On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

“Do you see any patients yourself, sir?”

  “No, not in years, except for an occasional consultation on some case that has everyone baffled. Since the Hug was opened, my function has been to be here for my researchers, discuss their problems with them if they’re in a dilemma or things haven’t gone the way they hoped. I advise them, sometimes suggest new avenues for them to explore. Those, my teaching and lecture schedule and my reading leave me too busy to see patients.”

  “Who does see patients? Refresh my memory.”

  “Addison Forbes, most of all, as his research is entirely clinical. Dr. Ponsonby and Dr. Finch see a few patients, while Dr. Polonowski has a big clinic. He’s very good on malabsorption syndromes.”

  Why can’t they speak English? Carmine wanted to ask. But he said, “So you suggest I should see Dr. Forbes first?”

  “In any order you like,” said the Prof, buzzing for Tamara.

  There’s another Hugger who doesn’t look too swift, Carmine noted. I wonder what she’s up to? Fine-looking and sexy woman, but she knows she hasn’t got too many good years left.

  Addison Forbes looked blank. “See patients?” he asked. “I should say so, Lieutenant! My patient intake can run to thirty-plus a week. Certainly never less than twenty. I’m so well known that my patient pool is not only national, but international.”

  “Is it possible that one of them harbors a grudge against you or the Hug, Doctor?”

  “My dear man,” Forbes said loftily, “It’s a rare patient who understands his malady! The moment a treatment doesn’t perform miracles when he has led himself to believe it will, he blames his doctor. But I am particularly careful to point out to all my patients that I am an ordinary doctor, not a witch doctor, and that improvement in itself is an advance.”

  He’s huffy, intolerant and patronizing as well as neurotic was Carmine’s opinion, which he didn’t voice. Instead he asked mildly, “Do any of them ever threaten you?”

  Forbes looked shocked. “No, never! If you’re after patients who threaten, then you should be seeing surgeons, not physicians.”

  “The Hug doesn’t have any surgeons.”

  “Nor any threats from patients” was Forbes’s stiff reply.

  From Dr. Walter Polonowski he found out that a malabsorption syndrome meant a patient couldn’t tolerate what Nature had intended as food for everyone, or else had developed a liking for substances Nature hadn’t intended as food for anyone.

  “Amino acids, fruits or vegetables, lead, copper, gluten, all kinds of fats,” said Polonowski, taking pity on him. “If you see enough patients, the list of substances is almost endless. Honey can cause anaphylactic shock, for instance. But what I’m chiefly interested in are the group of substances that cause brain damage.”

  “Have you any patients who resent you?”

  “I guess any doctor must, Lieutenant, but personally I can’t recall any instances. With my patients, the harm has been done before ever they get to see me.”

  Yet another worn-looking Hugger, Carmine thought.

  Dr. Maurice Finch looked much worse.

  “I blame myself for Dr. Schiller’s attempted suicide,” said Finch desolately.

  “What’s done is done, and you can’t say that you were the cause, Dr. Finch, you really can’t. Dr. Schiller has a lot of problems, as I’m sure you know. Besides, you saved his life,” said Carmine. “Blame the person who put Mercedes Alvarez here. Now take your mind off Dr. Schiller for a moment and try to remember if any of your patients have ever threatened you. Or if you have ever heard a patient utter threats against the Hug itself?”

  “No,” said Finch, looking bewildered. “No, never.”

  An answer he also received from Dr. Charles Ponsonby, though Ponsonby’s face became alert, interested.

  “It’s certainly a thought,” he said, frowning. “One forgets that that kind of thing happens, but of course it must. I will put my thinking cap on, Lieutenant, and try to remember on behalf of my colleagues as well as myself. Though I’m just about a hundred percent sure that it’s never happened to me. I’m too harmless.”

  From the Hug Carmine walked down Oak Street in the teeth of a bitter wind to the Chubb Medical School, where he negotiated the usual maze of corridors and tunnels such institutions specialize in, and at last found the Department of Neurology. There he asked to see Professor Frank Watson.

  Who saw him immediately, clearly reveling in the Hug’s misfortunes, though he did remember to deplore the murders.

