She needs him sober if they’re going to have a productive conversation—perhaps the most important one they’ve ever had. She begins making a pot of coffee as he turns left on King Street, then another left into the narrow driveway she shares with her unpleasant neighbor, Mrs. Grimball. Marino rolls the throttle a few times to announce himself and kills the engine.
“You got something to drink in there?” he says as Scarpetta opens the front door. “A little bourbon would be nice. Wouldn’t it, Mrs. Grimball!” he shouts up at the yellow frame house, and a curtain moves. He locks the bike’s front fork, slips the key in his pocket.
“Inside, now,” Scarpetta says, realizing he’s far more intoxicated than she thought. “For God’s sake, why did you find it necessary to ride down the alley and yell at my neighbor?” she says as he follows her to the kitchen, his booted footsteps loud, his head almost touching the top of each door frame they pass through.
“Security check. I like to make sure nothing’s going on back there, no lost hearses, no homeless people hanging out.”
He pulls out a chair, sits, slumped back. The odor of booze is powerful, his face bright red, his eyes bloodshot. He says, “I can’t stay long. Got to get back to my woman. She thinks I’m at the morgue.”
Scarpetta hands him a coffee, black. “You’re going to stay long enough to sober up, otherwise you’re not going anywhere near your motorcycle. I can’t believe you got on it in your condition. That’s not like you. What’s wrong with you?”
“So I had a few. Big deal. I’m fine.”
“It is a big deal, and you’re not fine. I don’t care how well you supposedly handle alcohol. Every drunk driver thinks he’s fine right before he ends up dead or maimed or in jail.”
“I didn’t come here to be lectured to.”
“I didn’t invite you over to have you show up drunk.”
“Why did you invite me? To rag on me? To find something else wrong with me? Something else not up to your high-horse standards?”
“It’s not like you to talk this way.”
“Maybe you’ve just never listened,” he says.
“I asked you to come over in hopes we could have an open and honest conversation, but it doesn’t appear this is a good time. I have a guest room. Maybe you should go to sleep and we’ll talk in the morning.”
“Seems as good a time as any.” He yawns and stretches, doesn’t touch his coffee. “Talk away. Either that or I’m out of here.”
“Let’s go into the living room and sit in front of the fire.” She gets up from the kitchen table.
“It’s seventy-five friggin’ degrees outside.” He gets up, too.
“Then I’ll make it nice and chilly in here.” She goes to a thermostat and turns on the air-conditioning. “I’ve always found it easier to talk in front of a fire.”
He follows her into her favorite room, a small sitting area with a brick fireplace, heart-of-pine floors, exposed beams, and plaster walls. She places a chemical log on the grate and lights it, and pulls two chairs close and switches off the lamps.
He watches flames burn the paper wrapping off the log and says, “I can’t believe you use those things. Original this, original that, and then you use fake logs.”
Lucious Meddick drives around the block and his resentment festers.
He saw them go inside after that asshole investigator thundered up on his motorcycle drunk and disturbed the neighbors. Daily double, Lucious thinks. He’s blessed because he’s been wronged and God is making it up to him. Setting out to teach her a lesson, Lucious has caught both of them, and he slowly noses his hearse into the unlighted alleyway, worrying about another flat tire, and getting angrier. He snaps the rubber band hard as his frustration spikes. Voices of dispatchers on his police scanner are a distant static he can decipher in his sleep.
They didn’t call him. He drifted past a fatal car crash on William Hilton Highway, saw the body being loaded into a competitor’s hearse—an old one—and again Lucious was ignored. Beaufort County is her turf now, and nobody calls him. She’s blackballed him because he made a mistake about her address. If she thought that was a violation of her privacy, she doesn’t know the meaning.
