Sins of the Flesh

“There’s method in my madness,” Delia said cheerfully as they descended to the Morgue, one floor below ground. “Everywhere in the ME’s is air-conditioned.” Her face saddened. “It’s still a wee bit of a shock, not seeing Patrick’s cheeky face. He seemed to resign his coroner’s duties overnight.”

“You can’t blame him.”

“No, of course not. But miss him, I do.”

Gustavus Fennell had stepped into Patrick O’Donnell’s shoes as Medical Examiner, a decision that had pleased everybody in the aftermath of Patrick’s sudden illness, a particularly malevolent arthritis. To have replaced a forceful, vital, pioneering man like Patrick with another of the same sort would have led to all kinds of wars, internal and external, whereas dear old Gus (who in fact was neither very old nor very much of a dear) knew all the ropes and could be relied upon to run the Medical Examiner’s department smoothly. Lacking his retired chief’s good looks and charm, Gus had gotten along as Second-in-Command by consciously playing the second lead, as Commissioner John Silvestri was well aware. Now, after three months as ME, the real Gus was starting to shed his veils in an intricate dance that would, Silvestri knew, finally end in revealing a gentle yet obdurate autocrat who would push his department onward and upward with extreme efficiency.

Like Patrick, Gus enjoyed performing criminal autopsies, the more complicated or mysterious, the better. When Delia and Abe walked, gowned and booteed, into his autopsy room, he was just stripping off his gloves, leaving an assistant to close for him. If the cause of death were unknown and might conceivably have a contagious factor, he worked masked, as he had on Jeb Doe.

Mask off, he led his visitors to several steel chairs in a quiet corner of the room, and sat with a sigh of relief. His face and hair, stripped of their coverings, were displayed as—no other word would do—nondescript. Mr. Average Everything, to which add, fade into the wallpaper. However, his slight body had a wiry strength its proportions belied, and his face said its owner could be trusted. That he had certain crotchets Abe and Delia knew: he was a strict vegetarian who forbade smoking anywhere in his department, and if circumstances deprived him of his two generous pre-dinner sherries or after-dinner ports, then mild-mannered Dr. Fennell became a hideous Mr. Hyde. His passion was bridge, at which he was an acknowledged master.

“Unless the fluid or tissue assays come back to show some toxin—I doubt they will—the cause of death is simple starvation,” Gus said, kicking off his chef’s clogs. “My feet are so sore today, I don’t know why. The testicles were enucleated about six weeks before death, by someone who knew exactly how to do it. There was nothing in the alimentary canal that I could call a food residue, but he wasn’t dehydrated.”

“Water, Gus? Or fruit juice, maybe?” Abe asked.

“Nothing but plain water is my guess. Certainly nothing with fiber of any kind in it, or indigestible end products. If he were given plain water the starvation metabolism would proceed smooth as silk, and it did. There were no substances under his nails.”

“May we have a look at him?” Delia asked.

“Sure.”

Delia and Abe moved to the dissecting table, where the body now lay unattended.

Thick, waving black hair, cut to cover the neck and ears but not long enough to be tied back, they noted; it was almost the sole evidence of normality that the corpse displayed, so dynamic were the ravages of a metabolism forced to digest itself to obtain sustenance. The skin was very yellow and waxy, stretched fairly tautly over the skeleton, which showed in vivid detail.

“His teeth are perfect,” Delia said.

“Good nutrition and fluoride in the water supply. The latter says he wasn’t raised in Connecticut.” Abe shook his head angrily, balked. “I’ll get Ginny Toscano to flesh out the skull for me, no matter how bad her hysterics are. Jeb needs an artist’s sketch.”

“Haven’t you heard? We have a new artist,” said Delia, first with this news too. “His name is Hank Jones, and he’s a child just out of art school with a cast iron digestion, absolutely no finer feelings, and a macabre sense of humor.”

“A child?” Abe asked, grinning.

“Nineteen, bless him. Ethnicity—you name it, he has at least a drop of it in his veins. His hobby is drawing cadavers at the Medical School, but I met him in our parking lot sketching Paul Bachman’s 1937 Mercedes roadster. He’s gorgeous!”

“Gorgeous I can live without, but if he doesn’t mind the sight of a nasty dead body, he’s worth knowing,” Abe said.

“Those who’ve seen his work say he’s good.” Delia raised her voice. “Gus, does starvation make body hair fall out, or has someone depilated the poor little blighter?”

“The latter, Delia,” Gus answered. “He wasn’t hirsute by nature, but what body hair he had was plucked. Further to hair, his head hair has been dyed black, which was also true of James Doe. The natural color was fairish, for James as well as Jeb. Both had very blue eyes, and skins that tanned well. Bone structure—Caucasian.” Gus spoke from his chair, still waggling his feet.

