Naked Cruelty

by Colleen McCullough

  “Aren’t you in the film yourselves?”

  “In it? Captain, we are it!” Robbie cried. “Behold the Tennyson Twins, sleuths extraordinaire!”

  “Ah! The action takes place around 1890.”

  “Amid London fogs and gloomy graveyards a-drip with dews and yews. The Stone Man will look like a cross between the mummy and Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “Why not make him smooth and handsome like Gregory Peck?”

  That didn’t go down well; they were creatures of habit.

  “I guarantee you’ll love the Warburton twins and whatever they’ve written,” he said to Myron some minutes later. “It’s pure Hollywood.” He flicked over the pages of one of a number of massive albums. “The movie makes a great comic, which I gather also makes it ideal. Not to mention that the Warburtons are refugees out of a comic … Well? Do I tell them to climb on a westbound plane, or not?”

  He hung up. “Climb on a westbound plane today, gentlemen. Mr. Mandelbaum will give you a whole morning, and if he likes your comic, lunch afterward at the Polo Lounge.”

  “Courted for my connection to a Hollywood movie mogul,” he said with disgust when they arrived at County Services.

  “They sure fell on their feet,” said Nick, not approving. “Innocent of all wrong-doing, the richer by whatever poor Miss Warburton left, and now selling their ideas to Myron Mendel Mandelbaum in person.” His lip curled. “They’re crooks.”

  “I agree, Nick, they are,” Carmine said, “but they’re a great example of what can happen to borderline people. Fortune favored them, so crime isn’t necessary.”

  “Yeah, like lawyers,” said Nick.

  “Someone suing you?”

  “No. I’m in Shakespeare’s camp, is all.”

  “He must have had the tights sued off him,” Delia said. “Probably by that twister Bacon.”

  “No, no, we are not going down this road again!” Carmine yelled. “Just because a couple of cases have resolved themselves doesn’t give us an excuse to celebrate. Too many bodies.”

  That’s the part of this job I hate the most, he thought, damping down their enthusiasms and elation at the close of a long and very hard investigation.

  Helen came in. “Am I allowed?” she asked.

  “Sure. It’s lunch in a minute anyway.”

  “Was Kurt the Vandal?” Helen asked.

  Carmine went through that again, with some amendments; she didn’t need to know that Kurt saw her, not Amanda, as his victim.

  Then she changed the subject abruptly.

  “Has Dad seen the glass teddy bear?”

  “I’m taking him this afternoon.”

  “And I can’t go, right?”

  “I’m afraid not, no.”

  She drew a breath. “I know it’s off-limits, Carmine, but I don’t see how it can stay sequestered from me,” she said. “It’s a brain-teaser, really, and I can’t come up with the answer. If you know, and you tell me, I promise I won’t mention the Dodo ever again.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat, Helen.”

  “But information brought her back.”

  “Okay, one question. Ask.”

  “Kurt was at every Carew party, but he certainly wasn’t the sympathetic guy on the secluded couch. I mean, he was up front! Bold as brass, nothing sneaky or anonymous. So what’s with the stranger no one can identify?”

  “None of us has an answer. Kurt could easily have gathered sufficient information to fuel his plans, that’s not an issue,” Carmine said. “Who the other guy was is a mystery.”

  “Does that mean another Dodo is hunting?”

  “If he were, he would have struck by now, and I doubt that Holloman will ever see women concealing rape again, at least in such numbers. Since the victim drawings all show the same man—well, more or less—we have to assume that he did go to the Carew parties. My guess is that he’s a psychologist writing a thesis or a book. As he didn’t announce any intentions in that direction, he’s sneaky and unethical. I understand that Carew is back in party mode, but all the Gentleman Walkers are looking out for the mystery man. If he shows up, he’s under arrest.”

  “Even if he’s done nothing?” Helen asked.

  “Only for long enough to be interviewed—and warned, if it seems necessary. No one wants Son of Dodo taking over.”

