Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  She and Berger had actually gone out to lunch last week, the two of them alone at Forlini’s near One Hogan Place, and had sat in a booth that Berger said was almost named after Scarpetta. She’d said it was a lucky booth because it was the break-up booth. Scarpetta had said she didn’t see how that could be construed as lucky, and Berger, who, it turned out, was a Yankees fan and used to go to games and thought she might do so again, had replied that it depended on who was up to bat in the bottom of the ninth.

  Scarpetta didn’t need to watch baseball to get the gist of things. She’d simply been glad that a booth named after New York’s fire commissioner wasn’t the hot seat it might have been in the not-so-distant past. Few people knew as much about Scarpetta as Jaime Berger did.

  “I didn’t answer your question,” Benton said, watching the door. “I’m sorry.”

  “I forgot the question.”

  “Your letter. Thank you for reading it to me, but don’t read it to them.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “They don’t need proof that you’re a decent human being.” Benton’s eyes on hers.

  “It’s that obvious.”

  “Everyone knows that shit on the Internet, the e-mails Morales sent pretending to be you, and all the rest of it? We know who you are and who you aren’t. Nothing that’s happened is your fault, and you and I will continue to talk about this, say the same thing again and again. It takes a long time for your emotions to catch up with your intellect. Besides. I should feel guilty. Morales got all that shit from Nancy what’s-her-name, and Marino never would have had that flake for a therapist had I not sent him to that damn treatment center and even wasted my time conferring with her.”

  “She should never have talked to Morales, I agree. But I can see why she would.”

  “Nope,” Benton said. “Never should have happened. He probably seduced her over the phone. I don’t know what he said, but she should never have told him one word of what Marino had confided in her. It’s such a HIPAA violation, she’s history. I’m seeing to that.”

  “Let’s don’t punish anybody. There’s been enough punishment, enough of people not getting along and fighting each other’s battles and making each other’s decisions and paying people back. Indirectly, that’s why Terri’s dead. That’s why Eva’s dead. If Terri hadn’t been paying everybody back . . . Well, if Marino wants to go after his former lamebrain therapist, let him do it himself.”

  “You’re probably right,” Benton said. “And they’re here.”

  He got up so Marino would see him in the crowded dark, and the party of four, which included Marino’s new girlfriend, Bacardi, who did have a first name—it was Georgia—and also Berger and Lucy, squeezed their way through the crowded dining room and paid their respects to Elaine and bantered about things Scarpetta couldn’t hear. Then everyone was pulling out chairs and sitting down, and seemed in fine spirits. Lucy had on a Red Sox baseball cap, probably to tease Berger, who naturally hated the Red Sox, but mainly to cover a small shaved spot.

  That was it. An insult to Lucy’s vanity, the bullet wound on the back of her head healed, the minor contusion to her brain gone. Marino had rather much summarized as only he could that Lucy was a-okay because there was nothing up there to hit but bone.

  Louie was back with plates of Elaine’s famous calamari, and he took orders without writing anything down, and Berger and Lucy wanted to try his special stash of Scotch, and Bacardi didn’t live up to her name and asked for an apple martini, and Marino hesitated, then shook his head and looked uncomfortable. Nobody paid any attention, and Scarpetta knew what had happened. She reached behind Lucy and touched Marino’s arm.

  He leaned back and his wooden chair creaked, and he said, “How ya doin’?”

  “Have you ever been here?” she asked him.

  “Not me. Not my kind of joint. I don’t like having private conversations with Barbara Walters two tables away.”

  “That’s not Barbara Walters. They have Red Stripe, Buckler, Sharp’s. I don’t know what you’re drinking these days,” Scarpetta said.

  She wasn’t encouraging him to drink or not drink. She was saying she didn’t care what he was drinking, and that only he should care about it, and what she cared about was him.

  Marino said to Louie, “You still got Red Stripe?”

  “You bet.”

  “Maybe a little later,” Marino said.

  “Maybe a little later,” Louie repeated along with the rest of the orders, and was gone.

  Berger was looking at Scarpetta, and she cut her eyes toward the man in the white Stetson sitting by the window.

  “You know what I’m thinking,” Berger said to her.

  “It’s not him,” Scarpetta said.