Filming women through a window at night is nothing new. Surprising how easy it is and how many of them don’t bother with curtains or blinds, or leave them open just a tiny inch or two, thinking Who’s going to look? Who’s going to get down behind the shrubbery or climb up in a tree to see? Lucious, that’s who. See how the snotty lady doctor likes watching herself in a home movie that people can gawk at for nothing and never know who took it. Better still, he’ll get both of them in the act. Lucious thinks of the hearse—nowhere near as nice as his—and the car wreck, and the unfairness of it is unendurable.
Who was called? Not him. Not Lucious, even after he radioed the dispatcher and said he was in the area, and she came back and told him in her snippy, terse tone that she hadn’t called him and what unit was he? He said he wasn’t a unit and she told him in so many words to stay off the cop channels and, for that matter, off the air. He snaps the rubber band until it stings like a whip. He bumps over pavers, past the iron gate behind the lady doctor’s carriage garden, and spots a white Cadillac blocking his way. It’s dark back here. He snaps the rubber band and swears. He recognizes the oval bumper sticker on the Cadillac’s rear bumper.
HH for Hilton Head.
He’ll just leave his damn hearse right here. Nobody drives through this damn alley anyway, and he has a mind to call in the Cadillac and laugh while the police give the driver a ticket. He gleefully thinks about You Tube and the trouble he’s about to cause. That damn investigator is in that damn bitch’s pants. He saw them walk into the house, sneaking and cheating. He has a girl, that sexy thing he was with in the morgue, and Lucious saw them carrying on when they weren’t paying attention. From what he hears, Dr. Scarpetta has a man up north. Isn’t that something. Lucious makes a fool of himself, promoting his business, telling the rude investigator that he—Lucious Meddick—would appreciate referrals from him and his boss, and their response? To disrespect him. To discriminate. Now they have to pay.
He turns off the engine and the lights and gets out as he glares at the Cadillac. He opens the back of the hearse and an empty stretcher is clamped to the floor, a stack of neatly folded white sheets and white body pouches on top of it. He finds the camcorder, and extra batteries in a utility box he keeps in back, and shuts the tailgate and stares at the Cadillac, walks past it, considering the best way to get close to her house.
Someone moves behind the glass of the driver’s door, just the faintest hint of something dark inside the dark car, shifting. Lucious is happy as he turns on the camcorder to see how much memory is left, and the darkness inside the Cadillac shifts again, and Lucious walks around the back of it and films the license plate.
Probably some couple making out, and he gets excited thinking about it. Then he’s offended. They saw his headlights and didn’t get out of the way. Disrespect. They saw him park his hearse in the dark because he couldn’t get past, and they couldn’t have been more inconsiderate. They’ll be sorry. He raps his knuckles against the glass, about to scare them but good.
“I got your plate number.” He raises his voice. “And I’m calling the damn police.”
The burning log crackles. An English bracket clock on the mantle tick-tocks.
“What’s really going on with you?” Scarpetta says, watching him. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re the one who asked me here. So I assume something’s wrong with you.”
“Something’s wrong with us. How about that? You seem miserable. You’re making me miserable. This past week has been out of control. Do you want to tell me what you’ve done and why?” she says. “Or do you want me to tell you?”
The fire crackles.
“Please, Marino. Talk to me.”
He stares at the fire. For a while, neither of them talk.
“I know about the e-mai
ls,” she says. “But then, you probably already know that, since you asked Lucy to check out the alleged false alarm the other night.”
“So you have her snoop around my computer. So much for trust.”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to say anything about trust.”
“I’ll say what I want.”
“The tour you gave your girlfriend. All of it was caught on camera. I’ve seen it. Every minute of it.”
Marino’s face twitches. Of course he knew the cameras and microphones were there, but she can tell it didn’t occur to him that he and Shandy were being watched. Certainly, he would have known their every action and word was being captured, but most likely he assumed that Lucy would have no reason to review the recordings. He was right about that. She wouldn’t have had a reason. He was confident he would get away with it, and that makes what he did even worse.