Delia and Abe continued to cruise around the table, curiously unsettled by Jeb Doe, who was far from the most horrible body either had ever seen, yet had a power to impress beyond most victims of a violent end. His smell was oddly wrong, which Abe, better educated scientifically than Delia, put down to the beginnings of decay minus some of the usual murder concomitants—no blood, vomitus, open rot. Delia simply thought of it as an utterly bloodless murder, as murder by inches over months. Jeb’s body didn’t look moist or damp, and the head, with its black mop of hair, was a terrifying sight, the skull showing fully under its wrapping of veined skin, which of course gave it the death grin, emphasized by a pair of brown lips drawn back and up in a rictus. Appalling! The eyelids were closed, but Jeb had been gifted with dense, long dark lashes and arched, definitive brows. Nothing about the body suggested mummification—those, Abe and Delia had seen aplenty.

Finally, convinced Jeb Doe had nothing more to tell them, Abe and Delia thanked Gus and departed.

Detectives Division was a trifle scattered through the big police presence in County Services, but Carmine’s (and Delia’s) end was easier to access from the ME’s domain by taking the first flight of stairs or elevator; she started up with a wave, leaving Abe to wend his way to his end alone, and grateful for that—with Delia, you never could tell where the conversation might go, and he wanted to hang on to his current thoughts undeflected. Her technique was oblique or tangential because she never saw things as mere mortals did, but that, of course, was exactly why Carmine so valued her. And, he amended, be fair, Abe Goldberg! You value her just as much.

Carmine had taken Desdemona and their sons to visit his old pal, the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum, in Beverly Hills, and wasn’t due back for three weeks. He had bribed Delia by giving her permission to work on a series of missing women that had been bothering her for months, and telling her that the usual crimes and suspects were safe in Abe’s hands, so butt out unless Abe orders you in, okay? Since she had never dreamed of having a whole month to ride her hobbyhorse, Delia took the unspoken implication philosophically, and left Abe alone. The however-many Doe victims seemed likely to blow up into a big case, but it would continue to move at a snail’s pace for some time; she wasn’t needed there.

Abe collected Liam Connor and Tony Cerutti on his way through, then, settled in his desk chair, gave them the news that the four Johns and James Doe had a new member of the family, Jeb.

“Looks like Professor Soderstern’s rape theory is out,” said Liam sadly. “Are we back to homosexual?”

“If we are, no nancy-boys or pansies, understood? Homosexual or the prof’s word, gay,” said Abe severely. “However, castration says not, unless the perpetrator is a fanatical homo-hater.”

“Then as a theory it stays in,” Tony Cerutti said. He was young, handsome, and still a bachelor, related to Commissioner Silvestri, Captain Delmonico and about a third of the Holloman PD, and while he could be impatient and tactless, he was an excellent detective whose speciality was street crime. “The homo-haters hate the ones who hide their inclinations because they marry and have kids. Then about ten years later the wife wakes up that she’s married to a queer—I can’t use that either? Anyway, she’s all screwed up, the kids are screwed up—yeah, castration can fit into the picture just fine if her father or her brother is—uh—offended. Can I say offended?”

“Don’t be smart, Tony,” Abe said calmly.

“You’re talking about a different age group, Tony,” said Liam, a quiet, understated man who formed an ideal contrast to Tony. Married, he never brought his domestic woes—if, indeed, he had any—to work, and had few prejudices. “The Doe victims are too young to have wives and kids. It does have to stay in our list of possibles, though. If a guy’s wife knows he’s homosexual and goes along with it, okay, but if he has deceived her, the results when she finds out are bound to be messy in all kinds of ways.”

“But messy to the point of a string of murders?” Abe looked skeptical. “I suggest we look at militantly anti-homosexual movements, including Neo-Nazis and assorted racial screwballs. Racial prejudice is usually linked to other social prejudices.”

“We can’t exclude a solitary psychopath,” Liam said, frowning. “One at a time suggests one perpetrator.”

“Definitely.”

Tony’s eyes were closed, a sign of deep thought. “Who done it won’t be easy to find,” he said in his attractively gravelly voice, “but where might be. Did Gus find evidence this latest Doe was gagged for long periods of time?”

“The mouth tissues were unbruised.”

“So wherever he was held was soundproof twenty-four-seven for at least a couple of months. Shades of Kurt von Fahlendorf, huh? A lot of the work looking for where has been done relatively recently looking for Kurt,” Tony said eagerly. “We need to take a look at those files, then we’ll have a list of possibles.”

“The Does must have screamed the place down,” Liam said.

