Sins of the Flesh (16 page)

“I don’t suppose,” said a voice below him, “you’d have another of those bourbons, and you’d let me snitch a section of your paper, and then later I could buy us a pizza?”

Fernando Vasquez, who lived shorefront a few doors down, was standing in the humble-pie of jeans and a checkered shirt.

“All of that can be arranged,” Carmine said, “provided you don’t want Sports. I didn’t realize you were a bachelor.”

“Solidad has taken the kids to Puerto Rico. I am so fed up with my own company I could spit snake venom.” He climbed the steps. “You can give me any part of the paper, I don’t care.”

“If my midnight until dawn visitor wasn’t so shy, there might be three of us, but after his introduction to the animals, he went invisible. Frankie goes to welcome him, but I never see him.”

“You mean Hank Jones, the artist?”

“Yeah, he’s painting my night view.”

Fernando following, Carmine went inside to fix a second drink. Then, very glad of the company, the two men enjoyed the last of the day on the deck before darkness drove them in.

C
ommissioner John Silvestri called a breakfast meeting in his big eagle’s aerie office atop the tower the architect had intended to give his late-1950s bureaucratic erection some distinction. Quite a vain aspiration was most people’s verdict, but it did permit John Silvestri to look down on all his fellow public servants.

The company was a trifle thin, due to two absences: Buzz Genovese was on vacation, and Tony Cerutti was on the road. Which left Carmine, Abe, Liam, Donny and Delia. Neither Gus Fennell nor Paul Bachman was there, nor was the new artist. That no one voiced any objections to this seven a.m. call-out was properly thanks to Silvestri’s position, but went a long way farther than that, even embracing the food and coffee. No fresher donuts, bagels and Danish existed, and the coffee was freshly filtered finest.

Silvestri was, besides, an excellent boss. Though he wore the pale blue ribbon of the Medal of Honor for exploits as a soldier during the Second World War, he was a born desk cop who had only once fired his side arm on police duty—to telling effect, thus proving his eye hadn’t lost its ability to see a concealed target and plug it dead-center. Though his last name was Silvestri, most of his blood was Cerutti, which made him genetically related to more than half of the Holloman Police Department, including Carmine Delmonico and several other detectives. Delia Carstairs was an Englishwoman from Oxford, but she was also his niece; her mother was Silvestri’s sister, who had foolishly thought she could escape her cop roots by marrying a scholar of old English in a different country. But where was her only child now? A cop with Uncle John!

His wife, Gloria, had held the title of the best dressed woman in Connecticut for years, and when the Silvestris appeared together it was generally held that the only other couple as handsome and elegant was M.M., President of Chubb University, and his wife, the divinely wafty Angela. That Gloria was not just a beautiful face was manifest in her owning a Master’s degree in Renaissance history from Chubb and in her having splendidly reared three sons.

None of the Silvestri boys was a cop. John Junior was a major in the United States Marines; Anthony was fast-tracking a career in particle physics at Berkeley; and Michael was well on the way to becoming yet another contentious Jesuit. So the Silvestris had a soldier, a scientist and a religious stirrer, as well as five grandchildren from John Junior, including two idolized girls. They were intensely proud of their Italian-American ancestry, and they hated the Mafia as disgracing a fine immigrant input for America.

Under ordinary circumstances Silvestri had a wicked sense of humor, but it was not in evidence this morning, despite the rare luxury his tower enjoyed—air-conditioning. Outside its walls the temperature was up to 89°F already, and no end in sight.

The death of Marty Fane had upset the Commissioner, whose darkly handsome face was stern. “A turf war?” he asked.

Carmine answered. “Almost a hundred percent no, sir,” he said calmly. “If I thought it was a turf war, I’d have asked for Fernando, Virgil and Corey this morning, because the uniforms would be in the thick of it. It may come to a turf war, but Marty wasn’t killed to start one.”

“Expound,” Silvestri said.

“I think we have a new man in town, sir, and this new man put paid to Marty. But not to take over his patch. Whatever he is, he’s not into prostitution.”

