I was getting a headache.
Next he took me into a small room where a laser printer was sweeping out miles of green-striped paper.
The stack of paper on the floor was already two feet high.
“I buzzed the boys down here before we left your office,” he laconically explained. “Had ’em print out everything from the computer for the last two months.”
Oh, God.
“So the addresses and everything are there.” His flat brown eyes glanced at me. “You’ll have to look at the hard copies to see what came up on the screen when the calls was made. Without the addresses, you won’t know which call’s what.”
“Can’t we just pull up exactly what we want to know on the computer?” I broke out in exasperation.
“You know anything about mainframes?”
Of course I didn’t.
He looked around. “Nobody in this joint knows squat about the mainframe. We got one computer person upstairs. Just so happens he’s at the beach right now. Only way to get in an expert is if there’s a crash. Then they call DP and the department gets knocked up for seventy bucks an hour. Even if the department’s willing to cooperate with you, those DP dip-sticks are as slow coming around as payday. The guy’s going to get around to it late tomorrow, Monday, sometime next week, and that’s if Lady Luck’s on your side, Doc. Fact is, you was lucky I could find somebody smart enough to hit a Print button.”
We stood in the room for thirty minutes. Finally, the printer stopped and Marino ripped off the paper. The stack was close to three feet high. He put it inside an empty printer-paper box he found somewhere and hoisted it up with a grunt.
As I followed him back out of the radio room, he tossed over his shoulder to a young, nice-looking black communications officer, “If you see Cork, I gotta message for him.”
“Shoot,” the officer said with a yawn.
“Tell him he ain’t driving no eighteen-wheeler rig no more and this ain’t Smokey and the Bandit.”
The officer laughed. He sounded exactly like Eddie Murphy.
For the next day and a half I didn’t even get dressed but was sequestered inside my home wearing a nylon warmup suit and headphones.
Bertha was an angel and took Lucy on an all-day outing.
I was avoiding my downtown office, where I was sure to be interrupted every five minutes. I was racing against time, praying I came up with something before Friday dissolved into the first few hours of Saturday morning. I was convinced he would be out there again.
I’d already checked in with Rose twice. She said Amburgey’s office had tried to get me four times since I drove off with Marino. The commissioner was demanding I come see him immediately, demanding I provide him with an explanation of yesterday morning’s front-page story, of “this latest and most outrageous leak,” in his words. He wanted the DNA report. He wanted the report on this “latest evidence” turned in. He was so furious he actually got on the phone himself threatening Rose, who had plenty of thorns.
“What did you say to him?” I asked her in amazement.
“I told him I’d leave the message on your desk. When he threatened to have me fired if I didn’t hook him up with you immediately, I told him that was fine. I’ve never sued anybody before . . .”
“You didn’t.”
“I most certainly did. If the little jerk had another brain it would rattle.”
My answering machine was on. If Amburgey tried to call me at home he was only going to get my mechanical ear.
It was the stuff of nightmares. Each tape covered seven twenty-four-hour days. Of course, the tapes weren’t that many hours long because often there were only three or four two-minute calls per hour. It simply depended on how busy the 911 room was on any given shift. My problem was finding the exact time period when I thought one of the homicides was called in. If I got impatient, I might whiz right on by and have to back up. Then I lost my place. It was awful.
Also, it was as depressing as hell. Emergency calls ranged from the mentally disenfranchised whose bodies were being invaded by aliens, to people roaring drunk, to poor men and women whose spouses had just keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke. There were a lot of automobile accidents, suicide threats, prowlers, barking dogs, stereos up too loud and fire-crackers and car backfires that came in as shootings.
I was skipping around. So far I had managed to find three of the calls I was looking for. Brenda’s, Henna’s and, just now, Lori’s. I backed up the tape until I found the aborted 911 call Lori apparently made to the police right before she was murdered. The call came in at exactly 12:49 A.M., Saturday, June 7, and all that was on the tape was the operator picking up the line and crisply saying, “911.”