Black notice (49 page)

Marino didn't believe for a nanosecond that Anderson had murdered Bray.

"What happened?" he asked. "She tease you until you couldn't take it no more?"

I thought of the sexy satin blouse and lacy lingerie Bray had been wearing.

"She eat a little pizza with you and tell you to go on home like you was nothing to her? She dis you for the last time last night?" Marino asked.

Anderson silently stared down at her motionless hands. She kept licking her lips, trying not to cry.

"I mean, it would be understandable. All of us can only take so much, isn't that right, Doc? Like when someone's fucking around with your career, just as an example. But we'll get to that part a little later."

He leaned forward in his antique chair, big hands on his big knees until Anderson's bloodshot eyes lifted and met his.

"You got any idea how much trouble you're in?" he said to her.

Her hand shook as she pushed back her hair.

"I was here early last night." She spoke in a flat, depressed voice. "I dropped by and we ordered pizza."

"This a habit of yours?" Marino asked. "To drop by? Were you invited?"

"I would come over here. Sometimes I dropped by," she said.

"Sometimes you dropped by unannounced. That's what you're saying."

She nodded, wetting her lips again.

"Did you do that last night?"

Anderson had to think. I could see yet one more lie condensing like a cloud in her eyes. Marino leaned back in his chair.

"Damn, this is uncomfortable." He rolled his shoulders. "Like sitting in a tomb. I think it might be a good idea to tell the truth, don't you? 'Cause guess what? I'm going to find out one way or other, and you lie to me, I'll bust your chops so bad you'll eat cockroaches in prison. Don't think we don't know about you and that goddamn rental car sitting out there."

"There's nothing unusual about a detective having a rental car." She fumbled and knew it.

"Sure as hell is if it's following people everywhere," he retorted, and now it was my time to speak.

"You parked it in front of my secretary's apartment," I said. "Or at least somebody in that car did. I've been followed. Rose was followed:'

Anderson didn't speak.

"I don't suppose your e-mail address would happen to be M-A-Y F-L-R." I spelled it out for her.

She blew on her hands to warm them.

"That's right. I forgot," Marino said. "You was born in May. The tenth, in Bristol, Tennessee. I can tell you your Social Security number, address, too, if you want."

"I know all about Chuck," I said to her.

Now she was getting very nervous and scared.

"Fact is," Marino stepped in, "we got of Chuckie-boy on tape stealing prescription drugs from the morgue. You know that?"

She took a deep breath. We really didn't have that on tape yet.

"A lot of money. Enough for him and you and even Brayto have pretty good lives."

"He stole them, not me," Anderson spoke up. "And it wasn't my idea."

"You used to work in vice," Marino replied. "You know where to unload shit like that. I just bet you were the mastermind of the whole fucking thing because as much as I don't like Chuck, he wasn't a drug dealer before you appeared on the scene."

"You were following Rose, following me, to intimidate us," I said.

"My jurisdiction is the city;" she said. "I cruise all over the place. Doesn't mean I have some motive in mind if I'm behind you."

Marino got up and made a rude noise to voice his disgust.

"Come on," he said to her. "Why don't we just go on back to Bray's bedroom. Since you're such a good detec-tive, maybe you can look at the blood and brains everywhere and tell me what you think happened. Since you weren't following no one and the drug dealing wasn't your fault, may as well get back to work and help me out here, Detective Anderson."

Her face got pale. Terror leapt through her eyes like scattering deer.

"What?" Marino sat next to her on the couch. "You got a problem with that? That mean you don't want to go to the morgue and watch the autopsy, either? Not eager to do yourjob?"

He shrugged and got up again, pacing, shaking his head.

"I tell you, it's not for weak stomachs, that's for sure. Her face looks like hamburger. . ."

"Stop it!"

`And her breasts are chewed up so bad . . ."

Anderson's eyes filled with tears and she covered her face in her hands.

"Like somebody wasn't getting their desires satisfied and just exploded in this sexual rage. A real lust-hate thing. And doing that to someone's face is usually pretty personal: '

"Stop it!" Anderson screamed.

Marino got quiet, staring at her in a studious way as if she were a math problem written on a chalkboard.

"Detective Anderson," I said. "What was Deputy Chief Bray wearing when you came over last night?"

"A light green blouse. Sort of satiny," her voice trembled and caught. "Black corduroys."

"Shoes and socks?"

"Ankle boots. Black. And black socks."

"Jewelry?"

"A ring and a watch."

"What about underwear, a bra?"

She looked at me and her nose was running and she talked as if she had a cold.

"It's important I know these things," I said.

"It's true about Chuck;" she said instead. "But it wasn't my idea. It was hers."

"Bray's?" I followed where she was going.

"She took me out of vice and put me in homicide. She wanted you a million miles out of the way," she said to Marino. "She's been making money off of pills and I don't. know what all else for a long time, and she took a lot of pills, too, and she wanted you gone."

She returned her attention to me and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. I dug in my satchel and handed her tissues.

"She wanted you gone, too," she said.

"'That's been rather obvious," I replied, and it didn't seem possible that this person we were talking about was the mauled remains I had examined moments earlier just rooms away in the back of this house.-

"I know she had on a bra," Anderson then said. "She used to always wear things. Open neck or top buttons undone. And she would lean over so you could see down her shirt. She did it all the time, even at work, because she liked the reaction she got"

"What reaction?" Marino asked.

