Sins of the Flesh

A slow smile appeared. “For my sins, probably yes. I have a lamentable tendency to voice what I’m thinking—isn’t that well expressed? I’m a parrot, I collect ways of saying things. But seriously, mum’s the word. However, your desirability mushrooms with every new snippet of information you feed me. I love unusual people!” His face changed. “Are you here on business?”

She looked shocked. “Oh, dear me, no! I wouldn’t be here at all if I didn’t know Ivy. My police cases are as decrepit as Roger, I’m afraid, though I admit that a detective never doffs her deerstalker hat either. So when I hear something interesting, I file it in my mind. We have lots of old cases we can’t close.”

“Age,” he said with great solemnity, “is the worst criminal of them all, yet perpetually escapes punishment. Ah! Enter the Kornblums! Ben and Betty. She’s the one in floor-length mink, he’s the one with the knuckle-duster diamond pinky ring. Betty is the sole reason to ban air-conditioning—it enables her to wear mink indoors in August. It wouldn’t be so bad if she weren’t addicted to two-toned mink—the spitting image of a Siamese cat.”

“Does she keep Siamese cats?” Delia asked.

“Two. Sun Yat Sen and Madame Chiang Kai Shek.”

“What does Ben do to earn diamond pinky rings?”

“Produce plays and movies. He’s another backer. They used to have a penthouse on Park Avenue,” Rufus said chattily, “but now they live in the Smith place—you know where I mean, tucked away inside a cleft of North Rock.”

Delia straightened. “The Smith place, eh? Hmm! Privacy galore. Has Mr. Kornblum any sordid secrets?”

“He fancies ponies way ahead of Siamese cats.”

“A gambler? An equestrian? A practitioner of bestiality?”

“Darling, you are delicious! The ponies he fancies are in the back row of the chorus.”

“I thought they were called hoofers.”

“No. Hoofers can dance well, they’re in the front row.”

“But Holloman isn’t rich in chorus girls.”

“That’s what Betty thought too. What she didn’t take into account was Holloman’s thousands of beautiful girls at various schools. Ben attends classes on everything from typing to dancing to amateur photography.”

The very large room was beginning to look populated; about twenty people were dotted around it engrossed in talk larded with laughter, witticisms and, Delia was willing to bet, gossip. They all knew each other well, though some on arriving behaved as if considerable time had gone by since last they saw these faces.

True to his word that she belonged to him, Rufus Ingham took Delia on a round of introductions, feeding her information so guilelessly that no one on meeting her had any idea that Rufus was steering the conversation to yield maximum results for a sergeant of detectives.

Perhaps due to her diminutive size, Delia wasn’t sure she could ever make a close friend of Rha Tanais in the same way she knew she could of Rufus Ingham. It was just too much constant hard work encompassing someone that big. Political cartoonists sometimes drew General Charles de Gaulle with a ring of cloud around his neck, and Rha inspired the same feeling in Delia. Whereas Rufus provoked emotions that shouted a friendship as old as time; having met him at last, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. Had Hank Jones been Rufus’s forty, he would have ranked with Rufus; how strange, that in the space of one short summer she should have met two men of great significance to her, when it hadn’t happened since her first days in Holloman. Women friends were essential, but men friends were far harder to find, as Delia well knew. Very happy, she let herself be introduced.

Simonetta Bellini (born Shirley Nutt) bowled Delia over. The principal model of Rha Tanais Bridal, she was tall, thin, and moved with incomparable grace; her genuinely Scandinavian-fair coloring lent her an air of virginal innocence even her skin-tight lamé tube of a dress couldn’t violate. She could wear a hessian sack, Delia decided, and still look like a bride.

“Fuck, a spoiled shindig,” she moaned as Rufus left to hunt fresh quarry.

“I beg your pardon?” Delia asked, bewildered.

“The creepy shrinks are coming. Rha says shindigs like this, the shrinks get to come, but they spoil the fun,” Shirl said. “They look at the rest of us as if we’re animals in a zoo.”

“Shrinks do have a tendency to do that,” Delia agreed, her antennae twitching. “Why do they have to be invited?”

“Search me,” Shirl said vaguely.

According to Jess, Rha and Rufus asked the shrinks for their abrasive qualities, and according to Simonetta/Shirl, they were indeed perceived as abrasive. “You said shindigs like this one, Shirl—are there other kinds of shindig?” Delia asked.

“Oh, lots. But the shrinks only come to this kind.”

The quintessential bride, thought Delia, has gauze inside her head as well as on top of it.

But as Rufus piloted her from guest to guest, Delia noted that Shirl’s aversion to “the shrinks” was universal. So universal, in fact, that she began to wonder how true Jess’s explanation had been. Would two such affable men honestly blight their shindig for the sake of mental stimulation? It didn’t seem likely, which meant Rha and Rufus invited the shrinks to one kind of shindig to please Ivy, who begged the favor of them to please Jess. Thus far it was an ordinary party for about fifty people; drinks and nibbles were to be succeeded by a buffet, apparently, but people were still arriving. There were mysteries here, but they seemed to be centered on Ivy and Jess, whose home this was not; nor were Ivy and Jess footing the shindig bill.

