Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 15

"This guy"I indicate Chandonne"isn't into v.a.g.i.n.al penetration and there's no evidence he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es," I remind Berger. "Not in the Paris murders, certainly not in the ones here. The victims are always clothed from the waist down. They have no injuries from the waist down. He doesn't seem remotely interested in them from the waist down, except for their feet. I was under the impression Susan Pless was clothed from the waist down, too."

"She was, had pajama bottoms on. But she had seminal fluidpossibly suggesting consensual s.e.x, at least at first. Certainly not after that, not when you see what he did to her," Berger replies. "The DNA from the seminal fluid matches up with Chandonne. Then we've got the weird long hairs that sure as h.e.l.l look like his." She nods at the television. "And you guys tested brother Thomas, right? And his DNA isn't identical to Jean-Baptiste's, so it doesn't appear Thomas left the seminal fluid."

"Their DNA profiles are very close, but not identical," I agree. "And wouldn't be unless the brothers were identical twins, which clearly they aren't."

"How do you know that for sure?" Marino frowns.

"If Thomas and Jean-Baptiste were identical twins," I explain, "both of them would have congenital hypertrichosis. Not just one of them."

"So how do you explain it?" Berger asks me. "A genetic match in all cases, yet the descriptions of the killers seem to indicate they can't be the same person."

"If the DNA in Susan Pless's case matches Jean-Baptiste Chandonne's DNA, then I can only explain it by concluding that the man who left her apartment at three-thirty in the morning isn't the man who killed her," I reply. "Chandonne killed her. But the man people saw her with isn't Chandonne."

"So maybe Wolfman screws 'em now and then, after all," Marino adds. "Or tries to and we just don't know it because he usually don't leave any juice."

"And then what?" Berger challenges him. "Puts their pants back on? Dresses them from the waist down after the fact?"

"Hey, it ain't like we're talking about somebody who does things the normal way. Oh, almost forgot to tell you." He looks at me. "One of the nurses got a peek at what he's packing. Undipped." Marino's jargon for uncirc.u.mcised. "And smaller than a d.a.m.n Vienna sausage." He shows us by holding his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. "No wonder the squirrel's in such a bad mood all the time."["_Toc37098915"]

CHAPTER 13.

WITH A CLICK OF THE REMOTE CONTROL, 1 AM returned to the cinder block interview room inside the forensic ward of MCV. I am returned to Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, who wants us to believe he is capable of somehow transforming his uniquely hideous appearance into elegant good looks when he is in the mood to dine out and pick up a woman. Impossible. His torso with its swirling coat of immature hair fills the television screen as he is helped back into his chair, and when his head enters the picture I am startled to discover that his bandages have been removed, his eyes now masked by dark plastic Solar s.h.i.+eld gla.s.ses, the flesh around them an irritated raw pink. His eyebrows are long and confluent, as if someone has taken a strip of downy fur and glued it on his brow. The same downy pale hair covers his forehead and temples.

Berger and I sit in my conference room. It is not quite seven-thirty and Marino has left for two reasons: He was paged about a possible identification of the body found dumped on the street in Mosby Court, and Berger encouraged him not to rejoin us. She said she needed to have some private time with me. I think she also was just plain sick of him, not that I blame her. Marino has made it abundantly clear that he is intensely critical of the way she interviewed Chandonne and that she did it in the first place. Part of thisno, all of thisis jealousy. There isn't an investigator on this planet who wouldn't want to interview such a notorious, freakish killer. It just so happens that the beast picked the beauty, and Marino is seething.

As I listen to Berger remind Chandonne on camera that he understands his rights and has agreed to talk to her further, I am gripped more convincingly by a certain reality. I am a small creature caught in a web, an evil web spun of threads that seem to wrap around the entire globe like lines of lat.i.tude and longitude. Chandonne's attempt to murder me was incidental to what he is all about. I was an amus.e.m.e.nt. If he figures I am watching his taped interview, then I am still an amus.e.m.e.nt. Nothing more. It occurs to me that if he had succeeded in ripping me to shreds, he would have already been focused on someone new and I would be nothing but a brief b.l.o.o.d.y moment, a past wet dream in his hateful, h.e.l.lish life.

