“Does he what?” she asked blankly, her mind fixed on the hypothetical question.
“Have twelve children?”
Her hand slapped on the desk. “Oh, really, Captain!” she cried.
“I take that as a no,” he said, writing in his notebook.
“Mr. Leto has no children—or a wife!” she snarled as he continued writing. “Forty-eight procedures sounds correct, given the number of years. I always used him for stereotaxy.”
“What kind of stereotaxy do you do, Doctor?”
“Obviously, more than prefrontal lobotomies,” she said tartly. “Operations in keeping with my interest and training. Walter Jenkins is my most ambitious project to date.”
“Yet you didn’t use Mr. Leto for Jenkins?”
Her brows rose. “When did I say that?”
“So you did use him for Jenkins?”
Her patience snapped, but not explosively; more, Carmine thought, like the final severing of a piece of very old elastic. “Enough!” she said. “Mr. Ernest Leto is very much alive and well, wherever he may be at the moment, and you, Captain, are groping in the dark. Either desist, or charge me with a crime.”
“Then I’ll desist. But I’ll be back.”
“Like summer influenza, you imply.”
“As a metaphor, Doctor, it will do.”
She laughed. “A waste of time for both of us. In my kind of surgery, bleeds and seizures are the major hazards, not cops. Talk to the Chubb Chairman of Neurosurgery, he’ll tell you that no one ventures into the wildernesses of the brain without plenty of help on hand, from an anesthetist to instrument assistants. There had to be an Ernest Leto.”
Carmine frowned. “You’re saying that no one at HI has ever objected to being denied a hand in the cookie jar? Ernest Leto, says the IRS, received two thousand dollars per operation. If they were genuinely non-American patients, I’m going to say ten big ones. Leto probably took four and declared two. Plus travel expenses.”
This time her laugh was a snigger. “Your imagination is really amazing, Captain!”
“Not at all,” he said cordially.
“Why don’t you ask your hypothetical question?” she asked.
“A good idea, Doctor. Let us say that a frantically busy, overworked psychiatrist at a famous institute for the criminally insane decides she needs a hobby—my hypothetical psychiatrist is a lady, I forgot to say—and espouses photography. Her duties stifle her, hence her need for a hobby. She takes head-and-shoulders portraits of youngish women who have all mysteriously disappeared. She knows she won’t see them again. Interestingly, among her patients are six women who have mysteriously disappeared. Oh, they don’t belong to her official institute! They’re private patients she doesn’t need to see again. My hypothetical question is: do the six studio portraits belong to the six women who have mysteriously disappeared?”
The dark eyes considered him as he sat, so comfortably ensconced, gazing at her blandly. While she fended him off, his eyes told her scornfully that she was losing the battle.
“Hypothetically,” she said smoothly, “I have no idea what you’re getting at. Oh, I believe you know where you’re going! It’s just that I don’t.” She looked at her nails. “Sorry, Captain.”
“Don’t be,” he said, getting up. “Hypothesis will become reality.”
Walter had used his time in the machine shop to good purpose in more than one way. If anyone approached to breathe down his neck and see what exactly he was doing, they would have been rewarded by the sight of two deft hands shaping a piece of soft steel on a metal lathe, the end result a complex, convoluted sculpture any discerning person would have delighted to display upon a prominent shelf. Oppositely, if anyone sneaked undetected into the workshop and observed what Walter was doing, they would have noted an ugly, lumpish chunk of iron like a shoddy imitation of a Moore. But if a fly had buzzed in and lighted on the wall, then crawled inside a locked cupboard, the fly would have seen that Walter was making a silencer for the .45 semi-automatic, and popping a little mercury into a box of .45 projectiles.
All research units had workshops: they had to. No professional inventor could dream up in his wildest fantasies the one-off Rube Goldberg devices that laboratory researchers demanded as if asking for a new toaster; then he breathed down the engineer’s neck until the Rube Goldberg was finished. Most of the work was exquisite. Tungsten or glass microelectrodes with tips so fine they could be seen only under a microscope sat in the appropriate storage; there were micro pumps capable of delivering a drop of a drop each hour; whatever was needed had to be produced, almost inevitably in the workshop. There was only one proviso: that it not be “large” in any functional way. What was large? A pound or a half-kilogram in weight, a foot or a third of a meter in length, breadth, or depth.
