DEDICATION

For KAREN QUINTAL

All the many loyal and loving years are deeply appreciated.

Here’s hoping there are just as many more to come.

Thanks, pal.

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969

MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1969

TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969

SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1969

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969

MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1969

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1969

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1969

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14, 1969

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 1969

SATURDAY/SUNDAY NIGHT, AUGUST 16–17, 1969

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17, 1969

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 1969

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1969

SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1969

MONDAY, AUGUST 25, 1969

TUESDAY, AUGUST 26, 1969

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 1969

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30, 1969

SUNDAY, AUGUST 31, 1969

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1969, LABOR DAY

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1969

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1969

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1969

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1969

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1969

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOKS BY COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MIDNIGHT, SUNDAY/MONDAY, AUGUST 3–4, 1969

He had no idea it was midnight. In actual fact, he didn’t know whether the sun was shining or the stars were twinkling. Nor could he work out how long he’d been here, so timelessly did time pass. One moment he had been free, smiling with happiness, at the center of a world that had opened its arms wide to embrace him; the next moment he had fallen into a sleep so deep that he remembered not even the tiniest fragment of a dream.

When he woke he was here, to live a different life. Here, in a big, featureless room that contained a padded toilet and a plastic water bubbler that produced a slim fountain whenever he put his foot down on a button in the floor below it. So he could drink, and he had a tidy place in which to excrete. Here only had one color: a dirty beige, not from squalor but from the poor lighting of one dim bulb, center-ceiling behind a tough glass case wrapped in steel rods.

He was stark naked, though he wasn’t hot, and he wasn’t cold. Everything was oddly soft—the floor and the walls sighed and gently gave way wherever he touched them, akin to leather squabs on a car seat. What at first he thought were seams around the bottom of the walls turned out to be the exact opposite of seams: tucks, as if this cushioning surface were rammed down inside a crevice, together with the edges of the floor. No matter how he tried to dig with his fingertips, the fabric refused to move one single millimeter.

Soon his ravenous hunger became the be-all and the end-all of his entire existence, for though he could always drink, and as much as he wished, he had no particle of food. At times, coming in and going out of the sleeps, he vaguely remembered a taste of food, and understood that he was fed something that sat in his belly like a coal of such glorious warmth and comfort that even the most fleeting memory of it caused him to weep.

His panics belonged to differently befogged and shrouded periods, when he had screamed on and on and on, crashed against the walls, flailed his fists against those yielding surfaces, howled like an old dog, bleated and bayed and bellowed and bawled. No one ever answered. All he heard was himself. Emerging from the panic exhausted, he would drink thirstily and sleep the sleep of the dead, featureless, his last thought the hope of food.

He had nothing to do, nothing to look at—not even a mirror! Nothing to pass the time, he who had passed so much of it gazing at his own reflection, marveling at the perfection of his beauty. All he had to do to get what he wanted was to smile. But in here there was no one to smile at. Just one little chance to smile, that was all he needed! A smile would get him out—no one could ever, ever, ever resist his smile! A smile would get him food. It always came in his sleeps, the food, therefore he must go to sleep smiling.

He was weakening, it seemed the way a snail dragged itself around, with mind-numbing slowness and enormous effort, a visible labor just to hold the house of his life up off his head, for if it slipped, he was gone like a drop of slime on a white-hot stove. He didn’t want to part with his beauty yet! Or his smile!

“Why are you so cruel?” He smiled. “Who are you?”

This time his awakening brought changes: he was still hungry, and he was in pain.

No glowing coal of food lingered in his belly—it hadn’t fed him! But at least the pain said he was still alive, and it wasn’t agonizing—more an ache in the groin. One of the things he couldn’t fathom was its attention to his groin, stripped of all hair, since it had never, as far as he knew, subjected him to any kind of abuse. This wakening’s pain made him doubt, and he groped for his penis; it was there, unharmed. No, the soreness was behind it, in his ball-sack. Something was wrong! Each testicle should roll under his fingers as if it were free inside the sack, but no testicles rolled. His ball-sack was empty. Empty!

He shrieked, and a voice spoke from every square inch of the room, impossible to pinpoint.

“Poor eunuch,” it cooed, dovelike. “You did well, my poor eunuch. No bleeding. They came out as easily as the stone out of a fleshless avocado. Snip, snip! Snip, snip! No balls.”

He screamed, and went on screaming, long shrill wails of grief and despair that finally died away into gibberish; and from that he passed to a silence flirting with catatonia, moving not the tiniest muscle. The pain was dying away to nothing, more bearable than the pain of no food, and even that didn’t matter the way it had before the discovery of his neutering. Without his manhood, there was nothing to smile about. An utterly weary hopelessness moved into his soul and took up residence there.

Though he didn’t know it was midnight, the savage hack of Time’s scythe that shoved Sunday the 3rd into the past and Monday the 4th into the present, he suddenly knew there would be no more food. Curling up to hug himself, arms around his knees, he gazed across the vast expanse of the floor into a dirty beige eternity.

The chair came down out of the ceiling behind him, descending silently to a halt with its foot platform still a meter short of the floor. Had he turned his head, he would have seen it and the person who occupied it, but he didn’t turn his head. Everything that was left of him was focused on his contemplation of eternity, though he was a long way off dying yet. A complete authority on the matter, his observer estimated that he had about forty days left before the very last flicker of life snuffed out. Forty days of ecstatic conversation and study—but how interesting! He still wore a kind of a smile ….

The chair lifted itself back into the ceiling while the dying man on the floor continued to plumb his perspective on eternity.

MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1969

“I told you, Abe, I told you,” Delia said, “but you and Carmine were being typical men—wouldn’t listen to a woman, oh, no!”

She and Abe were sitting in a booth at Malvolio’s waiting for their lunch, and Abe had miscalculated his moment: Delia’s gauzy outfit of mustard yellow and coral pink had seemed tame to him, an indication that today’s Delia was placidly bored. But her reaction to his news said otherwise; Abe heaved an internal sigh and revised his mental chart labeled DELIA CARSTAIRS.

“It’s taken this one to convince me,” he said in undefeated tones. “Until now, the evidence was insufficient.”

“No evidence, but no guts either,” she said, disgusted.

“I don’t see why you’re crowing so loud,” he said.

“Minnie is coming with our omelets,” she said in the voice of a prissy schoolmarm, “and I propose we eat before we discuss.”

Ah, that was it! Delia was plain hungry! Meekly Abe ate. Luigi’s summer cook produced superb Western omelets, and Delia hadn’t grown tired of them yet. Which didn’t mean Abe’s mental chart of Delia could stay unamended. The real problem was, did he modify CLOTHES, COLOR or FOOD, and how much ought he to cross-index? A very complicated mental chart, Delia’s.

The eating dealt with, Delia leaned forward, her bright brown jewels of eyes glittering. “Enlighten me,” she commanded.

Abe began. “Same as James Doe. Gus has named him Jeb Doe until he’s identified—if he ever is. I know you maintained James Doe was related to the four earlier bodies, but decomposition did not permit any positivity, whereas Jeb Doe does.” His cigarette kindled, he inhaled with obvious pleasure. “Gus hasn’t posted Jeb yet, but the preliminary examination is uncannily like James. The body was found on Willard two blocks farther out than Caterby, where Little San Juan has taken to dumping trash. No apparent cause of death, except that starvation sure played a part in it. His testicles had been removed some weeks prior to death.”

“Cause of death will be starvation,” Delia said confidently, “and the perpetrator is a multiple murderer, you must admit that now. Jeb and James Doe are preceded by four John Does whose bones we’ve found. My guess is that there are a lot more than four.”

“If so, not in Holloman. We’ve looked back twenty years, and found nothing before John Doe One in 1966.” Abe puffed away luxuriously, then gazed at his dwindling cigarette in real grief. “Why do they go so fast?”

“Because you’re quitting, Abe dear, and you can’t have your next ciggy until after dinner tonight. Are you sure there are no other John Does elsewhere in Connecticut?”

“At this moment, yes, but I’ll have Liam and Tony repeat our enquiries.” Abe smiled wryly. “At least we can be pretty sure no bodies will turn up in idyllic rustic settings.”

“Yes, this chap definitely thinks of his victims as garbage the moment they’re dead.” Delia put her hand on Abe’s arm when he rose to go. “No, let’s stay here a minute more, please. I love the air-conditioning.”

Abe sat with the alacrity of a trained husband. “It’s cool, yeah, but the smoke torments me,” he said plaintively.

She gave a mew of exasperation. “I love you dearly, Abraham Samuel Goldberg, but you have to get through kicking the habit, and in one respect Jews are like Catholics—they find it easier to suffer one torture when they have to suffer more than one. Well, I am not sweltering in County Services just so you can, a, swelter, and b, withdraw simultaneously. Set your mind where it ought to be—on Jeb Doe, not the Marlboro Man.”

“Sorry,” he muttered, wrestling a grin. “If Jeb Doe’s cause of death is starvation, then we know that the last two Does were definitely starved to death, as well as emasculated. In turn, it suggests an MO for all of them. Gruesome!”

“Yes, quite horrible,” said Delia, grimacing. “It’s a very unusual way to murder because the degree of premeditation is truly formidable—I mean, it takes weeks if not months, and can be stopped at any time. While it may not be messy, it’s certainly the opposite of most murder.”

“You mean it’s colder than ice, harder than steel?”

“Yes, whereas murder of its very nature suggests passion and rage,” said Delia, frowning.

“How would anyone light on starvation as a modus operandi? You’d need a dungeon.” Abe’s freckled face betrayed dismay. “We have had our share of underground premises in Holloman lately.”

“Exactly!” Delia cried, excited. “Starvation is a Middle Ages form of murder. Endowed with dungeons galore, the less civilized monarchs indulged in starving people to death. Aunt Sophonisba offended the King and the King threw her into a dungeon where—oh, how could it have happened?—they forgot to feed her. However, the victims were almost always women. Sort of murder by proxy, which lessens the guilt.”

Cigarettes forgotten, Abe stared at her, intrigued. “I hear you, but am I getting the correct message? Are you implying that our Doe murderer is a woman? Or that the victims should be women?”

Delia went wildly tangential. “Confining the word ‘homosexual’ to the male of our species while putting lesbians on a back burner, may I say that while a number of homosexuals may feel like women trapped inside men’s bodies, I believe the majority do not? After all, homosexuality isn’t exclusively the preserve of human beings. Animals practice it too,” she said.

Abe’s luminous grey eyes mirrored his brain’s confusion. “Are you saying these are homosexual murders? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying the killer is definitely not homosexual.”

Abe continued to stare at her, mesmerized. How did Delia’s mind work? Greater intellects than his had failed to find the answer to that question, thus he was able to view his defeat with equanimity. “So you’re hypothesizing that the four John Does, James Doe and Jeb Doe are all the work of the same heterosexual killer?”

“Definitely. Come, Abe, you think the same.”

“After Jeb, the same killer, yes. Heterosexual? Search me.”

“The real question is, how long ago were his trial runs?”

“Easing his way into his MO, you mean?”

“I do indeed.” Delia gave a wriggle of anticipatory delight. “James Doe was your case, Abe, so I need filling in.”

“The consensus of opinion at the time was that it was a homosexual murder, pure and simple. But after Liam and I had a talk with Professor Eric Soderstern, we had to can that,” Abe said.

There were many occasions, thought Delia, when being a minor police department in a small city could possess unexpected bonuses. The Holloman PD had all the resources and expertise of one of the world’s greatest universities at its fingertips; these included the Chubb University Medical School professors of psychiatry. Dr. Eric Soderstern, a famous authority on the psychology of homosexuality, had been consulted in Abe’s need.

“The prof said that castration of the victim indicated rape was the precipitating factor for murder, not homosexuality. We’d gotten nowhere with our enquiries among Holloman’s homosexual contingent.” Abe’s beautiful smile appeared. “We were also told that with this new decade coming up and so many guys coming out of the closet, homosexuality was taking a new lease on life with the word ‘gay.’ We have to educate ourselves to say gay rather than homosexual.”

“I’ve heard gay around a little,” said Delia. “It goes back at least as far as Oscar Wilde. But continue, dear.”

“Anyway, now at least we had a reason for the gay community’s ignorance—apparently James Doe wasn’t a homosexual and his murder had no gay aspects. Instead, we had to ask ourselves if he might have raped someone.”

“Perhaps he was homosexual, and raped a male?”

“Delia! That implication I don’t need!” Abe glowered at her, “Hot weather and you don’t mix, lady. I need a smoke.”

“Codswallop, of course you don’t. You’re down in the mouth, Abe dear, because the discovery of Jeb Doe does rather put the kibosh on rape theories of any kind. The killer lives for the act of murder, and has to be regarded as a multiple. His reasons for castration will be absolutely individual, not due to some Freudian generalization.” Delia arose in a mustard and coral cloud. “Come on, let’s see if Gus has done the autopsy.”

They stepped out into the August humidity, up near saturation point, and gasped.

“There’s method in my madness,” Delia said cheerfully as they descended to the Morgue, one floor below ground. “Everywhere in the ME’s is air-conditioned.” Her face saddened. “It’s still a wee bit of a shock, not seeing Patrick’s cheeky face. He seemed to resign his coroner’s duties overnight.”

“You can’t blame him.”

“No, of course not. But miss him, I do.”

