“I think that seems very plausible.”
“Ditto.”
“Then Beryl flees to Key West.”
I continued attacking my mail. “And Frankie keeps checking the computer for her return reservation. That’s how he knew exactly when she’d be back.”
“The night of October twenty-ninth,” Marino said. “And Frankie had it all figured out. A piece of cake. He had legitimate access to the passengers’ baggage, and I figure he probably checked out the bags from her flight as they were being loaded on the conveyor belt. When he finds a bag with Beryl’s name tag on it, he snatches it. A little later, she’s complaining that her brown leather tote bag is missing.”
He didn’t need to add that this was exactly the same maneuver Frankie used on me. He monitored my return from Florida. He snatched my suitcase. Then he appeared at my door, and I let him in.
The governor had invited me to a reception I had missed by a week. I supposed Fielding had gone in my place. The invitation went into the trash.
Marino went on to supply more details about what the police had discovered inside Frankie Aims’s Northside apartment.
Inside his bedroom was Beryl’s tote bag, containing her bloody blouse and underclothes. Inside a trunk that served as a table next to his bed was an assortment of violent pornographic magazines and a bag of small-gauge pellets that Frankie had used to fill the section of pipe he bashed against Gary Harper’s head. Out of this same trunk came an envelope containing a second set of Beryl’s computer disks, still taped between two stiff squares of cardboard, and the photocopy of Beryl’s manuscript, including the opening page of Chapter Twenty-five that she had gotten mixed up with the original Mark and I had read. Benton Wesley’s theory was that Frankie’s habit was to sit up in bed reading Beryl’s book while he fondled the clothes she was wearing when he murdered her. Perhaps so. What I did know with certainty was that Beryl never had a chance. When Frankie arrived at her door, he was carrying her leather tote bag and identifying himself as a courier. Even if she recognized him from that night when he had delivered Gary Harper’s bags to the McTigues’ house, there was no reason for her to give it a second thought–just as I had not given it a second thought until I had already opened my door.
“If only she hadn’t invited him in,” I muttered. My letter opener had disappeared. Where the hell had it gone?
“It made sense that she would,” Marino replied. “Frankie’s all official and smiling and wearing an Omega uniform shirt and cap. He’s got the bag, meaning he’s also got her manuscript. She’s relieved. She’s grateful. She opens the door, deactivates the alarm, and invites him in–”
“But why did she reset the alarm, Marino? I have a burglar alarm system, too. And I have delivery men arrive occasionally, too. If my alarm is on when UPS pulls up to the house, I deactivate it and open the door. If I’m trusting enough to invite the person in, I’m certainly not going to reset the alarm only to have to deactivate it and reset it again a minute later when the person leaves.”
“You ever locked your keys in your car?” Marino looked thoughtfully at me.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just answer my question.”
“Of course I have.” I found my letter opener. It was in my lap.
“How does it happen? In new cars, they got all kinds of safety devices to prevent it, Doc.”
“Right. And I learn them all so well I go through the motions without a thought, and next thing my doors are locked, my keys dangling from the ignition.”
“I have a feeling that’s exactly what Beryl did,” Marino went on. “I think she was obsessive about that damn alarm system she had installed after she started getting the threats. I think she kept it on all the time, that it was a reflex for her to punch those buttons the minute she shut her front door.”
He hesitated, staring off at my bookcase. “Kind of weird. She leaves her damn gun in the kitchen and then resets her alarms after letting the drone inside her house. Shows how screwy her mind was, how nervous the whole ordeal made her.”