Sins of the Flesh (27 page)

“Are you prepared to go on record as testifying to that, Doctor?” Carmine asked, staggered.

“I most certainly am!” said Dr. Wainfleet.

Fascinated, Carmine and Abe watched her visibly change mental gears; a bright smile appeared. “Now, if you please, I would like to see my patient Walter Jenkins.”

Neither man answered; they looked at each other.

“I insist!” Jess Wainfleet said through clenched teeth.

Again, she was answered by silence. “
I insist!
”

Carmine spoke. “Doctor, Walter Jenkins is dead.”

She rocked. “You’re lying!”

“Dr. Wainfleet, what price my lying? Walter Jenkins came down the stairs to the front foyer like a bat out of Hell, his head grabbed between his hands. Then he screamed and fell to the floor. By the time Lieutenant Goldberg reached him, he was dead. His body has been taken to the Holloman County Morgue for autopsy. We have no idea why he collapsed and died.”

She was rigid with shock. “
Autopsy?
”

“Naturally. It’s required by law, Doctor, you know that.”

“You can’t! I won’t let you!”

Carmine had had enough. “Madam, I am tired of your constant obstruction,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “You may be the head honcho of this little corner of our state and municipal world, but in the performance of my duties I outrank you. So does the State of Connecticut bench, to which I will appeal if I continue to be obstructed. The corpse in question is both a federal and a state prisoner, diagnosed criminally insane, with a cause of death yet to be established by the legal authority, the Coroner/Medical Examiner of Holloman County. He is Dr. Gustavus Fennell. If you wish, you may apply to him to witness the prisoner’s post mortem examination from the observation gallery, which is as close to the corpse as you may come, given your relationship to the living man. That is all I have to say on this subject. Is that quite clear?”

All color had drained out of her face, leaving it bleached to pure white; as a result, the eyes were obsidian—stone, not living matter.

“Thank you, Captain, it is clear,” Jess Wainfleet said. “I would respectfully ask that autopsy not begin until I am present, and that there be voice communication between Dr. Fennell and me. If this request is honored, his task will be easier.”

“Then I suggest that you make yourself available right now. I’ve asked Dr. Fennell to proceed at once.”

It was like, yet unlike, an operating room. Since sepsis was not a risk, no sterile precautions were taken beyond those to protect the living tenants of the room, and Walter Jenkins had not been suffering from any known infection: in fact, he had been thought in the rudest of good health.

His naked body lay on the overly large and long stainless steel table, which ended in a sink and drains beyond the feet, and was surrounded by sufficient of a ditch and fence to keep fluids from running off its surface onto the floor. He had been washed, and bearing no visible injuries, looked asleep save for the agony frozen on his face.

Apart from Gus Fennell and his assistant, two others stood on the autopsy room floor: a technician who would label the specimens as commanded, and Carmine Delmonico. Looking down from the gallery were Dr. Jess Wainfleet and Abe Goldberg. The gallery could be sealed off from the autopsy room by a series of electrically operated glass panels, but today it was open so that Jess Wainfleet could speak to Gus Fennell.

“One request, Dr. Fennell,” she said before the preliminaries began. “May I have the brain once you’ve done with it?”

His nondescript face, tilting upward, wrinkled in thought. “What is your reason, Dr. Wainfleet?”

“I spent a total of two hundred hours in twenty periods of ten hours each performing micro-neurosurgery on this man’s brain. I wish to do a complete anatomical and histological study of his brain to see what I can verify and what I discard from my technique,” Jess said in even tones.

“Then when I am finished, you may have his brain. If I find cause of death before dissection of the brain becomes necessary, you may have it intact.” He smiled up to someone he had no reason to suppose was any but an ordinary colleague. “If I do have to cut into brain, I’ll try to be economical.”

“Thank you!” Jess said with real gratitude.

“This is a very curious autopsy,” Dr. Fennell said for the benefit of his idly turning tape recorder, “in that no short cuts of any kind can be taken. To establish cause of death unequivocally is my directive, which means excluding surface insults, particularly injection sites or scratches drawing blood ….”

