Waiting until he sat back down, I said, “I think threatening to charge him with accessory to murder was a bit much.”
“Got his attention, didn’t I?”
“Give him a chance to save face, Marino.”
He stared sullenly at the curtained window as he smoked.
“I think by now he’s realizing it’s in his best interest to help us,” I said.
“Yeah, well, it’s not in my best interest to sit around playing cat and mouse with him. Even as we speak, Frank-ie Fruitcake’s on the street thinking his screwy thoughts, ticking away like a damn bomb about to go off.”
I thought of my quiet house in my quiet neighborhood, of Gary Harper’s necklace looped over the knob of my back door, and the whispery voice on my answering machine. Is your hair naturally blond, or do you bleach it…. How odd. I puzzled over the significance of that question. Why did it matter to him?
“If Frankie is our killer,” I said quietly, taking a deep breath, “I can’t imagine how there can be any connection between Sparacino and these homicides.”
“We’ll see,” he muttered, lighting up another cigarette and staring sourly at the empty doorway.
“What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?”
“Never ceases to surprise me how one thing leads to another,” he replied cryptically.
“What? What things lead to other things, Marino?”
He glanced at his watch and cursed. “Where the hell is he, anyhow? He go out to lunch?”
“Hopefully he’s tracking down Frankie’s record.”
“Yeah. Hopefully.”
“What things lead to other things?” I asked him again. “What are you thinking about? You mind being a little more specific?”
“Let’s just put it this way,” Marino said. “I got a real strong feeling if it wasn’t for that damn book Beryl was writing, all three of ’em would still be alive. In fact, Hunt would probably still be alive, too.”
“I can’t say that with certainty.”
“Course you can’t. You’re always so goddamn objective. So I’m saying it, okay?”
He looked over at me and rubbed his tired eyes, his face flushed. “I got this feeling, all right? It’s telling me Sparacino, the book, is the connection. It’s what initially linked the killer to Beryl, and then one thing led to another. Next, the squirrel whacks Harper. After that Miss Harper takes enough pills to kill a damn horse so she don’t have to rattle around in that big crib of hers all alone while cancer eats her alive. Then Hunt’s swinging from the rafters in his fuckin’ undershorts.”
The orange fiber with its peculiar three-leaf clover shape drifted through my mind, as did Beryl’s manuscript, Sparacino, Jeb Price, Senator Partin’s Hollywood son, Mrs. McTigue, and Mark. They were limbs and ligaments of a body I could not piece together. In some inexplicable way, they were the alchemy by which seemingly unrelated people and events had been fashioned into Frankie.
Marino was right. One thing always leads to another. Murder never emerges full blown from a vacuum. Nothing evil ever does.
“Do you have any theories as to just what exactly this link might be?”
I asked Marino.
“Nope, not a goddamn one,” he replied with a yawn at the exact moment Dr. Masterson walked into the office and shut the door.
I noticed with satisfaction that he had a stack of case files in hand.
“Now then,” he said coolly and without looking at either of us, “I found no one with the name Frankie, which I’m assuming may be a nickname. Therefore, I pulled cases by date of treatment, age, and race. What I have here are the records of six white males, excluding Al Hunt, who were patients at Valhalla during the interval you’re interested in. All of them are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four.”
“How about you just let us go through them while you sit back and smoke your pipe.”
Marino was a little less combative, but not much.
“I would prefer to give you only their histories, for confidentiality reasons, Lieutenant. If one is of keen interest, we’ll go through his record in detail. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough,” I said before Marino could argue.
“The first case,” Dr. Masterson began, opening the top file, “is a nineteen-year-old from Highland Park, Illinois, admitted in December of 1978 with a history of substance abuse–heroin, specifically.”