Scarpetta waits to see if she will say more. What must be a minute passes, and the silence is heavy.
“The worst thing was the kitchen,” Mrs. Paulsson finally says. “Taking out food and just leaving it on the counter. Even ice cream. Can’t tell you how much food I threw out.” Her face collapses into grief. “And milk. Always pouring milk down the sink because she left it out half the day.” Her voice rises and falls and shakes. “Do you know what it’s like to pick up after somebody all the damn time?”
“Yes,” Scarpetta says. “That’s one reason I’m divorced.”
“Well, he’s not much better,” she says, staring off. “Between the two of them that’s all I did, pick up.”
“If Frank did something to Gilly, what do you think it might have been?” Scarpetta asks, and she is careful not to ask questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
Mrs. Paulsson stares at the wall, not blinking. “In his own way he did something.”
“I’m talking physically. Gilly is dead.”
Her eyes fill with tears and she roughly wipes them with a hand as she stares at the wall. “He wasn’t here when it happened. Not in this house, not that I know of.”
“When what happened?”
“While I was gone to the drugstore. Whatever it was happened then.” She wipes her eyes again. “The window was open when I came home. It wasn’t when I left. I don’t know if she opened it. I’m not saying Frank did it. I’m saying he has something to do with it. Everything he got near died or was ruined. Kind of funny to think that about someone who’s a doctor. You should know.”
“I’m going to go now, Mrs. Paulsson. I know this hasn’t been an easy conversation, none of it has. You’ve got my cell phone number. If you think of anything that is important, I want you to call me.”
She nods, staring and crying.
“Maybe someone’s been in this house before whom we ought to know about. Someone besides Frank. Maybe someone Frank had over, someone he knew. Maybe someone who played the game.”
She doesn’t get up from her chair as Scarpetta moves to the doorway.
“Anyone at all who might come to your mind,” Scarpetta says. “Gilly didn’t die of the flu,” she repeats. “We need to know what happened, exactly what happened to her. We will know. Sooner or later. I believe you’d rather have it sooner, wouldn’t you?”
She just stares at the wall.
“You can call me anytime,” Scarpetta says. “I’m going to go now. If you need something, you can call me. I could use a couple of large trash bags if you have them.”
“Under the sink. If they’re for what I think, you don’t need them,” she mutters.
Scarpetta opens the cupboard under the sink and pulls four large plastic trash bags out of a box. “I’ll take them anyway,” she replies. “Hopefully I won’t need them.”
She stops by the bedroom and collects the balled-up linens, the boots, and the T-shirt, and places them inside the plastic bags. In the living room she puts on her coat and steps back out into the rain, carrying four bags, two heavy with linens, the other two having nothing in them but a T-shirt and a pair of boots. Puddles on the brick walk splash over her shoes and cold water soaks her feet, and the rain is half frozen as it slaps down all around her.
32.
INSIDE THE Other Way Lounge it is very dark, and the women who work here have stopped giving Edgar Allan Pogue sidelong looks that at first were curious, then disdainful, and finally indifferent before stopping altogether. He picks at the stem of a maraschino cherry and takes his time tying it in a knot.
He drinks Bleeding Sunsets in the Other Way, a specialty of the house that is a mixture of vodka and Other Stuff, as he thinks of it, Other Stuff that is orange and red and drifts unevenly to the bottom of the glass. A Bleeding Sunset looks like a sunset until a few tilts of the glass mix the liquids and syrups and Other Stuff together, and then the drink is simply orangish. When the ice melts, whatever is left in his glass looks like those orange drinks he used to get as a kid. They were in plastic oranges and he drank them out of green straws that were supposed to look like stems, and the orange drink was diluted and boring, but the plastic orange it came in always promised that the drink would be fresh and delicious. He would beg his mother to buy him one of the plastic oranges every time they came to South Florida, and every time he got disappointed again.
