Blow Fly

18

MARINO SMOOTHS OPEN his letter from Jean-Baptiste and begins to read: " 'Bonjour, mon cher ami, Pete…' "

He interrupts himself and looks up, scowling. "Can you believe he calls me Pete? Now that really pisses me off."

"More than being called mon cher ami?" Benton asks dryly.

"I don't like dirtbags calling me by my first name. It's just one of my things."

"Please read," Benton says with a touch of impatience, "and I hope there is nothing more in French for you to mangle. What's the date of this letter?"

"Not even a week ago. I arranged things to get here as quick as I could. To see you… oh, for shit's sake, I'm gonna call you Benton."

"Actually, you're not. Please read."

Marino lights another cigarette, inhales deeply and continues:

Just a note to tell you I am growing my hair. Why? But of course it is because they have given me my date to die. It is May seventh at ten p.m. Not a minute later, so I hope you will be there as my special guest. Before then, mon ami, I have business to conclude, so I make you an offer you can't refuse (as they say in the movies).

You will never catch them without me, Jean-Baptiste. It would be like catching a thousand fish without a very big net. I am the net. There are two conditions. They are simple.

I will admit nothing except to Madame Scarpetta, who has asked my permission to see her and tell her what I know.

No one else can be present.

I have yet another condition that she does not know. She must be the doctor who administers my lethal cocktail, as they say. Madame Scarpetta must kill me. I fully trust if she agrees, she will not break her promise to me. You see how well I know her.

A bientфt,

Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

"And the letter to her?" Benton abruptly asks, unwilling to say Scarpetta's name.

"The same thing. More or less." Marino does not want to read it to him.

"You have it in your hand. Read it."

Marino taps an ash into the water glass, squinting an eye as he blows out smoke. "I'll give you the upshot."

"Don't protect me, Pete," Benton softly says.

"Sure. If you want to hear it, I'll read it. But I don't think it's necessary, and maybe you ought…"

"Please read it." Now Benton sounds weary. His eyes are not as intense, and he leans back in the chair.

Marino clears his throat as he unfolds another plain white sheet of paper. He begins:

Mon chйri amour, Kay…

He glances up at Benton's expressionless face. The color has drained from it, his complexion sallow beneath his tan.

My heart is in great pain because you have not made an appointment to come to see me yet. I do not understand. Of course, you feel as I do. I am your thief in the night, the great lover who came to steal you away, yet you refused. You shunned me and wounded me. Now you must be empty, so bored, languishing for me, Madame Scarpetta.

As for me? I am not bored. You are here with me in my cell, without a will, completely under my spell. You must know it. You must feel it. Let me see, can I count? Is it four, five or fifteen times a day I rip open those very nice suits you wear-the haute couture of Madame Scarpetta, the doctor, the lawyer, the Chief. I tear off everything with my bare hands and bite into those big tits while you shiver and die with delight…

"Is there a point to this?" Benton's voice snaps like a pistol slide racking back. "I'm not interested in his pornographic drivel. What does he want?"

Marino looks hard at him, pauses, then turns over the letter. Sweat beads on his balding head and rolls down his temples. He reads what is on the back of the plain white sheet of paper:

I must see you! You cannot escape unless you do not care if more innocent people die. Not that anyone is innocent. I will tell you all that is necessary. But I must look at you in the flesh as I speak the truth. And then you will kill me.

Marino stops reading. "More shit you don't need to hear…"

"And she knows nothing about this?"

"Well," Marino equivocates, "not really. Like I said, I didn't show it to her. All I told her is I got a letter and Wolfman wants to see her and will exchange information for her visit. And he wants her to be the one who gives him the needle."

"Typically, penitentiaries use free-world doctors, regular physicians from the outside to administer the lethal cocktail," Benton oddly commerits, as if what Marino just said has no impact on him. "Did you use ninhydrin on the letters?" Now he changes the subject. "Obviously I can't tell, since these are photocopies."

The chemical ninhydrin would have reacted to the amino acid in fingerprints, turning portions of the original letters a deep violet.

"Didn't want to damage them," Marino replies.

"What about an alternate light source? Something nondestructive, such as a crime scope?"

When Marino doesn't respond, Benton pierces him with the obvious point.

"You did nothing to prove these letters are from Jean-Baptiste Chan-donne? You just assume? Jesus." Benton rubs his face with his hands. "Jesus Christ. You come here-here-take a risk like that and don't even know for a fact that these letters came from him? And let me guess. You didn't have the backs of the stamps and envelope flaps swabbed for DNA, either. What about postmarks? What about return addresses?"