  “I never thought of that.” Helen turned to Delia. “I thought you said lightning never strikes twice in the same place?”

  “It depends on the lightning, dear.”

  “No, that’s too much! Son of Dodo! You’re surely not serious?”

  “Then who is he?” Delia asked. “Not a sneaky psychologist.”

  M.M. was staggered. “It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, gazing at the glass teddy bear. “Helen’s right about the eyes, they’re mesmerizing.”

  “You should have seen it in the shop window, properly lit,” said Carmine. “Took the breath away.”

  “I hear you commandeered the dog and the cat.”

  “With infant children, I thought it was a good move.”

  “Until one of them dies.” M.M. groaned. “What a circus!”

  “The voice of experience?”

  “Several times.”

  “Where are you going to put this beauty?”

  “The Aubergs have been nagging me to fund some wonderful art building, but they want it small—intimate, said Horace Auberg. I’m having terrible trouble finding somewhere to put Blue Bear—that’s his classy new name—so I think I’ll ask Horace for Blue Bear’s house. Just one room, with some other pieces around the walls in niches, and Blue Bear in the middle. He’ll have to be ten feet away from the nearest spectator in case some maniac tries to swing a hammer at him.” M.M. sighed. “The world is full of maniacs! Look at Kurt von Fahlendorf. I even hoped my daughter might marry him. You can’t trust anyone anymore.”

  “That you can’t,” said Carmine gravely.

  “Blue Bear can’t stay here either.”

  “He’s off to a bank vault this afternoon, sir. I’ll bring the paperwork around for you, then you can put him in your own vaults.”

  “What do you think, Carmine?” M.M. asked as they departed.

  “About what, Mr. President?”

  “Blue Bear’s house.”

  “Ask your wife to chair the approval board. She’ll know.”

  “You have a beautiful house,” said Fernando Vasquez to his host that Saturday night, ensconced in Carmine’s leathery study. “So much oriental art, such rich colors.”

  “And like the men of ancient Rome, I deal with the decor,” Carmine said, smiling contentedly. It had taken longer to have a dinner for Fernando and his wife than was strictly polite, but Desdemona had to want to do it, and she was only now, in early December, really getting back to her old self.

  She was in the kitchen with Solidad Vasquez, leaving the two men to their port and cigars in peace.

  “Maureen Marshall thinks that Corey’s been promoted,” said Fernando with a grin.

  “His pay is up some,” Carmine said, “and he’s got a very pretty uniform. I give it six months before Maureen starts chewing about some new imagined slight.”

  “Know thine enemy,” Fernando said.

  “She won’t get through your defenses, will she?”

  “Nope. She doesn’t know me the way she knows the rest of you. A large part of your difficulties was due to familiarity, and you know what they say about familiarity—it breeds contempt. My strong suit is the sheer number of my men.”

  “I can see the point and the strength of your argument, but don’t forget that Corey was a uniform for eleven years. Some of your most senior men know him very well.”

  Fernando laughed. “I can handle Corey—and Maureen.”

  Solidad Vasquez was a willowy beauty wit
h that iron backbone most wives of ambitious men seemed to own. It hadn’t taken Desdemona long to discover Solidad’s metal, or to admit that her own backbone was of the ordinary kind. But then, thank God, Carmine was not an overly ambitious man. Though it ate at him sometimes, he liked the job he had. Listening to Solidad’s artless but crafty chatter, Desdemona found it easy to trace the upward rise of the Vasquezes, and, reading what wasn’t said, understood the prejudices and insults that followed those of Hispanic origins. Fernando and Solidad Vasquez were going to get there, hand their children an upper middle class existence.

  Desdemona’s extreme fairness and height fascinated her guest.

  “Your skin is like milk!” Solidad exclaimed.

  “Comes of no sunshine as a child,” said Desdemona, smiling. “The part of England I come from gets a lot of rain and little sun. As for the height—my ancestors were Vikings.”

