Phillip Margolin - Heartstone

“Richie, don’t leave me,” she whispered.

“I’ll be right back.”

The door closed quietly. Her clothes were in disarray. There were tires crunching dirt and gravel nearby. She could hear it now. There was another car door opening and footsteps coming toward the car.

She fumbled with her pants. Richie was outside the car. The interior light was on, because the door had not shut completely. She was in a panic. She could not have anyone see her like this. She struggled with her bra, still lying down so that she would not be seen.

There were voices shouting angrily. One of them was Richie’s. Her bra was fastened and she tried to button her blouse. A button popped and she cursed. Someone was grunting. No. More than one person. She struggled with the buttons. They would not fit. She wanted to see, but she could not sit up looking like this. Anyone would know what…The car shook with the impact and she could see Richie’s back blocking the rear side window. Then it was gone, lunging into the darkness. She sat up. The interior light made it difficult to see into the dark. She reached for the door to close it and Richie screamed. She froze and Richie screamed again. There was the sound of men grunting from exertion and someone swearing. She slammed the door tight. Richie was kneeling and there were two men in black leather jackets standing over him. One man kept raising and lowering his arm and Richie kept screaming.

She had to get out. She had to get away. She looked for the keys, but they were not in the ignition. Someone was yelling in the dark. Someone was rushing toward the car. She turned to her left and screamed. There was a face pressing against the window. Fists pounding on the door. The glass on the other side shattered and she whirled around. An arm clothed in black leather was groping like some obscene spider for the door handle. She curled in a fetal position against the driver’s door. She gripped the steering wheel and stared wide-eyed.

“Please. No, please,” she whimpered.

The passenger door swung open.

It was 9:30, Saturday, November 26, 1960, and Portsmouth police officer Marvin Sokol was almost halfway through his shift. Marvin was in a funny mood. He was feeling good because he had just won five bucks from his partner, Tom McCarthy, who had had the temerity to bet against Navy.

Sokol was an old Navy man. He had been in for four years during the Second World War. He always bet on Navy and this afternoon his boys had walloped Army 17-12 behind the running of Joe Bellino, who Sokol thought would make a great pro, although McCarthy thought that he was too small. Anyway, with Navy winning, Sokol’s mood was partly good.

On the other hand, he had read some sad news in the paper that morning and it was making him feel melancholy. He had forgotten about it while he and McCarthy were watching the game. But now, during the monotony of patrol, he had started to brood about it again.

Sokol was fifty years old. In great shape, but fifty nonetheless. Usually this did not bother him, but in this morning’s paper he read that “Amos and Andy” was going off the air for good after thirty-two years on radio. Sokol had grown up on the radio. He had a TV like everybody else, but he still listened to radio and his favorite program was “Amos and Andy.” He almost never missed it. When he heard it was cancelled, he thought about death.

When you are young, fifty seems ancient, but when you are fifty, fifty doesn’t seem that old. You don’t think about death being right around the corner. Unless they cancel a show you have listened to for thirty-two years and you realize that everything ends sometime.

Sokol looked over at McCarthy. A youngster. Twenty-two. Or was it twenty-three? He could never remember. “Amos and Andy” would not have meant a thing to him.

McCarthy was driving. Sokol did not care if he drove or not and McCarthy liked to drive, so McCarthy usually did. Sokol liked the Lookout Park section of his patrol. The park was peaceful and beautiful. There was hardly ever any trouble.

McCarthy swung the patrol car onto one of the unpaved dirt side roads that branched off the main paved road. There was a meadow up ahead. They could park for a bit and have a smoke. The car bounced a little and the jiggling motion of the headlights created an illusion that the trees were dancing.

The dirt road ended and McCarthy pulled the car to the side on the grass.

“Is that a car?” Sokol asked.

McCarthy had not noticed anything and he asked what Sokol meant.

“When you swung around, I thought I saw a car at the far end of the meadow.”

McCarthy swung the car back in the direction in which Sokol had pointed. There was a ’55 Mercury parked near the trees at the far corner of the wide meadow. It looked customized to McCarthy. Red body with red and yellow flames along the side. They drove across the field.

“Probably some kids making out,” Sokol said half wistfully.

McCarthy laughed.

“You want to give them the full treatment?”

Sokol thought about “Amos and Andy” and said “No.”

When they were almost to the car, they could see that there was no one sitting up in the front or rear seats. Sokol hoped that they were not going to find anyone making love.

McCarthy stopped the car at the rear of the driver’s side. He walked toward the driver’s door. Sokol skirted the rear and noticed that the window on the passenger’s side had been smashed in.

McCarthy raised his flashlight so that he could see the inside of the car. The beam illuminated the front seat and Officer Marvin Sokol forgot all about his personal problems.

The coroner’s assistants were trying to remove the body from the front seat of the car and place it on a rubber sheet. They were having trouble maneuvering the head and torso around the steering column, because rigor mortis had set in. One of the men twisted the arm around the steering wheel and Shindler flinched and turned away. When he lit his cigarette, his hand was shaking.

Shindler had been a policeman for six years and a homicide detective for three of those. He was supposed to be conditioned to scenes of violence, but this was something else.

Harvey Marcus, Shindler’s partner, was standing over the rubber sheet, looking down at the blood-splattered still life. Shindler wondered how he kept his poise. When Shindler had viewed the body in the car, he had bitten his lip to gain control. The face had been pulp. The body had been a mass of blood-covered wounds.

“You know, I saw him play on Thanksgiving Day. I go back to the High School every year,” Marcus said.

“Was he any good?” Shindler asked for no reason at all. Marcus shrugged.

“He was okay. He would have made a college team.”

Shindler put out his cigarette. He was going to drop it when he remembered and stuffed it in his raincoat pocket. Clues. He smiled grimly.

“I think there was more than one, Roy,” Marcus said.

“What?”

“I said, I think that he was killed by more than one person.”

“He would have to have been. Jesus, Harvey, did you see his face?”

Marcus did not answer that question. There had been no face in the conventional sense. A young boy like that, Shindler thought. Someone would pay.

“I figure one stabbed him, or kept him at bay, then the other one hit him from behind. Probably with the same thing they used to cave in the car window.”

“A tire iron?”

“It could have been.”

They walked around the rear of the car. All around them policemen scurried with cameras and tape measures. Plastic bags and note pads.

“The ground about twenty feet from here shows scuff marks and there is some blood on a rock that wasn’t washed away by the rain last night.”