by G. M. Ford
A moment after the door clicked closed, Corso fished the new room key from his pants pocket and started for the door.
“I think maybe I’m going to stick around for a few days.”
The news stiffened her spine. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Mr. Corso. Seems like the forces of evil have drawn a bead on you. It’s probably best you move on.”
Corso laughed. “You probably won’t believe this, Chief, but all of a sudden I’ve got eight million reasons to stay,” he said.
4
“T hat’s all,” she said. Corso took the clipping from her blunt fingers and glanced at the date. The article was slightly more than a year old. The byline read Carl Letzo. Marino Mystery Remains Unsolved read the modest headline.
“Nothing since, huh? No follow-ups. No anniversary reminder or anything like that?”
She shrugged. “I just work down here in the newspaper archives,” she said with a wan smile. “Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You’d have to talk to Mr. Blundred if you wanted to…”
Corso cut her off. “Thanks for the help,” he said.
She smiled, revealing a mouthful of braces but made no move to leave. Corso waited for a moment, then sat back in the chair and looked at her quizzically. She fidgeted and turned her face away. Her thick brown hair was held back from her face by a red plastic clip. She used one chubby hand to pick at the cuticles of the other.
“I read all your books,” she blurted. “As soon as they come out. In hardback,” she added quickly.
Corso thanked her. “It’s always nice to know somebody’s reading the damn things.”
Corso’s expletive brought a rush of blood to her cheeks.
“My mother and I…I…we read them together. She reads them while I’m at work.”
Corso kept smiling. The silence seemed to unnerve her.
She giggled. “Sometimes when I come home, she won’t give it back to me. She’s…you know…she’s so into the story she’s just got to keep reading.”
“Sounds like you need to buy two.”
Her eyes widened. “Hardbacks? Are you crazy? I mean…” She stopped herself. “Oh I didn’t mean to…I…”
“No problem,” Corso assured her. His insides tightened. The grin threatened to slide from his face and shatter on the floor. This time, it was he who turned away, picked up his notebook and pen from the table and opened it to the first blank page. “Tell you what,” he said. “You write your name and address in here, and I’ll have the publicity department send you a couple of signed copies whenever a book comes out.”
“Really?” she wheezed. “Really?”
“No problem,” he said again. A voice emanating from the back of his head asked him whether or not he used the phrase “no problem” with an uncommon regularity. He watched her scratch out her name and address and decided he did. Decided he threw the phrase around like rice at a wedding, then wondered why that was so.
Claudia Cantrell. South East Admiralty Avenue. Corso cleared his throat as he turned the page. “Thanks again for the help,” he said.
Took her a minute to catch the hint, at which point she excused herself on the pretext of work to be done and sidestepped from the room in a flurry of apologies.
Corso sat back in the wooden chair and gazed at the modest pile of yellowing news stories on the table in front of him. The dusty odor of old newsprint brought him back. Back to his early years at the North Carolina Nation. Back when they’d referred to the paper’s dank basement as “the morgue.” Before microfiche, before microfilm…way before digital information storage, back when they kept hard copies of everything. Back before the past was subject to revision.
The paper was beginning to stiffen with age, the stock color moving from blond to beige. Another ten years and it would take an archaeologist to pry it open.
In the kind of banner bold type generally reserved for World Wars and Terrorist Attacks, it asked, “Suicide Bomber?” A grainy photo of the parking lot where he’d spent yesterday afternoon covered the center of the page. Slightly right of center, a quartet of cops surrounded a shrouded bundle of something as it lay on the pavement among the piles of fresh snow and rotting leaves. The bold print asked: “Madman or Victim?”
Despite his best efforts, Corso’s lip curled at the irony. That was the question, wasn’t it? Whether Nathan Marino had willingly taken part in the criminal activities leading up to his demise or whether, as many thought, he’d just been some poor slob who’d had the great misfortune to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had ended up paying for his bad luck with his life.
