On, Off

by Colleen McCullough

  On a chair near the bed lay today’s “smalls” washing she had not gotten around to — panties, bra, stockings, a single pair of knitted woollen gloves. Desdemona was out of the bed without a sound, across to the chair, her fingers scrabbling for the gloves. Once found, she slid one on to each hand and forced herself to edge out of any reflected light to where the balcony sliding door sat locked and barred with a steel rod that lay in its opening track. She bent, removed the rod, undid the latch, and slid the door open just enough to get through it onto the balcony, a shelf of concrete surmounted by a four-foot-high iron affair of pickets and a rail.

  Carmine was two floors up on the northeastern side of the Nutmeg Insurance building, almost exactly opposite where she was. That meant that to reach him she had to get herself two floors up with a dozen apartments between them on his or her level. Did she go up two floors first, or along her own floor’s balconies until she stood directly below his? No, up first, Desdemona! Get off this level as soon as possible. Only how?

  Each floor occupied ten feet of vertical space: nine-foot ceilings inside, plus a foot of concrete representing the floor of the next storey up, with its inclusions of water and drainage pipes, electricity conduits. Too far to reach up, too far…

  The wind was whistling, but once she closed her sliding door that wouldn’t penetrate the double-glazed interior. Bitterly cold, cutting through her pajamas as if they were made of tissue. Only one thing for it. She scissored her long legs and vaulted up on to the balcony rail, paused there teetering ten floors above the street as the wind tore at her, groping past the foot-thick shelf to find the bottom of the balustrade one storey up. There! Only her height and a teenaged propensity for gymnastics made it possible, but she had that height, that propensity. Both hands gripping the bottom of the balustrade upstairs, she took her feet off the rail, twisted in midair until her body was perpendicular, then swung her legs inward to cradle the rail behind her bent knees. A huge lunge, and she stood on the balcony above her own.

  One down, one to go. Teeth chattering, her body felt like ice beneath the heat her gymnastics generated; without pausing to rest she mounted that rail and reached for the bottom of the balustrade on Carmine’s level. Do it, Desdemona, do it before you can’t! Up again, safe again on the balcony two floors above her own.

  Now all she had to do was travel on the same level from one balcony to the next — easier said than done, as a ten-foot gap lay between the end of one and the beginning of the next. She chose to bridge the gap by balancing her feet on the rail and springing with all her might at the next balustrade. How many such? Twelve. And her feet were turning numb, her hands inside the woolly gloves minus all sensation. But it could be done — had to be done, given what was waiting for her downstairs if she tarried. How could she be sure he wasn’t at least as agile as she?

  Finally it was done; she stood on Carmine’s balcony, began pounding on the sliding door to his bedroom, at this end.

  “Carmine, Carmine, let me in!” she screamed.

  The door was yanked open; he stood wearing only boxer shorts, took in her presence in a millisecond, pulled her inside.

  The next moment he had stripped the quilted down cover off his bed and was draping it around her.

  “He’s in my apartment,” she managed to say.

  “Stay here and concentrate on getting warm,” he said, cranked the thermostat up and vanished even as he pulled on his trousers.

  “Look at this,” he said to Abe and Corey twenty minutes later at Desdemona’s door, gaping open.

  The hard steel dead bolt had been cut through; a small pile of iron filings lay on the floor where it had sat in closed position.

  “Jesus!” Abe breathed.

  “We have a whole new trade to learn,” Carmine said grimly. “If this proves anything, it proves that our ideas of security suck. To keep him out, we’d have had to overlap the metal on the outside of the door, but we didn’t. Oh, he’s gone — gone the minute he found Desdemona gone, I reckon. Flitted out like a ghost.”

  “How the hell did she get past him?” Corey asked.

  “Went onto her balcony, vaulted two floors up, then came along the intervening apartment balconies between here and where I am. I heard her banging on my balcony door.”

  “Then she’s a mess in this weather — metal rails, the wind.”

  “Not her!” Carmine said, a hint of pride in his voice. “She put on gloves and she was wearing bedsocks.”

  “One hell of a woman,” said Abe reverently.

