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The house was a three-family one that José Alvarez owned; he lived in the bottom-floor apartment with his wife and children, and rented out the middle and top-floor apartments. This was how all working people aspired to live: virtually rent free themselves, the middle apartment paying the mortgage and utilities, and the top one bringing in that little extra against repairs as well as to save for rainy days. Living on the bottom floor, they had the backyard, half of the four-car garage, and the basement for their own use. And a landlord who lived on the premises was able to keep a stern eye on the tenants.

Like all its neighbors, the house was painted a darkish grey, had double windows whose outer sets were replaced in summer by insect screens, a front porch right on the sidewalk, but a big backyard surrounded by a high chain-link fence; the garage sat across its back beyond a driveway down one side of the house. As Carmine stood on the oak-lined street looking, he could hear the baying of a large dog; scant chance of anyone’s breaking in via the back porch with a hound on patrol.

The priest opened the front door, which was separate from the door leading to the two upstairs apartments. Carmine gave the cleric a smile and shrugged himself out of his overcoat.

“I’m sorry to have to do this, Father,” he said. “My name is Carmine Delmonico. Should I be Lieutenant or Carmine in there?”

After some consideration the priest said, “Lieutenant would be better, I think. I’m Bart Tesoriero.”

“Do you need to speak Spanish in your parish?”

Father Tesoriero opened the inner door. “No, though I do have a fair number of Hispanic parishioners. It’s an old part of town, they’ve all been here a long time. No Hell’s Kitchen, that’s for sure.”

The living room, quite a large one in this bottom apartment, was full of people and silence. Himself of Latin origins, Carmine knew that relatives would have come from everywhere to be with the Alvarezes in their time of need. This meant that he knew how to deal with them, but he didn’t have to. The priest ushered all save the immediate family into the kitchen, with a woman who looked like the grandmother leading a toddling boy.

That left José Alvarez, his wife, Concita, their eldest son, Luís, and three daughters — Maria, Dolores and Teresa — in the room. Father Tesoriero put Carmine in the best chair, and himself sat between husband and wife.

It was a home of lace doilies, lace curtains under drapes of synthetic velvet, respectably well-worn furniture and floors tiled in terra-cotta beneath busy rugs. The walls bore pictures of the Last Supper, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mary holding the Christ Child, and many framed photographs of the family. Vases of flowers were everywhere, each bearing a card; the perfume of freesias and jonquils was so heavy Carmine felt choked. Where did florists get them at this time of year? On the center of the mantelpiece was a silver-framed photograph of Mercedes, in front of it a burning candle in a red glass bowl.

The first thing Carmine did when he entered a house of grief was to imagine how the bereaved must have looked before tragedy struck. Nigh impossible here, but nothing could alter bone structure. Strikingly handsome, all of them, and all with that café au lait skin color. A little Negro, a little Caribbean Indian, a great deal of Spanish. The parents were probably in their late thirties, but looked a decade and more older than that, sitting like two rag dolls in their own ghastly world. Neither of them seemed to see him.

“Luís, is it?” he asked the boy, whose eyes were swollen and reddened from tears.

“Yes.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen.”

“And your sisters? How old are they?”

“Maria is twelve, Dolores is ten, and Teresa is eight.”

“Your baby brother?”

“Francisco is three.”

By now the boy was weeping again, the dreary, hopeless tears that can only fall after too many have gone before them. His sisters lifted their faces from soaked handkerchiefs for a moment, their little bony knees clenched together under the margins of matching plaid pleated skirts like pairs of ivory skulls. Shaken by great hiccoughs, they sat and writhed from the pain of it, the terrible shock that was now wearing itself down to exhaustion after the days of worry and then the news that Mercedes was dead, cut into pieces. Of course no one had intended that they should find that out, but they had.

“Luís, could you take your sisters into the kitchen, then come back for a minute?”

The father, he saw, had finally focused on his face, viewing it with confused wonder.

“Mr. Alvarez, would you rather we postponed this for a few more days?” Carmine asked softly.

“No,” the father whispered, dry-eyed. “We will manage.”

Yes, but can I?

Luís returned, tears gone.

“Just the same old questions, Luís. I know you’ve already been asked them a million times, but memories can bury themselves and then suddenly come back for no reason, which is why I’m asking them again. I understand that you and Mercedes went to different schools, but I’ve been told that you were great pals. Girls as pretty as Mercedes get noticed, that’s natural. Did she ever complain about being noticed? Followed? Watched from a car or by someone on the other side of the street?”

“No, Lieutenant, honestly. Boys would wolf-whistle her, but she ignored them.”

