On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  Kyneton sagged, looked around vainly for a chair, hung on to a case of swabs instead. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, I’m ruined!”

  “Straighten up, Kyneton, for God’s sake!” Carmine snapped. “You’re not ruined — yet. Find someone to do your next operation, send your wife home, and follow her. Once you’ve gotten her and your mother to yourself, confess. Go down on your knees and beg forgiveness. Swear never to do it again. And don’t hold anything back. You’re a sweet-talking con merchant, you’ll bring them round. But God help you if you don’t treat those two women right in future, hear me? I’m not charging you with anything at the moment, but don’t think I can’t find something to charge you with if I want, and I’ll be keeping my eye on you: for however many years I’m a cop. One last thing. Next time you shop at Brooks Brothers, buy your mother and wife something nice at Bonwit’s.”

  Did the bastard listen? Yes, but only to what he divined would save him. “None of that helps me with the partnership.”

  “Sure it does! Provided your mother and wife stand by you. Between the three of you, you can make Tamara Vilich sound like a frustrated woman telling a whole mess of lies.”

  The cog wheels were clunking around; Kyneton brightened visibly. “Yes, yes, I see what you mean! That’s how to do it!”

  A moment later, Carmine was alone. Keith Kyneton had raced off to mend his fences without a word of thanks.

  “And just what,” demanded an irate female voice, “do you think you’re doing in here?”

  Carmine flapped his impressive gold badge at the nurse, who looked ready to call hospital security.

  “I’m doing penance, ma’am,” he said. “Terrible penance.”

  The world when covered with fresh snow was so beautiful; as soon as he shed his outdoor layers Carmine turned one of his easy chairs to face the huge window that looked out across the harbor, and switched off all the interior lights. The strident yellow of highway illuminations offended him, but washed across sheets of snow it was softer, more golden. The ice was beginning to creep out from the eastern shore, though the wharves were still a black vacancy chipped by sparkles; too much wind for long, rippling reflections. No car ferries now until May.

  What was he going to do about Desdemona? All his overtures had been repulsed, all his notes of apology returned unopened, thrust under his door. To this moment he didn’t honestly know why she had been so mortally offended, so unrelenting — sure, he had over-stepped the mark, but didn’t everyone sometimes have words, not see eye to eye? Something to do with her pride, but just what escaped him. That barrier different nationalities could erect, too high to see over. Was it his remark about buying a new dress occasionally, or simply that he’d dared to query her behavior? Had he made her feel unfeminine, or grotesque, or — or —

  “I give up,” he said, leaned his chin on his hand, and tried to think about the Ghost. That was his new name for the Monster, who had nothing in common with popular conceptions of monsters. He was a ghost.

  Chapter 17

  Wednesday, January 19th, 1966

  “I’m going for a walk, dear,” Maurice Finch said to Catherine as he got up from the breakfast table. “I don’t feel much like going in to work today, but I’ll think about it while I walk.”

  “Sure, you do that,” his wife said, glancing through the window at the outside thermometer. “It’s fifteen below, so dress warm — and if you do decide to go to work, start the car on your way back.” He seemed, she felt, considerably more cheerful these days, and she knew why. Kurt Schiller had returned to the Hug and approached Maurie to assure him that their quarrel had not been the cause of his suicide attempt. Apparently the love of his life had thrown him over for someone else. The Nazi schmuck (Catherine’s opinion of Schiller hadn’t budged) didn’t go into details, but she supposed that men who liked men were as vulnerable as men who liked women; some floozie — what did the sex of the floozie matter? — had gotten tired of being adored, needed someone with a new approach and maybe a bigger bank balance.

  She watched Maurie from the window as he scrunched off down the frozen path that led to his apple orchard, always his favorite place. They were old trees, had never been pruned to keep the fruit pickably low, but in spring that made them a soaring froth of white blossoms that took the breath away, and in fall they were smothered with glossy red globes like Christmas tree decorations. Several years ago Maurie had been inspired to train some of their branches into arches; the old wood had creaked in protest, but Maurie did it so gently and slowly that now the spaces between the trees were like the aisles in a cathedral.

