The Last Precinct - Cornwell Patricia - Страница 84

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"Brother Thomas was screwing his family, had his own side business, was diverting ships, falsifying bills of lading, running his own guns and drugs. And the theory is the family caught on. He changed his tattoo into an owl and began using aliases because he knew the family would kill him if they found him," I recite what I have been told, what Jay told me in Lyon.

"Interesting." She touches a finger to her lips, looking around. "And it appears the family did kill him. The other son did. The jar of formalin. Why did you bring it home? Tell me again."

"It wasn't really deliberate. I went to a tattoo parlor in Petersburg to have the tattoo from the body looked at by someone who's an expert, a tattoo artist. I came straight home from there and left the tattoo in my office here. It was just a chance situation that the night he came here…"

"Jean-Baptiste Chandonne."

"Yes. The night he came here I had carried the jar in here, in the great room, and was looking at it while I was doing other things. I set it down. He pushes his way into my house and I run. By now he has the chipping hammer out and has it raised to strike me. It was just a panicked reflex that I see the jar and grab it. I jump over the back of the sofa and unscrew the lid and throw the formalin in his face."

"A reflex because you know very well how caustic formalin is."

"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 God."

"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 hell would you have done?" Anger spikes. "I'm supposed to play doctor after the son of a bitch 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 damn 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 bloody 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 dispassionately, 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 God," I mutter. "That's right. I bought the hammer after she was murdered, not before." I am so confused by what has passed, 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.

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