Bill wouldn’t be by. I knew I wouldn’t hear from him. He knew what Abby had said about him, and he knew I was present when she said it.
“And the other thing,” he went on, snapping up his slicker and turning the collar up around his ears, “if you’re gonna be pissed at me, then be pissed. But last night I was just doing my job and if you’re thinking I enjoyed it, you’re flat-out wrong.”
He turned around at the sound of a throat clearing. Wingo hesitated in my doorway, his hands in the pockets of his stylish white linen trousers.
A look of disgust passed over Marino’s face, and he rudely brushed past Wingo and left.
Nervously jingling change, Wingo came to the edge of my desk and said, “Uh, Dr. Scarpetta, there’s another camera crew in the lobby . . .”
“Where’s Rose?” I asked, slipping off my glasses. My eyelids felt as if they were lined with sandpaper.
“In the ladies’ room or something. Uh, you want me to tell the guys to leave or what?”
“Send them across the street,” I said, adding irritably, “just like we did to the last crew and the crew before that.”
“Sure,” he muttered, and he made no move to go anywhere. He was nervously jingling change again.
“Anything else?” I asked with forced patience.
“Well,” he said, “there’s something I’m curious about. It’s about him, uh, about Amburgey. Uh, isn’t he an antismoker and makes a lot of noise about it, or have I got him mixed up with somebody else?”
My eyes lingered on his grave face. I couldn’t imagine why it mattered as I replied, “He’s strongly opposed to smoking and frequently takes public stands on the issue.”
“Thought so. Seems like I’ve read stuff about it on the editorial page, heard him on TV, too. As I understand it, he plans to ban smoking from all HHSD buildings by next year.”
“That’s right,” I replied, my irritation flaring. “By this time next year, your chief will be standing outside in the rain and cold to smoke-like some guilt-ridden teenager.”
Then I looked quizzically at him and asked, “Why?”
A shrug. “Just curious.”
Another shrug. “I take it he used to smoke and got converted or something.”
“To my knowledge, he has never smoked,” I told him.
My telephone rang again, and when I glanced up from my call sheet, Wingo was gone.
If nothing else, Marino was right about the weather. That afternoon I drove to Charlottesville beneath a dazzling blue sky, the only evidence of this morning’s storm the mist rising from the rolling pastureland on the roadsides.
Amburgey’s accusations continued to gnaw at me, so I intended to hear for myself what he had actually discussed with Dr. Spiro Fortosis. At least this was my rationale when I had made an appointment with the forensic psychiatrist. Actually, it wasn’t my only reason. We’d known each other from the beginning of my career, and I’d never forgotten he had befriended me during those chilly days when I attended national forensic meetings and scarcely knew a soul. Talking to him was the closest I could comfortably get to unburdening myself without going to a shrink.
He was in the hallway of the dimly lit fourth floor of the brick building where his department was located. His face broke into a smile, and he gave me a fatherly hug, planting a light peck on the top of my head.
Professor of medicine and psychiatry at UVA, he was older by fifteen years, his hair white wings over his ears, his eyes kindly behind rimless glasses. Typically, he was dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt and a narrow striped tie that had been out of fashion long enough to come into vogue again. I’d always thought he could be a Norman Rockwell painting of the “town doctor.”
“My office is being repainted,” he explained, opening a dark wooden door halfway down the hall. “So if it won’t bother you being treated like a patient, we’ll go in here.”
“Right now I feel like one of your patients,” I said as he shut the door behind us.