‘I wonder if Claire Rawley might have been his patient.’
‘I just hope he’s still alive,’ Marino said.
‘Yes,’ I said with feeling. ‘Me, too.’
A medical examiner is not an enforcement officer of the law, but an objective presenter of evidence, an intellectual detective whose witnesses are dead. But there were times when I did not care as much about statutes or definitions.
Justice was bigger than codes, especially when I believed that no one was listening to the facts. It was little more than intuition when I decided Sunday morning at breakfast to visit Hughey Dorr, the farrier who had shoed Sparkes’s horses two days before the fire.
The bells of Grace Baptist and First Presbyterian churches tolled as I rinsed my coffee cup in the sink. I dug through my notes for the telephone number one of the ATF fire investigators had given to me. The farrier, which was a modern name for an old-world blacksmith, was not home when I called, but his wife was, and I introduced myself.
‘He’s in Crozier,’ she said. ‘Will be there all day at Red Feather Point. It’s just off Lee Road, on the north side of the river. You can’t miss it.’
I knew I could miss it easily. She was talking about an area of Virginia that was virtually nothing but horse farms, and quite frankly, most of them looked alike to me. I asked her to give me a few landmarks.
‘Well, it’s right across the river from the state penitentiary. Where the inmates work on the dairy farms, and all,’ she added. ‘So you probably know where that is.’
Unfortunately, I did. I had been there in the past when inmates hanged themselves in their cells or killed each other. I got a phone number and called the farm to make certain it was all right for me to come. As was the nature of privileged horse people, they did not seem the least bit interested in my business but told me I would find the farrier inside the barn, which was green. I went back to my bedroom to put on a tennis shirt, jeans, and lace-up boots, and called Marino.
‘You can go with me, or I’m happy to do this on my own,’ I told him.
A baseball game was playing loudly on his TV, and the phone clunked as he set it down somewhere. I could hear him breathing.
‘Crap,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘I’m tired, too.’
‘Give me half an hour.’
‘I’ll pick you up to save you a little time,’ I offered.
‘Yeah, that will work.’
He lived south of the James in a neighborhood with wooded lots just off the strip-mall-strewn corridor called Midlothian Turnpike, where one could buy handguns or motorcycles or Bullet burgers, or indulge in a brushless carwash with or without wax. Marino’s small aluminum-sided white house was on Ruthers Road, around the corner from Bon Air Cleaners and Ukrop’s. He had a large American flag in his front yard and a chainlink fence around the back, and a carport for his camper.
Sunlight winked off strands of unlit Christmas lights that followed every line and angle of Marino’s habitat. The multi-colored bulbs were tucked in shrubs and entwined in trees. There were thousands of them.
‘I still don’t think you should leave those lights up,’ I said one more time when he opened the door.
‘Yo. Then you take them down and put ’em back again come Thanksgiving,’ he said as he always did. ‘You got any idea how long that would take, especially when I keep adding to them every year?’
His obsession had reached the point where he had a separate fuse box for his Christmas decorations, which in full blaze included a Santa pulled by eight reindeer, and happy snowmen, candy canes, toys, and Elvis in the middle of the yard crooning carols through speakers. Marino’s display had become so dazzling that its radiance could be seen for miles, and his residence had made it into Richmond’s official Tacky Tour. It still bewildered me that someone so antisocial didn’t mind endless lines of cars and limousines, and drunken people making jokes.