Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

  He grinned. “Does Miss Procter’s teach gemology too?”

  “Captain, really! Did the Russians get into space first? Gemology is number one on the Miss Procter’s syllabus—name me a debutante who doesn’t have a jeweler’s eyepiece in her evening bag to check out any offered diamonds.”

  “Quite,” said Carmine, keeping his mouth straight. “So a museum piece sits unprotected in a window with a vandal on the loose. Except that the Vandal has a carefully laid plan. And were it not for Miss Procter’s syllabus, we wouldn’t know that the teddy bear is anything other than very lovely and moderately expensive. The Vandal must have had a shock when Hank Murray succeeded in hiring Shortland Security. They’re the best, so getting the glass teddy bear out is now almost impossible.”

  “Do you think he’s what the vandalisms have been about?”

  “It begins to look that way.”

  “According to Mr. Murray, Miss Warburton will be back in the shop tomorrow. Her injuries were slight.”

  “What did she lose in breakage?”

  “Just a one-off Orrefors bowl made by someone called Björn Wiinblad. Her books give its retail price as a thousand dollars.”

  “The other piece wasn’t harmed?”

  “No, sir, it survived. It’s cute, if wacky. Art glass is highly individualistic—there is no other substance can be worked in so many different ways than glass,” Helen said.

  “This is shaping up as a peculiar case,” Carmine said. “I want you to cultivate a friendship with Miss Warburton if you can, and work other aspects of the case as well. I want a full report on Robert and Gordon Warburton, ex San Diego. That means all the way back to times before their birth. And investigate Amanda Warburton’s life too. How did she come to get possession of the glass teddy bear?”

  Helen looked at Captain Delmonico’s obdurate face and made an intelligent decision: not to hope for the Dodo.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, looking willing. “I can do that.”

  On his way into the County Services parking lot, Carmine got lucky; Morty Jones was arriving too, and because a captain rated a better spot, he was able to trap Morty as he walked past the Fairlane everybody knew was Carmine Delmonico’s unmarked—a crotchet that the Commissioner condoned. Morty made the mistake of assuming the Fairlane’s driver was gone; when Carmine opened his door and leaned out, Morty gasped.

  “Get in,” said Carmine curtly.

  There was no escape; Morty slid on to the passenger’s seat.

  “You can smoke, Morty,” Carmine said as he slewed sideways to examine the sergeant, eyes busy. Yes, no doubt he was drinking. Not so much the stink as the trembling hands, the rheumy eyes.

  He’d been such a promising cop, Morty Jones, twenty years ago; Danny Marciano, not a dinosaur then, had put in as much work on Morty as he did later on Nick Jefferson, bullied him into taking a degree from West Holloman State College at nights, and put him in patrol with Virgil Simms, another great guy.

  All the girls were after him. He was going to have a big career in law enforcement, and he was easy on the eyes: tall, a graceful mover, handsome in a dark and broody way he used to joke branded his ancestors as Welsh. He passed his sergeant’s exams with distinction, and, armed with his degree and a new wife, applied to join Detectives. The move had upset Captain Danny Marciano as much as his choice of a bride, but nothing could budge Morty: Ava said a detective was better. He was wild about her, would do anything to please the woman all his friends knew was a tramp—only how to tell Morty? It couldn’t be done.

  By the time he made it to Detectives he was the father of a son, Bobby, an event that predisposed him to like his whole world, including Larry Pisano, the lieutenant to whose team he was posted. Not a good boss for Morty Jones. Elderly and embittered, especially after he was passed over in favor of Carmine Delmonico as head of the division, Pisano lived for only two things: his looming retirement, and creating as much trouble as he could for Carmine. Among other ploys, he set out to ruin Morty Jones’s roseate life by informing him of Ava’s extramarital activities. Morty hadn’t believed him, but the seed of doubt was sown; the cheerful, enthusiastic cop gradually lost his good humor and—worst of all, in Carmine’s view—his interest in his work, which he continued to perform, but sloppily.

