Sins of the Flesh (18 page)

“Yes, I see,” Ivy said.

“So do I,” said Rufus.

“I don’t think Jess is in much danger, and I also think she knows it,” Rha announced loudly. “What worries her is how much of the odium will stick after the fuss dies down. Say Captain Delmonico decided to charge her with six counts of murder, put her under arrest, and the D.A. sent her for trial. No matter how suspicious her conduct might look, what solid evidence could the Prosecution produce to convict her? All they’ve got is her refusal to explain herself on grounds of professional ethics. No jury would buy into it. In fact, no D.A. would buy into it.”

“There are no bodies,” said Rufus. “Doesn’t habeas corpus mean you have to produce a body? Like, ‘I have the body!’?”

Rha clawed at the air with taloned fingers. “Oh, Rufus, really! The body you have to produce under habeas corpus is the body of the accused, and it had better be alive. It means the Law has to try you in a court before it can imprison you. In other words, no one can throw you in the pokey without a trial first.
Capice?
”

“Clever bird!” said Rufus.

“Stupid turd!” said Rha.

Walter was waiting in her office when Jess walked into it shortly after eleven. How well he looked! was her first thought, followed by the guilty realization that as yet she hadn’t sat down with him for that exhaustive interrogation aimed at discovering how many new pathways he was opening up. His eyes, her disobedient mind went on, were the most beautiful she had ever seen, between their amazing aquamarine color and the lucent glimmers in their depths, both heightened by his long, thick, crystal-fair lashes. Am I experiencing the Pygmalion syndrome? Is he my Galateus? No, I cannot let that happen! I
must
not!

“A good dinner?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Ivy is a superb cook.”

“What did you eat?”

“A unique seafood cocktail, then a beef casserole.”

“I had mac-and-cheese.”

“With vegetables, I hope?”

“No, I didn’t feel like rabbit food.”

“Where did you hear vegetables described as rabbit food?”

“Television.”

“Is that what you did tonight? Watched television?”

“Only a movie on Nine or Eleven,
On the Waterfront
, with Marlon Brando. It was good. But most of the time I sat at my window looking at the dark and thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“I was trying to remember what it was like before I knew you. What it was like to be a maniac and a monster.”

“I’ve told you before, Walter, that the staff call you things they don’t even begin to understand. May I offer you some advice?”

“Yes.”

“When you’re in the mood to look at the dark and think, don’t direct your mind backward into the past—that’s wasted effort. The past and who you used to be can never come back again. One of the things I hope I gave you was the ability to think ahead—to plan. It’s forethought makes a man far more than a mere animal, and you’re so lucky, Walter. You have a clean page to write on, to fill with brand-new plans. Forget the past, it’s irrelevant. You’re Walter Jenkins, a thinking man, and you have a lot to think about. You’re relatively young, and it’s possible that before you grow old, the review panels will be enlightened enough to offer you a chance at life outside in the world. In the meantime, life inside HI can be planned. You should think about the things you like to do, then work out a schedule that fits them in enjoyably. For instance, you’re very good at wiring things up, at electronic gadgets—maybe you’d like to do a course by mail in electronics? Whatever, I’m just throwing things at you. You’re very good at architectural drawing, I’m sure we could find a correspondence course in that. The important thing is, do you see what I’m driving at? Do you understand how important it is to keep your brain occupied and interested?”

He had listened to this speech—long, for Walter—with eyes fixed on her face, and comprehension in them. “Yes, I see what you’re driving at, and I do understand how important it is to keep my brain occupied with interesting things.”

“Have you any preferences?”

“Lots of them,” he said solemnly. “I have to think longer and harder before I can tell you anything.” He rose to his feet. “Coffee? I just ground it before you came in.”

Her face lit up. “Oh, I’d love some! It was the one thing Ivy didn’t serve, and I have to work tonight.”

