“Dilated pupils wouldn’t be opioids but could be a lot of other drugs.” Colin presses his gloved fingers into an arm, a leg, making a note of blanching. “Amphetamines, cocaine, sedatives. And alcohol, of course. Did you happen to notice if she might have taken anything while you were with her?”
“I didn’t see her take anything or have a reason to think she might have. She was drinking while I was here. Several glasses of wine and several Scotches.”
“What happened after you left? What did you do? Where did you go?” Chang asks.
I don’t have to answer. I should tell him I’ll be happy to cooperate under certain conditions, such as with my lawyer present, but that’s not who I am. I have nothing to hide. I know Marino did nothing wrong. All of us are on the same side. I explain that we spent some time driving in the area where the Jordans lived, discussing that case, and returned to the hotel around two a.m.
“You see him go into his room?”
“He’d forgotten something in his van and went back out to get it. I went on up to my room alone.”
“Well, that’s a little bit curious. That he walked you in and then returned to his van.”
“There was a valet on duty who should be able to say whether Marino did what he said he was going to do and got groceries out of the backseat, or whether he drove off again,” I reply pointedly. “And the van was having serious mechanical problems that made Marino take it to a body shop this morning.”
“He could have gone on foot. The hotel’s maybe a twenty-minute walk from here.”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Ambient temp’s seventy-one degrees. Body temp is seventy-three degrees,” Colin says, as he moves Jaime Berger’s body off the side of the bed.
Her arms and head are unwilling, and he has to apply pressure to coax them, and it is difficult to watch. I’ve broken rigor thousands of times, countless times, really, and don’t give it a thought when I’m forcing the dead to give up their stubborn and unreasonable positions. But I can scarcely bear to look. I think of the take-out bag I offered to carry upstairs and feel guilt. I feel to blame. Why didn’t I question the person who materialized out of the shadows on the dark street last night? Why wasn’t I concerned when Jaime indicated she hadn’t ordered sushi?
“Anything else in here you think I should be aware of?” Chang continues to ask me questions that have little to do with what he really wants to know.
“The turned-over glass. And I would swab what appears to be spilled Scotch on the table. But you might want to wait until we’re dealing with the leftover food and what’s in the trash. All of it needs to be handled the same way. Anything she might have eaten or drunk.”
I keep my hands in my pockets as we begin to walk around. I tell Sammy Chang the same thing I told him earlier at the prison. I will look and explore as long as he approves, and I will touch nothing without his permission. We start with the master bath.
27
The mirrored medicine cabinets are open wide, their contents strewn over shelves and the granite countertop, in the sink, and all over the floor, as if a storm blew in or an intruder ransacked the master bathroom. Scattered about are cuticle scissors, tweezers, nail files, eye drops, toothpaste, dental floss, teeth-whitening strips, sunscreens, over-the-counter pain relievers, body scrubs, and facial cleansers. There are prescription medications, including zolpidem tartrate or Ambien, and anxiolytic lorazepam, better known as Ativan. Jaime wasn’t sleeping well. She was anxious and vain and not at peace with aging, and nothing she had on hand to relieve her routine discomforts and discontentedness was going to defeat the enemy that confronted her the final hours and minutes of her life, a violent attacker that was sadistic and overpowering and impossible to see.
As I interpret her death through the symbols of her postmortem artifacts and her chaotic clutter, it is clear to me that at some point early this morning she suffered an onset of symptoms that caused her to search desperately for something, for anything, that might mitigate panic and physical distress so acute that it looks as if an intruder pillaged her apartment and murdered her somehow.
There was no intruder, only Jaime, and I imagine her dumping out the contents of her pocketbook, perhaps looking for a medication that might relieve her suffering. I imagine her rushing inside the master bath for a drug that might offer remedy, and sweeping and knocking items off the shelves, frantic and crazed by the torture of what had seized her. Only it wasn’t another person killing her, not directly. I believe it was a poison, one so potent it transformed Jaime’s body into her own worst enemy, and I wasn’t here.
I hadn’t stayed. I’d left earlier, so relieved to get away that I’d waited outside in the dark under a tree for Marino to pick me up, and I can’t stop thinking that had I not been hurt and angry, I might have noticed the warnings. It might have occurred to me that something was wrong, that she wasn’t merely drunk. I was defensive of Lucy, and she’s always been my weakness, and now someone she loves, maybe the love of her life, is dead.
“If you don’t mind.” I indicate to Chang that I want to look and touch as he takes photographs.
Had I been here during Jaime’s crisis, I could have saved her. There were signs and symptoms, and I ignored them, and I don’t know how I will explain that to my niece.
“Sure, go ahead,” he says. “Any reason for you to suspect she might have had something inside this apartment that someone else wanted to get hold of? I notice several computers and what looks like case records and other confidential documents in the living room. What about sensitive information on her computers?”
“I have no idea what’s on her computers. Or even if they’re her computers.”
I could have gotten a squad here. I could have given her CPR, I could have breathed for her until paramedics took over with an Ambu bag as they rushed her to the ER. She should be in a hospital now, on a ventilator. She should be all right. What she shouldn’t be is cold and stiff on her bed, and I will have to tell Lucy I failed Jaime and I failed her. I’m not sure Lucy will forgive me. I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. All these years she has made the same comments to me again and again, repeating the same objections because I make the same mistakes. Don’t fight my battles. Don’t feel my feelings. Don’t try to fix everything, because you only make it worse.
I made it worse. I couldn’t have made it any worse, and I’m saying to Chang, “I think you’re aware of what Jaime’s been doing in Savannah, and therefore the nature of the documents you’re referring to. But to answer your question, I wouldn’t know if she had something inside her apartment that someone might have wanted. I have no idea what’s on the computers in the living room.”
“When you were with her, did she say anything to give you the impression she was worried about someone wanting to harm her?”
“Only that she’d gotten increasingly security-conscious,” I reply. “But she didn’t mention anything specific about being afraid of anything or anyone.”
“Don’t know what jewelry and other valuables she might have brought down here from New York, but her watch is still sitting there.” He indicates a gold Cartier watch on a black leather strap on the counter near a glass that has a small amount of water in it. “Seems like that would have been worth stealing. I’m wondering if she started rummaging for medication or something when she was drunk.”