“Don’t bother. I can tell you what he ate, was sitting right there. Beer nuts. And two martinis,” he said.
The peanuts had barely begun clearing Harper’s stomach when he died. There was nothing else but brownish fluid, and I could smell the alcohol.
I asked Marino, “What did you find out from him?”
“Not a damn thing.”
I glanced at him as I labeled the container.
“I’m in the tavern drinking tonic and lime,” he said. “I guess this was about quarter of. Harper walks in at five on the nose.”
“How did you know it was him?” The kidneys were finely granular. I set them in the scale and jotted down the weights.
“Couldn’t miss him with that mane of white hair,” Marino replied. “He fit Poteat’s description. I knew the second he walked in. He takes a table to himself and don’t say nothing to nobody, just orders his ‘usual’ and eats beer nuts while he waits. I watch him for a while, then go over, pull up a chair and introduce myself. He says he’s got nothing he can help me out with and he don’t want to talk about it. I press him, tell him Beryl was
being threatened for months, ask if he was aware of that. He looks annoyed, says he didn’t know.”
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” I was also wondering what the truth was about Harper’s drinking. He had a fatty liver.
“No way for me to know,” Marino said, flicking a cigarette ash on the floor. “Next I ask him where he was the night she was murdered, and he tells me he was in the tavern at his usual time, went home afterwards. When I ask if his sister can verify that, he tells me she wasn’t home.”
I looked up in surprise, the scalpel poised midair. “Where was she?”
“Out of town,” he said.
“He didn’t tell you where?”
“No. He said, and I quote, ‘That’s her business. Don’t ask me.'” Marino’s eyes fixed disdainfully on the sections of liver I was cutting. He added, “My favorite food used to be liver an’ onions. You believe that? I don’t know a single cop who’s seen an autopsy and still eats liver …”
The Stryker saw drowned him out as I began work on the head. Marino gave up and backed away as bony dust drifted on the pungent air. Even when bodies are in good shape they smell bad when opened up. The visual experience isn’t exactly Mary Poppins, either. I had to give Marino credit.
No matter how awful the case, he always came to the morgue.
Harper’s brain was soft, with numerous ragged lacerations. There was very little hemorrhage, verifying that he hadn’t lived long after sustaining the injuries. At least his death was mercifully quick. Unlike Beryl, Harper had no time to register terror or pain or to beg for his life. His murder was different from hers in several other ways, as well. He had received no threats–at least none that we knew about. There were no sexual overtones. He had been beaten versus stabbed to death, and no articles of his clothing were missing.
“I counted one hundred and sixty-eight dollars in his wallet,” I told Marino. “And his wristwatch and signet ring are present and accounted for.”
“What about his necklace?” he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“He had on this thick gold chain with a medal on it, a shield, sort of like a coat of arms/’ he explained. “I noticed it at the tavern.”
“It didn’t come in with him, and I don’t recall seeing it on him at the scene …” I started to say “last night.”
It wasn’t last night. Harper had died early Sunday night. It was Tuesday now. I had lost all sense of time. The last two days seemed unreal, and had I not replayed Mark’s message again this morning I would wonder if his call were real, too.
“So maybe the squirrel took it. Another souvenir,” Marino said.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I answered. “I can understand the taking of a souvenir in Beryl’s case, if her murder is the handiwork of a deranged individual who had an obsession with her. But why take something from Harper?”