Sins of the Flesh (10 page)

“Walter Jenkins. I’m Dr. Wainfleet’s aide.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

After that they walked in silence. Jenkins settled Delia in a comfortable chair, brought her a mug of coffee far superior to most institutional brews, and would have left her to peruse the journals on the coffee table had she not lifted a friendly hand.

“What does Dr. Wainfleet’s aide do?” she asked, smiling.

His face registered no emotion; more, thought Delia, as if a few gears had to click around before the answer came up.

“Coffee, first and foremost,” he said, but not in a joking manner. “I have memory skills she finds a great help—she says my memory and hers dovetail, and that their collective power is actually more than the sum of both added together.”

“Isn’t that something called a gestalt?”

“Yes, it is. Are you a psychiatrist?” He asked the question without evincing true curiosity, more as if he needed to keep the clicks and the gears going around.

“Dear me, no! I’m in the police.”

He nodded, swung on his heel and left too quickly for Delia to continue exploring him.

Two minutes later Jess came in, Walter behind her with a fine china mug of coffee for her. She leaned over to peck Delia’s cheek, and gave her aide a brilliant smile. “Thanks, Walter.” She glanced at Delia. “Have you got your car keys, or did you hand them over at the gate?”

“I have them.”

“Give them to Walter, he can drive your car down here to save you a walk in this awful sun. Is it your Mustang, or an unmarked?”

“A blue Ford in slot 9,” she said, handing over the keys, and, as soon as he was out the door, “What an interesting man! I’d love to see what our new police artist would do with him in paints! Hank is heavily into robots.”

All Jess’s unconscious little movements ceased as if struck by some psychic lightning bolt; the doed black eyes took on a startled, even alarmed look.
“Robots?”

“No, that’s too unkind a word for Mr. Jenkins. I apologize to his receding back, and he doing me such a kindness too!”

“Why did you use the word robot?” Jess persisted.

“His lack of warmth? Or do I mean emotion? He walked in bare feet across melting tar, Jess, and didn’t seem to feel pain. Perhaps what he reminded me of most vividly was the perfect soldier—you know, totally brave because totally fearless, unaffected by the niggling weeny things that get ordinary people so down. If you could clone him—isn’t that what the genetics boffins are aiming for, cloning?—the U.S. Army would be in seventh heaven.”

“You make him sound like Frankenstein’s monster.”

Delia stiffened. “Is he, Jess?”

“No, but he is an inmate.” Jess bit her lip. “There, I’ve just given you information you’re not qualified to gauge or assess. Walter is top secret.”

“Your secret’s safe with me, but explain.”

“Walter was a genuine homicidal maniac, but over the course of four years I’ve unlocked the key to Walter’s syndrome, and I’ve effected a cure. He still has some way to go, but the Walter you see is a million miles from the Walter who used to be. On my authority and with Warden Hanrahan’s agreement, Walter has the run of the Asylum and its grounds—though of course he can never go outside the walls for as long as a millisecond. Everybody knows him and is cheering for him, and my team is ecstatic at my results. The trouble is that the cost of treating someone like Walter is nearly prohibitive, so before I can go any farther with my plans for Walter, I have to develop techniques that are more cost-effective. Todo and his tax dollar reign, and rightly so. But I guard Walter with my life. In a way, Walter is my life. That’s why your impression of Walter is so important. You didn’t pick him as an inmate, right?”

“No, I didn’t. But I knew
something
was different,” Delia said, at a loss to explain adequately what she meant. “He reminded me of a slot machine. My asking him a question pulled his handle, but the dollar signs or cherries or clown heads had to clunk into a row before he answered. Always, I hasten to add, correctly.”

“He’s improving—and that’s not wishful thinking!” Jess said. “I can’t be technical in my explanation to you, but in essence what I’m doing is forcing him to abandon the pathways his thought processes used to travel, and open up pathways he’s never touched before. Our brains are overloaded with alternative routes that seem to be there on a just-in-case premise. So Walter is drawing himself a new road map for his thoughts to travel, and I’m its designer-architect. His old paths ended in horrific dead ends, but his new paths have benign and logical destinies.”

Her own mind was spinning, so much so that suddenly Delia knew it was time for her to go. If she stayed, she might end in being drawn too deeply into the controversy she could see around Walter Jenkin’s profoundly disturbed head.

