“Maybe she pissed him off or something,” Marino went on. “Maybe he’d just had a bad conversation with his mother, who the hell knows?”
“What’s going to happen when people like Al Carson don’t call you anymore?”
“It’s my damn case,” he said as if he hadn’t heard me. “Gant was my case, and this one is too, any way you look at it. Even if it’s not the same killer, who’s gonna figure that out before I do, since I’m the one who knows everything there is about it?”
“You can’t always barge in with both barrels going,” I said. “That’s not going to work with Bray. You’ve got to find a way to make it worth her while to tolerate you, and you better figure that out in the next five minutes.”
He was silent as I turned onto Libbie Avenue.
“You’re smart, Marino,” I added. “Use your head. This isn’t about turf or egos. This is about a woman who’s dead:’
“Shit,” he said. “What the fuck’s wrong with people?”
The Quik Cary was a small market that had neither a plate-glass front nor gas pumps. It wasn’t brightly lit up or located in a spot that attracted customers either coming off or getting on heavily traveled roads. Except during the holidays, it stayed open only until six.
The parking lot throbbed red and blue, and in the midst of rumbling engines, cops and an awaiting rescue crew, Bray gloried in an aura of television lights that floated around her like a flotilla of small suns. She. was dressed in a long red wool cape, heels, and diamond earrings that flashed with each turn of her beautiful, head. By all appearances she had just rushed out of a black-tie party.
It was beginning to sleet as I lifted my crime case out of the trunk. Bray spotted me before the media did, and then her eyes found Marino and anger touched her face.
“. . . will not release that until her family has been notified,” she was saying to the press.
“Watch this,” Marino said under his breath.
He walked with a sense of urgency toward the store and did something I’d never seen him do before. He left himself wide open for a media ambush. He even went so far as to get on his portable radio as he tensely cast about, sending out every signal imaginable that he was in charge and knew many secrets.
“You in there, two-oh-two?” his voice carried to me as I locked up my car.
“Ten-four,” a voice came back.
“In front, comin’ in,” Marino mumbled.
“Meet ya.”
At least ten reporters and cameramen instantly surrounded him. It was amazing how fast they moved.
“Captain Marino?”
“Captain Marino!”
“How much money was stolen?”
Marino didn’t shoo them off. Bray’s eyes dragged across his face like claws as all attention shifted to him, this man whose neck her foot was on.
“Did they keep less than sixty dollars in the drawer like other convenience stores do?”
“Do you think convenience stores should have security guards this time of year?”
Marino, unshaven and full of beer, looked into the cameras and said, “If it was my store, I sure as hell would.”
I locked my car. Bray was walking toward me.
“So you attribute these two robbery-homicides to the Christmas season?” another reporter said to Marino.
“I attribute them to some squirrel who’s cold-blooded and got no conscience. He’ll do it again,” Marino
answered. “And we’ve got to stop him and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Bray confronted me as I made my way around police cars. She had her cape pulled tightly around her, and she was as cold and stinging as the weather.
“Why do you let him do this?” she asked me.
I stopped in my tracks and looked her in the eye, my frosted breath puffing like a coal train about to run her over.
“Let is not a word I use with Marino,” I said. “I suspect you’re finding that out the hard way.”
A reporter for a local gossip magazine raised his voice above the others and said, “Captain Marino! Talk on the street is you’re not a detective anymore. What are you doing here”