On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  “I’d agree with you, except on one point. So far they’re all part-colored, and there are some would take offense at that, as you well know. Despite long residence in Connecticut, their roots are Caribbean. Even Rachel Simpson from Bridgeport turns out to have been of Barbadian origins. So it begins to look as if there is some kind of racial vendetta involved.”

  Down went the empty glass with a thump; Patrick slid out of the booth. “I’m going home, Carmine. If I don’t, I’ll stay here and keep on drinking.”

  Carmine wasn’t far behind his cousin; he paid his check, gave the waitress a two-dollar tip for Sandra’s sake, and walked the half block to his apartment eight floors below Dr. Hideki Satsuma’s penthouse in the Nutmeg Insurance building.

  Chapter 3

  Friday, October 8th, 1965

  By Friday, the Holloman Post and other Connecticut papers were full of the murder of Mercedes Alvarez and the disappearance of Verina Gascon, also feared dead, but no sharp reporter had yet picked up on police vibes that they were dealing with a multiple rapist/killer of carefully reared, sheltered, teenage girls — or that Caribbean origins might play a part.

  There was a message on Carmine’s desk that Otis Green was out of the hospital, at his home, and anxious to see him. Another said Patrick also wanted to see him. Abe was in Bridgeport making enquiries about Rachel Simpson, and Corey had been given the double job of Nina Gomez in Hartford and Vanessa Olivaro in New Britain. As Guatemala had one coast on the Caribbean, the new emphasis was definitely Caribbean.

  Since Patrick was just an elevator ride away, Carmine went to see him first. He was in his office, his desk littered with brown paper bags.

  “I know you’ve seen plenty of these already, but you don’t know as much about them as I do,” Patrick said, waiting while his cousin poured freshly brewed coffee from a percolator.

  “So tell me,” said Carmine, sitting down.

  “As you see, they do indeed come in all shapes and sizes.” Patrick held up a specimen 12 x 6 inches. “This holds six hundred-gram rats, this rather larger one holds four two-hundred-fifty-gram rats. A researcher rarely uses rats bigger than two-hundred-fifty grams, but as rats continue to grow for as long as they live, they can get up to the size of a cat or even a small terrier. However, no one at the Hug uses rats that large.” He held up a 24 x 18 inch bag. “For reasons that escape me, the Hug cats are all large male animals, just as the rats are all males. And the monkeys. This is a cat bag. I went over to the Hug first thing this morning and managed to have words” — not an unfair summary of the encounter, Carmine was sure — “with Miss Dupre, who deals with all purchasing and stock taking. The bags are specially made by a firm in Oregon. They consist of two layers of very stout brown paper separated by a three-millimeter-thick padding of fiber made from sugarcane bagasse. You’ll note that there are two plastic discs on the outside of the bag. Fold the top of the bag over twice and the two discs lie in close proximity to each other. The picture wire on the top disc is twisted in a figure-of-eight around the bottom one and the bag can’t come open. Same way you’d close an interdepartmental memo envelope, except that its tie is thread. A dead animal will keep inside a bag without body fluids leaking through for up to seventy-two hours, but no carcass is kept half so long in a bag. Any animals that die over the weekend aren’t found until Monday unless the researcher is in over the weekend. He’ll put the carcass in a bag, but then throws the bag into one of the freezers that dot his floor. His technician then takes it down to animal care on Monday morning, though it won’t go to the incinerator until Tuesday morning.”

  Carmine held a bag up to his nose and sniffed intently. “I see that they’re treated with a deodorant.”

  “Correct, as Miss Dupre would put it. What a snooty bitch!”

  “It’s just too much!” cried the Prof to Carmine when they met in the Hug foyer. “Did you read what that antivivisectionist idiot wrote in the Holloman Post? We medical researchers are pure sadists, indeed! It’s your fault, trumpeting about the murder!”

  Carmine had a temper, usually well controlled, but this was more than he could stomach. “Considering,” he said bitingly, “that I’m only here in the Hug because a number of innocent young girls have suffered as I’m darned sure no animal ever has in the Hug, you would do better to focus your attention on rape and murder than on antivivisectionism, sir! Where the hell are your priorities?”