People are like those plastic oranges and what’s in them. People are one thing to look at and another thing to taste. He lifts his glass and swirls the orangish swill that is left in the bottom. He thinks about ordering another Bleeding Sunset as he calculates how much cash he has left and also takes into account his sobriety. He isn’t a drunk. He has never been drunk in his life. He worries excessively about being drunk and can’t drink a Bleeding Sunset or any other concoction without analyzing every ounce he swallows, worrying about the effect. He also worries about being fat, and alcohol is fattening. His mother was fat. She got fatter in time, and it was a shame because she had been pretty once. It runs in the family, she used to say. You keep eating like that and you’ll see what I mean, she used to say. That’s the way it starts, right around the middle, she used to say.
“I’ll have one more,” Edgar Allan Pogue says to whoever might be listening.
The Other Way is like a very small clubroom scattered with wooden tables covered with black cloths. There are candles on the tables, but they have never been lit when he’s here. In a corner is a pool table, but no one has played pool when he’s here, and he suspects that the clients here are not interested in pool and the scarred table with its red felt cloth might be left over from an earlier incarnation. Quite likely the Other Way was something else once. Everything was something else once.
“I believe I’ll have one more,” he says.
The women who work here are hostesses, not waitresses, and they expect to be treated like hostesses. Gentlemen drift in and out of the Other Way and do not snap their fingers at the ladies because they are hostesses and demand respect, so much respect that Pogue feels they are doing him a favor to let him come in and spend his money on their runny, bloody Bleeding Sunsets. His eyes move in the dark and he sees the redhead. She wears a skimpy, short black jumper that should have a blouse under it but doesn’t. The jumper barely covers what she needs to cover, and he has never seen her bend over unless it is for reasons other than brushing off a tablecloth or setting down a drink. She bends over to give special men something to see, those special men who tip well and know how to talk the talk. The jumper has a bib that is nothing more than a square of black cloth smaller than a sheet of typing paper and held up by two black straps. The bib is loose. When she leans into a conversation or to pick up an empty glass, she jiggles inside the bib and may even spill out of it, but it is dark, very dark, and she has not bent over his table and probably won’t and he cannot see well from where he sits.
He gets up from his table near the door because he has no desire to yell out that he wants another Bleeding Sunset, and he’s no longer sure he wants one. He keeps thinking of the bright plastic orange with the green straw, and the more he sees it and remembers his disappointment, the more unfair it is. He stands by the table and reaches into a pocket and pulls out a twenty. Money in the Other Way is what it takes, like steak to a dog, he thinks. The redhead clicks over in her little stilt-high pointed shoes, jiggling inside her bib, pumping inside her tight little skirt. Up close, she is old. She is fifty-seven or fifty-eight, maybe sixty.
“You heading out, hon?” She plucks the twenty off the table and doesn’t look at him.
There is a mole on her right cheek and it is drawn on, probably with eyeliner. He could have done a much better job. “I wanted another one,” he says.
“Don’t we all, hon.” Her laughter reminds him of a cat in pain. “Hold the phone and I’ll bring ya one.”
“It’s too late,” he says.
“Bessie girl, where’s my whisky?” a quiet man asks from a nearby table
.
Pogue saw him earlier, saw him drive up in a big new Cadillac, a silver one. He is very old, at least eighty or eighty-one or eighty-two, and dressed in a pale blue seersucker suit and pale blue tie. Bessie shakes and bounces over to him and suddenly Pogue is gone even though he hasn’t left yet. So he leaves. He may as well leave since he is already gone. He walks out the heavy dark door, out into the gravel parking lot, out into the dark, out to the black olive trees and palms along the sidewalk. He stands in the dense shadows of the trees and looks at the Shell station across North 26th Avenue, at the big seashell lit up bright yellow in the night, and he feels the warm breeze and is content to just stand for a few minutes, looking.
