“I’m guessing that’s what happened. You know, he spots her for the first time when he delivers Harper’s bags to the McTigues’ house last January. Then what? He spots her again maybe a couple weeks later when he’s hanging out at Al Hunt’s car wash begging for a loan. Bingo. It’s like a message to him. Then maybe he spots her again at the airport–he was in and out all the time picking up lost bags, doing who knows what. Maybe he sees Beryl this third time when she’s at the airport catching a plane for Baltimore, where she’s going to meet Miss Harper.”
“Do you think Frankie talked to Hunt about Beryl, too?”
“No way to know. But I wouldn’t be surprised. It would sure help explain why Hunt hung himself.
He saw it coming–what his squirrelly pal finally did to Beryl. Then, next thing, Harper gets whacked. Hunt probably felt guilty as shit.”
I shifted painfully in my chair as I shoved paper around in search of the date stamp I’d had in hand but a second ago. I ached all over and was seriously contemplating having my right shoulder X-rayed. As for my psyche, I wasn’t sure what anyone could do about that. I didn’t feel like myself. I wasn’t sure what I felt except that it was very hard for me to sit still. It was impossible for me to relax.
I commented, “Part of Frankie’s delusional thinking would be to personalize his encounters with Beryl and ascribe profound significance to them. He sees Beryl at the McTigues’ house. He sees her at the car wash. He sees her in the airport. It would really set him off.”
“Yeah. Now the schizo knows God’s talking to him, telling him he has some connection with this pretty blond lady.”
Just then Rose walked in. Taking the pink telephone message she offered to me, I added it to the pile.
“What color was his car?”
I slit open another envelope. Frankie’s car had been parked in my drive. I had seen it when the police arrived, when my property was pulsing with red strobe lights. But nothing had penetrated. I remembered very few details.
“Dark blue.”
“And no one remembers seeing a blue Mercury Lynx in Beryl’s neighborhood?”
Marino shook his head. “After dark, if he had his headlights off, the car wouldn’t exactly be conspicuous.”
“True.”
“As for when he hit Harper, he probably pulled his ride off the road somewhere and went the rest of the way on foot.”
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.