"Well, people definitely reacted. And skirts with slits that looked normal unless you were sitting in her office with her and she'd cross her legs in certain ways . . . I told her she shouldn't dress like that."

"What reaction?" Marino asked again.

"I told her all the time she shouldn't dress that way."

"Takes a lot of nerve for a lowly detective to tell a deputy chief how to dress."

"I didn't think officers should see her like that, look at her like that."

"Made you a little jealous, maybe?"

She didn't answer.

"And I bet she knew it made you jealous, made you really squirm, just fucking miserable and mad, right? Bray got off on it. She's the type who would. Wind you up and then take your battery out so what you want don't go nowhere."

"She had on a black -bra," Anderson said to me. "It had lace around the top. I don't know what else she had on."

"She used the hell out of you, didn't she?" Marino said. "Made you her drug mule, gofer, little Cinderella on the hearth. What else she ask you to do?"

Anger was beginning to warm up Anderson.

"She make you take her car to be washed? That was the rumor. She made you look like a sucking-up, moonstruck ass-kisser nobody took seriously. Sad thing is, maybe you wouldn't be such a shitty detective if she'd left you alone. You never even had a chance to find out, not with her keeping you on a leash the way she did. Let me tell you something. Bray was no more going to sleep with you than the man in the moon. People like her don't sleep with anybody. They're like snakes. They don't need nobody else to keep them warm."

"I hate her," Anderson said. "She treated me like dirt."

"Then why'd you keep coming here?" Marino asked.

Anderson fixed on me as if she hadn't heard Marino. "She'd sit right in that chair where you are. And she'd make me get her a drink and rub her shoulders and wait on her hand and foot. Sometimes she wanted me to give her massages."

"Did you?" Marino asked.

"She'd have on nothing but a robe and lie on that bed."

"Same one she was murdered on? Did she take her robe off when you massaged her?"

Anderson's eyes were blazing as they turned on him.

"She always kept herself covered just enough! I took her clothes to the dry cleaner and filled her fucking Jaguar with gas and. . . She was so mean to me!"

Anderson sounded like a child angry with her mother.

"She sure was," Marino said. "She was mean to a lot of people."

"But I didn't kill her, good God' I never touched her except when she wanted me to, like I already told you!"

"What happened last night?" Marino asked. "You stop by because you just had to see her?"

"She was expecting me. To drop off some pills, some money. She liked Valium, Ativan, BuSpar. Things that made her relax."

"How much money?"

"Twenty-five hundred dollars. Cash."

"Well, it ain't here now," Marino said.

"It was on the table. The table in the kitchen. I don't know. We ordered pizza. We drank a little and talked. She was in a bad mood."

"Over what?"

"She heard you'd gone to France," she said to both of us. "To Interpol."

"I wonder how she found that out?"

"Probably your office. Maybe Chuck found out. Who knows? She always got what she wanted, found out what she wanted. She thought she was the one who should have gone over there. To Interpol, I mean. That's all she would talk about. And she started blaming me for all the screwups. Like the restaurant parking lot, the e-mail, the way things happened at the Quik Cary scene. Just everything."

The clocks all chimed and gonged. It was noon.

"What time did you leave?" I asked when the concert stopped.

"Maybe nine."

"Did she ever shop at the Quik Cary?"

"She may have dropped in there before," she replied. "But as you could probably tell from looking around her kitchen, she wasn't much into cooking or eating at home."

"And you probably brought in food all the time," Marino added.

"She never offered to pay me back. I don't make much money"

"What about that nice little allowance from prescription drugs? I'm confused," Marino said. "You saying you didn't get a fair cut?"

"Chuck and I got ten percent each. I'd bring her the rest once a week, depending on what drugs came in. Into the morgue or maybe if I got some from a scene. I never stayed 'long when I came over here. She was always in a hurry. Suddenly, she had things to do. I have car payments. That's what my ten percent's gone to. Not like her. She doesn't know what it's like to worry about a car payment."

"You ever fight with her?" Marino asked.

"Sometimes. We'd argue."

"Did you argue last night?"

"I guess so."

"Over what?"

"I didn't like her mood. Same thing."

"Then?"

"I left. Like I said. She had things to do. She always decided when a discussion or argument was over."

"You driving the rental car last night?" Marino wanted to know.

."Yes."

I imagined the killer watching her leave. He was there, somewhere in the dark. Both of them had been at the port when the Sirius had come in, when the killer arrived in Richmond using the alias of a seaman named Pascal. He probably saw her. He probably saw Bray. He .would have been interested in all of those who had come to investigate his crime, including Marino and me.

"Detective Anderson," I said. "Did you sometimes come back lure after you'd left, to try to talk to Bray some more?"

"Yes," she confessed. "It wasn't fair for her to just push me out like that."

"You.came back often?"

"When I was upset."

"What would you do, ring the bell? How did you let her know you were here?"

"What?"

"It seems the police always knock, at least when they come to my house," I said. "They don't ring the bell."

"'Cause half the rattraps we go to don't have doorbells that work," Marino remarked.

"I knocked," she said.

"And how would you do it?" I asked as Marino lit a cigarette and let me talk.

"Well . . :'

"Twice; three times? Hard, soft?" I kept going.

"Three times. Loud."

"And she would always let you in?"

"Sometimes she wouldn't. Sometimes she'd just open the door and tell me to go home."