“I think I hear my pager,” she said, picked up her handbag from the floor, and went rummaging inside. Encountering the pager, she made it buzz, then consulted it anxiously. “Oh, bugger!” she said. “I’m needed, and just when I was settling in.”

“At least your car will be closer. Walter will come in with your keys any second,” said Jess, delighted to be liberated. Ari Melos had warned her, she reflected, that she was getting too close to Walter to see him in perspective. She should have seen these flaws in Walter, but hadn’t. Therefore she was becoming Walter habituated. Only how to dishabituate herself? He wasn’t ready yet to go a single day without seeing her; when she had taken her 1968 vacation, Walter had gone back to the Asylum, and it had set him back sufficiently for her to postpone 1969’s vacation, speak of putting it off until spring of next year.

When Delia walked out of HI’s front door she found her cop unmarked parked there, and Dr. Ari Melos just pulling up.

“Have I missed your presence, Sergeant?” he asked, climbing out of his car without bothering to lock it.

“My beeper went off, alas. Saturday night was wonderful, yes?”

“Emphatically yes.”

“I’ve just met an interesting member of your team.”

“Really? Who?”

“Walter Jenkins.”

“An astonishing case,” Melos said smoothly.

“Ought he to be wandering unsupervised?”

“His papers are marked never to be released, but that, we all agree, means from inside these prison walls. Walter is no longer homicidal, and even in the worst of his furors he was as cold as the North Pole. Guards on foot are collected in groups of five and are armed to the teeth. He is safely contained, Sergeant, I do assure you. In fact, Walter is the best reason for existence that HI could ever have.” He looked suddenly perturbed. “You do not, I trust, intend to lodge a complaint?”

“Dear me, no. If Dr. Wainfleet says Walter is safe, then I accept that Walter is safe.”

She climbed in and drove away, surprised to discover that Walter, who must almost have amputated himself at the midriff when he tried to slide behind the wheel, had made the adjustments necessary to drive the car himself, driven it, parked it, and then put her seat back exactly where it had been. Few people playing with a full deck did that, she reflected, so whatever Jess had done to Walter’s cards, they now certainly seemed the full number.

And Walter, watching her drive back to the gate from his window on the second floor, assessed what he had learned about the tiny, tubby woman who drove it. To all intents and purposes it was her car, he had decided; it didn’t have a cop car look or smell to it, whereas its servicing stickers were the Holloman PD garage, so it definitely was a cop car. Nor did she herself fit the standards—height, weight, health—too little on all counts. So what did she have that the head honchos all valued enough to wink at standards? She carried a 9mm hand gun and a .22, probably a little lady’s two-shot handbag job, silver-plated and pearl-handled; he found spare magazines and a box of .22s in the arm rest between the front bucket seats, together with a bottle of spring water, two bars of dark chocolate and two folded cloths. The glove box held maps, a first aid kit, a Connecticut road atlas, the car’s papers and a spare pair of shoes, each in a drawstring cotton bag. Neat lady, permissibly obsessive. The book she was reading, Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, lay on the passenger seat. According to her bookmark, she was about halfway through the volume.

She was the Enemy. That status had nothing to do with her cop activities or career; it sprang out of his instinct that Jess was beginning to develop a weird need of her. He didn’t know what to name the whatever-it-was Jess was starting to feel, nor could he predict its outcome. It simply
was,
and a part of it was an enormous threat to him. He knew that he mattered to Jess more than the rest of her world put together, and that Delia’s threat was outside of his importance to Jess. No, what he sensed was that Delia would pluck at a loose end to remove it as unwanted—and end in unraveling everything. She introduced an unknown factor into Walter’s life in a way that Ivy Ramsbottom never had, but it wasn’t because she was a cop.

Not yet, for all his copious reading, able to find metaphors for what he felt or how he felt, he had climbed into a metaphor that saw him flying on gauzy wings high above a mass of crawling insects. Jess had enabled him to get this far, she had shown him a world of thoughts, and his gratitude was so great that he would have done anything for her—
anything!
Now Delia Carstairs was moving into his space, and he couldn’t discuss her with Jess; he had to work out for himself what her significance was. For if he asked Jess, he would show Jess too much, betray open pathways on his map that she had no idea were open. Was Delia a superhighway bypassing his own desperate efforts to stay flying on gauzy wings? Whatever else he discounted, Walter could never make light of the solitude around him. Didn’t Jess tell him every day that he wasn’t enough, that she needed at least one other? One other what? He used to think she meant, one other like him, until she began to say he was unique; after that, he didn’t honestly know. Did she mean a
Delia?

