Postmortem(82)

Somehow I collected all of these things and followed Marino to his car. I opened the passenger door and the interior light didn’t go on. Slipping inside, I groped for the shoulder harness and brushed crumbs and a wadded paper napkin off the seat.

He backed out of the lot without saying a word to me. The scanner light blinked from channel to channel as dispatchers transmitted calls Marino didn’t seem interested in and which often I didn’t understand. Cops mumbled into the microphone. Some of them seemed to eat it.

“Three-forty-five, ten-five, one-sixty-nine on chan’l three.”

“One-sixty-nine, switchin’ ov’.”

“You free?”

“Ten-ten. Ten-seventeen the breath room. With subj’t.”

“Raise me whenyurten-twen-fo’.”

“Ten-fo’.”

“Four-fifty-one.”

“Four-fifty-one X.”

“Ten-twenty-eight on Adam Ida Lincoln one-seven-zero . . .”

Calls went out and alert tones blared like a bass key on an electric organ. Marino drove in silence, passing through downtown where storefronts were barred with the iron curtains drawn at the end of the day. Red and green neon signs in windows garishly advertised pawnshops and shoe repairs and greasy-spoon specials. The Sheraton and Marriott were lit up like ships, but there were very few cars or pedestrians out, just shadowy clusters of peripatetics from the projects lingering on corners. The whites of their eyes followed us as we passed.

It wasn’t until several minutes later that I realized where we were going. On Winchester Place we slowed to a crawl in front of 498, Abby Turnbull’s address. The brownstone was a black hulk, the flag a shadow limply stirring over the entrance. There were no cars in front. Abby wasn’t home. I wondered where she was staying now.

Marino slowly pulled off the street and turned into the narrow alleyway between the brownstone and the house next door. The car rocked over ruts, the headlights jumping and illuminating the dark brick sides of the buildings, sweeping over garbage cans chained to posts and broken bottles and other debris. About twenty feet inside this claustrophobic passageway he stopped and cut the engine and the lights. Directly left of us was the backyard of Abby’s house, a narrow shelf of grass girdled by a chain-link fence with a sign warning the world to “Beware” of a “Dog” I knew didn’t exist.

Marino had the car searchlight out and the beam was licking over the rusting fire escape against the back of the house. All of the windows were closed, the glass glinting darkly. The seat creaked as he moved the light around the empty yard.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m waiting to hear if you’re thinking what I am.”

I stated the obvious. “The sign. The sign on the fence. If the killer thought she had a dog, it should have given him pause. None of his victims had dogs. If they had, the women would probably still be alive.”

“Bingo.”

“And,” I went on, “my suspicion is you’re concluding the killer must have known the sign didn’t mean anything, that Abby—or Henna—didn’t have a dog. And how could he know that?”

“Yo. How could he know that,” Marino echoed slowly, “unless he had a reason to know it?”

I said nothing.

He jammed in the cigarette lighter. “Like if maybe he’d been inside the house before.”

“I don’t think so . . .”

“Cut the playing-dumb act, Doc,” he said quietly.

I got out my cigarettes, too, and my hands were trembling.

“I’m picturing it. I think you’re picturing it. Some guy who’s been inside Abby Turnbull’s house. He don’t know her sister’s here, but he does know there ain’t no damn dog. And Miss Turnbull here’s someone he don’t like none too well because she knows something he don’t want anybody in the whole goddam world to know.”

He paused. I could feel him glancing over at me, but I refused to look at him or say a word.

“See, he’s already had his piece of her, right? And maybe he couldn’t help himself when he did his number because he’s got some kind of compulsion, some screw loose, so to speak. He’s worried. He’s worried she’s going to tell. Shit. She’s a goddam reporter. She gets paid to tell people’s dirty secrets. It’s going to come out, what he did.”

Another glance my way, and I remained stonily silent.

“So what’s he do? He decides to whack her and make her look like the other ones. Only little problem is he don’t know about Henna. Don’t know where Abby’s bedroom is either, see, because when he’s been inside the house in the past, he never got any farther than the living room. So he goes in the wrong bedroom—Henna’s bedroom—when he breaks in last Friday night. Why? Because that’s the one with the lights on, because Abby’s out of town. Well, it’s too late. He’s committed himself. He’s got to go through with it. He murders her . . .”