Blow Fly (33 page)

“You say that to explain yourself,” Lucy comments with no trace of rancor. “You were the most powerful medical examiner in the country, perhaps in the world. You were the Chief. Maybe it was unbearable, that power and admiration.”

Lucy's beautiful face is not quite as sad now.

“So much has seemed unbearable,” Scarpetta replies. “So much. But no. I didn't find my power unbearable when I was the Chief. I have found losing my power unbearable. You and I feel differently about power. I am not proving anything. You are always proving something when it is so unnecessary.”

“You haven't lost it,” Lucy tells her. “Your removal from power was an illusion. Politics. Your true power has never been imposed by the outside world, and it follows that the outside world can't take it away from you.”

“What has Benton done to us?”

Her question startles Lucy, as if Scarpetta somehow knows the truth.

“Since he died . . . I still can scarcely bring myself to say that word.
Died.”
She pauses. “Since then it seems the rest of us have gone to ruin. Like a country under seige. One city falling after another. You, Marino, me. Mostly you.”

“Yes, I am a Fury.” Lucy gets up, moves to the window and sits cross-legged on Jaime Berger's splendid antique rug. “I am the avenger. I admit it. I feel the world is safer, that you are safer, all of us are safer with Rocco dead.”

“But you can't play God. You're not even a sworn law-enforcement officer anymore, Lucy. The Last Precinct is private.”

“Not exactly. We are a satellite of international law enforcement, work with them, usually behind the curtain of Interpol. We are empowered by other high authorities I can't talk to you about.”

“A high authority that empowered you to legally rid the world of Rocco Caggiano?” Scarpetta asks. “Did you pull the trigger, Lucy? I need to know that. At least that.”

Lucy shakes her head. No, she didn't pull the trigger. Only because
Rudy insisted on firing that round and having gunpowder and tiny drops of Rocco's blood blow back on his hands, not hers. Rocco's blood on Rudy's hands. That wasn't fair, Lucy tells her aunt.

“I shouldn't have allowed Rudy to put himself through that. I take equal responsibility for Rocco's death. Actually, I take full responsibility, because it was by my instigation that Rudy went on the mission to Poland.”

They talk until late, and when Lucy has relayed all that happened in Szczecin, she awaits her aunt's condemnation. The worst punishment would be exile from Scarpetta's life, just as Benton has been exiled from it.

“I'm relieved that Rocco's dead,” Scarpetta says. “What's done is done,” she adds. “At some point, Marino will want to know what really happened to his son.”

D
R. LANIER SOUNDS AS IF
he is on the mend, but he is as taut as a cocked catapult.

“You got a safe place for me to stay down there?” Scarpetta asks him over the phone inside her single room at the Melrose Hotel at 63rd and Lexington.

She opted not to spend the night with Lucy, resisting her niece's persistent urging. Staying with her would make it impossible for Scarpetta to leave for the airport in the morning without Lucy's knowing.

“The safest place in Louisiana. My guest house. It's small. Why? Now you know I can't afford consultants . . . .”

“Listen,” she cuts him off. “I've got to go to Houston first.” She avoids being specific. “I can't get down your way for at least another day.”

“I'll pick you up. Just tell me when.”

“If you could arrange a rental car for me, that's what would work best. I have no idea about anything right now. I'm too tired. But I'd rather take care of myself and not inconvenience you. I just need directions to your house.”

She writes them down. They seem simple enough.

“Any particular kind of car?”

“A safe one.”

“I know all about that,” the coroner replies. “I've peeled enough people out of unsafe cars. I'll get my secretary on it first thing.”

T
RIXIE LEANS AGAINST THE COUNTER
, smoking a menthol cigarette and glumly watching Marino pack a large ice chest with beer, luncheon meats, bottles of mustard and mayonnaise, and whatever his huge hands grab out of the refrigerator.

“It's way past midnight,” Trixie complains, fumbling for a bottle of Corona in a longneck bottle that she clogged by stuffing in too large a slice of lime. “Come on to bed and then you can leave, can't you? Don't that make more sense than zooming out of here, half-lit and all upset, in the middle of the night?”

Marino has been drunk since he returned from Boston, sitting in front of the TV, refusing to answer the phone, refusing to talk to anyone, not even to Lucy or Scarpetta. About an hour ago, he was kicked hard by a message on his cell phone from Lucy's office. That sobered him enough to pry him out of his reclining chair.

Trixie holds the bottle straight up and tries to push the lime away with her tongue. She succeeds, and beer gushes into her mouth and over her chin. Not so long ago, Marino would have found this hilarious. Now nothing will make him smile. He jerks open the freezer door, pulling out the container of ice cubes and dumping them into the chest. Trixie, whose
real name is Teresa, is thirty years old and not even a year ago moved into Marino's small house in its blue-collar neighborhood, right off Midlothian Turnpike on the wrong side of the James River in Richmond.