With Jess Wainfleet and Ari Melos in a non-operative phase of their research, the artisan who ran the workshop had been granted a three-month furlough with pay to travel abroad and study techniques in other laboratory workshops. This left the shop entirely to Walter Jenkins, who, should anything come up, could turn to with a will and produce the item required. No sweat, as he said laconically.
He loved Marty Fane’s pistol, a custom job right for a pimp; it was gold-plated and had a mock-ivory grip, and it blew a big hole in its target. After each projectile had been doctored by a plus of mercury, it blew a much bigger hole. The I-Walter was very pleased with it.
He was feeling emotions these days—or at least he thought he was feeling emotions. The only judge he had of truth or falsehood was himself, for Jess was in terrible trouble of some kind, and it had driven the I-Walter from the foreground of her mind. That didn’t kindle anger or grief, if what he read about anger and grief were true; rather, it set off a paroxysm of payback against the people who were upsetting her.
The first welling up of this payback feeling had pushed him into deciding to kill Captain Carmine Delmonico—and what a fiasco that had been! He’d chosen a nun as his female victim deliberately, intending to put her in the Captain’s bed, imply they were lovers, then have it look as if Delmonico had shot her before shooting himself. And it had all gone so wrong, though just afterward Walter had deemed it a triumph, not understanding his mistakes. But they had come to him upon reflection, and ruined his sense of triumph. So many mistakes! Like wiring her ankles and wrists together; easier to carry her, yes, but it left red welts on her skin. And he hadn’t done enough surveillance, so didn’t expect that fool of a kid to be on the Captain’s deck—painting, for God’s sake! All hell had broken loose, the kid screaming, the dog barking—what a fiasco!
A bell rang, a warning system he had devised; Walter put the gun in his cupboard, the bullets after it, closed the door and locked it. Casually, as if weary of it, he picked up the sculpture.
“You do the most beautiful work, Walter,” Ari Melos said as he breathed down Walter’s neck. “Gorgeous!”
“Remarkable,” said Rose, not knowing what else to say.
“Thanks,” said Walter, unlocking the lathe clamps and holding the steel up to the light. “It’s not done with yet—see those?” He indicated a section where the silky steel was marred by tangled scratches. “That happened early, before I got the hang of it. I was going to smooth them out, but now I have a better idea. I’m going to work them into a pattern, transform them. Chased, like.”
“I see what you mean,” Melos said. “When it is finished, are you giving it to Dr. Jess?”
Walter shrugged. “Nah, wasn’t going to give it to anyone.”
“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it,” Melos said quickly.
“Okay,” said Walter, surprised, “but only after it’s finished.”
Turning, the pair went out. “I’ve known for a long while that he has talent,” said Melos, his voice floating back. “Some lunatics are incredibly gifted, and I think Walter is one of them.”
Fuck being incredibly gifted, Walter thought. Your eyes will give me your soul when I throttle you
, and you won’t be any different. I should rig it to make it look as if you strangled Rose, then hung yourself, but it’s too much fun to strangle. Let the cops think an outsider did them both.
There were no memories to return, Jess had ablated every last one, but the I-Walter who was emerging from the old manic shell was a thinking being, and the I-Walter was acutely aware that he was starting to enjoy the act of killing. It had been there faintly when he had killed Marty Fane, but it had a reflexive flavor to it, as though when the knife went in, there was only one direction for it to go: onward and upward and clear down to the bone, very bloodless and very fast. No real thrill at all.
Ah, but when his hands had closed around Sister Mary Therese’s neck! The first factor he encountered was her eyes, rolling in terror, and from that moment until finally he had climbed off her lifeless body, he had looked into her eyes. Sitting on top of her was simple asphyxiation, his weight preventing her straining lungs from pulling in enough air, even had there not been any merciless fingers on her trachea. A crude parody of the sex act, which he had never experienced in all his life; the first prisoner to try it died very bloodily; or so they had told him. It was one of those vanished memories.