“What about when she worked as a candy striper last summer?”

“She never said anything to me that wasn’t about the patients and how nice the sisters were to her. They only let her into the maternity hospital. She loved it.”

He was beginning to weep again: time to stop. Carmine smiled and nodded toward the kitchen.

“I apologize,” he said to Mr. Alvarez when the boy was gone.

“We realize that you must ask and ask, Lieutenant.”

“Was Mercedes a confiding child, sir? Did she discuss things with her mother or with you?”

“She confided in both of us all the time. Her life pleased her, she loved to talk about it.” A great spasm went through him, he had to cling to the arms of his chair to suppress it. The eyes that stared into Carmine’s own were transfixed with pain, while the mother’s seemed to stare into the depths of Hell. “Lieutenant, we have been told what was done to her, but it is almost impossible to believe. We have been told that Mercedes is your case, that you know more about what happened to her than the Norwalk police do.” His voice went thin with urgency. “Please, I
beg
you, tell me! Did she — did my little girl suffer?”

Carmine swallowed, impaled on those eyes. “Only God really knows the answer, but I don’t think God could be so cruel. A murder of this kind needn’t be done to watch the victim suffer. The man may well have given Mercedes drugs to make her sleep through it. Of one thing you can be sure: it was not God’s purpose to make her suffer. If you believe in God, then believe that she didn’t suffer.”

And God forgive me for that lie, but how could I tell this devastated father the truth? He sits there, dead in mind, dead in spirit, sixteen years of love, care, worry, joy and minor sorrows gone up like a puff of smoke from a incinerator. Why should I share my opinion of God with him and make his loss worse? He has to pick up the pieces and continue; there are five other children who need him, and a wife whose heart isn’t merely broken — it’s mashed to pulp.

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Alvarez suddenly.

“Thank you for bearing with me,” Carmine said.

“You comforted them immeasurably,” said Father Tesoriero on the way to the door. “But Mercedes did suffer, didn’t she?”

“My guess is, beyond description. It’s hard to be in my line of work and believe in God, Father.”

Two journalists had appeared on the street, one with a microphone, the other with a notepad. When Carmine emerged they ran toward him, only to be roughly shoved away.

“Fuck off, you vultures!” he snarled, climbed into the Ford and drove away in a hurry.

Several blocks later, sure no reporters were on his tail, he pulled to the side of the road and let his feelings overwhelm him. Did she suffer? Yes, yes, yes, she suffered! She suffered hideously, and he made sure she stayed awake for all of it. Her last glimpse of life must have been her own blood flowing down a drain hole, but her family must never know that. I’ve gone way beyond disbelief in God. I believe that the world belongs to the Devil. I believe that the Devil is infinitely more powerful than God. And the soldiers of goodness, if not of God, are losing the war.

“You’re lucky, you know” was Carmine’s reply. “If the Holloman Hospital architects hadn’t decided to put the parking lot in front of the building, you’d have no view at all. As it is, you can see all the way to Long Island. Isn’t it a beautiful day? The fall is just about at its best, and while I mourn the passing of the elms, you can’t beat maples for color. Their leaves have invented new shades at the warm end of the spectrum.”

“I didn’t realize you had either the words or the science to express yourself!” she snapped, eyes like ice. “You are sitting in the Governor-in-Chief’s chair and partaking of refreshments to which you are not entitled! Kindly pick up your traps and go!”

At which moment the Prof walked in, propped at the sight of Lieutenant Delmonico, and sighed deeply. “Oh, dear, I hadn’t thought of you,” he said to Carmine.

“Whether you like it or not, Professor, I have to be here.”

President Mawson MacIntosh of Chubb University arrived before the Prof could answer, beamed at Carmine and shook him warmly by the hand. “Carmine! I might have known that Silvestri would put you on this,” said M.M., as he was universally known. “I am tremendously cheered. Here, sit next to me. And don’t,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper, “waste your tastebuds on the doughnuts. Try the apple Danish.”

Miss Desdemona Dupre made a small sound of suppressed fury and marched out of the room, colliding with Dean Dowling and his own neurology professor, Frank Watson. He who authored “the Hug” and its staff of “Huggers.”

M.M., whom Carmine knew well from several awkwardly delicate internal Chubb cases, looked far more imposing than that other President, he of the United States of America. M.M. was tall, perfectly dressed, trim in the waist, his handsome face crowned by a head of luxuriant hair whose original auburn had transformed to a wonderful apricot. An American aristocrat to his fingertips. Despite his height, L.B.J. paled to insignificance whenever the two men stood side by side, which they did occasionally. But persons ofM.M.’s august lineage would far rather preside over a great university than over an undisciplined bunch of rowdies like Congress.