  Smith rocked. “A number? You mean more than one?”

  Sit on your rage, Carmine, don’t let this introverted specimen of splendid isolation get under your skin! “Yes, I mean a number! Yes, I mean more than one — many more! You have to know, Professor, but the information is strictly classified. It’s high time you took this seriously, because your singularity is anything but a singularity! It’s multiple! Hear me? Multiple!”

  “You must be mistaken!”

  “I am not,” Carmine snarled. “Grow up! Antivivisectionism is the least of your worries, so don’t come whining to me!”

  There were three-family houses in the Hollow in far worse condition than Otis’s. Around Fifteenth Street, where Mohammed el Nesr and his Black Brigade lived, the houses had been gutted, their windows boarded up with plywood, their walls inside lined with mattresses. Here on Eleventh Street was shabbiness, peeling paint, evidence that the absentee landlords didn’t bother with maintenance, but when a still simmering Carmine trod up the stairs to the Green’s apartment on the second floor he found what he had expected to find: clean premises, nice homemade drapes and dust covers on the upholstery, polished wooden surfaces, rugs on the floor.

  Otis lay on the sofa, a man of about fifty-five years, fairly trim but with enough loose skin to suggest that at one time he had carried forty pounds more than he did now. His wife, Celeste, hovered aggressively. She was somewhat younger than Otis and dressed with a certain elegant flashiness that fell into place after he learned she was from Louisiana. Frenchified. A third person cluttered up the room, a young, very black man with the same mannerisms as Celeste, though he utterly lacked her looks or her way with clothes; he was introduced as Wesley le Clerc, Celeste’s nephew and the Green’s boarder. The look in his eyes told Carmine that he had a very big racial chip on his shoulder.

  Neither wife nor her nephew was willing to leave, but Carmine didn’t have to exert his authority: Otis exerted his.

  “Go away and leave us be,” he said curtly.

  Both of them left immediately, Celeste with warnings of what would happen to Carmine if he upset her husband.

  “You have a loyal family,” said Carmine as he perched on a large, clear plastic ottoman filled with red plastic roses.

  “I got a loyal wife” from Otis, followed by a snort. “That kid’s a menace. Wants to make a name for hisself in the Black Brigade, says he’s found the prophet Mohammed an’ is gonna call hisself Ali somethin’ or other. It’s the roots thing, like with any people stolen in millions, but far as I know, the le Clercs come from a part of Africa worshipped King Kong, not Allah. I am an old-fashioned man, Lieutenant, don’t hold with tryin’ to be someone I ain’t. I go to the Baptist church an’ Celeste goes to the Catholic church. I been a black man in a white man’s army, but if the Germans and the Japs had won, I’d a been a helluva lot worse off, is how I see it. I got a little money in the bank, an’ when I retire, I am goin’ back to Georgia to farm. I had it up to here” — he put his hand to his throat —

  “with Connecticut winters. Still an’ all, that’s not why I wanted to see you, sir.”

  “Why did you want to see me, Mr. Green?”

  “Otis. To get it outta the way. How many people know what I found in that fridge?”

  “Hardly any, and we’re trying to keep it that way.”

  “It was a little girl, wasn’t it?”

  “No. Not a child, at any rate. We know she was from a family of Dominicans, and we know she was sixteen years old.”

  “So she black, not white.”

  “I’d prefer
to say she was neither, Otis. A mixture.”

  “Lieutenant, this is a terrible sin!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Carmine paused while Otis muttered under his breath, let him calm down, then broached the subject of bags.

  “Is there a usual pattern to the number and size of the bags in the fridge, Otis?”

  “I guess so,” Otis said after some thought. “I mean, I know when Mrs. Liebman’s doin’ decerebrations ’cos there’s four to six cat bags. Otherwise, it’s mostly rat bags. If a macaque dies, the way we thought Jimmy had, then there’s a real big bag, but I will always know what’s in it ’cos Cecil will be cryin’ his heart out.”

  “So when there are four to six cat bags in the fridge, you know that Mrs. Liebman has been decerebrating.”

  “’s right, Lieutenant.”

  “Can you remember any time in the past when there were four to six cat bags in the fridge that Mrs. Liebman couldn’t have had anything to do with?”