  “I have to get back to her. Set the wheels in motion, guys. Search the place from penthouse to basements. But he’s gone.”

  Finding Desdemona still under his quilt, he unwrapped her. “Feeling better?”

  “As if I’ve wrenched my arms out of their sockets, but — oh, Carmine, I got away! He was there, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just my imagination?”

  “He was there, all right, though long gone. Cut through the dead bolt with something like a diamond-tipped fretsaw — thin, fine, cut through anything if used by an expert. Therefore we now know he’s an expert. Didn’t try to do it too fast and break his saw. The bastard! He spat on our security.” Carmine knelt to pull off her soaked bedsocks, examine the skin of her feet. “You survived at this end. Now let’s have a look at your hands.” They too had survived. “You’re some woman, Desdemona.”

  Thoroughly warmed, she began to glow. “That’s a compliment I’ll treasure, Carmine.” Then she shivered. “Oh, but I was so terrified! All I saw was his shadow as he opened the front door, but I knew he’d come to kill me. Only why? Why me?”

  “Maybe to get at me. To get at the cops. To prove that if and when he decides to act, nothing will stop him. Trouble is that we’re used to ordinary criminals, men who wouldn’t have the brains or the patience to try a stunt like sawing through a two-inch dead bolt. Diamond teeth or not, it must have taken him several hours.”

  Suddenly he reached for her, pulled her hard against him in an almost frantic hold. “Desdemona, Desdemona, I nearly lost you! You had to save yourself while I snored! Oh, Jesus, woman, I’d have died had I lost you!”

  “You are not going to lose me, Carmine,” she said on a sigh, nuzzling her head into his shoulder, her lips busy on his neck. “I was terrified, yes, but I never thought for one moment of going anywhere else than to you. With you, I knew I’d be safe.”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you back again. But I’d feel ever safer if you took me to bed,” said Desdemona, emerging from his neck. “There are some bits of me that haven’t thawed in years.”

  Part Four

  February & March

  1966

  Chapter 22

  Monday, February 14th, 1966

  Mid-February saw the commencement of a thaw. It began to rain remorselessly on a Friday and didn’t stop until well into Sunday night. All the low-lying parts of Connecticut were under freezing water trying vainly to get away. The Finch house was cut off from Route 133 in exactly the manner Maurice Finch had described to Carmine; Ruth Kyneton’s streamlet had risen so high that she had to pin out her washing in gumboots; and Dr. Charles Ponsonby came into the Hug complaining bitterly about a flooded wine cellar.

  Thwarted by the intensity of the deluge and tormented by stiffening leg muscles, on Monday at dawn Addison Forbes decided to take a short run around the East Holloman area, then down to the water’s edge at his jetty. There he had built a boat shed to house his little fifteen-footer, though few were the times that his frame of mind prompted him to launch it for a leisurely sail on Holloman Harbor. For the last three years leisure was a sin to Addison Forbes, if not a crime.

  A squad car was parked suspiciously near Forbes’s rather precipitous driveway, its occupants giving him an admiring wave as he leaped past, intent on concluding his run. Sweat rolled off him as he plunged down the bushy slope from the road; three days of downpour had melted the frozen snow, hence the flooding all over the state, and the ground under
Forbes’s running shoes was saturated, slippery. Years ago he had planted a row of forsythia at the bottom of the incline — how wonderful it always was when that harbinger of spring burst into yellow blossom!

  But in February the forsythia hedge was rigid brown sticks, so when Forbes noticed a jarring patch of lilac on the ground beneath it, he stopped. A split second later he saw the arms and legs emerging from the lilac patch, and his treacherous heart suddenly surged in his ears like a tidal race. He clutched at his chest, opened his parched mouth to yell, could not. Oh, dear Lord, the shock! He was going to have another coronary, this had to trigger another coronary! Hanging on to the back of an old park bench Robin had put there for “dreaming on,” he inched around it until he could sit and wait for the pain to clamp down, old and ineradicable instinct causing him to flex his left hand constantly as he waited for the pain to shoot down the arm and into it. Eyes dilated, mouth agape, Addison Forbes sat and waited. I am going to die, I am going to die…

  Ten minutes later the pain hadn’t arrived, and he could no longer hear his heart. Its pulse had slowed precisely as it did after all his runs, and he felt no different than he did after all his runs. A huge jerk shot him to his feet, and that didn’t cause pain either; he turned his gaze to the lilac patch with its arms and legs, then took the slope up to the house in long, rhythmic steps, joy welling inside him.

