The attendants wasted no time sliding Waddell’s body into the back of the hearse and slamming the tailgate shut.
Somebody said something I did not get, and suddenly candles showered over the fence like a storm of falling stars and landed softly on the pavement.
“Goddam squirrels!” Marino exclaimed. Wicks glowed orange and tiny flames dotted the tarmac. The hearse hastily began to back out of the bay. Flashguns were going off. I spotted the Channel 8 news van parked on Main Street. Someone was running along the sidewalk. Uniformed men wed stamping out the candles, moving toward the fence, demanding that everyone clear the area.
“We don’t want any problems here,” an officer said. “Not unless some of you want to spend the night in lockup -” “Butchers,” a woman screamed.
Other voices joined in and hands grabbed the chain-link fence, shaking it.
Marino hurried me to my car.
A chant rose with tribal intensity. “Butchers, butchers, butchers…”
I fumbled with my keys, dropped them on the floor mat, snatched them up, and managed to find the right one.
“I’m following you home,” Marino said.
I turned the heater on high but could not get warm. Twice I checked to make sure my doors were locked. The night took on a surreal quality, a strange asymmetry of light and dark windows, and shadows moved in the corners of my eyes.
We drank Scotch in my kitchen because I was out of bourbon “I don’t know how you stand this stuff,” Marino said rudely.
“Help yourself to whatever else there is in the bar,” I told him.
“I’ll tough it out.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to broach the subject, and it was obvious that Marino wasn’t going to make it easy for me. He was tense, his face flushed. Strands of gray hair clung to his moist, balding head, and he was chain-smoking.
“Have you ever witnessed an execution before?” I asked
“Never had a strong urge to.”
“But you volunteered this time. So the urge must have been pretty strong.”
“I bet if you put some lemon and soda water in this it wouldn’t be half bad.”
“If you want me to ruin good Scotch, I’ll be glad to see what I can do.”
He slid the glass toward me and I went to the refrigerator. “I’ve got bottled Key Lime juice, but no lemon.” I searched shelves.
“That’s fine.”
I dribbled Key Lime juice into his glass, then added the Schweppes. Oblivious to the strange concoction he was sipping, he said, “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but the Robyn Naismith case was mine. Mine and Sonny Jones’s.”
“I wasn’t around then.”
“Oh, yeah. Funny, it seems like you’ve been here forever. But you know what happened, right?”
I was a deputy chief medical examiner for Dade County when Robyn Naismith was murdered, and I remembered reading about the case, following it in the news, and later seeing a slide presentation about it at a national meeting. The former Miss Virginia was a stunning beauty with a gorgeous alto voice. She was articulate and charismatic before the camera. She was only twenty-seven years old.
The defense claimed that Ronnie Waddell’s intent was burglary, and Robyn’s misfortune was to walk in on it after returning home from the drugstore. Allegedly, Waddell did not watch television and was unfamiliar with her name or brilliant future when he was ransacking her residence and brutalizing her. He was so hopped up on drugs, the defense argued, that he didn’t know what he was doing. The jurors rejected Waddell’s temporary insanity plea and recommended the death penalty.
‘I know the pressure to catch her killer was incredible, “ I said to Marino.
“Friggin’ unbelievable. We had this great latent print We had bite marks. We had three guys doing a cold search through the files morning, noon, and night. I got no idea how many hours I put in on that damn case Then we catch the bastard because he’s driving around North Carolina with an expired inspection sticker.”
He paused, his eyes hard when he added, “Course, Jones wasn’t around by then. Too damn bad he missed out of seeing Waddell get his reward.”
“Do you blame Waddell for what happened to Sonny Jones?” I asked.