Sins of the Flesh

by Colleen McCullough

  Silvestri was, besides, an excellent boss. Though he wore the pale blue ribbon of the Medal of Honor for exploits as a soldier during the Second World War, he was a born desk cop who had only once fired his side arm on police duty—to telling effect, thus proving his eye hadn’t lost its ability to see a concealed target and plug it dead-center. Though his last name was Silvestri, most of his blood was Cerutti, which made him genetically related to more than half of the Holloman Police Department, including Carmine Delmonico and several other detectives. Delia Carstairs was an Englishwoman from Oxford, but she was also his niece; her mother was Silvestri’s sister, who had foolishly thought she could escape her cop roots by marrying a scholar of old English in a different country. But where was her only child now? A cop with Uncle John!

  His wife, Gloria, had held the title of the best dressed woman in Connecticut for years, and when the Silvestris appeared together it was generally held that the only other couple as handsome and elegant was M.M., President of Chubb University, and his wife, the divinely wafty Angela. That Gloria was not just a beautiful face was manifest in her owning a Master’s degree in Renaissance history from Chubb and in her having splendidly reared three sons.

  None of the Silvestri boys was a cop. John Junior was a major in the United States Marines; Anthony was fast-tracking a career in particle physics at Berkeley; and Michael was well on the way to becoming yet another contentious Jesuit. So the Silvestris had a soldier, a scientist and a religious stirrer, as well as five grandchildren from John Junior, including two idolized girls. They were intensely proud of their Italian-American ancestry, and they hated the Mafia as disgracing a fine immigrant input for America.

  Under ordinary circumstances Silvestri had a wicked sense of humor, but it was not in evidence this morning, despite the rare luxury his tower enjoyed—air-conditioning. Outside its walls the temperature was up to 89°F already, and no end in sight.

  The death of Marty Fane had upset the Commissioner, whose darkly handsome face was stern. “A turf war?” he asked.

  Carmine answered. “Almost a hundred percent no, sir,” he said calmly. “If I thought it was a turf war, I’d have asked for Fernando, Virgil and Corey this morning, because the uniforms would be in the thick of it. It may come to a turf war, but Marty wasn’t killed to start one.”

  “Expound,” Silvestri said.

  “I think we have a new man in town, sir, and this new man put paid to Marty. But not to take over his patch. Whatever he is, he’s not into prostitution.”

  “Then let’s leave it for the moment. Our plethora of missing persons first, I think. Abe, what progress on the John Does?”

  “We’ve identified the last four, sir—John Doe Three, John Doe Four, James Doe, and Jeb Doe. All physically very good-looking kids about nineteen or twenty years old, and all employed for varying time spans between a week and several months by the designers Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham. They worked out of Busquash Manor, which contains a theater stage,” said Abe.

  “Homosexual elements?” the Commissioner asked.

  “Yes, sir, though I’m not convinced homosexuality had much to do with their murders,” Abe said steadily. “Indications are that each Doe was kidnapped, then castrated and starved to death. Now that we know who the kids were, it seems likely that the Rha Tanais/Rufus Ingham connection provides a pool of candidates for the killer. The kind of work allied to the sexual freedom around Rha Tanais and his pal attract dozens of kids of both sexes in any year—it’s a honeypot for this killer, sir. I’d say in all certainty that John Doe One and John Doe Two were also scooped out of this pool. Tony Cerutti is on the road talking to relatives and friends of the identified victims, and it’s becoming clearer by the day that the perpetrator is either a central part of the Busquash Manor zoo, or so close he can masquerade as center.”

  Silvestri’s face lightened. “Good news, Abe! You’ve made real progress since our last meeting. So where do you plan to go from here? Anything you can share?”

  “Tony should be on his way home tomorrow or the day after, sir. Then the three of us will start putting the people of Busquash Manor under a cop microscope, starting with Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham.” Abe frowned. “I’d like to add, sir, that I don’t think either of those men is the perpetrator. However, it’s very possible that they know more than so far they’re telling. I intend to grill them.”

  The Commissioner turned his dark eyes on Delia, a twinkle flaring in their depths.

