On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  Which answers the riddle of why they live in this semi-slum, thought Carmine, his gaze passing from Hilda to Ruth, who looked just as worried about Keith. The United Women of Keith.

  “What time did you get home last night, Miss Silverman?”

  “Not long after six.”

  “What time did you go to bed?”

  “At ten. I always do.”

  “So you don’t wait up for your husband?”

  “There’s no need. Ruth does. I’m the major earner at the moment, you see.”

  The sound of a car pulling into the drive galvanized both women; they leaped up, rushed to the front door and hopped about like two basketballers jockeying for position.

  Wow! was Carmine’s reaction when Keith Kyneton walked in. Definitely a prince, not a frog from Dayton, Ohio, anymore. How had the transformation happened, and where? His looks and his physique were undeniable, but what fascinated Carmine were the clothes. Everything of the very best, from his tailored gabardine slacks to his tawny cashmere sweater. The well-dressed neurosurgeon after a hard day in the O.R., while his wife and mother bought off the rack at Cheap & Nasty.

  Having shaken off his women, Keith stared at Carmine with hard grey eyes, his generous lips thinned. “Are you the one who pulled me out of the O.R.?” he demanded.

  “That’s me. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico. Sorry about it, but I presume Chubb’s got another neurosurgeon to pinch-hit?”

  “Yes, of course it has!” he snapped. “Why am I here?”

  When he heard why he was here, Keith collapsed into a chair. “Our backyard?” he whispered. “Ours?”

  “Yours, Dr. Kyneton. What time did you come in last night?”

  “About two-thirty, I think.”

  “Did you notice anything different about the place where you parked your car? Do you always park it out front, or do you put it in the garage?”

  “In dead of winter I put it in the garage, but I’m still leaving it outside,” he said, gazing not at Ruth but at Hilda. “It’s a year-old Cadillac, starts like a dream on a cold morning.” He was regaining his high opinion of himself. “Truth is, I am whacked by the time I get home, really whacked.”

  A new Caddy while your wife and your mother drive fifteen-year-old clunkers. What a piece of shit you are, Dr. Kyneton. “You didn’t answer my question, Doctor. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you got home last night?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Did you notice that last night was kinda damp and soggy?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “Your driveway is unsealed. Were there strange tire tracks?”

  “I told you, I didn’t notice anything!” he cried fretfully.

  “How often do you work late, Dr. Kyneton? I mean, is Holloman overloaded with patients requiring your particular skills?”

  “Since ours is the only unit in the state with the equipment to perform cerebrovascular surgery, we do tend to be overloaded.”

  “So coming home at two or three in the morning is the norm?”

  Kyneton chewed his lip, suddenly looked away from his mother, his wife, his interrogator. Hiding something. “It’s not always the O.R.,” he said sulkily.

  “If not the O.R., then what?”

  “I am a postdoctoral fellow, Lieutenant. I give lectures that have to be prepared, I have to write extremely detailed case notes, I have to do teaching rounds in the hospital, and I’m kept busy training neurosurgical residents.” His gaze remained deflected.

  “Your wife tells me that you’re going to buy into a private neurosurgical practice.”

  “That’s right, I am. A group in New York City.”

  “Thank you, Miss Silverman, Dr. Kyneton. I may have other questions later, but this will do for the present.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” said Ruth Kyneton.

  “I really don’t need walking out,” Carmine said gently when they reached the porch and the front door was shut.

  “Glad to know there’s two of us ain’t fools.”

  “Is that your opinion of them, Mrs. Kyneton? Fools?”

  She sighed, kicked a pebble off the boards into the night. “I reckon the fairies musta brought Keith — never fitted in, all airs and graces before he went to kindergarten. But I’ll give him this — he worked his guts out to get an education, improve himself. And I love him for it something chronic. Hilda suits him, y’know. I guess it don’t look like that, but she does.”

  “If this private practice comes off, what about you?” he asked, sounding gruff.

  “Oh, I ain’t going with them!” she said cheerfully. “I’m gonna stay right here on Griswold Lane. They’ll look after me.”