“There are cameras everywhere,” she says. “Did you really think no one would find out what you did?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I thought you cared. I thought you cared about that murdered little boy. Yet you unzipped his pouch and played show-and-tell with your girlfriend. How could you do such a thing?”
He won’t look at her or respond.
“Marino. How could you do such a thing?” she asks him again.
“It was her idea. The tape should have showed you that,” he says.
“A tour without my permission is bad enough. But how could you let her look at bodies? Especially his.”
“You saw the tape from when Lucy was spying on me.” He glowers at her. “Shandy wouldn’t take no for an answer. She wouldn’t get out of the cooler. I tried.”
“There’s no excuse.”
“Spying. I’m sick of it.”
“Betrayal and disrespect. I’m sick of it,” Scarpetta says.
“I’ve been thinking of quitting anyway,” he goes on in a nasty tone. “If you stuck your nose in my e-mails from Dr. Self, you ought to know I got better opportunities than hanging out here with you for the rest of my life.”
“Quit? Or are you hoping I’ll fire you? Because that’s what you deserve after what you did. We don’t give tours of the morgue and make a spectacle of the poor people who end up there.”
“Jesus, I hate the way women overreact to everything. Get so damn emotional and irrational. Go ahead. Fire me,” he says thickly, over-enunciating, the way people do when they try too hard to sound sober.
“This is exactly what Dr. Self wants to happen.”
“You’re just jealous because she’s a hell of a lot more important than you.”
“This isn’t the Pete Marino I know.”
“You ain’t the Dr. Scarpetta I know. Did you read what else she said about you?”
“She said quite a lot about me.”
“The lie you live. Why don’t you finally admit to it? Maybe that’s where Lucy got it. From you.”
“My sexual preference? Is that what you’re so desperate to know?”
“You’re afraid to admit it.”
“If what Dr. Self implied were true, I certainly wouldn’t be afraid of it. It’s people like her, people like you, who seem to be afraid of it.”
He leans back in his chair, and for an instant, he seems near tears. Then his face turns hard again as he stares at the fire.
“What you did yesterday,” she says, “isn’t the Marino I’ve known all these years.”
“Maybe it is and you just never wanted to see it.”
“I know it isn’t. What’s happened to you?”
“I don’t know how I got here,” he says. “I look back on it and see this guy who did good as a boxer for a while, but I didn’t want to have mush for a brain. Got sick of being a uniform cop in New York. Married Doris, who got sick of me, had a sicko son who’s dead, and I’m still chasing sicko assholes. I’m not sure why. Never have been able to figure out why you do what you do, either. You probably won’t tell me.” Sullenly.
“Maybe because I grew up in a house where nobody talked to me in a way that conveyed anything I needed to hear or made me feel understood or important. Maybe because I watched my father die. Every day, that’s all any of us watched. Maybe I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand the thing that defeated me as a child. Death. I don’t think there are simple or even logical reasons for why we’re who we are and do what we do.” She looks over at him, but he doesn’t look at her. “Maybe there’s no simple or even logical answer that explains your behavior. But I wish there were.”
“In the old days, I didn’t work for you. That’s what’s changed.” He gets up. “I’m having a bourbon.”
“More bourbon isn’t what you need,” she says, dismayed.
He isn’t listening, and he knows his way to the bar. She hears him open a cabinet and get out a glass, then another cabinet and a bottle. He walks back into the room with a tumbler of liquor in one hand, the bottle in the other. An uneasiness starts in the pit of her stomach, and she wants him to leave but can’t send him out in the middle of the night drunk.
He sets the bottle on the coffee table and says, “We got along pretty good all those years in Richmond when I was the top detective and you was the chief.” He lifts his glass. Marino doesn’t sip. He takes big swallows. “Then you got fired and I quit. Since then, nothing’s turned out the way I thought. I liked the hell out of Florida. We had a kick-ass training facility. Me in charge of investigations, good pay, even had my own celebrity shrink. Not that I need a shrink, but I lost weight, was in great shape. Was doing really good until I stopped seeing her.”
