The Last Precinct

Chapter 15

WHY IS IT YOUR FAULT?" BERGER ASKS CHAN-donne. "Why would you say that Susan's murder is your fault?"

"Because they followed me," he answers her. "They must have come in just after I left, and then they did that to her."

"And did they follow you to Richmond, too, sir? Why did you come here?"

"I came because of my brother."

"Explain that to me," Berger replies.

"I heard about the body at the port, and I was convinced it was my brother, Thomas."

"What did your brother do for a living?"

"He was in the shipping business with my father. He was a few years older. Thomas was good to me. I didn't see him much, but he would give me his clothes when he no longer wanted them, and other things, as I've told you. And money. I know the last time I saw him, maybe two months ago in Paris, he was frightened something bad was going to happen to him."

"Where in Paris was this meeting with Thomas?"

"Faubourg Saint Antoine. He loved to go where the young artists and nightclubs are, and we met in a stone alleyway. Cour des Trois Freres, where the artisans are, you know, not too far from Sans Sanz and the Balanjo and, of course, the Bar Americain, where girls can be paid to keep you company. He gave me money and said he was going to Belgium, to Antwerp, and then on to this country. I never heard from him again, and next the news came out about the body."

"And where did you hear this news?"

"I told you I get many newspapers. I pick up what people throw away. And many tourists who don't speak French read the international version of USA Today. There was a small story in it about the body found here, and I knew right away it was my brother. I was sure. For this reason, I came to Richmond. I had to know."

"How did you get here?"

Chandonne sighs. He looks fatigued again. He touches the inflamed, raw skin around his nose. "I don't want to say," he replies.

"Why don't you want to say?"

"I'm afraid you'll use it against me."

"Sir, I need you to be truthful with me."

"I'm a pickpocket. I took a wallet from a man who had his coat draped over a monument in Pere-Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in Paris, where some of my family is buried. A concession a perpetuite" he says proudly. "Stupid man. An American. It was a big wallet, the sort people keep passports and plane tickets in. I've done this many times, I regret to tell you. It's part of living on the street, and I've lived on the street more and more since they started after me."

"These same people again. Federal agents."

"Yes, yes. Agents, magistrates, everyone. I immediately took the plane because I didn't want to give the man time to report his wallet missing and then have someone stop me at the gate in the airport. It was a return ticket, coach, to New York."

"You flew out of what airport and when?"

"De Gaulle. That would have been last Thursday."

"December sixteenth?"

"Yes. I got in early that morning and took a train to Richmond. I had seven hundred dollars because of what I took from the man."

"Do you still have the wallet and passport?"

"No, never. That would be stupid. I threw them in the trash."

"Where in the trash?"

"At the train station in New York. I can't tell you exactly where. I got on the train…"

"And during your travels, nobody looked at you? You weren't shaven, sir? No one stared at you or reacted to you?"

"I had my hair in a net under a hat. I wore long sleeves and a high collar." He hesitates. "I have another thing I do when I look like this, when I have not cleaned off the hair. I wear a mask. The type of mask people put over their nose and mouth if they have severe allergies. And I wear black cotton gloves and large tinted glasses."

'This is what you wore on the plane and the train?"

"Yes. It works very well. People move away from me and I, in this instance, had an entire row of seats to myself. So I slept."

"Do you still have the mask, hat, gloves and glasses?"

He stops to think before answering. She has thrown him a curveball and he is uncertain. "I can possibly find them," he hedges.

"What did you do when you got to Richmond?" Berger asks him.

"I got off the train."

She questions him about this for several minutes. Where is the train station? Did he take a taxi next? How did he get around? Just what did he think he would do about his brother? His answers are lucid. Everything he describes makes it seem plausible that he might have been where he claims to have been, such as the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road and in a blue taxicab that let him off at a dump of a motel on Cham-berlayne Avenue, where he paid twenty dollars for a room, again using an assumed name and paying cash. From here, he states that he called my office to get information about the unidentified body he says is his brother. "I asked to speak to the doctor but no one would help me," he is telling Berger.

"Who did you talk to?" she asks him.

"It was a woman. Maybe a clerk."

"Did this clerk tell you who the doctor is?"