  “I hear that it was you who gave the Hughlings Jackson Center its nickname, Professor,” said Carmine, smiling a little.

  Watson swelled like a toad, stroked his thin black mustache and lifted one mobile black eyebrow. “Yes, I did. They hate it, don’t they? Ab-so-lute-ly hate it. Especially Bob Smith.”

  How you enjoy playing Mephistopheles! Carmine thought. “Do you hate the Hug?”

  “With a passion,” the Professor of Neurology said candidly. “Here am I, with just as many brilliant people on my team, and I battle for every single cent of research money I can find. Do you know how many Nobel Prize winners there are in this medical school, Lieutenant? Nine! Imagine it — nine! And none of them is a Hugger. They’re in my camp, existing on beggarly grants. Bob Smith can afford to buy equipment he uses once in a blue moon if at all, while I have to count the number of gauze swabs I use! All that money was the ruin of Bob Smith, who might otherwise have discovered something neurologically significant. He doesn’t work, he languishes. A poseur.”

  “Hurts that much, huh?” Carmine asked.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” Frank Watson said savagely. “It’s pure, unadulterated agony!”

  A trip back to Cedar Street revealed that Francine Murray’s jacket had yielded no clues apart from its presence in the locker, which also failed to help. From Silvestri he learned that Travis had survived the day thus far; there had actually been more trouble at Taft High, whose student intake included the Argyle Avenue ghetto. What they all need, he thought, is some sane political direction, but at least there’s one good thing about Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade: start on drugs, even something as innocuous as pot, and you’re out of his organization. He wants his soldiers clear of mind and firm of purpose. And that’s good, no matter what his purpose might be. Thank God for Silvestri and the Mayor: as long as the Black Brigade do nothing more than drill up and down Fifteenth Street with broomsticks over their left shoulders, they’re not hassled. Only what kind and how many armaments have they got behind those mattressed walls? One day someone will talk, and then we’ll get the warrant we need to take a look.

  December first…Our man will strike again around the end of January or the beginning of February, and we’re as far from catching him as Mohammed el Nesr is from convincing the bulk of Holloman’s black population that revolution is the way to go.

  He picked up his phone, dialed. “I know it’s not Wednesday, but any chance I could come pick you up and take you out for Chinese or something else with me?” he asked Desdemona.

  He looked, she thought, extremely uncomfortable, though he smiled when she slid into his Ford and tried to make small talk until he bolted out of the car, into the Blue Pheasant, and out again with an armload of cardboard containers.

  Then it was silence, even after he had done his finicky transferring of the food to covered white bowls and seated her at the table.

  “You do make work for yourself,” she said, piling food on her plate and inhaling the aromas blissfully. “I’d be happy to eat it straight out of the boxes, you know.”

  “That would be an insult,” he said, but absently.

  Because she was hungry she said nothing more until the meal was finished, then she pushed her plate away and, when he reached to take it, grasped his arm firmly. “No, sit down, Carmine, and tell me what’s the matter.”

  He looked down at her hand as if surprised at something, then sighed and sat. Before she could take her hand away he put his own over it and kept it there.<
br />
  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to remove your guards.”

  “Is that all? Carmine, it’s been weeks since anything has happened. I’m sure whoever it was grew bored ages ago. Did it not occur to you that perhaps all this has been because sometimes I do embroidery for the Catholic church? After all, the only thing that was cut up was a priest’s vestment — it might be that whoever it was thought Chuck Ponsonby’s piece was suspicious but not definitely religious — it did have that long, narrow altar look to it. Sideboard cloths do.”

  “It occurred to me,” he admitted.

  “So there you are. I now do commissions for household napery only — tablecloths and serviettes — oops, napkins.”

  “Commissions?”

  “Yes, I charge for my work. Very heavily, as a matter of fact. People with means get tired of the same old cross-stitch or eyelet stuff they churn out by the bucketful in countries with cottage industries. What I do is unique. People love it, and my bank balance grows considerably.” She looked guilty. “I haven’t declared it — why should I, when I pay full taxes yet can’t vote? It doesn’t matter to you as a policeman, does it?”

