Naked Cruelty (28 page)

“I want to pull you in, Fernando, because I want to flood Carew with cops on election night and the night immediately after,” said Carmine. “It will be three weeks since Melantha Green, and his cycle is a three-week one. If I'm wrong, I won't ask for another date, because he'll have gone to some unpredictable cycle only God could solve. We have to be seen to be doing something to protect the community, and this is the best suggestion I have.”

“Have you talked to the Commissioner?” Fernando asked.

“Not yet. If you have a better idea, I'd rather know now.”

That was the trouble with having new feet in Danny Marciano's shoes; Carmine didn't know Fernando Vasquez well enough yet to divine which way he'd jump in any given situation. Danny had jumped the way he was pushed by Silvestri or Carmine, but those days were gone, and had had their bad side; too many empires were built, too many perks and privileges were sanctioned. In time Fernando would settle down and settle in, but his Latin roots were Spanish, not Italian, which made a big difference. This was his first major job in a non-Hispanic area, and he was still groping for the right way to go about things.

“We can't have young women raped and murdered,” Fernando said. “I've read enough about this case to know that no stone's gone unturned. The guy's like a ghost—but sex killers always are. No familiar tracks.”

“Now he's killing, he'll never stop,” Carmine said, “unless he's caught. One day he'll make a serious mistake. I want to flood his victim area with cops to help push him into making that mistake. Will you give me uniforms?”

“As many as I can spare.” Fernando held up one hand, a beautiful member, square in the palm, with long, tapering fingers. “But one thing I ask, Carmine.”

“Ask.”

“Let's not notify my guys until election day midday, when I'll call in extra men. I'm not saying there are leaks in my division, but I'd rather make sure the Dodo has as little time as possible to prepare. Agreed?”

“That's a good idea. I won't mention it in Detectives either. That way, if the Dodo is planning to go Tuesday night, he'll have no reason not to until Tuesday afternoon. He may decide then to abort, but it's short notice, and he doesn't strike me as the kind to change his plans unless he absolutely has to. A longer wait might spook him, a short one is less likely to.”

“Have you a plan?” Fernando asked.

“Nothing to rival Alexander the Great, no. I just need as many men as possible in cars and on foot.”

“I can give you ten cars—I daren't make it more. Thirty foot patrols of two men each. That skins me dangerously, Carmine. If anything unrelated happens elsewhere in Holloman, bearing in mind what kind of year the country's had, things could explode.” Despite his pessimistic words, Fernando looked remarkably cheerful. “But they won't. If anything happens, it will be earlier, and you won't get any reinforcements at all.”

Carmine reached out a hand. “Thanks, Fernando.”

It was shaken warmly. “My thanks to you, Carmine. If you didn't have a weird and quirky detective named Abe Goldberg, all my uniforms would have meant nothing to Kurt von Fahlendorf. I suggest we go see the Commissioner.”

It would not have surprised Helen MacIntosh to learn that Captain Delmonico had deliberately sidelined her to West Germany and Munich, though why she should suspect him of ulterior motives lay deeper than her consciousness. After nearly two months in Detectives, she had concluded that the Captain's unit was so tightly knit there might be some activities he didn't want her to know about. These activities were concerned with personalities rather than events, which meant she honestly didn't care one way or the other about them, but she was sharp enough to sense that he might perceive her differently than she did herself.

By far the hottest item on her secret agenda was the uncovering of the von Fahlendorf kidnappers. Why not the Dodo? Because the laurels for catching him would inevitably be scattered among several detectives, with the Captain himself at the top of the pyramid. Not good enough, just not good enough! Helen was intent upon winning all the laurels for herself, which negated the Dodo. So when she was offered the chance to investigate the von Fahlendorfs in Munich, she leaped at it.

The most uncomfortable part of the expedition was Kurt's attitude to her; though she had told him explicitly that she was pretending to be his fiancée, by the time they boarded their plane he had somehow become convinced that the engagement was as real as the plane itself. A nuisance, but one she was prepared to suffer considering the prize.