  She was wearing a loose, floppy pajama suit of the weirdest print anyone present had ever seen; on a pea-soup-green background paraded dozens of cats and dogs with toothy smiles, caricatures and cartoons of cats and dogs in lurid colors and worse designs—spots, stripes, zig-zags, checks, curliques, squares, triangles. It was blinding as well as mesmerizing, but none of it rivaled her gigantic purse, the front end of a cat joined to the front end of a dog, and opening along its top from the set of feline ears to the set of canine ears. Not only did it hide her usual arsenal, it probably had room inside it for a small mortar and plenty of shells.

  “I’m afraid, sir,” she said in her pear-shaped Oxford voice, “that I’m at the opposite end of the earth from Abe. I haven’t advanced my case a scrap. The missing women are still shadows.”

  “Well, Delia, if you can’t find a loose string in the tangle, no one can,” Silvestri said with as much cheer as he could summon. “I can’t imagine you’re at a complete standstill.”

  “Not quite, sir,” she said, smiling to show lipstick on her teeth. “I chanced upon a book at the weekend, and it’s providing some illumination—just, unfortunately, not in the direction of solving the case.”

  “Carmine?” the Commissioner asked.

  “Delia goes back to her book and her missing women, while I concentrate on the new man in town. He rides a big bike, but he’s not part of a biker gang, and he prefers murder to assault. His MO is unlike anything we’ve seen, which is why I think he’s just blown into town from somewhere out of state. The death of Marty Fane was shameful, in that there was absolutely no need for it, and seasoned hoods have more sense than to prey on old-stager pimps like Marty, who would have killed his first rival before his voice broke. That says our new man in town doesn’t care about his own skin the way hoods usually do. Or else he’s supremely confident of his own ability to get in first.”

  “You’re talking psychopathic loner, Carmine.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” said Silvestri, sighing. “Let’s eat.”

  With a charming apology, Delia gathered up several fruit Danish on a plate and carried it downstairs to her own office, regretting the much poorer coffee, but too anxious to dive into her book to consume her sugar binge upstairs in Uncle John’s aerie.

  The book was highly technical and on most levels beyond her understanding, but she could just manage to get enough of it to make reading it worthwhile. It hadn’t come from the municipal library, or even from the five-million-volume main Chubb library; its source was the Chubb medical library. She had gone there on Saturday to see if she could find material that would help her grasp what Jess Wainfleet did, her peculiar and super-specialist psychiatry, and with the help of a bored librarian, she had found what seemed a promising book. Then had come Marty Fane, and any chance to spend a quiet Sunday reading.

  As she read, the quality of her coffee forgotten, memories began to stir and then to roil, of an era after the Second World War but before the great advances in psychiatric chemotherapy …. Fascinated, she read on, skipping the pages and pages of gibberish in search of the passages that unlocked at least a part of her case beneath her very eyes. Shortly before one in the afternoon she closed the book, conscious that her head and neck and shoulders were one mass of aches and pains from a nervous tension that had escaped her notice until she was done.

  Book in hand, she went to find Carmine, whom she tracked down in Paul Bachman’s laboratory. On seeing Delia, he thanked Paul and walked upstairs with her to his office.<
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  “I have some thoughts on my Shadow Women,” she said, sitting in his visitor’s chair.

  Carmine’s hand, which had been pulling his dog’s silky ear, went suddenly still; Frankie sighed and flopped prone on the floor, aware that the attention was over.

  “Expatiate, Deels.”

  “Something called a prefrontal lobotomy, or leukotomy,” she said, “depending on how the surgeon described his operation. If he thought of its ultimate purpose, to sever the prefrontal grey matter cortex from its connection to the rest of the brain, then—lobotomy. If he thought of how he was going to sever the connection by cutting its white matter pathways, then—leukotomy. Lobotomy is the most drastic measure taken to neutralize frightful behavior disorders. Before lobotomy, savage, dangerous animals. After lobotomy, flat and emotionally unresponsive human beings.”

