“Point is, Doc, I’ve been around the block more than once. And Petersen’s setting off the same alarm toads like Andretti and Phil did. He’s giving me this performance, I’m sitting there and asking myself, ‘What’s this Harvard highbrow think? I’m a bimbo or what?’
“I inserted a tape inside my microcassette player without saying anything.
Marino nodded for me to press the Play button. “Act one,” he drolly announced. “The setting, the Petersen kitchen. The main character, Matt. The role, tragic. He’s pale and wounded about the eyes, okay? He’s staring off at the wall. Me? I’m seeing a movie in my head. Never been to Boston and wouldn’t know Harvard from a hole in the ground, but I’m seeing old brick and ivy.”
He fell silent as the tape abruptly began with Petersen mid-sentence. He was talking about Harvard, answering questions about when he and Lori had met. I’d heard my share of police interviews over the years, and this one was perplexing me. Why did it matter? What did Petersen’s courting of Lori back in their college days have to do with her murder? At the same time I think a part of me knew.
Marino was probing, drawing Petersen out. Marino was looking for anything – anything – that might show Petersen to be obsessive and warped and possibly capable of overt psychopathy.
I got up to shut the door so we wouldn’t be interrupted, as the recorded voice quietly went on.
“. . . I’d seen her before. On campus, this blonde carrying an armload of books and oblivious, as if she was in a hurry and had a lot on her mind.”
Marino: “What was it about her that made you notice her, Matt?”
“It’s hard to say. But she intrigued me from a distance. I’m not sure why. But part of it may have been that she was usually alone, in a hurry, on her way somewhere. She was, uh, confident and seemed to have purpose. She made me curious.”
Marino: “Does that happen very often? You know, where you see some attractive woman and she makes you curious, from a distance, I’m saying?”
“Uh, I don’t think so. I mean, I notice people just like everybody else does. But with her, with Lori, it was different.”
Marino: “Go on. So you met her, finally. Where?”
“It was at a party. In the spring, early May. The party was in an off-campus apartment belonging to a buddy of my roommate, a guy who turned out to be Lori’s lab partner, which was why she’d come. She walked in around nine, just about the time I was getting ready to leave. Her lab partner, Tim, I think was his name, popped open a beer for her and they started talking. I’d never heard her voice before. Contralto, soothing, very pleasant to listen to. The sort of voice that makes you turn around to find the source of it. She was telling anecdotes about some professor and the people around her were laughing. Lori had a way of getting everybody’s attention without even trying.”
Marino: “In other words, you didn’t leave the party after all. You saw her and decided to stick around.”
“Yes.”
“What did she look like back then?”
“Her hair was longer, and she was wearing it up, the way ballet dancers do. She was slender, very attractive . . .”
“You like slender blondes, then. You find those qualities attractive in a woman.”
“I just thought she was attractive, that’s all. And there was more to it. It was her intelligence. That’s what made her stand out.”
Marino: “What else?”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
Marino: “I’m just wondering what attracted you to her.” A pause. “I find it interesting.”
“I can’t really answer that. It’s mysterious, that element. How you can meet a person and be so aware. It’s as if something inside you wakes up. I don’t know why . . . God . . . I don’t know.”
Another pause, this one longer.
Marino: “She was the kind of lady people notice.”
“Absolutely. All the time. Whenever we went places together, or if my friends were around. She’d upstage me, really. I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked it. I enjoyed sitting back and watching it happen. I’d analyze it, try to figure out what it was that drew people to her. Charisma is something you have or you don’t have. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t. She didn’t try. It just was.”