  There were a lot of things Carmine wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, “Good night, Mrs. Kyneton. You’re some woman.”

  All the way back to Cedar Street, Carmine struggled with the unexpected discovery that the killer sometimes secreted the girls on the spot and removed them later. It preyed on his mind more than the change in ethnicity did.

  “He isn’t begging us to catch him,” he said to Silvestri, “nor is he jerking our strings just to show us how clever he is. I don’t believe that his ego needs that kind of stimulation. If he jerks our strings, it’s because he has to, as part of his plans rather than as a cute aside. Like burying Francine in the Kynetons’ backyard. In my book, that’s a defense mechanism. And it says to me that the killer is connected to the Hug, that he harbors a grudge against someone there — and that he isn’t a scrap worried that we might find him.”

  “I think we have to search the Hug,” Silvestri said.

  “Yes, sir, and more to the point, we have to search it tomorrow, a Saturday. But we won’t get a warrant out of Judge Douglas Thwaites.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Silvestri growled. “What time is it?”

  “Six,” said Carmine, looking at the antique railroad clock behind Silvestri’s head.

  “I’ll call M.M. and see if he can’t persuade the Hug Board to give us permission to search. Of course they can have as many Huggers as they want to watch us search, but whom would you prefer, Carmine?”

  “Professor Smith and Miss Dupre,” said Carmine promptly.

  “He gave her a shot of Demerol,” Patrick said when Carmine walked in. “He couldn’t have gone into a vein with a struggling girl on his hands, but he needed the drug to work as soon as possible. So I looked at her abdomen first, and there it was. With the risk of puncturing intestine or liver, he had to use a big-bore hypodermic — a fine twenty-five-gauge tuberculin syringe would have kept on going rather than pushed things aside. And that was our saving grace. A twenty-five-gauge pinprick would have healed completely in the seven days he kept her alive. The eighteen-gauge made a hole.”

  “Why is going into the abdomen quicker than into muscle?”

  “It’s called a parenteral injection, mixes the drug with the fluid of the abdominal cavity. Next best thing to a vein. I’d picked that he’d use Demerol, it’s a fast-acting opiate. Generic name, meperidine, and more addictive even than heroin, so getting a prescription for the oral version isn’t easy. Only medical people would have access to ampoules. Anyway, I was right. Up came the meperidine signature.”

  “Any idea how much he gave her?”

  “No. I found my trace in the dermal cells where the needle went in. But either he miscalculated the dosage or Francine had a better resistance to it than usual. If she managed to hide her jacket, then she came around much sooner than he counted on.”

  “No gag, but muffled in a super-thick mat. Tied with maybe duct tape over her pants legs and her blouse. He might have taken the jacket off her himself to tape her blouse cuffs,” Carmine said. “When she woke up, she couldn’t move much, though it’s possible she managed to start freeing her hands. I think Francine was a formidable young woman. The kind we can’t afford to lose.”

  “They’re all that kind.” Patrick frowned. “Still, he ought to have seen a pink sleev
e poking out of a black mat.”

  “The place was dark and he was in a hurry. It’s possible Francine had moved enough to hide what she’d done, or maybe when he opened the locker she came out fighting.”

  “Either or,” Patrick said.

  “Have you missed dinner, Patsy?”

  “Nessie’s gone to a Chubb concert, so it’s Malvolio’s for me.”

  “And for me. Meet you there as soon as I tell Silvestri where I’m going.” Carmine grinned. “He’ll be on that phone for at least an hour.”

  “The saints preserve me from tycoons,” Silvestri grumbled when he slid into their booth. “At least I’m on my own time, so I can have a drink. Coffee and a double Scotch on the rocks,” he said to the waitress who reminded Carmine of Sandra.

  “That bad, huh?” Patrick asked sympathetically.

  “M.M. was easy. He appreciated our situation. But Roger Parson Junior was like getting blood out of a stone. He refuses to see any connection to his precious Hug.”

  “How did you get around him, John?” Carmine asked.

