On Off (33 page)

“I quite like a cop boyfriend,” she said, smiling. “I’ve ordered, but asked Luigi to hold off for a while. You’re far too generous, never letting me pay at least my share of the bill.”

“In my family, a man who let a woman pay would be lynched.”

“You look as if you’ve had rather a good day for a change.”

“Yes, I found out bunches of things. Trouble is, I think that they’re all red herrings. Still, it’s fun finding out.” He reached across the table to take her hand, turned it over. “It’s fun finding out about you too.”

She squeezed his fingers. “Ditto, Carmine.”

“In spite of this terrible case, Desdemona, my life has improved over the last days. You’re a part of it, lovely lady.”

No one had ever called her a lovely lady before; she felt a rush of confused gratification flood through her, went a bright red, didn’t know where to look.

Six years ago in Lincoln she had thought herself in love with a wonderful man, a doctor; until, passing his door, she heard his voice through it.

“Who, Desperate Desdemona? My dear chap, the ugly ones are always so grateful that they’re well worth wooing. They make good mothers, and one never has to worry about the milkman, does one? After all, one doesn’t gaze at the mantelpiece while one is poking the fire, so I shall marry Desdemona. Our children will be clever into the bargain. Also tall.”

She had started making plans to emigrate the very next day, vowing to herself that she would never again lay herself open to that kind of pragmatic cruelty.

Now, thanks to a faceless monster, here she was living with Carmine in his apartment and perhaps taking it for granted that he loved her the way she loved him. Words were cheap — hadn’t the Lincoln doctor proved that? How much of what he had said to her originated in his job, his protectiveness, his shock at what had almost happened to her? Oh, please, Carmine, don’t let me down!

Carmine himself had decided not to man a watch; it wasn’t likely that the beginning of March would see zero Fahrenheit temperatures, so he was better off somewhere in clear radio contact with everyone else, and with a gigantic map of Connecticut pinned to a wall at his elbow. Two consecutive Ghost strikes in the far east suggested that this time the Ghosts would head north or west or southwest. The Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island state police had agreed to patrol their Connecticut borders thicker than flies on a carcass. It was war to the teeth.

“We should have personal property going back to Paul Revere’s hat,” she said sarcastically, not amused that he had filched her files, nor worried at her own absence last Monday.

“These two murder victims,” he said, waving the very thin and unnamed file under her nose. “I want to see their personal effects.”

She yawned, examined her nails, glanced at the clock. “I’m afraid you’ve left your run too late, Lieutenant. It’s five and the place is closed for the day. Come back tomorrow, we’re open.”

Tomorrow Silvestri was going to have the whole tale, but why not give the bitch a sleepless night before the axe fell? “Then I suggest,” he said pleasantly, “that first thing in the morning you get your peon to use his pickup legally by delivering the box of personal effects to Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico at the County Services building. If the requested box isn’t delivered, my niece Gina will wind up sitting at your desk. She’s eager for a county job in an out-of-the-way corner because she needs to study. She wants to join the FBI, but it’s one helluva hard entrance exam for a woman.”

Restless because Desdemona’s desertion had left him with two days to fill in and no one to fill them in with; Silvestri had forbidden him to poke his nose into any case other than the Ghosts, with the single exception of the racial situation if it exploded. And now, with a reasonably fine, above-freezing Sunday, was Mohammed el Nesr busy? Not busy demonstrating or rallying, at any rate. His quiescence was no mystery. Like Carmine, Mohammed was waiting for the Ghosts to abduct another victim this week, freshen up pain and indignation. The big rally would go on next Sunday, for sure. Taking desperately needed cops away from the Ghosts. A pain in the ass, but good strategy on Mohammed’s part.

Tense because Day Thirty was almost upon him.

“I found an antique evidence box stuck behind those packages when I came in this morning. No name on it, which I guess is why you never got it. Then I found a tag with your name on it yards away.” He bent down, fumbled under his counter and came up with a big, square box that looked not unlike those in current use.

The belongings of the woman and child beaten to death in 1930! He’d forgotten all about them, so absorbed in surveillance planning had he become. Though he had remembered to ask Silvestri to light a fire under the archives bitch and her peon.