  Her bright brown eyes, fenced in by spikes of mascara, glowed at Carmine. “But then, luckily, psychiatric chemotherapy arrived, too soon to fill our psychiatric hospitals with lobotomized zombies. I found this marvelous book, Carmine, that outlines the entire history of dangerous behavioral dementias from ancient times right up to 1965. If one leaves the red herring of the studio portraits out of the Shadow Women, those who encountered them during their six months of tenancy all describe flat, rather unresponsive women. Well, to me their mood is no longer a mystery, whatever else about them may be. I think they were all heavily dosed with a mood- or mind-altering drug like chlorpromazine.”

  “It’s a very good point, Delia, but where does it get you?” Carmine asked.

  “It says that in order to keep each woman tractable over the period, she had to be chemically reduced to a sort of a zombie.”

  “If it’s part of a murder MO, it’s in the realm of science fiction,” Carmine objected. He thought. “Or science fantasy.”

  “I want to interview Jess Wainfleet,” Delia said, “here in County Services, and in tandem with you.”

  One black brow flew up; he grinned. “Is she suspect?”

  “No, but I need more information, and I’m more likely to get it in a formal setting divorced from her own bailiwick. Ideally I would like her to be unafraid yet not at perfect ease, unable to plead a sudden emergency or parade Walter Jenkins under our noses. She has a huge ego and she can be arrogant. We can play on the ego by humbly begging her to see us in County Services, as we don’t want our plea for her help known at HI,” Delia said.

  “How has your thinking changed on the Shadow Women?” Carmine asked, reluctant to foist his own theories on her just yet. She had distinctive ways of looking at things, and must be granted the time necessary to decide purely for herself whether her ideas had merit. Personally he put her up there with Abe Goldberg, so …

  “Drugging them to achieve an emotional plateau only an inch above sea level says more about the mastermind than it does about them,” Delia said slowly. “A lot of patience, no impulses to draw close to any of them emotionally—he’s very cool, I think, though I don’t know if he’s cold. Really, I need a Jess Wainfleet.”

  “Don’t be disappointed if she doesn’t work as well as you hope. For myself, I’d go for Dr. Aristede Melos,” Carmine said.

  “Good thought. If Jess doesn’t work, I’ll try him. Thank you!”

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1969

  Carmine was relieved to see that Delia had dressed down for this entirely informal interview; had Delia greeted her today in yerterday’s dogs and cats, Jess might have been excused for thinking anything. Room 1 was larger than Room 2 and had better ventilation; Delia had even attempted to humanize it with a vase of summer flowers.

  The escorting uniform showed Jess in, no more; it was left to Delia to seat Dr. Wainfleet in the most comfortable chair, and perform the introductions when Carmine walked in. A flicker of surprise showed in Jess’s eyes—clearly he didn’t look as she had expected. She wore a burgundy pant-suit and a pale rose-pink blouse in cotton fabrics as a concession to the heat; both face and body were relaxed, though the smile on her lips didn’t reach her guarded eyes.

  “At best, Dr. Wainfleet, this is a semi-formal procedure,” Carmine said from the corner where the tape recorder lived, “and the reason we asked you to come to us is purely selfish. Our recording setup is tried and true, and the subject so foreign that we felt it had to be recorded for our archives as well as our present case. As far as we have been able to ascertain, Dr. Wainfleet, you are our nearest premier authority on neuroanatomy, and it is in that capacity that we wish to talk to you. To the best of our knowledge, you are not embroiled in the case of six missing women currently being conducted by Sergeant Delia Carstairs, and therefore stand in no need of an attorney-at-law, but if you have reason to believe or know that such is not the case, then you are entitled to ask for legal representation. If you waive your right to an attorney-at-law, you are free to invoke it at any time in the future,” said Carmine.

  Jess’s eyes danced. “For an informal interview, Captain, you have managed to endow it with all the portent of the Pythoness at Delphi!” she said, smiling. “However, I understand. What’s more important to you, I waive my right to an attorney this morning.”

  “Then let’s make ourselves as easy as possible under the circumstances,” Carmine said with an answering smile. “The coffee is Malvolio’s, freshly made every half hour, and it’s not milk, it’s half-and-half. Okay?”

