“Positive. The poor guy tried to make it look like some stranger busted in, but there’s his wife and her lover in the bed and her lover’s cut up some but she’s mincemeat – he did it. My bet is that he’ll confess later today voluntarily.”
Marciano rose to his feet. “Then let’s get some breakfast.”
His phone rang; Marciano wriggled his brows at Carmine and picked up. Within three seconds the police captain had stiffened, lost all contentment. He mouthed “Silvestri!” at Carmine and commenced a series of nods. “Sure, John. I’ll start Carmine now and get Patsy there as soon as I can.”
“Trouble?”
“Big trouble. Silvestri’s just had a call from the head of the Hug – Professor Robert Smith. They’ve found part of a female body in their dead animal refrigerator.”
“Christ!”
Sergeants Corey Marshall and Abe Goldberg were breakfasting at Malvolio’s, the diner the cops used because it was next door to headquarters in the County Services building on Cedar Street. Carmine didn’t bother walking in; he rapped his knuckles on the glass in front of the booth where Abe and Corey were washing down hotcakes and maple syrup with big mugs of coffee. Lucky stiffs, he thought. They get to eat, I get to give my report to Danny, now I don’t get to eat. Seniority’s a pain in the ass.
The car Carmine regarded as his own (it was really a Holloman Police Department unmarked) was a Ford Fairlane with a souped-up V-8 engine and cop springs and shocks. If the three of them were in it, Abe always drove, Corey rode shotgun, and Carmine spread himself and his papers in the back. Telling Corey and Abe took half a minute, the trip from Cedar Street to the Hug less than five.
Holloman lay about halfway up the Connecticut coast, its spacious harbor looking across the Sound to Long Island. Founded by dissenting Puritans in 1632, it had always prospered, and not only because of the numerous factories that lay on its outskirts as well as up the Pequot River. A good proportion of its 150,000 people were connected in some way to Chubb University, an Ivy League institution that admitted itself inferior to none, even Harvard and Princeton. Town and Gown were inextricably intertwined.
Chubb’s main campus lay around three sides of the big Green, its early colonial Georgian and nineteenth-century gothic buildings joined by some startlingly modern edifices tolerated only because of the august architectural names associated with each; but there was also Science Hill to the east, where the science campus was located in square towers of dark brick and plate glass, and, way across town to the west, the Chubb Medical School.
Because medical schools grew up alongside hospitals, by 1965 they tended to be situated in the worst part of any city; in this respect Holloman was no different. The Chubb Medical School and the Holloman Hospital straggled down Oak Street on the southern border of the larger of Holloman’s two black ghettoes, called the Hollow because it lay in a hollow that had once been a swamp. To compound the health care woes, in 1960 the oil reservoirs of East Holloman were relocated at the end of Oak Street on waste ground between I-95 and the harbor.
The Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research sat on Oak Street right opposite the Shane-Driver medical student apartments, 100 for 100 students. Next to the Shane-Driver was the Parkinson Pavilion for medical research. It faced the Hug’s neighbor, the Holloman Hospital, a twelve-storey pile that had been rebuilt in 1950, the same year that saw the Hug go up.
“Why do they call it the Hug?” Corey asked as the Ford swung into the temporary road that bisected a gigantic parking lot.
“First three letters of Hughlings, I guess,” said Carmine.
“Hug? It’s got no dignity. Why not the first four letters? Then it’d be the Hugh.”
“Ask Professor Smith,” said Carmine, eyeing their destination.
The Hug was a shorter, smaller twin of the Burke Biology Tower and the Susskind Science Tower cross-campus on Science Hill; a baldly square, squat pile of dark brick with plenty of big plate-glass windows. It sat in three acres of what had used to be slum dwellings, demolished to make way for this monument perpetuating the name of a mystery man who had had absolutely nothing to do with its genesis. Who on earth was this Hughlings Jackson? A question all of Holloman asked. By rights the Hug should have been named after its donor, the enormously wealthy, late Mr. William Parson.
Having no gate key to the parking lot, Abe put the Ford on Oak Street right outside the building. Which had no entrance onto Oak Street; the three men tramped down a gravel path along the north side to a single glass door, where a very tall woman was waiting for them.
It’s like a child’s building block in the middle of a huge room, Carmine thought; three acres is a lot of land for something only a hundred feet per side. And shit, she’s holding a clipboard. Office, not medical. His mind automatically registered the physical details of every person who swam into his piece of the human sea, so it was busy as she drew closer: six-three in bare feet, early thirties, navy pant suit on the baggy side, flat lace-up shoes, mouse-brown hair, a face with a biggish nose and a prominent chin. She’d never have made Miss Holloman ten years ago, let alone Miss Connecticut. Once he halted in front of her, however, he noted that she had very fine, interesting eyes the color of thick ice, which he had always found beautiful.
“Sergeants Marshall and Goldberg. I’m Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico,” he said curtly.
“Desdemona Dupre, the business manager,” she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the UP button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor.
“This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops,” she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. “There you are, animal care.”
“Thanks,” said Carmine. “We’ll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators.”
Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment.
Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it.
Cecil Potter was a fine-looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though they were not smiling now.
One of Carmine’s most important policies in this year of busing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil’s firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy.
“It’s here,” said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap-lock handle. “I didn’t touch a thing, just shut the door.” He hesitated, decided to risk it. “Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?”
“Babies?”
“The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that’s them. They in there, an’ very upset. Jimmy won’t lay off telling them where he been, an’ they very upset.”
“Jimmy?”
“The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an’ put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her – tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis – he my assistant as well as the handyman – went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found her, an’ he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an’ called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you.”