Gustavus Fennell had stepped into Patrick O’Donnell’s shoes as Medical Examiner, a decision that had pleased everybody in the aftermath of Patrick’s sudden illness, a particularly malevolent arthritis. To have replaced a forceful, vital, pioneering man like Patrick with another of the same sort would have led to all kinds of wars, internal and external, whereas dear old Gus (who in fact was neither very old nor very much of a dear) knew all the ropes and could be relied upon to run the Medical Examiner’s department smoothly. Lacking his retired chief’s good looks and charm, Gus had gotten along as Second-in-Command by consciously playing the second lead, as Commissioner John Silvestri was well aware. Now, after three months as ME, the real Gus was starting to shed his veils in an intricate dance that would, Silvestri knew, finally end in revealing a gentle yet obdurate autocrat who would push his department onward and upward with extreme efficiency.

Like Patrick, Gus enjoyed performing criminal autopsies, the more complicated or mysterious, the better. When Delia and Abe walked, gowned and booteed, into his autopsy room, he was just stripping off his gloves, leaving an assistant to close for him. If the cause of death were unknown and might conceivably have a contagious factor, he worked masked, as he had on Jeb Doe.

Mask off, he led his visitors to several steel chairs in a quiet corner of the room, and sat with a sigh of relief. His face and hair, stripped of their coverings, were displayed as—no other word would do—nondescript. Mr. Average Everything, to which add, fade into the wallpaper. However, his slight body had a wiry strength its proportions belied, and his face said its owner could be trusted. That he had certain crotchets Abe and Delia knew: he was a strict vegetarian who forbade smoking anywhere in his department, and if circumstances deprived him of his two generous pre-dinner sherries or after-dinner ports, then mild-mannered Dr. Fennell became a hideous Mr. Hyde. His passion was bridge, at which he was an acknowledged master.

“Unless the fluid or tissue assays come back to show some toxin—I doubt they will—the cause of death is simple starvation,” Gus said, kicking off his chef’s clogs. “My feet are so sore today, I don’t know why. The testicles were enucleated about six weeks before death, by someone who knew exactly how to do it. There was nothing in the alimentary canal that I could call a food residue, but he wasn’t dehydrated.”

“Water, Gus? Or fruit juice, maybe?” Abe asked.

“Nothing but plain water is my guess. Certainly nothing with fiber of any kind in it, or indigestible end products. If he were given plain water the starvation metabolism would proceed smooth as silk, and it did. There were no substances under his nails.”

“May we have a look at him?” Delia asked.

“Sure.”

Delia and Abe moved to the dissecting table, where the body now lay unattended.

Thick, waving black hair, cut to cover the neck and ears but not long enough to be tied back, they noted; it was almost the sole evidence of normality that the corpse displayed, so dynamic were the ravages of a metabolism forced to digest itself to obtain sustenance. The skin was very yellow and waxy, stretched fairly tautly over the skeleton, which showed in vivid detail.

“His teeth are perfect,” Delia said.

“Good nutrition and fluoride in the water supply. The latter says he wasn’t raised in Connecticut.” Abe shook his head angrily, balked. “I’ll get Ginny Toscano to flesh out the skull for me, no matter how bad her hysterics are. Jeb needs an artist’s sketch.”

“Haven’t you heard? We have a new artist,” said Delia, first with this news too. “His name is Hank Jones, and he’s a child just out of art school with a cast iron digestion, absolutely no finer feelings, and a macabre sense of humor.”

“A child?” Abe asked, grinning.

“Nineteen, bless him. Ethnicity—you name it, he has at least a drop of it in his veins. His hobby is drawing cadavers at the Medical School, but I met him in our parking lot sketching Paul Bachman’s 1937 Mercedes roadster. He’s gorgeous!”

“Gorgeous I can live without, but if he doesn’t mind the sight of a nasty dead body, he’s worth knowing,” Abe said.

“Those who’ve seen his work say he’s good.” Delia raised her voice. “Gus, does starvation make body hair fall out, or has someone depilated the poor little blighter?”

“The latter, Delia,” Gus answered. “He wasn’t hirsute by nature, but what body hair he had was plucked. Further to hair, his head hair has been dyed black, which was also true of James Doe. The natural color was fairish, for James as well as Jeb. Both had very blue eyes, and skins that tanned well. Bone structure—Caucasian.” Gus spoke from his chair, still waggling his feet.

Delia and Abe continued to cruise around the table, curiously unsettled by Jeb Doe, who was far from the most horrible body either had ever seen, yet had a power to impress beyond most victims of a violent end. His smell was oddly wrong, which Abe, better educated scientifically than Delia, put down to the beginnings of decay minus some of the usual murder concomitants—no blood, vomitus, open rot. Delia simply thought of it as an utterly bloodless murder, as murder by inches over months. Jeb’s body didn’t look moist or damp, and the head, with its black mop of hair, was a terrifying sight, the skull showing fully under its wrapping of veined skin, which of course gave it the death grin, emphasized by a pair of brown lips drawn back and up in a rictus. Appalling! The eyelids were closed, but Jeb had been gifted with dense, long dark lashes and arched, definitive brows. Nothing about the body suggested mummification—those, Abe and Delia had seen aplenty.

Finally, convinced Jeb Doe had nothing more to tell them, Abe and Delia thanked Gus and departed.

Detectives Division was a trifle scattered through the big police presence in County Services, but Carmine’s (and Delia’s) end was easier to access from the ME’s domain by taking the first flight of stairs or elevator; she started up with a wave, leaving Abe to wend his way to his end alone, and grateful for that—with Delia, you never could tell where the conversation might go, and he wanted to hang on to his current thoughts undeflected. Her technique was oblique or tangential because she never saw things as mere mortals did, but that, of course, was exactly why Carmine so valued her. And, he amended, be fair, Abe Goldberg! You value her just as much.

Carmine had taken Desdemona and their sons to visit his old pal, the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum, in Beverly Hills, and wasn’t due back for three weeks. He had bribed Delia by giving her permission to work on a series of missing women that had been bothering her for months, and telling her that the usual crimes and suspects were safe in Abe’s hands, so butt out unless Abe orders you in, okay? Since she had never dreamed of having a whole month to ride her hobbyhorse, Delia took the unspoken implication philosophically, and left Abe alone. The however-many Doe victims seemed likely to blow up into a big case, but it would continue to move at a snail’s pace for some time; she wasn’t needed there.

Abe collected Liam Connor and Tony Cerutti on his way through, then, settled in his desk chair, gave them the news that the four Johns and James Doe had a new member of the family, Jeb.

“Looks like Professor Soderstern’s rape theory is out,” said Liam sadly. “Are we back to homosexual?”

“If we are, no nancy-boys or pansies, understood? Homosexual or the prof’s word, gay,” said Abe severely. “However, castration says not, unless the perpetrator is a fanatical homo-hater.”

“Then as a theory it stays in,” Tony Cerutti said. He was young, handsome, and still a bachelor, related to Commissioner Silvestri, Captain Delmonico and about a third of the Holloman PD, and while he could be impatient and tactless, he was an excellent detective whose speciality was street crime. “The homo-haters hate the ones who hide their inclinations because they marry and have kids. Then about ten years later the wife wakes up that she’s married to a queer—I can’t use that either? Anyway, she’s all screwed up, the kids are screwed up—yeah, castration can fit into the picture just fine if her father or her brother is—uh—offended. Can I say offended?”

“Don’t be smart, Tony,” Abe said calmly.

“You’re talking about a different age group, Tony,” said Liam, a quiet, understated man who formed an ideal contrast to Tony. Married, he never brought his domestic woes—if, indeed, he had any—to work, and had few prejudices. “The Doe victims are too young to have wives and kids. It does have to stay in our list of possibles, though. If a guy’s wife knows he’s homosexual and goes along with it, okay, but if he has deceived her, the results when she finds out are bound to be messy in all kinds of ways.”

“But messy to the point of a string of murders?” Abe looked skeptical. “I suggest we look at militantly anti-homosexual movements, including Neo-Nazis and assorted racial screwballs. Racial prejudice is usually linked to other social prejudices.”

“We can’t exclude a solitary psychopath,” Liam said, frowning. “One at a time suggests one perpetrator.”

“Definitely.”

Tony’s eyes were closed, a sign of deep thought. “Who done it won’t be easy to find,” he said in his attractively gravelly voice, “but where might be. Did Gus find evidence this latest Doe was gagged for long periods of time?”

“The mouth tissues were unbruised.”

“So wherever he was held was soundproof twenty-four-seven for at least a couple of months. Shades of Kurt von Fahlendorf, huh? A lot of the work looking for where has been done relatively recently looking for Kurt,” Tony said eagerly. “We need to take a look at those files, then we’ll have a list of possibles.”

“The Does must have screamed the place down,” Liam said.

“But we have a list of places to check,” said Abe, pleased. “With Delia head down, tail up on the trail of her Shadow Women, she won’t mind lending us her plans and schematics of Holloman—they’ll be a help too. If we were on a classic paper trail, I’d bring her in, but this is secret compartment stuff.” Abe rubbed his palms together; his speciality was locating secret compartments.

Carmine Delmonico had a daughter old enough to be a pre-med student at Chubb’s Paracelsus College, but he saw nothing of Sophia during school vacations. Her mother had left Carmine to marry the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum while Sophia was still a baby; the marriage had quickly foundered, but not the bond between Myron and his step-daughter, with the result that Sophia had grown up with two fathers, each of whom adored her. It was generally understood that the girl would fall heir to Myron’s empire one day, but in the meantime her inclinations led her in the direction of medicine; during school semesters she lived with Carmine and his second family in Holloman, and during vacations she lived with Myron on the West Coast. A brilliant, capable and down-to-earth young woman, she was sufficiently detached from her biological father’s spell to see how she could best help him, and proceeded to do so.

After the birth of their second son, Alex, only fifteen months later than his brother, Julian, Carmine and Desdemona had run into trouble; Desdemona suffered a post-partum depression made worse by her streak of obsessiveness. A health administrator whom Carmine had met during a case, Desdemona refused to concede her weakness, and thus was slow recovering. At which point Sophia stepped in. His wife, said Sophia to Carmine, needed a long rest being pampered, and since she wouldn’t be separated from her sons, they too must become a part of her rest-and-recreation holiday. The result was that Carmine took Desdemona, Julian and Alex to California at the end of July; they were to stay in Myron’s enormous mansion for as long as Sophia felt necessary, though Carmine would have to return to Holloman when his annual leave was up. That Desdemona consented to such a colossal upheaval was hard evidence that, in her heart of hearts, she knew she needed a long rest. The little boys were no problem in that world of make-believe Myron could tap at will; with so many treats, excursions and people at their beck and call, they didn’t need to badger Mommy, who could enjoy them without being bullied or dominated as she had been in Holloman.

Knowing all this, Delia could settle to her task in peace and quiet; the Shadow Women were elusive, and continued to defy analysis. Six cases considered open in only the loosest way, certainly not urgent; cases that enabled her to quit work on time every day, and count on free weekends. That was important at the moment, for Delia had made two new friends, and looked forward to her leisure hours very much.

She had met Jessica Wainfleet and Ivy Ramsbottom near Millstone Beach at the beginning of June, when they combined forces to rescue a cat stranded up a tree, yowling piteously. Of course when the creature was thoroughly satisfied that all three women had genuinely risked their necks on its behalf, it descended daintily of its own accord and vanished in a tabby blur. Jess and Ivy had laughed until they wept; Delia laughed until she had a stitch in her side. This feline practical joke had occurred very near Delia’s condo, so they had repaired to the condo to drink sherry, send out for pizza, and make mutual discoveries about each other. Jess and Ivy had been friends for years. Each lived in the region; Jess had a small house a block behind Delia, and Ivy lived in Little Busquash, a cottage on the huge grounds of Busquash Manor, the great pile atop Busquash Peninsula just to Delia’s west.

“But you outclass both of us, Delia,” said Jess with a sigh. “I’d kill to have a condo right on the beach—top floor too!”

“A bequest from a rich aunt I didn’t even know I had, some luck, and some useful relatives,” Delia said happily. “Yes, I have everything I want.”

“Except a husband?” Jess asked slyly.

“Oh, dear me, no! I don’t want a husband. I like my life as it is—except that I am in need of two new chums.”

All three women were spinsters; in America, very rare, even for lesbians. Though Delia sensed no undercurrents suggesting that, thank the Lord! It had broken up several new friendships, for Delia was conservative in her social attitudes, and disliked sex rearing its (to her) ugly, destructive head. Simply, she was one of those lucky women whose sexual urges were neither powerful nor frequent. Her self-image was of an eccentric, and she cultivated it assiduously, helped by a patrician Englishness she also made capital out of. The sooner after meeting her that people adjudged her eccentric, the better, as far as Delia was concerned.

Ivy Ramsbottom was an extremely tall woman, though not at all obese; her exact height she declined to give, but Delia put it at about Desdemona’s height, six feet three, and deemed Ivy of the same athletic bent. There the comparison faded; Ivy had curly corn-gold hair, fine features and cornflower-blue eyes. She was so well-dressed that only Gloria Silvestri eclipsed her. Her casual walk-on-the-beach-in-early-summer costume was so perfect that not even a mad scramble after a cat had mussed it.

“Clothes are my trade,” she said to Delia, manipulating her pizza slice so deftly that it wouldn’t have dared drip on her sweater. “I manage my brother’s clothing businesses.”

“What sort of clothes?” asked Delia, who adored dressing only a little less than police work.

