On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  No point in going there; Robin changed the subject. “But,” she said chirpily, “Robina’s husband got a big promotion. They can buy that house they love in Westchester.”

  “Good for what’s his name,” he said absently; his work was calling to him from the top of the tower.

  “Oh, Addison, he’s your son-in-law! Callum Christie is his name.” She sighed, tried once more. “This afternoon I saw a rerun of Quo Vadis — goodness, didn’t they give the poor Christians a hard time? Lions dragging human arms around — brr!”

  “I know scads of Christians I’d happily throw to the lions. Rob you blind six days of the week, then go to church on Sunday and fix it up with God. Pah! I’m proud to stand by my sins, no matter how awful they are,” he said through his teeth.

  She giggled. “Oh, Addison, honestly! You do talk nonsense!”

  The salad had gone; Addison Forbes put down his knife and fork and wondered for the millionth time why he had ever married an empty-headed nurse halfway through medical school. Though he knew the answer, just didn’t care to admit it; he hadn’t had the money to finish, she was crazy about him, and a nurse’s income was just enough. Naturally he had planned to get through his residency before contemplating a family, but the fool woman fell pregnant before he graduated. So there he was, battling with an internship and twin daughters she had insisted on naming Roberta and Robina. Despite their homozygousness, Roberta had inherited his medical bent, whereas Robina the airhead had become a successful teenaged model before marrying an up-and-coming stockbroker.

  His repugnance for his wife hadn’t dissipated with the years; rather, it had grown until he could hardly stand the sight of her, and had private fantasies of killing her an inch at a time.

  “You would do better, Robin,” he said as he rose from the table, “to enroll in some degree program at West Holloman State College instead of scoffing popcorn in a movie theater. Or you could throw pots, which I’m told is what middle-aged women with no talent do. You couldn’t take a refresher course in nursing, you’d never manage the math. Now that our daughters have left the safety of your maternal river for a life in the ocean, your river has turned into a stagnant pond.”

  The same ending to the same meal; Addison stalked off up the spiral stairs to his padlocked eyrie while Robin shrilled after him.

  “I’d sooner be dead than run a vacuum over your stupid eyrie, so leave the door open, for God’s sake!”

  His voice floated back. “You’re nosy, my dear. No, thanks.”

  Mopping at her eyes with a tissue, Robin mixed the creamy Italian through her salad and flooded her meat loaf with cranberry sauce. Then she jumped up, ran to the refrigerator and unearthed a container of potato salad she’d hidden behind the cans of Tab. It wasn’t fair that Addison visited his pitiless regimen on her, but she knew exactly why he did: he was petrified of falling off his wagon if he saw real food.

  Carmine Delmonico stood leaning his shoulders against the florid blue and gold pheasant painted on the restaurant window, a big brown bag tucked in the crook of one arm. His eyes followed the bright red Corvette idly, then widened when it backed neatly into the curb and Miss Desdemona Dupre extricated her impressive length from it lithely.

  “Wow!” he said, straightening. “Not the kind of car I had picked for you.”

  “It will appreciate, not depreciate, so when I sell it I won’t lose money on it,” she said. “Shall we go in? I’m starving.”

  “I thought we’d eat at my place,” he said, beginning to walk. “The joint’s jumping with undergrad Chubbers, and my face is well known these days thanks to the Holloman Post. A pity to make the poor guys go to the john to take a swig from their brown bags.”

  “The Connecticut liquor laws are archaic,” she said, walking with him. “They can be killed in a war, but they can’t drink.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me, though I expected you to put up a fight over where we eat.”

  “My dear Carmine, at thirty-two I’m a trifle old to bridle girlishly at eating in a man’s apartment — or is it a house? Do we have a long walk?”

  “Nope, just to the corner. I live on the twelfth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building. Ten floors of offices, ten floors of apartments. Dr. Satsuma has the penthouse, but that rich I am not. Just modestly well off.”

  “Modesty,” she said, preceding him into a marble foyer, “is not a quality I associate with you.”

  “What I like most about you, Desdemona,” he said as they zoomed up in the elevator, “is your way of saying things. At first I thought you were taking the mickey out of me, but now I realize that it’s natural for you to be kinda — pompous.”