  His fingers had been moving over the skin of her forearm as if they liked the feel of it, but now they stopped. “Sometimes,” he said gravely, “I have attacks of deafness. What was that you said? Something about not voting?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She took her hand away, looking self-conscious. “We’ve solved the major matter, which is the removal of my guards. I am relieved, quite honestly. Though there are solid doors between me and them, I never feel really private. So good riddance to them, I say.” She hesitated. “When?”

  “I’m not sure. The weather may be your best friend. In case you didn’t notice, the wind’s getting up and the chill factor will fall way below freezing tomorrow. That drives everyone indoors.” He rose from the table. “Come and sit over here, get nice and comfortable, have a cognac, and talk to me.”

  “Talk to you?”

  “Right, talk to me. I need to know certain things, and you are the only one I can ask.”

  “Ask what?”

  “About the Hug.”

  She pulled a face, but accepted the cognac, which he took as acquiescence. “Very well, ask away.”

  “I understand the Prof’s state of mind, also Dr. Finch’s, but why is Polonowski so edgy? I ask, Desdemona, because I want you to give me answers that don’t have to do with murder. If I don’t know why a Hugger acts suspiciously, I tend to think of murder, and maybe waste a lot of valuable time. I’d hoped that Francine would clear you all, but she hasn’t. This guy is as cunning as a sewer rat, so he had a way of being in two places at once. Give me the low-down on Polonowski.”

  “Walt’s in love with his technician, Marian, but he’s also tied hand and foot to a marriage I think he regretted years ago,” she said, swirling the brandy in its balloon. “There are four children — they’re very Catholic, hence no contraception.”

  “Loose not the stopper of thy wineskin until thou reachest Athens,” Carmine quoted.

  “Well put!” she cried appreciatively. “I suppose poor Walt is one of those chaps whose wineskin has a mind of its own when he climbs into bed next to his wife’s wine cup. Her name’s Paola, and she’s a nice woman who’s turned into a shrew. Much younger than he, and blaming him for the loss of her youth and looks.”

  “Is he having an out-and-out affair with Marian?”

  “Yes, for months.”

  “Where do they meet? At Major Minor’s some afternoons?” he asked, referring to the motel on Route 133 that did a brisk trade in illicit fornication.

  “No. He has a cabin somewhere upstate.”

  Shit, thought Carmine. The guy has a cabin we didn’t know about. How handy. “Do you know where it is?”

  “Afraid not. He won’t even tell Paola.”

  “Is the affair common knowledge?”

  “No, they’re very discreet.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “Because I found Marian in the fourth-floor toilet howling her eyes out. She thought she was pregnant. When I sympathized and advised her to have herself fitted with a diaphragm if she was hesitant about the Pill, the whole story tumbled out.”

  “And was she pregnant?”

  “No. False alarm.”

  “Okay, let’s move on to Ponsonby. He’s got some weird art on his office walls, not to mention shrunken heads and devil masks. Torture, monsters swallowing their children whole, people screaming.”

  Her laughter pealed out so infectiously that he felt warmed. “Oh, Carmine! That’s just Chuck! The art is simply one more facet of Chuck’s insufferable snobbishness. I feel sorry for him.”

  “Why?”

  “Hasn’t anyone told you that he has a blind sister?”

  “I do my homework, Desdemona, so I do know that. I take it she’s the reason why he stayed in Holloman. But why do you feel sorry for him? Her, yes.”

  “Because he’s built his entire life around her. Never married, no close relatives, though they’ve known the Smiths since childhood. There are just the two of them in a pre-Revolutionary house on Ponsonby Lane. Once they owned all the land for a mile around, but Claire’s education was expensive, so was Chuck’s, and I gather they were hard up in their parents’ day. They’ve certainly sold all the land off. Chuck adores surrealist art and classical music. Claire can’t see the art, but she’s a music fan too. They’re both gourmets and wine buffs. I suppose I feel sorry for him because when he speaks of their life together, he waxes rhapsodical, which is — well, strange. She’s his sister, not his wife, though some of the crueler members of the staff do joke about them. I think that in his heart of hearts Chuck must resent at least some aspects of being tied to Claire, but he’s far too loyal to admit that, even to himself. He certainly can’t be the Monster, he doesn’t have the time or the liberty.”