  “I almost had a heart attack when I walked in the door,” Berger said. “You have no idea. I thought, How can that be possible?”

  “He still where he ought to be?”

  “You mean hell?” Lucy cut in, seeming to know exactly what they were talking about. “That’s where he ought to be.”

  “Don’t go getting any ideas, Rocky,” Marino said to her.

  That used to be his nickname for Lucy, because she never knew when to quit swinging and was always challenging him to boxing and wrestling matches, until she turned twelve and got her period. His middle name was Rocco, so his calling her Rocky had always struck Scarpetta as a bit of projection going on. What he loved in Lucy was what he loved in himself and just didn’t know it.

  “I don’t care what anybody says, I’m crazy about those damn movies,” Bacardi said as Louie was with them again already. “Even the last one, Rocky Balboa. I always cry at the end. I don’t know why. Real blood and guts? Not a tear. But the movies? I’m a mess.”

  “Anybody driving?” Louie said again, and then answered himself, his usual routine, “Of course not. Nobody’s driving. I don’t know what happened. Gravity,” he added, letting them know their drinks were strong. “I start pouring, and gravity takes over. I can’t lift up the bottle, and I keep pouring.”

  “My parents used to bring me here when I was a kid,” Berger said to Lucy. “This is old New York. You should absorb every detail, because one day there won’t be anything left of an era when everything was better, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. People would come in here and actually talk about art and ideas. Hunter Thompson. Joe DiMaggio.”

  “I’ve never really thought of Joe DiMaggio talking about art and ideas. Mainly baseball—but not Marilyn Monroe. We all know he didn’t talk about her,” Lucy said.

  “You better hope there’s no such things as ghosts,” Benton said to his almost niece. “After what you did.”

  “I’ve been wanting to ask you about that,” Bacardi said to Lucy. “Wow. Now, this has got a hell of a lot of apples in it.”

  She tucked her arm under Marino’s and leaned against him, and a butterfly tattoo lifted out of her tight knit top on a swell of bosom.

  Bacardi said, “Since the damn thing crashed, and what a mystery that is, I never got to see the damn photograph. It’s fake, right?”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked innocently.

  “Don’t play your dumb-as-a-fox role with me.” Bacardi smiled and sipped her apple martini, not daintily.

  Scarpetta said to Berger, “You must have seen some interesting people here when you were a kid.”

  “Many of the people in the pictures on the walls,” Berger said. “Half of them Lucy has never heard of.”

  “Here we go again. It’s a damn wonder anybody serves me a drink,” Lucy said. “I’m still ten. I’ll be ten my entire life.”

  “You weren’t around when JFK was shot, not when Bobby was, not when Martin Luther King was. Not even for Water-gate,” Berger said.

  “Was there anything I missed that might have been good?”

  “When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. That was good,” Berger said.

  “I was around for that, and when Marilyn Monroe died.” Bacardi worked
her way back into the discussion. “So let’s hear it. Tell me about the photograph. The worm, or whatever the media’s calling it.”

  “There are dead pictures of her on the Internet,” Marino said. “A couple of ’em. That’s what happens. Some asshole who works in a morgue sells a picture. We could stop letting people bring in their phones,” he said to Scarpetta. “Make them leave them in the morgue office like I have to leave my gun when I go into lockup. Have a safe or something.”

  “It’s not a real photograph,” Lucy said. “Not exactly. Just from the neck up. The rest of it I cut and pasted and enhanced.”

  “You think it’s true she was murdered?” Bacardi asked very seriously.

  Scarpetta had seen the altered photograph and what Eva had written about it, and was quite familiar with all of the records pertaining to the case. If she hadn’t been more than halfway through her single-malt Scotch, straight and neat, she might not have been so candid.

  “Probably,” she said.

  “Probably not smart to say that on CNN,” Benton said to Scarpetta.

  She took another sip. The Scotch was smooth with a peaty finish that drifted up her nose and evaporated somewhere in her brain, deeper than before.

  “People would be surprised if they knew what I don’t say,” she said. “Eva Peebles had it mostly right.”

  Lucy curled her fingers around her glass, raising it to her aunt, then to her lips, exploring it with her nose and tongue the way a Tastevin treats a fine wine. She looked at Scarpetta from the shadow of her baseball cap and smiled.