And so it went for several hours of painstaking searches of skin, scalp, nail beds, tear ducts, salivary glands, and so on, until Gus could categorically rule out an external agent introduced other than by mouth. Then came the examination of internal organs, the many body fluids and tissue samples that were sent to Paul Bachman for detection of toxins, the examination of arteries for bruits, fat or air emboli, plus veins, lymphatic channels, and glands, ductile or ductless. Clots? No. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Finally came the head, the grotesque peeling off and away of the face to reveal the skull’s rictus, and then, ultimately, the saw shearing through the cranium to lift a huge lid off the brain.

“Ah!” Gus exclaimed. “A subarachnoid bleed!”

Jess Wainfleet spoke at last. “
An aneurysm?
Impossible!”

The brain was coming out, its surface empurpled, blackened, reduced to pulp in places. Gus swung a massive magnifying glass over the brain’s base, held upward in his hand.

Jess was babbling. “I did every conceivable test on him! I did
everything
, I tell you! Pneumoencephalograms—right
and
left carotid arteriograms—his arteries filled beautifully, each side was a perfect tree!” Her fist pounded. “There was no aneurysm!”

“My dear, there was,” Gus said gently. “See for yourself! See? On the basilar artery right at the cerebellar-pontine angle—just before it bifurcates into the vertebrals, see? Messy, but visible. The one place that hardly ever fills satisfactorily, yet the site of his aneurysm. From the look of the areas south of the Circle of Willis, I’d say he’s had an occasional tiny bleed ahead of the catastrophe itself. Cause of death is evident. I won’t need the brain itself. Do you still want it, Dr. Wainfleet?”

“Yes,” she said tiredly. “And thank you.”

It was nine o’clock on Sunday night, no one had eaten since lunch, and John Silvestri was demanding to be fed information immediately. The Commissioner gathered Carmine, Abe, Paul and Gus, and marched them into Malvolio’s for a late dinner.

“The first thing I need is a bourbon and soda,” said Carmine.

“Ditto,” said Abe.

“I’m an abstemious man, but I have earned a red wine glass full of ruby port,” said Gus. “At least none of you smokes.”

Consumed with curiosity, Luigi elected to wait on this booth of heavies himself, sitting with them whenever he wasn’t needed; a fellow classmate of Silvestri’s in St. Bernard’s days (and a cousin), he would have donated several crushed knuckles before singing of what he heard, as everyone knew.

After two glorious gulps of his bourbon, Carmine spoke. “Gus, the first thing is, explain the autopsy result, and why it upset Jess Wainfleet so much.”

“Two hundred hours of neurosurgery!” Gus said on a squeak. “It boggles the imagination. Jess did twenty procedures on Walter, each ten hours long, I presume in some kind of attempt to rewire his brain. Well, you don’t put in that amount of time unless you make sure your patient has a physically perfect brain—no silent tumors or scars or—aneurysms. Aneurysms are the toughest to find, as you have to do a dangerous test, the arteriogram, to see an aneurysm. What is it? A weakness in an artery wall, like a bubble. As long as blood pressure remains stable, the bubble is okay. But if blood pressure rises, it can develop a tiny hole, and leak. If there’s a huge increase in blood pressure, it bursts and blood goes everywhere. Whether it’s on the aorta or in the brain, death ensues. Jess did arteriograms. That is, she put a needle full of dye into the carotid artery and watched the dye travel through the brain arteries. On both sides of the brain. She was convinced Walter was free of aneurysms—they’re not very common, and people usually have only one. But Walter’s aneurysm was on the one artery of the brain that doesn’t always fill with dye completely. That’s how she missed it,” said Gus, taking bird-like sips of his port. “Most unfortunate!”

“Why was she so anxious to have his brain?” Abe asked.

“Oh, she’ll sit at a microtome and slice it so thinly that tissue paper is a brick wall by comparison,” Paul said. “She’ll want to know what effect her two hundred hours of microsurgery produced. She’s a scientist.”

“Grisly,” said the Commissioner.

“It’s not finished yet,” Abe said, “but before I explain what I mean, I’m going to order dinner and another drink.”

Luigi got up, flapping a hand for more drinks. “Place your orders, gentlemen. Everything’s on, but there are no specials.”