  He disappeared; she went to wash the dishes.

  Then came a high, horrifying shriek. A plate crashed to the floor in shards as Catherine grabbed a coat and ran for dear life. Her slippered feet slid and skidded on the ice, but somehow she kept her balance. Another shriek! Not even feeling the 17°F temperature, she raced faster.

  Maurie was standing by the wonderful dry stone wall encircling his orchard, staring over it at something glittering on the bank of iron-hard snow that had piled against it during the last blizzard.

  One glance, and she led him away, back to the warmth of the kitchen, back to sanity. Back to where she could call the police.

  Carmine and Patrick stood where Maurice Finch had, since his feet had obliterated any other footprints that might have been there before his — highly unlikely, both men felt.

  Margaretta Bewlee was in one piece apart from her head, which wasn’t anywhere to be found. Against the stark whiteness her dark chocolate skin was even darker, the pink of palms and soles of feet echoing the color of the dress she wore: a confection of pink lace embroidered all over with sparkling rhinestones. It was short enough to see the crotch of a pair of pink silk panties, ominously stained.

  “Jesus, everything’s different!” Patrick said.

  “I’ll see you in the morgue,” Carmine said, turning away. “If I stay here, I’ll retard your progress.”

  He went inside to where the Finches huddled together at their breakfast table, a bottle of Manischevitz wine before them.

  “Why me?” Finch asked, face ghastly.

  “Have some more wine, Dr. Finch. And if we knew why you, we might have a chance to catch this bastard. May I sit down?”

  “Sit, sit!” Catherine gasped, indicating an unused glass. “Have some, you need it too.”

  Though he didn’t care for sweet wine, the Manischevitz did help; Carmine put his glass down and looked at Catherine. “Did you hear anything during the night, Mrs. Finch? It’s snapped so cold that everything makes a noise.”

  “Not a thing, Lieutenant. Maurie put peat moss and mulch in his mushroom tunnel for a while after he came home yesterday, but we were in bed by ten and slept through until six this morning.”

  “Mushroom tunnel?” Carmine asked.

  “I fancied seeing if I could grow the gourmet varieties,” Finch said, looking a little better. “Mushrooms are persnickety, but I don’t understand why when you see how they grow in a field.”

  “Do you mind if we take your property apart, Doctor? I’m afraid that finding Margaretta here makes that necessary.”

  “Do what you want, do what you need — just find this monster!” Finch got up like an old man. “However, I think I know why we didn’t hear anything, Lieutenant. Want to see?”

  “I sure do.”

  Cautioned not to step anywhere that looked as if the ground had been disturbed, Maurice Finch led Carmine across the area where his glasshouses stood, then in between the big, heated sheds that held Catherine’s chickens. Finally, a good third of a mile beyond the house, Finch stopped and pointed.

  “See that little road? It comes up from a gate on Route 133 and ends at the foot of the orchard. We put it in with a blade on the front of our truck because of the brook — when the brook floods, it cuts our house off from access to Route 133. If the Monster knew it existed, he could use it to drive in and we’d never hear him.”

  “Thank you
for that, Dr. Finch. Go back to your wife.”

  Finch did as he was told without protest, while Carmine went to find Abe and Corey, explain whereabouts they should look for signs of the Ghost. He is a ghost, ghosted in and ghosted out again, but he’s a very knowledgeable ghost, the Ghost. Maurice Finch has crisscrossed his property with homemade tracks, but the Ghost is aware of every one of them. And you asked a good question, Dr. Finch: “Why me?” Why, indeed?

  Carmine made sure he was back at the County Services building before Patrick brought Margaretta’s body in; this was one autopsy he wanted to see from start to finish.

  “She was put on top of a snowbank frozen to solid ice, but I suspect that she was already frozen when he dumped her there,” said Patrick as he and Paul tenderly lifted the long frame out of its bag. “The ground everywhere is frozen, nothing smaller than a backhoe could have broken it to bury her, but this time he wasn’t concerned about hiding her, even for a short while. He dumped her in the open in a sparkling dress.”