“Then let’s leave it for the moment. Our plethora of missing persons first, I think. Abe, what progress on the John Does?”

“We’ve identified the last four, sir—John Doe Three, John Doe Four, James Doe, and Jeb Doe. All physically very good-looking kids about nineteen or twenty years old, and all employed for varying time spans between a week and several months by the designers Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham. They worked out of Busquash Manor, which contains a theater stage,” said Abe.

“Homosexual elements?” the Commissioner asked.

“Yes, sir, though I’m not convinced homosexuality had much to do with their murders,” Abe said steadily. “Indications are that each Doe was kidnapped, then castrated and starved to death. Now that we know who the kids were, it seems likely that the Rha Tanais/Rufus Ingham connection provides a pool of candidates for the killer. The kind of work allied to the sexual freedom around Rha Tanais and his pal attract dozens of kids of both sexes in any year—it’s a honeypot for this killer, sir. I’d say in all certainty that John Doe One and John Doe Two were also scooped out of this pool. Tony Cerutti is on the road talking to relatives and friends of the identified victims, and it’s becoming clearer by the day that the perpetrator is either a central part of the Busquash Manor zoo, or so close he can masquerade as center.”

Silvestri’s face lightened. “Good news, Abe! You’ve made real progress since our last meeting. So where do you plan to go from here? Anything you can share?”

“Tony should be on his way home tomorrow or the day after, sir. Then the three of us will start putting the people of Busquash Manor under a cop microscope, starting with Rha Tanais and Rufus Ingham.” Abe frowned. “I’d like to add, sir, that I don’t think either of those men is the perpetrator. However, it’s very possible that they know more than so far they’re telling. I intend to
grill
them.”

The Commissioner turned his dark eyes on Delia, a twinkle flaring in their depths.

She was wearing a loose, floppy pajama suit of the weirdest print anyone present had ever seen; on a pea-soup-green background paraded dozens of cats and dogs with toothy smiles, caricatures and cartoons of cats and dogs in lurid colors and worse designs—spots, stripes, zig-zags, checks, curliques, squares, triangles. It was blinding as well as mesmerizing, but none of it rivaled her gigantic purse, the front end of a cat joined to the front end of a dog, and opening along its top from the set of feline ears to the set of canine ears. Not only did it hide her usual arsenal, it probably had room inside it for a small mortar and plenty of shells.

“I’m afraid, sir,” she said in her pear-shaped Oxford voice, “that I’m at the opposite end of the earth from Abe. I haven’t advanced my case a scrap. The missing women are still shadows.”

“Well, Delia, if you can’t find a loose string in the tangle, no one can,” Silvestri said with as much cheer as he could summon. “I can’t imagine you’re at a complete standstill.”

“Not quite, sir,” she said, smiling to show lipstick on her teeth. “I chanced upon a book at the weekend, and it’s providing some illumination—just, unfortunately, not in the direction of solving the case.”

“Carmine?” the Commissioner asked.

“Delia goes back to her book and her missing women, while I concentrate on the new man in town. He rides a big bike, but he’s not part of a biker gang, and he prefers murder to assault. His MO is unlike anything we’ve seen, which is why I think he’s just blown into town from somewhere out of state. The death of Marty Fane was shameful, in that there was absolutely no need for it, and seasoned hoods have more sense than to prey on old-stager pimps like Marty, who would have killed his first rival before his voice broke. That says our new man in town doesn’t care about his own skin the way hoods usually do. Or else he’s supremely confident of his own ability to get in first.”

“You’re talking psychopathic loner, Carmine.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” said Silvestri, sighing. “Let’s eat.”

With a charming apology, Delia gathered up several fruit Danish on a plate and carried it downstairs to her own office, regretting the much poorer coffee, but too anxious to dive into her book to consume her sugar binge upstairs in Uncle John’s aerie.

The book was highly technical and on most levels beyond her understanding, but she could just manage to get enough of it to make reading it worthwhile. It hadn’t come from the municipal library, or even from the five-million-volume main Chubb library; its source was the Chubb medical library. She had gone there on Saturday to see if she could find material that would help her grasp what Jess Wainfleet did, her peculiar and super-specialist psychiatry, and with the help of a bored librarian, she had found what seemed a promising book. Then had come Marty Fane, and any chance to spend a quiet Sunday reading.