  “I just found the artwork weird,” he said apologetically.

  “I like the artwork. Either you do, or you don’t.”

  “Okay, moving on again. Sonia Liebman.”

  “A very nice woman, very good at her job. She’s married to an undertaker, Benjamin Liebman. Their one chick is at a college near Tucson, doing pre-med. Wants to be a general surgeon.”

  An undertaker. Shit, I didn’t do enough homework. “Does Benjamin work for someone, or is he retired?”

  “Good heavens, no! He has his own establishment somewhere near Bridgeport.” Desdemona closed her eyes, screwed them up. “Um — the Comfort Funeral Home, I think.”

  Double shit. An ideal place for a killer into dissection. I’ll have to pay the Comfort Funeral Home a visit tomorrow.

  “Satsuma and Chandra?”

  “Looking for jobs elsewhere. Rumor hath it that Nur Chandra has already had an offer from Harvard, anxious to even the Nobel Prize score. Hideki is still not sure. His decision somehow rests on the harmonies in his garden.”

  Carmine sighed. “Who’s your pick, Desdemona?”

  She blinked. “No one at the Hug, I say that with truth. I’ve been there for five years, which makes me a latecomer. Most of the researchers are a bit bonkers in one way or another, but that goes with the territory. They’re so — harmless. Dr. Finch talks to his cats as if they could talk back, Dr. Chandra treats his macaques like Indian royalty — even Dr. Ponsonby, who’s less fond of his rats than the others, shows interest in their doings. None of the researchers is psychotic, I’d swear to that.”

  “Ponsonby isn’t fond of his rats?”

  “Carmine, truly! Dr. Ponsonby plain doesn’t like rats! A lot of people don’t like rats, including me. Most researchers get used to them and manage to develop great affection for them, but not all. Marvin will pick up a rat with his bare hand to give it a shot in the tummy, and it will kiss him with its whiskers for the attention. Whereas Dr. Ponsonby uses a furnace glove if he can’t get out of picking up a rat. Their incisors can go straight through a thinner glove — well,
they can gnaw through concrete!”

  “You are not helping, Desdemona.”

  Tiny sharp taps on the window brought Desdemona to her feet. “Bugger, sleet! Just ducky for driving. Take me home, Carmine.”

  And that, he thought with an inner sigh, is the end of any trying to hold her hand again. It’s not that she turns me on, it’s more that somewhere underneath all that competent independence is a darned nice woman struggling to get out.

  Chapter 12

  Thursday, December 16th, 1965

  Since it hadn’t snowed before Thanksgiving and the first half of December had been no colder than usual, most Connecticut people thought Christmas might be green. Then it snowed heavily the night before Carmine was due to go to New York City to see the Parsons. As he loathed trains and was not about to make his journey jammed in a railroad car that stank of wet wool, bad breath and cigarettes, Carmine set out early in the Ford to find I-95 down from three to two lanes, but negotiable. Once he hit Manhattan only the avenues had been ploughed, chiefly because no one could ever get enough cars off the streets to plough. Where he was going to park the Ford he had no idea as he inched down Park Avenue until he could turn up Madison, but Roger Parson Junior had thought of it. When he stopped outside a building that was neither the largest nor the smallest on that block, a uniformed doorman rushed out to take the keys and shove them at a minion. He himself conducted Carmine into a purply princely lobby of Lovanto marble, past the bank of elevators to a single one at its end. The executive elevator: a lock on its controls and a decor fit for executives.

  Roger Parson Junior met him when its doors opened on the forty-third floor, Richard Spaight at his shoulder but subtly behind.

  “Lieutenant, I’m very glad that you braved the weather to come. Did you take the train?”

  “No, I drove. It’s harder getting around in Manhattan than coming in from Connecticut,” said Carmine, handing over his coat, scarf and deerstalker hat.

  Parson stared at the hat in fascination. “Ah — a conscious reminder of Sherlock Holmes?”