While her body moved about and her tongue clacked acceptable banalities, Delia’s mind dwelled on Ivy and Jess differently than it had until this moment in their friendship, just two months old. I see far more of Jess than I do of Ivy, she thought; some of that is free choice, I know, but some is definitely Ivy’s doing—she travels to New York City frequently, she’s committed to Rha and Rufus by blood as well as business, and she lives an uphill walk away. Jess lives around the corner, our professions are slightly allied, and our schedules permit lunches once or twice a week. And while Ivy isn’t gigantic enough to be offputting for a midget like me, there’s no doubt she’s a Desdemona—borderline. So terrifyingly well-dressed! Funny, that Aunt Gloria Silvestri doesn’t cow me when it comes to clothes, whereas Ivy does. There is an aloof quality to her—no, that’s the wrong word. Opaque is better. Yet I like her enormously, which means the real Ivy hides behind someone she’s not. Ivy knows pain, she’s been hurt. I don’t sense that in Jess, whose hurts have been professional, I would think—her sex militating against her abilities. Ivy’s hurts have been of the spirit, the soul ….

Slender fingers snapping under her nose, Rufus laughing. “No gathering wool, Delicious Delia! I’d like you to meet Todo Satara, our choreographer.”

He had been enjoying a joke with Roger Dartmont and his feminine counterpart in stage fame, Dolores Kenny; they moved off while Todo remained. Probably a stage name, she decided, since he didn’t look Oriental: mediumly tall, balletic body movements, a face not unlike Rudolf Nureyev—Tartar? His vitality and sexuality left her breathless, even though he was past his dancing days. The look in his black eyes was disquieting; like coming face to face with a panther that hadn’t had a meal in weeks.

“By rights Delia belongs to Ivy and Jess,” Rufus said before following the famous singers, “but until they arrive, she’s mine, and I’m not sure I intend to give her back.”

What conversational tidbit could she throw at Todo to make him feel fed? “I admire great dancers so much!” she gushed. “The tiniest movement is sheer visual poetry.”

He swallowed it whole, delighted. “We are what God makes us, that simple,” he said, his accent pure Maine. “Actually you move pretty well—crisp and non-nonsense, like a competitive schoolmarm.” The sinister eyes, glutted, assessed her. “You are very deceptive, darling, under the frills you’re extremely fit and, I suspect, fleet. I bet you do the hundred yards in no time flat.”

With a mental salute to Hank Jones, she chuckled. “You’re the second man with X-ray vision I’ve met inside a week! My best time for the hundred yards was astonishingly fast, but I was in training then. Oh, it was hard!”

“I could teach you some marvelous comedic dance routines.”

“Thank you, kind sir, I can live without them.”

“A pity, you have stage presence. Don’t try to tell me you spend your leisure hours in a dreary beige room looking at television for mental occupation—I wouldn’t believe you.”

“You might be right,” she said coyly.

There was a stir at the door from the hall; Todo Satara stiffened. “Oh, shit! Off-key fanfare, and enter the loonies.”

Six people came in amid a cacophony of greetings, Rha and Rufus directing them where to put anything they didn’t wish to carry, exchanging kisses with Ivy and shaking hands with the rest, Jess included. That was interesting: an uneasy alliance between Ivy’s family and Jess Wainfleet?

Ivy took the best dressed award, as usual, in a floor length cobalt blue crepe dress, but privately Delia thought Jess magnificent in crimson silk. The two of them standing together quite eclipsed the wives of the millionaires.

The other four newcomers were the shrinks, three of whom she had already met over a Lobster Pot lunch. Number four, she now learned, was a psychiatric nurse named Rose who had married Jess’s senior assistant literally yesterday, and in consequence was Mrs. Aristede Melos. The two men wore white tropical suits, the two women knee-length white dresses—not precisely hospital gear, but definitely out of place in this peacocky house, its peacocky people. Well, they were shrinks, so they were playing some sort of mind game, Delia divined, and if as children they had been taught good manners, the lessons hadn’t struck or stuck. They coagulated clannishly, and needed no encouragement to eat or drink; now that they had arrived, the buffet was opened.

Todo and Rufus took Delia to the buffet and heaped her plate with goodies: lobster, shrimps, caviar, crusty bread, indescribably tasty sauces, and the best company in the room. Then, all three plates filled, the three of them repaired to a small table having just three chairs. Ideal for talking, but not yet, she thought, her eyes as busy as her antennae, thrumming on full alert.

Dr. Aristede Melos, Jess’s senior assistant, was a thin, dark man of forty-odd—strange, that nearly all the protagonists were around forty. His face was plain, his expression dour, and his eyes conveniently hidden behind thick-lensed glasses with horn rims. His brand-new wife was the bustling, cheery type, but looking into her pale-grey eyes didn’t inspire much cheer, Delia felt. Rose’s fair complexion would have benefited from pinker clothes; white simply bled her to a chalky effigy.

The other two shrinks were husband and wife: Dr. Fred and Dr. Moira Castiglione. They radiated a long marriage complete with a couple of kids. Delia knew that Jess valued the Castigliones more than she did Melos, whom she found stubborn and afflicted with tunnel vision. Moira was red-haired and hazel-eyed, had a plain face and little charm of manner, whereas Fred, a brown man, was outgoing and ebullient. He had the gift of seeming an intent listener, though whether he actually did listen was moot, for his eyes gave nothing away. Like most married couples in the same profession, they worked as a team, used each other to bounce ideas off, and had a conversational shorthand.

The meal ended, Todo excused himself, and Delia started to dig. “Rufus, exactly why do you and Rha invite Jess’s shrinks to your shindigs, as Shirl calls them?”

“Ah, you’ve sensed the negative feedback.”

“What rot! One would have to be dead not to sense emotions that strong. Your people dislike Jess’s shrinks intensely.”

“They do, which is unfortunate,” Rufus said on a sigh. “It’s all to do with music, with Jess’s comfort, and ultimately with our duty as well as our love for Ivy. It goes back to 1962, when we invited Jess to an evening very much like this one. She went back to HI raving about it, and her senior staff got it into their heads that they should have been invited too. So they nagged.”