  “I thank you for your consideration,” Jess said. “Do you mind if I smoke an occasional cigarette?”

  Delia reached behind her and produced a clean glass ashtray, then hard on its heels the six studio portraits of her Shadows. “Do you recognize any of these women, Jess?” she asked, geared for the inevitable denial.

  But what Jess said, almost instantaneously, was “Oh, yes!”

  “You do know them?” Delia said on a squeak.

  “Certainly,” Jess said, removing a cigarette from her pack and lighting it. “They were all patients of mine.”

  Carmine was staring at the psychiatrist in a mixture of awe and anger at his own sheer stupidity in not perceiving that there might be a connection between a group of women displaying the same symptoms and a psychiatrist conceivably treating them. They had all demonstrated a flatness of mood typical in clinical depression, yet it hadn’t occurred to him to canvass Holloman’s thriving cluster of psychiatrists. Admittedly he wouldn’t have flushed Jess Wainfleet out of hiding, as she was a public servant in charge of criminally insane patients, but it would have made her more visible. As it was, she had been drawn to their attention purely as an expert in a different field.

  Delia spoke. “When did you see these women, Jess? Did you see them separately, or together as a group?”

  “Separately,” Jess said, voice unconcerned. “Each of them was my patient.” She frowned, looked at Delia. “I don’t understand? I thought I was here to give you help with neurosurgical details, not identify people.”

  “So did we, Jess. This comes as a terrific surprise,” said Delia. “It never occurred to anyone in the Holloman PD that these six missing women were HI patients, or in the Asylum—for that matter, we didn’t think there were any female prisoners there.”

  “There aren’t,” Jess said blankly. “They were all my own private patients.”

  “Private patients?”

  “Yes, of course. I am permitted to treat private patients,” Jess said, looking surprised. “Each of these women was a private patient.” She laughed, apparently at their naiveté. “It was all aboveboard, and it’s all in the HI records.”

  “Starting with Margot Tennant in 1963?” Carmine asked.

  “That is correct, yes.”

  “Was there a time span for each woman?”

  “As far as I was concerned, yes,” Jess said. “January second of the relevant year, without fail.” She touched each photograph as she spoke. “Donna Woodrow in 1964. Rebecca Silberfein in 1965. Maria Morris in 1966. Julia Bell-Simons in 1967. Elena Carba in 1968. She was the last.”

 
; “And that’s it? Just January second of each year?”

  “Yes.” Jess leaned forward a little, took a sip of coffee, then folded her hands on the table, not thrown off balance in the least. “Actually I’m pleased that your investigation has been revealed to me—I have concrete examples to illustrate the procedures you want to know about. Let me take the second woman, Donna Woodrow, in 1964. She was referred to me suffering from an intractable behavioral psychosis that made her a danger both to herself and to others. The alternative for Donna was to undergo a crude bilateral amputation of all her pathways to the prefrontal lobe. Or Donna could undergo my kind of surgery.

  “I consider crude amputation abhorrent. It turns an uncontrollably manic patient into an oafish and shambling zombie—a creature stripped of its very soul! It’s irreversible because brain tissue doesn’t have the ability to regenerate. So no future recovery can ever happen. These poor creatures have lost their humanity. So why is it done? To turn a rabid wildcat into plant matter, soulless and subhuman.

  “The best I can say about it is that it saves the State both money and manpower. But, Captain and Sergeant, I firmly believe that no one on earth has the right to strip a human being of his or her soul. Better to kill them than do that.”

  Passion had flowed into the voice and animated the eyes; this was Jess Wainfleet fighting like a tiger for the Walters of the world. No wonder she valued him so much! He, whose history had been a horror story of violence and murder, was proof positive that amputation of all connections between the brain and its prefrontal cortex was not the only way to treat the underlying causes.

  “What I did to each of those women was to modify the procedure so that the patient kept her human soul. Each woman emerged able to enjoy some kind of basic human life—read, watch television, listen to and absorb a radio news broadcast, keep herself clean, fed, and fit to move about in society, if not to relate to it on a very adequate level.”