As she read, the quality of her coffee forgotten, memories began to stir and then to roil, of an era after the Second World War but before the great advances in psychiatric chemotherapy …. Fascinated, she read on, skipping the pages and pages of gibberish in search of the passages that unlocked at least a part of her case beneath her very eyes. Shortly before one in the afternoon she closed the book, conscious that her head and neck and shoulders were one mass of aches and pains from a nervous tension that had escaped her notice until she was done.

Book in hand, she went to find Carmine, whom she tracked down in Paul Bachman’s laboratory. On seeing Delia, he thanked Paul and walked upstairs with her to his office.

“I have some thoughts on my Shadow Women,” she said, sitting in his visitor’s chair.

Carmine’s hand, which had been pulling his dog’s silky ear, went suddenly still; Frankie sighed and flopped prone on the floor, aware that the attention was over.

“Expatiate, Deels.”

“Something called a prefrontal lobotomy, or leukotomy,” she said, “depending on how the surgeon described his operation. If he thought of its ultimate purpose, to sever the prefrontal grey matter cortex from its connection to the rest of the brain, then—lobotomy. If he thought of how he was going to sever the connection by cutting its white matter pathways, then—leukotomy. Lobotomy is the most drastic measure taken to neutralize frightful behavior disorders. Before lobotomy, savage, dangerous animals. After lobotomy, flat and emotionally unresponsive human beings.”

Her bright brown eyes, fenced in by spikes of mascara, glowed at Carmine. “But then, luckily, psychiatric chemotherapy arrived, too soon to fill our psychiatric hospitals with lobotomized zombies. I found this marvelous book, Carmine, that outlines the entire history of dangerous behavioral dementias from ancient times right up to 1965. If one leaves the red herring of the studio portraits out of the Shadow Women, those who encountered them during their six months of tenancy all describe flat, rather unresponsive women. Well, to me their mood is no longer a mystery, whatever else about them may be. I think they were all heavily dosed with a mood- or mind-altering drug like chlorpromazine.”

“It’s a very good point, Delia, but where does it get you?” Carmine asked.

“It says that in order to keep each woman tractable over the period, she had to be chemically reduced to a sort of a zombie.”

“If it’s part of a murder MO, it’s in the realm of science fiction,” Carmine objected. He thought. “Or science fantasy.”

“I want to interview Jess Wainfleet,” Delia said, “here in County Services, and in tandem with you.”

One black brow flew up; he grinned. “Is she suspect?”

“No, but I need more information, and I’m more likely to get it in a formal setting divorced from her own bailiwick. Ideally I would like her to be unafraid yet not at perfect ease, unable to plead a sudden emergency or parade Walter Jenkins under our noses. She has a huge ego and she can be arrogant. We can play on the ego by humbly begging her to see us in County Services, as we don’t want our plea for her help known at HI,” Delia said.

“How has your thinking changed on the Shadow Women?” Carmine asked, reluctant to foist his own theories on her just yet. She had distinctive ways of looking at things, and must be granted the time necessary to decide purely for herself whether her ideas had merit. Personally he put her up there with Abe Goldberg, so …

“Drugging them to achieve an emotional plateau only an inch above sea level says more about the mastermind than it does about them,” Delia said slowly. “A lot of patience, no impulses to draw close to any of them emotionally—he’s very cool, I think, though I don’t know if he’s cold. Really, I need a Jess Wainfleet.”

“Don’t be disappointed if she doesn’t work as well as you hope. For myself, I’d go for Dr. Aristede Melos,” Carmine said.

“Good thought. If Jess doesn’t work, I’ll try him. Thank you!”

C
armine was relieved to see that Delia had dressed down for this entirely informal interview; had Delia greeted her today in yerterday’s dogs and cats, Jess might have been excused for thinking
anything.
Room 1 was larger than Room 2 and had better ventilation; Delia had even attempted to humanize it with a vase of summer flowers.