“All varieties these days, though he started out among the forgotten women, as he calls them—women who are too tall, too fat, or disproportionate in some way. Why should they be doomed to dismal or unfashionable things? A tiny segment of one percent of women wear clothes well anyway. I can only think of Gloria Silvestri, Mrs. William Paley Jr., and the Duchess of Windsor, though a number of women can pass muster, and a few almost make it to the top. However, the majority of women look like something the cat dragged in.”

“I quite agree!” cried Delia.

“But most of all,” said Ivy, continuing, “he’s famous for his bridal gowns. I manage Rha Tanais Bridal in person.”

“Rha Tanais is your brother?” Delia asked, squeaking.

“Yes,” said Ivy, amused.

“Different name?”

“Ramsbottom is not euphonious,” Ivy said with a grin. “Gown by Ramsbottom doesn’t quite get there, somehow.”

“Gown by Rha Tanais is far more exotic.”

“And Rha Tanais is exotic,” said Jess, laughing. “But come, Delia, why should a mere purveyor of clothes be more exciting than a psychiatrist like me or a detective like you?”

“The sheer fame, no other reason. Fame is exciting.”

“I concede your point, it’s a valid one.”

Jess Wainfleet was forty-five years old, a slender woman with a good figure for clothes, since she wasn’t busty; most men would have called her attractive rather than pretty or beautiful, despite her small, fine, regular features. Her black hair was cropped very short, her make-up restrained yet flattering, and her creamy-white skin endowed her with a certain allure. Her chief glory was her eyes, dark enough to seem black, large, and doed.

By rights Delia should have met Jess somewhere along the way, but she never had, a curious omission. Dr. Jessica Wainfleet was the director of the Holloman Institute for the Criminally Insane, always called the Holloman Institute (HI) for short. It had begun 150 years earlier as a jail for dangerous criminals, and so was off the beaten track to the north of route 133, set in fifteen acres walled in by bastions thirty feet high that were surmounted at intervals by watchtowers fifteen feet higher again. Soon the locals called it the Asylum, and though from time to time efforts were made to scotch the unofficial name, it remained the Asylum. In the explosion of infrastructure building that had gone on after the Second World War it underwent extensive renovations, and now housed two separate but allied activities; one was the prison itself, tailored for incarceration of men too unstable for life in an ordinary prison, and the other was a research facility in its own building. Jess Wainfleet headed the research facility.

“Brr!” said Delia, mock-shivering. “How do you work there and stay sane yourself?”

“Most of my work is clerical,” said Jess apologetically. “I deal with lists, rosters, schedules. Interesting, however, that both of us are in a criminal field. I get scads of would-be PhDs wanting to interview this or that inmate, including a few who turn out to be journalists.” She snorted. “Why do people assume you must be a fool if you sit behind a desk?”

“Because they equate a desk with a bureaucratic mind,” said Delia, grinning, “whereas in actual fact,” she went on in casual tones, “I imagine that at this moment you’re being self-deprecating. There are some first-rate papers come out of HI—even detectives keep up with the literature on certain types among the criminally insane. Sorry, my friend, you’re found out. Lists and rosters? Rubbish! You see and follow the progress of inmates.”

Jess laughed, hands up in surrender. “I give in!”

“One of my jobs in Detectives is to chase bits of paper, I admit. Not a sexist directive, but self-appointed. I have a mind just made for statistics, plans, tabulations, the written word,” Delia said, anxious to explain. “My boss, Captain Carmine Delmonico, is another who reads, though his forte is the oversized tome. We do notice the work of places like HI, and it’s a real pleasure to meet you, Jess.”

By the end of June the three were fast friends, and agreed that when 1970 rolled around, they would go on vacation together to some alluring destination they could wrangle about for months to come. They met at least twice a week to talk about nearly everything under the sun, their favorite meeting place Delia’s condo. Little Busquash was a strenuous uphill walk for the other two, and Jess’s place, she confessed, was wall to wall papers.

Why neither Jess nor Ivy had ever married was not discussed, though Delia thought it was because they, like she, lived inside their minds. If Delia had ever questioned her own taste in clothes she might have wondered why clothes weren’t talked about either, but it simply didn’t occur to her that Jess and Ivy avoided the subject of clothes out of affection for their new pal, who they soon saw was at perfect peace with the way she dressed.

Removing the 8 × 10-inch photographs from each of six very thin files, Delia lined them up on her desk in two rows of three, one row above the other, so her eyes could take in all of them at once. Each was a studio portrait, unusual in itself; most file photos of missing persons were blow-ups of smaller, casual shots. Under ordinary circumstances the portrait artist’s name or studio would be indicated somewhere on the back of the paper: a rubber stamp, or an ink signature, or at the very least a pencil mark of some kind, But none of these photos held a clue as to its portrait artist, just an area on the back of each where a pencil mark had been erased, and never in the same spot—two were near the center, one high to the left, a random business. Paul Bachman and his team hadn’t been able to discern a residuum.

1963 | TENNANT, Margot. Thirtyish. Brown hair, brown eyes. Average height and shape. 3/23 Persimmon St., Carew.
1964 | WOODROW, Donna. Thirtyish. Red hair, green eyes. Average height and shape. 222c Sycamore St., Holloman.
1965 | SILBERFEIN, Rebecca. Thirtyish. Fair hair, blue eyes. Average height and shape. 12th fl., Nutmeg Insurance Bldg.
1966 | MORRIS, Maria. Thirtyish. Black hair, black eyes. Average height and shape. 6 Craven Lane, Science Hill, Holloman.
1967 | BELL-SIMONS, Julia. Thirtyish. Blonde, blue eyes. Average height and shape. 21/18 Dominic Rd., the Valley.
1968 | CARBA, Elena. Thirtyish. Peroxide blonde, brown eyes. Average height and shape. 5b Paterson Rd., North Holloman.

Apart from their average height and shape and the fact that each looked to be about thirty years old, the six missing women had little in common physically. Hair and eyes went from near-black to near-white, with red and brown thrown in—or so the studio portraits indicated. 1965’s Rebecca Silberfein was the fairest; her hair was a streaky natural flaxen blonde and her eyes so pale and washed out they looked whitish. Her nose wasn’t long, but it was broad and beaky. Maria Morris, blackish of hair and eyes, had a very olive skin and a crookedly flat nose. 1964’s Donna Woodrow had really green eyes, the color of spring leaves rather than the more usual muddy combat tinge, and her carroty hair was definitely not out of a dye bottle—no henna highlights. She had, besides, a fine crop of camouflaged freckles. None of them could be called beautiful, but none was unattractive, and none gave off a smell of the streets. The fashion of the times meant hair styles bouffant from back-combing, and heavily lipsticked mouths tended to hide their natural shape, but everyone connected with the case had reason to thank each woman’s impulse to have a fine photograph of herself in color. Only why leave it behind?

The shape of the skull was similar in all six cases, suggesting Caucasian of Celtic or Teutonic kind. Allowing for the hair, the cranium looked to be very round, the brow broad and high, the chin neither prominent nor receding. About the cheekbones it was harder to tell, due to weight differences and, probably, how many molars were missing. Sighing, Delia pushed the photos together.

Nothing was known about these six women save their names, an approximate age, faces, and their last known addresses. Notification of missing person status had been extremely slow, depending as it had upon individuals engaged in an occupation wary of creating fusses—landlords.

Delia sighed again, aware that sheer over-familiarity with the case carried its own, very special, dangers.

Starting with Mary Tennant in 1963, each case followed an identical course. Tennant had rented the top floor of an old three-family house in Persimmon Street, Carew, very early in January of that year; she signed a one-year lease and paid, in cash, her first month’s rent, her last month’s rent, and a damages deposit of $100. If she had a car it must have been randomly parked on the street, as no one knew it or was aware of its existence. As a tenant she was remarkable in only one respect: she was extremely unobtrusive. No one ever heard her music or her TV or noises of her moving around; she passed people on the stairs in silence, and never seemed to entertain visitors. The details furnished by the rental agency were scant: she had said she was a secretary, gave two written references and a driver’s license in verification, and presented so favorably in an anonymous kind of way that the agency never bothered checking. Most three-family houses saw the landlord living on the premises, but Carew was a student-resident district, so Tennant’s landlord owned fifteen three-family houses, and used his realty business as a rental agency. When July’s rent came due on the first of the month, Miss Tennant didn’t pay it, and ignored the agency’s reminders. This led to the discovery that Miss Tennant had no telephone—amazing! Several personal visits to her home by the clerk delegated to handle the affair never found Miss Tennant there, and thus matters stood when August arrived. She was now well and truly in arrears, and no one could remember seeing her since June.

The delinquency now attained a certain urgency, for early September saw the new academic year’s influx of students pour into rental agencies looking for furnished accommodations: Miss Tennant had to go, and go fast. In mid-August the realtor went to the Holloman PD and requested that he be accompanied to Miss Tennant’s apartment by a police officer, as enquiries suggested she hadn’t been seen since June, and her rent was overdue.

Missing Persons leaped to the same conclusion the Realtor had, that Miss Margot Tennant would be found inside her apartment, very dead: but such was not the case. A faint and noisome smell proved to emanate from the refrigerator, where two-month-old fish and meat were in a slow decay. Miss Tennant’s few possessions were removed from the premises and stored until garnishment proceedings saw them auctioned to pay rent and damages, the latter to the refrigerator. Said possessions were meager: a cheap radio, a black-and-white TV, a few clothes and a cigar box of imitation jewelry—no books, magazines, letters or other private papers. Thanks to the refrigerator, they didn’t fetch enough to pay what the missing Mary Tennant owed.

Each year since had seen the same pattern. Locations were scattered all over Holloman County, but the renting was always at New Year or scant days after, and June the last rent paid by the missing woman before the six-to-eight-week period leading to a report with Missing Persons. The few things in common lent the task of finding the missing women a nightmare quality because the differences only pointed up the similarities.

Missing Persons had handed the Shadow Women to Detectives and Carmine Delmonico when the third woman vanished from her studio flat on the twelfth floor of the Nutmeg Insurance building; now the total had escalated to six. “Ghost” was the sobriquet of a famous case, therefore couldn’t be applied to the missing women, but Delia had suggested “Shadow” as apt, and the Shadow Women they became.

Something was going on, but what on earth could it be? The Commissioner, John Silvestri, found the case fascinating and kept tabs on it through his regular breakfast meetings with his detectives; since she was his blood niece, Delia yearned to be able to produce something brand-new to offer him, but thus far the pickings were nonexistent.

One promising hypothesis had been promulgated by Silvestri’s wife, Gloria, who was the best-dressed woman in Connecticut. She decided that each woman was having cosmetic plastic surgery, and that in her own identity she was too well known not to be hounded and embarrassed if news of the surgery leaked. So she became a Shadow Woman for six months.

“As you well know, John,” said Gloria, stroking her smooth, unscragged throat, “any woman in that predicament would die sooner than confess, even if the price is a murder hunt.”

“Yes, dear,” said the Commissioner, dark eyes twinkling.

“The cops never find any clothes worth wearing, do they?”

“No, dear.”

“Then that’s it. They’re all movie stars and socialites.”

“I appreciate your submitting your theory to me in writing, dear, but why have you signed it Maude Hathaway?”

“I like the name. Gloria Silvestri sounds like old vaudeville programs and fish on Fridays.”

Enquiries produced no professional cosmetic plastic surgeon operating in the vicinity of Holloman, though the Chubb Medical School had plastic surgeons aplenty, but attached to a famous burn unit. What Maude Hathaway’s effort said was that no stone would go unturned.

Delia had long passed beyond practical considerations. Her mind had fixed on the reason why any reasonably attractive woman in her late twenties to early thirties would voluntarily isolate herself from her fellow human beings? Not that Delia was fool enough to exclude the possibility that obedience was ensured by a hostage situation like the kidnapping of a beloved man, woman or child, but that stretched the chain laterally as well as added to its length, and the more people were involved, the greater the chances of a situation falling apart. If not a hostage situation, then a death threat of some kind? Yet wouldn’t a woman tortured by worry about a loved one have a telephone in her house? None of the Shadow Women had telephones. Was there a set of rules involved? That hinted at a genuine mania, psychopathy, an utter absence of morals, ethics, principles. Easy enough to impose for a short period, but six months of living under the rigid quasi-mathematical torture of rules was a very long time indeed unless the subject had first been exhaustively brainwashed, which seemed impossible. Had the Shadow Women been jailed for long enough to turn them into semi-zombies? No, because what people they had met had seen them as nice, conversable, ordinary. Prison left visible scars.

There was something Delia called a “gibber factor,” though only a Jess Wainfleet would fully understand what she meant by the term. To Delia, no human being was truly inviolate, meaning that he or she could not be broken. Everyone had a breaking point wherein mental torture caused the mind to snap. The human being shattered into small pieces, unable to cope. In Delia’s world, they became a “gibbering idiot”—her father’s phrase—and resigned their hold on sanity. Six months of relentless mental torture would trigger the gibber factor, Delia was sure, yet what evidence was there that the Shadow Women had spent six months under relentless mental torture? The answer: there was no evidence. Each woman, she was sure, had commenced her strange six-month isolation voluntarily, and nothing left behind in the rented premises suggested that July and early August were any different from the earlier months.

