“Marino; we can’t give in. Someone knows who this killer is. Have you talked to the officer who showed us around the penitentiary? Officer Roberts?”
“Yo. The conversation went exactly nowhere.”
“Well, I didn’t fare a whole lot better with your friend Helen Grimes.”
“That must’ve been a treat.”
“Are you aware that she no longer works for the pen?”
“She never did any work there that I know of. Helen the Hun was lazy as hell unless she was patting down one of the lady guests. Then she got industrious. Donahue liked her, don’t ask me why. After he got whacked, she got reassigned to guard tower duty in Greensville and suddenly developed a knee problem or something.
“I have a feeling she knows a lot more than she let m” I said “Especially if she and Donahue were friendly with each other.”
Marino sipped his coffee and looked out the sliding glass doors. The ground was frosted white, and snowflakes seemed to be falling faster. I thought of the snowy night I was summoned to Jennifer Deighton’s house, and images flashed in my mind of an overweight woman in curlers sitting in a chair in tie middle of her living room. If the killer had interrogated her, he had done so for a reason. What was it he had been sent to find?
“Do you think the killer was after letters when’ he appeared at Jennifer Deighton’s house?” I asked Marino.
“I think he was after something that had to do with Waddell. Letters, poems. Things he may have mailed to her over the years.”
“Do you think this person found what he was looking for?”
“Let’s just put it this way, he may have looked around, but he was so tidy we couldn’t tell.”
“Well, I don’t think he found a thing,” T said.
Marino looked skeptically at me as he lit another cigarette. “Based on what?”
“Based on the scene. She was in her nightgown and curlers. It appears she had been reading in bed. That doesn’t sound like someone who is expecting company,” “I’ll go along with that.”
“Then someone appears at her door and she must have let him in, because there was no sign of forcible entry and no sign of a struggle. I think what may have happened next is this person demanded that she turn over to him whatever it was he was looking for, and she wouldn’t. He gets angry, gets a chair from the dining room, and sets it in the middle of her living room. He sits her in it and basically tortures her. He asks questions, and when she doesn’t tell him what he wants to hear he tightens the choke hold. This goes on until it goes too far. He carries her out and puts her in her car.”
“If he was going in and out of the kitchen, that might explain why that door was unlocked when we arrived,” Marino considered.
“It might. In summary, I don’t think he intended for her to die when she did, and after he tried to disguise her death. He probably didn’t hang around very long. Maybe he got scared, or maybe he simply lost interest in his assignment. I doubt he rummaged through her house at all, and I also doubt that he would have found anything if he had.”
“We sure as hell didn’t,” Marino said.
“Jennifer Deighton was paranoid,” I said. “She indicated to Grueman in the fax she sent him that there was something wrong about what was being done to Waddell. Apparently, she’d seen me on the news and had even tried to contact me, but continued to hang up when she got my machine.”
“Are you thinking she might have had papers or something that would tell us what the hell this is all about?”
“If she had,” I said, “then she was probably sufficiently frightened to get them out of her house.”
“And stash them where?”
“I don’t, know, but maybe her ex-husband would. Didn’t she visit him for two weeks the end of November?”
“Yeah.” Marino looked interested. “As n matter of fact, she did.”
‘Willie Travers had an energetic, pleasant voice over the phone when I finally reached him at the Pink Shell resort in Fort Myers Beach, Florida. But he was vague and noncommittal when I began to ask questions.