On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  Patrick looked defeated when he found Carmine outside on the cold porch. “The snow’s frozen so solid that they were able to lay a strip of straw matting from the road to the back porch — looks like cheap stair runner,” he said. “They scraped and salted the road where they parked, so no tire tracks that haven’t been obscured by the local cops. They opened the back door with a key or a set of picks, and I’d say they knew exactly which bedroom was Faith’s. She had her own room — all the kids do — on the second floor, which is the sleeping floor for everyone. They must have found her asleep. The only signs of a struggle are a few disturbances in the sheets at the bottom of her bed, maybe a few feeble kicks. Then they carried her out the way they came in, up the straw runner to the road and their vehicle. From what we can gather, no one heard a thing. She was missed when she didn’t appear for breakfast, which the mother puts on early at this time of year — it’s an hour’s drive into Norwich on badly ploughed roads. The kids go in with their father and stay at his shop until it’s time to go to school, just a short walk away.”

  “You’re doing my job, Patsy. Do we have any idea of her height? Her weight?”

  “Not until Father Hannigan and his nuns arrive. The grief in there is demented, and nobody will let me give anybody a shot. The hair’s coming out in handfuls.”

  “And the blood’s flying where Mrs. Khouri keeps scratching herself. That’s why I’m out here, not in there,” Carmine said, sighing. “Not that flying blood and hair matter. The Ghosts won’t have left a shred of either behind.”

  “The family’s given Faith up for dead already.”

  “Do you honestly blame them, Patsy? We’re about as useful as tits on a bull, and it’s getting to Abe and Corey. They’re hurting bad, just can’t show it.”

  Patrick squinted and heaved a gasp of relief. “Here come our priest and cohorts. Maybe they know how to calm everyone down.”

  If they couldn’t do that, at least Father Hannigan and the three nuns with him were able to give Carmine the information he needed. Faith was five-two, and weighed about eighty-five pounds. Slender, not yet very developed. A dear girl, devout, maintained an A-plus average in all her subjects, which leaned to the sciences; her ambition had been to do medicine. She was due to join the ranks of the candy stripers at St. Stan’s Hospital this summer, but until now her mother and father had kept her at home, didn’t want her into good works too young. Anthony, the brother who wasn’t there, was doing pre-med at Brown; it seemed all the children were interested in the human sciences. The family itself was tightly knit and highly respected. Their shop was in a good part of Norwich and had never been held up, their house had never been burgled, nor had any among them been harassed or attacked.

  “It keeps going back to the unimpeachable innocence, the face, and the age, with a possible for the religion,” Carmine said to Silvestri when he returned to Holloman. “Of late color hasn’t worried the Ghosts, or size, but we always have those first three, and in most cases the fourth. Margaretta Bewlee’s sixteenth birthday present from her mother was a visit to the beauty parlor to have her hair straightened and styled like Dionne Warwick — she was performing one of Dionne’s numbers in a school concert. That news made me wonder about her, but after I checked it out I realized it wasn’t evidence of — how can I put it? — declining virtue? Though Margaretta is the one who gnaws at me, John. She is the sole black pearl in a collection of creamy ones. Too tall, too black, too inappropriate.”

  “Maybe the Ghosts are jumping on the racial bandwagon. Their activities sure aren’t helping the racial situation.”

  “Then why not another equally dark victim now? The Times crossword had a clue recently — ‘go back to beige.’ Six letters. The answer was ‘rebuff.’ When I tumbled to it I laughed until I cried. Every place I go, I am rebuffed.”

  Silvestri didn’t say what he was thinking: you need a long vacation in Hawaii, Carmine. But not yet. I can’t afford to take you off this case. If you can’t crack it, no one can. “It’s time I held a press conference,” he said. “I got nothing to tell the bastards, but I gotta eat crow in public.” He cleared his throat, munched on the end of a very tattered cigar. “The Governor agrees I should eat crow in public.”

  “Out of favor with Hartford, huh?”

  “No, not yet. How do you think I spend most of my days? On the phone to Hartford, that’s how.”

