“Oh, hell,’ he complained. “Some drone swiped my lighter. At the car wash. I mean, I’d only had the car a day, you believe it? I take her in, right? Was too busy bitching after the fact, the brushes broke off the antenna, was giving the drones holy hell about that…”
Sometimes Marino reminded me of my mother.
“… wasn’t until later I noticed the damn lighter gone.”
He paused, digging in his pocket as I rummaged through my purse for matches.
“Yo, Chief, thought you was gonna quit smoking,” he said rather sarcastically, dropping a Bic lighter in my lap.
“I am,” I muttered. “Tomorrow.”
The night Beryl Madison was murdered I was out enduring an overblown opera followed by drinks in an overrated English pub with a retired judge who became something less than honorable as the evening progressed. I wasn’t wearing my pager. Unable to reach me, the police had summoned
Fielding, my deputy chief, to the scene. This would be the first time I had been inside the slain author’s house.
Windsor Farms was not the sort of neighborhood where one would expect anything so hideous to happen. Homes were large and set back from the street on impeccably landscaped lots. Most had burglar alarm systems, and all featured central air, eliminating the need for open windows. Money can’t buy eternity, but it can buy a certain degree of security. I had never had a homicide case from the Farms.
“Obviously she had money from somewhere,” I observed as Marino halted at a stop sign.
A snowy-haired woman walking her snowy Maltese squinted at us as the dog sniffed a tuft of grass, which was followed by the inevitable.
“What a worthless fuzz ball,” he said, staring disdainfully at the woman and the dog moving on.
“Hate mutts like that. Yap their damn heads off and piss all over the place. Gonna have a dog, ought to be something with teeth.”
“Some people simply want company,” I said.
“Yeah.”
He paused, then picked up on my earlier statement. “Beryl Madison had money, most of it tied up in her crib. Apparently whatever savings she had, she blew the dough down there in Queer West.
We’re still sorting through her paperwork.”
“Had any of it been gone through?”
“Don’t look like it,” he replied. “Found out she didn’t do half bad as a writer–bucks-wise. Appears she used several pen names. Adair Wilds, Emily Stratton, Edith Montague.”
The mirrored shades turned my way again.
None of the names were familiar except Stratton. I said, “Her middle name is Stratton.”
“Maybe accounting for her nickname, Straw.”
“That and her blond hair,” I remarked.
Beryl’s hair was honey blond streaked gold by the sun. She was petite, with even, refined features.
She may have been striking in life. It was hard to say. The only photograph from life I had seen was the one on her driver’s license.
“When I talked to her half sister,” Marino was explaining, “I found out Beryl was called Straw by the people she was close to. Whoever she was writing down there in the Keys, this person was aware of her nickname. That’s the impression I get.”
He adjusted the visor. “Can’t figure why she Xeroxed those letters. Been chewing on that. I mean, how many people do you know who make photocopies of personal letters they write?”
“You’ve indicated she was an inveterate record keeper,” I reminded him.
“Right. That’s bugging me, too. Supposedly the squirrel’s been threatening her for months. What’d he do? What’d he say? Don’t know, because she didn’t tape his calls or write nothing down. The lady makes photocopies of personal letters but don’t keep a record when someone’s threatening to whack her. Tell me if that makes sense.”
“Not everybody thinks the way we do.”
“Well, some people don’t think because they’re in the middle of something they don’t want nobody to know about,” he argued.
Pulling into a drive, he parked in front of the garage door. The grass was badly overgrown and spangled with tall dandelions swaying in the breeze, and there was a FOR SALE sign planted near the mailbox. Still tacked across the gray front door was a ribbon of yellow crime-scene tape.