Black notice (40 page)

He searched my face to see if I remembered. I didn't.

"You were on a panel together. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. SIDS."

"and howcould you possibly know that ?"

"It's in your vita," he said, amused.

"Well, there's certainly no mention of her in my vita," I defensively replied.

His eyes wouldn't let go of me. I couldn't stop looking at him, and it was hard to think.

"Will you go see her?" to asked. "It wouldn't seem unusual for you to drop by to say hello to an old friend while you're visiting Paris, and she's agreed to talk to you. That's really why you're here."

"Nice of you to let me know now;" I said as my indignation rose.

"You may not be able to do anything. Maybe she knows nothing. Maybe there's not a single other detail she can offer to help us with our problem. But we don't believe that. She's a very intelligent, ethical woman who's had to work very hard against a system that's not always on the side of justice. Maybe you can relate to her?"

"Just who the hell do you think you are?" I asked. "You think you can just pick up the phone and summon me here and ask me to just drop by the Paris morgue while some criminal cartel isn't looking?"

He said nothing, his gaze never wavering. Sunlight filled the window beside him and turned his eyes the amber of tiger-eye.

"I don't give a damn whether you're Interpol or Scotland Yard or the queen of England," I said. "You don't get to put me or Dr. Stvan or Marino in jeopardy."

"Marino won't be going to the morgue."

"I'll let you tell him that."

"If he accompanied you, that would raise suspicions, especially since he's such a model of decorum;" Talley remarked. "Besides, I don't think Dr. Stvan would like him very much."

"And if there's evidence, then what?"

He didn't answer me, and I knew why.

"You're asking me to tamper with the chain of evidence. You're asking me to steal evidence, aren't you? I don't know what you call it here, but in the United States it's called a felony."

"Impairment or falsification of evidence, according to the new penal code. That's what it's called here. Three hundred thousand francs, three years in prison. Possibly you could get charged with a breach of respect due the dead, I suppose, if one really wants to push the matter, and that's another hundred thousand francs, another year in prison."

I shoved back my chair.

"I must say," I coldly told him, "it's not been often in my profession that a federal agent begs me to break the law." -

"I'm not asking. This is between you and Dr. Stvan."

I got up. I didn't listen..

"You may not have gone to law school, but I did;" I said. "Maybe you can recite a penal code, but I know what it means."

He didn't move. Blood was pounding in my neck and sunlight was so bright in my face I couldn't see.

"I've been a servant to the law, to the principles of science and medicine, for half my life," I went on. "The only thing you've done for half your life, Agent Talley, is make it through adolescence in that Ivy League world of yours: '

"Nothing bad's going to happen to you," Talley calmly replied as if he hadn't listened to an insulting word I'd said.

"Tomorrow morning, Marino and I are flying home."

"Please sit down."

"So you know Diane Bray? Is this her grand finale? To get me thrown into a French prison?" I went on.

"Please sit," he said.

Reluctantly, I did.

"If you do something Dr. Stvan asks and should get caught, we'll intercede;' he said. "Just as we did with what I was sure Marino would have packed in his suitcase."

"I'm supposed to believe that?" I asked, incredulous. "French police with their machine guns snatch me in the airport and I say, . It's all right. I'm on a secret mission for Interpol?"

"All we're doing is getting you and Dr. Stvan together."

"Bullshit. I know exactly what you're doing. And if I get in trouble, you guys will be like every other agency in the goddamn world. You'll say you don't even know me."

"I would never say that."

He held my gaze, and the room was so hot I needed fresh sir.

"Kay, we would never say that. Senator lord would never say that. Please, trust me."

"Well, I don't"

"When would you like to return to Paris?"

I had to stop to think. He had me so befuddled and furious.

"You're scheduled on the late afternoon train," he reminded me. "But if you'd like to stay for the night, I know of a wonderful little hotel on the rue du Boeuf. It's called La Tour Rose. You'd love it."

"No, thank you," I said.

He sighed, getting up from the table and collecting both our trays.

"Where's Marino?" It occurred to me that.he had been gone for a long time.

"I was beginning to wonder that myself," Talley said as we walked through the cafeteria. "I don't think he likes me very much:'

"That's the most brilliant deduction you've made all day," I said.

"I don't think he likes it when another man pays attention to you." -

I didn't know how to answer that.

He slid the trays into a rack.

"Will you make the phone call?" Talley was relentless. "Please?"

He stood perfectly still in the middle of the cafeteria and touched my shoulder, almost boyishly, as he asked me again.

"I hope Dr. Stvan still speaks English," I said.

When I got Dr. Stvan on the phone, she remembered me without hesitation, which reinforced what Talley had told me. She was expecting my call and wanted to see me.

"I teach at the university tomorrow afternoon," she told me in English that sounded as if it had not been practiced in a while. "But you can come by in the morning. I get in at eight."

"Will eight-fifteen give you enough time to get settled?"

"Of course. Is there something I can help you with while you're in Paris?" she asked in a tone that made me suspect others could hear.

"I'm interested in how your medical examiner system works in France." I followed her cue.

"Not very well some of the time," she replied. "We're near the Gare de Lyon, off the Quai de la Rapee. If you drive yourself, you can park in back where the bodies are received. Otherwise, come in to the front."

Talley looked up from telephone messages he was sifting through.

"Thanks," he said when I hung up.

"Where do you suppose Marino has wandered off to?" I asked.

