Sins of the Flesh (9 page)

Abe was holding out another brandy. “I’m truly sorry, Rha. I never realized my briefcase was so full of shocks. How do you know this is Mr. Un Known?”

“Go back to the foyer, take the corridor to the left of the grand staircase, walk along it to the end, and open the door with the inset panel of Sanderson roses. You’ll be in Fenella Carantonio’s room. Our copy of that is on the wall. Bring it back,” said Rha, preoccupied with Rufus. “He’ll be okay by the time you return.”

Abe went out; Rha stroked the head of beautiful hair with a rhythmic tenderness that didn’t vary until Rufus moved, sat up on the arm of Rha’s chair and drew a breath.

“Oh, Rha, what are we going to do?” he asked, whispering it.

“Play it very cool, Rufus my love.
Very
cool!”

“Was it wise, to come out with it like that? I’m petrified, and you must be beside yourself.”

“We have no choice but honesty, my dearest friend of all friends. Take your cues from me, we’ll get through it. Un Known never existed, and his twin brother, No One, never existed either. We stick to the truth as we know it. It’s my turn to be lucid, yours to be confused. Remember,
always the truth!
We can’t afford to become entangled in lies.”

“Give me a sip of that brandy.”

When Abe returned he found Rufus still huddled against Rha, and sipping at cognac.

“Who is this, really?” he asked. “Someone must have posed for it, there’s nothing dreamy about it. This is a real man.”

The room he had been directed to locate was a lush boudoir of pinks, white, reds and gilt, its fabrics Sanderson roses, its furniture Louis Quinze, its carpet Aubusson; an intensely feminine retreat calculated to emasculate a man inside five minutes. Except for the portrait of Un Known, which hung in the midst of an area of whiteness, its dark and brooding presence at odds with all else, including the room’s very spirit. It had been executed by one of those European painters who still understood and carried on the techniques of the Renaissance masters. That was not to cast Hank Jones into disrepute; they were the products of two very different schools. The older work, in oils and with museum-quality brush strokes, caught Un Known in ways Hank had not.

The man’s hair was thick, black, lay straight back from his brow in natural waves, and finished on his collar. His ears were small, neat, and clipped against his head, and the bones of his skull belonged to Adonis. Richly tanned skin lent him a certain hardness he needed, so delicate were the curves of his mouth and the fineness of his nose; his cheekbones rivaled Julius Caesar’s. Thin, arched brows sat beneath a broad, high forehead, and there was a slight dent in his chin, probably, when more relaxed, a crease in his right cheek also. The radical difference between Un Known and Doe the Desired lay in the eyes, which Hank had done a vivid blue, whereas Un Known’s were dark enough to appear black. In the Fenella portrait, their effect was to transform Lucifer into Mephistopheles: sinister, stuffed with secrets, innately evil. Beauty at its most masculine and deadly.

“If you ever met him, you’d remember,” Abe said, still awed.

“Sometimes I’m convinced I know him well, at others I’m sure I never met him,” Rha said. “Given Fenella’s age, and the fact that he’s listed as Rufus’s father, neither of us remembers.”

“Fenella said that after she told him she was pregnant, he disclaimed responsibility and she never saw him again,” Rufus said.

Abe studied Rufus’s face, his own frowning and intent. “I can’t see anything of Un Known’s face in yours, no matter how hard I try. You’re a good looking guy, but not in the same way. Do you take after Fenella?”

“Not really. She was very fair—that’s her portrait at the top of the grand staircase.”

“Then you don’t resemble either parent.”

“I’m a changeling, Abe,” Rufus said with a grin. “I figure I must have been hers—she left me her entire estate. I loved her, but she was sickening a long time before her disease clamped down, so it was love at one remove, if you know what I mean. Rha and I were raised by nannies, nurses, governesses and tutors.”

Abe’s heart twisted. “Not much home life, huh?”

Rufus laughed. “We did have a home life, actually. We were born on the same day, and we always had each other. Because we’re gay, you probably think we were molested as children, but we weren’t. We think we were just—born queenly.”

Not wanting to go there, Abe concentrated on Un Known. “So no one apart from Fenella ever knew this man?”