That told Delia each of them owned an average intellect; that they were satisfyingly entertained by whatever their radio and television broadcast, and that if they read at all, it was newspapers, magazines and throw-away paperbacks. If they played solitaire or dominoes or did crosswords, any evidence was gone, and that probably meant they hadn’t. Everything left behind was cheap, ordinary and uninspiring: over-the-counter medicines, supermarket cosmetics. After Mary Tennant, no perishable foods were left behind, and none of the six had left household cleaners or a stock of plastic bags. Had someone cleaned up? If so, no attention had been paid to fingerprints, for the same set was found all over each apartment, presumably the occupant’s. None was on file with any large agency—a dead end.

Plenty of people vanished for a few months, then turned up unwilling to give an explanation; Missing Persons was full of files solved that way—by the subject—and from thence were sent for permanent storage to the Holloman PD repository out on Caterby Street. But no matter how innocent a disappearance might be, the file on closure was a fat one, thanks to biographical data accumulated as the investigation ground on, always too slowly to please the relatives. Whereas the Shadow Women were thin files, devoid of biographical data; none had a past, none seemed likely to have a future. Certainly no one had ever come forward with information about any Shadow Woman, and the date was rapidly approaching for 1969’s victim to bob to the surface.

They rented at the beginning of January, paid first and last month’s rent, vanished by the end of June, and were invaded by the letting agent in mid-August, two weeks after the last month’s deposit was exhausted. Which was why Carmine had put her on the case. August. Who would 1969 be? By now every Realtor in the county was aware of the Shadow Women, and taking immense pains with the details of any rentals in early January. Two likely names had come up at the time, but neither turned out a possible candidate; whoever she was, her rental must have fallen down a crack. That was usually the way, Delia reflected. Monday the fourth day of August today, a matter of ten to fifteen days to go ….

She glanced at her watch. An hour more, and she’d scoot. The pathetic little bunch of skinny files needed their photos back inside, but suddenly she decided to take them instead to the new police artist, Hank Jones.

Then she noticed a file Carmine had withdrawn from Caterby Street, and realized that he must have left it for her to look at as well. Yes, he’d clipped a note to it that said “Our most famous Missing Persons file.” Oh, it was old! 1925. Sidetracked, Delia pulled it forward and opened it upon an 8 x 10 black-and-white head shot of a very beautiful young woman: Dr. Eleanor (Nell) Carantonio. An up and coming young anesthesiologist at the Holloman Hospital, Dr. Carantonio had failed to turn up to give a morning’s scheduled anesthetics, and was never seen again.

A haughty, white-skinned face framed by fashionably shingled black hair, with dark eyes that managed to flash fire even in the picture …. No Shadow, this! An opinion borne out by reading the forty-four-year-old file, which revealed circumstances very different from the Shadows. Dr. Nell’s profession was known, her life an open and unimpeachable book, and she was wealthy. Since she left no will, her nearest relative, a first cousin named Fenella (Nell) Carantonio, had had to wait over seven years to take possession of two million dollars and a huge mansion on the Busquash Peninsula. Eleanor—Nell. Fenella—Nell. No trace of the young woman’s body had ever been found, from 1925 to this day. Age twenty-seven when she vanished. The second Nell was nine years her junior, and her only known relative.

No help or guidance there, said Delia to herself, picked up her photos and got to her feet. Off to the ME’s air-conditioning and the artist the ME’s and PD shared. As she walked Delia continued to think about the most baffling puzzle of them all—why did the Shadow Women have studio portraits of themselves? And why had the portraits been left behind?

She was convinced the women were dead, but no bodies had ever come to light, and she had excellent reason to know that even the most bizarre methods of getting rid of bodies had been thoroughly explored. If a body were considered as over a hundred pounds of meat and fat plus some really big bones, then the disposal of that body was every killer’s worst nightmare.

Sadly (for Delia was a woman who adored flamboyance) what her case seemed to be boiling down to was rather humdrum. A killer who prowled in search of shy, retiring, very ordinary women, and, having found one, did whatever his fantasy prompted before taking her life, then managed to dispose of her invisibly. The rental of apartments was a year-round activity, and in a student town many of them were let furnished. The dates were his kinks, had nothing to do with the women. Delia was obliged to admit to herself that she was automatically drawn to the more extravagant explanations of these rare cases that made no sense. In the cold blast of air that assaulted her as she went around in ME’s revolving doors, she decided that the Shadow Women would end in a shabby, dreary manner satisfying no one. What an indictment her adjectives and adverbs were! Humdrum, shabby, dreary. Lives were being taken, and she was cataloguing the method of their taking on a scale graduated in degrees of glamour! Well, she knew why: it kept Delia the detective on her toes, whipped up energy, enthusiasm. Flippant it may be, but as a technique it worked a treat.

Ginny Toscano had attained sixty, and was retiring, which led to some quiet cop cheers; when she had started out as the police artist the work had been far more, to use her word, “civilized.” Some of what she was asked to do these days she found beyond her stomach or her talents, for the world—and her job—had changed almost out of recognition. And the very moment that a new artist was hired, Ginny used up the time until her birthday on annual leave.

The big studio and its accompanying laboratory/kitchen had been tastefully decorated in shell-pink, institution oak and off-white, but when Delia entered she found hardly a morsel of Ginny remained. I hope, thought Delia, that the poor dear is having a wonderful time in Florence!

The walls were almost completely papered in unframed posters of landscapes not from this Earth, their skies transected by sweeping curves of what looked like Saturn’s rings, or holding two suns as well as several moons, while the foregrounds were soaring multicolored crystals, or weird mountains, or erupting volcanoes, or cascades of rainbow-riddled fluid. One depicted a robot warrior mounted on a robot Tyrannosaurus rex at full trundle, and another was the famous half-buried Statue of Liberty from Planet of the Apes. Fabulous! thought Delia, bewitched.

In the midst of this other-worlds environment a thin young man was working on the top sheet of a slab of paper with a dark German pencil, his models clipped to the top of his architect’s table, well above the paper block: a series of photographs of Jeb Doe, with one of James Doe at either end of the row.

“Bugger!” Delia cried. “Lieutenant Goldberg beat me to it.”

He looked up, grinning. “Hi, Delia.”

“Any chance you can squeeze me in too, Hank?”

“For you, baby, I’d squeeze to death.” He put his pencil down and swiveled his high chair to face her. “Sit ye doon.”

In Delia’s estimation he had one of the most engaging faces she had ever seen—impish, happy, radiating life—and his eyes were unforgettable—greenish-yellow, large, well spaced and opened, and surrounded by long, dense black lashes. His negroidly curly hair was light red and his skin color that of a southern Chinese. His head was big but his face, delicately fine-featured, tapered from a high, wide brow to a pointed chin; a dimple was gouged in each cheek, this last a characteristic that made Delia weak at the knees. He made Delia weak at the knees—Platonic, naturally!

If it were impossible to gauge all the kinds of blood in his veins, that went doubly so for his voice, unexpectedly deep and quite lacking an accent that pinned his origins down; he didn’t roll his r’s like an American, clip his word endings like an Oxonian, drawl his a’s like an Australia, reverse his o’s and u’s like a Lancastrian, twang like a hillbilly—she could go on and on, never reaching an answer. To hear him talk was to hear traces of every accent, adding up to none. No arguments, Hank Jones bore investigating.

Delia laid out her six photographs on a vacant corner of the bench at her side; Hank wheeled over to study them closely.

“I’m not sure that I need a drawing,” she said, “as much as I need an expert opinion. The idiotic hair-do fashion makes it hard to assess the shape of the cranium in the first three, but it seems to me that it’s likely to be quite round. In fact, I came to the conclusion that if I were to go on bone structure alone, in all six cases I could be looking at the same skull, despite the differing noses, eyebrows and cheeks. Actually, I want you to shoot down one of my more potty ideas—that these six women are in fact all the same woman, someone highly skilled in the use of prostheses and stage makeup. If her true eyes were light in color, she could achieve any color with contact lenses, and wigs and hair dyes in the Sixties are a piece of cake. So tell me I’m baying at the moon, please! Shoot me down!”

His own eyes lifted from the six photographs to rest on her face thoughtfully, and with considerable affection. He didn’t know why he had taken one look at her in the parking lot and liked her so much, save that his eccentric soul recognized a partner in crime. That day she had been wearing a tie-dyed organdy dress in strident scarlet admixed with mauve and yellow; it was miniskirted at midthigh and displayed her grand piano legs clad in bright blue tights rendered queasily opalescent by the sheerness of their weave. Though in Hank’s judgment the outfit’s finishing touch was a pair of black lace-up nun’s shoes, which she told him owned both comfort and pursuit power. One day, he vowed, he would paint well enough to capture the character and lineaments of her face, from the mop of frizzy, brassy hair to the mascara-spiked lashes and the beefy nose; but how could he ever manage the mouth, so lipsticked that little streaks of red crept up into the fissures around it and made it look as if sewn shut with bloody sutures? Though she flirted with grotesquerie, she deftly avoided it by the force of her personality. Yes, she was definitely his kind of eccentric—only where did fact leave off and fantasy begin? Hank suspected that might take a long time to discover. In the meantime, the journey was going to be fun.

Today something had gotten her down. He had never seen her so dismally dressed. Wasn’t she enjoying life without the Captain?

After fifteen minutes by the clock, Hank put the photos in a pile and handed them to Delia.

“Very similar skulls, but each one is different,” he said. “I can see why you concluded they’re the same skull, so I may as well start with the matches. The ethnic group is northwestern European, with eyes set the same distance apart and near-identical orbits. Jeez, how I hate the air brush! I had to zap each one with my X-ray vision to find the true edge of the orbit, but I did, baby, I did! Eyes being the windows of the soul …. You based your same-skull hypothesis on the orbits and the zygomatic arches. But—but—the nasal bone and cartilage structure is different skull to skull—the width of the mouth—the height of the external auditory meatus—and the maxillary bone sprouting the upper teeth. The lower down the face, the more marked the differences become. Tendons and ligaments attach to their sites on the skull in highly individual ways. The differences in faces always go clear down to bone somehow. I hate to be flyin’ the Spitfire put your fuselage on the ground, honey-baby, but you are smokin’ wreckage in a Flanders field.”

He thrust his face close to hers and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Maybe I did shoot you down on the skull, but I’d swear on my collection of Blackhawk comics that the same guy snapped all the photos—he’s wall to wall idiosyncrasies with a camera.”

“Really?”

“My Captain Marvel comics too it’s the same guy, and he ain’t no professional. Good camera, no lighting but Nature.”

“No one has spotted that,” Delia said, very grateful. “We did think each woman had her portrait done by someone rather fly-by-night, but it’s a hugely over-populated field, photography, and we thought each one different enough.”

“Not in the ways that count,” Hank said positively.

“Oh, this is wonderful! It really, really helps.”

“How?” Hank asked, eager to learn.

“I won’t bore you by going on at length about how tenuous our theories have been—we’ve felt at times like dogs chasing their own tails. All that link these six disappearances are conjectures a good lawyer could demolish in a minute as wishful thinking. There are common elements: each follows the same calendar, was noticed for six months, then vanished leaving a few cheap possessions behind and the landlord out of pocket for two months’ rent. That’s it!” Delia clutched at her hair, growling. “However, Hank, there’s a smell about it that tells us the Shadow Women are linked, that foul play has been done, and that only one perpetrator is involved. In reality, they’re six entirely separate cases with no tangible evidence connecting any one of them to any other. Each woman left just one unusual thing behind—a studio portrait of herself. Hank, you’ve broken fresh ground for us, you’ve told us that the same person took all six Shadow portraits. As a lead it mightn’t go anywhere, but that’s not what’s so important about it. Its significance lies in the fact that it tells us the six cases are definitely linked, that the similarities are neither accidental nor coincidental.”

She waved the photos triumphantly. “Dear boy, you’re an absolute brick! An idiosyncratic amateur photographer, at that! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

And she was gone.

Hank stared after her for a moment, cast into the state of minor fugue Delia inspired in many. Smiling and shrugging, he wheeled his high chair back to the sloping drawing board and its slab of paper. Working on the Jeb Doe skull because his was the freshest corpse, Hank found the 6B pencil he had worn to the required slant of tip, and chuckled to himself.

From A to Z in a second, he thought: stripping the flesh off Delia’s heads to come at a skull, now laying flesh on Jeb’s skull. Man, what a cool way to earn a living! Sure beat imparting a white sparkle to teeth in an advertising agency, and how close had he come to that, huh? Who said learning anatomy from cadavers was a waste of time compared to a life class? If he hadn’t snuck into the Med School dissecting labs, he wouldn’t be here at all.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969

Though the darkness was too stygian to permit his having any idea of the size of the place he was in, Abe Goldberg, sensitive in such matters, knew that it was immense. He was sitting in one of a row of what felt like theater seats, thrust there by the willowy young man who had met him at the front door; said willowy young man had led him through an incredible house, down a ramp, opened a door onto this night, and whispered “Wait!”

A voice spoke, weary and resigned. “Light it.”

Part of the blackness became a purple pool that illuminated a huge gold throne occupied by a naked, sexless dummy, and spread far enough to reveal the inner edge of a couch to one side.

Silence reigned. Someone heaved a melodramatic sigh, then the weary voice spoke again.

“This may come as a shock, Peter, but the truth is that you couldn’t light your own farts.”

A different set of vocal cords screeched, the noise overridden by His Weariness, who went on as if uninterrupted.