Assuming one was the kind of person who believed in such things, the facts could surely be described as simple enough. On the night of March 24, 2003, a thirty-nine-year-old delivery driver named Nathan Marino had left Aunt Bee’s Country Fried Chicken at about ten-fifteen in the evening with six take-out orders to deliver. Five were pretty much par for the course. Three Deluxe dinners, which included three pieces of Aunt Bee’s “justifiably deeelishious” chicken, a thigh, a wing and a breast, along with a pair of chewy biscuits and a small plastic container of coleslaw.
Two more were for the Mountain Man dinner, which was the same as the Deluxe but with a bucket of mashed potatoes and gravy thrown in. The sixth order had been a matter of some debate. Came from way out, nearly over in Cartell County. Two Super Buckets and four large Cokes. Any regular order from anything like that far away would have resulted in a polite refusal to deliver. Fifty-three dollars’ worth of chicken, was, after all, fifty-three dollars’ worth of chicken and so, with the understanding he could go home when he finished the run, Nathan Marino had been dispatched.
Thirteen hours later, a disheveled and disheartened Nathan Marino appeared at the counter of the Bank of Commerce, where he’d passed a note to a teller explaining that he’d been taken hostage and had a bomb wired around his neck, and that any deviation from his instructions would result in his being blown to kingdom come. As if to punctuate the situation, he’d pulled open his jacket wide enough to reveal an oversized handcuff locked around his neck. From the handcuff hung a black metal box the size of a camera case. A dozen or more wires ran down over his uniform shirt into the box. His red puffy eyes suggested he’d been crying. “Please,” was all he said.
As she’d been so recently trained, the teller, one Mary Lou Tabakian, had immediately activated the silent alarm and complied with the demand for money, stuffing the entire contents of her cash drawer into the white plastic bag she’d used to transport her lunch.
Branch manager Phil Conley had long contended that the alarm buttons were poorly placed and ripe for inadvertent activation, so when he sidled over to Mary Lou’s window, his assumption was that his newest teller had unknowingly bumped the button with her knee, thus validating his well-known concern regarding their whereabouts.
The sight of Nathan Marino wiped the smug smile from Phil Conley’s face and sent the hairs on the back of his neck to full attention. His worst fears were realized when Mary Lou handed him the note.
Conley read it twice. When he looked up, Nathan gave him a quick peek at the bomb and said, “All of it. They want me to get all of it.”
Corso sat back in the seat and imagined himself facing the bank manager’s dilemma. What was he going to do? The threat wasn’t directed at the bank or its customers but rather at the guy with the note. On one hand, his job was to guard the bank’s assets. On the other hand, choosing money over a man’s life wasn’t something he wanted on his permanent record. The bomb looked real enough, but what if it wasn’t. What if it was some half-wit contraption this guy had put together in his garage. A device whose greatest danger was in making the bank look the fool, a possibility not destined to sit well with his ultraconservative superiors, but one which, he decided, was far more desirable than its gruesome alternative.
Phil Conley looked Nathan Marino in the eye and said, “Just a moment please; I’ll take care of this for you.”
&nbs
p; Although his hands were visibly shaking, he kept his face pretty much intact as he moved down the line of tellers, emptying cash drawers and whispering instructions to close the windows as he went along. The process took the better part of five minutes. By the time he got back to Nathan and Mary Lou, he’d appropriated another white grocery bag, this one with a red Safeway logo on the side, and packed it as full of cash as the first. As the bags wouldn’t fit through the slot, he hefted them over the top of the cage, where Nathan Marino took them from his hands and headed for the back door without so much as a by-your-leave. The rest, as they liked to say, was history.
Three steps outside the bank’s back door, Nathan Marino had been tackled and quickly subdued by a squad of policemen. By the time they had him splayed and handcuffed, somebody’d finally noticed the contraption wired around his neck and allowed discretion to become the better part of valor. After carefully patting Nathan down and extracting a block-printed, multipage set of instructions from his coat pocket, they’d marched him out into the center of the parking area and forced him to sit on the pavement as they began to clear the area of both civilians and themselves.
