“Some of these cribs are going for a hundred g’s and up,” Marino said as he slowed the car to a crawl. “I wouldn’t take one if you gave it to me. I’ve been inside a few of ’em. Incredible. But no way you’d catch me living in this neighborhood. A fair number of single women here, too. Crazy. just crazy.”
I’d been eyeing the odometer. Patty Lewis’s row house was exactly 6.7 miles from where Brenda Steppe lived. The neighborhoods were so different, so far from each other, I couldn’t imagine anything about the locations that might link the crimes. There was construction going on here just as there was in Brenda’s neighborhood, but it wasn’t likely the companies or the crews were the same.
Patty Lewis’s house was squeezed between two others, a lovely brownstone with a stained-glass window over the red front door. The roof was slate, the front porch girdled in freshly painted wrought iron. In back was a walled-in yard dense with big magnolias.
I’d seen the police photographs. It was hard to look at the graceful elegance of this turn-of-the-century home and believe anything so horrible happened inside it. She came from old money in the Shenandoah Valley, which was why, I assumed, she was able to afford living here. A free-lance writer, she struggled over a typewriter for many years and was just reaching the tier where rejection letters were war stories from the past. Last spring a story was published by Harper’s. A novel was due out this fall. It would be a posthumous work.
Marino reminded me the killer, once again, got in through a window, this one leading into her bedroom, which faced the backyard.
“It’s the one there on the end, on the second story,” he was saying.
“Your theory is he climbed that magnolia closest to the house, got up on the porch roof and then through the window?”
“It’s more than a theory,” he retorted. “I’m sure of it. No other way he could’ve done it unless he had a ladder. It’s more than possible to climb the tree, get on the porch roof and reach over to slide up the window. I know. I tried it myself to see if it could be done. Did it without a hitch. All the guy needs is sufficient upper-body strength to grab the edge of the roof from that thick lower tree branch,” he pointed, “and pull himself up.”
The brownstone had ceiling fans but no air-conditioning. Ac cording to an out-of-town friend who used to come to visit several times a year, Patty often slept with the bedroom window open. Simply put, it was a choice between being comfortable or being secure. She chose the former.
Marino made a lazy U-turn in the street and we headed northeast.
Cecile Tyler lived in Ginter Park, the oldest residential neighborhood in Richmond. There are monstrous three-story Victorian houses with wraparound porches wide enough to roller-skate on, and turrets, and dentil work along the eaves. Yards are thick with magnolias, oaks and rhododendrons. Grape vines climb over porch posts and arbors in back. I was envisioning dim living rooms beyond the blank windows, faded Oriental rugs, ornate furniture and cornices, and knickknacks jammed in every nook and cranny. I wouldn’t have wanted to live here. It was giving me the same claustrophobic case of the creeps that ficus trees and Spanish moss do.
Hers was a two-story brick house, modest by her neighbors’ standards. It was exactly 5.8 miles from where Patty Lewis lived. In the waning sun the slate roof glinted like lead. Shutters and doors were naked, stripped to the wood and still waiting for the fresh paint Cecile would have applied had she lived long enough.
The killer got in through a basement window behind a boxwood hedge on the north wing of the house. The lock was broken and, like everything else, waiting to be repaired.
She was a lovely black woman, recently divorced from a dentist now living in Tidewater. A receptionist at an employment agency, she was attending college classes at night to complete a degree in business. The last time she’d been seen alive was at approximately 10:00 P.M., a week ago Friday, about three hours before her death, I had estimated. She had dinner that night with a woman friend at a neighborhood Mexican restaurant, then went straight home.