“I know this is a musical comedy, Peter, but this song-to-be is curtain down on Act One. It’s the hit of the show—or so the authors insist.” The voice gathered power. “King Cophetua is smitten, Peter darling, smitten. Smitten! Servilia the slave girl has just told him to fuck off, danced away warbling for her shepherd-boy with no notion in her empty little head that he’s really an Assyrian wolf using her to descend on King Cophetua’s fold. Are you following me? Have you gotten the general gist? King Cophetua is blue, blue, blue! That doesn’t mean you have to light him blue, but why in Ishtar’s name have you lit him purple? What you’ve created looks like Beelzebub’s boudoir drenched in sicked-up grape juice! Mood, Peter darling, mood! This isn’t lighting, it’s blighting! And I am vomit-green!”

The screeches had dwindled to sobs of distress, the dominant voice seeming to feed off them until it lost all its weariness. Suddenly it shouted, “Lights up!” and the entire space in which Abe was marooned sprang into glaring relief.

Abe stared at what he presumed was an entire stage in nude disarray, a full forty feet high; its upper half was a grid of rods, rails, booms, rows of lights on thin steel beams, gangways, and walls solid with boxes, machinery, rods. The wings, he was fascinated to discover, communicated as one space with the back of the stage. His mechanical eye discerned hydraulic rams—expensive! No amateur playhouse, this, but the real thing, and constructed with a disregard for cost that put it ahead even of some major Broadway playhouses. Though it wasn’t a theater; audience room was limited to perhaps fifty stall seats.

The owner of the voice was approaching him, the willowy man at his side, no doubt to fill him in. Abe gazed in awe.

Easily six and a half feet tall, he was clad in a black-and-white Japanese kimono of water birds in a lily pond, and wore backless slippers on his feet; gaping open as his legs scissored stiffly, the kimono revealed close-fitting black trousers beneath. His physique was too straight up and down to be called splendid, yet he wasn’t at all obese. What my Nanna would have called “solid” thought Abe: a basketballer, not a footballer. Feet the size of dinghies. Tightly curly corn-gold hair, close-cropped, gave Abe a pang of envy; Betty had finally managed to push him into growing his fair, thinning hair long enough to cover his ears and neck, and he hated this modern look. Now here was an internationally famous guy sporting short-back-and-sides! This guy had no wife, so much seemed sure. His facial features were regular and were set in an expression suggesting a kind nature, though looks were treacherous; Abe reserved judgement. The eyes were fine and large, an innocent sky-blue.

How, wondered Abe, am I to reconcile his aura of kindness with his waspish tongue? Except, of course, that the rules of conduct in the theater world were rather different from others, he suspected. The artistic temperament and all that.

Mr. Willowy was now moving toward the weeping form of Peter the lighting blighter, clucking and shushing as he went.

On his feet, Abe stuck out his right hand. “Lieutenant Abe Goldberg, Holloman PD,” he said.

One huge hand engulfed his in a warm shake, then the Voice sat down opposite Abe by pulling a fused section of seats around. Something flashed as he moved; Abe blinked, dazzled. He wore a two-carat first water diamond in his right ear lobe, but no other jewelry, not even a class ring.

“Rha Tanais,” he said.

“Forgive a detective’s curiosity, sir, but is Rha Tanais your original name?”

“What an original way to put it! No, Lieutenant, it’s my professional name. I was christened Herbert Ramsbottom.”

“Christened?”

“Russian rites. Ramsbottom was probably Raskolnikov before Ellis Island, who knows? I ask you, Herbert Ramsbottom? High school was a succession of nicknames, but the one everybody liked best was Herbie Sheep’s Ass. Luckily I wasn’t one of those poor, despised outsiders picked sometimes to literal death.” The blue eyes gleamed impishly. “I had wit, height, good humor—and Rufus. Even the worst of the brute brigade had enough brain to understand I could make him a laughing-stock. I racked my own brain for a new monicker, but none sounded like me until, as I browsed in the library one day, I chanced upon an atlas of the ancient world. And there it was!”

“What was?” Abe asked after a minute’s silence, appreciating the fact that (a rare treat in a detective’s working life) he was in the presence of a true raconteur with considerable erudition.

“Family tradition has it that we originated in Cossack country around the Volga and the Don, so I looked at the lands of the ancient barbarians to find that the Volga was called the Rha, and the Don was called the Tanais. Rha Tanais—perfect! And that really is how I found my new name,” said Rha Tanais.

“You’d have to be a professor of classics to guess, sir.”

“Yes, it’s a mystery to the world,” Rha Tanais agreed.

Abe glanced across to where Mr. Willowy was concluding his ministrations to Peter the lighting blighter, and looking as if he was about to join them. This remorseless glare gave the lie to Abe’s impression of youth; Mr. Willowy was an extremely well preserved fortyish. At six feet he seemed short only when he stood next to Rha Tanais, but no other word than “willowy” could describe his body or the way he moved it. Coppery red hair, swamp-colored eyes, and wearing discreet but effective eye makeup. Beautiful hands that he used like a ballet dancer. Such he had probably been.

“Come and meet Lieutenant Abe Goldberg!” Tanais hollered, muting his tones as Mr. Willowy arrived. “Lieutenant, this is my irreplaceable other half, Rufus Ingham.” Suddenly he burst into bass-baritone song, with Rufus Ingham singing a pure descant.

“We’ve been together now for forty years, and it don’t seem a daaay too long!”

A bewildered Abe laughed dutifully.

“Rufus didn’t come into the world so euphoniously named either,” Tanais said, “but his real name is a secret.”

Rufus cut him short, not angrily, but quite firmly—which one was the boss? “No, Rha, we’re not talking to Walter Winchell, we’re talking to a police lieutenant. Honestly! My name was Antonio Carantonio.”

“Why try to hide that, Mr. Tanais?”

“Rha, my name is Rha! You mean you don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“This is The House! Carantonio is The Name! Abe—I may call you Abe?—the story has passed into Busquash mythology by now, they even tell it on the tour buses. I’m sure the Holloman police department must have files in the plural on it. In 1925, before Rufus and I were ever thought of, the owner of this house and a two million dollar fortune vanished from the face of the earth,” said Rha Tanais in creepy tones. “After seven years she was declared dead, and Rufus’s mother inherited. The original owner was Dr. Nell Carantonio, and Rufus’s mother was yet another Nell Carantonio.”

“I’m Carantonio because I’m illegitimate,” Rufus interjected. “I have no idea who my father is—my mother put him down on my birth certificate as first name, Un, and second name, Known.”

Rha took up the narrative. “Fenella—Rufus’s mother—died in 1950, but unlike the original Nell, she did leave a will. Antonio Carantonio IV—Rufus—got the lot.” He heaved one of his sighs, both hands flying into the air. “Can you imagine it, Abe? There we were, a couple of sweet young things, with a positive barn of a house and carloads of money! Fenella had quintupled the first Nell’s fortune and kept the house in repair. Our heads had always been stuffed with dreams and we’d made good beginnings, but suddenly we had the capital and the premises to do whatever we wanted.”

“And what did you want?” Abe asked.

“To design. Glamorous clothes for so-called unattractive women, first. Then bridal gowns. After that came stage costumes, and finally production design. Wonderful!” Rha caroled.

“Wonderful,” Rufus echoed on a sigh.

“Let’s get out of here and have an espresso,” said Rha.

Shortly thereafter Abe found himself drinking superb coffee in a small room off the restaurant-sized kitchen; its chairs were upholstered in fake leopard skin and were replete with gilded carvings, the drapes were black-and-gold-striped brocade, and the floor was a black-spotted fawn marble. All it needs, thought Abe, is Mae West.

“The nice thing about Fenella—Nell the second—is that she approved of gays,” said Rufus. “She was a good mother.”

“Stop chattering, Rufus! Let the man state his business.”

Abe did so succinctly, unsure whether rumors about the six Doe bodies had ever penetrated as high in homosexual strata as this one, since neither he nor his team had ever approached Rha and Rufus, but all worlds gossip. “I’m going to have at least two likenesses of the later Does shortly, and I’m here to ask if you’d mind looking at them,” Abe concluded. “One thing has emerged—that the Does were what my niece calls drop-dead gorgeous. Expert opinion says they weren’t—er—gay, but they were all around twenty years of age, and likely to be seeking careers on the stage, or in film, or maybe in fashion. Mrs. Gloria Silvestri said I should talk to you.”

Rha’s face lit up. “Isn’t she something? She makes all her own clothes, you know, so I take her around the fabric houses. Unerring taste!”

“Let the man state his business, Rha,” said Rufus softly, and took over. “I know what she was thinking. We always have scads of young things passing through and learning the trade. At seventy miles from New York City, Holloman is an ideal jumping-off place before hitting the urban nightmare. Girls and boys both, we see them. They stay anything from a week to a year with us, and I’m glad you found us first rather than last. We might be able to help, but even if it turns out we can’t, we can keep our ears and eyes open.”

Down went his empty coffee cup; Abe stood. “May I come back with my sketches when our police artist has finished?”

“Of course,” said Rha warmly.

On his way to the front door, Abe had a thought. “Uh—is Peter the lighting blighter okay?”

“Oh, sure,” said Rufus, he seemed taken aback that anyone should remember a lighting blighter. “He’s sucking a stiff Scotch.”

“Did you add the theater onto the house?”

“We didn’t need to.” Rufus opened the front door. “There was a ballroom out the back nearly as big as the Waldorf—I ask you, a ballroom? Debutantes running amok in Busquash.”

“I daresay they did back in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” said Abe, grinning, “but I can see why you gentlemen would find a theater stage far handier. Thanks for the time and the coffee.”

From a window the two partners in design watched Abe’s slight figure walk to a respectable-looking police unmarked.

“He’s very, very smart,” said Rufus.

“Definitely smart enough to tell a sequin from a spangle. I suggest, Rufus my love, that we be tremendously co-operative and astronomically helpful.”

“What worries me is that we won’t know anything!” Rufus said with a snap. “Gays aren’t the flavor of the month.”

“Or the year. Never mind, we can but try.” Came one of those explosive sighs; Rha’s voice turned weary again. “In the meantime, Rufus, we have a pool of sicked-up grape juice to deal with.” He stopped dead, looking thunderstruck. “Gold!” he roared. “Gold, gold, gold! When the richest king in the world is blue from unrequited love, he does a Scrooge McDuck and rolls in gold, gold, gold!”

“Open treasure chests everywhere!”

“A waterfall of gold tinsel!”

“He’ll have to roll on a monstrous bean-bag of gold coins, that won’t be easy to make look convincing—”

“No, not a bean-bag! The pool of gold dust at the bottom of the tinsel waterfall, numb-nuts! He bathes in his sorrow!”

Rufus giggled. “He’ll have to wear a body suit, otherwise the tinsel will creep into every orifice.”

Rha bellowed with laughter. “So what’s new about that for Roger Dartmont? Shitting gold is one up on shitting ice-cream.”

Still chuckling at their shared visions of Broadway’s ageing star, the immortal Roger Dartmont, Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham went back to work, imbued with fresh enthusiasm.

Abe went straight to see Hank Jones as soon as he returned from his interview with the design duo.

“How’s it going, Hank?”

The pencil kept moving. “A proposition, sir?”

“Hit me.”

The pencil went down. Hank flipped his left hand at two drawings of naked skulls side by side on his drawing board. “A black-and-white pencil sketch won’t do it, sir. James and Jeb will have different faces, but the sameness of the medium will diminish the differences and make the similarities overwhelming. They’re very much the same type, what I call a Tony Curtis face. I have to play up each man’s individuality! D’you get my drift, sir? Tony Curtis is a type.”

“Make it Abe, Hank. You’re as much a professional in your line as I am in mine, so formality’s not necessary.” What he couldn’t say was that he was beginning to realize their incredible luck in finding Hank Jones, clearly too good for the job’s pay and status. Not only was he an unusually gifted artist, he was also a young man who thought. In September he’d have to pow-wow with Carmine and Gus, then they could go to Silvestri to have Hank’s status and pay improved. “What do you suggest?” he asked.

“That I paint them rather than draw them,” said Hank eagerly. “Oh, not in oils—acrylic will do, it dries at once. Each Doe would have his natural color of hair, whatever the fashionable cut was that year, and the right skin tones. The eyes I’d do as blue, like Jeb’s.” Hank drew a breath. “I know speed is a part of my job description, but honest, I’m fast, even in paint. If you had a color portrait of Jeb and James at least, people’s memories would trigger better, I know they would. But it does mean a few extra days.”

Abe patted the artist on the back, no mean accolade. “Right on, Hank! That’s a brilliant idea.” He smiled, his grey eyes crinkling at their corners. “If you have a thoroughbred in the stables, don’t hitch him to a wagon. Use your talents, that’s what they’re there for. Take as long as it takes.”

“For Jeb, by Friday,” said Hank, delighted.

On the dungeon front, things were gloomier. Liam and Tony were wading through possible sites for a dungeon, but after Abe’s visit to Busquash Manor, they crossed it off their list; those gargantuan roofs hid not underground cells but a full-sized theatrical stage, complete with a trap room and pit below stage level. The whole area was in use, the acoustics superb—no, Busquash Manor was not a possible. When Kurt von Fahlendorf had been kidnapped they had ransacked Holloman County for a soundproof cellar, which made this new quest much easier. Most structures were listed, had been inspected then, and could be inspected again. The chamber where von Fahlendorf had languished had been filled in since. No local builder had installed a soundproof studio anywhere, and what new cellars had come into existence were just ordinary basements. War relics like gun emplacements hadn’t changed, and theaters in a try-out city like Holloman containing three repertory companies and a faculty of drama were, like Busquash Manor, in constant use.