The lit-up shell makes him think of the plastic oranges again. He doesn’t know why, unless his mother used to buy the drinks for him at gas stations, and maybe she did. That would make sense if she bought them now and then, probably for a dime apiece when they were driving from Virginia to Florida, to Vero Beach every summer to visit her mother, who had money, a lot of it. He and his mother always stayed in a place called the Driftwood Inn, and he doesn’t remember much about it except it looked like it was built of driftwood and at night he slept on the same inflated plastic raft that he floated on during the day.
The raft was not very big and his arms and legs hung off it the same way they did when he was paddling around in the waves, and that was what he slept on in the living room while his mother stayed inside the bedroom with the door locked, the only air conditioner rattling from the window inside her closed-up and locked bedroom. He remembers how hot and sweaty he got, how his sunburned skin stuck to the plastic raft and every time he moved it felt like a Band-Aid being ripped off, all night long, all week long. That was their vacation. It was the only one they took each year, in the summer, always in August.
Pogue watches headlights coming and taillights going, bright white and red eyes flying by in the night, and he looks up ahead to his left and waits for the traffic light to change. When it does, the traffic slows, and then he trots across the clear lane of eastbound traffic and darts between cars in the westbound lane. At the Shell station, he looks up at the bright yellow shell floating high above him in the dark and he watches an old man in baggy shorts pumping gas at one pump and another old man in a rumpled suit pumping gas at a different pump. Pogue stays in the shadows and moves silently to the glass door and a bell jingles as he walks inside and heads straight back to the drink machines. The lady at the counter is ringing up a bag of chips, a six-pack of beer, and gas, and doesn’t look at him.
Near the coffee machine is the soda machine, and he takes five of the biggest plastic cups and lids and walks up to the counter with them. The cups are bright with cartoon designs and the lids he picks out are white with a little spout for drinking. He sets the cups and lids on the counter.
“Do you have any plastic oranges with green straws? Orange drinks?” he asks the lady behind the counter.
“What?” She frowns and picks up one of the cups. “There’s nothing in these. You buying Big Slurps or not?”
“Not,” he says. “I just want the cups and the lids.”
“We don’t sell just cups.”
“That’s all I want,” he says.
She peers over her glasses to look at his face, and he wonders what she sees when she looks at his face like that. “We don’t sell just the cups, I’m telling you.”
“I’d rather buy the orange drinks if you’ve got them,” he replies.
“What orange drinks?” Her impatience flares. “See that big cooler back there? What’s in there is what we got.”
“They’re in plastic oranges that look just like oranges and come with a green straw.”
Her frown dissolves into a look of amazement and her brightly painted lips part in a gaping smile that reminds him of a jack-o’-lantern. “Well, I’ll be damned, now I know exactly what you’re talking about. Those damn orange drinks. Darling, they haven’t been sold in years. Damn, I haven’t thought about those forever.”
“Then I’ll just take the cups and lids,” he insists.
“Lord, I give up. Good thing my shift’s about to end, tell you that.”
“A long night,” he says.
“Just got longer.” She laughs. “Those damn oranges with the straws.” She looks toward the door as the old man in baggy shorts comes in to pay for his gas.
Pogue doesn’t pay any attention to him. Pogue stares at her, at her dyed hair as platinum as fishing line and her powdered skin that looks like a soft, wrinkled cloth. If he touched her skin, it would feel like butterfly wings. If he touched her skin, the powder would come off, just like butterfly wings. Her name tag says EDITH.
“Tell you what,” Edith is speaking to him. “I’m gonna charge you fifty cents per empty cup and throw in the lids for nothing. Now I got other customers.” Her fingers peck on the register and the drawer slides open.
Pogue hands Edith a five-dollar bill and his fingers touch her fingers as he takes his change, and her fingers are cool and quick and soft, and he knows the skin on them is loose, the loose skin that women her age have. Outside in the humid night, he waits for traffic and crosses the street the same way he did minutes earlier. He lingers beneath the same black olive trees and palms, watching the front door of the Other Way Lounge. When no one comes or goes, he walks rapidly to his car and gets in.