  The Vasquez children, two girls and a boy, were older than the Delmonico pair, but not by enough to kill a burgeoning friendship. For the first time in her American career, Desdemona was choosing a friend for herself, someone unconnected to Carmine’s huge family. Solidad too was a stranger, it made sense for them to stick together, and they liked being opposites in so much, from size and coloring to background and nationality.

  The Vasquezes had bought a house on East Circle four doors down, which meant a jetty and a boat shed.

  “I liked them, especially Solidad,” Desdemona said to Carmine after their guests had walked home.

  “Good,” said Carmine, not blind. “How’s your mood?”

  “Back to normal, I would say. No, leave the dishes. Dorcas is coming in tomorrow morning to tidy up.” She huffed. “I can’t thank my Aunt Margaret enough,” she said in a whisper as they passed through the nursery to check on the boys.

  “You’ve decided what to do with your legacy?” Carmine asked as they reached their bedroom.

  “Yes. It’s going on domestic help. By rights it should go on college fees, but I have a funny feeling that domestic help is more beneficial. I’m such a hygiene freak.”

  “Anything that gets you through your days more happily is better,” he said. “I love you, Mrs. Delmonico.”

  She snuggled close. “And I love you, Captain.”

  “How are you coping with the guns?”

  “Quite well. The Taft High business opened my eyes a little. New countries take people from so many different places. Slavery was a part of the people movement too, involuntary though it was. Eventually it will all settle down, just not yet.”

  He held her tightly. “You won’t leave me?”

  Her head reared up in shock. “Carmine! Whatever made you think that? My goodness, I must have been depressed!” She slid into bed. “Now that Alex is weaned, I’m a box of birds, truly.”

  There was no more talk. Words were simply sounds. Passion, tenderness and a delicious familiarity of touch and sensation sometimes meant more than any words.

  December wore down toward Christmas in racial discontent and several attempted riots provoked by Black People’s Power; that they came to nothing was due to the city’s small size and careful management. But the BPP continued to create persistent disturbances that no one wanted publicized by arrest and arraignment. The Holloman PD was very busy.

  And, as is perpetually the way with people, individual griefs, problems, troubles and dilemmas outweighed the larger picture; a family’s budget was more important than the national one, its members more treasured than anonymous millions.

  For Carmine the year tottered to an end in an inevitable mixture of the personal and the cop. Desdemona was commander of her domestic ship again; there were no more attacks of despair, no more delusions of inadequacy, but, having had her fingers burned, Carmine’s wife lost the last of her beloved independence. She was inextricably bound to her family, she would never be free again. Wishful thinking to yearn for it, yet sometimes, in the very remotest watches of the night, its ghostly summons sounded, a tattoo from a distant, youthful battlefield. For Carmine himself this life of watching his sons grow and his wife change was near idyllic, for he sensed that their need of him was greater.

  His people settled down in their new configurations, though some of the senior uniforms noticed that the men of Detectives avoided Corey Marshall as if he were a leper. Memories were long; he would always wear the odium of Morty Jones’s suicide and the unhappy fate of Morty’s children. He was, however, a good chief lieutenant for an autocratic martinet like Fernando Vasquez; as he had a staff of his own, paperwork was a breeze.

  The problem Helen MacIntosh posed was solved thanks to her ability to suck up huge amounts of professional information; when Carmine told the Commissioner that he thought her ready to move on at the end of January, Silvestri blandly agreed, readying himself to do battle with Hartford over a replacement. As he would have M.M. on side, he anticipated victory.

  Judge Thwaites had her measure.

  “She’s feral,” he said over Christmas drinks in his chambers.

  “Interesting word,” Carmine said.

  “As wild as she is cunning, and capable of evading every trap set for her.” His beady old eyes glittered; he sipped his Kentucky bourbon. “A fantastic instinct for the kill.”

  “You make her sound a criminal, Doug,” said Silvestri.

  “She would be, given a different upbringing. As it is, I predict she’ll be governor of the state before she’s forty-five.”

  “Or governor of someone else’s state,” said Carmine. “She’s going to one of the New York Manhattan precincts.”