The escorting uniform showed Jess in, no more; it was left to Delia to seat Dr. Wainfleet in the most comfortable chair, and perform the introductions when Carmine walked in. A flicker of surprise showed in Jess’s eyes—clearly he didn’t look as she had expected. She wore a burgundy pant-suit and a pale rose-pink blouse in cotton fabrics as a concession to the heat; both face and body were relaxed, though the smile on her lips didn’t reach her guarded eyes.

“At best, Dr. Wainfleet, this is a semi-formal procedure,” Carmine said from the corner where the tape recorder lived, “and the reason we asked you to come to us is purely selfish. Our recording setup is tried and true, and the subject so foreign that we felt it had to be recorded for our archives as well as our present case. As far as we have been able to ascertain, Dr. Wainfleet, you are our nearest premier authority on neuroanatomy, and it is in that capacity that we wish to talk to you. To the best of our knowledge, you are not embroiled in the case of six missing women currently being conducted by Sergeant Delia Carstairs, and therefore stand in no need of an attorney-at-law, but if you have reason to believe or know that such is not the case, then you are entitled to ask for legal representation. If you waive your right to an attorney-at-law, you are free to invoke it at any time in the future,” said Carmine.

Jess’s eyes danced. “For an informal interview, Captain, you have managed to endow it with all the portent of the Pythoness at Delphi!” she said, smiling. “However, I understand. What’s more important to you, I waive my right to an attorney this morning.”

“Then let’s make ourselves as easy as possible under the circumstances,” Carmine said with an answering smile. “The coffee is Malvolio’s, freshly made every half hour, and it’s not milk, it’s half-and-half. Okay?”

“I thank you for your consideration,” Jess said. “Do you mind if I smoke an occasional cigarette?”

Delia reached behind her and produced a clean glass ashtray, then hard on its heels the six studio portraits of her Shadows. “Do you recognize any of these women, Jess?” she asked, geared for the inevitable denial.

But what Jess said, almost instantaneously, was “Oh, yes!”

“You
do
know them?” Delia said on a squeak.

“Certainly,” Jess said, removing a cigarette from her pack and lighting it. “They were all patients of mine.”

Carmine was staring at the psychiatrist in a mixture of awe and anger at his own sheer stupidity in not perceiving that there might be a connection between a group of women displaying the same symptoms and a psychiatrist conceivably treating them. They had all demonstrated a flatness of mood typical in clinical depression, yet it hadn’t occurred to him to canvass Holloman’s thriving cluster of psychiatrists. Admittedly he wouldn’t have flushed Jess Wainfleet out of hiding, as she was a public servant in charge of criminally insane patients, but it would have made her more visible. As it was, she had been drawn to their attention purely as an expert in a different field.

Delia spoke. “When did you see these women, Jess? Did you see them separately, or together as a group?”

“Separately,” Jess said, voice unconcerned. “Each of them was my patient.” She frowned, looked at Delia. “I don’t understand? I thought I was here to give you help with neurosurgical details, not identify people.”

“So did we, Jess. This comes as a terrific surprise,” said Delia. “It never occurred to anyone in the Holloman PD that these six missing women were HI patients, or in the Asylum—for that matter, we didn’t think there were any female prisoners there.”

“There aren’t,” Jess said blankly. “They were all my own private patients.”

“Private patients?”

“Yes, of course. I am permitted to treat private patients,” Jess said, looking surprised. “Each of these women was a private patient.” She laughed, apparently at their naiveté. “It was all aboveboard, and it’s all in the HI records.”

“Starting with Margot Tennant in 1963?” Carmine asked.

“That is correct, yes.”

“Was there a time span for each woman?”

“As far as I was concerned, yes,” Jess said. “January second of the relevant year, without fail.” She touched each photograph as she spoke. “Donna Woodrow in 1964. Rebecca Silberfein in 1965. Maria Morris in 1966. Julia Bell-Simons in 1967. Elena Carba in 1968. She was the last.”

“And that’s it? Just January second of each year?”