Oh, he could see pathways everywhere! But which were the right ones? He couldn’t read the street names!

“Walter, are you all right?” Jess was asking as she stood in his doorway.

“I’m having trouble with some of the new pathways,” he said.

“May I come in?”

“Sure, please.”

She sat in the armchair by his window, one hand gesturing to its mate, opposite. “Sit, Walter.”

He sat, but stiffly. “Where will I start, Jess?”

“Anywhere.”

“Why aren’t I enough?”

“In one way, you’re as many millions of enoughs as there are stars in the Milky Way, Walter,” she said in the voice she kept for him alone, soft and warm, “but where you yourself aren’t enough lies in other people, not in me. I need someone else to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that what I did to set you straight, I can also do to other people like you.”

“But this Walter is enough for you?” he asked tonelessly.

“More than enough! Inside my own mind, Walter, you stand on a high pedestal as the greatest happening of my whole life!” Her voice took on a note of triumph, though to Walter it just sounded louder. “I refuse to give up the search! Somewhere is another person who will serve both our ends, Walter—yours as well as mine! I want to see you granted your freedom, acknowledged as a citizen in good standing of your country.”

He had heard it all before, but it had been a while, and with a sinking at the core of him he realized he had forgotten, that he had been fretting over a nothing, a replica Walter Jess hadn’t had any luck finding. He
knew
that! What had made him forget it?

“Jess, there are too many new pathways,” he said. “I’m at a crossroads all the time. You said they’d be hard to open up, a real struggle. But they’re not. Opening them up is so easy that I’m caught in a stampede.”

A huge mixture of emotions boiled up in her; she wanted to shout, sing, trumpet her victory, but the impassive face in front of her dazzled eyes forbade it. All that would do was confuse him, he had no idea what he was saying.

“Then it’s time we changed our methods,” she said calmly. “Between us, we have to work out a system that lets the pathways open up naturally—they’re doing that now, but much faster than we anticipated. We don’t want to slow them down, Walter, what we want is to enable you to deal with the stampede.”

Ari Melos came in; Jess had neglected to close the door.

“A session on a Monday afternoon?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, forcing herself to sound offhanded. “We need some privacy, Ari. Close the door for me, please.”

Outside in the corridor Dr. Aristede Melos looked at Walter’s door, its complex lock, and stood frowning. The atmosphere in there had been electric. Jess was making another breakthrough, but he wouldn’t know what it was until he read about it in her next Walter paper. Secretive bitch!

W
hen Delia walked into her office she found Carmine Delmonico in her chair, his feet propped on her worktable, and the ugliest dog in Holloman, Connecticut, sound asleep on the floor beside him. He was in his work clothes, a fine white cotton shirt open at the neck and with its sleeves rolled up, a pair of dun chinos, and rough suede desert boots.

His eyes were open, and twinkling at the expression of huge joy busy writing itself on her face. Then she pounced on him to give each cheek a smacking, lipsticky kiss, while he adroitly transferred her to her chair and himself to a spare one, ignoring the dog’s semi-hysteria at seeing Delia.

“When did you get in?” she asked, thumping the dog.

“Yesterday’s Red Eye, but I slept on the plane—Myron put me in first class.”

“It does make a difference. Why are you here?”

“I’m surplus to requirements in California, Deels. It took me one day to see how right Sophia was about Desdemona, who dived into the life like a man dying of thirst into a mirage that turns out to be real. Sophia was also right about the kids, who think they’ve arrived in toddler heaven. It took me two days to see that Myron and Sophia between them could set up world peace, if only the world were sensible enough to grant them the authority. Desdemona has absolutely nothing to do except amuse herself in whatever way she fancies, and the kids are at the center of a heaving mass of helpers, entertainers, you name it. Myron had found a great niche for me as his gofer at the studios, and I was enjoying being ordered around.” The big shoulders shrugged. “Then the shit hit the fan for Myron—some movie deal, don’t ask me. He had to fly off to London and couldn’t take me along.

“By the seventh day I realized that a rudderless Carmine was a handicap to a wife in need of a few weeks in Sybaris or some other place riddled with hedonism, and in no shape to compete for his sons’ attention with Bozo the Clown, Buck the cowboy, Tonto the Indian, Captain Kidd the pirate and Flash Gordon from Mars. So I flew home.”