  The Scotch came; Silvestri swallowed some and looked like one of Hell’s executive demons. “I told him to put his money where his mouth is. If there’s no link to the Hug, then the sooner we ransack the joint, the better his case. Though,” he added, still wearing that diabolical look, “I paid a price for his permission.”

  “And why,” asked Carmine warily, “do I think someone else is paying the price?”

  “Because, Carmine, you’re smart. Next Thursday at noon you have an appointment with Parson at his office in New York City. He wants to know everything we know.”

  “I need that like a hole in the head.”

  “Pay the price, Carmine, pay the price.”

  Chapter 10

  Saturday, December 11th, 1965

  The best laid schemes can go awry, Carmine reflected on that Saturday morning. There had been an armed robbery at a gas station that the thieves followed up by hitting two liquor stores, a jeweler and another gas station, which thinned his reserve of men down to a point where he knew the search was going to take all day. Corey and Abe and four other detectives, all rookies who would have to be supervised. Right. Two parties of three, Abe leading one, Corey the other, while he himself floated. Paul was on hand in case evidence came to light that needed his touch.

  They arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. to be greeted in the foyer by the Prof and Desdemona, neither of them pleased but each under Board instructions to be co-operative.

  “Miss Dupre, you go with Sergeant Marshall and his men on this floor. I presume you have keys to everything that’s locked? Professor, you go one floor up with Sergeant Goldberg. Do you have keys?” Carmine asked.

  “Yes,” whispered the Prof, who looked as if he might faint.

  “Cecil is in,” Desdemona said to Carmine as they walked down the north hall.

  “Because of this search?”

  “No, because of his babies. He’s always in weekend mornings. I’ll wait outside in case he has one in the main room. They abhor women,” she said.

  “So he told me. You can go with Corey to look in the machine shop and the electronics lab. The last thing I want is Roger Parson Junior accusing us of stealing something. I’ll search animal care myself.”

  “I am grateful for that, Lieutenant,” said Cecil, who didn’t seem annoyed at this invasion. “Want to see where my babies live? They in a good mood today.”

  I’d be in a good mood too if I lived like this, Carmine said to himself, entering a small foyer shut off from the main macaque room by heavy iron bars. They were so strong, Cecil explained, that, if enraged, they could break chain link like candy canes. The area, very large considering its small population, was landscaped like rocky savannah — a wall of rugged boulders pocked with holes, bushes, tufts of grass, logs, limbed concrete trees, warm light that felt like a hot sun. Rheostats connected to timers ensured that there was a dawn and a dusk.

  “Isn’t it unkind to deprive them of females?” Carmine asked.

  Cecil chuckled. “They make do, Lieutenant, same as men make do in prison. Hump the shit outta each other. But there’s a pecking order, an’ Eustace, he The Man. New guy arrives, he gets grabbed by Eustace, humped, then he gets passed to Clyde, an’ ol’ Clyde, he passes the new guy on, an’ so on. Jimmy, he the last in the pecking order. Never gets to do more than jerk hisself off.”

  “Well, thanks for showing me, Cecil, but I doubt any girl has ever been hidden in here.”

  “You dead right there, Lieutenant.”

  “What exactly are you looking for?” Desdemona asked when he joined Corey’s group in a workshop that was a machinist’s dream.

  “A cupboard with a human hair in it, a shred of clothing, a broken fingernail, a scrap of duct tape, a bloodstain. Anything that shouldn’t be there.”

  “Ah, so that’s why the magnifying glasses and the bright lights! I thought that sort of thing went out with Sherlock Holmes.”

  “They’re the tools of choice in a search like this. All these men are experts at looking for evidence.”

  “Mr. Roger Parson Junior is not amused.”

  “So I gather, but ask me if I care. The answer is, I don’t.”

  Room by room, closet by closet, cupboard by cupboard, the search went on; satisfied that the first floor had nothing to offer, Corey and his team went up to the third floor, Desdemona and Carmine tagging along.