  “I know what your troubles are, Morty,” Carmine said in a warm voice, “but the drinking has to stop.”

  “I drink on my own time, Carmine.”

  “Horse shit you do. Right at this moment your boozing is so consistent that they’re thinking of giving you your own stool in the Shamrock Bar. The Shamrock Bar, for God’s sake! A cop bar! You’re like a man in a car with no brakes at the top of the roller coaster’s worst hill—you won’t pull up when you get to the bottom, you’ll wind up mangled in a heap of broken parts—the parts that make up your life, Morty! I know about the bust-up with Ava, and it’s bad, but think of your kids. You owe them a duty. What happens when the Commissioner finds out, huh? You’re out on your ear, no pension, no references to help you get another job. You’re on contract, have you forgotten?”

  “I’m not drinking on the job,” Morty maintained.

  “Have you talked to Corey?”

  “No, he’s got his own problems.”

  “Then talk to me! I want to see you the kind of guy—and cop!—you used to be. Try to see your life on the job as the one place where you can forget your personal problems, bury yourself in the work. It’s a good technique, Morty, and it’s not beyond you. But while the alcohol is swilling around in your brain, you can’t think straight. That’s why it’s number one priority—stop drinking entirely, please! I could go to John Silvestri now, and you’d be gone in less than an hour. I choose not to, because I don’t believe you’re too far in to climb out. Delia found you a great housekeeper to give you a decent home life while you fight this battle, so fight it. Fight it!”

  But Morty’s response was a sudden bout of despairing tears; Carmine watched and listened in his own kind of despair.

  The story came out again; the accusation that his kids didn’t belong to him, Morty’s striking her, how awful it was to exist without Ava. His kids cried, he cried …

  “If I can’t get through to you, Morty, you’ll have to see Dr. Corning,” Carmine said eventually. “You need help.”

  “The department shrink? I won’t go!” Morty said.

  “You will go, because I’m seeing Corey and making sure of it,” Carmine said. “Doc Corning’s a good guy.”

  In answer, Morty opened the car door and bolted.

  Which left Carmine to see Corey.

  Who was in his office, apparently having some kind of argument with Buzz Genovese.

  “Later,” said Corey, glancing at Carmine’s face.

  Buzz gave Carmine a smile, and vanished. Carmine sat down; not the right moment to tower across a desk at a seated man.

  “What do you want?” Corey demanded, sounding truculent.

  “Dig out HPD Form 1313,” Carmine said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Cor.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “ ‘Who’ would be a better question, but you know who. Morty Jones. It’s time you and I referred him to Dr. Corning.”

  It had always been the team joke that the Jew Abe Goldberg looked like a WASP, and the WASP Corey Marshall looked like a Jew. The older they became, the truer the statement became. Corey had lost weight—Maureen was on a fad diet—and his long, Semitic face had fallen in a little more, giving the scimitar of a nose additional prominence and the permanent black beard shadow on Corey’s jaws the appearance of charcoal stage make-up. His dark eyes blazed into anger.

  “That’s crap, Carmine! There’s nothing wrong with Morty.”

  “Oh, come on, Cor, where are your eyes? Where’s your sense of smell? Morty Jones is drinking on the job, and he’s gotten
himself into a terrible mess,” Carmine said, keeping his voice level, dispassionate. “If I can see it, you must see it—he’s your team member.”

  “Yes, and my business!” Corey snapped. “I don’t need the captain sticking his oar in. As soon as Ava comes home, Morty will go back to normal—without the need for a psychiatrist.”

  “My sense is that Ava’s not coming home. She’s going to file for divorce, and we have to act before that happens. Dig out the form, Corey. That’s an order.”

  “Only if I agree with you, and I don’t. In my opinion, to send Morty to a psychiatrist would be the end of him.”

  Carmine’s hands clutched at the air. “Oh, Jesus, where do you guys get your mistrust of psychiatrists from? Dr. Corning has saved at least half a dozen cops from losing their jobs—and worse, their lives. The murder rate is rising nationwide, which makes cop suicides look less, but that’s a false statistic, and you know it. It’s my considered opinion that Morty is very depressed. He may need medication—but not Jameson’s whiskey.”

