Finally, clad in a checkered flannel man’s dressing gown, she went to the living room, where her cherished work lay in a big wicker basket atop a tall cane stand beside her favorite chair, whose herniating springs she didn’t notice. Frowning, she dug in the basket to find the long piece of silk on which she was embroidering a sideboard panel for Charles Ponsonby – surely it had been right on top? Yes, it had, she was positive of the fact! No chaos for Desdemona Dupre; everything had its place, and lived in it. But the embroidery wasn’t there. Instead, she found a small clump of tightly curling, short black hairs, picked them out and studied them. At which moment she saw the panel, its rich blood reds muddled on the floor behind the chair.
Down went the hairs; she scooped up the embroidery and spread it out to see if it had sustained an injury, but, though a little creased, it was fine. How odd!
Then, the answer occurring to her, her lips tightened. That Nosey Parker of a landlord of hers who lived in the apartment below had been snooping. Only what could one do about it? His wife was so nice; so too was he in his way. And where else would she get a fully furnished apartment for seventy a month in a safe neighborhood? The hairs went into her trash bin in the kitchen, and she settled, feet under her, in the big old chair to continue with what she privately considered the best piece of embroidery she’d ever done. A complicated, curving pattern of several reds from pinkish to blackish on a background of pale pink silk.
But bugger her landlord! He deserved a booby trap.
Tamara, tired of the painting, her imagination incapable for once of envisioning a face ugly enough, terrifying enough. It would come, but not tonight. Not so soon after today’s disaster. That insolent cop Delmonico, his bullish walk, the shoulders so broad that he looked much shorter than he was, the neck so huge that on anyone else the head would have been dwarfed – but not his head. Massive. Yet try though she would, eyes shut, teeth clenched, she couldn’t make his face assume a piggish cast. And after he made her miss her appointment, she wanted badly to paint him as the ugliest pig in creation.
She couldn’t sleep, and what else was there to do? Read one of her whodunits for the millionth time? She flopped into a big magenta leather chair and reached for the phone.
“Darling?” she asked when a drowsy voice answered.
“I’ve told you, never call me here!”
Click. The line went back to its dial tone.
Cecil, lying in bed with his cheek on Albertia’s beautiful breast, trying to forget Jimmy’s terror.
Otis, listening to the rhythmic beep-beep-beep of his own heart, the tears rolling down his seamed face. No more lead bricks to move, no more cylinders of gas to wriggle onto a dolly, no more cages to shove into the elevator. How much would his pension be?
Wesley, too happy and excited to sleep. How Mohammed had straightened up at his news! Suddenly the hick postulant from Louisiana loomed important; he, Wesley le Clerc, had been given the job of keeping Mohammed el Nesr informed about the murder of a black woman at the Hug. He was on his way.
Nur Chandra, exiled to his cottage in the grounds where only he and his whipping boy, Misrarthur, ever came. He sat, legs crossed and braided, hands on his knees with palms upraised, each finger precisely positioned. Not asleep, but not awake either. A different place, a different plane. There were monsters to be banished, terrible monsters.
Maurice and Catherine Finch, sitting in the kitchen poring over the accounts.
“Mushrooms, schmushrooms!” said Catherine. “They’ll cost you more than you can make, Maurie, and my chickens won’t eat them.”
“But it’s something different to do, sweetheart! You said yourself that digging out the tunnel was good exercise, and now it’s dug, what have I got to lose by trying? Exotic varieties for a few exclusive shops in New York City.”
“It’ll cost a lot of money,” she said stubbornly.
“Cathy, we’re not short of a dime! No kids of our own – for why do we need to worry about money? What are your nieces and my nephews going to do about this place, huh? Sell it, Cathy, sell it! So let’s get all the fun we can out of it first.”
“Okay, okay, grow your mushrooms! Only don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
He smiled, reached over to squeeze her roughened hand. “I promise I won’t gripe if it fails, but I just don’t think it is going to fail.”
Chapter 2
Thursday, October 7th, 1965
Carmine’s day began in Commissioner John Silvestri’s office, where he sat in the middle of a semicircle around the desk. On his left were Captain Danny Marciano and Sergeant Abe Goldberg, on his right Dr. Patrick O’Donnell and Sergeant Corey Marshall.
Not for the first time by any means, Carmine thanked his lucky stars for the two men senior to himself in the hierarchy.
Dark and handsome, John Silvestri was a desk cop, had always been a desk cop, and confidently expected that when he retired in five years’ time, he would be able to say that he had never drawn his side arm in a fracas, let alone fired a rifle or a shotgun. Which was odd, since he had joined the U.S. Army in 1941 as a lieutenant and emerged in 1945 bedaubed with decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. His most irritating habit concerned cigars, which he sucked rather than smoked, leaving slimy butts in his wake to impart an odor to the air Carmine fancied might resemble the odor given off by a spittoon in an 1890s Dodge City saloon.
Fully aware that Danny Marciano hated the cigar butts most, Silvestri loved to push his ashtray under Marciano’s snub nose; north Italian blood had given Marciano a fair and freckled complexion and blue eyes, and sitting at a desk had given him a few extra pounds. A good second man who lacked the cunning patience to wind up the Commissioner.
They left Carmine and his two fellow lieutenants to get on with the real police work, ignored political pressures from Town, Gown and Hartford, and could be relied upon to go to bat for their men. That Carmine was their favorite everybody knew; hardly any resentment stemmed from that fact because what it really meant was that Carmine inherited the ticklish cases requiring diplomacy or liaison with other law enforcement agencies. He was also the department’s top murder man.
He had just finished his freshman year at Chubb when Pearl Harbor was attacked, so he postponed his education and enlisted. By sheer chance he was seconded to the military police, and once he got past guard duty and arresting drunken soldiers he found that he loved the work; there were as many violent or crafty crimes in the teeming wartime army as on the streets of any city. When the war and an occupation stint in Japan were over, he was a major, eligible to complete his degree at Chubb under an accelerated program. Then, a sheepskin in his hand that would have let him teach English literature or mathematics, he decided that he liked police work best. In 1949 he joined the Holloman Police. Silvestri, a deskbound lieutenant at the time, soon spotted his potential and put him in Detectives, where he was now the senior lieutenant. Holloman was not big enough to have a homicide squad or any of the subdivisions larger city police forces had, so Carmine might find himself working all kinds of crime. However, murder was his speciality and he had a formidable solve rate: just about a hundred percent – not all convicted, of course.
He sat looking eager yet relaxed; this would be juicy.
“You go first, Patsy,” said Silvestri, who disliked the Hug case already because it was certain to become high profile. Only a small paragraph in the Holloman Post this morning, but as soon as the details leaked, it would be front-page news.
“I can tell you,” said Patrick, “that whoever dumped the torso in the Hug’s dead animal refrigerator left no fingerprints, fibers or any other trace of himself. The victim is in her middle teens, and has some colored blood. She’s small in size, and she looks well cared for.” He leaned forward in his chair, eyes glistening. “On her right buttock she has a heart-shaped scab. A nevus, removed around ten days ago. However, it wasn’t a pigmented birthmark, it was a hemangioma – a tumor made up of blood vessels. The killer used a pair of diathermy forceps to nip off every feeder to the growth, coagulate it. Must have taken him hours. Then he packed it with gelfoam to assist clotting, and after that he let the wound crust over, get nice and dry. I found traces of what I thought was an oil-based ointment, but it wasn’t.” He drew a deep breath. “It was greasepaint exactly the same color as her skin.”