“Was, a long time ago. I have a daughter nearly fifteen.”
“With American alimony what it is, I’m surprised you can buy Lalique and chinoiserie.”
“No alimony,” he said with a grin. “My ex left me to marry a guy who could buy and sell Chubb. She and my girl live in an L.A. mansion that looks like Hampton Court palace.”
“You’ve traveled.”
“From time to time, even for the job. I get the crap cases, and Chubb being an international community, a few cases spread to Europe, the Middle East, Asia. I saw the table and chandelier in a store window in Paris and hocked my suspenders to buy them. The Chinese stuff I bought in Hong Kong and Macau while I was in Japan just after the War. Occupational forces. The Chinese were so poor that I got things for a song.”
“But you weren’t above profiting from their poverty.”
“You can’t eat painted tigers, lady. Both sides got what they wanted.” It wasn’t said sharply, though it held a measure of reproof. “The first cold winter, they’d have been burned. I hate to think how much was burned during the years when the Japs treated the Chinese like sheep for the slaughter. As it is, what I have, I care for and appreciate. It’s not worth a hill of beans compared to what the British took out of Greece and the French out of Italy,” he added a little maliciously.
“Touché.” She put her beer down. “All right, time to get down to brass tacks, Lieutenant. What do you think you can winkle out of me in return for feeding me?”
“Probably nothing, but who knows? I won’t start by asking you anything I can’t find out for myself, though if you come across, it will save getting a few Hug backs up. Yours is permanently up, probably over your tallness, so I know where I stand with you – a good four inches shorter.”
“I am proud of my height,” she said, tight-lipped.
“So you should be. There’s lots of guys fancy climbing up Mount Everest.”
She burst out laughing. “That’s exactly what I said to Miss Tamara Vilich today!” Sobering, she looked at him levelly. “But you’re not such a one, are you?”
“Nope. I get my exercise working out in the police gym.”
“Ask your questions, then.”
“What’s the Hug’s annual budget?”
“Three million dollars. A million in salaries and wages, a million in running costs and supplies, three-quarters of a million to Chubb University, and a quarter of a million as reserve.”
He whistled. “Jesus! How the hell can the Parsons fund it?”
“From a trust with a capital of a hundred and fifty million. This means that we never get through what the interest fetches. Wilbur Dowling wants the size of the Hug doubled to include a psychiatric division devoted to organic psychoses. Though this doesn’t fall within the Hug’s parameters, those parameters could be altered fairly legitimately to gratify his wishes.”
“Why the hell did William Parson set aside so much?”
“I think because he was a business skeptic who believed that money would inevitably lose its value as time went on. He was so alone, you see, and toward the end of his life the Hug became his entire reason for being.”
“Would doubling the size of the Hug to fit in with the Dean’s ambitions be a problem in other ways than just money?”
“Definitely. The Parsons dislike Dowling to a man, and M.M. is such a Chubber to his bootstraps that he regards science and medicine as faintly sordid things that by rights should belong to state-funded universities. That he tolerates them is because the federal government pours money into scientific and medical research, and Chubb does very well out of it. The Hug’s isn’t the only percentage Chubb takes.”
“So M.M. and the Parsons are the stumbling blocks. It always goes back to personalities, doesn’t it?” Carmine asked, refilling his teacup from a pot kept warm inside a padded basket.
“They’re human beings, so yes.”
“How much does the Hug spend on major equipment?”
“This year, more than usual. Dr. Schiller is being endowed with an electron microscope that will cost a million.”
“Ah, yes, Dr. Schiller,” he said, stretching out his legs. “I hear that some of the Huggers are making his life so difficult that he tried to resign this afternoon.”
“How do you know that?” she demanded, sitting up straight.
“A little bird.”
Down went the beer glass with a clang; Desdemona scrambled up. “Then feed your little bird, not me!” she snapped.
He didn’t move. “Calm down, Desdemona, and sit down.”
She stood doing her habitual towering act, eyes locked on his, which were, a corner of her mind noted, not dark brown, but more an amber that this room enlivened. The brain behind them knew exactly what she was feeling, and couldn’t be bothered with her compunctions. As was, she admitted, only fitting: all he cared about was finding the Connecticut Monster. Desdemona Dupre was a pawn he could easily afford to lose. She sat down.
“That’s better,” he said, smiling. “What do you think of Dr. Kurt Schiller?”
“As a person, or as a researcher?”
“Both, I guess.”
“As a researcher, he’s an acknowledged world authority on the structure of the limbic system, which is why the Prof pinched him from Frankfurt.” She smiled, something she didn’t do often enough; her smile transformed a rather plain face into quite an attractive one. “As a person, I like him. The poor chap labors under some frightful handicaps apart from his nationality.”
“Like homosexuality?”
“That bird again?”
“Most men don’t need a bird to whistle that, Desdemona.”
“True. Women are more easily deluded, because women tend to view pleasant and gentle men as good husband material. Many of them prefer their own sex, which wives don’t find out until a few children later. It happened to two friends of mine. However, Kurt is pleasant and gentle but doesn’t pursue women so he can reproduce himself. Like all the researchers, he lives for his work, so I don’t think his homosexual affairs are long-standing. Or, if he does have a regular boyfriend, I imagine the boyfriend doesn’t see enough of him.”
“You’re very dispassionate,” he said.
“That’s because I’m not really involved. Candidly, I think Kurt came to America to start afresh, and put himself in a geographical location that means he can travel to New York City and the homosexual scene whenever he likes. What he forgot – or perhaps didn’t know – was how many people in the American medical professions are of Jewish extraction. It’s twenty years since the War ended with all those ghastly concentration camp revelations, but the memories are still very much alive.”
“In you too, I imagine,” he said.
“Oh, for me it was mostly the horrors of food and clothing rationing – what you’d call peanuts. Bombs and V-2s, but not where I lived well outside Lincoln.” She shrugged. “Still and all, I like Kurt Schiller, and until this awful business happened, so did everyone else, including Maurie Finch, Sonia Liebman, Hilda Silverman and the technicians. I remember Maurie saying at the time he learned Kurt had the pathology job that he’d done battle with his conscience, and his conscience said he mustn’t be the one to cast the first stone at a German young enough not to have participated in the Holocaust.” She glanced at her watch, the cheapest Timex she could find. “I must go, but thank you, Carmine. The food was just what I fancied, the environment truly gorgeous, and the company – why, quite bearable.”
“Bearable enough to do it again next Wednesday?” he asked, pulling her to her feet as if she weighed half of her 160 pounds.
“If you like.”
He took her down in the elevator and insisted on walking her to her Corvette.
An interesting woman, he thought as he watched the car growl away. There’s more to her than a complex about her height. Get her talking and she forgets to tower. Dresses in cheap shit, hacks at her hair herself, doesn’t have any jewelry. Does that make her stingy, or merely indifferent to the way she looks? I don’t think she’s either. Not surprising to find out she’s a keen hiker. I can see her striding along the Appalachian Trail in big boots – a feminine Tom Bombadil. No flare of attraction between us, that was a relief. Since I’d bet the contents of my walls that she’s not the Connecticut Monster, Miss Desdemona Dupre is the logical Hugger to cultivate.