“You flew out of what airport and when?”
“De Gaulle. That would have been last Thursday.”
“December sixteenth?”
“Yes. I got in early that morning and took a train to Richmond. I had seven hundred dollars because of what I took from the man.”
“Do you still have the wallet and passport?”
“No, never. That would be stupid. I threw them in the trash.”
“Where in the trash?”
“At the train station in New York. I can’t tell you exactly where. I got on the train…”
“And during your travels, nobody looked at you? You weren’t shaven, sir? No one stared at you or reacted to you?”
“I had my hair in a net under a hat. I wore long sleeves and a high collar.” He hesitates. “I have another thing I do when I look like this, when I have not cleaned off the hair. I wear a mask. The type of mask people put over their nose and mouth if they have severe allergies. And I wear black cotton gloves and large tinted glasses.”
‘This is what you wore on the plane and the train?”
“Yes. It works very well. People move away from me and I, in this instance, had an entire row of seats to myself. So I slept.”
“Do you still have the mask, hat, gloves and glasses?”
He stops to think before answering. She has thrown him a curveball and he is uncertain. “I can possibly find them,” he hedges.
“What did you do when you got to Richmond?” Berger asks him.
“I got off the train.”
She questions him about this for several minutes. Where is the train station? Did he take a taxi next? How did he get around? Just what did he think he would do about his brother? His answers are lucid. Everything he describes makes it seem plausible that he might have been where he claims to have been, such as the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road and in a blue taxicab that let him off at a dump of a motel on Cham-berlayne Avenue, where he paid twenty dollars for a room, again using an assumed name and paying cash. From here, he states that he called my office to get information about the unidentified body he says is his brother. “I asked to speak to the doctor but no one would help me,” he is telling Berger.
“Who did you talk to?” she asks him.
“It was a woman. Maybe a clerk.”
“Did this clerk tell you who the doctor is?”
“Yes. A Dr. Scarpetta. So then I asked to speak to him, and the clerk tells me Dr. Scarpetta is a woman. So I say, okay. May I speak to her! And she is busy. I don’t leave my name and number, of course, because I must continue to be careful. Maybe I’m followed again. How do I know? And then I get a newspaper and read about a murder here, a lady in a store killed a week earlier, and I’m shockedfrightened. They are here.”
“These same people? The ones you say are after you?”
“They are here, don’t you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him.”
“They certainly are amazing, aren’t they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it’s Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you’d go.”
“They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa.”
“What about your mother? She wouldn’t be upset to find out Thomas is dead?”
“She is drunk so much.”
“Your mother’s an alcoholic?”
“She’s always drinking.”
“Every day?”
“Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot.”
“You don’t live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?”
“Thomas would tell me. It’s been her life ever since I can remember. I’ve always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me.”