  “None of the Huggers showed a whisker outside last night. Though that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to watch them thirty days from now, John. I still have a gut feeling that the Hug is very much involved, and not merely as the object of vendetta,” said Carmine. “How much truth are you going to tell the press?”

  “A little this, a little that. Nothing about Margaretta’s party dress. And nothing about two killers.”

  Chapter 21

  Tuesday, February 1st, 1966

  The Holloman City Hall was famous for its acoustics, and the administrative duties of the Mayor having been removed to the County Services building a decade earlier, Holloman City Hall was left to do what it did best: play host to the world’s greatest virtuosi and symphony orchestras.

  Behind the auditorium was a rehearsal room designed for these artists to record in as well as rehearse in; its clutter of music stands and chairs arranged in semi-circular rows did not suggest the murder of anything more horrific than music. John Silvestri positioned himself on the conductor’s podium clad in his best uniform, with the Congressional Medal of Honor around his neck. This plus the campaign ribbons on his chest said that he was no ordinary man.

  About fifty journalists came, most from papers and magazines, one TV crew from the local station in Holloman, and one reporter from WHMN radio. The nation’s major dailies sent stringers; though the Connecticut Monster was big news, a canny editor understood that this police exercise wasn’t going to produce any startling new developments. What would come out of the conference was a chance to write scathing editorials about police incompetence.

  But Silvestri in public mode was a smooth operator, especially when he was eating crow. No one, thought Carmine, listening, ate crow more gracefully, with more apparent relish.

  “Despite the freezing conditions, various police departments throughout this state kept a total of ninety-six possible suspects under surveillance twenty-four hours a day from last Thursday until Faith Khouri’s abduction. Thirty-two of these people were in or around Holloman. None of them could have been implicated, which means we are no closer to knowing the identity of the man you call the Connecticut Monster, but we are now calling the Ghost.”

  “Good name,” said the crime writer from the Holloman Post. “Have you any evidence to implicate anyone? Anyone at all?”

  “I’ve just finished saying that, Mrs. Longford.”

  “This killer — the Ghost, I rather like that — must have a special place to keep his victims. Isn’t it about time that you started looking for it more seriously? Like searching premises?”

  “We can’t search any tenanted premises without a warrant, ma’am, you know that. What’s more, you’d be the first one to pounce if we did.”

  “Under normal circumstances, yes. But this is different.”

  “How, different? In the horrible nature of the crimes? I agree as a person, but as a lawman I can’t. A police force may be a vital arm of the law, but in a free society like ours it is also restrained by the same law it serves. The American people have constitutional rights that we, the police, are obliged to respect. Unsubstantiated suspicion doesn’t empower us to march into someone’s house and search for the evidence we haven’t been able to find elsewhere. The evidence must come first. We have to present an evidential case to the judicial arm of the law in order to be granted permission to search. Talking until we run out of spit won’t persuade any judge to issue a warrant without concrete facts. And we do not have concrete facts, Mrs. Longford.”

  The rest of the journalists were happy to appoint Mrs. Diane Longford as their workhorse;
nothing was going to come out of her inquisition anyway, and they could smell the coffee and fresh doughnuts laid out at the back of the hall.

  “Why don’t you have concrete facts, Mr. Commissioner? I mean, it boggles the imagination to think that a great many experienced men have been investigating these murders since the beginning of last October without coming up with a single concrete fact! Or are you saying that the killer is a real ghost?”

  Barbed irony affected Silvestri no more than did aggression or charm; he ploughed on regardless.

  “Not a real ghost, ma’am. Someone far more dangerous, far more lethal. Think of our killer as a very strong hunting cat in his prime — a leopard, say. He lies comfortably in a tree on the edge of the forest, perfectly camouflaged, watching a whole herd of deer grazing their way closer to the forest and his tree. To a bird in that tree, every deer looks the same. But the leopard sees every deer as different, and his target is one particular deer. To him, she’s juicier, more succulent than the others. Oh, he’s very patient! The deer pass under him — he doesn’t move — the deer don’t see him or smell him on his branch — and then his deer wanders below him. The strike is so fast that the rest of the deer hardly have time to start running before he’s back up his tree with his catch, legs helpless, neck broken.”

