“You didn’t ask.”
What was in Detroit besides the failing auto industry? Scarpetta picked up Lucy’s MacBook.
“I must have asked.” But she couldn’t think of an occasion when she had.
“You didn’t,” Lucy said.
Googling the Lecoq Foundation and finding nothing. Googling Monsieur Lecoq and finding only the expected multiple references to the nineteenth-century French detective novel by Émile Gabo riau. Scarpetta couldn’t find any reference to a real person named Monsieur Lecoq who was a wealthy philanthropist invested in paranormal psychology.
“And you certainly don’t hesitate to interrogate me about anything else that comes to your mind,” Lucy continued. “But you never asked me any specifics about my finances, and if I mentioned the Money Man, you didn’t even ask about him.”
“Maybe I was afraid.” Scarpetta reflected on that sad probability. “So I shied away from the subject by rationalizing that I shouldn’t pry.”
Googling Motor City Casino Hotel and the Grand Palais in Detroit. Receipts from both hotels over the past few years but no evidence Agee had ever stayed in either of them. Doing what? Gambling? Was he a gambler and got rooms comped, perhaps? How could he afford to be a gambler? A piece of paper from a personalized memo pad: From the Desk of Freddie Maestro and what looked like a PIN and City Bank of Detroit and an address written with a felt-tip pen. Why was the name Freddie Maestro familiar? Was the PIN for an ATM?
“Right,” Lucy said. “You can talk about dead bodies and sex but not about someone’s net worth. You can dig through some dead person’s pockets and dresser drawers and personal files and receipts but not ask me very basic questions about how I make my living and who I’m in business with. You never asked me,” Lucy emphasized. “I figured you didn’t want to know because you believed I was doing something illegal. Stealing or cheating the government, so I let it go because I sure as hell wasn’t going to defend myself to you or anyone.”
“I didn’t know because I didn’t want to know.” Scarpetta’s own insecurity because she’d grown up poor. “Because I wanted a level playing field.” Her own inadequacy because she was powerless when she was a child and her family had no money and her father was dying. “And I can’t compete with you when it comes to making money. I’m pretty good at holding on to what I’ve got, but I’ve never had the Midas touch or been in the business of business for the sake of business. I’m not particularly good at it.”
“Why would you want to compete with me?”
“That’s my point. I didn’t. I wouldn’t because I can’t. Maybe I was afraid of losing your respect. And why would you respect my business acumen? If I’d been a brilliant businesswoman, I wouldn’t have gone to law school, to med school, spent twelve years of postgraduate education so I could earn less than a lot of Realtors or car salesmen.”
“If I was such a brilliant businesswoman we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” Lucy said.
Googling Michigan on the Internet. The new Las Vegas, and a lot of movies were being filmed there, the state doing what it could to pump money into its hemorrhaging economy. A forty percent tax incentive. And casinos. Michigan had a vocational school for casino dealer training, and some of the organizations supplying tuition assistance included the Veterans Administration, the United Steelworkers, and the United Auto Workers. Come home from Iraq or lose your job at GM and become a blackjack dealer.
“I fucked up. Rupe died last May, and Hannah inherited everything and completely took over. An MBA from Wharton, I’m not saying she isn’t smart,” Lucy said.
“She took over your account?”
“She tried.”
People had to survive any way they could these days, and vices and entertainment were doing well. Movies, the food and beverage industry. Especially liquor. When people feel bad they actively seek feeling good. What did this have to do with Warner Agee? What had he gotten involved in? Scarpetta thought about Toni Darien’s dice keychain and High Roller Lanes being like Vegas, as Bonnell had put it. Mrs. Darien said Toni hoped to end up in Paris or Monte Carlo someday, and her MIT-trained father, Lawrence Darien, was a gambler who might have ties to organized crime, according to Marino. Freddie Maestro, Scarpetta remembered. The name of the man who owned High Roller Lanes. He had game arcades and other businesses in Detroit, Louisiana, South Florida, and she couldn’t remember where else. Ultimately, he had been Toni Darien’s boss. Maybe he knew her father.
“I’d met her a few times, then we had a discussion at her place in Florida and I told her no,” Lucy said. “But I let my guard down and acted on a tip she gave me. I dodged a bullet and got a knife in my back. I didn’t follow my instincts, and she fucked me. She fucked me good.”
“Are you bankrupt?” Scarpetta asked.
Googling Dr. Warner Agee with a combination of keywords. Gambling, casinos, the gaming industry, and Michigan.
“No,” Lucy said. “What I have isn’t the point. It’s not even what I lost. She wanted to hurt me. It gave her pleasure.”
“If Jaime’s doing such a thorough investigation, how can she not know?”
“Who’s doing the thorough investigation, Aunt Kay? It isn’t her. Not the electronic information. All of that’s from me.”
“She has no idea you knew Hannah, that you have this conflict of interest. Because that’s exactly what it is.” Scarpetta talked as she went through more accordion files.
“She’d boot me out of the process, and that would be completely self-defeating and ridiculous,” Lucy answered. “If anybody should be helping, it’s me. And I wasn’t Hannah’s client. I was Rupe’s. You know what’s in his records? Put it this way: Nothing relevant to what Hannah did to me is going to show up. I’ve made sure.”
Scarpetta said, “That’s not right.”
“What’s not right is what she did.”
An article Agee had published in a British journal, Quantum Mechanics, two years earlier. Quantum epistemology and measurement. Planck, Bohr, de Broglie, Einstein. The role of human consciousness in the collapse of the wave function. Single photon interference and causality violations in thermodynamics. The elusiveness of human consciousness.
“What the hell are you looking at?” Lucy asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Scarpetta flipped pages, skimming, reading, stopping at certain sections.
She said, “Students recruited for studies. The relationship between creative and artistic ability and psi. A study done at Juilliard here in New York. Research at Duke University, Cornell, Princeton. The Ganzfeld experiments.”
“Psychic phenomena? ESP?” Lucy had a blank expression on her face.
Scarpetta looked up at her and said, “Sensory deprivation. Why do we want to achieve a state of sensory deprivation?”
“It’s inversely proportional to perception, to acquiring information,” Lucy answered. “The more I deprive my senses, the more I perceive and create. That’s why people meditate.”
“Then why would we want the opposite for anyone? Overstimulation, in other words?” Scarpetta asked.
“We wouldn’t.”
“Unless you’re in the casino business,” Scarpetta said. “Then you would want to seek the most efficient means to overstimulate, to prevent a state of sensory deprivation. You want people to be impulse-driven, to lose their way, so you bombard the visual and auditory environment, the total field, the Ganzfeld, and your clients become a confused quarry without the slightest inkling of what’s safe and what’s not. You blind and deafen them with bright lights and noise so you can take what they’ve got. So you can steal.”
Scarpetta couldn’t stop thinking about Toni Darien and her job in a glitzy place of flashing lights and fast-moving images on huge video displays, where people were encouraged to spend money on food, liquor, and games. Bowl badly and play some more. Bowl badly and drink some more. Hap Judd’s photograph was hanging in High Roller Lanes. He might have known Toni. He might know a former patient of Benton’s, Dodie Hodge. Marino had said something about it to Berger during the conference call last night. Warner Agee might have known Toni Darien’s boss, Freddie Maestro. These people might all know one another or be connected somehow. It was almost nine a.m., and Scarpetta was surrounded by the receipts, spent tickets, schedules, publications-the detritus of Agee’s self-serving, ill-purposed life. The soulless bastard. She got up from the floor.