33.
“YOU SHOULD TELL HIM,” Marino says. “Even if it don’t turn out the way you think, he ought to know what’s going on.”
“That’s how people head off down the wrong path,” Scarpetta replies.
“It’s also how they get a head start.”
“Not this time,” she says.
“You’re the boss, Doc.”
Marino is stretched out on his bed inside the Marriott on Broad Street, and Scarpetta is sitting in the same chair she was sitting in earlier, but she has pulled it closer to him. He looks very big but less threatening in loose white cotton pajamas she found for him at a department store south of the river. Beneath the light, soft fabric his wounds are dark orange with Betadine. He claims his injuries aren’t hurting as much, not nearly as much. She has changed out of her mud-spattered midnight blue suit and is wearing tan corduroys and a dark blue turtleneck sweater and loafers. They are in his room because she did not want him in her room, so she decided his room was safe enough, and they have eaten sandwiches sent up by room service and now they are just talking.
“But I still don’t see why you can’t just bounce it off him,” Marino says, and he is fishing. His curiosity about her relationship with Benton is as pervasive as dust. She notices it constantly and it gets on her nerves, and there is no use trying to get rid of it.
“I’ll take the soil samples to the labs first thing in the morning,” she tells him. “We’ll know in a hurry whether a mistake has been made. If one has, there is no point in my telling Benton about it. A mistake is not germane to the case. It would simply be a mistake. A bad one.”
“You don’t believe it, though.” He looks at her from clouds of pillows she plumped behind him. His color is better. His eyes are brighter.
“I don’t know what I believe,” she says. “It makes no sense either way. If the trace evidence found on the tractor driver isn’t a mistake, then how do you explain it? How could the same type of evidence turn up in Gilly Paulsson’s case? Perhaps you have a theory.”
Marino thinks hard, his eyes fixing on the window filled with blackness and the lights of downtown. “I can’t think how,” he says. “I swear to God, I can’t come up with anything except what I said in the meeting. And that was just being a smartass.”
“Who? You?” she asks dryly.
“Seriously. How could what’s-his-name Whitby have the same trace on him that she did? In the first place, she died two weeks before he did. So why would he have it on him at all, especially two weeks after she got it on her? It don’t look good,” he decides.
Her spirit recoils and
she feels a sickness that she has learned to recognize as fear. The only logical explanation at the moment is cross-contamination or mislabeling. Either can happen more easily than people might think. All it takes is for one evidence bag or test tube to be placed in the wrong envelope or rack or the wrong label to be stuck on a sample. This can happen in five seconds of inattention or confusion and then the evidence suddenly came from a source that either makes no sense or, worse, answers a question that could set a suspect free or send him to court, to prison, to the death chamber. She thinks of dentures. She envisions the Fort Lee soldier trying to force the wrong dentures into the dead obese woman’s mouth. That’s all it takes, one lax moment like that.
“I still don’t see why you don’t bounce it off Benton,” Marino says, reaching for a glass of water by the bed. “What would be wrong with my having a few beers? A few hairs of the dog?”
“What would be right with it?” She has file folders in her lap and is idly flipping through copies of reports, seeing if anything she already knows about Gilly and the tractor driver might suddenly tell her something new. “Alcohol interferes with healing,” she says. “It’s not been much of a friend to you anyway, has it?”
“Last night it wasn’t.”
“Order what you want. I’m not going to tell you what to do.”
He hesitates and she senses that he wants her to tell him what to do, but she won’t. She’s done it before and it is a waste, and she doesn’t want to be his co-pilot as he flies like a crazed mad bomber through life. Marino looks at the phone, his hands in his lap, and he reaches for the water.
“How are you feeling?” she asks, turning a page. “Need more Advil?”
“I’m okay. Nothing a few beers wouldn’t fix.”
“That’s up to you.” She turns another page, scanning the long list of Mr. Whitby’s ruptured and lacerated organs.