“Just answer my question, please.”
“Some little armpit of a town called Six Mile.”
“Thank you.”
“Hey! Before you hang up, you mind telling me what went down in D.C.?”
“Not tonight, Marino. If I can’t find you tomorrow, you get hold of me.”
At 5:45 A.M., Richmond International Airport was deserted. Restaurants were closed, newspapers were stacked in front of locked-up gift shops, and a janitor was slowly wheeling a trash can around, a somnambulist picking up gum wrappers and cigarette butts.
I found Marino inside the USAir terminal, eyes shut and raincoat wadded behind his head as he napped in an airless, artificially lit room of empty chairs and dotted blue carpet. For a fleeting moment I saw him as if I did not know him, my heart touched in a sad, sweet way. Marino had aged.
I don’t think I had been in my new job more than several days when I met him for the first time. I was in the morgue performing an autopsy when a big man with an impassive face walked in and positioned himself on the other side of the table. I remembered feeling his cool scrutiny. I had the uncomfortable sensation he was dissecting me as thoroughly as I was dissecting my patient.
“So you’re the new chief.”
He had posed the comment as a challenge, as if daring me to acknowledge that I believed I could fill a position never before held by a woman.
“I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” I had replied. “You’re with Richmond City, I assume?”
He had mumbled his name, then waited in silence while I removed several bullets from his homicide case and receipted them to him. He strolled off without so much as a “good-bye” or “nice to meet you,” by which point our professional rapport had been established. I perceived he resented me for no cause other than my gender, and in turn I dismissed him as a dolt with a brain pickled by testosterone. In truth, he had secretly intimidated the hell out of me.
It was hard for me to look at Marino now and imagine I had ever found him threatening. He looked old and defeated, shirt straining across his big belly, wisps of graying hair unruly, brow drawn in what was neither a scowl nor a frown but a series of deep creases caused by the erosion of chronic tension and displeasure.
“Good morning.”
I gently touched his shoulder.
“What’s in the bag?” he muttered without opening his eyes.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said, surprised.
He sat up and yawned.
Settling next to him, I opened the paper sack and got out Styrofoam cups of coffee and cream cheese bagels I had fixed at home and heated in the microwave oven just before heading out in the dark.
“I assume you haven’t eaten?”
I handed him a napkin.
“Those look like real bagels.”
“They are,” I said, unwrapping mine.
“I thought you said the plane left at six.”
“Six-thirty. I’m quite sure that’s what I told you. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”
“Yeah, well I have been.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You got the tickets, right?”
“In my purse,” I replied. There were times when Marino and I sounded like an old married couple.
“You ask me, I’m not sure this idea of yours is worth the price. It wouldn’t come out of my pocket, even if I had it. But it don’t thrill me that you’re getting soaked, Doc. It would make me feel better if you at least tried to get reimbursed.”
“It wouldn’t make me feel better.”
We had been through this before. “I’m not turning in a reimbursement voucher, and you aren’t, either. You turn in a voucher and you leave a paper trail. Besides,” I added, sipping my coffee, “I can afford it.”
“If it would save me six hundred bucks, I’d leave a paper trail from here to the moon.”
“Nonsense. I know you better than that.”
“Yeah. Nonsense is right. This whole thing’s goofy as shit.”
He dumped several packs of sugar into his coffee. “I think Abby Turncoat scrambled your brains.”
“Thank you,” I replied shortly.
Other passengers were filing in, and it was amazing the power Marino had to make the world tilt slightly on its axis. He had chosen to sit in an area designated as non-smoking, then had carried an upright ashtray from rows away and placed it by his chair. This served as a subliminal invitation for other semi-awake smokers to a settle near us, several of whom carried over additional ashtrays. By the time we were ready to board there was hardly an ashtray to be found in the smoking area and nobody seemed quite sure where to sit. Embarrassed and determined to have no part in this unfriendly takeover.