To look into Sister Mary Therese’s eyes was the ultimate bliss: Walter was sure of it. Most important, the I-Walter was sure of it. The expressions in her eyes! To witness those expressions change as she ran the gamut of those genuinely terminal emotions! He had to see them again and again …. Even now, merely thinking about it, back came the wrenching vividness; he saw panic, terror, horror, despair. And then the look turned to submission. While he, who inflicted all of it upon his suffering victims—yes, he, the I-Walter—soared through the act of watching the eyes into full-blown ecstasy.
All the Walters, even the most pathetic of the Jess-Walters, understood now what the purpose of his existence was—ecstasy! He threw the sculpture at the wall, hungering to hurt someone—no, strangle somebody!
Schemes and plots and plans crowded in on him, but he couldn’t make sense of them; one part of himself knew that he had to seem the ordinary Jess-Walter, whereas most of him roared and screamed to do nothing but produce the look in eyes—anyone’s eyes, everyone’s eyes, from panic and terror to submission ….
“Oh, Walter!” came Jess’s aggrieved voice. “Have you honestly forgotten we’re eating in the senior staff dining room?”
The quiet soldier looked contrite—so many kinds of looks in the world, most of them designed to conceal or mislead.
“I’m so sorry, Jess, and I was looking forward to it too.”
She laughed, linked her arm through his. “My dearest of all helpers, it doesn’t matter! I knew you’d forget, so I came searching in plenty of time.”
The menu in the senior staff dining room, patronized by eight or nine persons, was superior, and had two waiters. To dine in it if you were not senior staff was rare.
Jess chose a shrimp cocktail and pork spare ribs, but Walter went more French, with a country terrine and a beef burgundy.
“Are you feeling any better?” Walter asked her.
“If you mean, about Ivy, I’m recovering from the shock. But that’s not significant. What is, is that I’ve neglected you quite disgracefully. But be of good cheer! Very soon now I’m going to sit down with you and go through these new pathways you’re opening up at such a rate. It’s quite wonderful.”
“I can feel it myself, Jess.”
“Do some things make you feel particularly good?”
What would she say if he told her, yes, strangling people?
The good soldier answered instead. “I sold my sculpture to Dr. Melos for a hundred bucks. It made me feel really good.”
“Walter, I’m delighted for you! Coming from Ari Melos, it’s a rare compliment. If he didn’t think you had true talent, he’d never part with his precious money.”
“That’s nice to know,” he said, looking satisfied.
“Can you describe niceness?” Jess asked.
Frowning, he digested this. “I’m not sure …. Happy, I guess. Like seeing a really beautiful butterfly?”
“Then what you felt was more than nice. You were thrilled.”
“That’s it!” he exclaimed. “Thrilled.” He ate beef. “Are there better words than thrilled, Jess?”
Astonished, she laughed. “Heavens, you are fixated! Better than thrilled …. Uplifted. Ecstatic. Inspired. It depends what you’re discussing, Walter,” she labored. “The right word is the one that fits the situation or state of mind.”
“Would I be uplifted if my Rube Goldberg worked?”
“Probably not.”
“What if I sculpted something crash-hot?”
“You’d either be uplifted or unduly critical.”
“Unduly critical?”
“Artists are rarely happy with their work, Walter.”
At the end of the meal, just as Jess was settling down to a real talk with him, Walter began to blink and look uncomfortable, shifting in his chair. “Jess, please excuse me.”
“What’s the matter?” she asked, alarmed.
“I’m starting a migraine aura.”
“Describe it,” she said tersely.
“A big boomerang shaped thing high up on my left side. It’s made up of glittering purple and yellow darts, and it’s creeping down.”
“Oh, God! It is a migraine aura, Walter. The headache will be left-sided, and start any time, but if it’s usual, you’ve got about twenty minutes. Get off to bed immediately.”