Delia drank in his beloved face. “You’re a sensible man.”

“The animals were grieving, so I figured I’d be welcome—Winston actually lost a pound after a week at the kennels, poor guy, and Frankie was a zombie,” Carmine said, rolling his feet across Frankie’s belly to its groans of pleasure. “How about lunch at Malvolio’s?”

“Definitely.”

“Frankie, mind the house,” Carmine said, escorting Delia out. “You can fill me in once we find a quiet booth.”

Nothing loath, Delia recounted the events of her August to date, ending with her visit to HI to see Jess Wainfleet, and her own odd reaction to Walter Jenkins.

“Yeah, that guy.” Carmine sipped his coffee, frowning. “You don’t know about him, of course, whereas I know him about as well as you can know anyone without actually meeting them. I was on the panel that agreed the Asylum could take him as an inmate—he’s an out-of-state lifer, and then he was very rare—the mania never let up for a second. Dr. Jess Wainfleet had just put HI together, and she wanted Walter exactly the way he was. The Asylum facilities plus HI and some hefty grant money saw Walter an inmate. I guess no one thought anything would come of Walter as a guinea pig—he’d killed a total of nine of his fellow lifers as well as three guards. Terrible crimes! Yet Dr. Wainfleet has made a kind of human being out of him.”

“Walter is the HI blue-eyed boy,” Delia said, “but I confess I didn’t take to him. I described him as a robot, which quite upset Jess. She teetered on the brink of taking offense.”

“HI and Jess Wainfleet do good work, according to the people who should know. The unadulterated maniacs like Jenkins are few and far between. Wainfleet’s papers on him are cagey, she never really advances a hypothesis. Some psychiatrist pals of mine maintain that she’s stalling for two reasons—one, that she hasn’t mined all the gold out of Jenkins yet, and the other, that she’s looking for a second Jenkins to confirm the first.” Carmine smiled. “But enough of that! What about the Shadow Women?”

“Abe’s been far luckier with his starvation victims, but I don’t want to steal his thunder.”

“You can’t. I’ve already seen him.”

“What do you think of Hank Jones’s paintings?”

“They’re the way of the future. I must meet him. Cease the sidestepping, Delia! The Shadow Women?”

“Oh, Carmine, I’m not sidestepping! The truth is that there have been no developments capable of shining any light on a really impenetrable darkness,” said Delia, misery personified.

Winston’s large bowl of raw meat was licked clean; when Carmine put Frankie’s dinner down he smiled at the sight of it, but did not relent by giving Winston more. Not that he intended dieting an animal, which he regarded as cruelty; more that it boggled the mind to think of Winston’s going a week actually leaving food in his bowl. That was the minus side of keeping pets; when you had to board them out, they fretted, no matter how luxurious the kennels. Who would ever have dreamed Winston would grieve?

When he settled himself in his over-large armchair, he had Winston on his lap and Frankie squeezed into the seat alongside him; he also had a stack of files on the table and time to think.

It had been Desdemona sent him home. Where would he be without Desdemona, his glorious ship of the line, her bows cleaving the sea as she forged ahead at full sail? Well, she needed time in dry dock, he went on inside his metaphor, and a long overhaul could not be accomplished with a husband to worry about, or two kenneled pets.

“You’re going home, dear heart,” she said bluntly. “Miss Monson has your tickets and the chauffeur will call at her office to pick them up en route to the airport. Concita has packed your bags, so all you have to do is pack your briefcase.” She dropped a kiss on his brow. “I feel so well, but experience has taught me that unless I stay here in this palace long enough, I’ll flag as soon as I get home again. You’ve made love to me so many times in a week that I’m dizzy, so I’ll survive without it better than you will, I suspect.
Go home!
Apparently Holloman is peaceful, but Hartford isn’t, with a war brewing between the Comancheros and the Puerto Ricans. We may have watched our astronauts skip around on the Moon, but North Hartford is rapidly becoming a moonscape we don’t have to fly a rocket to walk on. So you might be needed. Abe’s case is blowing sky-high, even if Delia’s isn’t.”

His amber eyes had studied her wonderful face with its big nose and big chin, amusement glittering in their depths. “Who’s the little dicky-bird sings you these songs, wife?”

“An anony-mouse, not a dicky-bird, husband.”

