“Can you describe what the doorman looked like?” Berger asks Chandonne on the videotape.
“A thin mustache. In a uniform,” Chandonne says. “She called him Juan.”
“Wait a minute,” I speak up.
Berger stops the tape again.
“Did he have a body odor?” I ask her. “When you sat in the room with him early this morning.” I indicate the television. “When you interviewed him, did he have…”
“No kidding,” she interrupts. “Smelled like a filthy dog. Kind of a strange mix of wet fur and bad body odor. It was all I could do not to gag. I guess the hospital didn’t give him a bath.”
It is a misconception that people are automatically bathed in the hospital. Usually, only the injuries are scrubbed unless the person is a long-term patient. “When Susan’s murder was investigated two years ago, did anyone in Lumi mention a body odor? That the man she was with smelled bad?” I ask.
“No,” Berger replies. “Not at all. Again, I just don’t see how that person could have been Chandonne. But listen. It gets stranger.”
For the next ten minutes I watch Chandonne suck down more Pepsi as he smokes and tells the incredible account of his alleged visit with Susan Pless in her apartment. He describes where she lived in amazing detail, from the rugs on the hardwood floor to the floral upholstered furniture to the faux Tiffany lamps. He says he was not impressed with her taste in art, that she had a lot of rather pedestrian museum exhibit posters and some prints of seascapes and horses. She liked horses, he said. She told him she grew up with horses and missed them terribly. Berger taps the table inside my conference room whenever she verifies what he is saying. Yes, his description of the inside of Susan’s apartment certainly leads one to believe he was there at some point. Yes, Susan did grow up with horses. Yes, yes, to everything.
“Jesus.” I shake my head as fear coils tightly in my gut. I am afraid of where this is going. I resist thinking about it. But a part of me can’t stop thinking about it. Chandonne is going to say that I invited him into my house.
“And it’s what time now?” Berger asks him on the tape. “You said Susan opened a bottle of white wine. What time was it when she did that?”
“Maybe ten or eleven. I don’t remember. It was not good wine.”
“How much had you had to drink at this point?”
“Oh, maybe half a bottle of wine at the restaurant. I didn’t drink much of the wine she poured for me later. Cheap California wine.”
“Then you weren’t drunk.”
“I am never drunk.”
“You were thinking clearly.”
“Of course.”
“In your opinion, was Susan drunk?”
“Only maybe a little. I would say happy, she was happy. So we sat on the sofa in her living room. It has a very nice view, a southwest view. From the living room you can see the red sign for the Essex House hotel on the park.”
“All true,” Berger says to me as she taps the table again.
“And her blood alcohol was point-one-one. She’d had a few,” she adds details from Susan Pless’s postmortem examination.
“Then what happened?” she is asking Chandonne.
“We hold hands. She puts my fingers in her mouth, one after the other, very sexy. We started kissing.”
“Do you know what time it was at this point?”
“I had no reason to be looking at my watch.”
“You were wearing a watch?”
“Yes.”
“Do you still have that watch?”
“No. My life got worse because of them” He spits the word them. Saliva sprays through the air every time he says “them” with a loathing that seems genuine. “I no longer had money. I pawned the watch maybe a year ago.”
“Them? These same people you keep referring to? Law enforcement agents?”
“American federal agents.”
“Back to Susan,” Berger directs him.
“I am a shy person. I don’t know how much detail you will want me to go into at this point.” He lifts his Pepsi and his lips curl around the straw like grayish worms.