Friscoe stomped down the hail, muttering to himself. ‘This better be good. This better be fingerfuckinlickin’ good.’
Friscoe hammered on the door to 10-A.
‘Who is it?’ Livingston asked from inside.
‘It’s Little Red Riding Hood, for Chrissakes, who do you think it is? Open the goddamn door.’
The chain rattled and Livingston swung the door partially open. Friscoe charged through it without looking to the right or left. He came face to face with Sharky and The Nosh. Friscoe stood in front of them, his hands on his hips and his tie dangling like black crepe paper from his open collar.
‘Awright,’ Friscoe bawled, ‘what the fuck’s so urgent you jokers get me outa the symphony right on the dime, when in ten more minutes I could’ve sneaked out between numbers and nobody woulda been the wiser? I had to crawl over half of Atlanta society to —,
Livingston was tapping him on the shoulder and at the same moment Sharky pointed back toward the door. Friscoe spun around.
‘What the hell do you —, he said, and stopped in mid- sentence.
He saw the bloody pattern near the ceiling, the splash of blood on the wall where the force of the shot had thrown her, the streaks down to the crumpled body below.
A gaunt spider of a man was leaning over her, examining the body.
‘Terrible for the blood pressure, Barney, blowing up like that,’ the gaunt man said quietly.
‘Holy shit!’ Friscoe said, half under his breath. He took a few steps towards the corpse and stopped. His face contorted. He swallowed hard, shuddered, looked at Livingston, back at Sharky, and then at the corpse again.
‘What the fuck. . . who is it? What happened here?’
Sharky started to speak but his voice cracked and he stopped to clear his throat. Livingston finally spoke up. ‘It’s the Domino woman,’ he said. The words cut deep into Sharky’s gut when he heard them said aloud.
‘Domino!’ Friscoe said.
‘Yeah.’
Friscoe’s eyes widened. ‘So what happened?’
The gaunt man, his hands encased in blood-covered surgeon’s plastic gloves, looked up at him. ‘Somebody aced the lady,’ he said in a voice that sounded tired.
‘I ain’t blind,’ Friscoe bellowed. ‘What I wanna know is, what happened?’
‘What happened, Sharky’s on the roof monitoring the bugs,’ Livingston said. ‘She got away from us this morning and was out most of the day. About seven-forty there was a call from somebody named Pete saying he would be late and would call back. She came in at seven-forty-four. Two minutes later another call. Whoever it was hung up. At seven-fifty-eight the doorbell rang, she opened the door and’ — he nodded towards the corpse. ‘Couple more things. She was packing her suitcase when she got hit. It’s in there on the bed. Then about fifteen minutes after . . . it happened. . . there was another call. We let the machine answer it. It was this Pete again. I picked it up, but he hung up as soon as he heard my voice.’
The gaunt man stripped off his gloves, put a hand on his knee, and stood up. And up. And up. He was a shade over six-foot-six, thin as a stalk of wheat, his clothes hanging from bony shoulders like rags on a scarecrow. His complexion was the colour of oatmeal, his hair — what there was of it — the colour of sugared cinnamon. The bones in his long, angular face strained against wafer-thin skin. His long needle fingers seemed as brittle as the limbs of a dead bush. Art Harris, one of the city’s better reporters, had once profiled him thus: ‘Max Grimm, the Fulton County coroner, is a cadaverous stalk of twigs who looks worse than many of his subjects . . .‘ The description provided Grimm with his nickname, Twigs. At sixty-seven he had been coroner for forty-one years and had managed to stave off compulsory retirement at sixty-five with the excuse that he was suffering some vague terminal disorder and wanted to work as long as possible at the job he had held for almost two-thirds of his life. Nobody believed him, but that was immaterial. He was too good to retire anyway.
His partner in crime was George Barret, head of the forensics lab. Together, they were the Mutt and Jeff of Pathology, the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of crime lab and morgue. Barret stood barely five-five, outweighed Grimm by at least twenty pounds, wore rimless bifocals, and parted his strawberry-coloured h4ir down the middle like a turn-of-the-century snake-oil pedlar. He was an arch-Baptist who neither smoked, swore, nor drank and was constantly offended by Grimm’s penchant for Napoleon brandy, which the coroner nipped constantly from a Maalox bottle. Barret entered the scene from one of the bedrooms carrying an ancient black snap-satchel which his late father, a country doctor, had willed him. Inside were crammed all the mysterious vials, chemicals, and tools of the forensic trade.
In his soft Southern voice he said, in a single sentence virtually uninhibited by punctuation: ‘Nothing here, I got all the pictures and measurements I need, oh, hi, Barney, I think we can assume from the tape and what we can .- or more correctly, what we can’t — find that the killer never ventured beyond the door there.’
Friscoe was a man fighting frustration, pearls of sweat twinkling on his forehead. ‘Well, where’s everybody else?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’ Livingston replied.
‘I mean where the hell is everybody else? Where’s Homicide? I see the ME there. I see Forensics. Where is everybody else? Here it Is an hour and five minutes since it happened and there ain’t a Homicide in sight yet.’
‘Nobody called Homicide,’ Livingston said.
Friscoe’s eyes went blank. ‘Nobody called Homicide?
‘Nobody called Homicide.’
‘Well, uh, is there a reason nobody called Homicide? I mean have all communications between this here apartment house and the main station busted down or what?’
Sharky was staring at the floor. He had said nothing since Friscoe arrived. He was still having trouble putting