“This sucks,” said Tony to Abe.

“It’s here somewhere,” Abe said stubbornly.

“Needles in haystacks,” said Liam, as disgruntled as Tony.

“Paint on, Hank Jones,” said Abe under his breath.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1969

Ivy Ramsbottom had invited Delia to “a late afternoon and entire evening of entertainment” at Busquash Manor, and Delia was bewildered. The invitation had come out of the blue last Thursday, which didn’t give a girl much time to sort out what to wear when the hosts were Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham. Oddly, it had been Jess Wainfleet who explained it yesterday over lunch at the Lobster Pot.

“No, Delia, you mustn’t decline,” Jess had said.

“I think I must. I don’t know Ivy’s brother and his friend from a bar of soap—if I came, it would look as if my reason for doing so was vulgar curiosity.”

“Believe me, it wouldn’t. The short notice is unusual, except that Ivy tells me the new musical Rha’s designing is hopeless. As they’re party animals, Rha and Rufus throw a party on the slightest of excuses, and they like to mix and match their invitation list,” Jess said, sipping sparkling mineral water. “I met them first at one of their parties, and Rufus, honoring my profession, I suppose, told me that every social get-together needed a certain amount of abrasion to go well. The recipe called for one stranger and several guests who set people’s backs up a little. Drop them into the mixture, said Rufus, and you were guaranteed to have a memorable party.” Jess grimaced. “My senior staff almost inevitably form the several guests who set people’s backs up—they’re a serious bunch who only attend to please me.”

“How extraordinary!” Delia stared at her friend, intrigued. “If you know all that, why oblige your hosts?”

“Because they’re two of the sweetest guys in the world, I love them dearly, and I love Ivy most of all.” The big dark eyes held a softer look than Delia was used to seeing; clearly it mattered to Jess that her motives be understood. “I’m very aware of my less admirable personality traits, the worst of them being an abnormal degree of emotional detachment—common in obsessive-compulsives of my kind. My affection for Ivy, Rha and Rufus is important to me, I’d rather make them happy than please myself. So I push my senior staff to attend Busquash Manor festivities, even if they dislike it.”

“It rather sounds to me,” said Delia shrewdly, “as if you dislike your senior staff.”

Jess’s laugh was a gurgle, the eyes brimmed with mirth. “Oh, bravo, Delia! You’re absolutely right. Besides, a Rha-Rufus party is a joy, and once they’re here, my HI bunch wallow in them. What they hate is being yanked out of their routines.”

“Then they’re obsessive-compulsives too.”

“They sure are! But please come, Delia.”

“What should I wear?”

“Whatever you like. Ivy and I will wear eveningified things—Busquash Manor is fully air-conditioned. Rha and Rufus will be in black trousers and sweaters, but Nicolas Greco will look like an advertisement for Savile Row and Bob Tierney will be in black tie. My bunch will dress down rather than up, and favor white—a mute protest at being pressured into attending.”

As a result of this lunch, Delia’s curiosity was so stimulated that she phoned an acceptance taken by a secretary, and ransacked her several wardrobes for something interesting to wear to what sounded like a sartorial free-for-all. She needed a diversion.

The Shadow Women had repaid the strenuous efforts of her last few days with absolutely nothing. The photographer responsible for the portraits hadn’t come to light, a sign of the times: the days when such a person had a shop kind of studio were gone save for an established very few. Nowadays prosperity was so widespread that any would-be artist could buy an excellent single lens reflex camera and advertise in the Yellow Pages. The difference in cost for wedding photos between one of these enterprising photographers and an established professional was slowly forcing the latter out of the market. So most of Delia’s time had been frittered away in phoning the would-be photographers of the Yellow Pages. Some had come into County Services to look at the portraits, but none had admitted to creating them.

Driving up in her own red Mustang, Delia found that parking space was available within the imposing mansion’s grounds, an expanse of tar marked with white lines and conveniently hidden by a tall hedge from the kind of landscaped garden that required no specialist attention or concentrated work: lawns, shrubs, an occasional tree. Once Busquash Manor had stood in ten acres on the peak ridge of the peninsula between Busquash Inlet and Millstone Beach, but at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century it had been subdivided, and four acres sold off in acre-lot parcels. The house itself was enormous, though the attic windows of its third storey suggested this had been a servants’ domain, leaving the family with two flights of stairs to climb at most. Excluding the third floor, Delia guessed there might originally have been as many as fifteen bedrooms.

She was more used to looking at the rear end of Busquash Manor, as this faced Millstone, where her condo sat at beachfront. A far less pleasing view, incorporating as it did an ugly acreage of sloping roofs that reminded her of a movie-theater complex in an outdoor shopping mall. From Ivy she had learned that the enormity of the roofs came from a genuine theater inside, mostly a gigantic stage. The house itself was built of limestone blocks and was plentifully endowed with tall, broad windows; where it really belonged, she decided, was at Newport, Rhode Island.

Inside, it revealed the unique eye and taste of its owners, though what in a lesser eye and taste would have been vulgarity here was lifted to a splendor that took the breath away. Had she known it, every piece of furniture and every drape had once adorned a Broadway stage in days when props had been custom-made by true artisans, and only the finest materials had been used. The colors were rich, sumptuous, and always uncannily right; there were chairs shaped like sphinxes, like lions or winged Assyrian bulls; walls turned out to be vast mirrors that reflected on and on into a near-infinity; one room was completely lined in roseate, beaten copper. Mouth agape, Delia trod across marble or mosaic floors, gazed at priceless Persian carpets, and wondered if she had gone through the looking glass into a different universe. No stranger to the trappings of wealth or to palatial houses, Delia still felt that Busquash Manor was an impossible fantasy.

Her nose was about level with Rha Tanais’s navel; she had to tilt her head far back to see his face, lit from within by what she sensed were warmly positive emotions. He gave her a delicate crystal glass of white wine; one sip told her it was superb.

“Darling, you are magnificent!” he cried. “How dare Ivy hide you? Come and meet Rufus.”

Who was already watching her, a stunned look on his handsome face. Organza frills upon frills in magenta, acid-yellow, orange and rose-pink. In shock, he stumbled to his feet.

“Delia darling, this is my other half, Rufus Ingham. Rufus, this is Ivy’s friend Delia Carstairs. Isn’t she magnificent?”

“Don’t ever change!” Rufus breathed, kissing her hand. “That dress is gorgeous!” He drew her toward a striped Regency sofa and sat down beside her. “I have to know, darling—where do you buy your clothes?”

“The garment district in New York City,” she said, glowing, “but once I get them home, I pull them apart and tart them up.”

“It’s the tarting up does it every time. What an eye you have—totally individual. No one else could ever get away with that dress, but you conquer it like Merman a song.” He smiled at her, his eyes caressing. “Dear, delicious Delia, do you know anyone here?”

“Ivy and Jess, but I seem to have arrived ahead of them.”

“Fabulous! Then you belong to me. D’you see the decrepit old gentleman posing under the painting of Mrs. Siddons?”

Rapidly falling hopelessly (but Platonically) in love with Rufus, Delia studied the elderly, debonair man indicated. “I feel I ought to know him, but his identity eludes me.”

“Roger Dartmont, soon to sing the role of King Cophetua.”

“The Roger Dartmont?” Her jaw dropped. “I didn’t realize he was so—um—up in years.”

“’Tis he, Delicious Delia. God broke the mold into a million pieces, then Lucifer came along and glued him together again, but in the manner Isis did Osiris—no phallus could be found.”

Delia giggled. “Difficult, if your name is Roger.” Her gaze went past Roger Dartmont. “Who’s the lady who looks like a horse eating an apple through a wire-netting fence?”

“Olga Tierney—a wife, darling. Her husband’s a producer of Broadway plays, including the abortion we’re working on at the moment. That’s him, the one in black tie who looks like a jockey. They used to live in Greenwich, now they have one of the islands off our own Busquash Point.” Rufus’s mobile black brows arched. “It’s a gorgeous place—or would be, if Olga weren’t one of the beige brigade.” His voice dropped. “Rumor hath it that Bob Tierney is overly fond of under-age girls.”

“An island,” said Delia thoughtfully, “would be excellent.”

Something in her tone made Rufus’s khaki-colored eyes swing to Delia’s face, expression alert. “Excellent?” he asked.

“Oh, privacy, sonic isolation, all sorts,” she said vaguely.

“Delicious Delia, what does a ravishingly dressed lady with an Oxford accent do for a living in an Ivy League town?”

“Well, she might discuss Shakespeare with Chubb undergrads, or run a swanky brothel, or operate an electron microscope, or”—a wide grin dawned as she paused dramatically—“she might be a sergeant of detectives with the Holloman police.”

“Fantastic!” he cried.

“I’m not undercover, Rufus dear, but I’m not advertising my profession either,” she said severely. “You may tell Rha, but I would prefer to meet everyone else as—oh, the proprietress of that swanky brothel or that expert on Shakespeare. Once people know I’m a cop, they become defensive and automatically censor their conversation. Would you have been so frank if you’d known?”

A slow smile appeared. “For my sins, probably yes. I have a lamentable tendency to voice what I’m thinking—isn’t that well expressed? I’m a parrot, I collect ways of saying things. But seriously, mum’s the word. However, your desirability mushrooms with every new snippet of information you feed me. I love unusual people!” His face changed. “Are you here on business?”

She looked shocked. “Oh, dear me, no! I wouldn’t be here at all if I didn’t know Ivy. My police cases are as decrepit as Roger, I’m afraid, though I admit that a detective never doffs her deerstalker hat either. So when I hear something interesting, I file it in my mind. We have lots of old cases we can’t close.”

“Age,” he said with great solemnity, “is the worst criminal of them all, yet perpetually escapes punishment. Ah! Enter the Kornblums! Ben and Betty. She’s the one in floor-length mink, he’s the one with the knuckle-duster diamond pinky ring. Betty is the sole reason to ban air-conditioning—it enables her to wear mink indoors in August. It wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t addicted to two-toned mink—the spitting image of a Siamese cat.”

“Does she keep Siamese cats?” Delia asked.

“Two. Sun Yat Sen and Madame Chiang Kai Shek.”

“What does Ben do to earn diamond pinky rings?”

“Produce plays and movies. He’s another backer. They used to have a penthouse on Park Avenue,” Rufus said chattily, “but now they live in the Smith place—you know where I mean, tucked away inside a cleft of North Rock.”

Delia straightened. “The Smith place, eh? Hmm! Privacy galore. Has Mr. Kornblum any sordid secrets?”

“He fancies ponies way ahead of Siamese cats.”

“A gambler? An equestrian? A practitioner of bestiality?”

“Darling, you are delicious! The ponies he fancies are in the back row of the chorus.”

“I thought they were called hoofers.”

“No. Hoofers can dance well, they’re in the front row.”

“But Holloman isn’t rich in chorus girls.”

“That’s what Betty thought too. What she didn’t take into account was Holloman’s thousands of beautiful girls at various schools. Ben attends classes on everything from typing to dancing to amateur photography.”

The very large room was beginning to look populated; about twenty people were dotted around it engrossed in talk larded with laughter, witticisms and, Delia was willing to bet, gossip. They all knew each other well, though some on arriving behaved as if considerable time had gone by since last they saw these faces.

True to his word that she belonged to him, Rufus Ingham took Delia on a round of introductions, feeding her information so guilelessly that no one on meeting her had any idea that Rufus was steering the conversation to yield maximum results for a sergeant of detectives.

Perhaps due to her diminutive size, Delia wasn’t sure she could ever make a close friend of Rha Tanais in the same way she knew she could of Rufus Ingham. It was just too much constant hard work encompassing someone that big. Political cartoonists sometimes drew General Charles de Gaulle with a ring of cloud around his neck, and Rha inspired the same feeling in Delia. Whereas Rufus provoked emotions that shouted a friendship as old as time; having met him at last, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. Had Hank Jones been Rufus’s forty, he would have ranked with Rufus; how strange, that in the space of one short summer she should have met two men of great significance to her, when it hadn’t happened since her first days in Holloman. Women friends were essential, but men friends were far harder to find, as Delia well knew. Very happy, she let herself be introduced.

Simonetta Bellini (born Shirley Nutt) bowled Delia over. The principal model of Rha Tanais Bridal, she was tall, thin, and moved with incomparable grace; her genuinely Scandinavian-fair coloring lent her an air of virginal innocence even her skin-tight lamé tube of a dress couldn’t violate. She could wear a hessian sack, Delia decided, and still look like a bride.

“Fuck, a spoiled shindig,” she moaned as Rufus left to hunt fresh quarry.

“I beg your pardon?” Delia asked, bewildered.

“The creepy shrinks are coming. Rha says shindigs like this, the shrinks get to come, but they spoil the fun,” Shirl said. “They look at the rest of us as if we’re animals in a zoo.”

“Shrinks do have a tendency to do that,” Delia agreed, her antennae twitching. “Why do they have to be invited?”

“Search me,” Shirl said vaguely.

According to Jess, Rha and Rufus asked the shrinks for their abrasive qualities, and according to Simonetta/Shirl, they were indeed perceived as abrasive. “You said shindigs like this one, Shirl—are there other kinds of shindig?” Delia asked.