"And the detective got you something to eat and drink, sir, isn't that right?" Berger is asking Chandonne.

"Yes."

"And what was that?"

"A hamburger and a Pepsi."

"And fries?"

"Mais oui. Fries." He seems to think this is funny.

"So you've been given whatever you need, isn't that right?" she asks him.

"Yes."

"And the hospital staff removed your bandages and gave you special gla.s.ses to wear. You're comfortable?"

"I hurt a little bit."

"Were you given any pain medication?"

"Yes."

"Tylenol. Isn't that right?"

"Yes, I suppose. Two tablets"

"Nothing more than that. Nothing that might interfere with your thinking.

"No, nothing." His black gla.s.ses are fixed on her.

"And n.o.body is forcing you to talk to me or made you any promises, isn't that right?" Her shoulders move as she flips a page in what I a.s.sume is a legal pad, "Yes."

"Sir, have I made any threats or promises to get you to talk to me?"

This goes on and on as Berger runs through her checklist. She is making sure that Chandonne's eventual representation won't have any opportunity to say that Chandonne was intimidated, badgered, abused or treated unfairly in any way. He sits straight in his chair, his arms folded on top of each other in a tangle of hair that splays over the top of the table and hangs in repulsive clumps, like dirty cornsilk, from the short sleeves of his hospital-issue s.h.i.+rt. Nothing about the way his anatomy has been put together computes. He reminds me of old campy movies where silly boys on the beach bury each other in sand and paint eyes on their foreheads and make beards look like head hair or wear sungla.s.ses on the backs of their heads or kneel with shoes on their knees to turn themselves into dwarfspeople turning themselves into freakish caricatures, because they think it is amusing. There is nothing amusing about Chandonne. I can't even find him pitiful. My anger stirs like a great shark deep beneath the surface of my stoical demeanor.

"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 gla.s.ses. 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 s.h.i.+rt and tie." Hate. Chandonne's true nature has begun to s.h.i.+ne 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 gla.s.ses 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 h.e.l.l did he know what the d.a.m.n 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.["_Toc37098916"]

CHAPTER 14.

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 s.e.xually, he says, because it reminds him of a pregnant belly, of b.u.t.tocks, of b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 Inst.i.tut 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, 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.

For the next ten minutes I watch Chandonne suck down more Pepsi as he smokes and tells the incredible account of his alleged visit with Susan Pless in her apartment. He describes where she lived in amazing detail, from the rugs on the hardwood floor to the floral upholstered furniture to the faux Tiffany lamps. He says he was not impressed with her taste in art, that she had a lot of rather pedestrian museum exhibit posters and some prints of seascapes and horses. She liked horses, he said. She told him she grew up with horses and missed them terribly. Berger taps the table inside my conference room whenever she verifies what he is saying. Yes, his description of the inside of Susan's apartment certainly leads one to believe he was there at some point. Yes, Susan did grow up with horses. Yes, yes, to everything.

"Jesus." I shake my head as fear coils tightly in my gut. I am afraid of where this is going. I resist thinking about it. But a part of me can't stop thinking about it. Chandonne is going to say that I invited him into my house.

"And it's what time now?" Berger asks him on the tape. "You said Susan opened a bottle of white wine. What time was it when she did that?"

"Maybe ten or eleven. I don't remember. It was not good wine."

"How much had you had to drink at this point?"

"Oh, maybe half a bottle of wine at the restaurant. I didn't drink much of the wine she poured for me later. Cheap California wine."

"Then you weren't drunk."

"I am never drunk."

"You were thinking clearly."

"Of course."

"In your opinion, was Susan drunk?"

"Only maybe a little. I would say happy, she was happy. So we sat on the sofa in her living room. It has a very nice view, a southwest view. From the living room you can see the red sign for the Ess.e.x House hotel on the park."

"All true," Berger says to me as she taps the table again.

"And her blood alcohol was point-one-one. She'd had a few," she adds details from Susan Pless's postmortem examination.

"Then what happened?" she is asking Chandonne.

"We hold hands. She puts my fingers in her mouth, one after the other, very s.e.xy. We started kissing."

"Do you know what time it was at this point?"

"I had no reason to be looking at my watch."

"You were wearing a watch?"