“Yes.” Jess leaned forward a little, took a sip of coffee, then folded her hands on the table, not thrown off balance in the least. “Actually I’m pleased that your investigation has been revealed to me—I have concrete examples to illustrate the procedures you want to know about. Let me take the second woman, Donna Woodrow, in 1964. She was referred to me suffering from an intractable behavioral psychosis that made her a danger both to herself and to others. The alternative for Donna was to undergo a crude bilateral amputation of
all
her pathways to the prefrontal lobe. Or Donna could undergo my kind of surgery.

“I consider crude amputation abhorrent. It turns an uncontrollably manic patient into an oafish and shambling zombie—a creature stripped of its very
soul!
It’s irreversible because brain tissue doesn’t have the ability to regenerate. So no future recovery can ever happen. These poor creatures have lost their humanity. So why is it done? To turn a rabid wildcat into plant matter, soulless and subhuman.

“The best I can say about it is that it saves the State both money and manpower. But, Captain and Sergeant, I firmly believe that no one on earth has the right to strip a human being of his or her soul. Better to kill them than do that.”

Passion had flowed into the voice and animated the eyes; this was Jess Wainfleet fighting like a tiger for the Walters of the world. No wonder she valued him so much! He, whose history had been a horror story of violence and murder, was proof positive that amputation of all connections between the brain and its prefrontal cortex was not the only way to treat the underlying causes.

“What I did to each of those women was to modify the procedure so that the patient kept her human soul. Each woman emerged able to enjoy some kind of basic human life—read, watch television, listen to and absorb a radio news broadcast, keep herself clean, fed, and fit to move about in society, if not to relate to it on a very adequate level.”

Her voice ceased, her explanation apparently over.

“So you rented the women apartments and supervised their post-operative progress,” Carmine said.

The slim figure stiffened. “I most definitely did not!” Jess snapped. “Each one came to me for an operation, then returned from whence she came with specific instructions as to what must be done and a request for a full outline of that progress for my records. I had no knowledge on the patient before the relevant January second, nor after it.”

“I’d like to digress,” said Carmine. “What did your own operation on these women entail?”

“As the brain has no ability to feel pain,” Jess said, answering in a way that told her audience she was used to such questions, “provided the invasion is relatively small and benign, one doesn’t need to worry about sequelae—sorry, after-effects—due to the invasion itself. It’s
vitally important
that the patient be fully conscious! I need general anesthesia only for fixing the stereotaxic frame’s calipers into the bone of the skull—the skull must be rigidly fixed, and the calipers do that. Of course the patient is strapped immobile as well. I leave no scars because the burr holes for the calipers are surrounded by hair, and I raise no bone flap. Instead, I go in through the orbits—the two round holes in the skull where the eyeballs reside. It’s easy. I simply retract each eyeball—what’s the matter, Delia?”

Delia had gone white.
“You pull the eyeball out?”

Jess laughed. “No! Retract means I push the eyeball very gently just enough out of the way to let me insert my instruments around or behind it. The eyeball itself is quite unharmed, really! On the other side of orbit bone lies brain, and with good stereotaxy plus my own knowledge, I can drill through orbit bone, maneuver my microelectrodes, and be where I want to be in the patient’s brain. With the patient awake, I electrically stimulate, guided by her answers, until I find the areas I must ablate—that is, destroy. Even though she may not have spoken logically for years, she does when I stimulate. It’s a very long, taxing procedure.”

“How can a demented person answer logically?” Delia asked.

“The dementia falls away as the pathways are adjusted.”

“What do you mean by adjusted?” Carmine asked.

“I destroy some pathways, and as I do so others, freed from the malign influence of those I have destroyed, actually begin to function as they were intended to,” Jess said, matter-of-factly.

“What is stereotaxy?” Carmine asked.

“It’s a mathematical plotting of the brain.” Jess said, “akin to the navigation co-ordinates of the world, but different. Externally, the stereotaxic device renders the head immobile and possesses mathematical co-ordinates that have been calculated from many brains in what is called a stereotaxic atlas. Having the stereotaxic atlas enables me to place my electrodes and other invasive tools in exactly the right place. There are limitations, unfortunately,” she said in the same tone of voice. “The atlas was prepared using skulls of a common kind, skulls those six women owned, and that many own, including males—it’s possible to extrapolate simple enlargement or diminution on the skull, provided its proportions are identical—Walter Jenkins, for example, has this skull, merely larger.”

