Sins of the Flesh (3 page)

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.

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.