On, Off

“Desdemona Dupre, the business manager,” she said as she took them into a tiny foyer, apparently only there to accommodate two elevators. But instead of pressing the UP button, she opened a door in the opposite wall and led them into a wide corridor.

“This is our first floor, which contains the animal care facilities and the workshops,” she said, her accent placing her as someone from the other side of the Atlantic. Turning a corner put them in another hall. She pointed to a pair of doors farther down. “There you are, animal care.”

“Thanks,” said Carmine. “We’ll take it from here. Please wait for me back at the elevators.”

Her brows rose, but she turned on her heel and disappeared without comment.

Carmine found himself inside a very large room lined with cupboards and bins. Tall racks of clean cages big enough to take a cat or dog stood in neat rows in an area fronting a service elevator many times the size of the two in the foyer. Other racks held plastic boxes topped with wire grids. The room smelled good, pungent like a pine forest, with only the faintest hint of something less pleasant below it.

Cecil Potter was a fine looking man, tall, slender, very well kept in his pressed white boiler suit and canvas bootees. His eyes, Carmine fancied, smiled a lot, though not smiling now.

One of Carmine’s most important policies in this year of bussing turmoil was that the black people he met in the course of his job or social life be treated courteously; he held out his hand, shook Cecil’s firmly, performed the introductions without barking them or looking rushed. Corey and Abe were his men through thick and thin, they followed suit with the same courtesy.

“It’s here,” said Cecil, moving to a closed stainless steel door with a snap lock handle. “I didn’t touch a thing, just shut the door.” He hesitated, decided to risk it. “Uh, Lieutenant, do you mind if I get back to my babies?”

“Babies?”

“The monkeys. Macaques. Rhesus mean anything to you? Well, that’s them. They in there, an’ very upset. Jimmy won’t lay off telling them where he been, an’ they very upset.”

“Jimmy?”

“The monkey Dr. Chandra thought was dead, an’ put in a bag in the fridge last night. Jimmy really found her—tore the place apart when he woke up in the dark freezing his buns off. When Otis—he my assistant as well as the handyman—went to empty the fridge, Jimmy came outta there screeching and yelling. Then Otis found her, an’ he was outta here screeching worse than Jimmy. I looked, an’ called the Prof. I guess the Prof called you.”

“Where’s Otis now?” Carmine asked.

“Knowing Otis, he run home to Celeste. She his mama as well as his wife.”

They were gloved now; Abe wheeled the bin away from the door and Carmine opened it as Cecil, already crooning and clucking, went into the monkey room.

Of the two big bags, one still lay at the back of the chamber. The other, rent from where the top folded over clear to the bottom, had exposed the lower half of a female torso. When Carmine noted its size and its lack of pubic hair his heart sank—a pre-pubescent child? Oh, please, not that! He made no movement to touch a thing, just leaned his shoulders against the wall.

“We wait for Patrick,” he said.

“I never smelled a smell like it—dead, but not decomposing,” said Abe, dying for a cigarette.

“Abe, go find Mrs. Dupre and tell her she can go upstairs as soon as the uniforms arrive,” Carmine said, knowing that expression well. “Post them on all the entrances and emergency exits.” Then, alone with Corey, he rolled his eyes. “Why in there?” he asked.

Patrick O’Donnell enlightened him.

Sporting the very modern title of Medical Examiner in a city that had always had a coroner without forensic skills in earlier days, Patrick had espoused pathology because he didn’t like patients who talked back, and the life of a public pathologist because it meant plenty of criminal cases as well as all the other kinds of sudden or mysterious death. Thanks to Patrick’s ruthless campaign to bring Holloman into the latter half of the twentieth century, he had managed to shed most of a coroner’s court duties on to a deputy coroner and build a little empire that encompassed far more than mere autopsies. He believed in the new science of forensics, and played an active part in any case that interested him, even if no body was involved.

He looked as Irish as his name from the reddish hair to the bright blue eyes, but in actual fact he and Carmine were first cousins, the sons of two sisters of Italian extraction. One married a Delmonico, the other an O’Donnell. Ten years older than Carmine and a happily married man with six children, Patrick let neither of these impediments spoil their deep friendship.

“I don’t know much, but here’s what I do know,” said Carmine, and filled him in. “Why in there?” he repeated at the end of it.

“Because if Jimmy the monkey hadn’t woken up undead and flown into a panic, these two brown bags, unmarked and intact, would have been dumped into some kind of receptacle and taken to the animal care incinerator,” Patrick said, grimacing. “This is the perfect way to get rid of human remains. Poof! Up in smoke.”