“Thanks, Larry, I owe you one,” he said, picked up the box and took it to his office.

Something to do with a Sunday morning if your beloved is on a route march through wet leaves.

No fetid relics of a crime thirty-six years old puffed out of it when he pulled the lid off; they hadn’t bothered keeping the clothes the pair were wearing, which meant there must have been blood all over them, including footwear. Since no one had thought to record the exact distance of “near” Leonard Ponsonby, for all that Carmine knew some of the blood might have been his. No one had even drawn a sketch to show how the bodies had lain in relation to each other. “Near” was as much as he had to go on.

The pocketbook was there, however. By habit he had donned gloves to remove it gingerly so he could examine it with his more sophisticated eyes. Homemade. Knitted, as women did in those days of no money, with two cane handles and a lining of coarse cotton fabric. No clasp. This woman couldn’t afford even the cheapest cowhide, let alone leather. The pocketbook contained a tiny purse in which sat a silver dollar, three quarters, one dime and one nickel. Carmine put the money purse on his desk. A man’s handkerchief, clean but not ironed; calico, not linen. And, in the bottom, fragments and crumbs of what he presumed were the two cookies. The mother had probably stolen them from the station café so the child would have something to eat on the train, and that might be why they were hiding out in the snow. The autopsies had said both stomachs were empty. Yes, she’d stolen the cookies.

The carpetbag wasn’t a large one, though it was old enough to have been one of those the northern predators had carried south with them after the Civil War. Faded, balding in places, never elegant even when new. He opened it with gentle reverence; in here resided almost everything that poor woman had owned, and no thing was more touching than the mute evidence of lives long over.

On top were two long woollen scarves, hand knitted in varicolored stripes, as if the knitter had scrounged for scraps. But why were the scarves in the bag when the weather was so awful? Spares? Under them were two pairs of clean women’s panties made of unbleached muslin, and two much smaller pairs that obviously belonged to the child. A pair of knitted kneesocks and a pair of knitted stockings. On the bottom, carefully folded between torn tissue paper, a little girl’s dress.

Carmine stopped breathing. A little girl’s dress. Made of pale blue French lace exquisitely embroidered with seed pearls. Puffed sleeves on dainty cuffs, pearl-studded buttons up the back, silk lining, and beneath that, stiffened net gathered to hold the skirt out like a ballerina’s tutu. A 1930 precursor of a Tinker Bell, except that this one had been completely handmade, every pearl sewn on separately and firmly, none of the stitching done by machine. Oh, the things the 1930 cops had missed! On the left breast the word
EMMA
had been picked out in dark, purplish pearls.

Head whirling, Carmine laid the dress on his desk and then stood just staring at it for what might have been five minutes or an hour; he didn’t know, hadn’t looked at his watch or the clock.

Finally he sat down and put the carpetbag on his lap, opening it as widely as its rusting jaws would allow. The lining was worn, had come apart on one side seam; he put both hands inside the bag and felt around, eyes closed. There! Something!

A photograph, and not taken on a box Brownie. This was a studio portrait still mounted in a cream cardboard folder stamped with the name of the photographer.
Mayhew Studios, Windsor Locks.
Someone had written what looked like “1928” on the frame below, but in pencil now so faint it was a best guess.

The woman was seated on a chair, the child — about four years old — seated on her knees. In this, the woman was much better clad, wore a string of real pearls around her neck and real pearls in her earlobes. The little girl wore a dress similar to the one in the carpeting,
EMMA
showing up clearly. And both of them had the face. Even in black-and-white their skins had a suggestion of café au lait; their hair was densely black and curly, their eyes very dark, their lips full. To Carmine, gazing at them through a wall of tears, they were exquisite. Destroyed in all their youth and beauty, every vestige of it bloodied to pulp.

A crime of passion. Why had no one seen that? No killer would waste his essence on a torrent of blows were hate not the motive. Especially when the skull under the bludgeon belonged to a little girl. There’s no way these two female creatures weren’t connected to Leonard Ponsonby. They were there because he was there, he was there because they were there.