Anderson fixed on me as if she hadn’t heard Marino. “She’d sit right in that chair where you are. And she’d make me get her a drink and rub her shoulders and wait on her hand and foot. Sometimes she wanted me to give her massages.”
“Did you?” Marino asked.
“She’d have on nothing but a robe and lie on that bed.”
“Same one she was murdered on? Did she take her robe off when you massaged her?”
Anderson’s eyes were blazing as they turned on him.
“She always kept herself covered just enough! I took her clothes to the dry cleaner and filled her fucking Jaguar with gas and. . . She was so mean to me!”
Anderson sounded like a child angry with her mother.
“She sure was,” Marino said. “She was mean to a lot of people.”
“But I didn’t kill her, good God’ I never touched her except when she wanted me to, like I already told you!”
“What happened last night?” Marino asked. “You stop by because you just had to see her?”
“She was expecting me. To drop off some pills, some money. She liked Valium, Ativan, BuSpar. Things that made her relax.”
“How much money?”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars. Cash.”
“Well, it ain’t here now,” Marino said.
“It was on the table. The table in the kitchen. I don’t know. We ordered pizza. We drank a little and talked. She was in a bad mood.”
“Over what?”
“She heard you’d gone to France,” she said to both of us. “To Interpol.”
“I wonder how she found that out?”
“Probably your office. Maybe Chuck found out. Who knows? She always got what she wanted, found out what she wanted. She thought she was the one who should have gone over there. To Interpol, I mean. That’s all she would talk about. And she started blaming me for all the screwups. Like the restaurant parking lot, the e-mail, the way things happened at the Quik Cary scene. Just everything.”
The clocks all chimed and gonged. It was noon.
“What time did you leave?” I asked when the concert stopped.
“Maybe nine.”
“Did she ever shop át the Quik Cary?”
“She may have dropped in there before,” she replied. “But as you could probably tell from looking around her kitchen, she wasn’t much into cooking or eating at home.”
“And you probably brought in food all the time,” Marino added.
“She never offered to pay me back. I don’t make much money”
“What about that nice little allowance from prescription drugs? I’m confused,” Marino said. “You saying you didn’t get a fair cut?”
“Chuck and I got ten percent each. I’d bring her the rest once a week, depending on what drugs came in. Into the morgue or maybe if I got some from a scene. I never stayed ‘long when I came over here. She was always in a hurry. Suddenly, she had things to do. I have car payments. That’s what my ten percent’s gone to. Not like her. She doesn’t know what it’s like to worry about a car payment.”
“You ever fight with her?” Marino asked.
“Sometimes. We’d argue.”
“Did you argue last night?”
“I guess so.”
“Over what?”
“I didn’t like her mood. Same thing.”
“Then?”
“I left. Like I said. She had things to do. She always decided when a discussion or argument was over.”
“You driving the rental car last night?” Marino wanted to know.
.”Yes.”
I imagined the killer watching her leave. He was there, somewhere in the dark. Both of them had been at the port when the Sirius had come in, when the killer arrived in Richmond using the alias of a seaman named Pascal. He probably saw her. He probably saw Bray. He .would have been interested in all of those who had come to investigate his crime, including Marino and me.
“Detective Anderson,” I said. “Did you sometimes come back lure after you’d left, to try to talk to Bray some more?”
“Yes,” she confessed. “It wasn’t fair for her to just push me out like that.”
“You.came back often?”
“When I was upset.”
“What would you do, ring the bell? How did you let her know you were here?”