Waiting for her coffee, she put the last few minutes under a second review, and knew disquiet. There was
something
—yes, there was something going on, and Walter wasn’t being entirely frank about it or himself. Looking at the dark … Why did that ring alarm bells? Because it didn’t mean the dark outside his window. It meant the dark inside his mind. And why did he want to seek the dark? It was where everyone’s monsters dwelled, even the sanest of men’s, and this was a man had known his monster with the intimacy of a sadistic killer—no laws, no limitations. He had come so far, and at a speed that awed her; now she found herself wondering exactly how much she knew about the progress of this psychological triumph. All the tests had been applied, and didn’t really apply; his I.Q. was phenomenally high, but she was responsible enough to assume that beneath the monster he had always been the brilliant man. His abilities were astounding, from his manual dexterity to his ambidexterity, but again she had to assume that they had always been there below the monster. What a tragedy! she had thought each time a new facet of his mental physicality appeared; what might Walter Jenkins have been if the wiring of his brain hadn’t banished all his gifts behind the door flung open to liberate the monster?

The coffee mug and the aroma arrived together; she blinked, gave Walter a specially warm smile.

“I heard something today,” he said, sitting with his own mug of coffee. “I’ll help you with the files in a minute.”

“What did you hear?” she asked placidly.

“That the cops accused you of six murders.”

“No, they didn’t. They can’t, they have no evidence. Just ignore the gossip, Walter. That’s all it is.”

“No one will arrest you, Jess. I wouldn’t let them.”

A laugh escaped her; were he anyone else, she would have put an affectionate hand on his arm, but Walter’s personal space was inviolate. “Thank you, but it’s not necessary,” she said. “I’ve committed no murders, and the police know that very well. What they’re really after is information about the victims I don’t have, but they’re convinced I do. The situation is like many of life’s situations—time will prove it a dead end. They’ll realize that, and abandon the theory that embroils me.”

“They’d better,” he said grimly, “because I won’t let them hound you, Jess.”

“Rest easy, Walter, I’m in no danger. You have my word on it,” Jess said, gazing at him sternly.

“I’ll rest easy, I promise.” He fell silent, then suddenly asked, “Who is this Captain Carmine Delmonico?”

“A long-time and very senior Holloman policeman. A detective. However, he’s a member of the panel that reviews your progress, and therefore he’s important to you. Thus far he’s been an excellent choice for the panel—he never lets his personal prejudices get in the way of his panel decisions, and he accepts my professional opinions in the same way as a Senate Committee would the opinions of Richard Feynman on something atomic.”

“A friend at court.”

“Yes, Walter, definitely. Which is why this business with the six women is such a nuisance. It undermines his respect for me.”

Walter rose, came round the desk, and hunkered down to deal with the safe combination. “We can’t have that, Jess,” he said, his tones absorbed. “No, we just can’t have that.”

S
ince Walter Jenkins had no pathway leading to frustration, but had many leading to an ability to plan, he set about his task in a calm and unhurried way. Having no true comprehension of the multiple-layered nature of Jess Wainfleet’s problem with Captain Carmine Delmonico and the Holloman PD, he had decided that the correct answer was also the most direct: remove Delmonico from his position of leadership and deflect the rest of the Holloman PD into an avenue of investigation that had nothing to do with Jess. Therefore, he reasoned, a simple elimination would not work; he had to do something that suggested Delmonico had about-faced, had found something new and important.

