murder was investigated two years ago, did anyone in Lumi mention a body odor? That the man she was with smelled bad?" I ask.

"No," Berger replies. "Not at all. Again, I just don't see how that person could have been Chandonne. But listen. It gets stranger."

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