Sins of the Flesh (4 page)

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.

T
hough 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.