“Oh, lots. But the shrinks only come to this kind.”

The quintessential bride, thought Delia, has gauze inside her head as well as on top of it.

But as Rufus piloted her from guest to guest, Delia noted that Shirl’s aversion to “the shrinks” was universal. So universal, in fact, that she began to wonder how true Jess’s explanation had been. Would two such affable men honestly blight their shindig for the sake of mental stimulation? It didn’t seem likely, which meant Rha and Rufus invited the shrinks to one kind of shindig to please Ivy, who begged the favor of them to please Jess. Thus far it was an ordinary party for about fifty people; drinks and nibbles were to be succeeded by a buffet, apparently, but people were still arriving. There were mysteries here, but they seemed to be centered on Ivy and Jess, whose home this was not; nor were Ivy and Jess footing the shindig bill.

While her body moved about and her tongue clacked acceptable banalities, Delia’s mind dwelled on Ivy and Jess differently than it had until this moment in their friendship, just two months old. I see far more of Jess than I do of Ivy, she thought; some of that is free choice, I know, but some is definitely Ivy’s doing—she travels to New York City frequently, she’s committed to Rha and Rufus by blood as well as business, and she lives an uphill walk away. Jess lives around the corner, our professions are slightly allied, and our schedules permit lunches once or twice a week. And while Ivy isn’t gigantic enough to be offputting for a midget like me, there’s no doubt she’s a Desdemona—borderline. So terrifyingly well-dressed! Funny, that Aunt Gloria Silvestri doesn’t cow me when it comes to clothes, whereas Ivy does. There is an aloof quality to her—no, that’s the wrong word. Opaque is better. Yet I like her enormously, which means the real Ivy hides behind someone she’s not. Ivy knows pain, she’s been hurt. I don’t sense that in Jess, whose hurts have been professional, I would think—her sex militating against her abilities. Ivy’s hurts have been of the spirit, the soul ….

Slender fingers snapping under her nose, Rufus laughing. “No gathering wool, Delicious Delia! I’d like you to meet Todo Satara, our choreographer.”

He had been enjoying a joke with Roger Dartmont and his feminine counterpart in stage fame, Dolores Kenny; they moved off while Todo remained. Probably a stage name, she decided, since he didn’t look Oriental: mediumly tall, balletic body movements, a face not unlike Rudolf Nureyev—Tartar? His vitality and sexuality left her breathless, even though he was past his dancing days. The look in his black eyes was disquieting; like coming face to face with a panther that hadn’t had a meal in weeks.

“By rights Delia belongs to Ivy and Jess,” Rufus said before following the famous singers, “but until they arrive, she’s mine, and I’m not sure I intend to give her back.”

What conversational tidbit could she throw at Todo to make him feel fed? “I admire great dancers so much!” she gushed. “The tiniest movement is sheer visual poetry.”

He swallowed it whole, delighted. “We are what God makes us, that simple,” he said, his accent pure Maine. “Actually you move pretty well—crisp and non-nonsense, like a competitive schoolmarm.” The sinister eyes, glutted, assessed her. “You are very deceptive, darling, under the frills you’re extremely fit and, I suspect, fleet. I bet you do the hundred yards in no time flat.”

With a mental salute to Hank Jones, she chuckled. “You’re the second man with X-ray vision I’ve met inside a week! My best time for the hundred yards was astonishingly fast, but I was in training then. Oh, it was hard!”

“I could teach you some marvelous comedic dance routines.”

“Thank you, kind sir, I can live without them.”

“A pity, you have stage presence. Don’t try to tell me you spend your leisure hours in a dreary beige room looking at television for mental occupation—I wouldn’t believe you.”

“You might be right,” she said coyly.

There was a stir at the door from the hall; Todo Satara stiffened. “Oh, shit! Off-key fanfare, and enter the loonies.”

Six people came in amid a cacophony of greetings, Rha and Rufus directing them where to put anything they didn’t wish to carry, exchanging kisses with Ivy and shaking hands with the rest, Jess included. That was interesting: an uneasy alliance between Ivy’s family and Jess Wainfleet?

Ivy took the best dressed award, as usual, in a floor length cobalt blue crepe dress, but privately Delia thought Jess magnificent in crimson silk. The two of them standing together quite eclipsed the wives of the millionaires.

The other four newcomers were the shrinks, three of whom she had already met over a Lobster Pot lunch. Number four, she now learned, was a psychiatric nurse named Rose who had married Jess’s senior assistant literally yesterday, and in consequence was Mrs. Aristede Melos. The two men wore white tropical suits, the two women knee-length white dresses—not precisely hospital gear, but definitely out of place in this peacocky house, its peacocky people. Well, they were shrinks, so they were playing some sort of mind game, Delia divined, and if as children they had been taught good manners, the lessons hadn’t struck or stuck. They coagulated clannishly, and needed no encouragement to eat or drink; now that they had arrived, the buffet was opened.

Todo and Rufus took Delia to the buffet and heaped her plate with goodies: lobster, shrimps, caviar, crusty bread, indescribably tasty sauces, and the best company in the room. Then, all three plates filled, the three of them repaired to a small table having just three chairs. Ideal for talking, but not yet, she thought, her eyes as busy as her antennae, thrumming on full alert.

Dr. Aristede Melos, Jess’s senior assistant, was a thin, dark man of forty-odd—strange, that nearly all the protagonists were around forty. His face was plain, his expression dour, and his eyes conveniently hidden behind thick-lensed glasses with horn rims. His brand-new wife was the bustling, cheery type, but looking into her pale-grey eyes didn’t inspire much cheer, Delia felt. Rose’s fair complexion would have benefited from pinker clothes; white simply bled her to a chalky effigy.

The other two shrinks were husband and wife: Dr. Fred and Dr. Moira Castiglione. They radiated a long marriage complete with a couple of kids. Delia knew that Jess valued the Castigliones more than she did Melos, whom she found stubborn and afflicted with tunnel vision. Moira was red-haired and hazel-eyed, had a plain face and little charm of manner, whereas Fred, a brown man, was outgoing and ebullient. He had the gift of seeming an intent listener, though whether he actually did listen was moot, for his eyes gave nothing away. Like most married couples in the same profession, they worked as a team, used each other to bounce ideas off, and had a conversational shorthand.

The meal ended, Todo excused himself, and Delia started to dig. “Rufus, exactly why do you and Rha invite Jess’s shrinks to your shindigs, as Shirl calls them?”

“Ah, you’ve sensed the negative feedback.”

“What rot! One would have to be dead not to sense emotions that strong. Your people dislike Jess’s shrinks intensely.”

“They do, which is unfortunate,” Rufus said on a sigh. “It’s all to do with music, with Jess’s comfort, and ultimately with our duty as well as our love for Ivy. It goes back to 1962, when we invited Jess to an evening very much like this one. She went back to HI raving about it, and her senior staff got it into their heads that they should have been invited too. So they nagged.”

“Over not being invited to a party thrown by people they didn’t know? Jess’s personal friends, unrelated to her work?”

“You’ll understand better when the evening’s over,” Rufus said, “and I’d rather you experienced what’s going to happen in the same ignorance Jess felt at the time, which is why I don’t want to go into explanations this minute. Just take my word for it, Jess’s shrinks felt left out in the cold, and thought they deserved to be let into the warm.” He shrugged, looked wry. “A work situation can be uncomfortable when the people who consider themselves indispensable get it into their heads that they’re unappreciated. They carped and nagged.”

“Jess is a very strong and fairly ruthless woman,” Delia said, unconvinced. “Senior professional staff behaving like children? As an explanation, Rufus, it’s weak, though I don’t doubt it’s the one fed to you and Rha—and possibly Ivy too.”

“Point taken. Personally I tend to think that Ari Melos or one of the Castigliones caught Jess out in a bureaucratic error she’d find embarrassing to explain.”

“More likely, yes. Capital criminals incarcerated for life as insane provide institutions like HI with their patients, and the paperwork is a nightmare.” Delia grinned. “You’ve whetted my curiosity, I’m dying to find out what’s so special about this kind of shindig. I must confess that the arrival of the shrinks looks a little like cabbage moths invading an orchid house.”

Jess and Ivy bore down on her; Rufus escaped.

“You both look sensational,” she said, kissing Jess’s cheek and, on a little upward leap, Ivy’s chin.

“I’m sorry we were so late,” Jess said. “A conference.”

“On an August Saturday?”

“Or an August Sunday,” Jess answered dryly. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen to you, Delia.”

“Oh, I understand. I love Rha and Rufus.”

“I knew you would,” Ivy said.

“Maybe it was better that you meet Rha and Rufus without our moral support,” Jess added, enigmatic black eyes gleaming. “It’s easy to see you’re in your element. Excuse me, girls, I see the great Dolores Kenny.” And off went Jess, looking excited.

Despite her stunning appearance, Ivy seemed—unhappy?—unwell?—uneasy? Something was wrong, though Delia fancied it had nothing to do with Rha, Rufus, Jess or the shindig. Perhaps she felt caught in the middle of the situation Jess’s shrinks provoked? But why should she feel that more than Jess did? No matter how she might have felt in 1962, when the contretemps occurred, by 1969 Jess obviously had come to terms with it.

Delia put her hand on Ivy’s arm. “Are you well, dear?”

A pair of beautiful blue eyes fell to rest on Delia’s face, a startled expression in their depths; then they began to fill with tears. The finely painted red mouth quivered for a moment, then Ivy visibly brought her unruly emotions under control, and smiled. “Yes, Delia, I’m well. But thank you for asking. You’re a very perceptive person.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Ivy dear, but I can tell when the people I’m fond of are troubled.”

“Troubled … Yes, troubled is a good word for my state of mind. It’s purely personal, and by tomorrow I’ll be fine. Do you believe in right and wrong? I mean the kind of thing they used to teach us in first grade?”

“Before we understood the importance of grey, you mean?”

“Yes, exactly.” She sipped her martini. “Let’s go over there for a minute, do you mind? No one will notice us.”

Curious and disturbed, Delia followed her towering companion to a Victorian love seat tucked in a corner and partially hidden by the graceful curling fronds of a belmoreana palm, and sat the opposite way to Ivy, yet heads together. How like the Victorians! she thought. Nether regions barred from each other, upper regions in close proximity. Keep the lovers chaste!

“What’s the matter?” Delia asked, disposing of their glasses on the broad arm separating her from Ivy.

“I’m considerably older than Rha,” Ivy said, “and Ivor, our father, was chauffeur, bodyguard, caretaker and God knows what else to the third Antonio Carantonio.”

Considerably older than forty? Shocked, Delia stared into the face near hers, but couldn’t see a single sign of age.

“I’ve lived in Little Busquash all my life,” Ivy continued, oblivious to the sensations she was triggering in Delia. “Rha’s and my mother was—was ‘simple’—she couldn’t read or write, and was barely capable of keeping house. When Antonio III died in 1920 and Dr. Nell inherited, Ivor kept on running things for her. Mind you, she was hardly ever there—university and medical school took priority. I loved Dr. Nell! When she disappeared my father was like a man demented, though I didn’t realize until later that he had expected to be mentioned in her will, that all his frantic behavior was really just Ivor looking for a will. Well, there wasn’t one, so he had to ingratiate himself with the new heir, Fenella—also Nell.”

Delia looked about uneasily, not sure where this story was going, and beginning to wonder if it should be aired in such a public place. Ivy proceeded to confirm her impressions.

“My father was a very strange man. He was heterosexual and homosexual—” She broke off when Delia grasped her hand, looking surprised. “What is it?” she asked.

“Ivy, now isn’t the right time or place for this. Are you free tomorrow? Could you come to lunch at my condo and tell me then?”

Relief made Ivy’s face sag; all at once Delia could see some of those extra years, even if not enough. “Oh, yes! I’ll come.”

Smiling as she left Ivy to the attentions of a group of her models, Delia joined the Doctors Castiglione. No need to conceal her profession from them; thanks to Jess, they knew she was a cop.

“It’s clear that you don’t feel like a fish out of water here, Delia,” said Dr. Moira. “You fit right into this menagerie.”

“Is that how you see it? As a menagerie?”

“What Moira means,” said Dr. Fred, “is that you’re extremely clever and resourceful.”

“Menagerie?” Delia persisted.

Dr. Moira sniggered. “A collection of queer animals, anyway.”

And I begin to see why they are disliked, she thought; they patronize. I’ll bet their qualifications are very ordinary, but does that include Ari Melos? Poor Jess! Public service salaries don’t buy brilliant helpers. “Queer as in homosexual?” she asked.

“Queer as in peculiar,” said Dr. Moira.

“Why come, if these are not your kind of people?”

The Castigliones stared at her as if she were—peculiar.

“Our abiding passion,” said Dr. Fred.

“And that is?”

“Music. Moira and I are trying to put an HI orchestra together—I conduct, she plays violin. Music does indeed soothe the savage breast.”

“Admirable,” said Delia.

Dr. Ari Melos and his new bride arrived, each drinking red wine; Melos was very pleased to be here, but Rose looked to be out of her depth.

“A Rha salon is one of the high points of my year,” Melos said, “and I can’t wait for Rose to experience what she’s only heard of until now. I wonder what treats there are in store?”

And grudgingly the Castigliones nodded.

Well, well, we move ahead, thought Delia; whatever it is has to do with music.