  Silvestri drew a breath; he had caught their attention. “I admit it’s not a brilliant metaphor, but I use it to illustrate the magnitude of what we’re up against with the Ghost. From where we are, he’s invisible. Just as it doesn’t occur to deer to look up into a tree, just as the smells the wind carries to deer nostrils originate on their level, not from up a tree, so it is with us. It hasn’t occurred to us to look or smell in the right place for him because we have no idea where his place is, what kind of place he uses. We might pass him on the street every day — you might pass him on the street every day, Mrs. Longford. But his face is ordinary, his walk is ordinary — everything about him is ordinary. On the surface he’s a little alley cat, not a leopard. Underneath, he’s Dorian Gray, Mr. Hyde, the faces of Eve, Satan incarnate.”

  “Then what protection can the community have against him?”

  “I’d say vigilance, except that vigilance didn’t prevent his taking girls of a specific type even after we saturated Connecticut with bulletins and warnings. However, it is clear to me that we have frightened him, forced him to give up his daylight abductions in favor of the night. That’s nothing to boast about because it hasn’t stopped him. It hasn’t so much as slowed him down. Yet it’s a ray of hope. If he’s more scared than he was, and we keep the pressure up, he’ll start to make a few mistakes. And, ladies and gentlemen of the press, you have my word that we will not miss his mistakes. They’ll make us the leopard up the tree, and him our particular deer.”

  “He did well,” Carmine said to Desdemona that night. “The AP stringer asked him if he was planning to run for governor at the next elections. ‘No, sir, Mr. Dalby,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear, ‘compared to government, a policeman’s lot is a happy one, ghosts and all.’”

  “People respond to him. When I saw him on the six o’clock news, he reminded me of a battered old teddy bear.”

  “The Governor likes him, which is more to the point. You don’t dismiss war heroes as incompetent idiots.”

  “He must have been quite an elderly war hero.”

  “He was.”

  “You sound a bit sniffly, Carmine. Are you coming down with a cold?” she asked, taking another slice of pizza. Oh, it was nice to be back on good terms with him!

  “After sitting in unheated cars when the mercury’s zero, we are all coming down with colds.”

  “At least you didn’t have to watch me.”

  “But we did, Desdemona.”

  “Oh, the manpower!” she breathed, the manager in her awestruck as always. “Ninety-six people?”

  “Yep.”

  “Whom did you inherit?”

  “That’s classified, you can’t ask. What’s going on at the Hug since Faith disappeared?”

  “The Prof is still in his loony bin. When he discovers that Nur Chandra has accepted a post at Harvard, he’ll crash all over again. It’s more than losing his brightest star, it’s the fact that Nur’s contract says the monkeys go with him. I gather Nur has extended an invitation to Cecil to move to Massachusetts too — Cecil is wild with joy about it. No more ghetto living. The Chandras have bought a posh estate and Cecil is to have a lovely house on it. I’m happy for him, but very sorry for the Prof.”

  “Sounds weird to me. A contract that lets you take things with you that other people paid for? That’s like a congressman taking the Remington from his office wall when he’s voted out.”

  “At the time Nur came to the Hug, the Prof had every reason in the world to discount that stipulation. He knew that Nur would never find anywhere as perfect for his research as the Hug. And that was true until this beastly monster of a murderer appeared.”

  “Yeah, who could have foreseen that? I’m getting so paranoid that it suggests yet another motive. There’s a Nobel Prize at stake, after all.”

  “Do you know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve always had an odd feeling that Nur Chandra won’t win the Nobel Prize? Somehow it’s all been too easy. The only one of the monkeys that has shown any evidence of a conditioned epileptic state is Eustace, and it’s very dangerous in science to pin all your hopes on a solitary star. What if Eustace was harboring an epileptic tendency all along, and something entirely unrelated to Nur’s stimuli suddenly brought it out? Stranger things have happened.”

  “You’re a lot smarter than the rest of them rolled in one,” Carmine said appreciatively.