  “Vindicated,” His Honor said with a chuckle. “All of this was only to return from whence she came—as who she wants to be.”

  People were looking at her differently since she had shot and killed Kurt von Fahlendorf; Helen was never as conscious of it as when she was with the male detectives. Not overtly from Abe Goldberg, so immensely professional that he could subdue every emotion. And not at all from Carmine Delmonico, who understood her predicament, Helen sensed, because his wife had twice been threatened by a killer with a gun. Some superstitious atavism, buried deep, told Carmine that Helen’s peril had deflected evil intent away from Desdemona.

  The rest of the men were a lost cause. Nick, Buzz, Liam, Tony and Donny eyed her warily, avoided one-on-one situations if they possibly could, and dried up conversationally whenever she hove in view. Privately she despised them as specimens off the Ark; they believed women belonged to the kitchen and their children. Well, let them be male chauvinist pigs! She was protected by Captain Delmonico, and she stood on better terms with him than they did.

  Delia was Delia, a good friend, a staunch supporter, the loyalest of fellow women. Never having fired her .38 or her Saturday night special save at the range, she couldn’t fit herself into Helen’s shoes, was the trouble. Since her secondment to Abe Goldberg, Helen didn’t see enough of Delia, a pity.

  Most astonishing change of all to Helen was that in her parents. Her mother waffled about “bad karma” and was having sessions with her swami or guru or whatever he was called—just like the Beatles, really. Though Angela was very happy at the resolution of a quincunx in Helen’s natal horoscope—it had bothered her ever since, she told Helen, now she knew that it was Helen’s ability to shoot people dead. Her father, one of the nation’s great liberals, found himself on the receiving end of remorseless sarcasm at producing a killer-cop child, and hadn’t thanked her for the adverse publicity.

  In fact, Kurt’s death had changed everything, Helen thought as she stared down at Busquash Inlet from behind her glass wall. The Warburton twins, briefly owners of this apartment, were moving back to the West Coast, having struck a fabulous deal with the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum to write, direct, and star in a blood soaked film about murder and twin detectives.

  It hadn’t taken any steel on her part to continue living here. The w
hite carpet had been replaced by a rust-red one—Delia was right, no snowy bedroom vistas for Helen MacIntosh! The trouble was that now the rust-red carpet was down, she found she didn’t like it. Purple would look better. This debate over decor, she was astonished to discover, was seen by people like the male detectives as callousness! She was supposed to be cringing in fear! Why? Hadn’t she achieved a great victory? She, a weak woman, had put paid to the existence of a man who had raped, tortured and eventually murdered fellow women! They should give her a medal, not subject her to an enquiry. Of course that had exonerated her; she had acted in self-defense.

  Some of the consequences were exasperating, like the one that compelled her to see Dr. Liz Meyers and attend the rape clinic sessions devoted to Dodo victims. How she hated those sessions! After she spent two of them insisting loudly that the Dodo had not raped her, Dr. Meyers dismissed her as unsuitable for group therapy of this nature; after another one-on-one session, Dr. Meyers referred Helen to Dr. Matthew Worthing, who specialized in difficult cases. But Helen never saw him.

  What a profound experience it had been! The thrill of the kill … When she closed her eyes she could see, as if in slow motion, the crimson flower bloom in Kurt’s bare chest, followed by another in the right upper belly, and a final one over the heart. Not huge blooms, but tight little buds that had slowly unfurled. The sight of him on that white carpet! The look in his eyes! That was best of all. Amazement and terror, absolute incredulity. And then he died. Poof! Lights out.

  How often dare I kill? Not here—never again in Holloman! Not even in Connecticut. I’ll be able to kill at least once in Manhattan, maybe twice or three times before I have to move on. Three million square miles of police departments, so many that I can wander from place to place at my whim. I’ll get better at it. To dispose of a body would be a tremendous help …

  The look in his eyes! Watching the life vanish from his eyes, I came to climax. Now, even thinking of it, I climax again.