  “If to avoid slang is to sound pompous, then I’m pompous.”

  He ushered her out of the elevator, fished a key from his pocket and opened his front door, flicked a light switch.

  Desdemona walked into a room that took her breath away. Its walls and ceiling were dull Chinese red, a carpet the same color covered the floor, and much thought had gone into the lighting. Fluorescent strips concealed by a pelmet ran along the perimeter, illuminating some of the loveliest Oriental art she had ever seen: a three-leafed screen of tigers against gilt squares, a wonderfully droll and tender ink painting of a fat old man asleep with his head pillowed on a tiger, a group of tigers young and old, a mommy tiger serving a homily to a baby tiger, and, to break up so many tigers, a few panels of ethereal mountains painted on white stone inside intricately carved black frames. Four upholstered Chinese red tub chairs stood around a Lalique table of frosted ostrich plumes beneath a round piece of inch-thick transparent glass; above it blazed a small, matching Lalique chandelier. Two places had been set on that flawless table, of thin plain crystal and thin plain china. Four Chinese red easy chairs were arranged in a group around a squat, large ceramic temple dog with a sheet of glass on its head. Around the walls a few cabinets in black lacquer broke up so much redness. Interesting, that this shade of red was not discordant or irritating. It was just intensely sumptuous.

  “Ye gods!” she exclaimed feebly. “The next thing you’ll be telling me you write highly intellectual poetry and cherish a thousand secret sorrows.”

  That made him laugh as he carried the bag into a kitchen as white as the living room was dull red, immaculately clean, quite intimidatingly tidy. This man was a perfectionist.

  “Far from it,” he said as he emptied the steaming food into lidded bowls. “I’m just a Wop cop from Holloman with a yen for beautiful surroundings when I come home. White wine, or red?”

  “Beer, if you have it. I like beer with Chinese.

  “This place is not at all what I expected,” she said, taking two of the bowls while he stacked the rest up his arms like a waiter.

  He drew her chair out, seated her, seated himself.

  “Eat,” he said. “I got a bit of everything on the menu.”

  Since both of them were hungry, they polished off the large amount of food, each deftly wielding chopsticks.

  I am a snob, she thought as she ate, but we English do tend to be snobs unless we come from Coronation Street. Why do we forget that the Italians ruled the world before ever we did, and for longer, and with greater success? They gave birth to the Renaissance, they have adorned the world with art, literature, and the arch. And this Wop cop from Holloman has the air of a Roman emperor, so why should he not have ascetic feelings?

  “Green tea, black tea, or coffee?” he asked in the kitchen as he stacked the dishwasher.

  “Another beer, please.”

  “What did you expect, Desdemona?” he asked from the depths of his easy chair, his cup of green tea on the temple dog table.

  “If there had been a Mrs. Delmonico — after all, there might have been — good Italian leather and a conservative color scheme. If a policeman’s bachelor quarters — perhaps bits and pieces from Goodwill. Are you married? I ask only out of politeness.”

  “Was, a long time ago. I have a daughter nearly fifteen.”


  “With American alimony what it is, I’m surprised you can buy Lalique and chinoiserie.”

  “No alimony,” he said with a grin. “My ex left me to marry a guy who could buy and sell Chubb. She and my girl live in an L.A. mansion that looks like Hampton Court palace.”

  “You’ve traveled.”

  “From time to time, even for the job. I get the crap cases, and Chubb being an international community, a few cases spread to Europe, the Middle East, Asia. I saw the table and chandelier in a store window in Paris and hocked my suspenders to buy them. The Chinese stuff I bought in Hong Kong and Macau while I was in Japan just after the War. Occupational forces. The Chinese were so poor that I got things for a song.”

  “But you weren’t above profiting from their poverty.”

  “You can’t eat painted tigers, lady. Both sides got what they wanted.” It wasn’t said sharply, though it held a measure of reproof. “The first cold winter, they’d have been burned. I hate to think how much was burned during the years when the Japs treated the Chinese like sheep for the slaughter. As it is, what I have, I care for and appreciate. It’s not worth a hill of beans compared to what the British took out of Greece and the French out of Italy,” he added a little maliciously.