  “Smart enough to know I won’t win any Nobel Prizes!”

  They moved to the big chairs. Usually Carmine sat next to Desdemona, but tonight he sat opposite her, on the premise that looking at her sane and sensible face would cheer him a little.

  Yesterday he had gone to Groton to talk to Edward Bewlee, a man as sane and sensible as Desdemona. But the interview had not solved any mysteries.

  “Etta was so set on being a famous rock star,” Mr. Bewlee had said. “Her voice was beautiful, and she moved well.”

  And she moved well. Was that what appealed to the Ghosts?

  Back to the present — to Desdemona’s sane and sensible face.

  “Any other news on the Hug front?” he asked.

  “Chuck Ponsonby is filling in for the Prof. He’s not one of my favorite people, but at least he comes to me with his problems, rather than to Tamara. Apparently she tried to see Keith Kyneton, and he slammed the door of his office in her face. So Hilda is definitely wearing the victory laurels. Her appearance has improved no end — a well-cut black suit, tomato-red silk blouse, Italian shoes, new hair-do and rinse, proper make-up — and, if you believe it, contact lenses instead of spectacles! She looks like a perfect wife for a prominent neurosurgeon.”

  “Ready to strut her New York City stuff,” said Carmine with a smile. “Nice to think that something I said to Kyneton penetrated the fog.” He shifted in his seat. “There’s a rumor going around this building that Satsuma’s not renewing his lease on the penthouse or Eido’s apartment.”

  “That could well be true. He’s dithering between offers from Stanford, Washington State and Georgia. Which probably means he will end at Columbia.”

  “How did you work that one out?”

  “Hideki’s a city man, and New York City means he won’t need to give up his Cape Cod weekender. A longer drive, yes, but still a feasible one. He would have gone to Boston if Nur Chandra hadn’t beaten him to Massachusetts. Any other university than Harvard would have been a terrible comedown. Yet to me, Hideki’s a better bet for the Nobel Prize. The showy researchers may fascinate the scientific press, but they rarely follow through.” She hopped up nimbly. “Time for bed. Thank you for the pizza, Carmine.”

  Bereft of a suitable reply, he took her two floors down to her steel door with its dead bolt a
nd combination, made sure she was properly locked in, and returned to his own domain feeling curiously depressed. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask her if he stood any chance of moving their relationship on to a more intimate plane, only to have the words stilled by that athletic spring to her feet, her brisk, no-nonsense departure.

  The truth was that Carmine’s overtures had not been obvious enough for Desdemona to divine they so much as existed, and if her own emotions were rather hankering for him, then she didn’t dare linger in his presence once they had said all they could say about the Hug and ordinary topics of conversation. What she had dreaded was a long silence, not sure she could deal with it.

  Besides, she was very tired. After heated arguments, she had won the privilege of resuming her weekend hikes — on the proviso that she was driven to her starting point in a squad car whose cop denizens made sure it was not followed, then picked up at some point she designated as her finishing line. So she had hiked up in the northwestern corner of the state Saturday and Sunday, and ached from what had become an unaccustomed exercise. The Appalachian Trail had its winter charms, but at times she had regretted not packing her snow shoes.

  Thus after a long soak in a hot bath she dried off well and donned her customary sleeping attire — a pair of flannel men’s pajamas and thick, woolly bedsocks. Not for Desdemona a thermostat producing warm air! In which, had she only known it, she was very like Carmine Delmonico.

  She was asleep as soon as she lay down, to dream of nothing she could afterward remember, only that some peculiar noise woke her at a moment her alarm clock said was 4 A.M. A scrape with a slight screech to it.

  Sitting bolt upright, she began to think that it wasn’t the noise wakened her; some primeval sense of impending doom had done that. The bedroom door was open, displaying the small apartment’s living area, plunged into darkness. As indeed was the bedroom. No bogeys demanding night lights haunted Desdemona’s sleep. Yet a sliver of light from the hall outside flickered briefly with a shadow in its midst, man-high, man-shaped. Gone in an instant as the outside door was closed. I am not alone. He is here inside, he has come to kill me.