"There's no return address-not for him, I mean-and no postmark that might tell us where he sent it from," Marino admits, and he is sweating profusely now.

Benton leans forward. "What? He hand-delivered the letters? The return address isn't his? What the hell are you talking about? How could he mail something to you and there's no postmark?"

Marino unfolds another piece of paper and hands it to him. The photocopy is of an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch white envelope, preprinted, U.S. postage paid for the nonprofit organization the National Academy of Justice.

"Well, I guess we've both seen this before," Benton says, looking at the photocopy, "since we've been members of the NAJ for most of our lives. Or at least I used to be. Sorry to say, but I'm not on their mailing list anymore." He pauses, noting that First-class mail has been x-ed through just below the preprinted postage-paid stamp.

"For once, I'm blanking out on any possible explanation," he says.

"This is what came in the mail to me," Marino explains. "The NAJ envelope, and when I opened it, the two letters were inside. One to me, one to the Doc. Sealed, marked Legal Mail, I guess in case someone at the prison was curious about the NAJ envelope and decided to tear into it. Only other thing written on the envelopes was our names."

Both men are silent for a moment. Marino smokes and drinks beer.

"Well, I do have a possibility, the only thing I can think of," Marino then says. "I checked with the NAJ, and from the warden on down, there are fifty-six officers who are members. It wouldn't be unusual to see one of these envelopes lying around somewhere."

Benton is shaking his head. "But your address is printed, machine-printed. How could Chandonne manage to do that?"

"How the hell do you stand this joint? Don't you even got air-conditioning? And we did swab the envelopes the letters came in, but it's that self-stick adhesive. So he didn't have to lick nothing."

This is evasion and Marino knows it. Sloughed-off skin cells can adhere to self-sticking adhesives. He doesn't want to answer Benton's question.

"How did Chandonne pull off sending you letters inside an envelope like this?" Benton shakes the photocopy at Marino. "And don't you find it just a little odd that first-class mail is x-ed out? Why might that be?"

"I guess we'll just have to get Wolfman to explain," Marino rudely replies. "I got no fucking idea."

"Yet you seem to know for a fact that the letters are from Jean-Baptiste." Benton measures each word. "Pete. You're better than this."

Marino wipes his forehead on his sleeve. "Look, so the fact is, we don't got scientific evidence to prove nothing. But it's not because we didn't take a shot at it. We did use the Luma-Lite, and we did try for DNA, and everything's whistle-clean as of this moment."

"Mitochondrial DNA? You trying for that?"

"Why bother? It would take months, and by then he'll be dead. And there's no way in hell we're going to get a goddamn thing anyway. For crying out loud, don't you think the asshole gets off on somehow using a National Academy of Justice envelope? How's that for a fuck-you? Don't you think he gets off on making us do all these tests when he knows we'll come up with zip? All he had to do was cover his hands with toilet paper or whatever when he touched anything."

"Maybe," Benton says.

Marino is about to erupt. He is exasperated beyond his limit.

"Easy, Pete," Benton says. "You would think less of me if I didn't ask."

Marino stares off without blinking.

"My opinion?" Benton goes on. "He wrote the letters and was deliberate about not leaving evidence. I don't know how he managed to use a National Academy of Justice envelope, and yes, that is a huge fuck-you. Frankly, I'm surprised you haven't heard from him before now. The letters sound authentic. They do not have the off-key ring of a crank. We know Jean-Baptiste has a breast fetish." He says this clinically. "We know it is very likely he has information that could destroy his criminal family and the cartel. It fits with his insatiable need to dominate and control that he presents the conditions he has."

"And what about him saying the Doc wants to see him?"

"You tell me."

"She never wrote him. I asked her point-blank. Why the hell would she write that piece of shit? I told her about the National Academy of Justice envelopes, that the letter to her and me came in one. I showed her a photocopy…"

"Of what?" Benton interrupts.

"A photocopy of the National Academy of Justice envelope." Marino is getting exasperated. "The one her and my letters from Wolfman came in. I told her if she gets one of these goddamn National Academy of Justice letters herself, not to open it, not to even touch it. Do you really believe he wants her to be his executioner?"

"If he intends to die…"

"Intends?" Marino interrupts him. "I don't believe ol' Wolfмe Boy's got much to say about that."

"A lot can happen between now and then, Pete. Remember who his connections are. I wouldn't be too sure of anything. And by the way, when Lucy got her letter, was it also sent in a postage-paid National Academy of Justice envelope?"