  The three men stood looking at Margaretta, and at that very peculiar dress.

  “I didn’t see Sophia enough during the years when she wore party dresses,” Carmine said, “but with all those girls, Patsy, you must have seen dozens of party dresses. This isn’t a young woman’s dress, is it? It’s a child’s party dress she’s been wedged into.”

  “Yes. When we lifted her we found that it wasn’t buttoned up the back. Margaretta’s shoulders are way too broad, but her arms are thin, so he was able to make her look okay from the front.”

  The dress had small, puffed sleeves with narrow cuffs, and a waist that allowed for a child’s body — wide and a little tubby. On a ten-year-old child it would probably have reached the knees; on this young woman it barely covered the tops of her thighs. The shell-pink lace was French-made, Carmine guessed; expensive, proper lace embroidered on to a base of fine, strong net. Then later someone else had sewn what looked like several hundred transparent rhinestones all over it in a pattern that echoed that of the lace; each rhinestone was perforated at its tip to take a fine needle and thread. Painstaking manual labor that would add multibucks to its price tag. He would have to show this to Desdemona for a really accurate estimate of its quality and cost.

  He watched Patrick and Paul ease Margaretta out of the odd garment, which had to be preserved intact. One of the reasons why he loved his cousin so much lay in Patrick’s respect for the dead. No matter how repulsive some of the bodies he encountered were — fecal matter, vomitus, unmentionable slimes — Patrick handled them as if God had made them, and made them with love.

  Deprivation of the dress left Margaretta in a pair of pink silk panties reaching up to her waist and down to her thighs: modest panties. The crotch was bloodstained, but not grossly so. When they were peeled off, there was the plucked pudendum.

  “It’s our guy for sure,” Carmine said. “Any idea before you start how she died?”

  “Not from blood loss, for certain. Her skin’s just about its right color and there’s only one incision of the neck, the one that decapitated her. No ligature marks on her ankles, though I think she was tied down with the usual canvas band across her chest. He might have put another over her lower legs between rapes, but I’ll have to look a lot closer to verify that.” His lips thinned. “I think this time he raped her to death. Not much blood externally, but she’s very swollen in the abdomen for someone who hasn’t begun to decay. Once she was dead, he put her in a freezer until he was ready to dump her.”

  “Then,” said Carmine, backing away from the table, “I’ll wait for you in your office, Patsy. I was going to see this one through, but I don’t think I can.”

  Marciano met him outside. “You look kinda white around the gills, Carmine. Had any breakfast?”

  “No, and I don’t want any either.”

  “Sure you do.” He sniffed Carmine’s breath. “Your trouble is, you’ve been drinking.”

  “You call Manischevitz drinking?”

  “No. Even Silvestri would classify it as grape juice. Come on, pal, you can fill me in at Malvolio’s.”

  He hadn’t managed much of the French toast and maple syrup, but he went back to his office feeling better for trying to eat. Today was going to bring worse mental punishment than it had thus far; he had a premonition that Mr. Bewlee would insist on seeing his daughter’s remains, no matter what his minister of religion said, or who volunteered to do this awful task. Some parts of her he just couldn’t be let see, but he’d know every crease in the palms of her hands, maybe some tiny scar where he’d removed a big splinter from her foot, the shape of her nails…The sweet and lovely intimacies of fatherhood that Carmine had never experienced. How strange it is, to sire a child you don’t honestly know, who has lived far from you and in whose company you feel an exile.

  Now that he had taken to calling the killer a ghost, some corners and crevices in his mind had shifted to permit faint rays of light down their depths; Carmine had found himself thinking in new channels since that night when he had gazed across Holloman’s harbor in the snow, and seeing Margaretta Bewlee in her party dress on that icy bank had unlocked another avenue that beckoned to him alluringly, just out of his grasp, a ghost of an idea. A ghost…

  Then he had it. Not a ghost. Two ghosts.