  “I’ll undertake to deal with the booze myself, Carmine,” Corey said, adamant, “but I will not sign your form.”

  Carmine got up and left. True, to mention suicide was to give Morty’s situation undue significance, but it was imperative that the drinking stop, and he didn’t think Corey was capable of that kind of therapy. Why did they hate psychiatrists?

  Delia trotted in late that afternoon. “I’ve finished the interviews,” she said, “save for the twins tomorrow morning. Do I get to do them?”

  “You can sit in, but I’m having the pleasure,” Carmine said.

  “And I’m off to see what noisome things I can find under the California stones,” said Helen lightly, waved at Delia, and left managing to look as if she were intrigued by her task.

  “Anything interesting?” Carmine asked Delia.

  “Only what Miss Marcia Boyce does for a crust,” Delia said, perching on the chair Helen had vacated.

  “Expatiate.”

  “Miss Boyce runs a secretarial agency on Cromwell Street. Her girls are skilled in abstruse forms of executive assistance like typing specifications for space rockets, Nobel standard papers in physics and organic chemistry, medical dissertations, mathematical hypotheses—you name it, Carmine, and Marcia Boyce has a secretary who can do it. It costs heaps to hire a Boyce secretary, but those who do can be certain they’ll have no errors in transcribed dictation or deciphered scribbles. Most hirings are to Chubb or U-Conn, but there are lots of out-of-state universities hire too. Educational institutions rarely hang on to a Boyce girl for more than six months—a federal grant runs out and Miss Boyce has her girl back. However, professors who have already won a Nobel Prize hang on to their Boyce girls for years. Miss Boyce doesn’t care which way it goes—she takes a healthy cut as personal profit.”

  Delia paused to sip her mug of cop coffee, grimacing. “Of course if Richard Nixon becomes president in November, there won’t be nearly as much research money available. Republican presidents are notoriously anti-research unless it’s armaments related. Pure research will die one of its little deaths because the dodos in Washington don’t understand that applied research sits on a solid foundation of pure research, so … According to Miss Boyce, at the moment everyone is using up LBJ’s lavish research money rather like condemned men eating a last meal.”

  “The topic’s fascinating, Deels, but not relevant.”

  “Oops, sorry!” The eyes twinkled within their stiff mascara hedges. “Miss Boyce is genuinely worried about Miss Warburton, but she can’t offer anything concrete. Even when the Busquash residents made such a kerfuffle over their skyscraper and sacked the town Elders, Miss Boyce says there was no sort of emphasis on Miss Warburton as a tenant. The word Miss Boyce is fond of is ‘evil’—she says Miss Warburton is being persecuted—her word again—by an evil presence, someone out to torment Amanda in a sadistic way. Marcia doesn’t believe the Vandal is interested in the glass. She thinks his obsession is Miss Warburton herself.”

  “How does Hank Murray figure in her ideas?”

  “No, it’s not Hank is the Vandal, at least according to Miss Boyce.” Delia gave up on the coffee with a sigh. “The trouble is, Carmine, there seems to be no motive apart from a psychopathia.”

  “And there, Miss Carstairs, you and Miss Boyce are wrong.” Carmine filled her in about the glass teddy bear and his eyes.

  “Ooh!” Delia exclaimed. “And Helen found all this out?”

  “Thanks to Miss Procter’s School for Girls—or so she’d have you think. There’s an element of leg-puller in Miss MacIntosh, but I confess I like her the better for it. We can safely put the bear’s value in the high double millions.”

  “Does Miss Warburton know?”

  “It would seem not. I’ve shifted Helen to the case to see what she can learn. Obviously our trainee is going to do much better on cases that have an up-market nature.”

  “Stands to reason,” Delia said. “I miss Nick!”