By the time that meals were consumed and the hot chocolates (Luigi made great hot chocolates) were ordered, tomorrow’s plans had been worked out. Paul would do the fluid and tissue analyses from the Walter Jenkins postmortem, John Silvestri would retire to his aerie, Gus would go back to less urgent work, and the two detectives would meet with Delia, Liam, Tony and Donny at eight in the morning in Carmine’s office.

D
elia had had a delightful Sunday held captive by Rufus and Rha, who kept her mind off criminal matters by teaching her to write witty song lyrics, limericks, and all kinds of zany verse. As a technique it was inspired, for it couldn’t be performed with a mere segment of a mind; the whole intellect was involved. And it made everybody laugh, sometimes to the point of near-hysteria.

Thus to learn of the later events of yesterday came as an utter shock, one she was very glad not to have participated in; she could have contributed nothing to success while enduring a great deal of personal anguish.

“I hope to conclude the whole sorry business today,” Carmine said, ending his narration of events. “Dr. Wainfleet is a very slippery customer, adept at taking what seems an indefensible position and turning it into an advantageous one. Our constitution was tailor-made for her. Every time she’s seen, she must be fully warned of her Constitutional rights all over again, is that clear? Delia, I’m sorry to have to drag you in today, but a woman must be present at each interview, and she’s too smart for me to use a woman uniform. I’m aware that you have ‘friend at court’ status with her, but it can’t be helped. It’s purely to make sure she doesn’t cry rape or physical abuse. If you need to wear slippers, then wear them, okay?”

“Thank you, Chief, but my feet weren’t badly punctured. If I wear thick socks and long trousers, my nun’s shoes will be bearable.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Why not Abe and his team rather than me?” Delia asked as the Ford Fairlane growled toward Route 133.

“What a diplomat you are!” Carmine said appreciatively. “It has to do with your friendship with Jess, actually. She doesn’t like men. By that I don’t mean she’s a man-hater. This is far different, far colder. Men are the enemy in a war situation, and she sees herself as on the side of the angels. Nothing could ever convince her that, were she not a woman and therefore held back, she isn’t qualified to rule the world. I don’t know whether megalomania is a certifiable illness or not, but she’s definitely a megalomaniac. What she’d condemn in anyone else, she can excuse in herself as her inalienable right to stand above the laws that bind and tie the rest of the world. The trouble is, her crimes are so well concealed that she can’t be called to account for them.”

“I see,” said Delia, seeing indeed. “We have to obtain a confession.”

“Exactly.”

“But how?”

“I have no idea, except that we play the cards as they come and be prepared to bluff.”

“No, let’s not think of it as a card game, it’s too complex for that. It’s a piano sonata we have to play by ear.”

“Okay, Beethoven, it’s a piano sonata.”

Jess Wainfleet stared through the transparent wall of the glass jar holding Walter Jenkins’s brain, beginning to feel that two or three additional changes of the preserving solution would be sufficient; the liquid in the jar was still a reddish-pink, but it was translucent. She donned heavy-duty rubber gloves and tipped the jar until the reddish-pink stream into a bucket became a trickle, then she refilled the jar and looked again. A much paler pink that would deepen in color, but not yet, and not nearly as richly as the last lot.

The base of the brain was on top, its spindling threads and tatters all that were left of blood vessels and tissue envelopes covering it. And there, insofar as she could ascertain, was the Circle of Willis, the brain’s brilliant internal safety valve to ensure that, in the event of blood supply to one side of the brain being cut off, blood from the flowing side could cross via this ring of tiny bridges and give the starved side blood. That it was so difficult to pinpoint lay in the devastation caused by the rupture of the aneurysm on the basilar artery, which ran off the back of the Circle of Willis toward the top of the spinal cord.

Walter’s blood pressure must have been through the roof. When the aneurysm ruptured it sent blood out of itself at huge pressure, part of the jet down to bone, part of the jet up into butter-soft brain at the pons and medulla. All the cellular nuclei that governed heart rate, breathing and other bodily functions were hosed into mush by that jet. Walter died screaming in agony because that was how subarachnoid hemorrhage victims died. The pain endings were in artery walls outside the brain.