Todo Satara sidled up. Bent on being awkward? Delia got in first, hoping to divert him.

“How many of the Asylum inmates are HI patients, Doctor?” she asked, assuming an interested expression.

“All of them, if we wish,” Melos said, apparently unaware of Todo’s enmity. “However, at any one time I would say no more than twenty are actively participating in HI programs. You must surely know, Sergeant, that the M’Naghten Rules are so archaic a ‘guilty by reason of insanity’ verdict at trial is rare—the dementia goes on full display after the prison term commences. Anyone in the Asylum is clinically insane, which gives us a fascinatingly rich patient pool to draw from.”

Todo pounced. “Scary work,” he said. “How do you manage to keep your cool sitting in a session with a homicidal maniac?”

“Oh, really!” Melos exclaimed. “There speaks the ignorant layman. Sometimes I think the general public still believes that the warders wear suits of armor and keep the inmates at bay with high-pressure water hoses. Inmates are properly prepared for their sessions. If they need to be sedated, they are. It’s not dangerous work, Todo—in fact, it’s more likely to be boring.”

Dr. Fred took over. “HI has state and federal funds, and has one aim: to remove violent, sociopathic crime from humanity’s list of unacceptable behavior. One day we’ll be able to cure the physiologically violent criminal.”

“Oh, sure!” Todo sneered, looking militant. “It happens now, guys—some axe murderer is released as cured, and what’s the first thing he does outside the prison walls? Kills more people with his trusty axe. Psychiatrists play God, and that’s a very dangerous role.”

But Melos and Dr. Fred merely laughed.

“Blame the press, Todo, not psychiatrists,” Melos said. “No journalist ever wastes space on the thousands of successful cases. The one-in-a-million failure gets the publicity.”

Dr. Moira chimed in. “Setting an inmate at liberty isn’t under psychiatric control,” she said. “The steps taken to release a patient considered a danger to the community are multiple as well as agonizing for all concerned. Boards, committees, panels, reviews, outside consultations, exhaustive enquiries, investigations and tests—it’s a near-endless list.” She looked complacent. “Besides, Asylum inmates aren’t ever considered for release. HI is like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.”

Animation had crept in; the shrinks had undergone a sea-change now the subject was their work. If only, thought Delia, they could abandon their air of superiority, they might win a few fans, but they couldn’t. Her eyes encountered Jess, also listening, and saw an echo of her own sentiments; Jess too deplored their snobbery.

“I’ve never cottoned on to the idea of using tax dollars to create a place like HI,” said Todo, enjoying himself. “I mean, isn’t it bad enough that public funds have to keep the criminally insane fed and housed, without also providing health services ordinary citizens can’t afford? I hear that HI has a modern hospital capable of treating anything from a heart attack to cirrhosis of the liver.”

Rose piped up. “But how can it be helped?” she asked, sure of her ground. “This is a civilized country, people have to be treated for their illnesses. But what hospital can cope with violent patients who can’t be reasoned with? The Institute is a prison, and the general hospital side of it was installed to protect the community. Our psychiatric research unit is quite separate again, so is its funding.” Her rather plain and ordinary face had become flushed.

The mother defending her young, thought Delia; she’s new to this, and resents the criticism.

“There’s no altruism involved, Todo,” said Dr. Moira crisply. “Ours is a job that has to be done. The cost of long-term—no, life-long!—incarceration is so astronomical that we have to find some answers, or at least make the tax dollars go farther.”

“Our work is immensely valuable to society,” said Ari Melos. “In the long run, it’s units like HI that will make the whole problem of the criminally insane a cheaper exercise.”

I think, said Delia to herself, that I have just heard the same old arguments that come up every time these two disparate groups of people get together. Rha and Rufus invite them to please Ivy, who wants to please Jess, who wants to please her staff. And it’s all to do with music.

Around six, while the sun was still lighting the sky brilliantly, blinds and curtains were unobtrusively drawn, plunging the big room into semi-darkness. A most alluring after-shave essence stole into her nostrils, the mark of Nicolas Greco, whom she’d met only in passing. The Rha Tanais Inc. accountant of the Savile Row suits, easily the best-dressed man Delia had ever seen, and, she suspected, as close to indispensable as people got.

“Rufus has issued stern instructions,” said he, piloting her with a hand under her left elbow. “I am to put you in Fenella’s chair—it has the best outlook.”

People were taking seats all over the place, no system or method to it except for this one smallish armchair, which had a footstool and, across its padded back, a sign that said RESERVED. Placed in it, she had an uninterrupted view of one large, octagonal niche wherein a grand piano, a harp, drums, and music stands were located. Even Betty Kornblum of the Siamese cat wore an excited expression, and the shrinks, clustered together, were positively animated.

What had been an ordinary, if magnificent, party turned into what in Delia’s days at Oxford had been called a “salon.”

Rufus began it by playing Chopin on the piano well enough to entrance a Paderewski audience—glorious! Was this what he did for a living? One of the willowy waiters picked up a violin and Rufus passed to Beethoven’s fifth sonata for violin and piano; you could have heard a pin drop, so rapt and quiet was the audience. Roger Dartmont sang, Dolores Kenny sang, and they finished with a duet. Todo danced with a group of the waiters, males for one dazzling athletic number, females for a voluptuous dance, then males and females together for something balletic and graceful.

With pauses and intermissions it went on for five hours, and by the end of it Delia fully understood why all the badgering to obtain invitations for the shrinks went on. To be privileged to witness such first-class performances in the cozy intimacy of a salon was memorable enough to, pardon the hyperbole, kill for. The evening would, Delia knew, live in her memory forever. If anything puzzled her, it was the arrogance of the psychiatrists, who didn’t seem to grasp that they were being honored; rather, they seemed to think they were entitled. And that, she decided, had nothing to do with psychiatry. It was all to do with the mind-set of people who would, could they, ban all exclusivity from the face of the globe. A Rha and Rufus salon was exclusive, and they had managed to invade it. What did that make Jess?

“That was utter magic,” she said to her hosts as she was leaving, “and I want you to know that I deeply appreciate your asking me to come. Truly, I don’t take the privilege for granted.”

Rha’s eyes twinkled. “Rufus and I are greedy, darling,” he said. “Concerts are such a bore! Parking—crowds—coughs—strangers a-go-go—and never exactly the program you feel like. Salons are a total self-indulgence. No grubby money changes hands, performers who love to perform get to do their thing—terrific!”

“Even the loonies wallowed,” she said demurely.

“Poor babies! So ghastly earnest!”

“Were you a concert pianist, Rufus?” she asked.

“Never, Delicious Delia! Too much like hard work. No, I love to play and I keep my hands supple, but life’s too full of variety to lay one’s entire stock of sacrificial goats on just one single altar. I play to please me, not others.”

“If you eat British stodge, I’d very much like to ask the pair of you to dinner at my place,” she said, a little shyly.

“We’d love to come,” said Rha, and looked wary. “Uh—what is British stodge?”

“Bangers and mash for the main course—I drive to a butcher outside Buffalo for the bangers—absolutely authentic! And for dessert, spotted dick and custard.”

“How,” asked Rha seriously, “could we possibly turn down a spotted dick? Especially with custard.”

Delia handed Rufus her card. “Decide on a night, and call me,” she said, beaming.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 1969

Jess Wainfleet kept nothing of her professional life in the small house she owned one block behind the middle reaches of Millstone Beach; it was purely a gesture at the normality of having a private address. When HI had been built in 1960 she had fought to be let have an apartment on the premises, only to find her arguments overridden on the grounds that her own mental health was best safeguarded by living off-site. Once informed of the decision, she had accepted it with grace, and immediately acquired her house in Millstone, a shortish, cross-country drive from the Asylum.

The place did come in handy, she admitted; it was somewhere to put her enormous collection of papers, journals and books, it held her wardrobe of clothes, it had laundry facilities, and it was a mailing address. What it was not was a home: that was HI, for Jess was one of those people who literally lived for her work.

Within six months of HI’s being finished, she had organized herself. A bathroom in close proximity to her suite of offices became exclusively hers; opening off it was a room originally intended as a rest and recuperation area for a member of the staff feeling under the weather, and this too Jess commandeered. To all extents and purposes the Director of HI was enabled to live on the premises provided neither bathroom nor rest room suggested that she was making a home there.

Riddled with complexes and well aware of the degree of her obsessive-compulsive psychosis, Jess had managed to make an iceberg of them; what showed was the tip, the rest successfully buried. It would not have been possible were she intimately involved with another person, but since her psychic weaknesses were benign and she had no intimate friend, her colleagues accepted her failings as they did their own—as part and parcel of the profession.

The only person who had ever broken through Jess’s defensive wall was Ivy Ramsbottom, a fellow obsessive of about the same degree—everything compulsively straightened, catalogued and tidied, without going over the top into a clinical mania.

“The world is full of people like us,” Jess had said to Ivy on first meeting, just after noting that Ivy’s china-headed pins were stuck in their little cushion in a shaded pattern that turned them into a graduated rainbow. “It would kill you to stick a black-headed pin into that row of red ones, wouldn’t it?”

A startled Ivy laughed, and owned that it would.

Jess had been walking on Holloman Green to take in the beauty of its copper beeches when her eye caught a fascinating picture framed by cuprous leaves: a jet-black shop window containing three unrealistically slender plastic mannequins, a bride and two bridesmaids clad in fabulous dresses. Above the black window it said in white letters Rha Tanais Bridal. Unable to resist, Jess had crossed the road and walked into the shop. It was a large premises whose changing booths were big enough to hold a client in a full crinoline, and whose dress racks were entirely devoted to wedding clothes.

An extremely tall, attractive woman in a modish purple dress approached her, smiling.

“You’re here out of curiosity, not custom,” the woman said as she shook hands. “I’m Ivy Ramsbottom.”

“I’m Dr. Jess Wainfleet, a psychiatrist,” Jess said bluntly, “and your window fascinated me. The crowds it draws! Even cars passing by slow down to a crawl.”

“There’s not a woman born doesn’t yearn to be a bride. Come into my den and have an espresso.”

That had been eight years ago. The friendship had bloomed, mostly because of their shared obsessive tendencies—it was so good to have someone to laugh with about them! In Ivy, the type was pure, extending to meticulously straight notes on a refrigerator door and the pattern on the china facing all the same way, whereas in Jess it was joined by a manic quality that pushed her to work too hard, sometimes become impatient.

Of course by now Jess knew Ivy’s story, and had been of help to her; the insights and sensitivities of her field made her the best kind of confidante an Ivy could ask for. If there was pain and sorrow in it, that was because Ivy couldn’t reciprocate with the kind of advice Jess’s problems needed. Those, she continued to bear alone and unaided save for the act of friendship itself.

So after the salon at Rha and Rufus’s place, Jess visited her house only long enough to change out of evening wear into an HI outfit of trousers and a plain blouse; then she went home: that is, she drove out to the Asylum.

First step was to patrol her kingdom, its shiplike corridors of rails and unmarked, anonymous doors; sometimes she opened one and entered a particularly beloved room, such as the neuro O.R. When she had agreed to take this job in 1959, she had insisted that HI have all the appurtenances of a general hospital; it cost money, yes, but general hospitals weren’t geared for criminally insane patients in any way, especially security. So when an Asylum prisoner became ill, he was treated at HI, even including surgery or intensive care. Of course the O.R. was also used for experimental animal surgery, chiefly primates—how did one deal with the Todo Sataras of this world, with their tax dollars and inability to understand that trying to treat the violently insane in a general hospital ended up being more expensive than an HI?

Finally, as the big clock on the wall opposite her desk said 4.47 a.m., she eased into the padded armchair behind her desk and opened the cupboard door that occupied her desk’s right side. A safe with a combination lock came into view. Cupping her hand around the striated and sparsely numbered disc, she performed the necessary twirls back and forth until, with a faint “thunk” the last tumbler disengaged. Her hand dropped. A stupid thing to do—anyone trying to see her manipulate the disc would have to have eyes in the end of the chair arm, yet still she did it every single time. That was the obsession, of course. Like knowing no one’s back was going to break because you trod on a crack—but what if someone’s back did break? Therefore you stepped over the crack just to make sure. Rituals were so powerful, so stuffed with meanings that went all the way back to the apes.

“Language,” she said as she lifted bundle after bundle of files out of the safe, “is an expression of the complexity in a brain. Like the verb ‘want.’ An animal can indicate want by making some physical movement or gesture of vocalization aimed at want fulfilment. ‘I want it!’ Only a human can actually say it, including indications of the degree of want, the specific kind of want, the niche want occupies. Without moving any muscles except those of the lips and tongue and upper airway. How do the pathways open up between an infant’s saying ‘I want!’ and a mature adult’s saying ‘I want, but I can’t have my want because to take it would destroy someone else’s superior entitlement to it?’”

Her voice died to a mutter. “What, in the pathways to maturation, can possibly overcome the most primal urge of all—want? Oh, Jess, there is an answer, and you’re the one will find that answer, you are, you are!”

It was a big office, and well furnished, but she hadn’t lit the overhead fluorescents, just flicked on the green-shaded lamp goosenecked to her desk; the room’s far corners were plunged into utter darkness, and unexpected shadows lurked, shook, trembled whenever the worker at the desk changed position. Something in Jess loved this encroaching blackness—as if she, and she alone, held it at bay; it was a harmless demonstration of power, and, being harmless, could be condoned. Mindless power—now that was something else again, never to be condoned.

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