“All I can tell you is that an aura of fear surrounded him—everybody was afraid of him because they’d picked it up from Fenella. And Ivor was definitely around—another nasty piece of work. Rufus and I used to hide when he appeared.”

A shudder in someone as big as Rha was impressive; Abe stared at a shuddering Rha in amazement. “So the one father you did know frightened the pair of you as well?”

“So much so that neither of us remembers Ivor either. If you showed us a photograph of Ivor, we wouldn’t recognize him.”

“Oh, that’s sad!” Abe exclaimed, thinking of his own sons; life as a cop showed you almost every day how many bad parents the world contained, but he and Betty were determined their boys would prosper under the right mixture of freedom and discipline. So far it was working, but that was the key word—work. “How many of your people know about Un Known?”

“Anyone who stays more than a month is bound to know,” Rha said. “We keep Fenella’s room as a kind of shrine, and the more responsible kids get a week or two caring for it. They all see the portrait as out of place, and ask. Of course Ivy knows, Jess too. Long-term backers like the Kornblums and the Tierneys.”

“Nic Greco,” Rufus contributed; he still looked shocked.

“Do you tell the story when asked?”

“Warts and all,” Rha said. “The whole Carantonio story is interesting, and Un Known is definitely its Mystery Man.”

Rufus spoke again. “All four of your victims knew. Each of them had flicked a duster around Fenella’s shrine.”

“When and how did Fenella die?”

“In 1950. Rha and I were twenty years old. I was the principal dancer with a successful company called
Ballet Bohemia
and Rha had just opened his boutique a block from Bloomingdale’s in New York City—
Rha Tanais
, no qualifications. It was for big women, he was in hock to the eyeballs, and he gambled his all on what he displayed in his shop windows. They were genius! The word got around faster than a brush fire. I was bored with ballet and wanted to work with Rha. The odd thing is that Rha’s success happened
before
Fenella died, a matter of three months.”

“Were you expecting to inherit, Rufus?”

The khaki eyes didn’t change. “At the time, no. Fenella approved of our homosexuality, but not of our leaving Holloman. Well, she was dying, poor baby, and in one part of our minds we knew it, but we buried it. Oh, there was no quarrel, but we knew we had to get out of Holloman to make something of ourselves, and the curse of dying by inches is that you never really think it’s going to happen at all. As for her money—she’d educated us at home and neither of us went to college—it wasn’t
real.
She never spoiled us with expensive gifts or toys, and she didn’t give us an allowance while we lived at Busquash Manor.” Rufus smiled. “She couldn’t have done better by us if she’d tried, which we don’t think she did. We hit New York City at seventeen, worked our assess off, and had some luck.”

“And Fenella’s illness?”

“She had a wasting disease—the word they used was strange to us—demyelinating. The use of her body was gradually taken from her, until she ended in an iron lung. That occurred at our seventeenth year, and there wasn’t anything we personally could do for her except sit by her bed. We’re not proud of running away, but that’s what we did—ran away. Death by inches over many years.”

“How old was she?” Abe asked.

“She was born in November of 1908, the same day her father, Angelo Carantonio, was killed at a railroad crossing. So in May of 1950 she was forty-two years old.” Rufus’s face contorted. “She looked a thousand.” Rufus gazed at Abe, a challenge in his eyes. “As far as I know, the police were never involved in her death. She’d been treated by a bunch of doctors for fifteen years.”

“Thank you,” Abe said, defusing Rufus’s challenge with a winning smile. “I have to ask, honestly.”

“Of course you do!” Rha cried. “Between your own case and that of the delicious Delia’s, Abe, you’re awash in missing persons of both sexes.” He rolled his eyes ceiling-ward. “Well, haven’t we all
died
to go missing at one time or another, as the bishop said when caught with the dancing-girl and both sets of knickers missing?”

“That,” said Abe solemnly, “I’d give a lot to see. However, back to business. I’m adding Un Known and Dr. Nell Carantonio to our list of missing persons.”

“May we have copies of the pictures, Abe darling?”

“Calling me darling is an arrestable offense, so don’t.”

“Oops!” from Rha, with an impenitent look.

“Oh, Jesus!” Abe waved his hands in the air, and departed.

Rha and Rufus stood in the foyer looking up at Fenella’s huge portrait, of a thin, anaemically fair young woman emerging from clouds of wispy white tulle.

