He paused. “The upholstery of the driver’s seat was rotted out.”
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, looking up from the letter I was glancing over.
“He had it covered with a blanket he must have swiped from one of the planes.”
“The source of the orange fiber?” I inquired.
“They got to run some tests. But we’re thinking that’s the case. The blanket’s got orangish-red pinstripes running through it, and Frankie would have been sitting on it when he drove to Beryl’s house. Probably explains the terrorist shit. Some passenger was using a blanket like Frankie’s during an overseas flight. The guy changes planes and it just so happens an orange fiber ends up on the one that gets hijacked in Greece. Bingo! Some poor Marine ends up with this same type of fiber stuck to his blood after he’s whacked. Got any idea how many fibers must get transferred from plane to plane?”
“It’s hard to imagine,” I agreed, wondering why I merited being on every junk mailer’s list in the United States. “And it probably also explains why Frankie carried so many fibers on his clothes. He was working in the baggage area. He was all over the airport and may even have gone inside the planes. Who knows what he did or what debris he picked up on his clothes?”
“Omega wears uniform shirts,” Marino remarked. “Tan. They’re made of Dynel.”
“That’s interesting.”
“You should know that, Doc,” he said, watching me closely. “He was wearing one when you shot him.”
I didn’t remember. I remembered only his dark rain slicker, and his face bloody and covered with the white powder from my fire extinguisher.
“Okay,” I said. “So far I’m following you, Marino. But what I don’t understand is how Frankie got Beryl’s telephone number. It was unlisted. And how did he know she was flying in from Key West the night of October twenty-ninth, the night she returned to Richmond? And how the hell did he know when I flew in, too?”
“The computers,” he said. “All passenger info, including flight schedules, phone numbers, and home addresses, is in the computers. All we can figure is Frankie sometimes played around with the computers when one of the counters was unattended, maybe late at night or early in the morning. The airport was like his damn crib. No telling what all he was into without anybody paying him any mind. He wasn’t much of a talker, a real low-profile kind of guy, the sort who slips around quiet as a cat.”
“According to his Stanford-Binet,” I mused, grinding the date stamp into its dried-out ink pad, “he was well above average in intelligence.”
Marino said nothing.
I mumbled, “His IQ was in the upper one-twenty range.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Marino said somewhat impatiently.
“I’m just telling you.”
“Shit. You really take those tests seriously, don’t you?”
“They’re a good indicator.”
“They ain’t gospel.”
“No, I won’t say that Intelligence Quotient tests are gospel,” I agreed.
“Maybe I’m glad I don’t know what mine is.”
“You could have your IQ tested, Marino. It’s never too late.”
“Hope it’s higher than my damn bowling score. That’s all I got to say.”
‘
“Not likely. Not unless you’re a pretty sorry bowler.”
“I was last time I went.”
I slipped off my glasses and gingerly rubbed my eyes. I had a headache that I was sure would never go away.
Marino went on, “All me and Benton can figure is Frankie got Beryl’s phone number out of the computer, and after a while was monitoring her flights. I’m figuring he knew from the computer that she’d taken a plane to Miami back in July when she ran off after finding that heart scratched on her car door–”
“Any theories as to when he might have done this?” I interrupted, pulling the wastepaper basket closer.
“When she’d fly to Baltimore she’d leave her car at the airport, and the last time she met Miss Harper up there was in early July, less than a week before Beryl found that heart scratched on her door,” he said.
“So he may have done it while her car was parked at the airport.”
“What do you think?”