  Otis looked surprised, tried to sit up.

  “You want your wife in jail for murdering me, Otis? Lie back down, man!”

  “About six months ago. Six cat bags when Mrs. Liebman was away on vacation. I remember wonderin’ who was fillin’ in for her, but then I was needed, so I just threw them bags into my bin an’ wheeled them off to the incinerator.”

  Carmine rose. “That’s a great help. Thanks, Otis.”

  The visitor hadn’t let himself out of the downstairs front door before Celeste and Wesley were back.

  “You okay?” Celeste demanded.

  “Better than before he came,” said Otis sturdily.

  “What color’s the body?” Wesley demanded. “Did the cop say?”

  “Not white, but not black either.”

  “A mulatto?”

  “He didn’t say that. That’s a Louisiana word, Wes.”

  “Mulatto’s black, not white,” said Wesley with satisfaction.

  “Don’t you go makin’ mountains outta molehills!” Otis cried.

  “I gotta see Mohammed” was Wesley’s rejoinder. He zipped himself into his black imitation leather jacket with the white fist painted on its back.

  “You’re not seeing Mohammed, boy, you’re going to work this minute! You do not qualify for welfare and I am not boarding you for nothing!” Celeste snapped. “Go on, shoo!”

  Sighing, Wesley divested himself of his passport to Mohammed el Nesr’s headquarters at 18 Fifteenth Street, put on a down jacket instead, and hied himself off in his battered 1953 De Soto to Parson Surgical Instruments. Where, if he had bothered to enquire, which he didn’t, he could have discovered that his dexterity at crafting mosquito forceps had more than once made the difference between continued employment and a pink slip.

  For Carmine the day was depressing and bitter; the missing persons files that fitted the Mercedes description were beginning to arrive on his desk. Six more, to be exact, one every two months throughout 1964: Waterbury, Holloman, Middletown, Danbury, Meriden and Torrington. The only place where he had repeated himself in nearly two years was Norwalk. Every girl was sixteen years old and of mixed-blood originating in the Caribbean, though never a family of recent immigrants. Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Martinique, Cuba. Five feet tall, stunningly pretty, of mature figure, extremely carefully reared. All the new arrivals on his desk were Catholic, though not all had gone to Catholic schools. None had had a boyfriend, all were straight-A students and popular with their classmates. More importantly, none had confided in a friend or a member of her family about having a new friend, or a new kind of good deed to practice, or even a new acquaintance.

  At 3 P.M. he climbed alone into the Ford and started down I-95 to Norwalk, where Lieutenant Joe Brown had arranged for him to see the Alvarez family in their home. He couldn’t be there himself, he was quick to add; Carmine knew why. Joe couldn’t face another session with the Alvarezes.

  The house was a three-family one that José Alvarez owned; he lived in the bottom-floor apartment with his wife and children, and rented out the middle and top-floor apartments. This was how all working people aspired to live: virtually rent free themselves, the middle apartment paying the mortgage and utilities, and the top one bringing in that little extra against repairs as well as to save for rainy days. Living on the bottom floor, they had the backyard, half of the four-car garage, and the basement for their own use. And a landlord who lived on the premises was able to keep a stern eye on the tenants.

  Like all its neighbors, the house was painted a darkish grey, had double windows whose outer sets were replaced in summer by insect screens, a front porch right on the sidewalk, but a big backyard surrounded by a high chain-link fence; the garage sat across its back beyond a driveway down one side of the house. As Carmine stood on the oak-lined street looking, he could hear the baying of a large dog; scant chance of anyone’s breaking in via the back porch with a hound on patrol.

  The priest opened the front door, which was separate from the door leading to the two upstairs apartments. Carmine gave the cleric a smile and shrugged himself out of his overcoat.

  “I’m sorry to have to do this, Father,” he said. “My name is Carmine Delmonico. Should I be Lieutenant or Carmine in there?”

  After some consideration the priest said, “Lieutenant would be better, I think. I’m Bart Tesoriero.”

  “Do you need to speak Spanish in your parish?”

  Father Tesoriero opened the inner door. “No, though I do have a fair number of Hispanic parishioners. It’s an old part of town, they’ve all been here a long time. No Hell’s Kitchen, that’s for sure.”

