“That’s right. Point-oh-three alcohol level.” Berger opens another cupboard and another until she finds where Bray kept her liquor. “One bottle of vodka. One of Scotch. Two Argentine cabernets. Not the bar of someone who drank a lot. Probably was too vain about her figure to ruin it with booze. Pills at least aren’t fattening. When you came to the scene, was that the first time you’d ever been to her houseto this house?” Berger asks.
“Yes.”
“But your house is only a few blocks away.”
“I’d seen this house in passing. From the street. But no, I’d never been inside. We weren’t friends.”
“But she wanted to be friends.”
“I’m told she wanted to have lunch or whatever. To get to know me,” I reply.
“Marino.”
“That’s what Marino told me,” I confirm, getting used to her questions by now.
“Do you think she was sexually interested in you?” Berger asks this very casually as she opens a cabinet door. Inside are glasses and dishes. “There are plenty of intimations that she played both sides of the net.”
“I’ve been asked that before. I don’t know.”
“Would it have bothered you if she was?”
“It would have made me uncomfortable. Probably,” I admit.
“She eat out a lot?”
“It’s my understanding she did.”
I am noting that Berger asks questions I suspect she already has answered. She wants to hear what I have to say and weigh my perceptions against those of others. Some of what she explores carries the echo of what Anna asked me during our fireside confessionals. I wonder if it is remotely possible that Berger has talked to Anna, too.
“Reminds me of a store that’s a front for some illegal business,” Berger says as she checks out what’s beneath the sink: a few cleansers and several dried sponges. “Don’t worry,” she seems to read my mind. “I’m not going to let anyone ask you these sorts of things in court, about your sex life or whatever. Nothing about her personal life, either. I realize that’s not supposed to be your area of expertise.”
“Not supposed to be?” It seems an odd comment.
“Problem is, some of what you know isn’t hearsay, but knowledge you got directly from her. She did tell you” Berger opens a drawer”that she often ate out alone, sat at the bar at Buckhead’s.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“The night you met her there in the parking lot and confronted her.”
“The night I tried to prove that she was in collusion with my morgue assistant, Chuck.”
“And she was.”
“Unfortunately, she certainly was,” I reply.
“And you confronted her.”
“I did.”
“Well, good oF Chuck’s in lockup where he belongs.” Berger walks out of the kitchen. “And if it’s not hearsay,” she returns to that topic, “then Rocky Caggiano is going to ask you and I can’t object. Or I can, but it will get me nowhere. You need to realize that. And how it makes you look.”
“Right now, I’m more worried about how everything makes me look to a special grand jury,” I pointedly answer her.
She stops in the hallway. At the end of it, the master bedroom is behind a door that is carelessly ajar, adding to the ambiance of neglect and indifference that chills this place. Berger meets my eyes. “I don’t know you personally,” she says. “No one seated on that special grand jury is going to know you personally. It’s your word against a murdered policewoman’s that it was she who harassed you and not the other way around, and that you had nothing to do with her murdereven though you seem to think the world is better off without her.”
“Did you get that from Anna or Righter?” I bitterly ask her.
She starts down the hallway. “Pretty soon, Dr. Kay Scar-petta, you’re gonna get a thick skin,” she says. “I’m making that my mission.”[“_Toc37098928”]
CHAPTER 26
BLOOD IS LIFE. IT BEHAVES LIKE A LIVING CREA-ture.
When the circulatory system is breached, the blood vessel contracts in a panic, making itself smaller in an attempt to diminish the blood flowing through it and out of the tear or cut. Platelets immediately rally to plug the hole. There are thirteen clotting factors and together they instigate their alchemy to stop blood loss. I have always thought that blood is bright red for a reason, too. It is the color of alarm, of emergency, of danger and distress. If blood were a clear fluid like sweat, we might not notice when we are injured or when someone else is. Bright red boasts of blood’s importance, and it is the siren that sounds when the greatest of all violations has occurred: when another person has maimed or taken a life.