  “So do I, though I wish he’d make more of an effort to like Helen. Still, Abe says he’s doing fantastically well in Hartford, and he’s a minority representative for us.”

  “How can a little boy from the stews of Argyle Avenue come to like M.M.’s daughter?” Delia asked. “Especially given her personality? In time she’ll lose some of the hauteur, the unconscious exclusivity, but it must be very hard for Nick in particular to stomach. He’s had to work so hard to get what he sees as falling into her undeserving lap.”

  “I know, Delia, I know.”

  The Brothers Warburton announced their advent before they actually appeared; the County Services parking attendant buzzed to say that this pair of spooky twins refused to leave their car on the street; until their Bentley was safely garaged, they were not getting out of it. The attendant was told to let them park, and shortly thereafter the Warburton twins materialized in Carmine’s office looking insufferably smug.

  They were exquisitely dressed for a chilly fall day. Both wore what were probably Hong Kong copies of Savile Row suits: Robert’s was a navy three-piece pinstripe with a striped Turnbull & Asser shirt and a Stanford tie; Gordon’s was a pearl-grey silk with a white silk shirt and a self-embroidered white silk ascot. They wafted a hugely expensive cologne, and bore shaves so close the skin gleamed like satin. Even their eyebrows were thinned and brushed, Carmine suspected. A pair of sartorial dazzlers.

  “What color’s your Bentley?” he asked, curious.

  “Pewter,” said Robert, “with white leather interior.”

  Having introduced Delia, Carmine escorted the twins to the largest of the interrogation rooms, sat himself and his papers down opposite the Warburtons, and put on a pair of reading half glasses that gave him a professorial air. Their diary was full-page size, one day to a page, and its cover was a hairy faux zebra skin; the year, 1968, was emblazoned in gold numbers an inch high.

  I am fed up with all this light and dark nonsense already, thought Carmine, conscious of a burning desire to cause mayhem. Fire a twelve-pounder shot at this catamaran, hole both hulls!

  “I should inform you,” he said, “that I have a very old and dear friend in L.A.—Myron Mendel Mandelbaum.”

  The effect of this projectile was extraordinary. Both the brothers assumed an identical look of mingled awe, astonishment, delight and—speculation? The skinned-green-grape eyes had somehow acquired the kind of stars Carmine had last seen in the eyes of a glass teddy bear. Now I know, he thought, what the phrase “stars in their eyes” truly means.

  “Mr. Mandelbaum assures me that you are indeed—er—‘hot property’ in Hollywood. Apparently it’s far cheaper to pay real actors a high salary than incur the costs of blue screen doubling the same actor through many scenes. Also, two real actors give additional flexibility, Mr. Mandelbaum says. I’ve also talked to your agent, who assures me that you’ve arrived at a point where
you can choose your film roles. TV commercials as well.”

  They proved what superb actors they were by managing to look simultaneously proud yet humble, worthy yet unworthy.

  “How divine to be vindicated by luminaries like the great and powerful Myron Mendel Mandelbaum,” said Robert, winking at tears. “A Zeus, he dwells atop Mulholland Drive, unattainable, a thousand titans as his lackeys, his world spread out before him in a myriad million lights!”

  “Obliterated by smog, more like,” said Carmine. “Okay, let’s can the crap. March 3 this year—where were you?”

  Gordon flipped the pages, Robert read the entries.

  “In Holloman,” said Robert.

  “Both of you?”

  They looked identically appalled. “We are never apart!”

  “May l3?”

  “Holloman. In between, we were in L.A. filming our greatest screen triumph, Waltz of the Vampire Twins.”

  “But B-grade. June 25?”

  “Holloman.”

  “July 12?”

  “In the air from L.A.”

  “August 3?”

  “On vacation in Yosemite National Park.”

  “Can you produce proof? Receipts, for instance?”

  “Of course.”

  “August 31?”

  “Alaska, filming a TV commercial for an after-shave.”

  “Why Alaska?”

  “Coo-oo-ool,” Robert drawled.

  “September 24?”

  “Holloman.”