He had spent all of Sunday in the HI library, which luckily had a microfiche facility that covered all Connecticut major crimes; HI was an institute for the criminally insane, and its senior staff liked to be able to consult newspaper or magazine reports on its speciality. Thus he had learned about Delia’s Shadow Women, and opened up a few more pathways as he did so—pathways that would have greatly thrilled and dismayed Jess. He also sampled the high end of Carmine Delmonico’s profile, and had a half dozen superb photographs of the Captain into the bargain, though he had to process them from negative to positive before he really saw what he had to contend with. Delmonico was well into his forties, but not yet past his prime …. Then Walter found an article in a local magazine on the Holloman PD, a recent, lengthy piece that featured other important faces, like Commissioner John Silvestri, Captain of Uniforms Fernando Vasquez, and Sergeant Delia Carstairs, whom the journalist found fascinating because she was the Commissioner’s niece, from Oxford in England, and whose plain clothes were anything but plain. It also featured the radically new style of the young police artist, one Hank Jones, and how his modern approach had identified a series of bodies labeled “Doe.”

Walter wallowed in movies. He had watched hundreds and hundreds of them on his road back from insanity, and almost all he knew of the world was movie or television fed. Consequently he saw at once that he could accomplish nothing by attacking head on. That would be like planting the briefcase bomb inside Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair”—someone could move it to the wrong side of a solid oak table leg. No, he had to be more subtle than that!

The moment that resolution clicked into place, Walter threw out any idea of a daylight foray, and felt a thrill of emotion that would have transfigured Jess. His medium was the night, in which he could move more stealthily than a predator after prey, and no one would suspect his absence from a high security prison.

The plan! What ought it be? First, it had to deflect the Captain; second, it had to remove all suspicion in the Shadow Women case from Jess Wainfleet; and third, it had to replace Jess with a different, unconnected suspect.

Let it look as if Delmonico was the killer! The time was still August, if a little late, so the woman could have done her disappearing act halfway through August, as the others had. Maybe Delmonico kept her a little longer, if she was a special kind of woman? Such a special kind of woman that, having killed her, Delmonico suddenly realized he only had one course—to put his gun in his mouth and make a meal of a bullet. Yes! Yes, that made perfect sense! He had a wife and two kids, but he had heard Jess on the phone to Delia, and one of the subjects was Delmonico’s family, vacationing on the West Coast for some time to come. He must be at home alone. Ideal, ideal!

Then the identity of the woman hit him, and his breath hissed out of him like air out of a compressor valve, sharp and loud and vicious. It had to be her kind, even if she wasn’t the renting kind, the disappearing kind. The Captain had grown bored, that was it, he’d moved on to a spicier, juicier, tastier kind of woman. Well, they did, these multiple killers, wasn’t that so? There must be a note, and the note could explain it all. Delmonico was well educated, everyone said, so the note would have to reflect that. Businesslike yet poetic …

Brimming over with joy, Walter perfected his plan—Jess would smile in triumph, if only she knew how well her subject was planning! Logic wasn’t hard, it was easy.

Would he do it in two stages, or three? As many as it demanded, decided Walter. My plan is flawless.

At eleven-thirty he was on the road. First stop was to gas up at a station that had gas pump jockeys; he asked for five dollars’ worth, got it, handed the money over, and was gone before the kid manning the pump even noticed his face. Still easing back on the throttle so as not to irritate folks in the houses nearby, Walter concentrated on the left side of 133, not wanting to ride by the high brick wall when he came upon it. Two or three little shops, and there it was, punctuated in its middle by an archway surmounted by a cross. Speed slackening, he rode well past it before steering the bike off the road into the encroaching forest. A few yards in he killed the engine and dismounted, then reached into one pannier and removed the tools of this particular trade: a roll of duct tape, a pair of thin rubber surgeon’s gloves, and a roll of picture wire. Diagonal pliers-cum-cutters, screwdrivers and scissors resided in one of his jacket pockets.

The high brick wall was for 133 alone; the property’s fences on its three forest sides were chain-link topped with barbed wire; not a problem for Walter, who produced his diagonals and cut a neat rectangle in the wire, which wasn’t rigged with any kind of alarm. Once through the fence, he found himself in carefully tended grounds, many of the larger lone trees ringed by a wooden seat. There were two separate buildings, the farther one clearly a school of some sort. The spacious grounds held tennis courts, basketball courts and what he suspected was a gymnasium. Unacquainted with schools, Walter didn’t know that the air of demure quietude it emanated was a powerful indication that it lacked both boys and men. The nearer, much smaller building, of two storeys, was Walter’s target. He moved to it quite briskly, but kept one hand on his knife in case of dogs—but there were no dogs.

