Patricia Cornwell – Scarpetta11 – The Last Precinct

“Would they let you into the house?” Berger is desperate to place him inside the family house so authorities can have probable cause for a search warrant. I can see already that Chandonne is a master of the game. He knows damn well why she wants to place him inside the incredible Chandonne hotel particulier on lie Saint-Louis, a house I actually saw with my own eyes when I was recently in Paris. There will be no search warrant in my lifetime.

“Yes. But I wouldn’t stay long, and I didn’t go into all the rooms,” he is telling Berger as he calmly smokes. “There are many rooms in my family’s house that I have never been in. Only the kitchen, and, let me see, the kitchen and the servants’ quarters and just inside the door. For the most part, you see, I have taken care of myself.”

“Sir, when was the last time you visited your family’s home?”

“Oh, no time recently. Two years, at least. I really don’t re­member.”

“You don’t remember? If you don’t know, just say you don’t know. I’m not asking you to guess.”

“I don’t know. But not recently, of that I’m sure.”

Berger points the remote control and the picture freezes.

“You see Ms game, of course,” she says to me. “First, he gives

us information we can’t trace. People who are dead. Cash in a hotel where he signed in under an assumed name he can’t re- member. And now, no basis for a warrant to search his fam­ily’s home because he’s saying he never lived there and has scarcely been inside it. And certainly not recently. No proba­ble cause that’s fresh.”

“Hell! No probable cause, period,” Marino adds. “Not un­less we can find witnesses who’ve seen him in and out of the family house.”[“_Toc37098914”]

CHAPTER 12

BERGER RESUMES THE VIDEOTAPE. SHE IS ASKING Chandonne, “Are you employed or have you ever been?”

“This and that,” he mildly replies. “Whatever I can find.”

“Yet you could afford to stay in a nice hotel and eat at an expensive New York restaurant? And buy a good bottle of Ital­ian wine? Where did you get the money for all that, sir?”

At this, Chandonne hesitates. He yawns, giving us a star­tling view of his grotesque teeth. Small and pointed, they are widely spaced and gray. “Sorry. I am very tired. I don’t have much strength.” He touches his bandages again.

At this, Berger reminds him that he is talking of his own volition. No one is forcing him. She offers to stop but he says he will continue a little longer, maybe just a few minutes longer. “I’ve been on the street much of my life when I can find no work,” he tells her. “Sometimes I beg, but most times I find any job I can. Washing dishes, sweeping. Once I even drove a moto-crottes.”

“And what is that?”

“A trottin ‘net. One of those green motorcycles in Paris that cleans sidewalks, you know, with the vacuum that picks up dog shit.”

“Do you have a driver’s license?”

“No.”

“Then how did you drive a trottin ‘net?’

“If it’s under one hundred and twenty-five CCs you don’t need a driver’s license, and the moto-crottes only go maybe twenty kilometers an hour.”

This is all bullshit. Again, he is mocking us. Marino shifts in his chair inside my conference room. “The asshole’s got an answer to everything, don’t he?”

“Any other ways you get money?” Berger is asking Chan-donne.

“Well, from women sometimes.”

“And how do you get money from women?”

“If they give money to me. I admit women are my weak­ness. I love womenthe way they look, smell, feel, taste.” He who sinks his teeth into women he brutalizes and murders says all this in a gentle tone. He feigns perfect innocence. He has begun flexing his fingers on the table as if they are stiff, splaying his fingers in and out, slowly, hair shining.

“You like the way they taste?” Berger is getting more ag­gressive. “Is that why you bite them?”

“I don’t bite them.”

“You didn’t bite Susan Pless?”

“No.”

“Sir, she was covered with bite marks.”

“I didn’t do that. They did it. I’m followed and it’s they who kill. They kill my lovers.”

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