“Real gold?”
“Like I said, I’ve only seen photographs, but on the report it says ten-karat. Must be stamped on the clasp. Don’t know how else you’d know.”
“Hon, I can tell just by looking at it. I can tell you anything you want to know about jewelry. Real, fake, good, bad, expensive, cheap. I used to work property crimes. Plus, I like stuff I can’t afford and would rather have nothing than crap. You know what I mean?”
Marino was aware of his cheap knockoff Italian designer suit, made in China. He felt sure if he got rained on, he’d leave a trail of black dye-stained water, like a squid. He struggled out of the jacket and tossed it over the back of a chair. He yanked off his tie and couldn’t wait to put on jeans, a sweater, and that old fleece-lined leather Harley jacket he’d had forever and had refused to hand over at the bazaar.
“Can you e-mail me a picture of the ankle bracelet Terri Bridges had on?” Bacardi asked him.
Her voice was melodic and happy, and she seemed interested in what she did and interested in him. Talking to her was waking him up in a way he hadn’t felt in a very long while. Maybe it was because he’d forgotten how nice it was to be treated like an equal, or, more important, with the respect he deserved. What had changed in the last few years to make him feel so bad about himself?
Charleston had been an accident waiting to happen, and that was the fact of the matter. It wasn’t about a so-called disease one poured out of a bottle. When he’d come to that realization, he and his therapist Nancy got into their biggest disagreement, an ugly argument. This was right before he’d finished his treatment program. She’d started it by saying that everything dysfunctional in his life was rooted in his alcoholism, and as drunks and junkies got older, they became exaggerated versions of themselves.
She’d even drawn a chart for him when they were alone in the chapel that sunny June afternoon, and all the windows were open, and he could smell the sea air and hear the gulls screaming as they swooped over the rocky coastline on the North Shore, where he ought to have been fishing or riding a motorcycle, or better yet, sitting with his feet propped up, drinking booze instead of blaming his life on it. Nancy had shown him in black and white how after he and beer had become “best friends” when he was twelve, his life had begun a slow deterioration peppered with traumas that she inked heavily and labeled:
Fighting
Poor Perf. in School
Isolation
Sexually Promix.
FX relationships
Risk/boxing/guns/police/motorcy.
Nancy had charted his fuckups for the better part of an hour, using abbreviations that required deciphering. What she basically demonstrated to him was that ever since his first beer, he’d been on an angry, dangerous path of aggression, sexual promiscuity, fractured friendships, divorce, and violence, and the older he got, the closer together his traumas were spaced, because that was the nature of the Disease. The Disease took you over, and as you got older, you physically couldn’t resist its having its way with you, or something like that.
Then she had signed and dated his chart, and even drew a smiley face under her name, and handed the damn thing to him, all five pages, and he said, What do you want me to do? Tape it on my fucking refrigerator?
He’d gotten up from the pew and walked over to the window, and looked out at the ocean crashing against black granite, and spray shooting up and gulls screaming as if whales and birds were gathering and rioting right in front of him, trying to break him out of the joint.
Do you see what you just did?Nancy said to his back, from her pew, while he looked out at the most beautiful day he’d ever seen, wondering why he wasn’t outside in the middle of it. You just pushed me away, Pete. That’s the alcohol talking.
The hell it is,he replied. I haven’t had a fucking drink in a fucking month. That was me talking.
Now as he talked to a woman he’d never met who had a name that made him happy, he realized he hadn’t been doing all that badly, really, until he’d stopped being a real cop. When he’d finally left Richmond PD, and had gone to work as a private investigator for Lucy, and then as a death investigator for Scarpetta, he’d lost enforcement powers and all self-respect. He couldn’t arrest anybody. He couldn’t even have some asshole’s car ticketed or towed. All he could do was muscle his way into situations and issue empty threats. He might as well have had his dick cut off. So what did he do last May? He had to show Scarpetta he still had a dick, because what he was really doing was proving it to himself and trying to take his life back. He wasn’t saying what he’d done was right or should be excused. He’d never said that, and he sure as hell didn’t think it.
“I’ll get you whatever you need,” he said to Bacardi.
“That’d be great.”
He took perverse pleasure in imagining Morales’s reaction. Marino was talking to the Baltimore homicide investigator, doing whatever he wanted.
Fuck Morales.
Marino was a sworn NYPD cop. More than that, he worked for the elite DA squad, and Morales didn’t. What made that poor man’s Puff Daddy in charge? Just because he was on duty last night and responded to the scene?
Marino said to Bacardi, “You sitting in front of your computer?”
“Home alone, Happy New Year. Fire away. You watch the ball drop in the Big Apple? Me? I ate popcorn and watched The Little Rascals. Don’t laugh. I got the complete set of originals.”
“When I was a kid, you could name something Buckwheat and not have Al Sharpton up your ass. I had a cat named Buckwheat. Guess what. She was white.”
He opened a big envelope and pulled out his copies of the police and autopsy reports, and then opened the envelope of photographs, which he pushed around on the Formica countertop, covering a couple of cigarette burns and pot rings, until he found what he wanted. Cordless phone tucked under his chin, he inserted a photograph into the scanner attached to his laptop.
“You should know there’s some political bullshit here,” he said.
“You only got some?”
“Point being, just you and me need to be talking about this right now, and nobody else involved. So if anybody besides me gets in touch—I don’t care if it’s the NYPD police commissioner—I’d appreciate it if you’d not mention me, but let me know. And I’ll handle it. Not everybody in the mix is—”
“You’re telling me the grass is green and the sky is blue. No worries, Pete.”
It felt good to hear her call him Pete. He went into his e-mail to attach the scanned photograph as an image.
“I get any calls,” she said, “I’ll let you know first and foremost. I’d appreciate the reciprocation. There are a lot of people running around who’d love the credit for solving my lady here in Baltimore and the kid in Greenwich. Did I mention how weird people are about getting credit? See, my theory? That’s what led up to the mortgage crisis. Everybody wants credit. I’m not being a comedian.”
“Especially if Morales calls,” Marino added. “I’m surprised he hasn’t. But then, he doesn’t seem to be a follow-up kind of guy.”
“Yup. What I call fuck and run. Shows up for the big moment, then disappears, lets everybody else clean up after him or finish what he started. Sort of like a deadbeat dad.”
“You got kids?”
“Not in the house anymore, happy to report. They turned out pretty good, considering. I’m looking at the picture now. And nobody seems to know why the victim there, Terri Bridges, was wearing the bracelet?”
“That’s the story. Her boyfriend, Oscar, said he’d never seen it before.”
“A bracelet’s not rocket science, but I’m not one of those who ignores circumstantial evidence,” she said. “I guess you can tell I’m over forty and superstitious about putting my entire case in a lab coat pocket. All the young ones? Shit. It’s Forensic Let’s Make a Deal. Behind door number one is a videotape of someone raping and murdering a woman he’s kidnapped. Behind door number two is DNA from a cigarette butt found at the driveway. Which do they choose?”
“Don’t get me started.”
“Yeah, you and me together. I tell them, you know what CSI stands for? It stands for Can’t Stand It. Because when I hear that term or acronym or whatever the hell it is, I think to myself, I can’t stand it. I really can’t