With time differences, they arrived close to midnight at Munich; she wouldn't get to meet the family until breakfast of Saturday, probably. A large Mercedes car met them, but again, no representative of the family came with it; the uniformed driver informed Kurt in German that it was past the family's bedtime. The worst feature of the trip, Helen reflected as she climbed in, was that she spoke no German, and had to take Kurt's word for it when he translated. Kurt himself grew more jovial the closer to his home he got, and seemed to regard the family's absence as normal.

What she could see of the house when the car drew up an hour later told her that it was huge by American standards; more a palace than a mansion. Her two bags were whisked inside, Kurt kissed her in the vast foyer, and she was conducted up a curving flight of purple Levanto marble stairs to her quarters, a better word than bedroom, as she had a sitting room and a little kitchen as well as a bedroom, and her bathroom looked as if mad King Ludwig of Bavaria had designed it, between the marble swans, dolphins and seahorses that swooped, frisked and floated all over green marble weeds and pink marble shells.

She let the maid finish unpacking her bags, bestowed a ten-dollar note upon the astonished girl, pushed her out the huge double doors, and sat down at a desk in her sitting room to enter her journal, as she wasn't very tired. Like Kurt, Helen had the knack of sleeping on planes. First class helped, if only he'd admit it, the skinflint.

She met them at breakfast, though no one had told her what time it was served, or where; her answer was to venture out of her quarters at seven, and start to wander. A chance meeting with the butler, who spoke good English, established a valuable friendship. Clearly enchanted by her youth and beauty, he beamed.

“You are too early,
fräulein
,” he said. “The maid would have brought you coffee at eight, and breakfast when you wanted.”

“Oh, I'm a lark, not an owl,” she said, losing him with the metaphor. “I'll eat with everyone. What's your name?”

“Macken,
fräulein
.”

She glanced around the blue, cream and gilt of the room and looked conspiratorial. “Meet me here after breakfast, Macken, then you can take me on a grand tour.”

“But Herr Kurt—”

“I intend to give him plenty of time with his family.”

And off she went, following Macken's directions, to a small parlor wherein the family breakfasted at seven-thirty.

Five people sat at a round table, in the center of which stood a big basket of crisp white bread rolls whose aroma assailed the hungry Helen's nostrils as truffles did a hound's, a plate of assorted cheese slices, a plate of sliced German sausage, and a plate of salami. At each place—there was a sixth—sat a bowl of butter. Breakfast, it seemed. Alien, but tempting.

The men rose; Kurt performed the introductions, delighted that his Helen had risen early.

She smiled at everybody, sat down, and drank her first cup of coffee at a gulp. It was refilled as promptly as Minnie did a mug at Malvolio's.

They were strikingly handsome. Kurt set the family pattern: tall, a strong physique, frost-fair hair, pale blue eyes, the kind of features a few movie stars were lucky enough to have, as they obviated any requirement to act. Though she was not really a von Fahlendorf, the Baroness too was very fair, but sleek and exotic, with green eyes. The dark one was Josef, who quite took the breath away: thick black hair, large and dreamy black eyes, the face of an Adonis.

“My dear, I am so glad to meet you,” Dagmar said. “Kurt has written so much about you. Mama, what do you think?”

The Baroness smiled with all the enigma of a cat. “She is beautiful indeed, Dagmar.” Then, to Helen, “I always knew that American cosmeticians were superbly clever. Which company makes your hair dye and what is it called?”

Mouth full of delicious fresh bread roll and butter, Helen blinked, swallowed in a hurry, coughed, almost choked. Oh, hell! she thought. Aristocrats come in two flavors—bitter and sweet. This bunch are so sure of their bloodlines and wealth that they say and do exactly as they like. Bitter? They'd make a lemon feel syrupy by comparison. I am in for a rough ride.

