“What’s your verdict on the Groton abduction, Carmine?”
“Oh, it’s our man, but proving that is going to be hard. He has changed his pattern, rung in the new year with a new tune. As soon as Patrick gets back, talk to him. I’m taking a drive around the Hugger homes. No, no, don’t panic! Just a look-see. Though if I find anyone at home, I’m going to ask to inspect places like basements and attics. Danny, you should see what’s in the Prof’s basement! Wowee wow!”
While he was in the booth he tried the Finches, whose phone rang out unanswered. The Forbeses, he discovered, used an answering service, probably because Forbes saw so many human patients. Its cooing operator informed Carmine that Dr. Forbes was in Boston for the weekend, and gave him a Boston number. When he called it, Dr. Addison Forbes barked at him irritably.
“I’ve just heard that another girl’s been taken,” Forbes said, “but don’t look at me, Lieutenant. My wife and I are up here with our daughter Roberta. She’s just been accepted into ob-gyn.”
I am running out of suspects, Carmine thought, hung up and went back to the Ford.
Coming into Holloman city on Sycamore, he decided to see what Tamara Vilich got up to on a holiday weekend.
Having checked who it was through the glass panel, she opened her front door clad in very non-Hugger clothes: a floating garment of filmy scarlet silk slit up both sides to her hips, very sexy, not much left to the imagination. She is one of those women, he thought, who never wears underpants. A female flasher.
“You look as if you could use a decent cup of coffee. Come in,” she said, smiling, the scarlet of her raiment turning her chameleon eyes quite red and devilish.
“Nice place you have here,” he said, gazing about.
“That,” she said, “is so hackneyed it sounds insincere.”
“Just making polite conversation.”
“Then make it with yourself for a minute while I deal with the coffee.”
She vanished in the direction of the kitchen, leaving him to absorb her decor at his leisure. Her taste ran to ultra modern: brilliant colors, good leather seating, chrome and glass rather than wood. But he hardly noticed, his attention riveted on the paintings assaulting her defenseless walls. In pride of place was a triptych. The left panel showed a nude, crimson-colored woman with a grotesquely ugly face kneeling to adore a phallic-looking statue of Jesus Christ; the center panel showed the same woman sprawled on her back with her legs wide open and the statue in her left hand; the right panel showed her with the statue jammed into her vagina and her face flying into pieces as if struck by a mercury-tipped bullet.
Having taken in its message, he chose a seat from which he couldn’t see the revolting thing.
The other paintings displayed more violence and anger than obscenity, but he wouldn’t hang a one of them on his walls. A faint reek of oil paints and turpentine told him that Tamara was probably the artist, but what drove her to these subjects? A rotting male corpse hanging upside down from a gallows, a quasi-human face snarling and slavering, a clenched fist oozing blood from between its fingers. Charles Ponsonby might approve, but Carmine’s eye was shrewd enough to judge that her technique wasn’t brilliant; no, these weren’t good enough to interest a finicky connoisseur like Chuck. All they had was the power to offend.
Either she’s sick, or she’s more cynical than I suspected, he thought.
“Like my stuff?” she asked, rejoining him.
“No. I think it’s sick.”
Her fine head went back, she laughed heartily. “You mistake my motives, Lieutenant. I paint what a certain market wants so badly it can’t get enough. The trouble is my technique isn’t as good as the masters in the field, so I can only sell my work for its subject matter.”
“The implication, for peanuts. Right?”
“Yes. Though one day maybe I will be able to earn a living at it. The real money is in limited editions of prints, but I’m not a lithographer. I need lessons I can’t afford.”
“Still paying off the Hug embezzlement, huh?”
She uncoiled from her chair like a spring and returned to the kitchen without answering.
Her coffee was very good; he drank thirstily, helped himself to an apple Danish fresh out of the freezer.
“You own the premises, I believe,” he said, feeling better.
“Been checking up on people?”
“Sure. It’s a part of the job.”
“Yet you have the gall to sit in judgement of my work. Yes,” she went on, stroking her throat with one long, beautiful hand, “I own this house. I rent the second floor to a radiology resident and his nurse wife, and the top floor to a couple of lesbian ornithologists who work at the Burke Biology Tower. The rent’s saved my bacon since my – er – little slip.”
That’s right, Tamara, brazen it out, it suits you better than indignation. “Professor Smith implied that your husband of that time masterminded you.”
She leaned forward, feet tucked under her, lifted her lip in contempt. “They say you won’t do what you don’t want to do, so what do you think?”
“That you loved him a great deal.”
“How perceptive of you, Lieutenant! I suppose I must have, but it seems an eternity ago.”
“Do you let your tenants use the basement?” he asked.
Her creamy lids fell, her mouth curved slightly. “No, I do not. The basement is mine.”
“I have no warrant, but would you mind if I looked around?”
Her nipples popped out as if she were suddenly cold. “Why? What’s happened?” she asked sharply.
“Another abduction. Last night, in Groton.”
“And you think, because I paint what I paint, that I’m a psycho with a basement soaked in blood. Look where you want, I don’t give a fuck,” she said, and walked into what he realized had once been a second bedroom, but now was her studio.
Carmine took her at her word, prowled around the basement to find nothing worse than a dead rat in a trap; had he liked her, he would have removed it for her, but as he didn’t, he didn’t.
Her bedroom was very interesting; black leather, black satin sheets on a bed whose frame was stout enough to take manacles, a zebra skin on the black carpet with its head intact and two glowing red-glass eyes. I bet, he thought, walking about quietly, that you’re not on the receiving end of the whips, honey. You are a dominatrix. I wonder who is being flogged?
A photograph in an ornate silver frame stood on the bedside table on what he guessed was her side of the bed; an elderly, stern woman who looked enough like Tamara to be Mom. He picked it up in what, had she entered the room, would have seemed an idle manner, then slid its back out quickly. Bingo! Paydirt. Behind Mom lay a full-length picture of Keith Kyneton; he was stark naked, built like Mr. Universe, and up like a fifteen-year-old. Another thirty seconds and Mom was back on the table. Why don’t they realize that hiding one photo behind another is the oldest trick in the Book of Deceptions? Now I know all about you, Miss Tamara Vilich. You might be flogging others, but not him – his work would suffer. Do you play games together, then? Dress him up as a baby and paddle his backside? Play a nurse giving him an enema? Or a strict schoolteacher dishing out humiliations? A hooker picking him up in a bar? Well, well!
With nowhere else left to go, he went home, but got off the elevator on the tenth floor and pressed Desdemona’s intercom. Her voice answered tonelessly – not evidence of distaste, evidence of technology.
“There’s been another one,” he said baldly, peeling off his outdoor layers.
“Carmine, no! It’s only been a month!”
He gazed around, located the work basket and a tablecloth that was being finished more rapidly than it would have been in her hiking days. “Why,” he demanded, mood darkened to utter discouragement and in need of someone to lash out at, “are you such a miser, Desdemona? Why don’t you spend money on yourself? What’s with this frugal living? Can’t you buy a nice dress once in a while?”