  “Her body is down by the water,” he said, coming into the kitchen. “Call the police, Robin.”

  She squeaked and fluttered, but made the call, then came to him, her hand seeking his pulse.

  “I’m fine,” he said irritably. “Don’t fuss, woman, I’m fine! I have just undergone a colossal shock, but my heart didn’t falter.” A dreamy smile played around his lips. “I’m hungry, I want a good breakfast. Fried eggs and bacon, raisin toast with plenty of butter, and cream in my coffee. Go on, Robin, move!”

  “They conned us,” Carmine said, standing at the water’s edge with Abe and Corey. “How could we have been so dumb? Watching all the roads, not even thinking of the harbor. They dumped her here from a boat.”

  “The whole east shore was frozen until Saturday night,” Abe said. “This had to be last minute, it can’t be where they planned to dump her.”

  “Bullshit it isn’t,” Carmine said positively. “The thaw made it easier, that’s all. If the water had stayed frozen, they would have walked across the ice all the way from a street we’re not patrolling. As it is, they could use a rowboat, bring it in close enough to throw her out. They never set foot on the shore.”

  “She’s frozen solid,” Patrick said, coming to join them. “A lilac party dress sewn with pearls, not rhinestones. Some lacy fabric I’ve never seen before — not proper lace. The dress fits better than Margaretta’s, at least for length. I haven’t turned her over yet to see if the back is buttoned up. No ligature marks, and no double cut in the neck. Apart from a few wet leaves, she’s very clean.”

  “Since they never set foot on shore, there won’t be anything here. I’ll leave you to it, Patsy. Come on, guys,” he said to Abe and Corey, “we have to ask every householder with water frontage if they saw or heard a thing last night. But Corey, you’re going to cast our net wider. Take the police launch and go around the tankers and freighters moored anywhere in the harbor. Maybe someone came up on deck to suck in fresh air after days of being stuck belowdeck, and saw a rowboat. That’s the kind of thing a seaman would notice.”

  “It’s a repeat of Margaretta,” said Patrick to Silvestri, Marciano, Carmine and Abe; Corey was out on the water in the big police launch. “Faith’s shoulders were narrower and her breasts were small, so they managed to button up the dress. There wasn’t a mark on it, which means she must have been wrapped in a waterproof nylon sheet for the trip in the boat. Something finer and smoother than ordinary tarpaulin. Boats always have a couple of inches of water slopping around in their bottoms, but the dress was bone dry, unstained.”

  “How did she die?” Marciano asked.

  “Raped to death, like Margaretta. What I don’t know is if their new ultimate tool is deliberately designed to kill, or whether they would prefer it did its job more slowly — over, say, several assaults with it. As soon as Faith died they put her in a freezer, but not a household job. More like a supermarket one. It’s long enough to fit Margaretta flat out, and wide enough that both girls were positioned in it with their arms extended away from their bodies and their legs somewhat apart. They dressed both girls after they were hard as rocks. Faith’s panties were modest, but lilac instead of pink. Bare feet, bare hands. Faith has two misshapen toes from an old break, left foot. That will make her easy to identify if her family ever comes out of its furor.”

  “Do you think the same person made both dresses?” Silvestri asked. “I mean, they’re different yet the same.”

  “I’m no expert on party dresses. I think Carmine’s lady should look at them and tell us,” Patrick said with a wink.

  Carmine flushed. So it’s that obvious, is it? So what if it is, anyway? It’s a free country, and I’ll just have to hope that we never need Desdemona’s testimony to nail these sons of bitches. A police lawyer would tell me that Desdemona is the most serious mistake I’ve made on this case, but I’m prepared to go with my gut instinct that she’s irrelevant, despite the attempt on her life. Love wouldn’t cause me to lose my cop instincts. God, but I love her! When she appeared on my balcony I knew in a second that she meant more to me than I do. She’s the light of my entire existence.