He lights a cigarette and looks at her, at her face, puffy from booze, the mascara so chronically smeared under her eyes that it looks tattooed on. Her platinum hair has been scalded by so many treatments that Marino hates to touch it, told her once while he was drunk that it felt like insulation. Some of her hurt feelings are permanently crippled, and when Marino catches a glimpse of them hobbling out of her eyes or mouth, he leaves the room, either with his thoughts or his feet.

“Please don't go.” Trixie sucks hard on a cigarette and shoots the smoke out of the side of her mouth, barely inhaling. “I know what you're doing. You ain't coming back, that's what. I saw what you've been packing in your truck. Guns, your bowling ball, even your trophies and fishing poles. Not to mention your usual clothes, nothing nice like those suits that have been hanging in the closet since Jesus wrote the Ten Commandments.”

She steps in front of him and grabs his arm as he rearranges ice in the chest, smoke making him squint.

“I'll call ya. I've got to get to Louisiana, and you know it. The Doc's down there, or is about to be down there. I know her. I know damn well what she's gonna do. She don't have to tell me. You don't want her dead, Trixie.”

“I'm so fucking tired of the
Doc this
and the
Doc that
!
”
Her face darkens, and she shoves Marino's hand away, as if touching had been his idea, not hers. “Ever since I've known you, it's been the
Doc this
and the
Doc that.
She's the only woman in your life, if you're honest about it. I'm just the second-draft choice in your basketball game of life.”

Marino winces. He can't stand Trixie's colorful near-miss expressions, which remind him of a piano out of tune.

“I'm just the girl who sits out the dance in the prom that is your life,” she continues the drama, and by now that's all it is.

A drama. Like a bad soap opera.

Their fights are by rote, for the most part, and although Marino has a special aversion to psychology, not even he can avoid an insight as big as a mountain. He and Trixie fight about everything because they fight about nothing.

Her fat bare feet with their chipped red-painted nails pat across the kitchen as she paces, wildly waving her plump arms, cigarette ashes snowing down on the stained linoleum floor. “Well, you just go on to Louisiana and get with the
Doc this and that,
and by the time you come back—if you ever do—maybe someone else will be living in this dump of yours and I'll be gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.”

Half an hour ago, Marino asked her to put his house on the market. She can live in it until it sells.

Her flower-printed acetate robe flutters around her feet as she paces, her breasts sagging over the sash she keeps tightening around her thick waist. Marino feels pangs of anger and guilt. When Trixie nags him about Scarpetta, he flies out of control like a pissed-off bird out of a knothole, with no place to go, no way to defend himself, no way to counterattack, not really.

His wounded ego can't be assuaged by implying indiscretions with Scarpetta that unfortunately have never occurred. So the arrows of the jealous Trixies in his life find their spot and draw their blood. Marino isn't bothered that he's lost every woman he's ever had. He's bothered by the one he never got, and Trixie's tantrum is mounting dangerously close to the necessary crescendo that will bring about the necessary coda.

“You're so crazy for her it's disgusting,” Trixie yells. “You're nothing but a big redneck to her. That's all you'll ever be. A big, fat, stupid redneck!” she shrieks. “And I don't care if she ends up dead!
Dead
is all she knows anyhow!”

Marino picks up the ice chest as if it weighs nothing and walks through his shabby, cluttered living room and stops at the front door. He looks around at the thirty-six-inch color TV—not a new one, but a Sony and plenty nice. He stares sadly at his favorite reclining chair, where it
seems he has spent most of his life, and he feels an ache so deep it's a cramp in his bowels. He imagines how many hours he has spent half-drunk, watching football and wasting his time and efforts on the likes of Trixie.

She's not a bad woman. She's not evil. None of them have been. They're simply pitiful, and he is even more pitiful than any of them because he has never insisted on more for himself, and he could have.

“I won't be calling you after all,” Marino tells her. “I don't even give a rat's ass what happens to the house. Sell it. Rent it. Live in it.”

“You don't mean that, baby.” Trixie begins to cry. “I love you.”

“You don't know me,” Marino says from the door, and he feels too tired to leave and too depressed to stay.

“ 'Course I do, baby.” She crushes out a cigarette in the sink and rummages in the refrigerator for another beer. “And you're going to miss me.” Her face twists as she smiles, crying at the same time. “And you'll get your ass back here. I was just mad when I said you wouldn't. You will.” She pops off the bottle cap. “One reason I know you'll be back is, what?” She points coyly at him. “Can you guess what Detective Trixie noticed, huh? You're leaving without your Christmas decorations.

“All those millions of plastic Santas, reindeer, snowmen, jalapeno pepper lights and the rest of what you been collecting for a century? And you're gonna drive off and just leave 'em in the basement? Naw-uh. No way, naw-uh.”

She talks herself into believing she's right. Marino wouldn't leave for good and not pack up his beloved Christmas decorations.

“Rocco's dead,” he says.

“Who?” Trixie's face goes blank.

“See, that's what I mean. You don't know me,” he says. “It's all right. It ain't your fault.”

He shuts the door on her, shuts the door on Richmond for good.