On the other hand, Dean Wilbur Dowling looked the psychiatrist he was: untidily dressed in a combination of tweed, flannel and a pink bow tie with red polka dots, he wore a bushy brown beard to counterbalance his egg-bald head, and stared at the world through horn-rimmed bifocals.

And on the few times that he had seen Frank Watson, Carmine was always reminded of Boris out of
The Adventures of Rocky and Bull-winkle.
Watson dressed in black and had a long, thin face whose upper lip bore a lounge-lizard’s black mustache; sleek black hair and a permanent sneer completed the Boris similarity. Yes, Frank Watson was definitely the kind of person who drank regularly from a cup of vitriol. But surely he wasn’t on the Hug’s Board of Governors?

No, he wasn’t. Watson ended his conversation with the Dean and slithered away with a metaphorical flourish of a black cape he wasn’t wearing. Interesting guy, thought Carmine. I will have to see him.

The five Parson Governors trooped in as a group, and knew better than to query Carmine’s presence when M.M. made a subtly effusive introduction.

“If anyone can get to the bottom of this unspeakable affair, Carmine Delmonico can,” M.M. ended.

“Then I suggest,” said Roger Parson Junior, taking the chair at the end of the table, “that we put ourselves at Lieutenant Delmonico’s disposal. After, that is, he has told us precisely what has happened and what he intends to do in the future.”

The Parson contingent looked so alike that anyone would have picked them as closely related; even the thirty years’ difference in age between the three elderly and two youthful members of the clan made little difference. They were a trifle over medium height, thinly stooped, with long necks, beaky noses, prominent cheekbones, downturned mouths and scant heads of lank, indeterminately brown hair. Their eyes, to a man, were grey-blue. Now, M.M. looked like a regal tycoon, whereas the Parsons looked like academic paupers.

Carmine had spent some of his weekend in researching them and the Parson group of companies. William Parson, the founder (and uncle of the present Governor-in-Chief) had started with machine parts and parlayed his holdings until they stretched from motors to turbines, and surgical instruments through typewriters to artillery. The Parson Bank had come into being at exactly the right time to go from strength to strength. William Parson had left it rather late to marry. His wife produced one child, William Junior, who turned out to be mentally retarded and epileptic. The son died in 1945, aged seventeen, and the mother followed in 1946, leaving William Parson alone. His sister, Eugenia, had married and also produced only one child, Richard Spaight, now head of the Parson Bank and a Hug Governor.

William Parson’s brother, Roger, was a drunkard from an early age and absconded in 1943 to California with a sizeable slice of the company profits, abandoning his wife and two sons. The affair was hushed up, the loss absorbed, and both Roger’s boys had proven loyal, devoted and extremely capable heirs for William; their sons came out of the same mold, with the result that in this year of 1965 Parson Products stock had been blue chip for decades. Depressions? Chicken feed! People still drove cars that needed motors, Parson Turbines made diesel turbines and generators long before jet planes flew, girls went on pounding typewriters, surgical operations kept increasing, and countries were always blazing away at each other with Parson guns, howitzers and mortars, big, medium and small.

In an interesting aside, Carmine had discovered that the family black sheep, Roger, having sobered up in California, had founded the Roger’s Ribs chain, married a movie starlet, done very nicely for himself, and died on top of a whore in a seedy motel.

The Hug had come out of William Parson’s desire to do something in memory of his dead son, but its birth pangs had not been easy. Naturally Chubb University expected to head it and manage it, but such was not Parson’s intention. He wanted affiliation with Chubb, but refused to yield up its governance to Chubb. In the end Chubb had crumbled after being presented with an ultimatum of horrific proportions. His research center, said William Parson, would, if necessary, be attached to some sordid, non-Ivied, tin-pot institution of learning out of the state. When a Chubber like William Parson said
that,
Chubb knew itself beaten. Not that Chubb hadn’t come in for a slice of the pie; 25 percent of the annual budget was paid to the university for affiliation rights.

Carmine also knew that the Board of Governors met every three months. The four Parsons and Cousin Spaight came up from their New York City apartments by limousine and stayed in suites at the Cleveland Hotel opposite the Schumann Theater for the night after the meeting. This was necessary because M.M. always gave them a dinner, hoping that he would be able to coax the Parsons into endowing a building that would one day house the William Parson art collection. This most important collection in American hands had been bequeathed to Chubb in William Parson’s will, but its delivery date was left to the discretion of his heirs, who thus far had preferred to hang on to even the tiniest Leonardo cartoon.