“What do we do now?” Rufus asked.

“What can we do?”

“At the very least, tell Ivy.”

“That goes without saying, but there’s no one else, is there?”

“Not in this present contretemps, anyway.”

“Ivy will be terrified that it might all be dredged up again.”

“If it is, it is,” Rha said, voice hard. “There can be no shelter from the elements this time. Abe Goldberg is too good.”

While Abe made full sail, Delia was miserably aware that she lay on her oars still waiting for a wind. She had established that the person behind the camera taking studio shots of her Shadow Women had no professional ambitions; he shot for his own records, for no other reason. Now she had nothing left to do.

After a lonely lunch she climbed into her cop unmarked and set out for HI and the Asylum, Jess having assured her that she was at a loose end herself, and would welcome company. Truth to tell, Delia felt like a drive, while Jess privately cursed time wasted on pleasantries.

As prisons went the Asylum was not large; the original asylum had seen its inmates shockingly crowded together, and there had been 150 of them; when the huge renovations were completed in 1960, a hundred cells held a hundred inmates, one per cell, in a rigid framework far more stringent than even high security prisons. This was not a place where inmates had contact with each other; their physical fitness was ensured by small multiple gyms, and they ate in their cells, most of which were padded. Now that a few drugs were available to damp them down, caring for them was less dangerous, but it was not a place any of its staff would have called nice, or safe, to work in.

It sat in fifteen acres of parklike ground, though the Asylum itself sat in two blocks, one to either side of the only gate, and HI sat three hundred yards down a sealed road in its own block; almost all of it was unused acreage. The reason lay in its walls, erected in 1836 by the inmates themselves, and so stoutly, thickly and impregnably that, even in 1960, by which time the land was valuable, no one in authority wanted to incur the cost of building new walls for a smaller area. The bastions enclosing the Asylum were thirty feet high, wide enough on top to take small wheeled vehicles, and contained ten watchtowers, each round in shape and twenty feet in diameter. At their base they were hollow, and in shape if looked down on from a helicopter, formed a teardrop whose thinner end saw the forest outside meet a relic of the same forest inside. A bleak place, it was a saucer that sat just within the Holloman County boundary on its northwestern side, where people had never much cared to live, between the dampness and the wind tunnel it formed whenever the wind blew from the inclement northern quarter. Allotment size around it stood at five acres, which meant forest hid all but its watchtowers from view.

The entrance was on Millington, and looked every inch the prison it was: a massive iron gate that opened only to pass buses, machinery and big trucks; a smaller gate for cars, vans and little trucks; and a turnstiled door for pedestrians that led through a short tunnel. In the back, interior side of the walls were various reception rooms and offices, their guards armed with both pistols and semiautomatic rifles. Handy, that the hollow walls and their bigger watch towers could be used.

Admitted when she showed her gold detective’s shield, Delia parked and then walked to her designated office, where she lodged her 9mm Parabellum pistol and her Saturday night special, and asked for Dr. Wainfleet in HI.

HI had been built from scratch, and contrived to look somewhat classier than most public structures, though it was uninspiringly rectangular in shape and not overly glassed. What glass there was probably had to be toughened and shatterproof, considering the patient kinds, which would make it very expensive. Instead, walls had been faced with interesting stone by an architect who liked to do that type of thing, so as a look, it worked.

The road down to HI from the Asylum curved and was deserted save for a patrol car cruising slowly past her going the same way; the only other soul in sight was on foot, and striding out toward her. Clad in a grey T-shirt and short shorts, he wore no shoes and seemed not to notice that the August sun was sending ripples off the gooey tar—the soles of his feet must be solid asbestos, she thought. A superb physical specimen with a military air about him, and impossible to think of as an inmate. Besides, inmates didn’t have the run of the grounds, even were one permanently in HI care. A handsome man too, she added as he drew near, still straight-faced. But no, he was after her! Three feet from her he stopped and nodded.

“Sergeant Carstairs?” he asked.

“I am she.”

“Dr. Wainfleet asked me to fetch you. She’s not in her own office at the moment, but she’ll be there as soon as she can.”

Perfect courtesy, yet no feeling. Who was he?

“Who are you, sir?” she asked in polite tones.