  How much easier two of them would make it! The speed and the silence, the invisibility. Two of them: one to dangle a bait, the other to execute the snatch. There had to be a bait, something that a sixteen-year-old girl as pure as the driven snow would take as eagerly as a salmon the right fly. A waif of a kitten, a puppy all grimed and abused?

  Ether…Ether! One of them dangled the bait, the other came up behind like lightning and clamped a pad soaked in ether over the girl’s face — no chance to scream, no risk of a bite or a hand’s slipping for a moment to allow a cry. The girl would be out to it in seconds, sucking ether into her lungs as she struggled. Then two of them to whisk her away, give her a shot, get her into a vehicle or into a temporary hiding place. Ether…The Hug.

  Sonia Liebman was in the Hug’s O.R. tidying up after rat brain soup. When she saw Carmine, her face darkened — but not due to him.

  “Oh, Lieutenant, I heard! Is poor Maurie okay?”

  “He’s okay. Couldn’t not be, with that wife.”

  “So the Hug’s still up shit creek, right?”

  “Or someone wants to make it seem that way, Mrs. Liebman.” He paused, could see no point in dissimulating. “Do you have any ether in the O.R.?” he asked.

  “Sure, but it’s not anesthetic ether, just ordinary anhydrous ether. Here,” she said, leading the way into the anteroom, where she pointed at a row of cans sitting on a high shelf.

  “Would it act as an anesthetic?” he asked, plucking a can off the shelf to examine it. About the size of a large can of peaches, but with a short, narrow neck surmounted by a metal bulb. Not a lid, but a seal. The stuff must be so volatile, he thought, that not the tightest lid known would keep it from evaporating.

  “I use it as an anesthetic when I’m decerebrating cats.”

  “You mean when you remove their brains?”

  “You’re learning, Lieutenant. Yes.”

  “How do you etherize them, ma’am?”

  For answer she hauled a container made of clear Plexiglass out of a corner; it was about thirteen inches square, thirty inches high, and had a tightly fitting lid secured by clamps. “This is an old chromatography chamber,” she said. “I put a thick towel on the bottom, empty a whole can of ether onto the towel, pop the cat inside and shut the lid. Actually I do it outside on the fire stairs, better ventilation. The animal passes out very quickly, but can’t hurt itself on these smooth sides before it does.”

  “Does it matter if it hurts itself when it’s about to lose its brain without ever waking up?” Carmine asked.

  She reared back like a cobra about to strike. “Yes, you sap, of course it matters!” she hissed. “No animal is ever subjected to pain or suffering in my O
.R.! What do you think this is, the cosmetic industry? I know some vets who don’t treat their animals as well as we do!”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Liebman, I didn’t mean to offend you. Blame it on ignorance,” said Carmine, groveling abjectly. “How do you get the can open?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “There’s probably a tool for it,” she said, mollified, “but I don’t have one, so I use an old pair of rongeurs.”

  These looked like a large pair of pliers, except that two scooped ends met in opposition and nibbled away at whatever was put between them. Like the soft metal bulb of a can of ether, as Sonia Liebman proceeded to demonstrate. Carmine retreated from the smell that seemed to spring out of the can faster than a genie.

  “Don’t you like it?” she asked, surprised. “I love it.”

  “Do you know how much ether you have in stock?”

  “Not to an accurate count — it’s neither valuable nor important. When I notice the shelf supply is getting low, I simply order more. I use it for decerebrations, but it’s also used to clean glassware if an investigator is going to do a test that requires no residues of any kind.”

  “Why ether?”

  “Because we have plenty of it, but some investigators prefer chloroform.” She frowned, looked suddenly enlightened. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at! Ether doesn’t last in the body, Lieutenant, anymore than it clings to glassware. A few respirations blow it away, straight out of the lungs and the bloodstream. I can’t use Pentothal or Nembutal to anesthetize a decerebrate because they hang around in the brain for hours. Ether is gone — poof!”

  “Couldn’t you use an anesthetic gas?”

  Sonia Liebman blinked, as if amazed at his density. “Sure I could, but why? Humans can co-operate, and they don’t have fangs or claws. With animals, it’s a shot of parenteral Nembutal or the ether chamber.”