Sitting cross-legged on the asphalt, Nathan Marino emitted an unending and seemingly unpunctuated stream of pleas and exhortations to the effect that they mustn’t do this to him. That he must be allowed to complete his mission or else he’d surely be blown to bits by the unnamed kidnappers who had committed this heinous act. He begged; he cried; he blubbered all the way to the end. Never showing anything less than complete certainty regarding his doom were he not allowed to fulfill his instructions to the letter. Whoever these real or imagined people were, they’d certainly made an impression on Nathan Marino.
Corso sat back in the chair again. He crossed his long arms over his chest and closed his eyes, trying to imagine the terror Marino must have felt as he sat on that frozen patch of ground waiting for the bomb to explode. He’d thought about dying before. More times than he could count, but never like this. His death dreams revolved around stopping bullets or hurtling into concrete from behind the wheel. Always quick. Always final. Above all, always heroic. Never just sitting there like a side of beef waiting for a sudden surge of electricity to work its way down some anonymous wire where it would trigger an explosion whose sudden fury would tear him to pieces. He shuddered at the hopelessness and futility of Nathan Marino’s passing.
The question of how long Nathan Marino sat in that parking lot before oblivion struck did not become an issue, at least not in the pages of the Edgewater Ledger, until a couple of days before the coverage stopped altogether. Apparently, Carl Letzo’s assessment of the situation had been correct. At the first whiff of incompetence or impropriety, the local powers had completely shut down the information pipeline.
By April 6, thirteen days after the event, the story had altogether disappeared from the local papers, returning lead stories to such heady matters as sewer and water levies and the gala opening of a new “executive” golf course on Lake Prichard, wherever the hell that was.
While the amount of time Marino waited before the device detonated was subject to some debate, the specifics regarding the moment of truth itself were uniformly agreed upon. According to bystanders, a tearful Nathan Marino had been rocking back and forth, filling the air with pleas when, all of a sudden, the air was split by a sharp crack, followed by a deep thud, as if something thick and wet had been dropped from a great height and rendered asunder by the impact.
What witnesses seemed to most uniformly recall was the manner in which the concussion blew Nathan Marino over backward so violently as to make his torso bounce twice before finally coming to rest beneath a cloud of blue smoke. That and the sight of his head arcing across the sky.
5
D espite law enforcement’s best attempts to control the flow of information, the details of the autopsy made the Internet within a week. Unnamed sources detailed how the explosive device had been cleverly designed to wreak maximum damage to the wearer. On the three sides the enclosing box had been formed of fiber-reinforced steel. On Nathan’s side, however, the box had been constructed of less exotic material. Taking the line of least resistance, the explosion had mangled Nathan Marino’s chest and torso, the concussion killing him instantly by blowing his heart to bits in the nanoseconds before launching his head across the parking lot.
As a bank robbery, attempted or otherwise, ran afoul of a number of federal monetary regulations, it fell under the general purview of the FBI. Before the week was out, the Bureau had entered the scene and, as was always the case, the flow of anything akin to new information ground to a halt.
Corso made a note to inquire as to whether the Bureau had come into the case on its own behest or whether their presence had been requested by local authorities. Probably the former, as most law enforcement agencies had been burned at least once by the Bureau’s tactics and were loath to deal with them except under the most extreme circumstances. The Bureau’s MO in a case like this was to arrive with smiles and fanfare, then immediately take over the micromanagement of the investigation while assessing the situation.
As far as the FBI was concerned, that the perfect case was one with sufficient media appeal to keep it on the evening news, one that had heretofore baffled local law enforcement agencies and could, in the Bureau’s opinion, be resolved in a timely manner, while, at the same time, affording no possibility of the Bureau looking anything but stellar in its efforts.
