minute, and when she’d bend down to set it upright, her other bags would slide off her shoulders. Cold and irritable, she made her way to the modern Bellevue at First Avenue and East 27th, a full-service hospital center with a glass atrium entrance, a garden, a renowned trauma unit and ICU, and a forensic psychiatric floor for male patients whose alleged crimes ranged from jumping a turnstile to murdering John Lennon.
The phone on Benton’s desk rang just minutes after he and Scarpetta were disconnected. He was sure it was her, trying him back.
“What happened?” he said.
“I was about to ask you that.” Jaime Berger’s voice.
“I’m sorry. I thought you were Kay. She’s having some problem—”
“I’d say. Nice of you to mention it when we spoke earlier. Let’s see. That would have been six, seven hours ago? Why didn’t you say something?”
Berger must have read Gotham Gotcha.
“It’s complicated,” Benton said.
“I’m sure it is. We have a number of complications to deal with. I’m two minutes from the hospital. Meet me in the cafeteria.”
Pete Marino’s one-bedroom walk-up in Harlem was close enough to Manna’s Soul Food that he lived and breathed fried chicken and short ribs. It was unfair to a man whose deprivation of food and drink had created an insatiable appetite for everything he couldn’t have.
His makeshift dining area was a TV tray and straight-back chair overlooking the constant traffic on Fifth Avenue. He stacked deli turkey on a slice of whole-wheat bread, which he folded in half and dipped into a puddle of Nathan’s Coney Island mustard on a paper plate. He drank a Sharp’s nonalcoholic beer, about a third of the bottle in two swallows. Since he’d fled from Charleston, he’d lost fifty pounds and certain parts of his personality. Boxes of biker clothes, including an impressive collection of Harley-Davidson leather, went to a bazaar on 116th Sreet, where in exchange he got three suits, one blazer, two pairs of dress shoes, and a variety of shirts and ties, all knockoffs made in China.
He no longer wore his diamond stud, leaving a tiny hole badly located in his right earlobe, which somehow seemed a symbol of his have-not, off-center life. He’d quit shaving his scalp as smooth as a bowling ball, and what gray hair hadn’t abandoned him circled his large head like part of a tarnished silver halo held up by his ears. He’d made a pact to give up women until he was ready, and his motorcycle and pickup truck were pointless when there was no place to park, so he’d given them up, too. His therapist at the treatment center, Nancy, had helped him comprehend the importance of self-control in his day-to-day interactions with other people, no matter what was wrong with them or what they had coming to them.
She said in her descriptive way that alcohol was the lighted match that ignited the bonfire of his anger, and had gone on to explain that his drinking was a fatal disease he’d acquired honestly from his blue-collar, uneducated, and inadequate father who got drunk and violent every payday. In short, Marino had inherited this fatal disease, and based on the brisk business at every bar and liquor store he quickly walked past, it was an epidemic. He decided it had been around since the Garden of Eden, where it wasn’t an apple but a bottle of bourbon that the snake had given to Eve, which she in turn had shared with Adam, and that had led to sex and being thrown out of paradise with nothing but the fig leaves on their backs.
Nancy warned Marino if he didn’t religiously attend AA meetings, he would become a dry drunk, which was an individual who got angry, nasty, compulsive, and out of control without the benefit of a six-pack or two. The nearest gathering place of the AAs, as Marino called them, was a church not far from the Professional African Hair Braiding Center, and therefore quite convenient for him. But he hadn’t become a regular or even an irregular. When he’d first moved here, he’d attended three times in three days, uncomfortable as hell when the participants, suspiciously kind and friendly, had gone around the room, introducing themselves, giving him no choice but to solemnly swear himself in, as if he were on trial.
My name’s Pete and I’m an alcoholic.
Hi, Pete.
He sent Nancy e-mails explaining that it went against the nature and training of a cop to confess to anything, especially in a room packed with strangers, any one of whom might turn out to be a potential dry-drunk shitcan Marino might have to lock up someday. Besides, it had taken only three meetings for him to complete all twelve steps, although he’d decided against making a list of persons he’d harmed and making amends. His reason was step nine, which clearly stated that one shouldn’t make amends if it would only further injure whoever had been harmed, and he decided that was everyone.
Step ten was easier, and he had filled an entire notebook with the names of those who had wronged him throughout his life.
He hadn’t included Scarpetta on either list until a strange coincidence occurred. He found the apartment where he now lived, made a deal with the landlord to lease it at an affordable price in exchange for services, such as handling evictions, only to discover the location was so close to former President Bill Clinton’s office that Marino often walked past the fourteen-story building on his way to the subway station at 125th and Lenox. Thinking of Bill Clinton caused Marino to think of Hillary Clinton, and that caused him to think about women who were powerful enough to be the president or some other world leader. That led to thoughts of Scarpetta.
It had gotten to where he almost confused the two in his fantasies. He would see Hillary on CNN, then see Scarpetta on CNN, and by the time he changed channels in a desperate attempt to divert his attention with ESPN or maybe a pay-per-view movie, he was depressed. His heart would ache like an abscessed tooth. He would obsess about Scarpetta and the lists she wasn’t on. He would jot her name on one list, then scratch through it and jot it on the other. He fantasized about what it would be like if she were president. He would suddenly find himself on the Secret Service’s security threat list and have to escape to Canada.
Maybe Mexico. He’d spent several years in South Florida and could handle Spanish-speaking people better than he could those who spoke French. He’d never understood the French, and didn’t like their food. What did it say about a country that didn’t have a national beer, like Budweiser, Corona, Dos Equis, Heineken, or Red Stripe?
He finished a second turkey roll-up, took another slug of Sharp’s, and watched people whose only ambitions were West Indian take-out, boutiques, juice bars, tailor shops, or maybe the nearby Apollo theater, the noise of cars, trucks, and pedestrians a jarring orchestra that Marino didn’t mind in the least. In warm weather he kept his windows open until he couldn’t stand the dust. What he avoided was silence. He’d had plenty enough of that in rehab, where he wasn’t allowed to listen to music or watch TV, couldn’t fill his head with anything but the confessions of drunks and drug addicts, and his own haunted thoughts and memories of embarrassingly naked talks with Nancy.
He got up from his chair and collected his soggy paper plate, his napkin, his empty Sharp’s bottle. The kitchen was no more than six steps away, with a small window above the sink that afforded him a view of artificial turf-covered concrete and aluminum tables and chairs surrounded by a chain-link fence—what was advertised as the apartment building’s backyard.
On the counter was his computer, and he read the gossip column from this morning that he’d saved on the desktop, determined to discover who was behind it, then find the scumbag and do something that would rearrange his or her body parts permanently.
No investigative tool he knew of worked. He could Google Gotham Gotcha until the cows came home, and nothing that popped up told him a damn thing he didn’t already know. It was useless trying to trace the columnist through the advertising companies that paid to push foods, liquor, books, electronics, movies, and TV shows. There was no pattern, only the validation that millions of fans were addicted to a fucking gossip column that this morning had made the worst episode of Marino’s life its centerpiece.
His phone rang.
It was Detective Mike Morales.
“What’s up,” Marino said.
“Data mining, bro,” Morales said in his slow, lazy way.
“I’m not your bro. Don’t waste your rapper-talk shit on me.”
Morales’s MO was to come across as half asleep and bored, and doped up on sedatives or painkillers, which Marino doubted, but then again, he didn’t know. Behind Morales’s haze was a snobby bastard who had gone to Dartmouth, then Johns Hopkins, where he’d completed medical school and decided he’d rather be one of New York’s finest, a cop, which Marino didn’t take at face value. Nobody who could be a doctor would end up a cop.