“I love you, I’ll always love you, and I’m going home.”

Now he studied Hank Jones’s paintings in wonder. After so long in No Man’s Land, the Does had names and identities.

Abe had more work to do with Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham, but had already outlined his future course: Tony Cerutti the bachelor would go on the road to interview parents, schoolfriends, history prior to joining Rha Tanais—named after two rivers in an atlas of ancient times, yet! Liam would deal with the accountant, Nicolas Greco, and bureaucratic data.

However, the case that most intrigued Carmine was Dr. Nell Carantonio, whose body had never been located. The first thing he found fascinating was her medical degree, very rare for a woman in 1921, the year she had graduated from Chubb Medical School, another coup—
Chubb
graduate a woman doctor in 1921? In a social climate seething with prejudices against women in any profession, Dr. Nell seemed to have led a charmed life. Her student years must have been stuffed with all kinds of cruelties and denigrating plots, but no record of them had survived, and she graduated in the top five of her class, which plain didn’t happen. Women’s papers were marked down, their clinical work sabotaged; some of the worst and most ruthless bigots were their professors. But no, Dr. Nell graduated high. Following which she was allowed to intern at the Holloman Hospital in numerous fields; her final choice of anesthetics seemed to have been a personal wish, as she had been offered residencies in general medicine and pediatrics as well. Once in Anesthesiology, she had been well respected and never short of surgeons requesting that she administer the gas for them. The entire twenty-seven years of her life had been pursued as she wanted, and with success. Then—poof! She vanished into thin air.

The wealth had been in the family for three generations, its source being complicated little machines that did chores previously in the purlieu of human beings; the savings in time and money had enabled Antonio Carantonio I to build a small empire his son and then his grandson had continued to build. Antonio Carantonio III had just the one child, Eleanor called Nell, and had sold out his company interests for want of an heir. If Nell wanted to be a doctor, it was fine by him. He gave her his blessing and two million dollars safely invested in blue-chip stocks. Even the Great Depression, endured while the courts waited to see if she were dead, did not affect the fortune. Then Fenella Carantonio had parlayed the two million into ten million, simultaneously preserving her mansion and the secret of her only child’s paternity. Rufus Ingham, also known as Antonio Carantonio IV. The homosexual business partner and personal lover of Rha Tanais.

“‘O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!’” Carmine murmured. “I wonder who gets what when Rufus is no more? Nor is Rha the kind to have progeny.”

Dr. Nell’s body could be anywhere, and Rufus’s father might still be alive. Carmine picked up the portrait of Un Known and examined it very closely. The background was a landscape reminiscent of Louvain after the Kaiser’s war machine had rolled through it, all smoke, crumbled medieval walls of niches once occupied by statues, a fire-torn sky …. Did it have some significance, or was it just the first circle of Hell? And the eyes—he reached for his magnifying glass and thrust the portrait under the central spotlight of his lamp, then held the magnifying glass above it. No, the eyes were not black. Their pupils were widely dilatated, but around their edges he could discern a ring of dark blue. Blue! Blue, not brown! This would have to go to the artist for cleaning—who knew what other secrets it held?

How old would Un Known be now? Rufus was forty in November, so was Rha, and what kind of man would have appealed to Fenella in the days of her limbo waiting for Dr. Nell to be declared dead? In 1930, say, she was twenty-two years old, so—not a man in her own age group, someone at least ten years older. Make Un Known forty in 1930, and that would make him around eighty. Then he was probably dead. It was all there to be learned, and Carmine wanted to learn it all. An ideal project for himself, one that could be run in tandem with Abe’s case, without stealing any of Abe’s limelight. An attitude of mind only Carmine cherished; he knew his detectives were neither jealous nor defensive, therefore it was up to him to watch out for their professional welfare.

Malvolio’s was always where the dickering went on between members of the same police unit. It wasn’t so much that walls had ears, as that office chats could be interrupted, phrases overheard out of context, phones ring, people dragged off to do something perceived as more urgent. Whereas food and the partaking thereof were sacred; only the direst of emergencies could intrude on them.

Carmine tipped twenty-two pounds of cat off his lap and put the phone there instead, then dialed Abe’s home number.

“Breakfast in Malvolio’s at eight?” he asked.

“Betty thanks you. The boys have been nagging for pancakes, and I hate them. You’ve just made the Goldbergs very happy.”