  “Touché.” She put her beer down. “All right, time to get down to brass tacks, Lieutenant. What do you think you can winkle out of me in return for feeding me?”

  “Probably nothing, but who knows? I won’t start by asking you anything I can’t find out for myself, though if you come across, it will save getting a few Hug backs up. Yours is permanently up, probably over your tallness, so I know where I stand with you — a good four inches shorter.”

  “I am proud of my height,” she said, tight-lipped.

  “So you should be. There’s lots of guys fancy climbing up Mount Everest.”

  She burst out laughing. “That’s exactly what I said to Miss Tamara Vilich today!” Sobering, she looked at him levelly. “But you’re not such a one, are you?”

  “Nope. I get my exercise working out in the police gym.”

  “Ask your questions, then.”

  “What’s the Hug’s annual budget?”

  “Three million dollars. A million in salaries and wages, a million in running costs and supplies, three-quarters of a million to Chubb University, and a quarter of a million as reserve.”

  He whistled. “Jesus! How the hell can the Parsons fund it?”

  “From a trust with a capital of a hundred and fifty million. This means that we never get through what the interest fetches. Wilbur Dowling wants the size of the Hug doubled to include a psychiatric division devoted to organic psychoses. Though this doesn’t fall within the Hug’s parameters, those parameters could be altered fairly legitimately to gratify his wishes.”

  “Why the hell did William Parson set aside so much?”

  “I think because he was a business skeptic who believed that money would inevitably lose its value as time went on. He was so alone, you see, and toward the end of his life the Hug became his entire reason for being.”

  “Would doubling the size of the Hug to fit in with the Dean’s ambitions be a problem in other ways than just money?”

  “Definitely. The Parsons dislike Dowling to a man, and M.M. is such a Chubber to his bootstraps that he regards science and medicine as faintly sordid things that by rights should belong to state-funded universities. That he tolerates them is because the federal government pours money into scientific and medical research, and Chubb does very well out of it. The Hug’s isn’t the only percentage Chubb takes.”

  “So M.M. and the Parsons are the stumbling blocks. It always goes back to personalities, doesn’t it?” Carmine asked, refilling his teacup from a pot kept warm inside a padded basket.

  “They’re human beings, so yes.”

  “How much does the Hug spend on major equipment?”

  “This year, more than usual. Dr. Schiller is being endowed with an electron microscope that will cost a million.”

  “Ah, yes, Dr. Schiller,” he said, stretching out his legs. “I hear that some of the Huggers are making his life so difficult that he tried to resign this afternoon.”

  “How do you know that?” she demanded, sitting up straight.

  “A little bird.”

  Down went the beer glass with a clang; Desdemona scrambled up. “Then feed your little bird, not me!” she snapped.

  He didn’t move. “Calm down, Desdemona, and sit down.”

  She stood doing her habitual towering act, eyes locked on his, which were, a corner of her mind noted, not dark brown, but more an amber that this room enlivened. The brain behind them knew exactly what she was feeling, and couldn’t be bothered with her compunctions. As was, she admitted, only fitting: all he cared about was finding the Connecticut Monster. Desdemona Dupre was a pawn he could easily afford to lose. She sat down.

  “That’s better,” he said, smiling. “What do you think of Dr. Kurt Schiller?”

  “As a person, or as a researcher?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “As a researcher, he’s an acknowledged world authority on the structure of the limbic system, which is why the Prof pinched him from Frankfurt.” She smiled, something she didn’t do often enough; her smile transformed a rather plain face into quite an attractive one. “As a person, I like him. The poor chap labors under some frightful handicaps apart from his nationality.”

  “Like homosexuality?”

  “That bird again?”

  “Most men don’t need a bird to whistle that, Desdemona.”

  “True. Women are more easily deluded, because women tend to view pleasant and gentle men as good husband material. Many of them prefer their own sex, which wives don’t find out until a few children later. It happened to two friends of mine. However, Kurt is pleasant and gentle but doesn’t pursue women so he can reproduce himself. Like all the researchers, he lives for his work, so I don’t think his homosexual affairs are long-standing. Or, if he does have a regular boyfriend, I imagine the boyfriend doesn’t see enough of him.”

