“With his hand. He reached out his hand and touched my cheek, or tried to touch it.”
“You stood there while he did that? Just stood there?”
“It all happened so fast,” I say. “So fast,” I repeat. “I’m not sure. I just know he tried to do that and was snatching off his coat and trying to throw it over my head. And I ran.”
“What about the chipping hammer?”
“He had it out. I’m not sure. Or he got it out. But I know he had it out when he was chasing me into the great room.”
“Not out at first? He didn’t have the chipping hammer out at first? You’re sure?” She presses me on this point.
I try to remember, to envision it. “No, not at first,” I decide. “He tried to touch me first with his hand. Then net me. Then he pulled out the chipping hammer.”
“Can you show me what you did next?” she asks.
“Run?”
“Yes, run.”
“Not like that,” I say. “I’d have to have the same adrenaline rush, the same panic, to run like that.”
“Kay, walk me through it, please.”
I move out of the entrance hall, past the dining room and back into the great room. Straight ahead is the yellow Jarrah coffee table I discovered at that wonderful shop in Katonah, New York. What was the name? Antipodes? The rich blond wood glows like honey and I try not to notice the dusting powder all over it, or that somebody left a 7-Eleven coffee cup on it. “The jar of formalin was here, on this corner of the table,” I tell Berger.
“And it was there because… ?”
“Because of the tattoo in it. The tattoo I’d removed from the back of the body that we believe is Thomas Chandonne.”
“The defense is going to want to know why you brought human skin to your house, Kay.”
“Of course. Everyone’s been asking me that.” I feel a rush of annoyance. “The tattoo is important and created many, many questions because we just couldn’t figure out what it was. Not only was the body badly decomposed, thus making it very difficult to even see the tattoo, but then it turned out that it was a cover-up tattoo. One tattoo covering up another, and it was crucial, especially, that we determine what the original tattoo was.”
“Two gold dots that were covered up with an owl,” Berger says. “Every member of the Chandonne cartel has two gold dots tattooed on him.”
“That’s what Interpol told me, yes,” I say, and by now I have accepted that she and Jay Talley have spent a lot of quality time together.
“Brother Thomas was screwing his family, had his own side business, was diverting ships, falsifying bills of lading, running his own guns and drugs. And the theory is the family caught on. He changed his tattoo into an owl and began using aliases because he knew the family would kill him if they found him,” I recite what I have been told, what Jay told me in Lyon.
“Interesting.” She touches a finger to her lips, looking around. “And it appears the family did kill him. The other son did. The jar of formalin. Why did you bring it home? Tell me again.”
“It wasn’t really deliberate. I went to a tattoo parlor in Petersburg to have the tattoo from the body looked at by someone who’s an expert, a tattoo artist. I came straight home from there and left the tattoo in my office here. It was just a chance situation that the night he came here…”
“Jean-Baptiste Chandonne.”
“Yes. The night he came here I had carried the jar in here, in the great room, and was looking at it while I was doing other things. I set it down. He pushes his way into my house and I run. By now he has the chipping hammer out and has it raised to strike me. It was just a panicked reflex that I see the jar and grab it. I jump over the back of the sofa and unscrew the lid and throw the formalin in his face.”
“A reflex because you know very well how caustic formalin is.”