"Of course. I'm a gentleman."
"How much was the bill?"
"Two hundred and twenty-one dollars, not including the gratuity."
Berger corroborates what he says as she stares straight ahead at the TV screen, "And that's exactly what the bill was. The man paid in cash and left two twenty-dollar bills on the table."
I quiz Berger closely on how much about the restaurant, the bill, the tip was publicly disclosed. "Was any of this ever in the news?" I ask her.
"No. So if it wasn't him, how the hell did he know what the damn bill was?" Frustration seeps into her voice.
On the videotape she asks Chandonne about the tip. He claims he left forty dollars. 'Two twenties, I believe" he says. "And then what? You left the restaurant?" "We decided to have a drink at her apartment," he says.
Chapter 14
CHANDONNE GOES INTO GREAT DETAIL AT THIS point. He claims he left Lumi with Susan Pless. It was very cold, but they decided to walk because her apartment was only a few blocks from the restaurant. He describes the moon and the clouds in sensitive, almost poetic detail. The sky was streaked with great swipes of bluish-white chalk and the moon was partially obscured and full. A full moon has always excited him sexually, he says, because it reminds him of a pregnant belly, of buttocks, of breasts. Gusts of wind kicked up around tall apartment buildings and at one point, he took off his scarf and put it around Susan to keep her warm. He claims to have been wearing a long, dark cashmere coat, and I remember the chief medical examiner of France, Dr. Ruth Stvan, telling me about her encounter with the man we believe was Chandonne.
I visited Dr. Stvan at the Institut Medico-Legal not even two weeks ago because Interpol asked me to review the Paris cases with her, and during our conversation she recounted to me a night when a man came to her home, feigning car trouble. He asked to use her phone, and she recalled he was wearing a long dark coat and seemed very much a gentleman. But Dr. Stvan said something else when I was with her. It was her recollection that the man had a strange, most unpleasant body odor. He smelled like a dirty, wet animal. And he made her uneasy, very uneasy. She sensed evil. All the same, she might have let him in or, more likely, he would have forced his way in except for one miraculous happenstance.
Dr. Stvan's husband is a chef at a famous Paris restaurant called Le Dome. He happened to be home sick that night and called out from another room, wanting to know who was at the door. The stranger in the dark coat fled. The next day a note was delivered to Dr. Stvan. It was written in block printing on a bit of bloody, torn brown paper and signed Le Loup-Garou. I have yet to really face my denial of what should have been obvious. Dr. Stvan autopsied Chandonne's French victims and then he went after her. I autopsied his American victims and didn't take serious measures to prevent him from coming after me. A great common denominator underlies this denial, and it is this: People tend to believe that bad things happen only to others.
"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.
I can't imagine anyone wanting to kiss those lips. I can't imagine anyone wanting to touch this man.
"I want you to tell me everything you remember," Berger says to him. "The truth, sir."
Chandonne sets down the Pepsi and I am slightly jarred when Talley's sleeved arm enters the picture again. He lights another Camel for Chandonne. I wonder if it occurs to Chandonne that Talley is a federal agent, that he is one of the very people who Chandonne says have been following him and ruining his life. "Yes then, I will tell you. I don't want to, but I'm trying to be cooperative." Chandonne blows out smoke.
"Please go on. In as much detail as you can remember."
"We kissed for a while and it quickly progressed." He says