  “Have you had any joy tracing the pink dress, Carmine?” Danny Marciano asked.

  “No, none. I’ve had someone check in every store that sells kids’ dresses from one end of the state to the other, but hundred-dollar-plus party dresses seem too rich for Connecticut tastes. And that’s weird, considering that Connecticut has some of the wealthiest areas in the whole nation.”

  “Wealthy mothers of little girls spend their lives driving their Caddies from one shopping center to another,” Silvestri said. “They go to Filene’s in Boston, for Chrissake! And Manhattan.”

  “Point taken,” said Carmine with a grin. “We’re examining Yellow Pages from Maine to Washington, D.C. Who’s for a stack of hotcakes with bacon and syrup next door?”

  At least he’s eating again, thought Patrick, nodding his consent to this plan. God knows what he sees in that Limey woman, but his ex-wife she ain’t. He’s not hooked on a looker for the second time, though the more I see of her, the less I think of her as downright unattractive. One thing for sure, she has a brain and she knows how to use it. That’s bound to entrance a man like Carmine.

  “Oh, Addison went to the Hug,” said Robin Forbes to Carmine chirpily when he arrived back at the house.

  “You sound happy,” he said.

  “Lieutenant, for three years I’ve lived in hell,” she said, moving around with a spring in her walk. “After he had that massive heart attack, Addison became convinced that he was living on borrowed time. So afraid! The jogging, nothing but raw fruit and vegetables — I’d drive all the way to Rhode Island to find a piece of fish he wouldn’t reject. He was positive that a shock would kill him, so he’d go to any lengths to avoid a shock. Then this morning he finds that poor little girl, and he’s shocked — really shocked. But he doesn’t even feel a twinge, let alone die.” Eyes twinkling, she jigged. “We’ve returned to a normal life.”

  Having no idea that Addison Forbes harbored homicidal fantasies about his wife, Carmine left after another walk around the property thinking that it was indeed an ill wind blew nobody any good. Dr. Addison Forbes would be a much happier man — at least until Roger Parson Junior’s lawyers found a challengeable clause in Uncle William’s will. Was it a part of the Ghosts’ scheme to destroy the Hug as well as beautiful young girls? And if it was, why? Could it be that in destroying the Hug, they were really destroying Professor Robert Mordent Smith? If so, then they were well along the road to success. And whereabouts did Desdemona fit? He had spent th
eir breakfast together grilling her in true, remorseless police fashion: had she seen something she’d buried below all conscious memory, had she been walking some street when a girl had been abducted, had someone at the Hug said something inappropriate to her, had anything unusual entered the tenor of her days? To all of which, bearing his questions patiently, even taking the time to puzzle over them, she returned firm negatives.

  After a fruitless cruise through the Hug, Carmine climbed back into the Ford and aimed for the Merritt Parkway, which traveled to New York on the Trumbull side of Bridgeport. Though he did not expect to be permitted to see the Prof, he could find no reason why he ought not inspect as much of Marsh Manor as possible, ascertain for himself what the Bridgeport police had reported: that it would be easy for an inmate to break out of the place.

  Yes, he decided, turning in through the imposing pineapple-topped gates, agoraphobia would keep more patients inside Marsh Manor than security patrols. There were no security patrols.

  Right. Where to next? The Chandras. Their estate was off the Wilbur Cross where Route 133’s seemingly aimless course brought it into an area of farms and barns in pleasant fields and apple orchards. Too late to have another talk with Nur Chandra at the Hug — he had finished there last Friday, as had Cecil.

  The house wasn’t on the scale of the Marsh Manor funny farm, but the estate reminded Carmine of a Cape Cod compound, half a dozen residences scattered around it; though this, in ten acres, was much larger. If it impressed Carmine at all, it was in letting him see how much organization went into making living luxurious for two people and a few kids with money to burn. No doubt the Chandras employed a manager, a deputy manager and a specialist manager as well as the army of turbaned lackeys. The whole thing structured so that the Chandras themselves never gave a moment’s thought to so much effort. A metaphorical snap of the fingers, and whatever was wanted appeared immediately.