“There’s a dive shop in Hampton Roads that Dr. Mant sometimes uses.”
He got the numbers and called, but the shop was closed this snowy New Year’s Eve, and the owner did not seem to be at home. Then Danny went out to the bay, and when he returned a brief time later, I could hear a familiar voice talking loudly with him as heavy footsteps sounded along the hallway.
“They wouldn’t let you if you were a cop,” Pete Marino’s voice projected into the autopsy suite.
“I know, but I don’t understand it,” Danny said.
“Well, I’ll give you one damn good reason. Hair as long as yours gives the assholes out there one more thing to grab. Me’? I’d cut it off. Besides, the girls would like you better.”
He had arrived in time to help carry in the hookah and coils of hose, and was giving Danny a fatherly lecture. It had never been hard for me to understand why Marino had terrible problems with his own grown son.
“You know anything about hookahs?” I asked Marino as he walked in. He looked blankly at the body “What?
He’s got some weirdo disease?”
“The thing you’re carrying is called a hookah,” I explained.
He and Danny set the equipment on top of an empty steel table next to mine.
“Looks like dive shops are closed for the next few days,” I added. “But the compressor seems pretty simple a pump driven by a five-horsepower engine which pulls air through a filtered intake valve, then through the lowpressure hose connected to the diver’s second-stage regulator. Filter looks all right. Fuel line is intact. That’s all I can tell you.”
“The tank’s empty,” Marino observed.
“I think he ran out of gas after death.”
“Why?” Roche had walked over to where we were, and he stared intensely at me and the front of my scrubs as if he and I were the only two people in the room. “How do you know he didn’t lose track of time down there and run out of gas?”
“Because even if his air supply quit, he still had plenty of time to get to the surface. He was only thirty feet down,” I said.
“That’s a long way if maybe your hose has gotten hung up on something.”
“It would be. But in that scenario, he could have dropped his weight belt.”
“Has the smell gone away?” he asked.
“No, but it’s not as overpowering.”
“What smell?” Marino wanted to know.
“His blood has a weird odor.”
“You mean like booze?”
“No, not like that.”
He sniffed several times and shrugged as Roche moved past me, averting his gaze from what was on the table. I could not believe it when he brushed against me again though he had plenty of room and I had given him a warning. Marino was big and balding in a fleece-lined coat, and his eyes followed him.
“So, who’s this?” he asked me.
“Yes, I guess the two of you haven’t met,” I said. “Detective Roche of Chesapeake, this is Captain Marino with Richmond.”
Roche was looking closely at the hookah, and the sound of Danny cutting through ribs with shears on the next table was getting to him. His complexion was the shade of milk glass again, his mouth bowed down.
Marino lit a cigarette and I could tell by the expression on his face that he had made his decision about Roche, and Roche was about to know it.
“I don’t know about you,” he said to the detective, “but one thing I discovered early on, is once you come to this joint, you never feel the same about liver. You watch.” He tucked the lighter back inside his shirt pocket. “Me, I used to love it smothered in onions.” He blew out smoke.
“Now, on the pain of death you couldn’t make me touch it.”
Roche leaned closer to the hookah, almost burying his face in it, as if the smell of rubber and gasoline was the antidote he needed. I resumed work.
“Hey, Danny,” Marino went on, “you ever eat shit like kidneys and gizzards since you started working here?”
“I’ve never ate any of that my entire life,” he said as we removed the breastplate. “But I know what you mean.