And she grieved terribly; why, or what for, she barely grasped. Never her lover, even in her imagination. He was far more her child, she decided, her gestated creation. Though not gestated in her belly—there was nothing visceral about Walter. He was the child of her mind, she had carried him through twenty separate procedures that saw him change from a raving maniac to a creature bounded and determined by thought. Walter dead was herself dead. The grand experiment had been terminated by a weakness she hadn’t suspected existed.
An aneurysm!

The vultures were gathering: the Meloses, the Castigliones, Jim Hanrahan …. To avoid the smirks on their faces, she had phoned every last one of them before midnight last night to tell them of Walter’s unsuspected aneurysm, making it very clear to everyone that these things happen, and are no one’s fault. Those among them who had medical degrees got the message at once, and those in ignorance soon became enlightened. Jim Hanrahan was in deep trouble over the secret doors in the Asylum walls, and no one attached to HI itself was strong enough to spill her.

The real crunch was the only immutable, and immutable it was: time—the years—age—call it what you will …

I haven’t enough time left to start again. I am nearing fifty years of age, and Walter’s death is a cut wrist in a warm bath. My vigor is leaching away like the hard hot deluges of monsoon rains soaking into thirsty barren ground.

Oh, what are we here for, if our time be so short, so sourly brief? I am too old to do it all again! My supernova has fizzled to a dim, brown old shell. I am defeated.

Then she bethought herself of something and phoned HI.

“I am afraid I won’t be in today,” she said to her secretary, a meek creature named Jenny Marx who had long taken an inferior position to Walter Jenkins, and certainly wouldn’t be a problem now. “If the police should need to see me, tell them I’m at home and will be glad to see them here at any time.”

There. That was it.
An aneurysm!

Like most scholarly persons who had chosen a solitary life, Jess Wainfleet’s home was centered around the room she called her library, though it was not a room visitors ever saw. They were accommodated in a kitchen breakfast booth.

The library was shelved from floor to ceiling wherever no windows intruded, and provided with a broad-stepped, bannistered ladder anchored in tracks on the floor; it held a Barcalounger, an upright easy chair, a desk with an office chair behind it, two console tables and two lecterns on wheeled stands, one holding her stereotaxic atlas of the brain. The floor was black carpet, the ceiling a uniform cloudy brilliance from inset fluorescent tubes overlaid with milky plexiglas. The kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a door to the cellar opened off a hall.

When Carmine and Delia arrived at Jess’s front door, she led them straight to her library.

Its furniture had received two additions: a pair of stern hard-backed chairs facing the office chair across the desk.

“Please sit there,” she said, taking the office chair.

Delia sat; Carmine walked about a little at first, his manner polite, patently awed.

“Everyone from Voltaire to Thucydides,” he said, smiling at his hostess, “and you’ve had your
Scientific Americans
bound in leather year by year. I used to do that until I married, then I couldn’t afford it anymore.”

“Has married bliss been worth the pain of loss, Captain?”

His face registered genuine astonishment. “Good God, yes! Infinitely. I can still afford the annual subscription, and by the time my sons can reach the shelves where they’re stored, they will be pulling them out to read, not to rip.”

“A miracle!” Jess exclaimed.

“Excuse me?”

“You are a thinking parent, a luxury I never had.”

“I’d rather call a thinking parent a necessity than a luxury.”

“And what may I do for the Holloman police?”

“Why did you take their heads?” Delia asked, setting the tape recorder on the desk, its innards already in motion.

This time it was Jess astonished. “Oh, really!” she cried, exasperated. “All I needed from the pathetic creatures were their brains, and it’s a great deal easier to extract an intact brain from a cranium if the entire body isn’t attached.”

“Margot Tennant was the first, long before Walter Jenkins came on the scene,” Delia said, keeping her voice neutral. “Perhaps you would explain to us what happened to her. From the beginning, I mean. Where did she come from?”

“I reiterate, she was a private patient from another nation signed over to my care by her relatives, who were financially exhausted and emotionally quite beyond caring what happened to her. I reiterate, all the Shadow Women, as you so aptly named them, were from foreign parts,” said Jess Wainfleet.

“It would be a great help if you told us your source, Jess, and also more about Ernest Leto,” Delia said.

“Oh, I’m sure it would be, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. Modern authorities make it so difficult for people to rid themselves of intolerable burdens because modern authorities never seem to experience one iota of the pain or the hardship of caring for the hopeless. All that interests them are the pieces of paper, and pieces of paper inevitably end as ass-wipes. I know the pain, I know the hardship. Therefore I refuse to join the bureaucratic conspiracy. You will learn what I choose to tell you, nothing else.”