  “You’re very dispassionate,” he said.

  “That’s because I’m not really involved. Candidly, I think Kurt came to America to start afresh, and put himself in a geographical location that means he can travel to New York City and the homosexual scene whenever he likes. What he forgot — or perhaps didn’t know — was how many people in the American medical professions are of Jewish extraction. It’s twenty years since the War ended with all those ghastly concentration camp revelations, but the memories are still very much alive.”

  “In you too, I imagine,” he said.

  “Oh, for me it was mostly the horrors of food and clothing rationing — what you’d call peanuts. Bombs and V-2s, but not where I lived well outside Lincoln.” She shrugged. “Still and all, I like Kurt Schiller, and until this awful business happened, so did everyone else, including Maurie Finch, Sonia Liebman, Hilda Silverman and the technicians. I remember Maurie saying at the time he learned Kurt had the pathology job that he’d done battle with his conscience, and his conscience said he mustn’t be the one to cast the first stone at a German young enough not to have participated in the Holocaust.” She glanced at her watch, the cheapest Timex she could find. “I must go, but thank you, Carmine. The food was just what I fancied, the environment truly gorgeous, and the company — why, quite bearable.”

  “Bearable enough to do it again next Wednesday?” he asked, pulling her to her feet as if she weighed half of her 160 pounds.

  “If you like.”

  He took her down in the elevator and insisted on walking her to her Corvette.

  An interesting woman, he thought as he watched the car growl away. There’s more to her than a complex about her height. Get her talking and she forgets to tower. Dresses in cheap shit, hacks at her hair herself, doesn’t have any jewelry. Does that make her stingy, or merely indifferent to the way she looks? I don’t think she’s either. Not surprising to fi
nd out she’s a keen hiker. I can see her striding along the Appalachian Trail in big boots — a feminine Tom Bombadil. No flare of attraction between us, that was a relief. Since I’d bet the contents of my walls that she’s not the Connecticut Monster, Miss Desdemona Dupre is the logical Hugger to cultivate.

  Ah! A good night’s work.

  Chapter 6

  Wednesday, November 17th, 1965

  “We’re getting nowhere,” said Carmine to Silvestri, Marciano and Patrick. “It’s coming up for two months since Mercedes was abducted, and we’ve lifted every stone in Connecticut to look under it. I don’t think there’s a deserted house, barn or shed in the whole state that we haven’t turned inside out, or a forest we haven’t tramped through. If he sticks to his pattern, he’s already got his next victim marked out, but we know no more about him or the identity of his next victim now than we did on Day One.”

  “Maybe we ought to be looking in houses, barns and sheds that are not deserted,” said Marciano, always the one impatient at official restrictions.

  “Sure, that’s agreed,” Silvestri said, “but you know very well, Danny, that no judge would issue us with a search warrant as things stand at the moment. We need evidence.”

  “It could be that we’ve frightened the killer off,” Patrick said. “He mightn’t snatch another victim. Or if he does, it might be in another state. Connecticut’s not huge. He could live here and still snatch in New York, Massachusetts or Rhode Island.”

  “He’ll snatch, Patsy, and inside Connecticut. Why inside Connecticut? Because it’s his turf. He feels like he owns it. He’s not a foreigner here, this is home, sweet home. I think he has lived here for long enough to know every town and village.”

  “How long would that take?” Patrick asked, intrigued.

  “Depends whether he’s a traveling man, doesn’t it? But I’d say five years, minimum — if he’s a traveling man.”

  “That doesn’t knock too many Huggers out of the running.”

  “No, Patsy, it doesn’t. Finch, Forbes, Ponsonby, Smith, Mrs. Liebman, Hilda Silverman and Tamara Vilich are Connecticut born and bred, Polonowski’s been here for fifteen years, Chandra for eight, and Satsuma for five.” Carmine scowled. “Let’s change the subject. John, are the press co-operating?”