  During this more leisurely inspection of the third floor, Carmine realized that under ordinary circumstances life at the Hug was pleasant; most of the technicians had attempted to turn cold science into warm familiarity. Walls and doors were plastered with cartoons that only someone in the game would find funny; pictures of people were there too, and landscapes, and posters of vividly colored things whose nature Carmine couldn’t begin to fathom, though he could appreciate their beauty.

  “Crystals under polarized light,” Desdemona explained, “or pollen, dust mites, viruses under an electron microscope.”

  “Some of these work niches look like Mary Poppinsville.”

  “Marvin’s, you mean?” she asked, pointing to an area where everything from drawers to boxes and books had been covered with Contact adhesive paper in pink and yellow butterflies. “Think about it, Carmine. People like Marvin spend the most concerted stretch of each twenty-four hours rooted to one spot. Why should that spot be grey and anonymous? Employers don’t stop to think that if the cells people work in were more individual and harmonious, the quality of output might rise. Marvin is the poet, is all.”

  “Ponsonby’s technician, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Doesn’t Ponsonby object? He doesn’t strike me as a yellow and pink butterfly man, not when he’s got Bosch and Goya on his walls.”

  “Chuck would like to object, but the Prof wouldn’t back him up. Theirs is an interesting relationship, goes back to childhood, and the Prof was the boss then as much as now, I suspect.” She spotted Corey about to move an apparatus of fine glass columns on a levered stand, and shrieked. “Don’t you dare touch the Natelson! Stuff it up, mate, and you’ll be singing soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

  “I don’t think,” Carmine said solemnly, “that it’s big enough to hide anything. Look in that closet.”

  They looked in every closet from the first floor clear to the roof, but found nothing. Paul came to go over the O.R., swabbing any surface that could possibly collect fluid.

  But, said Paul, “I doubt there’s anything to find. This Mrs. Liebman is immaculate, never forgets to clean the corners or the under sides.”

  “My feeling,” said Abe, contributing his mite to the gloom, “is that the Hug may have received parts of bodies, but that they were bagged before they arrived, and went straight from someone’s car trunk to the dead animal fridge.”

  “A negative exercise, guys, that tells us something,” Carmine said.

  “Whatever role the Hug plays in this business, it isn’t a holding
pen or a slaughter yard.”

  Chapter 11

  Monday, December 13th, 1965

  The trouble with a case growing as old as the Monster’s was that the amount of work that could be done gradually tapered off; Sunday had been a day of trying to read, flicking from one TV channel to another, some pacing the floor. So it was with relief that Carmine arrived at the Hug at 9 A.M. on Monday morning. To find a crowd of black men clustered outside it bearing placards that said CHILD KILLERS and BLACK HATERS. Most of them wore a Black Brigade jacket over combat fatigues. Two squad cars were parked nearby, but the picketers were orderly, content to shout and lift their fists in Mohammed el Nesr’s personally coined gesture. No Black Brigade chiefs were there, Carmine noted; these were small fry, hoping to catch a TV journalist or two in their net. When Carmine walked up the path to the entrance door, they ignored him apart from a flurry of yelled “Pig!”

  Of course the weekend news had been full of Francine Murray. Carmine had passed on Derek Daiman’s warning to Silvestri at the time, but although nothing had happened until today, any sensitive cop nose could sniff trouble coming. Holloman wasn’t the only town involved, but it seemed to have become the focus of all indignation, general and particular. The Hug’s part in things ensured that, and one thing for sure, the newspapers weren’t crowning their pictures of John Silvestri and Carmine Delmonico with laurels; the weekend editorials had been diatribes against police incompetency.

  “Did you see them?” the Prof spluttered when Carmine entered his office. “Did you see them?” Demonstrators, here!”

  “Hard not to see them, Professor,” Carmine said dryly. “Calm down and listen to me. Is there anyone you can think of who might bear a grudge against the Hug? Like a patient?”

  The Prof hadn’t washed his magnificent hair, and his shave had missed as many bristles as it caught. Evidence of a crumbling ego or personality or whatever the shrinks called it. “I don’t know,” he said, as if Carmine had come out with something just too ludicrous to imagine.