On the whitewashed wall left of a door leading into a hallway were dark spatters of dried blood.
“Does her alarm have a time delay?”
I asked. “Oh, yeah. You open the door and the alarm hums about fifteen seconds, long enough for you to punch in your code before it goes off.”
“Then she must have opened the door, deactivated the alarm, let the person in, and then reset the alarm while he was still here. Otherwise, it would never have gone off later, when he left.
Interesting.”
“Yeah,” Marino replied, “interesting as shit.”
We were inside the living room, standing near the overturned coffee table. It was sooty with dusting powder. The magazines on the floor were news and literary publications, all of them several months old.
“Did you find any recent newspapers or magazines?”
I asked. “If she bought a paper locally, it could be important. Anywhere she went after getting off the plane is worth checking.”
I saw his jaw muscles flex. Marino hated it when he assumed I was telling him how to do his job.
He said, “There were a couple of things upstairs in her bedroom where her briefcase and bags was.
A Miami Her aid and something called the Keynoter, has mostly real estate listings for the Keys.
Maybe she was thinking of moving down there? Both papers came out Monday. She must’ve bought them, maybe picked them up in the airport on her way back to Richmond.”
“I’d be interested in what her realtor has to say …”
“Nothing, that’s what he has to say,” he interrupted.
“Has no idea where Beryl was and only showed her house once while she was gone. Some young couple. Decided the price was too high. Beryl was asking three hundred Gs for the joint.”
He looked around, his face impervious. “Guess someone could get a deal now.”
“Beryl took a taxi home from the airport the night she got in.”
I doggedly pursued the details.
He got out a cigarette and pointed with it. “Found the receipt in the foyer there, on that little table by the door. Already checked out the driver, a guy named Woodrow Hunnel. Dumb as a bag of hammers. Said he was waiting in the line of cabs at the airport. She flagged him down. This was close to eight, it was raining cats and dogs. He let her out here at the house maybe forty minutes later, said he carried her two suitcases to the door, then split. The fare was twenty-six bucks, including the tip. He was back at the airport about half an hour later picking up another fare.”
“You’re sure, or is this what he told you?”
“Sure as I’m damn standing here.”
He tapped the cigarette on his knuckle and began fingering the filtered tip with his thumb. “We checked out the story. Hunnel was shooting straight with us. He didn’t touch the lady. There wasn’t time.”
I followed his eyes to the dark spatters near the doorway. The killer’s clothing would have been bloody. It wasn’t likely a cabdriver with bloody clothes was going to be picking up fares.
“She hadn’t been home long,” I said. “Got in around nine and a neighbor calls in her alarm at eleven. It had been going for a half hour, meaning the killer was gone by around ten-thirty.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “That’s the hardest part to figure. Based on those letters, she was scared shitless. So she sneaks back to the city, locks herself inside her house, even has her three-eighty on the kitchen counter–show you that when we get there. Then, boom! The doorbell rings or what?
Next thing you know, she’s let the squirrel in and reset the burglar alarm behind him. Had to be somebody she knew.”
“I wouldn’t rule out a stranger,” I said. “If the person is very smooth, she may have trusted him, let him in for some other reason.”
“At that hour?”
His eyes flicked me as they went around the room. “What? He’s selling magazine subscriptions, Good Humor bars at ten o’clock at night?”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t know.
We stopped at the open doorway leading into a hallway.