Yup.

"The fantasy of a woman doctor administering the lethal injection and watching him die would be erotic to him," Benton muses.

"Not just any doctor. We're talking about Scarpetta!"

"He victimizes to the end, dominates and controls another human being to the end, forces a person to commit an act that will scar forever." Benton pauses before he adds, "You kill someone, you never forget him, now do you? We have to take the letters seriously. I do believe they are from him-fingerprints, DNA or not."

"Yeah, well I believe they're from him, too, and that he means what he says, and that's why I'm here, if you ain't figured it out yet. If we can get Wolfman to sing, we move in on all his daddy's lieutenants and put the Chandonne cartel out of business. And you got nothing to worry about anymore."

"Who is we?"

"I wish you'd quit saying that!" Marino gets up to help himself to another beer. Anger and frustration flare again. "Don't you get it?" he calls out, rummaging inside the refrigerator. "After May seventh, after we got the goods and Wolfman's dead, there ain't no reason for you to be Tom what's-his-name anymore!"

"Who is we?"

Marino snorts like a bull as he pops open a bottle of Dos Equis this time. " We is me. We is Lucy."

"Does Lucy know you came to see me today?"

"No. I didn't tell no one and won't."

"Good." Benton doesn't move in his chair.

"Wolfman gives us pawns to knock off the board," Marino plans on without him. "Maybe he's already given us our first pawn by ratting out Rocco. I can only figure that somebody must have ratted him out if he's suddenly a fugitive."

"I see. How honorable of Chandonne, if your son is his first pawn. Will you visit Rocco in prison, Pete?"

Marino suddenly smashes the beer bottle in the sink. Glass shatters. He strides over to Benton and gets in his face.

"Shut up about him, you hear me? I hope he gets fucking AIDS in prison and dies! All the suffering he's caused! Now it should be his goddamn turn!"

"Whose suffering?" Benton doesn't flinch at Marino's hot, beery breath. "Your suffering?"

"Start with his mother's suffering. And keep on going." Marino still has a hard time thinking about Doris, his ex-wife and Rocco's mother.

She was Marino's sweetheart when he was in his prime. He still thought of her as his sweetheart long after he stopped paying attention to her. He was stunned when she left him for another man.

While this is crossing Marino's mind, he is yelling at Benton, "You can come home, you fucking idiot! You can live your life again!"

Marino sits down on the couch, breathing hard, his face a deep red that reminds Benton of the 575M Maranello Ferrari he has seen around Cambridge. Its color is a deep burgundy called Barcetta, and thinking of that car reminds him of Lucy, who has always been in love with fast, powerful machines.

"You can see the Doc, and Lucy, and…"

"Untrue," Benton whispers. "Jean-Baptiste Chandonne has manipulated himself into this position. He is exactly where he wants to be. Connect the dots, Pete. Go back to how it started after he was arrested. He shocked everyone by offering an unsolicited confession to yet another murder, this one in Texas, and then, of all things, pled guilty. Why? Because he wanted to be extradited to Texas. It was his choice, not the governor of Virginias."

"No way," Marino challenges. "Our ambitious Virginia governor didn't want to piss off Washington by pissing off France-the anti-death penalty capital of the world. So we gave Chandonne to Texas."

Benton shakes his head. "Not so. Jean-Baptiste gave Jean-Baptiste to Texas."

"And how the hell would you know, anyway? You talking to people? I thought you didn't talk to no one."

Benton doesn't reply.

"I don't get it," Marino goes on. "Why would Wolfman give a shit about Texas?"

"He knew he would die quickly there, and he wanted to die quickly. It was part of his master plan. He had no intention of rotting on death row for ten or fifteen years. And his chances of gamesmanship are much greater in Texas. Virginia might very well fold to political pressure and stay his execution.

"Virginia is also claustrophobic. His every move would be watched. He would get away with much less, because law-enforcement and corrections officers would make it their mission to ensure his safety and good behavior. He would be monitored to the extreme. Don't tell me that if he were in Virginia, his mail wouldn't be secretly checked. The hell with his legal rights."

"Virginia would want to fry his ass," Marino argues. "After what he done."

"He killed a store clerk. He killed a cop. He almost killed the chief medical examiner. The governor at that time is now a senator and chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He didn't piss off Washington because he wasn't about to piss off the French. The governor of Texas, now in his second term and a trigger-happy Republican, by the way, doesn't give a damn who he pisses off."

"The chief medical examiner? You just can't bring yourself to say her name, can you?" Marino exclaims, incredulous.