“Had you continued to see Dr. Self, she would have decimated your life. And I can’t believe you don’t realize that her communicating with you is nothing but manipulation. You know what she’s like. You saw what she was like in court. You heard her.”
He takes another swallow of bourbon. “For once there’s a woman more powerful than you, and you can’t stand it. Maybe can’t stand my relationship with her. So you got to bad-mouth her because what else can you do. You’re stuck down here in no-man’s-land and about to become a housewife.”
“Don’t insult me. I don’t want to fight with you.”
He drinks, and his meanness is wide awake now. “My relationship with her is maybe why you wanted us to move from Florida. I’m seeing it now.”
“I believe Hurricane Wilma is why we moved from Florida,” she says, as the feeling in her stomach gets worse. “That and my need to have a real office, a real practice, again.”
He drains his glass, pours more.
“You’ve had enough,” she says.
“You got that right.” He lifts his glass, takes another swallow.
“I think it’s time I call a cab to take you home.”
“Maybe you should start a real practice somewhere else and get the hell out of here. You’d be better off.”
“You’re not the judge of where I’d be better off,” she says, watching him carefully, firelight moving on his big face. “Please don’t drink anymore. You’ve had enough.”
“I’ve had enough, all right.”
“Marino, please don’t let Dr. Self drive a wedge between you and me.”
“I don’t need her to do that. You done it on your own.”
“Let’s don’t do this.”
“Let’s do.” Slurring, swaying a bit in his chair, a gleam in his eyes that’s unnerving. “I don’t know how many days I got left. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen. So I don’t intend to waste my time in a place I hate, working for someone who don’t treat me with the respect I deserve. Like you’re better than me. Well, you’re not.”
“What do you mean by how many days you’ve got left? Are you telling me you’re sick?” she says.
“Sick and tired. That’s what I’m telling you.”
She’s never seen him this drunk. He’s swaying on his feet, pouring more bourbon, spilling it. Her impulse is to take the bottle away from him, but the
look in his eyes stops her.
“You live alone and it ain’t safe,” he says. “It’s not safe, you’re living here in this little old house alone.”
“I’ve always lived alone, more or less.”
“Yeah. What the fuck’s that say about Benton? Hope you two have a nice life.”
She’s never seen Marino this drunk and hateful, and she doesn’t know what to do.
“I’m in a situation where I got to make choices. So now I’m gonna tell you the truth.” He spits as he talks, the glass of bourbon perilously tilted in his hand. “I’m bored as hell working for you.”
“If that’s how you feel, I’m glad you’re telling me.” But the more she tries to soothe him, the more inflamed he gets.
“Benton the rich snob. Doctor Wesley. So because I ain’t a doctor, lawyer, or Indian chief, I’m not good enough for you. Tell you one goddamn thing, I’m good enough for Shandy, and she’s sure as hell not what you think. From a better family than yours. She didn’t grow up poor in Miami with some blue-collar grocery store worker just off the boat.”
“You’re very drunk. You can sleep in the guest room.”
“Your family’s no better than mine. Just-off-the-boat Italians with nothing but cheap macaroni and tomato sauce to eat five nights a week,” he says.
“Let me get you a cab.”
He slams his glass down on the coffee table. “I think it’s a real good idea for me to get on my horse and ride.” He grabs a chair to steady himself.
“You’re not going anywhere near that motorcycle,” she says.
He starts walking, knocks against the door frame as she holds on to his arm. He almost drags her toward the front door as she tries to stop him, implores him not to go. He digs in a pocket for his motorcycle key and she snatches it out of his hand.
“Give me my key. I’m saying it real polite.”
She clenches it in her fist behind her back, in the small foyer at the front door. “You’re not getting on your bike. You can hardly walk. You’re taking a cab or staying here tonight. I’m not going to let you kill yourself or somebody else. Please listen to me.”