He knew I did. He had “dropped by” videotapes before. “What sort of videotape?”
I asked.
“This drone I spent the entire morning with. Interviewing him about Beryl Madison.”
He paused. I could tell he was pleased with himself.
The longer I knew Marino, the more he had begun subjecting me to show-and-tell. In part I attributed this phenomenon to his saving my life, a horrific event that had served to bond us into an unlikely pair.
“You on duty?” I asked.
“Hell, I’m always on duty,” he grumbled.
“Seriously.”
“Not officially, okay? Knocked off at four, but the wife’s off in Jersey visiting her mother and I got more loose ends to tie up than a damn rug maker.”
His wife was gone. His kids were grown. It was a gray, raw Saturday. Marino didn’t want to go home to an empty house. I wasn’t exactly feeling contented and cheery inside my empty house, either. I stared at the pot of sauce simmering on the stove.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Drop by with your videotape and we’ll watch it together. You like spaghetti?”
He hesitated. “Well…”
“With meatballs. And I’m getting ready to make the pasta now. You’ll eat with me?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I can do that.”
When Beryl Madison wanted a clean car, it was her habit to visit Masterwash on Southside.
Marino had found this out by hitting every high-class car wash in the city. There weren’t that many, a dozen at most that offered to roll your driverless car automatically through an assembly line of
“hula skirts” gyrating over sudsy paint as spray jets fired needle streams of water. Following a quick hot-air drying, the car was manned by a human being and driven to a bay where attendants vacuumed, waxed, buffed, dressed the bumpers, and all the rest of it. A Masterwash “Super Deluxe,” Marino informed me, was fifteen dollars.
“I was lucky as hell,” Marino said as he guided spaghetti onto his fork with a soup spoon. “How do you track down something like that, huh? The drones wipe off, what, seventy, a hundred rides a day? And you think they’re gonna notice a black Honda? Hell, no.”
He was the happy hunter. He had bagged the big one. I knew when I had given him the preliminary fiber report last week he would start hitting every car wash and body shop in the city. One thing about Marino, if there was one bush in the desert, he had to look behind it.
“Hit pay dirt yesterday,” he went on. “Buzzed by Mas terwash. Was close to last on my list because of its location. Me, I figured Beryl would take her Honda to some West Endy joint. But she didn’t, took it Southside, and the only reason I can figure for that is the place has a body and detail shop.
Turns out she took her car in shortly after she bought it last December and had one of those hundred-buck jobs done to seal the undercoating and paint. Next thing, she’s opened an account there, made herself a member so she could get two bucks knocked off each wash and the perk of the week thrown in free.”
“That’s how you found out about it?” I asked. “Because of this membership deal?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “They don’t have a computer. Had
to look through all their damn receipts. But I found a copy of when she paid for her membership, and based on the condition of her car when we found it in her garage, I was guessing she had it washed not long before she ran off to Key West. Been rooting through her paperwork, too, looking at her charge-card bills. Only one listing for Mas-terwash, and that’s the hundred-buck job I told you about. Apparently she paid cash when she had her ride cleaned after that.”
“The car wash attendants,” I said. “What do they wear?”
“Nothing orange that might fit with that oddball fiber you found. Most of ’em wear jeans, running shoes–all of ’em have on these blue shirts with ‘Masterwash’ embroidered in white on the pocket. I looked over everything while I was there. Nothing hit me. Only other fabric-type shit I saw was the barrels of white towels they use to wipe down the cars.”