I was getting anxious. I didn't trust Marino on his own. No doubt he was offending someone.

"There are but so many places he can go," Talley replied.

We found him downstairs in the lobby, sitting glumly by a potted palm. It seemed he had wandered through too many doors and had locked himself out of every floor. So he had taken the elevator down and hadn't bothered to ask for assistance from security.

I hadn't seen him this petulant in a while, and he was so surly on our way back to Paris that I finally moved to another seat and turned my back to him. I closed my eyes and dozed. I wandered to the dining car and bought a Pepsi without asking him if he wanted one. I bought my own pack of cigarettes and offered him nothing.

When we walked into the lobby of our hotel, I finally broke down.

"How about I buy you a drink?" I said.

"I gotta go to my room."

"What's wrong with you?"

"Maybe I should ask you that," he retorted.

"Marino, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. Let's relax in the bar for a minute and figure out what to do next about this mess we've gotten ourselves into."

"Only thing I'm doing next is going to my room. And it ain't me who's gotten us into a mess."

I let him step inside the elevator alone and watched his stubborn face disappear behind closing brass doors. I climbed the long, curved flights of carpeted stairs and was reminded how bad smoking was for my health. I unlocked my door and was not prepared for what I saw. Cold fear seized me as I walked over to the fax machine and stared at what the. chief medical examiner of Philadelphia, Dr. Harston, had sent. I sat down on the bed, paralyzed.

The lights of the city were bright, the sign for the Grand Marnier distillery was huge and high, and the Cafe de la Paix was busy below. I collected the paper off the fax machine, my hands shaking, my nerves jumping as if I had some awful disease. I got three Scotches from the minibar and poured all of them at once. I didn't bother to get ice. I didn't care if I felt like hell the next day because I knew I was going to anyway. There was a cover sheet from Dr. Harston.

Kay I was wondering when you'd ask. Knew you would when you were ready. Let me know if you have further questions. I'm here for you.

Vance.

Time numbly passed, as if I were catatonic, as I read the medical examiner's report of initial investigation, the description of Benton's body, what was left of it, in situ, in the gutted building where he died: Phrases floated past my eyes like ashes on the air. Charred body with bum fractures of the wrists and hands absent and skull shows laminar peeling burn fractures and charred down to muscle over the chest and abdomen.

The entrance of the gunshot wound to his head had left a half-inch hole in the skull that showed internal beveling of the bony fracture. It had entered behind the right ear causing radial fractures and impacting and terminating in the right petrous region.

He had a slight diastema between the maxillary centrals. I had always loved that subtle space between his front teeth. It made his smile more endearing because he was so precise in every other way, his teeth otherwise perfect because his perfect, proper New England family had made sure he wore braces .

. . . Suntan pattern of swimming trunks. lie had left for Hilton Head without me because I was called to a scene. If only I'd said no and gone with him. If only I'd refused to work the first in what would prove to be a series of horrendous crimes that would eventually claim him as the final victim.

None of what I was looking at was manufactured. It couldn't be. Only Benton and I knew about the two-inch linear scar on his left knee. He had cut himself on glass in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where we had first made love. That scar had always seemed a stigma of adulterous love. How odd it was spared because soggy insulation from the roof had fallen on it.

That scar had always seemed a reminder of a sin. And now it seemed to turn his death into a punishment that culminated in my envisioning everything the reports described because I had seen it all before, and those images knocked me to the floor, where I sat crying and mumbling his name.

I did not hear the knocking of the door until it turned to pounding.

"Who is it?" I called out in a husky, ruined voice.

"What's wrong with you?" Marino said loudly through the door.

I weakly got up and almost lost my balance as I let him in.

"I been knocking for five minutes . . ." he started to say. "Jesus-fucking-Christ. What the hell's the matter?"

I turned my'back to him and walked over to the window.

"Doc, what is it? What is it?" He sounded frightened. "Did something happen?"

He came over and put his hands on my shoulders, and it was the first time he'd ever done that in all the years I'd known him.

"Tell me. What are all these body diagrams and shit on the bed. Is Lucy okay?"

"Leave me alone," I said.

"Not until you tell me what's wrong!"

"Go away."

He removed his hands and I felt coolness where they had been. I felt our space. He walked across the room. I heard him pick up the faxes. He was silent.

Then he said, "What the shit are you doing? Trying to make yourself crazy? Why the hell do you want to be looking at something like this?" His voice rose as his pain and panic did. "Why? You've lost your mind!"

I wheeled around and lunged for him. I grabbed the faxes. I shook them in his face. Copies of body diagrams, and toxicology and submitted evidence reports, the death certificate, toe tag, dental charts, what had been in his stomach, all of it drifting and scattering over the rug like dead leaves.

"Because you just had to say it," I yelled at him. "You just had to open your big, rude mouth and say he wasn't dead! So now we know, right? Read it your goddamn self, Marino."

I sat down on the bed and wiped my eyes and nose with my hands.

"Just read it and don't ever talk to me about it again," I said. "Don't you ever say anything like'that again. Don't you say he's alive. Don't you ever do that to me again."

The phone rang. He snatched it up.

"What" he blurted out. "Oh, yeah?" he added after a pause. "Well, they're right. We are making a fucking disturbance, and you send fucking security up, I'll just send 'em right back down 'cause I'm a goddamn-fucking cop and I'm in a goddamn-fucking-shitty mood right now!"