'He's how old?'
'Forty-two. Brown hair and eyes, five-foot-eleven and weighs one-sixty.'
'Well, someone must know where he is or at least when he was seen last. You don't just walk away from a practice and not have anyone notice.'
'So far it's looking like he has. People have been driving up to his house for appointments. They haven't been called or nothing. He's a no-show. Neighbors haven't seen him or his car in at least a week. Nobody noticed him driving off, either with somebody or alone. Now apparently some old lady who lives next door spoke to him the morning of June fifth - the Thursday before the fire. They was both picking up their newspapers at the same time, and waved and said good morning. According to her, he was in a hurry and not as friendly as usual. At the moment, that's all we got.'
'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.
'I'm still trying to figure out what's gotten into you,' I said as he got into my car. 'Two years ago you would never do something like this. Then out of the blue, you turn your private residence into a carnival. I'm worried. Not to mention the threat of an electrical fire. I know I've given you my opinion before on this, but I feel strongly…'
'And maybe I feel strongly, too.'
He fastened his seat belt and got out a cigarette.
'How would you react if I started decorating my house like that and left lights hanging around all year round?'
'Same way I would if you bought an RV, put in an above-the-ground pool and started eating Bojangles biscuits every day. I'd think you lost your friggin' mind.'
'And you would be right,' I said.
'Look.'
He played with the unlit cigarette.
'Maybe I've reached a point in life where it's do it or lose it,' he said. 'The hell with what people think. I ain't going to live more than once, and shit, who knows how much longer I'm gonna be hanging around, anyway.'
'Marino, you're getting entirely too morbid.'
'It's called reality.'
'And the reality is, if you die, you'll come to me and end up on one of my tables. That ought to give you plenty of incentive to hang around for a long time.'
He got quiet, staring out his window as I followed Route 6 through Goochland County, where woods were thick and I sometimes did not see another car for miles. The morning was clear but on its way to being humid and warm, and I passed unassuming homes with tin roofs and gracious porches, and bird baths in the yards. Green apples bent gnarled branches to the ground, and sunflowers hung their heavy heads as if praying.
'Truth is, Doc,' Marino spoke again. 'It's like a premonition, or something. I keep seeing my time running short. I think about my life, and I've pretty much done it all. If I didn't do nothing else, I still would have done enough, you know? So in my mind I see this wall ahead and there's nothing behind it for me. My road ends. I'm out of here. It's just a matter of how and when. So I'm sort of doing whatever the hell I want. May as well, right?'
I wasn't sure what to say, and the image of his garish house at Christmas brought tears to my eyes. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses.
'Don't make it a self-fulfilled prophecy, Marino,' I said quietly. 'People think about something too much and get so stressed out they make it happen.'
'Like Sparkes,' he said.
'I really don't see what this has to do with Sparkes.'
'Maybe he thought about something too much and made it happen. Like you're a black man with a lot of people who hate your guts, and you worry so much about the assholes taking what you got, you end up burning it down yourself. Killing your horses and white girlfriend in the process. Ending up with nothing. Hell, insurance money won't replace what he lost. No way. Truth is, Sparkes is screwed any way you slice it. Either he's lost everything he loved in life, or he's gonna die in prison.'