A frantic scraping sound was coming from the wall near the door . . .
“Where’re the friggin’ lights in this joint . . . ?”
I would have done it.
I know I would have done it.
I never wanted to do anything so badly in my life as I wanted to squeeze that trigger.
I wanted to blow a hole in his heart the size of the moon.
We’d been over it at least five times. Marino wanted to argue. He didn’t think it happened the way it did.
“Hey, the minute I saw him going through the window, Doe, I was following him. He couldn’ta been in your bedroom no more than thirty seconds before I got there. And you didn’t have no damn gun out. You went for it and rolled off the bed when I busted in and blew him out of his size-eleven jogging shoes.”
We were sitting in my downtown office Monday morning. I could hardly remember the past two days. I felt as if I’d been under water or on another planet.
No matter what he said, I believed I had my gun on the killer when Marino suddenly appeared in my doorway at the same time his .357 pumped four bullets into the killer’s upper body. I didn’t check for a pulse. I made no effort to stop the bleeding. I just sat in the twisted sheet on the floor, my revolver in my lap, tears streaming down my cheeks as it dawned on me.
The .38 wasn’t loaded.
I was so upset, so distracted when I went upstairs to bed, I’d forgotten to load my gun. The cartridges were still in their box tucked under a stack of sweaters inside one of my dresser drawers where Lucy would never think to look.
He was dead.
He was dead when he hit my rug.
“He didn’t have his mask off either,” Marino was going on. “Memory plays weird tricks, you know? I pulled the damn stocking off his face soon as Snead and Riggy got there. By then he was already dead as dog food.”
He was just a boy.
He was just a pasty-faced boy with kinky dirty-blond hair. His mustache was nothing more than a dirty fuzz.
I would never forget those eyes. They were windows through which I saw no soul. They were empty windows opening onto a darkness, like the ones he climbed through when he murdered women whose voices he’d heard over the phone.
“I thought he said something,” I muttered to Marino. “I thought I heard him say something as he was falling. But I can’t remember.”
Hesitantly, I asked, “Did he?”
“Oh, yeah. He said one thing.”
“What?” I shakily retrieved my cigarette from the ashtray.
Marino smiled snidely. “Same last words recorded on them little black boxes of crashed planes. Same last words for a lot of poor bastards. He said, ‘Oh, shit.’
“One bullet severed his aorta. Another took out his left ventricle. One more went through a lung and lodged in his spine. The fourth one cut through soft tissue, missing every vital organ, and shattered my window.
I didn’t do his autopsy. One of my deputy chiefs from northern Virginia left the report on my desk. I don’t remember calling him in to do it but I must have.
I hadn’t read the papers. I couldn’t stomach it. Yesterday’s headline in the evening edition was enough. I caught a glimpse of it as I hastily stuffed the paper in the garbage seconds after it landed on my front stoop: STRANGLER SLAIN BY DETECTIVE INSIDE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S BEDROOM Beautiful. I asked myself, Who does the public think was inside my bedroom at two o’clock in the morning, the killer or Marino? Beautiful.
The gunned-down psychopath was a communications officer hired by the city about a year ago. Communications officers in Richmond are civilians, they aren’t really cops. He worked the six-to-midnight shift. His name was Roy McCorkle. Sometimes he worked 911. Sometimes he worked as a dispatcher, which was why Marino recognized the CB voice on the 911 tape I played for him over the phone. Marino didn’t tell me he recognized the voice. But he did.