The front door he opened with a small steel spatula attached to his screwdrivers—so easy he knew the inhabitants weren’t worried about security. The place was silent and dark, a tiny flame in a red glass bowl showing a faint ruby glint beneath a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the front hall. No one was moving, and he didn’t need a flashlight to see even into the blackest corners, for darkness was his natural milieu. Up the beautiful old staircase to the second floor and its sleepers.

These nuns each had a big room to herself, which made his task simple. Five doors down on the right, he struck paydirt. A sleeping woman in her late twenties or early thirties, smooth of face, smooth of skin, slender of body; her arms, clad in fine fawn cotton, reclined one to either side of her as she slumbered on her back. Closing her open door, he inched up the edge of her little single bed until he was level with her chest, then put his hands around her throat and jerked her upright, her scream no more than a sigh. A pair of terrified eyes, rolling white, goggled up at him, a black shape in a black room, as he leaped to straddle her, one knee at each of her shoulders, the weight of his rump settling onto her chest as he lay her down again, his face inches from her own. While his fingers around her neck tightened remorselessly and her legs drummed and threshed vainly behind him, he watched the life go out of her. It was delicious. It was like sucking her animation into himself and becoming more than both of them put together. It was an act of God. It was the ultimate experience, and the I-Walter called it ecstasy. For he was the I-Walter, and finally he knew what the I-Walter wanted. Ecstasy. Nothing but ecstasy.

To be absolutely sure, he remained sitting on top of her with his hands around her throat for several more minutes—was this what Kris Kristofferson meant by “coming down?” So much he didn’t know, unless he gleaned explanation as well as exposition from television, movies or radio, and he really did feel as if he was coming down from a much higher level. He found another popular word: transcendental. He thought that one applied too.

But there were things to be done. He lifted the limp form onto the floor and loosely remade the bed; nothing else was disturbed. Up she came to be draped around his neck; Walter Jenkins quit the scene, closing the door of her room after him. Out by the bike he laid her down to inspect her by flashlight, and was immensely pleased. Clad in a modest fawn cotton nightdress from wrists to neck to feet, she was quite pretty in the face, though her brown hair was cropped as short as a marine’s, and no cosmetic had ever marred her skin. Out of the other pannier came a smallish rubber body bag he had pilfered from HI, and into it went the body of the nun. He looked at his watch: two a.m. Best head home.

The body bag strapped across pillion and panniers with its contents face down, the whole forming a large U, he kicked the bike into life, eased it to a low growl, and poked the front of it onto 133. No traffic moved; the big trailer trucks that drove all through the night preferred I-95 or I-91, and the locals were at home in bed. He rode the few miles to the vicinity of the Asylum without encountering a soul, turned into the forest, and killed the Harley not many yards from its destination. Walter was growing bold. Provided he didn’t roar, no one on the walls noticed.

Safely inserted within the wall, the motorcycle stood on its prop with the body bag still lashed across it; there was no need to remove it, as it would remain there until rigor mortis had passed off, and would therefore be flexible when he needed to move it during the next phase. He wouldn’t gas up from his plastic containers until then either. In the meantime he had to be sure there were no signs of his bike or feet outside, so back outside he went to straighten bent grasses and ground things, straighten bent branches or shrubs, break off broken twigs. Only then did he change into his HI uniform of grey T-shirt and shorts, and commence the walk home. If someone saw him, he had his story all ready—restlessness, headache, boredom. Jess was hooked like a fish on boredom, but the I-Walter knew he couldn’t tell her that the most boring aspect of all was Jess herself.

Walter wasn’t a happy person.