Naked Cruelty (45 page)

He held her tightly. “You won't leave me?”

Her head reared up in shock. “Carmine! Whatever made you think that? My goodness, I must have been depressed!” She slid into bed. “Now that Alex is weaned, I'm a box of birds, truly.”

There was no more talk. Words were simply sounds. Passion, tenderness and a delicious familiarity of touch and sensation sometimes meant more than any words.

December wore down toward Christmas in racial discontent and several attempted riots provoked by Black People's Power; that they came to nothing was due to the city's small size and careful management. But the BPP continued to create persistent disturbances that no one wanted publicized by arrest and arraignment. The Holloman PD was very busy.

And, as is perpetually the way with people, individual griefs, problems, troubles and dilemmas outweighed the larger picture; a family's budget was more important than the national one, its members more treasured than anonymous millions.

For Carmine the year tottered to an end in an inevitable mixture of the personal and the cop. Desdemona was commander of her domestic ship again; there were no more attacks of despair, no more delusions of inadequacy, but, having had her fingers burned, Carmine's wife lost the last of her beloved independence. She was inextricably bound to her family, she would never be free again. Wishful thinking to yearn for it, yet sometimes, in the very remotest watches of the night, its ghostly summons sounded, a tattoo from a distant, youthful battlefield. For Carmine himself this life of watching his sons grow and his wife change was near idyllic, for he sensed that their need of him was greater.

His people settled down in their new configurations, though some of the senior uniforms noticed that the men of Detectives avoided Corey Marshall as if he were a leper. Memories were long; he would always wear the odium of Morty Jones's suicide and the unhappy fate of Morty's children. He was, however, a good chief lieutenant for an autocratic martinet like Fernando Vasquez; as he had a staff of his own, paperwork was a breeze.

The problem Helen MacIntosh posed was solved thanks to her ability to suck up huge amounts of professional information; when Carmine told the Commissioner that he thought her ready to move on at the end of January, Silvestri blandly agreed, readying himself to do battle with Hartford over a replacement. As he would have M.M. on side, he anticipated victory.

Judge Thwaites had her measure.

“She's feral,” he said over Christmas drinks in his chambers.

“Interesting word,” Carmine said.

“As wild as she is cunning, and capable of evading every trap set for her.” His beady old eyes glittered; he sipped his Kentucky bourbon. “A fantastic instinct for the kill.”

“You make her sound a criminal, Doug,” said Silvestri.

“She would be, given a different upbringing. As it is, I predict she'll be governor of the state before she's forty-five.”

“Or governor of someone else's state,” said Carmine. “She's going to one of the New York Manhattan precincts.”

“Vindicated,” His Honor said with a chuckle. “All of this was only to return from whence she came—as who she wants to be.”

People were looking at her differently since she had shot and killed Kurt von Fahlendorf; Helen was never as conscious of it as when she was with the male detectives. Not overtly from Abe Goldberg, so immensely professional that he could subdue every emotion. And not at all from Carmine Delmonico, who understood her predicament, Helen sensed, because his wife had twice been threatened by a killer with a gun. Some superstitious atavism, buried deep, told Carmine that Helen's peril had deflected evil intent away from Desdemona.

The rest of the men were a lost cause. Nick, Buzz, Liam, Tony and Donny eyed her warily, avoided one-on-one situations if they possibly could, and dried up conversationally whenever she hove in view. Privately she despised them as specimens off the Ark; they believed women belonged to the kitchen and their children. Well, let them be male chauvinist pigs! She was protected by Captain Delmonico, and she stood on better terms with him than they did.

Delia was Delia, a good friend, a staunch supporter, the loyalest of fellow women. Never having fired her .38 or her Saturday night special save at the range, she couldn't fit herself into Helen's shoes, was the trouble. Since her secondment to Abe Goldberg, Helen didn't see enough of Delia, a pity.

Most astonishing change of all to Helen was that in her parents. Her mother waffled about “bad karma” and was having sessions with her swami or guru or whatever he was called—just like the Beatles, really. Though Angela was very happy at the resolution of a quincunx in Helen's natal horoscope—it had bothered her ever since, she told Helen, now she knew that it was Helen's ability to shoot people dead. Her father, one of the nation's great liberals, found himself on the receiving end of remorseless sarcasm at producing a killer-cop child, and hadn't thanked her for the adverse publicity.

In fact, Kurt's death had changed everything, Helen thought as she stared down at Busquash Inlet from behind her glass wall. The Warburton twins, briefly owners of this apartment, were moving back to the West Coast, having struck a fabulous deal with the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum to write, direct, and star in a blood soaked film about murder and twin detectives.

It hadn't taken any steel on her part to continue living here. The white carpet had been replaced by a rust-red one—Delia was right, no snowy bedroom vistas for Helen MacIntosh! The trouble was that now the rust-red carpet was down, she found she didn't like it. Purple would look better. This debate over decor, she was astonished to discover, was seen by people like the male detectives as callousness! She was supposed to be cringing in fear!
Why
?
Hadn't she achieved a great victory? She, a weak woman, had put paid to the existence of a man who had raped, tortured and eventually murdered fellow women! They should give her a medal, not subject her to an enquiry. Of course that had exonerated her; she had acted in self-defense.

Some of the consequences were exasperating, like the one that compelled her to see Dr. Liz Meyers and attend the rape clinic sessions devoted to Dodo victims. How she hated those sessions! After she spent two of them insisting loudly that the Dodo had not raped her, Dr. Meyers dismissed her as unsuitable for group therapy of this nature; after another one-on-one session, Dr. Meyers referred Helen to Dr. Matthew Worthing, who specialized in difficult cases. But Helen never saw him.

What a profound experience it had been! The thrill of the kill … When she closed her eyes she could see, as if in slow motion, the crimson flower bloom in Kurt's bare chest, followed by another in the right upper belly, and a final one over the heart. Not huge blooms, but tight little buds that had slowly unfurled. The sight of him on that white carpet! The look in his eyes! That was best of all. Amazement and terror, absolute incredulity. And then he died. Poof! Lights out.

How often dare I kill? Not here—never again in Holloman! Not even in Connecticut. I'll be able to kill at least once in Manhattan, maybe twice or three times before I have to move on. Three million square miles of police departments, so many that I can wander from place to place at my whim. I'll get better at it. To dispose of a body would be a tremendous help …

The look in his eyes! Watching the life vanish from his eyes, I came to climax. Now, even thinking of it, I climax again.