"Yes. A Dr. Scarpetta. So then I asked to speak to him, and the clerk tells me Dr. Scarpetta is a woman. So I say, okay. May I speak to her! And she is busy. I don't leave my name and number, of course, because I must continue to be careful. Maybe I'm followed again. How do I know? And then I get a newspaper and read about a murder here, a lady in a store killed a week earlier, and I'm shocked_frightened. They are here."

"These same people? The ones you say are after you?"

"They are here, don't you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him."

"They certainly are amazing, aren't they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it's Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you'd go."

"They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa."

"What about your mother? She wouldn't be upset to find out Thomas is dead?"

"She is drunk so much."

"Your mother's an alcoholic?"

"She's always drinking."

"Every day?"

"Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot."

"You don't live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?"

"Thomas would tell me. It's been her life ever since I can remember. I've always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me."

Berger looks at me. "Possible?"

"Fetal alcohol syndrome?" I consider. "Not likely. Gener- ally severe mental and physical retardation would result if the mother were a chronic alcoholic, and cutaneous changes such as hypertrichosis would be the least of the child's problems."

"Doesn't mean he doesn't believe she caused his condition."

"He certainly might believe it," I agree with her.

"Helping to explain his extreme hatred of women."

"As much as anything can explain his kind of hate," I reply.

On tape, Berger has returned Chandonne to the subject of his allegedly calling the morgue here in Richmond. "So you tried to get through to Dr. Scarpetta on the phone but couldn't. Then what?"

"Then the next day, Friday, I hear on the TV in my motel room that another woman has been murdered. This time a policewoman. They do a newsbreak, you know, and I'm watching it as it is happening and next thing the cameras focus on a big black car pulling up to the scene and they say it is the medical examiner. It is her, Scarpetta. So I get the idea to go there immediately. I will wait until she is leaving the scene and then I will approach her. I will tell her I must talk to her. So I get a taxi."

His remarkable memory fails him here. He recalls nothing about the taxi company, not even the color of the car, only that the driver was a "black man." Probably eighty percent of the taxi drivers in Richmond are black. Chandonne claims that while he is being driven to the scene_and he knows the address because it was on the news_he hears another news-break. This time, the public is being warned about the killer, that he may have a strange medical condition which causes him to have a very unusual appearance. The hypertrichotic description fits Chandonne. "I know now, for sure," he goes on. "They have set the trap and the world thinks I have killed these women in Richmond. So I panic in the back of the taxi, trying to figure out what to do. I say to the taxi driver, 'Do you know this lady they speak of? Scarpetta?' He says that everyone in the city knows her. I ask where she lives and say I'm a tourist. He takes me to her neighborhood but we don't go in because there are guards and a gate. But I know enough to find her. I get out of the taxi several blocks from there. I'm determined 1 will find her before it's too late."

"Too late for what?" Berger asks.

"Before anybody else is killed. I must come back later that night and somehow get her to open the door so I can talk to her. You know, of course, I'm worried they will kill her next. It's their pattern, you see. They did that in Paris, you know. They tried to murder the medical examiner there, a woman. She was very lucky."

"Sir, let's keep on the subject of what happened here in Richmond. Tell me what happened next. It's what, midmorn-ing on Friday, December seventeenth, last Friday? What did you do after the taxi dropped you off? What did you do the rest of the day?"

"Wandered. Found an abandoned house on the river and went in it just to get out of the weather."

"Do you know where that house is?"

"I can't tell you, but not far from her neighborhood."

"From Dr. Scarpetta's neighborhood?"

"Yes."

"You could find that house again, the one you stayed in, couldn't you, sir?"

"It's under construction. Very big. A mansion no one lives in right now. I know where it is."

Berger says to me, "The one where they think he was staying the entire time he was here?"

I nod. I am familiar with the house. I think of the poor people it belongs to and can't imagine them ever wanting to live there again. Chandonne says he hid in the abandoned mansion until dark. Several times that night he ventured out, avoiding the guard gate in my neighborhood by simply following the river and railroad tracks that run behind it. He claims to have knocked on my door early evening and got no answer. At this point, Berger asks me when I got home that night. I tell her it was after eight. I had stopped off at Pleasants Hardware store after leaving the office. I wanted to look at tools because I was perplexed by the strange wounds I had found on Diane Bray's body and by bloody transfers made to the mattress when the killer had set down the bloody tool he had beaten her with. It was during this foraging at Pleasants Hardware that I came across a chipping hammer, and I purchased one and went on home, I tell Berger.