  The living room, quite a large one in this bottom apartment, was full of people and silence. Himself of Latin origins, Carmine knew that relatives would have come from everywhere to be with the Alvarezes in their time of need. This meant that he knew how to deal with them, but he didn’t have to. The priest ushered all save the immediate family into the kitchen, with a woman who looked like the grandmother leading a toddling boy.

  That left José Alvarez, his wife, Concita, their eldest son, Luís, and three daughters — Maria, Dolores and Teresa — in the room. Father Tesoriero put Carmine in the best chair, and himself sat between husband and wife.

  It was a home of lace doilies, lace curtains under drapes of synthetic velvet, respectably well-worn furniture and floors tiled in terra-cotta beneath busy rugs. The walls bore pictures of the Last Supper, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mary holding the Christ Child, and many framed photographs of the family. Vases of flowers were everywhere, each bearing a card; the perfume of freesias and jonquils was so heavy Carmine felt choked. Where did florists get them at this time of year? On the center of the mantelpiece was a silver-framed photograph of Mercedes, in front of it a burning candle in a red glass bowl.

  The first thing Carmine did when he entered a house of grief was to imagine how the bereaved must have looked before tragedy struck. Nigh impossible here, but nothing could alter bone structure. Strikingly handsome, all of them, and all with that café au lait skin color. A little Negro, a little Caribbean Indian, a great deal of Spanish. The parents were probably in their late thirties, but looked a decade and more older than that, sitting like two rag dolls in their own ghastly world. Neither of them seemed to see him.

  “Luís, is it?” he asked the boy, whose eyes were swollen and reddened from tears.

  “Yes.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “And your sisters? How old are they?”

  “Maria is twelve, Dolores is ten, and Teresa is eight.”

  “Your baby brother?”

  “Francisco is three.”

  By now the boy was weeping again, the dreary, hopeless tears that can only fall after too many have gone before them. His sisters lifted their faces from soaked handkerchiefs for a moment, their little bony knees clenched together under the margins of matching plaid pleated skirts like pairs of ivory skulls. Shaken by great hiccoughs, the
y sat and writhed from the pain of it, the terrible shock that was now wearing itself down to exhaustion after the days of worry and then the news that Mercedes was dead, cut into pieces. Of course no one had intended that they should find that out, but they had.

  “Luís, could you take your sisters into the kitchen, then come back for a minute?”

  The father, he saw, had finally focused on his face, viewing it with confused wonder.

  “Mr. Alvarez, would you rather we postponed this for a few more days?” Carmine asked softly.

  “No,” the father whispered, dry-eyed. “We will manage.”

  Yes, but can I?

  Luís returned, tears gone.

  “Just the same old questions, Luís. I know you’ve already been asked them a million times, but memories can bury themselves and then suddenly come back for no reason, which is why I’m asking them again. I understand that you and Mercedes went to different schools, but I’ve been told that you were great pals. Girls as pretty as Mercedes get noticed, that’s natural. Did she ever complain about being noticed? Followed? Watched from a car or by someone on the other side of the street?”

  “No, Lieutenant, honestly. Boys would wolf-whistle her, but she ignored them.”

  “What about when she worked as a candy striper last summer?”

  “She never said anything to me that wasn’t about the patients and how nice the sisters were to her. They only let her into the maternity hospital. She loved it.”

  He was beginning to weep again: time to stop. Carmine smiled and nodded toward the kitchen.

  “I apologize,” he said to Mr. Alvarez when the boy was gone.

  “We realize that you must ask and ask, Lieutenant.”

  “Was Mercedes a confiding child, sir? Did she discuss things with her mother or with you?”

  “She confided in both of us all the time. Her life pleased her, she loved to talk about it.” A great spasm went through him, he had to cling to the arms of his chair to suppress it. The eyes that stared into Carmine’s own were transfixed with pain, while the mother’s seemed to stare into the depths of Hell. “Lieutenant, we have been told what was done to her, but it is almost impossible to believe. We have been told that Mercedes is your case, that you know more about what happened to her than the Norwalk police do.” His voice went thin with urgency. “Please, I beg you, tell me! Did she — did my little girl suffer?”