She was stroking Lucy’s arm.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I remember being in the shower. Then I was on the floor and my head felt as if someone hit me with an anvil. Like I got hit with a car in the back of my head. For a minute I was blind. I thought I was permanently blind, and suddenly I saw light, and images. I heard him downstairs, and I couldn’t walk. I was dizzy, so I crawled over to the chair, kind of slid myself over the wood to where my coat was and got the gun out of it. And I started to see again.”
The bloody Glock was on the bloody floor near the railing of the gallery, and Scarpetta remembered it was one Marino had given to Lucy for Christmas. It was Lucy’s favorite gun. She’d said it was the nicest thing he’d ever given to her, a pocket-size forty-caliber pistol with a laser sight and boxes of high-velocity hollowpoints to go with it. He knew what she liked. He was the one who’d taught her to shoot when she was a child, when the two of them would disappear in his pickup truck, and later Lucy’s mother—Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy—would call and curse, usually after several drinks, and scream at Scarpetta for ruining Lucy, threatening to never let Lucy see her again.
Dorothy probably never would have allowed Lucy to visit were it not for the minor problem that she didn’t want a child, because Dorothy was a child who would always want a daddy to take care of her, to dote on her, to adore her the way their father had doted and depended on Scarpetta.
She pushed Lucy’s forehead with one hand and held the cloth against the back of her head with the other, and her hands felt hot and swollen now, her pulse pounding in them. The bleeding had slowed considerably, but she resisted looking. She continued the pressure.
“Looks like a thirty-eight,” Lucy said, shutting her eyes again.
She must have noticed the bullet when Scarpetta had handed it to Berger.
“I want you to keep your eyes open and stay awake,” Scarpetta said. “You’re fine, but let’s just stay awake. I think I hear something. I think the rescue squad’s here. We’re going to the ER and we’ll do all those fun tests you like so much. X-rays. MRI. Tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I hurt like shit. I’m okay. Did you see his gun? I’m wondering what it was. I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t remember him.”
Scarpetta heard the door open downstairs, and the clatter and confusion of tense voices as the squad came in, and Marino hurried them up the stairs, all of them talking loudly. He stepped out of the way, looking at Lucy in her bloody bath sheets, then at the Glock on the floor, and he leaned over and picked it up. He did the one thing you never do at a crime scene. He held it in his bare hands and walked off with it, disappeared into the bathroom with it.
Two paramedics were talking to Lucy and asking her questions, and she was answering as they buckled her into the stretcher, and Scarpetta was so busy with that, she didn’t notice Marino had somehow ended up back downstairs, and was there with three uniformed officers. Other EMTs were lifting Morales’s body onto yet another stretcher, nobody bothering with CPR because he had been dead for a while.
Marino was dropping the magazine out of the Glock—Lucy’s Glock—it seemed, and clearing the chamber while an officer held a paper bag open. Marino was telling them about Berger remotely unlocking the apartment door and letting him in without Morales knowing. Marino was making up a story about him creeping as close as he could, then deliberately making a sound so Morales would look up.
“Giving me just enough chance to get off a round before he shot someone,” Marino lied to the cops. “He was behind the Doc with his revolver pointed at her.”
Berger was with them, and she said, “We were right here on the couch.”
“A hammerless thirty-eight,” Marino said.
He was pointing all this out, taking the blame, not the credit, for killing someone, and Berger was going along with it flawlessly. It seemed her new role in life was keeping Lucy out of trouble.
Legally, Lucy absolutely couldn’t have a handgun in New York City, not even inside a residence, not even for self-defense. Legally, the handgun still belonged to Marino because he’d never gotten around to the paperwork, to transferring his gift over to Lucy’s ownership, because so much had gone on after that Christmas a year ago in Charleston. Nobody had been happy with one another, and then Rose wasn’t herself and no one knew why for a while, and Scarpetta wasn’t capable of fixing their world as it seemed to fly apart, like an old golf ball that’s lost its skin. It had been the beginning of what she’d decided, not all that long ago, was the end of them.
Her bloody hand held Lucy’s bloody hand as the paramedics clattered the stretcher toward the elevator, one of them talking on the radio to the ambulance in front of the building. The doors opened and Benton was stepping out in his pinstripe suit, looking just like he did on CNN when she’d watched him on her BlackBerry as she’d walked to Berger’s apartment.
He took Lucy’s other hand and looked into Scarpetta’s eyes, and the sadness and relief on his face was as deep as anything could possibly be.
JANUARY 13
Scarpetta’s well-known name was not what got her a table at Elaine’s, where it wasn’t possible for anyone to be important enough to earn indulgences or sovereign immunity if the legendary restaurateur didn’t like the person.
When Elaine took up residence every night at one of her tables, an expectation drifted up like cigarette smoke from an earlier day when art was adored, criticized, redefined—anything but ignored—and anybody in any condition might walk through the door. Contained within these walls were echoes of a past that Scarpetta mourned but didn’t miss, having first set foot in here decades earlier, on a weekend getaway with a man she’d fallen in love with at Georgetown Law.
He was gone, and she had Benton, and the decor at Elaine’s hadn’t changed: black except for the red-tile floor, and there were hooks for hanging coats, and pay phones that as far as Scarpetta knew weren’t used anymore. Shelves displayed autographed books that patrons knew not to touch, and photographs of the literati and film stars filled every spare inch of wall all the way to the ceiling.
Scarpetta and Benton paused at Elaine’s table to say hello—a kiss on each cheek, and I haven’t seen you in a while, where have you been? Scarpetta learned she had just missed a former Secretary of State, and last week it was a former Giants quarterback she didn’t like, and tonight, a talk show host she liked even less. Elaine said she had other guests coming, but that wasn’t news, because the grande dame knew everybody expected in her salon on any given night.
Scarpetta’s favorite waiter, Louie, found just the right table.
He said to her as he pulled out her chair, “I shouldn’t bring it up, but I’ve heard everything that’s gone on.” Shaking his head. “I shouldn’t say it—to you of all people. Gambino, Bonanno? It was better back then. You know? They did what they did, but they had their reasons, know what I mean? They didn’t go around whacking people for the hell of it. Especially doing some poor lady like that. A dwarf. And that elderly widow. Then the other woman and the kid. What chance did they have?”
“They didn’t,” Benton said.
“Me? I believe in cement shoes. There’s special situations. You don’t mind me asking, how’s the little . . . you know, the other dwarf doing? I feel like I shouldn’t use that word because a lot of people say it in the pejorative.”
Oscar had contacted the FBI and was fine. A GPS microchip had been removed from his left buttock, and he was taking a rest, as Benton put it, at the private and posh psychiatric unit at McLean called the Pavilion. He was getting therapy and, most of all, was being given the gift of feeling safe until he could sort himself out. Scarpetta and Benton would head back to Belmont in the morning.
“He’s doing okay,” Benton said. “I’ll tell him you asked.”
Louie said, “What can I bring you? Drinks? Calamari?”
“Kay?” Benton said.
“Scotch. Your best single-malt.”
“Make that two.”
Louie said with a wink, “For you? My special stash. A couple new ones for you to try. Anybody driving?”