“So not all candidates for your kind of surgery are suitable?” Carmine asked.

“Correct. I have to see every kind of X-ray, plain or with the addition of dyes or air, plus a specific set of measurements, before I can decide.”

“Do you mean these requirements could be—well, posted to you in the mail?”

“Why on earth not? Together with blood tests and other relevant information.”

“How long did each woman remain in your care, Doctor?” Delia asked, light dawning.

“Admission was at six a.m. and discharge at nine p.m., January second of the years between 1963 and 1968, inclusive,” Jess said, “but I first saw each one at seven, and paid my last visit at six p.m. So I myself can state that I saw each woman for a total of eleven hours. Nine of those hours were on an operating table. None of the patients exhibited aftereffects, so each was discharged per ambulance as arranged prior to operation.”

“Who assisted you to operate, Doctor?” Carmine asked.

“A professional neurosurgical technician named Ernest Leto. He and I had worked together at the National Hospital, Queens Square, in London. Since 1959, he’s freelanced so he can work with the surgeons he admires.”

“I’ll need his address,” Delia said.

The thin black brows lifted. “I fail to see why, but good luck! I placed an ad in the
New England Journal of Medicine
.”

“I see. Considering the gravity of the surgery, Dr. Wainfleet, you think a fifteen-hour admission adequate?”

“The post-operative course for this kind of surgery isn’t plagued by the usual bugbears—hemorrhages, wound infections and extreme pain. I operate scrupulously cleanly in a scrupulously clean environment, and have never had a wound infection. Any pain takes the form of headache, but is nothing like, for instance, the pain of migraine. Over-the-counter medications relieve it.”

“Did you use an anesthesiologist?” Delia asked.

“No. I acted as my own anesthesiologist, with Mr. Leto as my assistant. This was possible because Mr. Leto is expert at positioning the stereotaxic frame. I left him to do that while I administered the general anesthetic and injected the local anesthetic in both orbits. Once the stereotaxic frame was in position, I could rouse the patient. Mr. Leto then kept custody of a syringe of general anesthetic he could inject through the IV line very rapidly if the patient became violent. As they had been adequately pre-medicated, they never were uncooperative,” Jess said, her pride obvious.

Carmine stared at her a little grimly. “Dr. Wainfleet, we brought you in this morning to get a lesson on the possibilities of brain surgery for psychiatric reasons, but I confess I didn’t expect you to solve—partially, anyway—a missing persons case we’ve had on our hands for some years. Candidly, I’m staggered. Before I decide what to do with you, I’ll have to ask you more questions, but if in answering you incriminate yourself, you should have a lawyer present. It’s your choice. We can conclude this session now and reconvene when you’ve found a lawyer, and I’m warning you that you might need one; or we can continue without you having legal representation.”

“Let us continue,” she said, seeming unconcerned. “I’ve done nothing wrong, and can’t incriminate myself, as you put it. Ask your questions, Captain.”

“Were you aware of police interest in the six women you operated on, Doctor?”

“Absolutely not. Each was a patient a year apart.”

“Even though you have social contact with Sergeant Carstairs?”

“I knew she had a missing persons case, but we don’t discuss our work when we meet, Captain.”

“Doctor, you must have some idea what happened to your patients after you operated on them. Surgeons don’t operate and then fail to follow up—it’s not Hippocratic.”

Dr. Wainfleet sighed, her hands moving as if she was holding onto her good nature. “You want details I can’t give you, sir, because I don’t know them,” she said slowly. “The cases were not American. The patients were not American. The referring agency was not American. It happens every day, Captain! Someone in a particular country is the best practitioner in his or her field—usually medicine, but there are other fields—and gets referrals from abroad. Well, these six women were all referred to me from abroad, and came to this country so that I, an expert in the field, could operate on their brains.”