“I know, I’ve had them before. I’m going to lock myself in.”
“I’ll make sure you’re left in peace,” Jess said. “Nothing is worse than having people peering at you in the dark and disturbing you just as you have the headache under control.”
His face gladdened. “Oh, Jess, thanks! You understand.”
“You’re right, I understand. I have migraines too.”
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1969
He had pulled the migraine stunt shortly after nine, which meant Walter had two and a half hours to fill in before he needed to move; the best way to do this was to lie on his bed in a completely darkened room, neither writhing nor moaning. Any kind of movement, even that caused by a moan, is agony to the migraine sufferer, who lies as immobile as possible and tries to sleep. For Walter, whose brain had been invaded, there could be no shot of morphine. For him, it was sleep or agony.
He used those two and a half hours in trying to remember what he had told Jess was happening to him, and what he had kept a secret from her. Like his doors, his hollow wall, its contents, his expeditions into the outside world and what he had done during them, what he had done in the HI workshop, and, most secret of all, the utter fascination of watching life die out of a pair of eyes. They were all things that belonged to the I-Walter, who was a separate entity from the confused mish-mash of Walters he suddenly recognized, in that darkened room, as the Jess-Walter. The I-Walter hadn’t appeared at Jess’s bidding—in fact, he would appall her. How he knew that, he didn’t know, just that he did. So which Walter was the right Walter? The I-Walter, always the I-Walter. Secrets! How he loved secrets! Then, lying flat on his back on his bed, a tiny stabbing pain behind his eyes, he threshed up and down, back and forth on the pillows—WALTER, YOU HAVE BEEN HERE A HUNDRED TIMES BEFORE! You know all this, you have already reasoned it out! You’re the oxen on the tow-path, feet worn down to nothing.
Ari and Rose Melos. Delia Carstairs. Yes, they would be the first three. But only after I have treated myself to a binge. I deserve a binge!
I am the I-Walter, but Jess doesn’t know about the I-Walter. Even in despite of that, she thinks I am the center of her universe. Poor, deluded Jess! Psychiatrists are so easy to fool; they talk themselves into the right answers.
Inside his wall by half after eleven, clad in black leather and a conical helmet he intended to equip with wings later on, Walter Jenkins consulted his map by the light of a new pressure lantern—there! Out beyond S
outh Rock, surrounded by State forest, two miles from the nearest main road …. Perfect!
The Harley-Davidson’s panniers and pillion box were stacked with gasoline containers; he didn’t dare go near a gas station tonight, no matter what, and that included unexpected detours.
He opened the external door and wheeled the bike out along a new track; the earlier ones had all vanished, and this one wouldn’t be used again for months to come. Oh, pray it was a green winter this year! Snow would imprison him completely.
Though the leaves wouldn’t begin to turn for three more weeks and some of the days would be quite hot, there was a slight nip in the air, an initial harbinger of Fall. The sun was growing tired of rolling northward; in less than twenty days it would grind to a halt, exhausted, and start rolling down-globe on its southward plod, while behind it everything shivered.
Walter Jenkins shivered too, but not from the chill wind as his bike roared westward; his was an anticipatory shiver. Some miles away he turned southward, but didn’t take the tunnel through South Rock. Instead he veered west again to circumnavigate the basaltic pile, then picked up a very minor road through country devoted mostly to apple orchards. Spying trees loaded with big Opalescents, he stopped the bike, raided the nearest tree and wolfed down two apples, eyes closed in simple pleasure. So sweet! Then on again, the lingering taste of ideally ripe fruit in his mouth, an unexpected bonus.
And there it was, a single-storey sprawl in white clapboard, surrounded by well-kept gardens in which stood groups of chairs and tables, and adorned with a verandah that spread right across its front, where no doubt in good weather the folks could sit or lie about. The Harley-Davidson was up by an open gateway impeded by a deep pit across which steel bars had been laid to keep out horses or cattle or sheep.
Sins of the Flesh Page 25