Aloud she said, “I don't dye my hair, Baroness. It's my father's family's color. My brother has it too.”

The two women exchanged a glance that said they didn't believe a word of her answer.

“You see,” said Dagmar, nibbling at a roll, “Fahlendorf Farben is contemplating a cosmetics branch, a line to be called
Domina
. That means—”

“Lady!” said Helen with a snap. “I'm well versed in Latin
and
Greek, ladies. In fact, I graduated
summa cum laude
from Harvard—a great university, I'm sure you know.”

“Helen's father,” said Kurt, looking bewildered, “is the president of another great university—Chubb.”

“Really? How nice,” said the Baroness.

She, thought Helen, must have a pedigree that makes the von Fahlendorfs look like hayseeds and yokels. I bet Catherine de Medici was an ancestress, right along with Lucrezia Borgia. I am going to have
fun
!

Josef was opposite Helen, and gave her what was probably his most charming smile. “Breakfast is a hurried meal,” he said, his English more heavily accented than that of his in-laws. “I look forward to a more leisurely conversation at dinner, Helen.”

“No more than I,” she said, trying to simper; Josef looked like a man who would succumb to a simper.

He gave her another smile, got to his feet, bowed, and clicked his heels before leaving.

“Oh, dear, flog the in-laws, eh?” said Helen, crunching her roll. “What a delicious breakfast! Nothing sweet in sight, yet nothing slimming. I love it. Is the sausage bologna?”

“No, kaiserfleisch,” said Kurt, who seemed to think it was his job to keep the peace. “It is more delicate.”

“It's yummy.” Helen piled some on to another roll, well buttered. “I could get fat on this breakfast, Kurt. Seriously, though, is Josef off to work?”

“We all are,” said Dagmar, a touch of ice in her voice. “Dinner is at eight, but we assemble in the red drawing room for an aperitif at half past seven. Macken will send someone for you, otherwise you might get lost.”

“Good thinking,” said Helen, on her third roll. “Kurt, do go with your sister, please. I'm off for a drive later anyway.”

He smiled at her and hurried after Dagmar's retreating form.

Not much of a dresser for a rich woman, Helen was thinking as she watched them; her skirt, sweater and coat hadn't come from Chanel or Balenciaga. In New York, I'd pick her as shopping at Bloomingdale's, not Bergdorf's. She wouldn't bother driving to Boston to do Filene's basement either.
Not
a clothes horse. Therefore, who is the mysterious woman who can rival the Duchess of Windsor? The Baroness is sartorially up to it, but she's too old. And there's something about her … A flaw in what looks like a perfect stone until you really look …

Macken was pottering around the blue, cream and gilt room when Helen walked in at a quarter of eight.

“What does a German butler do?” she asked as he led her down a long, fussily decorated hall. “My father has a butler at Chubb House, but he's more a superintendent of staff than anything else. He doesn't open the front door unless he happens to be passing, for instance, and he doesn't have a pantry full of silverware. We hire an indigent scholarship student to polish the silver.”

She chattered on, apparently oblivious to Macken's horror at her familiarity, until, passing into the ballroom, she decided she had softened him up sufficiently.

“Macken,” she said earnestly, her eyes on his seamed face rather than the splendor of a room that would have done credit to any palace, “you must understand that I'm far more your class of person than I am of the von Fahlendorfs. And no, I am not going to marry Kurt, so there's no indiscretion involved. I'm here because Herr Kurt had a horrible time while he was kidnapped, and he needed company to come home. In other words, I'm everybody's friend, nobody's fiancée.”

His eyes were grey and keen; they regarded her with liking and respect. “I understand, Miss Helen.”

“Good! We're supposed to fly home on Monday, but don't be surprised if it's tomorrow—Sunday. Kurt's unhappy here.”

“Yes. It is Herr Josef. Kurt cannot forgive him for the injuries to his sister.”