Chandonne goes on to claim he began to get fearful about coming to see me. He claims there were a lot of police cars cruising the neighborhood, and that at one point when he came to my house late, there were two police cruisers parked in front. This was because my alarm had gone off_when Chandonne forced open my garage door so the police would come. Of course, he tells Berger that it wasn't him who set off the alarm. It was them_it must have been them, he says. By now, it is getting close to midnight. It is snowing hard. He hides behind trees near my house and waits until the police leave. He says it is his last chance, he has to see me. He believes they are in the area and will kill me. So he goes to my front door and knocks.

"What did you knock with?" Berger asks him.

"I recall there was a door knocker. I believe I used that." He drains the last of his Pepsi and Marino on tape asks him if he wants another one. Chandonne shakes his head and yawns. He is talking about coming into my house to bash my brains out and the bastard is yawning.

"Why didn't you ring the bell?" Berger wants to know. This is important. My doorbell activates the camera system. Had Chandonne rung the bell, I would have been able to see him on a video screen inside the house.

"I don't know," he replies. "I saw the knocker and used it."

"Did you say anything?"

"Not at first. Then I heard a woman ask, 'Who is it?' "

"And what did you say?"

"I told her my name. I said I have information about the body she's trying to identify, and to please let me talk to her."

"You told her your name? You identified yourself as Jean-Bap tiste Chandonne?"

"Yes. I said I was here from Paris and had been trying to get her at her office." He yawns again. "The most amazing thing happens," he goes on. "The door suddenly opens and

she is there. She tells me to come in, and the minute I do, she slams the door shut behind me and I can't believe it. She suddenly has this hammer and is trying to hit me."

"Suddenly has a hammer? Where did she get it? Did it just appear out of thin air?"

"I believe she grabbed it off a table just inside the doorway. I don't know. It happened so fast. And I try to get away from her. I run into the living room, yelling for her to stop, and that's when the terrible thing happened. It was fast. I only remember I was on the other side of the sofa, and then something was flying in my face. It felt like liquid fire in my eyes. I have never felt anything so, so…" He sniffs again. "The pain. I was screaming and trying to get it out of my eyes. I was trying to get out of the house. I knew she was going to kill me and suddenly it went into my mind that she is one of them. Them. They have got me at last. I walked right into their trap! It was planned all along that she would get my brother's body because she is them. Now I would be arrested and they would finally get the opportunity they want, finally, finally."

"And they want what?" Berger asks him. "Tell me again, because I'm having a very hard time understanding, much less believing, this part."

"They want my father!" he says with the first emotion I have seen. "To get Papa! To find a reason to go after him and bring him down, destroy him. To make it look like my father has a son who is a killer so they can get to my family. All this for years! And I am Chandonne and look at me! Look at me!!"

He stretches out his arms in a pose of crucifixion, hair floating out from his body. I watch in shock as he rips off his dark glasses and light pierces his tender, burned eyes. I stare into those bright red, chemically burned eyes. They don't seem to focus and tears stream down his face.

"I am ruined!" he cries out. "I am ugly and blind and accused of crimes I didn't do! You Americans want to execute a

Frenchman! Isn't that it! To make an example!" Chairs scrape

loudly and Marino and Talley are all over him, holding him in his chair. "I killed no one! She tried to kill me! Look what she did to me!"

And Berger is calmly saying to him, "We've been at this an hour. We're going to stop now. That's enough. Calm down, calm down."

Frames flicker and bars fill the screen before it turns the bright blue of a perfect afternoon. Berger turns off the VCR. I sit in stunned silence.

"Hate to tell you." She breaks the appalling spell Chan-donne has cast over my small, private conference room. "There are some antigovernment, paranoid idiots in the world who are going to find this guy believable. Let's hope none of them end up on the jury. It only takes one."