Apparently, it had taken the Bureau less than a week to decide that the strange death of Nathan Marino consisted of far more questions than it did answers, primarily the question of whether Marino had been a victim, a coconspirator, a dupe or, as some thought, the suicidal sole proprietor of a bizarre bank robbery scheme. Unable to answer this most basic question to their satisfaction, the FBI had done what they always did when the prospect of glory was judged to be too costly or too remote—they disappeared, leaving local authorities holding the bag.
The following three weeks of media scrutiny had done little to resolve the questions surrounding Nathan Marino. A thorough check of his background and employment history had revealed him to be the son of a large local family from whom, in recent years, he had grown estranged. A mediocre high school student, Nathan had taken five years to graduate. Teachers and guidance counselors had often described him as affable but prone to daydreaming, as untroublesome but unmotivated, as average but lacking in ambition.
Upon graduation, Nathan had embarked upon an extended series of service sector jobs that had kept him economically afloat for the past twenty years. He’d delivered flowers for a couple of years. Mowed the grass out at the golf course for a couple more. Worked as a security guard down at the shipyard. Spent time washing dishes at the local Shari’s restaurant. The list numbered eighteen jobs in twenty years. From all accounts, Nathan had been completely satisfied with his position in society, never expressing a desire for further education, never hanging around one job long enough to begin the climb up the company ladder. At the time of his death, Nathan had been delivering chicken for just under eleven months. His direct supervisor, one Harley Dewers, had described him as “an easy guy to get along with,” willing to take shifts on nights, weekends and holidays because, Harley speculated, “he didn’t seem to have a lot going on with his personal life,” an assessment that, by any measure, had to be considered something of an understatement.
Nathan had neither married nor sired children. Nor, for that matter, ever so much as gone on a date, as far as anyone knew. Local women with whom he’d attended high school had described him as ordinary-looking but “sweet” or “kind and thoughtful” or…“nice”…in, as each had been compelled to add, “a brotherly sort of way”…rather than…“you know, anything romantic.”
Thus pigeonholed, he’d apparently resigned himself to the life of a confirmed bachelor, living a solitary existence in a series of rented dwellings, the last of which, according to the paper, was somewhere out on Lowell Road,
a wild unincorporated area of the county just west of town. Those whose duty it had been to sort through his meager belongings had described his domicile as spare but neat, neither spit-shined clean nor hog-wallow messy, but more or less what one would expect from a man who was not expecting visitors.
Nathan’s sole concession to acquisition had been paperback novels…Westerns…nearly a thousand of which had been retrieved from his one-bedroom rental. As he didn’t own a television, it was assumed that Nathan must have frittered away the cold dark nights of winter dreaming of saloons and stampedes, somewhere in the Wild Wild West.
In what Corso assumed had been an attempt to maintain some semblance of dignity in the face of chaos, the Marino family had closed ranks, offering nothing more to the press than a series of statements, each read in a monotone by James Marino, Nathan’s eldest brother and designated family spokesman, to the effect that the family believed their son Nathan had been the victim of a horrible crime, that they were united in that belief and were appalled by the way the authorities were treating both Nathan and the Marino family as suspects. Other than that, the family was not prepared to speak about the situation and should that decision change, they’d be sure to let everybody know. Wham bam good-bye. That was it.
Had the blue-collar Marino family been more media savvy, they’d have understood how the lack of grist never stops the wheel. That as long as the stream kept running, the wheel kept turning around, that selling newspapers, not providing accurate coverage, was the object of the exercise and that, without facts, the fourth estate felt entitled to resort to speculation, rumor and hearsay, all of which were what filled that great void called the Evening News. Veiled rumors of violent family intrigue, whispers about possible childhood abuse, questions about Nathan’s possible sexual preferences, interviews with friends, neighbors, schoolyard chums and former classmates…as was to be expected, they ground it all to dust, then went on their way.