“But we have a list of places to check,” said Abe, pleased. “With Delia head down, tail up on the trail of her Shadow Women, she won’t mind lending us her plans and schematics of Holloman—they’ll be a help too. If we were on a classic paper trail, I’d bring her in, but this is secret compartment stuff.” Abe rubbed his palms together; his speciality was locating secret compartments.

Carmine Delmonico had a daughter old enough to be a pre-med student at Chubb’s Paracelsus College, but he saw nothing of Sophia during school vacations. Her mother had left Carmine to marry the movie mogul Myron Mendel Mandelbaum while Sophia was still a baby; the marriage had quickly foundered, but not the bond between Myron and his step-daughter, with the result that Sophia had grown up with two fathers, each of whom adored her. It was generally understood that the girl would fall heir to Myron’s empire one day, but in the meantime her inclinations led her in the direction of medicine; during school semesters she lived with Carmine and his second family in Holloman, and during vacations she lived with Myron on the West Coast. A brilliant, capable and down-to-earth young woman, she was sufficiently detached from her biological father’s spell to see how she could best help him, and proceeded to do so.

After the birth of their second son, Alex, only fifteen months later than his brother, Julian, Carmine and Desdemona had run into trouble; Desdemona suffered a post-partum depression made worse by her streak of obsessiveness. A health administrator whom Carmine had met during a case, Desdemona refused to concede her weakness, and thus was slow recovering. At which point Sophia stepped in. His wife, said Sophia to Carmine, needed a long rest being pampered, and since she wouldn’t be separated from her sons, they too must become a part of her rest-and-recreation holiday. The result was that Carmine took Desdemona, Julian and Alex to California at the end of July; they were to stay in Myron’s enormous mansion for as long as Sophia felt necessary, though Carmine would have to return to Holloman when his annual leave was up. That Desdemona consented to such a colossal upheaval was hard evidence that, in her heart of hearts, she knew she needed a long rest. The little boys were no problem in that world of make-believe Myron could tap at will; with so many treats, excursions and people at their beck and call, they didn’t need to badger Mommy, who could enjoy them without being bullied or dominated as she had been in Holloman.

Knowing all this, Delia could settle to her task in peace and quiet; the Shadow Women were elusive, and continued to defy analysis. Six cases considered open in only the loosest way, certainly not urgent; cases that enabled her to quit work on time every day, and count on free weekends. That was important at the moment, for Delia had made two new friends, and looked forward to her leisure hours very much.

She had met Jessica Wainfleet and Ivy Ramsbottom near Millstone Beach at the beginning of June, when they combined forces to rescue a cat stranded up a tree, yowling piteously. Of course when the creature was thoroughly satisfied that all three women had genuinely risked their necks on its behalf, it descended daintily of its own accord and vanished in a tabby blur. Jess and Ivy had laughed until they wept; Delia laughed until she had a stitch in her side. This feline practical joke had occurred very near Delia’s condo, so they had repaired to the condo to drink sherry, send out for pizza, and make mutual discoveries about each other. Jess and Ivy had been friends for years. Each lived in the region; Jess had a small house a block behind Delia, and Ivy lived in Little Busquash, a cottage on the huge grounds of Busquash Manor, the great pile atop Busquash Peninsula just to Delia’s west.

“But you outclass both of us, Delia,” said Jess with a sigh. “I’d kill to have a condo right on the beach—top floor too!”

“A bequest from a rich aunt I didn’t even know I had, some luck, and some useful relatives,” Delia said happily. “Yes, I have everything I want.”

“Except a husband?” Jess asked slyly.

“Oh, dear me, no! I don’t want a husband. I like my life as it is—except that I am in need of two new chums.”

All three women were spinsters; in America, very rare, even for lesbians. Though Delia sensed no undercurrents suggesting that, thank the Lord! It had broken up several new friendships, for Delia was conservative in her social attitudes, and disliked sex rearing its (to her) ugly, destructive head. Simply, she was one of those lucky women whose sexual urges were neither powerful nor frequent. Her self-image was of an eccentric, and she cultivated it assiduously, helped by a patrician Englishness she also made capital out of. The sooner after meeting her that people adjudged her eccentric, the better, as far as Delia was concerned.

Ivy Ramsbottom was an extremely tall woman, though not at all obese; her exact height she declined to give, but Delia put it at about Desdemona’s height, six feet three, and deemed Ivy of the same athletic bent. There the comparison faded; Ivy had curly corn-gold hair, fine features and cornflower-blue eyes. She was so well-dressed that only Gloria Silvestri eclipsed her. Her casual walk-on-the-beach-in-early-summer costume was so perfect that not even a mad scramble after a cat had mussed it.

“Clothes are my trade,” she said to Delia, manipulating her pizza slice so deftly that it wouldn’t have dared drip on her sweater. “I manage my brother’s clothing businesses.”