“Then let’s see what you choose to tell us,” said Carmine. “Margot Tennant was acquired. What did you do next?”

“She became the first of six experiments on a neurosurgical technique, the prefrontal lobotomy. You know this because I have already described the operation to you. However, I followed the patient’s progress through six months of her apartment life. At its end I put a photograph of her in the apartment that served as a trigger telling her it was time to go. She obeyed by leaving at once to come to this house. I went to the apartment and cleaned up, knowing I had six weeks’ leeway.”

Jess lit a cigarette and continued. “I returned here and sacrificed my subject by perfusing her brain with my own fixative solution through both carotid arteries. Death is absolutely instantaneous. Once the subject was dead and the fixative given enough time to suffuse through all the brain’s tissue, I amputated the head and then removed the brain.

“Without sacrificing my experimental animal, you must realize, I know nothing. But after studying the effect of my neurosurgical intervention, I learned everything there was to learn. And I was correct. Six subjects were sufficient.”

Never had Delia come so close to vomiting during a case; she felt her mouth go dry, felt the first premonitory retch, and fought to keep her gorge down. That she succeeded felt no victory; was Jess Wainfleet
human?
Detached, impassive, pitiless … And I had fun with this woman! I liked her!

“How did you dispose of the bodies?” Carmine asked.

“I bought a huge chest freezer—it’s still in the basement. After I succeeded so fantastically with Walter, I brought him here to my house four times to remove the first four frozen bodies. The task was beyond my physical capabilities, but no one checks my car when I drive into HI. I don’t know what Walter did with any of the bodies, including the last two, which I gave to him unfrozen and on site, so to speak. I presume he buried them somewhere.”

Carmine too was having trouble assimilating the degree of utter coldness, and a part of him had room to grieve for Delia—poor, deluded, betrayed Delia!
That
hurt. The rest just revolted.

“Are you saying, Dr. Wainfleet, that you deliberately made use of an inmate to conceal your personal activities?” he asked.

“Yes, yes!” she snapped, goaded.

“Their skulls are missing,” Carmine said.

“I
know!
I had Walter crush them in a vise, then pound the pieces to powder. He worshipped me,” she added in a confiding voice, “absolutely worshipped me!”

“Dr. Wainfleet, I must arrest you on six charges of murder in the first degree. Anything you say or do may be taken down and used against you in a court of law. You are entitled to legal representation,” Carmine said.

The handcuffs came from inside Delia’s spacious purse; Jess Wainfleet held out her hands without comment, even after her arms were repositioned at the small of her back before the cuffs were clicked into place.

“I didn’t think you’d give in without a fight,” Delia said.

“Were I ten years younger, I would have fought with every ploy known to the law,” Jess said, looking wry. “I’m too old to do it all again, even if I had another Walter to work on. But I don’t. Walter was a rare bird.”

“One the world won’t miss,” Carmine said. And nor, he added silently, will the world miss you, Dr. Wainfleet. I’m hard put to decide whether Walter was the worse monster, or you are. Whatever else he may have been, Walter was a dupe—your dupe. You used his capacity for murder to conceal your own murders, then condemned him for getting a kick out of killing.

By noon it was all over.

Dr. Jessica Wainfleet was in that sole woman’s cell that had seen so much, with a woman uniform right inside it with her, even when she used the bathroom. No suicide was going to happen on his watch, vowed Lieutenant Virgil Simms.

“Well, swoggle my horns!” said Commissioner Silvestri to his captains over lunch in his aerie. His black and sparkling eyes traveled from Carmine to Fernando and then back to Carmine, scant humor in them, which was almost unbelievable. “This has been a spooky and horrible case from start to finish, guys, not to mention two cases rolled in one—kinda. As my Aunt Annunziata used to say, ‘The sins of the flesh are the hardest to be rid of.’ I know it’s only lunch, and normally at this hour my eagle’s nest is as dry as a water hole in a drought, but today, gentlemen, I am moved to offer a snifter of X.O. cognac squeezed out of Napoleon’s boot.”