Abe came back in time to hear this, and went pale. “Jeez!” he breathed, horrified.

Photographs taken, Patrick lifted the first bag onto a gurney and tucked it inside an open body bag. Then he examined what he could see without disturbing the torn brown paper.

“No pubic hair,” said Carmine. “Patsy, if you love me, tell me this isn’t a child.”

“The hair’s been—not shaved—no, plucked—so she’s post-pubescent. Small girl, though. As if what our killer really yearned for was a child, but wasn’t game to follow through on all his disgusting desires.” He lifted out the second bag, not as mangled, and placed it beside the first. “I’ll get back to the morgue—you’ll want my report a.s.a.p.” His chief technician, Paul, was already preparing to vacuum the chamber’s interior; after that he would dust for fingerprints. “Lend me Abe and Corey as well, Carmine, and we can let Cecil get on with his work. Except for the monkeys, they must keep their experimental animals elsewhere—these are the day’s clean cages ready to go.”

“Leave no stone unturned, guys,” said Carmine, following his cousin and the gurney’s grisly contents out.

Desdemona Dupre—what a strange name!—was in the foyer waiting, flicking through the contents of a thick sheaf of papers on her clipboard.

“Mrs. Dupre, this is Dr. Patrick O’Donnell,” said Carmine.

Whereupon the woman bristled! “I am not a missus, I am a miss!” she said with a snap, that odd accent pronounced. “Are you coming upstairs with me, Lieutenant [she pronounced it leftenant], or may I go? I have work to do.”

“Catch you later, Patsy,” said Carmine, following Miss Dupre into an elevator.

“You’re from, uh, England?” he asked as they ascended.

“Correct.”

“How long have you been at the Hug?”

“Five years.”

They left the elevator on the fourth floor, which was the top floor, though the last button said ROOF. Here the Hug’s interior décor was better displayed. It was little different from the first floor: walls painted institution cream, dark oak woodwork, banks of fluorescent ceiling lights under plastic diffusers. Back down a twin of that first floor corridor to a door opposite its far end, where it met another hall at right angles.

Miss Dupre knocked, was bidden enter, and pushed Carmine into Professor Smith’s private domain without entering herself.

He found himself staring at one of the most strikingly handsome men he had ever seen. Robert Mordent Smith, William Parson Chair Professor at the Hughlings Jackson Center for Neurological Research, was over six feet tall, on the thin side, and possessed an unforgettable face: wonderful bone structure, black brows and lashes, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of wavy, streaky white hair. On someone still young enough not to have lines or wrinkles, the hair set him off to perfection. His smile revealed even white teeth, though the smile wasn’t reaching those marvelous eyes this morning. No surprise.

“Coffee?” he asked, gesturing Carmine to the big, costly chair on the opposite side of his big, costly desk.

“Thanks, yes. No cream, no sugar.”

While the Prof ordered two of the same via his intercom, his guest inspected the room, a generous 20 x 25 feet, with those huge glass windows on two walls. The Prof’s office occupied the northeast corner of the floor, so the view was of the Hollow, the Shane–Driver dormitory, and the parking lot. The décor was expensive but chintzy, the furniture walnut, the rug Aubusson. An imposing assemblage of degrees, diplomas and honors sat on a green-striped wall, and what looked to be an excellent copy of a Watteau landscape hung behind the Prof’s desk.

“It’s not a copy,” said the Prof, following Carmine’s gaze. “I have it on loan from the William Parson Collection, the largest and best collection of European art in America.”

“Wow,” said Carmine, thinking of the cheap print of Van Gogh’s irises behind his own desk.

A woman in her middle thirties entered bearing a silver tray on which stood a vacuum flask, two delicate cups and saucers, two crystal glasses and a crystal carafe of iced water. They sure do themselves proud at the Hug!

A severely tailored looker, thought Carmine, examining her: black hair piled up in a beehive, a broad, smooth, rather flat face with hazel eyes, and a terrific figure. Her suit was coat and skirt, snugly cut, and her shoes were Ferragamo flatties. That Carmine knew such things could be laid at the door of a long career in a profession that required intimate knowledge of all aspects of human beings and their behavior. This woman was what Mom called a man-eater, though she didn’t seem to have an atom of appetite for the Prof.

“Miss Tamara Vilich, my secretary,” said the Prof.

No atom of appetite for Carmine Delmonico either! She smiled, nodded and departed without lingering.

“Two mature misses on your staff,” said Carmine.