Sins of the Flesh

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.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969 (#u1b8bf95e-18d2-571b-ad86-f1cd2cc8795c)

Though 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?”